Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook’s Relevance-Filtered Chat Buddy List, or, Why Users Don’t Know Who’s Online
- Platform Update: OAuth 2.0 Spec Migration Required by November 5th, PHP SDK, Video
- Featured Facebook Campaigns: Sears Latino, Aeropostale, DirecTV and Food Network
- Facebook’s News Feed Links Status Updates to Pages Even If Users Don’t
- Mobile, Calendar, Photos, Quizzes, Pages, Dating, Music and More on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook’s Relevance-Filtered Chat Buddy List, or, Why Users Don’t Know Who’s Online Posted: 08 Aug 2011 04:35 PM PDT Since the Skype Video Calling and Chat redesign launch a month ago, you may have noticed something missing from your Facebook home page. The Facebook Chat buddy list now only shows you the online status of a subset of your closest or most recently interacted with friends, around 20 on a screen of average size and resolution. You can only determine if the rest of your friends are available to Chat by searching for them one by one. The redesign makes a bad tradeoff. Quick access to Chat with best friends is helpful, but search is far too inefficient a method of determining the online status of other friends. It’s unlikely that users will ever strike up a casual conversation with anyone outside of the buddy list. This is unfortunate, because it’s the ability to stay in touch more distant acquaintances that makes Facebook special.
Sure, people spend most of their time Chatting with close friends or people they frequently need to exchange information with, such as co-workers or teammates. The new design makes it very easy to start talking with a friend whose wall you recently posted on, profile you’ve been perusing, or that you Chatted with yesterday. The intelligent sorting algorithm isn’t perfect, though. For example, I see friends I haven’t interacted with in months, while best friends, people I frequently see in person, and those who’ve recently Liked my status updates remain hidden. With time the algorithm could improve, but now if I’m visiting New York City and want to ask several local friends where I should go for lunch, searching one-by-one to see if they’re online is a ton of work. I’ll probably forget to search for someone who might have the recommendation I need.
A quick glance at the unfiltered Chat buddy list on one of Facebook’s mobile apps reveals the friends that are missing, that I might have asked for advice or invited to dinner if it wasn’t so difficult to figure out if they were available to Chat.
The relevance-filtered buddy list is an especially big problem for users with abnormally high friend counts. Facebook says the average user has 130 friends (though we hear it’s closer to 180 now), and for those people perhaps only a handful of online friends don’t appear on the buddy list. If a use has 500 or 1000 friends, though, the number of missing friends is much more significant, recalling names from such a large set is difficult, and searching one friend at time takes far too long to be feasible. Its these power users and early adopters that are posting updates, tagging photos, and driving total time on site for Facebook. These are the same people that could lead their graphs to another social network if they got fed up with Facebook, so it’s in the site’s interest to keep them happy. Facebook should implement a combination of the relevance-filtered and complete buddy list, similar to how the news feed has tabs for Top News and Most Recent. The site has considered ways of eliminating the tabbed news feed because some users never leave the default Top News tab, but the buddy list is not an endless stream, it can be easily displayed in its entirety. By default, the tabbed buddy list could show users the relevance-filtered list, so the most frequent Chat use cases wouldn’t require any buddy list scrolling to initiate. Then let users click to view their full buddy list. Search could be left in to help those with massive buddy lists, or scrapped for a cleaner design. With a global user base topping 750 million that includes social butterflies and grandparents just looking to share with their kids, pleasing everyone is no simple task. More options make things more complicated, so in most situations, design that work for the majority are best. But when sleek, algorithmic-focused design creates more friction than it removes, one extra link or button may be the answer. In this case, I hope the answer is “See all online friends”. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Platform Update: OAuth 2.0 Spec Migration Required by November 5th, PHP SDK, Video Posted: 08 Aug 2011 11:25 AM PDT The last Platform Update to the Facebook Developer Blog announced a mandatory migration to a new spec of OAuth 2.0. It only requires a small code change, but all developers must implement it by November 5th. Facebook also noted that a slightly updated version of the PHP SDK will be released tomorrow, August 9th. This week, Facebook also provided a walk through of how developers can allow users to upload videos to their profiles through an application. Facebook is currently migrating to OAuth 2.0, a secure authorization protocol that allows applications to keep User IDs and access tokens private when transmitted. All developers must migrate their apps to OAuth 2.0 by October 1st. Facebook jointly publishes the OAuth spec with Yahoo! and Microsoft. A change to this spec necessitates a changes to Facebook’s auth APIs will also change, which in turn requires a minor change to API calls. As of November 5th, 2011, auth API calls that previously used included “
In other OAuth news, tomorrow Facebook will release v3.1 of its PHP SDK. The OAuth 2.0-ready versions of the PHP and JavaScript SDKs were initially slated for a July 1st launch. However the PHP SDK was finished early and released in late May, while technical difficulties delayed the JS SDK until late July. During the delay of the JS SDK, there were apparently some improvements made upon what was released in the v3 of the PHP SDK. The new v3.1 PHP SDK update to be released tomorrow will “leverage the recent changes to the JavaScript SDK”. Developers can download the update on GitHub. Facebook has been publishing a series of how-to guides that explain how developers can add advanced functionality to and optimize performance of their apps and websites. Previously, Facebook published a how-to for optimizing social plugin performance. The guides consolidate clear instructions so developers don’t have to dig through forums or use trial and error to achieve the functionality they desire. The How-To: Use the Graph API to Upload a Video (iOS) guide explains that by allowing users to upload video through an app, that app can gain new users since a link to it is included alongside video content. The guide covers how to:
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| Featured Facebook Campaigns: Sears Latino, Aeropostale, DirecTV and Food Network Posted: 08 Aug 2011 09:55 AM PDT The brands we featured this week ran some interesting campaigns, including: Sears launched a Sears Latino Page, Aeropostale launched an e-commerce store, DirecTV is engaging in a Page growth charity drive while Food Network is simultaneously promoting its sponsors while recruiting users to the Page with an associated giveaway. We've excerpted two of the campaigns below. You can see the full week's coverage in the Facebook Marketing Bible, which also includes detailed breakdowns of over 100 other featured campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook.
Sears Launches Sears Latino PageGoal: Page Growth, Product Purchase, Brand Loyalty, Network Exposure Core Mechanic: The new Sears Latino Facebook Page is aimed particularly at Latino customers. Method: The Sears Latino Page is marketing itself as a destination for Sears' Latino customers to go to be informed about the latest sales and products that are relevant to them. The Page's bilingual content — from the landing tab, appliance sweepstakes, status updates and product promotions — is culturally relevant and very family-oriented. Plus, the current appliance sweepstakes is Like-gated, asks for an email address for future email marketing and also asks users to share their entry to the stream. Impact: The Page currently has grown to 20,800 Likes in the two and half weeks since it launched, and is using several of the tools mentioned above to grow. Aeropostale's Facebook E-Commerce StoreGoal: Product Purchase, Network Exposure, Brand Loyalty, Core Mechanic: An e-commerce store on the Aeropostale Facebook Page. Method: The Aeropostale Facebook Page features an e-commerce store that allows customers the chance to buy, save, share, Like and comment on products without leaving the platform. The Usablenet store launched at the beginning of August and is combined with a mobile app. The interface of the store promotes sharing content to the stream; 50 users Like the store itself already and users may also Like individual products. Shopping on the store is fairly easy, although there are lots of clicks involved, the individual items are easy to view and Like. Users may also sign up for email, locate stores, track orders or search using the store. The Page is also promoting the store on the Wall via status updates. Impact: Thus far the Page has 5 million Likes, and PageData shows a growth of about 200,000 Likes since the store's launch at the beginning of the month. How are top brands in the industry designing their Facebook marketing campaigns? See the Facebook Marketing Bible for detailed breakdowns of dozens of Featured Campaigns by top-performing brands and businesses on Facebook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook’s News Feed Links Status Updates to Pages Even If Users Don’t Posted: 08 Aug 2011 08:29 AM PDT Facebook is now showing a special type of news feed story that links to a Page when multiple friends post updates that mention the Page’s name, even if they don’t explicitly tag it. The story reads “[Friend's name] and [x] other friends posted about [Page name]“, with the Page’s name linked. The “Posted About” news feed story shows that Facebook is using natural language processing on status updates to perform named entity recognition. It will help users determine topics that are trending amongst their friends, and help the Pages representing these topics gain more fans.
Facebook previously tested the same type of aggregated news feed story in late 2010, with the stories reading that multiple friends had “mentioned” a Page without tagging it. Other types of aggregated news feed stories the site has tested include those showing that multiple friends had published a link to the same website, written on the same friend’s wall, or checked into the same Place. However, none of these require named entity recognition. Page names are recognized from within simple text status updates as well as the headlines of posted links. Users can explicitly tag Pages they Like in their status updates using the @ operator, but some users don’t know about this feature, purposefully opt not to tag Pages, or don’t Like the Pages they would tag. Aggregated Posted About stories let Facebook link these updates to the mentioned Pages without actually changing a user’s original update, and thread Likes and comments for each original post. Posted About news feed stories and other aggregated stories surface popular content and actions from a user’s social graph, providing personalized trending topics. This contrasts with Twitter’s less personalized trending topics feature, which displays the most frequently mentioned words or phrases from the worldwide Twitter user base, or specific cities or countries. These Posted About stories are highly relevant and fun to read because they present different opinions on a specific topic. You might see a post of a friend talking about how they appreciate a new feature in iTunes aggregated with another friend’s post recommending a new album to buy on iTunes. However, Facebook has confirmed with us that its natural language processing doesn’t detect sentiment, how a Page’s name is being used, or whether the mentioned Page was actually the focus of the update. As such, the Posted About stories may highlight Pages that aren’t actually what a user was discussing, or that are being talked about negatively. Brands might be weary of having bitter or defamatory posts linked to their official presence.
For these reasons, some users may not enjoy the presence of Posted About stories. They may feel that Facebook is invading their privacy by “reading” their posts, even though the processing is done by computers, not humans. Others may not necessarily want to promote a Page they mention, especially if their update criticizes it, and may feel that they are being used by Facebook as a marketing tool. This could make particularly sensitive users less likely to mention Page names, or make them post less frequently in general. Growth Opportunity for PagesPage admins should be excited about the resumed trial of Posted About news feed stories, as they will likely drive growth of Pages. Each mention of a Page aggregated by the story represents a social recommendation, indicating the Page is important to the viewer’s network. They can then follow these implicit recommendations by clicking through the link to the Page and Liking it. Getting users to tag Pages in updates is a core free growth channel for Pages, and now Facebook is relieving users from having to remember to tag a Page or going through the chore of adding the tag. The Posted About stories should increase the total presence of links to Pages in the news feed, augmenting paid Page marketing through ads with organic growth. The story stype will give businesses an added incentive to get users talking about them on Facebook, and especially help commonly discussed Pages to grow. Posted About aggregated news feed stories could make the news feed more relevant, and there’s also plenty more potential for natural language processing to improve Facebook. One day you might be able to see aggregated stories about multiple friends that are happy or that are discussing world news , no matter what words they use to describe the emotion or topic. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 08 Aug 2011 08:16 AM PDT
Facebook's mobile feature phone app, Facebook for Every Phone, topped our list with more than 5 million MAU. Calendar apps, photos, quizzes, a handful of Page tab apps, Are You Interested? and Cupid, Yahoo and BandPage by RootMusic rounded out the list. The titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 395,100 and 5.4 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week
Facebook for Every Phone grew by about 5.4 million MAU this week, far surpassing the next most popular app, MyCalendar which grew by 4.3 million MAU. There were a few other calendar apps on the list, MeinKalender with 1.2 million MAU and MonCalendrier with 526,000 MAU. The calendars almost immediately ask users to invite friends to the app in order to use it.
A few friend interaction apps were on the list; 60photos grew by 3.8 million MAU. This app asks users to rate their friends' Facebook photos and then publishes stories to their Walls with positive ratings. 21 questions grew by 851,200 MAU; the story asks users questions about their friends and publishes a feed story to their Wall with each answer. The Connect app freequizz.es, which grew by 491,400 MAU, asks users questions about their friends — then asks them to invite those friends to use the app as well.
Page tab apps were popular this week. Static HTML: iframe tabs grew by 2.4 million MA,. Static Iframe Tab by 505,300 MAU, Pagemodo Custom Welcome Tab grew by 473,500 MAU and Welcome tab app for Pages by 396,100 MAU. Two dating apps grew on our list pretty significantly this week. Are YOU Interested? by 1.1 million MAU and Cupid by just about the same. BandPage by RootMusic grew by just over 1 million MAU and Yahoo's app grew by 712,300 MAU. All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday. |
We asked Facebook why Chat has been redesigned like this, and Director of Product Peter Deng told us, “The goal of the new design is to give more people faster access to the friends they message most. Looking at the early data of how people are engaging with and using Chat, things are moving in this direction.”
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