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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook Platform Team Formalizes 90-Day Breaking Change Policy, Improves Beta Tier Testing

Posted: 31 Aug 2011 07:25 PM PDT

Facebook has shared a few updates to its “Operation Developer Love” program, intended to further improve on what has been a sometimes turbulent relationship with its developer community.

Most prominently, it has said it intends to stick to a “90 day breaking change policy,” meaning it will give developers 90 days to adapt before making platform changes that cause applications to break. Examples of these types of changes include the deprecation of FBML and the REST API, or SDK. However, major product updates and urgent privacy and security fixes are, as one would expect, not included in this policy.

Facebook has also been giving developers more ways to test their applications against Facebook’s weekly Tuesday code updates. It’s been giving developers earlier and earlier access to test against the new changes for any bugs or other issues. It’s now also providing a Push Status feed to help developers more easily follow Facebook’s daily and weekly schedules of changes. It also now returns HTTP headers for API calls that identify the version number of the running code, helping developers more easily isolate version-specific issues.

Developer relations head Doug Purdy, who authored today’s developer post on the changes, also notes that his team has been busy improving the documentation, building out the developer support team, and moving to fix bugs more quickly – three of the biggest issues that developers have cited in past years. These latest updates aren’t going to be enough to make every developer happy (a very hard job), but they’re a step in the right direction.

Another Report Says Facebook Music Service Is Coming at f8

Posted: 31 Aug 2011 01:02 PM PDT

In the latest of many rumors about Facebook’s yet-to-launch music service, CNBC says today that it is coming at the company’s f8 developer conference next month in San Francisco.

GigaOm reported basically the same thing in June, and described the features in detail then. The service will include a new page called a Music Dashboard, that’s linked to the home page via a Music tab. The interface would allow you to choose from Spotify and a variety of other music services, and include a persistent play button, and a variety of other music-sharing features.

Facebook has bandied a variety of music-related ideas around over the years, and in 2008 it was poised to launch a streaming music of some sort in collaboration with a single music company, such as Lala. Nothing ever happened, largely because record labels didn’t want to agree to a deal to stream content to Facebook users at the time. Most of the potential partners that Facebook talked to then have since failed (also due to label licensing problems) or been acquired, and the project stalled out.

In the intervening years, musicians have formed a significant part of Facebook’s most popular Pages, and a variety of Page management companies have built businesses providing customized music applications for them. The market leader, RootMusic, just raised a second round of $16 million after growing its monthly active users by ten times in the past twelve months to reach around 32 million users a month today. As we noted about that deal this morning, a conceivable threat is what Facebook does with its music service. Are Spotify and other partners going to provide a better fan experience than Facebook Pages in this new service, and focus engagement away from the existing services? Or will Facebook’s Music Dashboard and other features tie the existing music Pages together with the new streaming options.

Either way, the new service sounds like a big win for the millions of Facebook users who love music, and for the partners who are part of the launch.

Among other launches that we expect at f8, the HTML5 efforts is looking increasingly mature, and there’s been a variety of leaks around upgrades to photos and its mobile app. Lastly, Facebook could finally launch its long-awaited iPad app.

New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Identified, Nanigans, Tagged and More

Posted: 31 Aug 2011 11:56 AM PDT

The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms.

Here are this week's highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at Identified, Nanigans, King.com, Amazon, FunCom Oslo AS, Tagged, 5th Planet Games,  TinyCo and Liquid Entertainment.

Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.

RootMusic Raises $16 Million Second Round, Following Hit BandPage Facebook App for Musicians

Posted: 31 Aug 2011 09:09 AM PDT

RootMusic has led a movement of musicians and fans onto Facebook over the past year. Now it’s building on its market position, announcing a second round of $16 million today.

Over the last twelve months, its BandPage application has grown from around 3 million monthly active users and 150,000 daily active users to 32.4 million MAU and 1.56 million DAU, according to our AppData tracking service. On Facebook, it is by far the largest Page app for musicians, and the seventh-largest app overall. By some measures, it is now bigger than long-time leading music fan site MySpace.

The company says that the money will be used for “expansion” without really saying how it will be used — but clearly, to go after a bigger opportunity. The platform, Facebook, has been growing quickly in recent years and now has 750 million people on the site every month. The demand that all these users have for quality Page experiences around musicians has almost certainly not been met yet. Meanwhile, long-time top music destination MySpace has fallen to the tens of millions of users from its heyday, with Compete showing it at under 30 million in the US, and Quantcast showing under 20 million.

The app also has a premium-service business model. The free version provides what you’d expect from a Page management application designed for music: a music player, a video section, a store for buying music, a tour calendar, and ways to post songs and other information to Facebook and Twitter. Page owners who want to get more interface customization options have to pay. The company has, by the looks of this promotional video, signed up many of the most popular acts in the world over the years, from a variety of older acts like The Doors and Bon Jovi to top new ones like Rihanna and Taylor Swift. It says it has more than 250,000 bands overall.

So far, RootMusic seems to have carved out the music category of Pages well. It has been steadily rolling out product upgrades over the past couple of years, while some of the other companies we’ve seen approach the market head in other directions or lose focus. It could, however, theoretically get more competition from any in-house music service that Facebook might decide to roll out, and in the form of streaming music services like Spotify attracting the attention of fans.

New investor GGV Capital (formerly Granite) led the round, with another new investor, Northgate Capital coming in to participate. Mohr Davidow Ventures also added on to its existing $2.3 million first round.

Birthdays, Horoscopes, Photos, Tabs, Skype, Yahoo and Windows on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by DAU

Posted: 31 Aug 2011 08:32 AM PDT

Photos and horoscopes were super popular on our list of growing applications by daily active users this week. Page tab apps, Skype, Yahoo and Windows Messenger were also on our list. The titles on our list below grew from between 191,500 and 4 million DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Oddly, three different apps named “Friend Photos & Albums” appeared.

Top Gainers This Week

Name DAU Gain Gain,%
1.  The Sims Social 7,531,096 +4,081,773 +118%
2.  Birthday Calendar 3,377,500 +3,334,336 +7,725%
3.  Daily Horoscope 8,162,467 +2,210,359 +37%
4.  Günlük Falınız – The Fortune Teller 1,610,346 +1,419,058 +742%
5.  21 questions 3,924,431 +983,926 +33%
6.  Horóscopo Diário 1,525,608 +622,977 +69%
7.  Yahoo! 11,804,142 +587,518 +5%
8.  Static IFRAME Tab : ThumbsUp Icon 502,516 +440,491 +710%
9.  Friends Photos & Albums 431,426 +416,693 +2,828%
10.  Friends Photos & Albums 451,848 +394,237 +684%
11.  Static Iframe Tab 685,349 +336,673 +97%
12.  Friends Photos & Albums 410,869 +312,258 +317%
13.  Skype 1,648,629 +296,851 +22%
14.  عيد على صحابك 288,881 +287,465 +20,301%
15.  My Tab 453,018 +284,369 +169%
16.  الأبراج اليومية 1,282,061 +272,859 +27%
17.  Top 5 Games 288,425 +263,151 +1,041%
18.  Welcome Tab 679,517 +261,941 +63%
19.  Windows Live Messenger 18,104,245 +236,761 +1%
20.  Astrology 3,868,633 +191,530 +5%

Birthday Calendar grew by 3.3 million DAU this week, the app creates an interface with a user's photos and birthdays in calendar form, allowing them to add events to it. Then there were other friend-related apps, 21 questions which asks questions about friends and posts answers to the feed, grew by 983,900 DAU.  عيد على صحابك grew by 2.2 million DAU, allowing users to post virtual gifts to their friends' Walls, but then generating a feed story that you did so, increasing network exposure. Friends Photos & Albums is a Connect app that places your friends' Facebook photos into a new interface on the app's website where you can view, Like or send them. This app appeared on our list three times, including growth of 416,700 DAU, 394,200 DAU and 312,300 DAU. The first is made by developer eYari and an apparently related company named eYPhotos made the second two.

Then horoscope apps were very popular this week for whatever reason. Daily Horoscope grew by 2.2 million DAU, Turkish Günlük Falınız – The Fortune Teller grew by 1.4 million DAU giving you a percentage of things like health and money, Horóscopo Diário is a Spanish language app that grew by 623,000 DAU,  الأبراج اليومية grew by 272,900 DAU and Astrology grew by 191,500 DAU. These apps either publish to your stream, ask you to subscribe to daily Wall posts or to invite your friends to use the app.

Tab apps included Static IFRAME Tab : ThumbsUp Icon that grew by 440,500 DAU, Static Iframe Tab with 336,700 DAU, My Tab with 284,400 DAU and Welcome Tab with 262,000 DAU. Yahoo's app grew by 587,500 DAU, Skype by 296,900 DAU and Windows Live Messenger with 236,800 DAU.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top emerging apps on Friday.

torsdag den 1. september 2011 at 07.47