Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: Project Spartan, Lamebook, Privacy Comments, Patents, Bug Bounty, Privacy, Ads and More
- Facebook Is Testing a “Translate” Button for Comments on Pages
- “Hide All Posts” From Pages No Longer an Option in the Facebook News Feed
- Microsoft, Yahoo, TripAdvisor, Yelp and VEVO Now Among Largest Facebook Applications
- Vote to See Inside Facebook and Inside Network Panels at SXSW
- Islam, Quizzes, Photos, Amazon and Social Networks on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
| Posted: 02 Sep 2011 06:42 PM PDT More Info on Facebook's Spartan – TechCrunch reported more information about BoltJS, a UI framework designed by Facebook and written in JavaScript that runs in the browser. Apparently it's part of Facebook's Project Spartan, which may not be fully revealed until f8. Facebook Settles With Lamebook – Lamebook, a humor site publishing funny Facebook posts, and Facebook settled this week. The judge refused to move the suit to California, and thus, some speculate that Facebook settled to avoid jury sympathy for the Austin-based company.
Facebook Pays $40,000 in Bounty Program – Facebook's Bug Bounty program has, thus far, paid out $40,000 to people around the world who have reported issues to the company. Chief Security Officer Joe Sullivan wrote a blog about the program this week with more information. Interesting Insights on Facebook Ads – SocialCode reported some interesting trends about Facebook ads, including: women are 11% more likely to click, older women are more likely to click through and men are slightly more likely to Like an ad. HTML5 Mobile App Allows for Connect – Nitobi, creators of PhoneGap, launched a new plugin, PhoneGap Facebook Connect. Essentially it allows users to login to HTML and JavaScript apps with their Facebook login. Social Networks and Patents – Business Week published an interesting story examining the lack of a "patent war" when it comes to social media companies like Facebook and Twitter. One reason the magazine speculated, is that Facebook (for example) only holds 12 patents, which is to say, there aren't as many patents to fight over. Facebook Developer Blog: Fluid Canvas – Facebook's Developer blog posted this week about how to build an app on Facebook with Fluid Canvas, to expand the size of apps, depending on a user's screen resolution. Other Announcements:
Vitrue Releases SaaS 3.0 – Vitrue released version 3.0 of its social media platform, which includes new localization features, analytics and metrics. Hootsuite Deepens Facebook Integration – AllFacebook reports that HootSuite has deepened its Facebook integration, specifically adding events, photos, groups, and geo-tool updates. 15% of Posts are Likejacked – Norton's analysis of 3.5 million video posts in August found that 15% were scams, or like jacking. Norton Safe Web for Facebook is an app that may guard against this type of attack. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Is Testing a “Translate” Button for Comments on Pages Posted: 02 Sep 2011 03:06 PM PDT
In tests that we and others are now seeing on some parts of the site (only on Pages, at this point), comments in languages other than your account’s current one now include “Translate” button next to them. If you click on the button, the comment is automatically translated to your account language. The Translate button is then replaced by “Original,” which if clicked will untranslate the comment. Facebook has already successfully crowdsourced the translation of its site to dozens of languages, connecting millions of people to each other around the world in new and unexpected ways. For an interesting example, take a look at the aggressive international cooperation that happens between users trying to mutually advance in a social game like FarmVille. Most users are not currently communicating much with people who speak other languages, simply because they can’t understand each other (unless they’re manually doing so through a third party service like Google Translate, as we sometimes do with commenters on our Facebook plugin for our site). And of course, users who already speak multiple languages won’t always need this tool. But you can still see how there are some potentially very big use cases here. Page owners, especially for popular international icons, are deluged by comments across the languages that Facebook now supports. Chances are they don’t understand everything every fan has been saying, so they’ve had to rely on Google Translate or other tools instead. As the feature is only working for Pages now, Facebook seems to be focusing on solving that problem.
If Facebook introduces this feature to personal profiles and apps as well, one can also imagine some other interesting ways it’d be used. For example, immigrant families who speak more than one language often have generational communication divides, typically where older members speak the language of the home country while younger generations speak the language of the host country. They’ll now have an easier time using Facebook to relate to each other. Meanwhile, social gamers with international friends could have a much easier time collaborating to get more points in a game, organize protests, or anything else. More pessimistically, users might use this feature to better understand each others’ flames, particular on Pages for controversial topics. For now, it only seems to be available in a few languages, including Spanish, French, Hebrew and Chinese. And it also doesn’t always recognize the comments, delivering a “There is no translation available for this story at the moment” response or sometimes not finding the right individual words within sentences. But in testing that we’ve done or had reported by readers, it appears to be familiar with slang — see the example in the screenshot from reader Amit Lavi, who tipped us off about the change. The translation technology figured out how to communicate “totally cool” from Hebrew to English, for example. It’s possible that the tech is making use of existing translation input from users that it has already gathered in its translation app. The feature could have far-reaching consequences for how people use Facebook, if not how they understand the rest of the world. We’ll see how the company decides to expand it from here. We’ved asked to for more details on how the feature works and what the plans for it are, and we’ll update with any response. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| “Hide All Posts” From Pages No Longer an Option in the Facebook News Feed Posted: 02 Sep 2011 01:05 PM PDT
The company may feel that since users are opting in to receive updates from people and Pages in the first place by friending or Liking them, the interface shouldn’t then make it too easy hide the most significant function of that decision. Philosophically, it has used the “you opted in in the first place” line of reasoning for other information-sharing features, from location to phone numbers to friend suggestions and much more.
But on that point, Facebook also decides on what posts to show in the news feed, and it is less likely to show any content from a source that users have previously shown they don’t interact with or don’t want. A final note: this change is happening right after a big revamp to the news feed, and before what might be the introduction of more granular controls for individual news feed items. If Facebook adds other ways to easily control content by person and page, this interface change won’t end up looking like much. [Thanks for the tip, Justin Oh of 22squared and Jeff Widman, cofounder of PageLever, along with our readers.] | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Microsoft, Yahoo, TripAdvisor, Yelp and VEVO Now Among Largest Facebook Applications Posted: 02 Sep 2011 09:30 AM PDT
Most notably, companies like Microsoft and Yahoo have been taking advantage of the platform’s authentication service (formerly known as Connect) to help users sign in to their other services using Facebook, and then sync the relevant Facebook user information to their service. Bing, for example, lets you sign in with Facebook, then shows you search results that your friends have Liked.
Our AppData traffic tracking service highlights the scale of the Facebook traffic for some of these apps today. By monthly active users, Bing is now the seventh largest app on the Facebook platform, with 28.9 million today. Windows Live Messenger is in tenth place at 21.5 million, and Yahoo is right after it with 20.9 million people. By daily active users, Messenger handily beats top social game CityVille to the number one spot, with 18.1 million people. Yahoo is in third place with 11.8 million and Bing is in tenth with 4.28 million. Other companies with large Facebook numbers on our list include TripAdvisor, Yelp and VEVO for Artists. Check out the graphs below to get a sense for these apps’ trajectories. But first: Strategic Implications of Facebook’s PrevalenceIf nothing else, these numbers illustrate that large sites that integrate Facebook can get serious traffic. Depending on how the integration is done, Facebook could be driving new traffic by encouraging more users to bother signing up, and engaging existing users by making the products more valuable through the use of Facebook data. But if the integrations are done poorly, companies could just be encouraging more users to view Facebook as the center of the web (and the owner of their data), without more value being created. Or, users might simply sign in at some point with Facebook but get nothing out of it — resulting in big stats, but nothing substantive. It is this complicated set of costs and benefits that helped convince Apple to not do its own Facebook integration with Ping last year. And, as far as we know, Facebook purposefully blocked then stonewalled a deal with Twitter because it was concerned that Twitter would be able to get the better side of the deal, essentially funneling more Facebook users to Twitter. The result of these two issues is that Apple has anointed Twitter as the main social sign-in service for iOS 5, leaving Facebook mostly excluded. The data here shows what Twitter and Apple might be missing out on. The flip-side is that Facebook’s dealmaking has left it in a worse position for reaching iOS users. Anyway, here are the biggest Facebook integrations today, by MAU and DAU: Bing
Windows Live Messenger
Yahoo
TripAdvisor
Yelp
VEVO for Artists
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| Vote to See Inside Facebook and Inside Network Panels at SXSW Posted: 02 Sep 2011 09:26 AM PDT The Inside Network editorial team has proposed several panels for this year's South By Southwest Interactive and Music Conferences, but we need your votes to get them on the program — and voting is just about to end, so now is the time to check them out if you haven’t already. The panels look at:
Brands Need 3rd-Party Tools to Succeed on FacebookCan brands succeed at Facebook marketing on their own? We'll discuss with the heads of the biggest service providers on the Facebook Platform what problems third-parties can solve for brands more efficiently than they can solve on their own, including advertising, brand presence, and promotion. We'll also look at some of the biggest questions brands are confronted with when choosing service providers, and why marketing on a social platform requires different partnership strategies than what brand are used to. Moderated by Josh Constine, Lead Writer of Inside Facebook. Panelists include:
Vote here for "Brands Need 3rd-Party tools to Succeed on Facebook" Facebook Credits: Not Just for Virtual GoodsFacebook Credits, the social network's virtual currency, has become the exclusive payment method for all Facebook games. Now, more users are maintaining a balance of Facebook Credits, and more users want them. This has opened new business and marketing opportunities. Content owners can license streaming access or downloads of their content in exchange for Facebook Credits. Meanwhile, ecommerce companies can reward users with Credits for marking purchases or signing up for email lists. Representatives of companies pioneering the use of Facebook Credits outside of social games will discuss the current state of Facebook Credits and their typical uses, explain how virtual currencies are already disrupting several industries, and debate which types of transactions are the next to be changed by the emergence of a virtual currency that is in demand and cheap to distribute. Moderated by Eric Eldon, Editor of Inside Network. Panelists include:
Facebook Music Marketing: Pages, Feeds, and GamesMusicians are adopting Facebook as a core component of their online marketing strategy as the importance of Myspace fades. But which of Facebook's social channels should artists focus on? Streaming music from their Facebook Page? Gaining fans by trading news feed posts with other musicians? Selling music and and driving listens within social games? Heads of some of most influential Facebook music marketing companies will debate which of these channels is most important, and we'll discuss how bands can tie the channels together to conduct successful marketing campaigns that don't spam Facebook's users. Moderated by Josh Constine, Lead Writer of Inside Facebook. Panelists include:
Vote here for "Facebook Music Marketing: Pages, Feeds, and Games" TV & Film in the Age of the Social GameWhat does Jersey Shore have to do with FarmVille? Major media producers like Starz, A&E and MTV are capturing new audiences both online and off by leveraging the power of social games on Facebook. As more licensed entertainment brands integrate with social games on the platform, what are the greatest risks, and who is taking the lion's share of rewards? Join us for a critical look at social game integrations that are headed for a crash, and the ones that are getting it right. Moderated by Amanda Glasser, Lead Writer of Inside Social Games. Panelists include:
Vote here for "TV & Film in the Age of the Social Game" | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 02 Sep 2011 08:31 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
عيد على صحابك is one of several apps with Islam-themed content on our list this week, growing by 939,400 MAU, posting a greeting card to a friend's Wall and also publishing a feed story. The app is joined by Kad Raya with 327,700 MAU and Kad Ucapan dan Lagu Raya with 294,700 MAU; both apps publish the cards to a friends' Wall.
Friend quiz apps included the Polish Bolesna prawda with 595,100 MAU, the German Warheiitsspiiel with 329,400 MAU, O-Meter App Factory with 314,700 MAU, the Chinese 21個問題 with 263,400 MAU and the Dutch MijnKalender (Nederlands) with 473,300 MAU. Most of the apps may ask questions about a user's friends and publish answers to their or your Wall, be a series of apps/quizzes or ask you to invite your friends.
Photo apps included Friends Photos & Albums, which appeared on our list twice this week, with 473,300 and 442,000 MAU. The Connect app places your friends' Facebook photos into a new interface on the app's website where you can view, Like or send them. Animated Picture grew by 342,600 MAU and purports to make an animated GIF for your profile photo.
Amazon Sweepstakes was on the list with 280,900 MAU, but then there were two social networks that rounded out the list. BeKnown, the professional networking app, grew by 253,200 MAU and schoolFeed by 246,400 MAU. This latter app is a Connect app that creates a social network for your high school, synchronizing with your Facebook profile, and so your Facebook friends show up in your feed. 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. |
Facebook Testing Comment Ordering? – AllFacebook 
Appbistro Announces PPI Ads for Page Apps – Appbistro announced that the company now installs apps for Page admins, thus the company has seen a 190% increase in installs, recently hitting 100,000 registered Page admins.
Facebook may be poised to let users translate comments from other languages — that’s 750 million users around the world who are going to have an easier time talking to each other.
Facebook has made a small interface change with a potentially big impact. Within the last day or two it has removed the option to “Hide All Posts” from the menu of options available for editing posts in the news feed. Many users instead are seeing only the options to hide the individual post, report the post or mark it as spam. If they then hide the post, they just see a message with links to either undo the post or unlike the Page. The option remains for friends’ posts, but a step further into the process.
For Page owners, the change means that users can no longer obscure all of their content with a single click, unless they want to Unlike the Page. That option does appear once you hide the post, but that’s relatively buried compared to the previous place it had in the main drop-down menu. Some Page owners have complained in the past that they don’t get enough visibility in the news feed based on the overall ranking structure of the algorithm. This change might make them happier.
The Facebook platform is best known for social games, but another class of applications has been on the rise in the past couple years: integrations of Facebook features by large media and tech companies into their own properties. They are now among the largest applications on the platform.
Here's a closer look at the four panels we've proposed. If you think these are important issues, please follow the links and vote for them. Help us out even if you aren't planning to attend, as some panels will be livestreamed, and we'll publish coverage of the discussions.
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