Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Platform Update: Graph API Additions, App Changes and Insights, Data Export
- Report: Facebook Nears $500M Net Income on $1.6B Revenue in First Half of 2011, Mostly Tracking Projections
- Facebook for iPhone 3.5 Hitting 50M DAU, Ports Recent Privacy Changes, Still Includes Check-Ins
- New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Kobojo, W3i, Acquinity Interactive and More
- Facebook Names Political and Business Leader Erskine Bowles to Board of Directors
- Friend Quizzes, Page Tabs, Photos, Phrases, Horoscopes, Luck and Mobile on This Week’s Top 20 Facebook Apps by DAU
| Platform Update: Graph API Additions, App Changes and Insights, Data Export Posted: 07 Sep 2011 06:18 PM PDT Facebook has published two Platform Updates and another post to the company developer blog over the past few days, detailing a variety of additions to the Graph API of features from the REST API, a new option for the Credits payment flow, alterations to developer resources, and the relocation of App Insights to the Developer app. The changes will allow developers to migrate more of their functionality to the Graph API, streamline the payment flow, and more quickly access technical assistance and metrics for their apps. Graph API ChangesHere are the functionalities that can now be handled through the Graph API, followed by possible uses for them. From the Labor Day update:
From the September 2nd update:
App and Games ChangesAs we covered on Inside Social Games, Facebook now allows developers to use a streamlined Credits payment flow in their games. This permits them to omit the bulk discounted Credits packages from the purchase options. By showing using fewer options, developers may be able to get users to make an impulse decision to buy and get back to the game before they can drop out of the payment flow.  The Developer app now features a summary of App Insights at the bottom of the profile for a developer’s app. Devs can click through to view all their User, Sharing, News Feed, Performance, Diagnostics, and Credits Insights. This should make checking Insights a more natural part of administrating Facebook applications.  With the recent changes to the Games and Apps Dashboards, Facebook has deprecated the ability for developers to publish news and activity to the Dashboards. In turn, it has deprecated the following APIs associated with these old functionalities:
In a change to session redirect behavior, Facebook explained that it has “started adding a fragment #_=_ to the redirect_uri when this field is left blank.” Developers should test to make sure this doesn’t cause any issues of their apps.There have also been some bugs with FB.Canvas.setAutoResize causing app heights to be set improperly. Facebook is working on a solution. Developer Resources Facebook is now sending warning emails to apps that cross the threshold of having too much negative feedback as benchmarked in App Insights. Developers then have 48 hours to correct the issue before they are reevaluated by Facebook’s automated enforcement systems. If the problem isn’t addressed, a developer’s apps may be disabled. This should reduce the incidence of developers being surprised with enforcement, as they were before Facebook instituted its improved enforcement system. A “Support” section has been added to the Developers site which aggregates links to Facebook’s new Stack Overflow technical Q&A, the bug tracking system for reporting reproducible bugs, the official Facebook Group for developers for community discussion, and the beta tier where upcoming code changes can be tested. The Developers Blog has been experiencing issues with delivering emails to subscribers about new posts, but Facebook will have a fix ready by September 14th. Data Export, Photo Tag AppsFacebook has recently added microformats the HTML included with zip file users receive from the Download Your Information tool, TechCrunch reported today. This will help the file be more compatible with apps a user has given access to the file to. That access could then pave the way for apps that help users recreate their social graph outside of Facebook. The change is being accompanied by a warning to developers that those looking to export social data from Facebook should have their users acquire and submit the Download Your Information file, and not use the Facebook Platform. Developers that try to export data from Facebook via Platform applications will have their apps disabled. Facebook even explicitly names Google, with which it’s had data portability arguments, explaining “If you are building an app whose purpose is to export data to another social network such as Google+, you should use Download Your Information, not Facebook Platform.” Photo tags applied by users are now clearly attributed as part of Facebook’s new privacy system. In accordance, apps that apply photo tags will be have the tags attributed to them in news feed stories.
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| Posted: 07 Sep 2011 12:41 PM PDT Facebook appeared to be on course to make $4 billion in revenue for 2011, we and other publications heard from sources close to the company in January, with net income at around $1 billion. Reuters has an update on that estimate today, citing a source that says Facebook actually made $1.6 billion in the first half of the year, with net income near $500 million so far. Looking at the past and present numbers together, revenue is lower than projected at this point, but net income is on track. That in turn suggests that costs have come in lower than expected. Facebook doesn’t currently provide information on its finances, so we don’t know for sure what has caused its business to grow. But financial documents leaked in January during Goldman Sach’s fundraising efforts indicated that Facebook had made roughly $2 billion in 2010, with profits up to $600 million. That was more than double 2009. Two additional trends have started to kick in, that could cause revenue to grow more sharply in this second half of the year, and continue the annual doubling trend.
One is that Facebook has finalized Credits as the only paid currency for third-party canvas apps on its platform. While Zynga and other top social game developers began transitioning as early as a year ago, the policy only went fully into effect on July 1st. From that point, we can say for certain that Facebook is getting 30% of revenue from basically all virtual goods transactions in apps. The other trend is what’s been happening in Facebook’s marketer ecosystem. The Ads API, a way for larger advertisers to buy big, automated, fine-tuned ad campaigns through third-party tools, has launched publicly after spending years in private beta testing. The result is that companies who have figured out how to get a good return on investment from ad campaigns can now spend in bulk, like they do with online ad leader Google through Adsense and Adwords. In the meantime, Facebook has been busy building up its own sales teams around the world, and introducing a variety of new products and advertiser services to make spending easy and worthwhile. While revenue is an increasingly important indicator for the company as it matures, it still has lots of growing left to do. It has opted against short-term revenue boosters like homepage takeover ads, in contrast to distant competitors like MySpace. Overall, it just needs to show some sort of serious revenue growth every year in order to get investors excited about its long-term future. If and when an offering happens, public investors will be hoping the company repeats the post-IPO success of many other companies over the years, and ultimately more than justify the $70 billion and $80 billion valuations that the private-market stock has been trading at. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook for iPhone 3.5 Hitting 50M DAU, Ports Recent Privacy Changes, Still Includes Check-Ins Posted: 07 Sep 2011 12:02 PM PDT Facebook yesterday released version 3.5 of its Facebook for iPhone mobile app. The update includes many of the new privacy, friend tagging, and location features that were added to the web interface two weeks ago. Users can also now post rich feed stories with thumbnails and captions by copying links into the publisher or tapping “Share” in the web view. Despite Facebook saying it would shift Places from focusing on check-ins to applying location as a layer, users can still view the Places check-in feed and map. However, now these features show all friends who’ve recently tagged a Place in an update, even if they were discussing somewhere they’d been or plan to go and not their current location.
On August 23rd, Facebook announced an overhaul of its privacy settings, bringing controls in-line with content. The changes have since rolled out to the web interface for most users, but now Facebook has begun porting the changes to its mobile interfaces starting with its most popular mobile app. Facebook for iPhone grew 2.4 million daily active users this month and today will reach 50 million DAU. The mobile site m.facebook.com now includes the revamped publisher, and an updated privacy settings page. The iPhone app offers access to the privacy setttings page through its internal browser so users can set default post privacy, past post privacy, and whether they must approve tags before they appear on their profile. The Android, BlackBerry, and other mobile apps still lack the new publisher.
Location, Friends, and Privacy in the PublisherWhen iPhone users go to add a status update, they’ll see their city-level location as determined by their IP and other signals at the bottom left of the publisher. They can tap this or the Places button to reveal the option to remove city-level location, tag an existing Place, or add and tag a new Place. Specific location tags are appended to the end of the update as “- at [Place]“. Photos can also be added to any update. Previously a major deficiency of the iPhone app compared to the Android app was the inability to tag friends in updates. Now users can select to tag friends in posts by tapping the friends button, with the tags appended to the update as “- with [name]“. Upon opening the tag selector they’re first presented with “Recents” for easy access to their closest friends, as well as a search option and a browsable list of all their friends.
A gear icon reveals the audience the post will reach, whether thats “Public”, “Friends”, a custom audience, or one of their friend lists. This feature is very streamlined, and actually requires several fewer clicks than the web interface to select to post to a friend lists. It should make it easier for users to share wider variety of content by being able to restrict its visibility to those for whom its relevant and appropriate.
Rich Link SharingThe update notes for Facebook for iPhone 3.5 note that this version “Added the ability to share external links from a web view.” This means that when users are browsing the internet through the app’s internal browser, the can now tap a forward and then a Share button to initiate a status update linking to the currently viewed URL.
What’s more interesting is how Facebook now formats these links. Previously, links posted through the iPhone publisher appears as simple hyperlinks. Now, whether through the Share button or by copying and pasting a URL into the publisher, Facebook converts URLs into rich feed posts that include a headline, caption, and thumbnail image the same way URLs are formatted when pasted into the web interface’s publisher. This lets users create much more compelling stories out of URLs that attract more clicks. This could help Facebook drive more referral traffick and become more important to web publishers. All Location Tags are Now Check-InsAfter a year of users announcing their current location as verified by GPS proximity through check-ins, Facebook confirmed with us that it would scrap the check-in feed and map. This was because users would now be able to any add location to any post no matter their current coordinates. We criticized this decision because the feed and map of just current locations had made it easy to find nearby friends and arrange meet-ups. In this iPhone update, the check-in feed and map are still available, except now they feature any friend who’s added location to a post, regardless of whether they were currently at that Place or not. If users click the Check-In button or go to tag a Place in a status update, they’re prompted “Where are you”, indicating that Facebook hasn’t quite sorted out whether location tags and check-ins are the same thing.
As users change their behaviors and start tagging Places they aren’t currently at, the feed and map will become confusing because it will show a friend at local restaurant when they’re actually across the country but had just posted a recommendation tagging the eatery. While its value will diminish as users adopt the new location capabilities, this stay of execution of the Places feed and map should come as good news to those like me who use the features to find clusters of friends on the weekends. With the 3.5 update, Facebook for iPhone now approaches parity with most of the web interface’s core features. Of the recent privacy changes, the only thing noticibly lacking is the option to change the privacy settings of previously published content on a post-by-post basis. With the basic functionality, Facebook can now concentrate on prepping the iPhone app to be compatible with its HTML5 mobile site that could offer gaming that is expected to launch at the f8 developer conference later this month. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Kobojo, W3i, Acquinity Interactive and More Posted: 07 Sep 2011 11:47 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 Kobojo, W3i, Acquinity Interactive, King.com, Social Point, lolapps, TinyCo, Majesco Entertainment and 5th Planet Games.
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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Names Political and Business Leader Erskine Bowles to Board of Directors Posted: 07 Sep 2011 11:26 AM PDT
Bowles might not be a familiar face in Silicon Valley, but he is on the Eastern seaboard due to a career that spans investment banking, politics and a stint in higher education. From a leading political family in North Carolina, he started began his career at Morgan Stanley before cofounding an investment bank, holding key positions in the Clinton administration, founding another investment bank, running for senate a couple times, and holding top positions in the University of North Carolina education system. He recently co-chaired Obama’s debt panel, which produced a politically difficult but intellectually sensible national debt reduction plan that has yet to be acted upon. He’s currently on the board of Morgan Stanley, Cousins Properties Inc., Norfolk Southern Corp. and Belk Inc. “Erskine has held important roles in government, academia and business which have given him insight into how to build organizations and navigate complex issues,” Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg said in a press release. “Along with his experience founding companies, this will be very valuable as we continue building new things to help make the world more open and connected.” He’s the sort of serious figure that Facebook wants to be associated with as it looks to convince the world of its seriousness as a company. As a consequence of its success, and particularly its plan to make its financial information public next year (possibly ahead of an IPO), Facebook has attracted new scrutiny from the government. Various congresspeople have spoken out against Facebook over privacy and security issues, the Securities and Exchange Commission has looked into its secondary market transactions, the Federal Trade Commission has examined how Facebook collects and applies user data in its products and revenue models. The company has already been building out its public policy team to help convince the political world of its positions. Meanwhile, Bowles’ legitimacy within the finance community and corporate America can help bolster Facebook’s image as a leading company in the nation, and possibly encourage more investors to take a closer look at Facebook stock if it decides to go public. Facebook also recently added Netflix chief executive Reed Hastings to the board. Long-time members also include Marc Andreessen, Jim Breyer, Don Graham and Peter Thiel, with David Sze and Paul Madera on as observers. Founder Mark Zuckerberg continues to own a majority of the company and as a result has decision-making power over the other directors. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 07 Sep 2011 08:07 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
21 questions grew by 734,700 DAU this week, Between You and Me by 241,900 DAU, Truth Game by 226,800 DAU, My Friend Secrets by 176,000 DAU, Truths About You by 157,800 DAU and Get Revealed by 122,600 DAU. These apps ask questions about your Facebook friends and answers may be posted to the stream.
A pair of Page tab applications were on the list, Static HTML: iframe tabs which grew by 397,400 DAU and iwipa: HTML + iframe + FBML by 122,100 DAU. The rest of the list was mixed with different types of apps. 60photos grew by 444,500 DAU; the app presents the photos of your Facebook friends and asks you to rate them, posting feed stories with your answers. Phrases (new) grew by 311,000 DAU and is not available in the United States. Twitter's app grew by 159,800 DAU and mobile app marketplace ibibo.com by 114,200 DAU.
Apps that have similar set up included How Attractive Are You? with 178,000 DAU and Luck Daily! with 131,500 DAU. Each of these apps generates a "score" of attractiveness or luck then publishes to the stream, also asking you to invite your friends to use the app. Finally, the Vietnamese horoscope app Tư vấn vui grew by 148,300 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. |
Whether it’s gearing up for an IPO in the next year or two, or just trying to strengthen its ties to other power centers in the United States, Facebook has 
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