Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: London, Pages, School, Spam, Foursquare, Zuckerberg and More
- Quixey’s Keyword-Based Facebook App Search Engine Could Become a Powerful Discovery Tool
- Facebook’s “Locations” App Lets Corporate Pages Display a Store Finder and Links to Their Local Branch Pages
- Profile Banners, Calendars, Dropbox, Quizzes, Photos and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook Roundup: London, Pages, School, Spam, Foursquare, Zuckerberg and More Posted: 05 Aug 2011 06:00 PM PDT Facebook’s Page Reaches 50 Million Likes — The company has just reached 50 million Likes on its official Page, which is also unsurprisingly the most popular Page on the site. Ceglia Facebook Ownership Facebook Looking Even Worse — Despite some turgid articles not too long ago about the possibility of upstate New York entrepreneur and scam artist Paul Ceglia winning his court case claiming that he owns half of Facebook, his big-name lawyers recently left. And now, Facebook says it has found “smoking gun” evidence that he fabricated documents purporting to show his ownership stake. It says it can’t reveal the evidence yet, though. Facebook Expands in London - Facebook is renting a 36,000 square-foot building in London for its 70 employees that will focus on ad sales. Unauthorized Pages in Users' Feeds – Some users are reporting that they are seeing Facebook Pages appearing in their news feeds despite having never Liked them. Facebook has yet to confirm the issue. Thanks to Mike for the tip.
Foursquare Makes Pages Self-Serve - Foursquare's organizational Pages are now self-serve and aimed at allowing brands to market themselves on the platform. Facebook Becomes Back-to-School Hub – As happened last year, Facebook is set to become a big place for back to school shopping, giving users the chance to win free items, take advantage of limited time deals and receive discounts. Spam King Sanford Wallace Indicted – Sanford Wallace, known as the Spam King, was indicted by a federal grand jury in San Jose this week for fraud on the Facebook platform. He faces 16 to 40 years in prison, plus fines.
Zuckerberg Named Silicon Valley's "Worst Dressed" – GQ magazine named Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg worst dressed man in Silicon Valley despite some stiff competition. [Image Via David Terrar] Facebook to Offer Digital Citizenship Grants – Facebook has pledged $200,000 in grant money for research “that improves understanding of the challenges and opportunities associated with how kids are growing up in a world of media and technology”, such as cyber bullying prevention. Other Announcements:SocialVibe Focuses on Political Ads – SocialVibe announced this week that it would be offering services tailored specifically to political campaigns and action committees ahead of the 2012 election. The company specializes in digital advertising. DealBurner Sends Group Deals When You Check In - DealBurner is a new service that sends users alerts when they check in to a location on Facebook Places or Foursquare about daily deals and pre-paid coupons offered at that business. The service aggregates deals from Groupon, LivingSocial, ScoutMob, and more. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Quixey’s Keyword-Based Facebook App Search Engine Could Become a Powerful Discovery Tool Posted: 05 Aug 2011 02:47 PM PDT Keyword-based app search engine startup Quixey added the ability to find Facebook apps this week. Users can now type in what they’re trying to do, such as “promote my band” and receive recommendations of apps across mobile operating systems, browsers, social networks, and the web. Quixey does a satisfactory job, returning generally relevant results, but missing some of the most popular Facebook apps when users search for their function. Although Facebook has social connections driving app discovery, competition is fierce and communication channels aren’t as strong as they used to be. Developers typically spend heavily on ads to market themselves. With time to improve, Quixey could help solve this problem by helping users find reputable apps, helping apps gain users, and making Facebook a more attractive development platform.
Currently, if someone wants to search for a Facebook app, they only have two options:
Facebook used to have a category-sorted App Directory, but it removed all links to it a long time ago and disabled it completely last month. AppBistro provides a Page tab application directory, but it doesn’t list user apps. A similar discovery problem exists on mobile which is being tackled by Chomp, Appsfire, and Appolicious, but there wasn’t a solid solution for finding Facebook apps until now. Quixey includes a very wide breadth of platforms in its app search results, including iPhone, iPad, Android, BlackBerry, Windows Phone, FireFox add-ons, Mac, PC, Web, Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and LinkedIn. When users conduct a search, they’ll see results from across platforms by default, but they can refine them to specific ones. Uses can also refine to only view apps mentioned in certain publications such as TechCrunch, or that integrate with certain services such as Flickr.
Results pages includes an in-line description, price, preview of a feature breakdown, star rating, and a list of platforms the app is available on. Clicking through a result reveals a full description and feature list, articles and tweets linking to the app, and videos. These signals make it easy to get a sense of the public opinion on an app before one tries it. Quixey only launched a few months ago, so some kinks are too be expected. Still, result ranking is still somewhat inaccurate, with hardly used apps appearing above some of the most popular Facebook apps for common needs. In some cases, such as when searching for “promote my band” or “Facebook music”, you’ll get the second-most popular app for that use case ranked first, but the most popular app won’t be anywhere in the results despite being indexed by Quixey. For instance, RootMusic’s BandPage doesn’t appear when searching “promote my band” or “Facebook music”, but less popular competitor ReverbNation’s Band Profile does. Same goes for a “professional networking” search returning Monster.com’s new BeKnown app, but not vertical leader BranchOut.
Results could be made even more compelling with the addition of Facepiles that show if friends have used the app. Quixey would need developers to authorize the plugins themselves, but these social recommendations could help users sort through lots of unknown apps and trust what they choose to install. Users and developers should both be excited about this new app discovery channel. It will make finding utility apps for things with generic names such as sharing photos or keeping calendars much easier, and give developers added incentive to maintain a high user experience that drives positive reviews. If it works out its result ranking algorithm and becomes more popular, Quixey could drive overall app usage, increasing time on site for Facebook and making developers money. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 05 Aug 2011 12:04 PM PDT In mid-July, Facebook confirmed to us that it began testing a new Parent-Child Page management system for business with a corporate / local structure — those with a central brand Page as well as Pages for each individual branch or franchise. The limited private beta program’s first public facing component is now live, with Regal Entertainment Group movie theaters now showing a new Facebook-developed Page tab app called Locations. The new app allows parent corporations Pages to display a map of nearby branch locations and links to their individual Pages. The app should help corporate Pages drive more Likes and foot traffic to their local branches, and could replace the “store finder” tab app found on most corporate websites.
Prior to the the start of the Parent-Child Page management system, it was very difficult for corporations to manage a hierarchy of Pages. A single person had to be added as the admin of every Page, and multiple Pages could be posted to, have apps installed, or have settings changed simultaneously. It was therefore very difficult to coordinate large scale cross-Page marketing campaigns, such as offering a coupon on the Facebook Page of every McDonald’s restaurant. First, a third-party tool called Hearsay Social launched to address the corporate / local problem. Over the last few months, though, that company worked with Facebook to create a native Parent-Child Page management system, complete with APIs and a basic graphic user interface. Now the initial tests of the system by a select few corporations are launching for public use. The Regal Entertainment Group Page now uses the Locations tab to show a map of all its movie theaters and links to their Pages. The map, powered by Bing, defaults to a tight radius around your current coordinates, but lets users search any address to pull up nearby locations represented by child Pages and the faces of friends who’ve checked in there. These child Pages now feature a link back to the parent Page, facilitating cross-Page promotion.
The Locations app also turns corporate Pages into a portal for local branches. Users can simply visit the corporate Page to find links to a nearby instance of the business or organization, rather than leaving Facebook to use a store finder on a client’s website. Once access to the Parent-Child system and Locations is rolled out, it could significantly increase Facebook’s utility as a sort of Yellow Pages with social recommendations. [Thanks to Kevin Evanetski for the tip] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 05 Aug 2011 08:45 AM PDT
A profile banner app, in Spanish, topped the list of our non-game applications growing by monthly active users this week. There were also a few calendar apps, in different languages, the Dropbox app, a few quiz/matchmaking apps and then a few photo apps. The apps on our list grew from between 152,500 and 698,700 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. We define “emerging” applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week. Top Gainers This Week
Banner de perfil en espagnol grew by about 457,000 MAU this week; the app allows a user to place a profile banner on their profile using pre-selected photos. Then there were three calendar-like apps that ask users to invite their friends to use them and receive notifications from particular friends, including: Besten Freunde (German) with 251,200 MAU, MonCalendrier (French) with 194,000 MAU and MiCalendario (Spanish) with 158,200 MAU. Dropbox's app grew by 173,300 MAU and takes a user to the website in order to download the app.
The other half of the list consisted of quiz and photo apps. freequizz.es is some sort of Connect app that asks you questions about your friends, then asks you to invite them to the app when you answer. It grew by 192,800 MAU. Together is an app that grew by 160,200 MAU and asks users to choose the best match for a friend from among your other friends, publishing the result to their Wall. Top Fifty Photos of Friends grew by 157,300 MAU and basically lets users rate their friends' photos and publish them to the stream. Peña Nieto – Bienvenidos grew by 156,600 MAU.
Finally, the most interesting app on our list, Dare 2 Tag, is a branded app from Jordana makeup company. The app grew by 154,300 MAU and asks the user to select a color scheme, then publishes a tagged photo of all their friends, pointing out the ways these people are both special, and how they pertain to certain Jordana beauty products. The app ends up tagging all these people, more than a dozen, in the photo after publishing to the stream. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned next week for our look at the top weekly gainers by monthly active users on Monday, the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday. |
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