Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: UK Gov, Police, Netlog, Ceglia, Narcissism, Google+ and More
- Facebook Prohibits Promotion of Apps on Competing Social Platforms, Unapproved Soft Offers
- Facebook Adds Game Stories to the News Feed, Privacy Settings to Limit Them
- How Beluga Metamorphosed Into Facebook Messenger
- Facebook Users Can Now Opt Into Letting Friends Export Their Email Addresses via Download Your Information
- Calendars, Pages, Quizzes, Happiness, Photos, and Korea on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook Roundup: UK Gov, Police, Netlog, Ceglia, Narcissism, Google+ and More Posted: 12 Aug 2011 06:30 PM PDT
NYPD Forms Social Media Tracking Unit – The New York Police Department has recently formed a unit specifically to track activity on Facebook and Twitter. Specifically information about parties, gang activity and other problems will be the focus. [Image via Facebook] Facebook is Not Posting Phone Numbers – Facebook is responding to a viral warning that the company is "stealing" or posting users' phone numbers for everyone to see. It says phone numbers of friends are kept private. European Social Network Netlog Banned From Facebook – Netlog, a European social network with roughly 80 million user has been banned from the Facebook Platform after it tried to “access internal Facebook APIs and deliberately compromised intended limitations of our platform acebook has banned the European,” Facebook said.
Facebook, Ceglia, Continue to Duel – Last week Facebook announced that it had "smoking gun" evidence against would-be Facebook owner Paul Ceglia to prove that his lawsuit is frivolous. Then, it turns out, Ceglia is in Ireland and saying he's being harassed by Facebook. More Facebook Means More Narcissism – Facebook can lead to mental health issues for teens according to one psychology professor's research. The American Psychological Association conference presentation included information that heavy Facebook users suffering anxiety and depression, and are more likely to be narcissistic.
Our Eyes Perceive Facebook, Google+ Similarly – A study found that Google+ has a setup that allows users to perceive it almost identically to Facebook. The study from EyeTrackShop tracked the order of visual fixation for 54 users, finding high correlation between the two networks. Google+ Set to Surpass Twitter – A study from the UK found that Google+ is set to become the second-largest social network after Facebook. Other Announcements: Vitrue, Clear Channel Radio Partner – Vitrue and Clear Channel Radio have announced a partnership in which all of the company's 850 radio stations will implement Vitrue's SRM platform. Buckaroo Unveils Social Media Promotions – Buckaroo has announced a new way that businesses can combine social deals with email marketing, Facebook and Twitter. The technology is designed for small businesses. Career Notify Leverages Facebook in Job Hunt – Career Notify is a recruitment and head hunting service that sends email notifications to Facebook friends and contacts whenever anyone gets a new job, promotion, or resigns. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Prohibits Promotion of Apps on Competing Social Platforms, Unapproved Soft Offers Posted: 12 Aug 2011 03:55 PM PDT Facebook has updated its Platform Polices, prohibiting apps from linking to or promote apps on competing social platforms, and from rewarding users with virtual currency, goods, or downloads through a third-party for taking an action. These policy changes, reported by TechCrunch, will prevent developers from directing traffic from their Facebook apps to off-site destinations, or from incentivizing user actions unless done with Facebook Credits or without the aid of third-parties. The policy changes were not announced on the Facebook Developer Blog or anywhere else. Facebook may only enforce the ban on linking to competitors in more aggressive cases. Still, fear of enforcement may limit how developers can promote versions of their apps on other platforms such as Google+’s recently launched games platform, hampering growth for both developers and platform owners.
Banning Cross-Platform PromotionFacebook already prohibited advertising for competing social platforms on its website. Now it’s Platform Policies states “I.11 – Apps on Facebook may not integrate, link to, promote, distribute, or redirect to any app on any other competing social platform.” This policy update could be seen as an extension of that ban, meant to cover developers who are effectively advertising within the real estate of their own games. Alternatively, it could seen as an limiting developers from driving engagement on other platforms from users whose engagement they won on Facebook. Many Facebook developers currently use banners and pop-ups on their canvas apps, as well as Facebook wall posts to promote their presence across the web. Much will depend on how Facebook interprets “social platform”. If this is taken to mean other web services offering a very similar developer platform within a social network, such as Google+, it would be more sensible, though a sign that Facebook believes these platforms have the potential to serious complete with it. If the term is interpreted to include vastly different mediums such as mobile or console app and game platforms, it could prohibit developers from offering users a more 360 degree experience, where they could play different parts of the same game or access different functionalities of an app while on their mobile device. If cross-platform promotion is important to a developer, they may either have to leave Facebook, or silo their Facebook app or game experience while their presence on more open social platforms seamlessly integrate across mediums and platforms. Fewer Incentive OptionsBeginning July 1st when Facebook made Credits the mandatory exclusive payment method for Facebook games, it restricted how developers could reward users. Essentially, developers could only reward users with:
The policy change strikes this third option as such: “you may not reward users with virtual currency for engaging in passive actions offered by third parties, such as watching a video, playing a mini-game, or taking an anonymous poll." This means that to reward users with the help of a third-party, developers must go through Facebook’s approved offer partners, namely TrialPay and other approved partners that feed it offers. Otherwise they must only be giving away their own virtual goods, and the actions a user takes to earn the reward must only deal with the developer itself, such as watching a video trailer for another one of its Facebook games. These limitations will make it more difficult for developers to monetize, though Facebook likely sees the move as improving the quality of offers seen on its Platform. Along with restricting developers, this will ban from Facebook all unapproved soft offer providers — those that help developers show video ads, fill out anonymized surveys, or interact with branded content. The only offer providers now allowed on the Facebook Platform are TrialPay, Sharethrough, EpicSocial, SocialVibe, Deal United, and SupersonicAds. All others will have to seek approval from Facebook or do business elsewhere. These Platform Policy changes impact a wide variety of developers, social platforms and third-party providers, yet they weren’t properly announced. This means some developers are likely unaware that they are violating Facebook’s policies. With enforcement for violations meaning suspension or expulsion from the Facebook Platform that can cost developers lots of money, it was irresponsible not to make the changes more obvious. It’s these kinds of secretive moves that could push developers to look more into the same social platforms it’s aiming to stifle, while it also makes efforts to improve discovery and virality for games and apps at the same time. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Adds Game Stories to the News Feed, Privacy Settings to Limit Them Posted: 12 Aug 2011 02:05 PM PDT Facebook yesterday announced several changes to how games work on the Platform, including that stories about game may be published to the news feeds of a user’s friends, including non-gamers, when the play a game for more than 15 minutes or complete an in-game objective. Depending on their prevalence in the news feed, game usage and achievement stories could help developers gain new users for free, but could also clutter the news feeds of people who don’t care about games. To help users avoid annoying their friends, Facebook will add a new privacy setting that allows them to define on an app-by-app basis who an app can share with. The setting will default to “friends” but users can select to prevent the publishing of game discovery, usage, and achievement stories to news feed and the new Games Ticker.
A Year of Limited ViralityPrior to last September, Facebook apps and games could publish stories to the news feed about users taking in-app actions. While relevant to other gamers and key source of new users for developers, non-gamers often found these stories irrelevant and considered them spam amongst their social content. With this spam threatening to overrun the news feed and drive users away from Facebook, the site closed this viral channel. Only the occasional story about a friend starting to play a game would appear in the news feed to those that had not already installed that game, significantly cleaning up the feed but also severely limiting organic growth for apps and games. Facebook also tested a randomly occurring Discover New Games sidebar module, but this wasn’t frequently seen and its placement in the sidebar made it much less noticeable than the old game stories that appeared in the news feed. Without the free growth channel of prominent placement in the news feed, developers were forced to spend more on ads to gain traction for their apps. Combined with Facebook’s 30% tax on Facebook Credits that in July it made the mandatory payment method for virtual goods within games, the Facebook Platform had become much expensive to develop on then a year ago. This led developers to look for alternatives, making Facebook more potentially vulnerable to competing platforms. Increased Virality to Fend Off CompetitorsYesterday, Google+ launched its own games platform that only charges developers 5% on purchases made in their game, deeply undercutting Facebook Credits. Facebook needed to make a concession to developers to make its Platform more attractive, and so soon after the Google+ games news dropped, it announced several changes to how Canvas pages and bookmarks work, as well as two new viral channels: the Games Ticker and news feed game stories.
The Games Ticker appears in the right sidebar while users play any Facebook Canvas game, and shows real-time updates of in-app activity by friends. These include:
When a user first starts using a game, it shows stories about the same game, but as they play longer also shows stories about games they haven’t installed. The Games Ticker should help keep users engaged with a game by informing them of friends who are playing too, and help them discover new games their friends enjoy. Only people who already play games will see the Games Ticker, but this should be a boon for developers since these are the same people who are likely to have a balance of Facebook Credits to spend and be used to sustained engagement with games. Still to attain the rapid, massive growth that attracted developers to Facebook in the first place, they’d need access to all users, not just existing gamers. So Facebook may now publish the stories listed above as well as posts users opt to fill out and share to the news feed, allowing all users, including those that don’t play games, to discover games from the home page. Previously, news feed stories were only published when a user first started playing. Facebook will only show a gamer’s friends these stories if its algorithm determines they are highly relevant, so users should only see stories about their closest friends. These stories allow developers to passively leverage their most engaged users to gain installs from their friends. Facebook explains it may be inappropriate to share news of usage of some types of games and apps, such as those related to “more personal behavior such as dating, weight management or pregnancy” and so developers can turn off these discovery stories through a setting in the Developer app.
New “App Privacy” Setting andUsers who see unwanted game stories in their news feed or ticker can select to hide future stories about that app or friend. Facebook will use this feedback data to determine how prominent an app’s stories should appear in the news feeds of all users. Those receiving Likes and comments on their posts will gain more impressions, and those frequently hidden or marked as spam will receive fewer impressions.
Users will also be able to prevent game stories about them from appearing in the news feeds or Games Tickers of friends thanks to a new privacy setting that wil be rolled out. Within the Apps, Games, and Websites privacy settings, if users select to edit settings of an app they use, they’ll see an “App privacy” setting. They can select a privacy bucket that “this app can share with”, such as “Friends”, “Friends of Friends and Networks”, or customize settings to”Only Me”, or “Specific People”. Previously, users could only set a privacy level for all content published by all their apps and games, not a specific game. The app privacy settings can also be reached by clicking on link within an app’s bookmark on the homes page, making it option to restrict distribution of game stories much more accessible.
Considering that it’s difficult for a user to tell how often game stories about them are appearing to friends, users might not use this privacy setting frequently though it’s readily available. This should help games grow without paying for as many ads, but Facebook will need to take extra care only publish highly relevant game stories to the news feed. Otherwise, in an effort to compete with other game platforms, it could degrade the user experience for everyone on Facebook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| How Beluga Metamorphosed Into Facebook Messenger Posted: 12 Aug 2011 12:35 PM PDT
Beluga Facebook Messenger Yesterday’s launch of a standalone Facebook messaging app was the culmination of five months of work, which turned a fledgling app from a team of three former Google engineers and turned it into one that could interface with the daily messaging needs of the social network’s 750 million users. We talked with Lucy Zhang, who co-founded the startup Facebook acquired to build Messenger, about how she took their original app Beluga and turned it into one that could handle messaging volume for a much larger user base. Messenger has become iOS’ top free app overnight through word-of-mouth. Earlier this year, Zhang and her co-founders Ben Davenport and Jon Perlow launched a group messaging client called Beluga that seamlessly interlaced chat over push notifications and SMS on Android and iOS. It had thoughtfully designed hooks into the Facebook platform that helped it grow virally on the social network — which is difficult for a mobile app to do considering that there aren’t really effective viral channels on iOS. Facebook snapped up the team in March before they could seriously consider a Series A round and the Beluga team set out to build a standalone counterpart for the social network. That’s unusual because Facebook typically picks up a small team of engineers or product managers, puts them through engineering bootcamp and then does some matchmaking to pair them internally with a product team that fits their interests and skills. This often means the acquired company has to abandon whatever they were working on before as an independent startup. In Beluga’s case, the three co-founders had pretty strong feelings about what they wanted from the get go. From what it sounds like, the decision to go with a standalone Facebook Messenger app was not as top-down as many of the company’s product choices are. “When we talked to Facebook about the acquisition, one of the things we made clear was that we thought it was very important to create a fast messaging client that was dedicated to messaging,” Zhang said. “It happened that they were very aligned with what we wanted. Mark Zuckerberg wanted to make this a reality.” >> Read on Inside Mobile Apps. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 12 Aug 2011 10:03 AM PDT Previously, Facebook’s Download Your Information tool let users export an archive of their status updates, photos, as well as a list of friends’ names, but not their contact information. Now, Facebook allows users to opt into having their email address included in exports by their friends, TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid reports. The feature will allow Facebook to deflect criticism that it doesn’t permit data portability by saying that users have the option but choose not to let friends export their email addresses for use in other web services, including Google+.
Facebook launched Download Your Information so users could back up the social content they own, in case they lost their local copy of data such as their photos. It was designed for personal use, with David Recordon, Facebook's senior open programs manager saying at its launch event "We built this product as something that's useful for people, not for other developers." It wasn’t meant to be used to seed a profile and social graph on another web service. Google and Facebook blocked or put up roadblocks on importing and exporting data between their services in November 2010. Google had accused Facebook of not supporting data portability because users couldn’t export email addresses of friends, but could import addresses from services like Gmail. Facebook responded saying the email addresses of friends are not a user’s own data, and therefore they don’t have the right to export them. Meanwhile, it allowed these same email addresses to be exported through Yahoo! Mail and some smaller third-party email services. Now Facebook users can authorize their email to be exported when friends use Download Your Information. The option is buried within the folded “Email” settings in Account Settings. Few users regularly visit their account settings, and even fewer would expanded an area that presumably only allows you to change your email address. The placement of the feature here will allow Facebook to say it exists without the risk that most users will actually enable address exporting. Google’s new social network Google+ bases friend discovery on email addresses, so if users could export the email addresses of all their Facebook friends, they could easily find them on Google+. Facebook clearly doesn’t want this to happen, but doesn’t want to appear to be hoarding user data — a key fear of users that might make them more likely to switch social networks. Users have little to lose by enabling the option, unless they have friends who would share their email address with unscrupulous developers or spammers. It will make them easier to find around the web, and help friends stay in contact by email if they ever choose to leave Facebook. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 12 Aug 2011 08:06 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
Topping our list of apps this week was the Spanish calendar app MiCalendario, which grew by 347,500 MAU. Then there were the Dutch and German versions, MijnKalender (Nederlands) with 205,100 MAU and MinKalender (Dansk) with 183,900 MAU. The apps immediately ask users to invite friends in order to use them.
The French Qui regarde le plus votre profil ? grew by 344,100 MAU. A Turkish app, Vizlesene, grew by 303,700 MAU. Friend quiz app freequizz.es grew by 302,200 MAU; the app asks users questions about their friends, then asks them to invite them to the app after answering. A Turkish Page tab app Hoş Geldiniz, grew by 245,200 MAU while an English one, Static HTML… [Fifth Tab], grew by 218,500 MAU. Photo discovery app Top Fifty Photos of Friends grew by 203,900 MAU. Turkish video app FizTube World’s grew by 200,400 MAU; usually these apps allow users to Like, share and comment on videos.
How Happy are You Today is an app that decides how happy you are with a percentage and publishes it to your Wall; it grew by 196,900 MAU. Warheiitsspiiel is a German app that grew by 190,600 MAU. Together is an app that asks users to make matches amongst their friends, publishing to their Wall; it grew by 187,400 MAU. Finally, Korea.com is an app that lets users see the website on the Facebook platform and grew by 287,000 MAU. 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. |
UK Officials Meet With Facebook to Stem Riots – United Kingdom officials are set to meet with Facebook, Twitter and BlackBerry regarding their 
Facebook Helps College Newspapers – Facebook has 
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