Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: Project Spartan, German Privacy, Ceglia, Oprah, BranchOut, Social Commerce and More
- Facebook Smart Lists Automatically Group Friends With Shared Characteristics for Use With Privacy Settings
- School, Video, Dating, Quizzes, Pages and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
| Posted: 09 Sep 2011 09:00 PM PDT Project Spartan to Include iOS, Android – The scope of Facebook’s HTML5-focused developer project has expanded from mobile Safari to include desktop, Android, iOS and the possibly completed but unlaunched iPad app, TechCrunch reported today. The goal is to extend Facebook’s app platform further into mobile. Facebook Signs German Privacy Code – Facebook voluntarily signed a code of conduct in Germany to protect user privacy.
German Company Recreates Like Button – Then a German website, Heise, changed Facebook Like buttons to gray versions that must be clicked in order to be activated, underscoring German privacy efforts. [Image via Zdnet]
8th Bridge Releases Social Commerce Report – 8th Bridge released its study, "Social Commerce IQ: Retail" report this week. It includes information about social shopping engagement rates, product sharing, Likes, recommendations and more. About 16% of users are driven to purchase by social recommendations and 35% said more Likes on a product increase the chance of purchase. Facebook Page Hijacking Easier than Thought – Sophos published a report about Facebook Page hijacking, noting that it's very simple for a third-party to takeover a Page. Here's a video and more information. Ceglia Update: Passwords Leaked – The latest in the Paul Ceglia drama, in which Ceglia claims to own half of Facebook and the company claims he's a fraud, is that he says his opponent’ lawyers published his email passwords in court papers.
Oprah Interviewed on Facebook – Facebook COO interviewed Oprah Winfrey on Facebook this week. Other Announcements:Votigo Premieres Beta Platform – This week Votigo announced a Beta verion of its self-service platform including sweepstakes, photo/video contests and more. BranchOut Offers Free Postings – BranchOut told Inside Facebook this week that, responding to President Barack Obama's job creation push, the company would be offering 5 free job postings to any U.S. company (worth $225). Booshaka Creates Small, Medium Biz Platform – Booshaka announced the creation of a marketing platform specifically for small-to-medium businesses, brands and agencies this week that includes rewards, newsfeed optimization, targeting options and more. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 09 Sep 2011 01:00 PM PDT Facebook is currently testing a new feature called Smart Lists that automatically groups friends with common characteristics into Friend Lists that dynamically update themselves over time. Previously, Friend Lists had to be manually assembled and updated — a chore that contributed to them being used by only 5% of the user base. First spotted by Nick Starr, Smart Lists are now being created for the coworkers, classmates, and friends who live within 50 miles of users in the test group. Since Smart Lists can be selected within privacy settings and the news feed publisher to determine who can see profile or posted content, they could encourage users to micro-share to specific subsets of their friends. This allows them to post a wider variety of content to Facebook, enriching the site. With Smart Lists, Facebook has leveraged the wealth of data it has about the interconnections between its users to drastically reduce friction in the Friend List creation process, and one-up Google+ Circles that must be laboriously built by hand.
Facebook is also now showing a tool tip explaining how the previously available “Friend List Feed Filters” work when users choose to filter the news feed by selecting a Friend List from the Most Recent drop-down menu. While viewing the filtered feed users can manage the members of the Friend List and confirm Facebook’s suggestions for additions to the list. This change educate users about Friend Lists and make manually created ones easier to keep up to date.
Since December 2007, Facebook has allowed users to assign friends to Friend Lists that can used as news feed filters, distribution parameters for posted content, and visibility settings for the profile. However, their buried place in the interface, the slow creation process, and the fact that explicitly categorizing friends is somewhat unnatural made Friend lists a feature that only attracted power users. CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the launch event for the Groups feature in October 2010 that only 5% of users had created friend lists. Over the years, Facebook has tried to surface the feature in more places around the site and make them a little easier to create. While creating friends lists, users gained the option to sort them by parameters such as Recently added as well as profile characteristics including those used to create Smart Lists to speed up assignment. Later Facebook started allowing users to add someone to a list when they confirmed their friend request. In October 2010, Facebook began showing suggestions of people to add to existing lists based on similarities with previously added members — the closest thing to a predecessor to Smart Lists. Previously these suggestions appeared only in the Friend List editor interface, accessible through Account0 -> Edit Friends, but now they appear beside the news feed when filtering the feed with a Friend List.
Contact sorting and micro-sharing have become bigger issues over the past few months. Google+ was applauded for its drag-and-drop Circle building process that was faster than building Facebook Friend Lists. Third-party developer Katango recently built a product that “auto-magically” build Friend Lists by clustering similar friends and allowing users to export the lists to Facebook. Both products raised the question of why Facebook, with all its biographical and behavior data, couldn’t automatically create Friend Lists for users. Now Facebook has shown that it can automatically build Friends Lists. Users currently in the limited tester base for Smart Lists have lists for coworkers, classmates, and local friends automatically created for them. The feature doesn’t go as far as Katango, which uses a wide variety of signals to create more than a dozen lists for users such their closest friends or people met on a vacation, as well as those made by Smart Lists. Facebook very well may improve the feature in the future to create Smart Lists from more subtle clusters of friends and not just those who share an explicitly listed characteristic. The tool tip explaining the feature notes that users can remove friends from Smart Lists at any time, allowing them to expel friends mistakenly admitted to lists where they don’t belong. The fact that Smart Lists update themselves in response is a huge improvement over Katango and Google+. As more friends move to a user’s city or join their company, they’ll be automatically added to the corresponding Friend Lists. With the friction of building and maintaining lists removed, a roll out of Smart Lists could significantly increase adoption of the Friends Lists and micro-sharing. Users may be more likely to share professional, nostalgic, and local-focused content by restricting the visibility of these posts to just those they’re relevant to. Without lists for these subsets automatically created and ready, users might have never shared these types of content, making Facebook a less interesting place for their friends to visit.
Smart Lists could also erase one of Google+’s core advantages over Facebook. The feature’s launch underscores a deficiency in Google+’s growth strategy of rolling out to early adopters first without a clear way to bring mainstream users aboard they way Facebook did by opening at one college at a time. As such Google revealed its Facebook-besting features but hasn’t been able to gain massive traction since, giving Facebook time to catch up. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| School, Video, Dating, Quizzes, Pages and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 09 Sep 2011 04:59 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
SchoolFeed grew by 262,400 MAU this week; it's 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. Then the Turkish video app, VideoPro grew by 241,600 MAU; the app allows users to view, share, Like and comment on videos.
There were a few dating apps, too. Fbp is an app growing mostly in Italy by 190,000 MAU and ! Make Luv 2 me ! by 169,200 MAU; the app boasts it is a "fun sexy and naughty game" and seems a bit raunchy. How Attractive Are You? is an app that grew by 187,800 MAU and publishes an "attractiveness" score to the feed. Then there was an interesting Connect app, Greeting Cards with 116,800 MAU this week that asks users to send all their friends a birthday card on their birthday, then takes you to a website to make other selections.
Quiz apps this week. 21個問題 with 142,600 MAU, Bolesna prawda with 123,500 MAU, Medidor de Amizade! with 101,200 MAU and O-Meter App Factory with 99,800 MAU. These apps basically ask you questions about your friends, then publish stories either to your feed or to the Wall of your friend. Then there were two Page tool apps, Hike FREE Tab Builder for Pages: New Static FBML with 96,000 MAU this week and Buzz Creator with 95,700 MAU, billing itself as an affordable series of self-service apps for Pages.
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. |
BranchOut Creates Vanity URLs – BranchOut announced the creation of vanity URLs for users, such as 
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