Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook Roundup: Privacy, Echo Nest, Music, Wal-mart, Ooyala, BrightApps and More
- Facebook Looks to Jumpstart App Development by Bringing Its Open Graph Roadshow Across the US
- Facebook Rolls Out New App Authentication Flow That Ups Privacy and Transparency
- Facebook Updates Formula for Counting Active Users
- “Recently Read Articles” Aggregated News Feed Stories Give Facebook Reader Apps a Viral Boost
- Music, Halloween, Friend Photos and More on This Week’s Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU
| Facebook Roundup: Privacy, Echo Nest, Music, Wal-mart, Ooyala, BrightApps and More Posted: 14 Oct 2011 08:00 PM PDT
Wal-Mart Offers Localized Deals for Fans – Wal-Mart and Facebook have partnered to offer the retailer's Facebook fans deals localized to its 3,500 locations in the U.S. Facebook is not working with other merchants in a similar way because of a lack of resources. We wrote about similar types of deals previously, when Facebook tested tools allowing corporations to administrate all the Places pages of the local instances of their business.
Ooyala Analyzes Facebook Videos – Ooyala recently released a video analysis tool, Custom Analytics with Business Dimension Reporting. The tool helps users segment audiences based on behavior on the Facebook platform.
BrightEdge Leverages Open Graph – BrightEdge released a new solution for Facebook Pages trying to improve their SEO, the S3 edition includes things like open graph tags, improved search rankings help, engagement measurement and more. Other Announcements:Buddy Media Opens San Francisco, Singapore Offices – Buddy Media has opened new offices in San Francisco and Singapore. Votigo Launches Self-Service Platform, Offers – Votigo has launched self-service access to its social media promotions platform this week. As part of the promotion, the company is offering contest and sweepstakes apps for two cents to the first 2,000 businesses creating a promotion with the platform before the end of October. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Looks to Jumpstart App Development by Bringing Its Open Graph Roadshow Across the US Posted: 14 Oct 2011 06:09 PM PDT
Facebook hopes that by creating a thriving community of Open Graph developers it users will gain access to a new set of applications that help them share news of their media consumption, daily activities, and purchasing habits, and more.
The Open Graph Technology Days, also branded as city-specific f8 conferences, will be held in: Chicago – October 21 - http://fbf8chicago.eventbrite.com New York – October 25 - http://fbf8ny.eventbrite.com Seattle – October 27 - http://fbf8seattle.eventbrite.com Austin – November 2 - http://fbf8austin.eventbrite.com All of these sessions except the Chicago event are already sold out, though developers can register to join a waiting list. At f8 in San Francisco, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced that Facebook’s new goal was increasing the volume of content that people share, not growing the service’s user count. To do that, it unveiled many new opportunities for developers surrounding its Open Graph protocol. Specifically, through Frictionless Sharing, apps can automatically publish stories about a user’s activity to the home page Ticker and add reports about activity to a user’s profile Timeline. Along with these new opportunities come many new questions from developers. By bringing f8 on the road to some of the country’s other major centers of innovation, Facebook can answer these questions in person and jumpstart app development.
Facebook has held these types of smaller developer conferences before in cities including London, New York, Taipei, and San Francisco. This time around, each Open Graph Technology Day will include:
Currently, most of the popular Open Graph applications on the platform were developed by f8 launch partners. Through the Open Graph Technology Days, Facebook may be able to encourage the long-tail of developers to take advantage of its new viral channels and build apps its users will come back to the site to engage with. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Rolls Out New App Authentication Flow That Ups Privacy and Transparency Posted: 14 Oct 2011 12:00 PM PDT Facebook is granting all developers access to a new application authentication flow today that was announced at f8 last month. Developers can now add a description of their app that will be displayed in a redesigned publishing permissions dialog. Extended permissions have been broken out into a second authentication step that explains why an app needs certain data, and lets users revoke specific permissions. Data about publishing permissions dialog impressions and accepts, sources of users, and extended permissions conversion rates are now included in Facebook’s app Insights analytics tool. The changes will make it clearer to users what permissions they are granting applications, and give them more control of their privacy. The two-step authentication process could increase app install friction in a way that could hurt app growth. However, in the long-run, the revised authentication flow could increase user confidence in the Platform such that users become more comfortable experimenting with new apps.
Facebook has also changed the way it measures active user counts to only publicly report authenticated users, rather than all users. We’ve written a separate article discussing how this will cause a one-time dip in active user counts that does not actually mean apps have lost users, and explaining how this impacts our AppData tracking service. Redesigned Permissions DialogPreviously, users only had to accept one extended permissions dialog to give an application publishing privileges and access to their data. The permissions dialog didn’t explain what that data would be used for, or what the app would publish to a user’s profile. This meant users would sometimes grant privileges they didn’t understand and would get angry when they saw the app had published on their behalf. The redesigned authentication flow aims to solve this problem. First, users see a dialog asking for permission to install the app and allow it to publish Open Graph activity. It shows users:
Open Graph app developers reorder the aggregation previews. These previews of what an app will publish represent a significant step forward in increasing transparency in the app install process. Facebook could further improve transparency by including a sample Ticker or news feed story from the app in the previews.
Separate Extended Permissions Dialog and Authenticated ReferralsApps requiring additional, optional privileges such as the ability to publish check-ins or post to a user’s wall will display a second extended permissions dialog after users complete the initial install dialog. This step includes clear descriptions of what each permission means and the option to deny the app these non-essential privileges. Below, the dialog is an explanation provided by the developer for why it requires these permissions.
Before the redesign, users had to grant apps all the extended permissions and then dig into their app privacy settings to revoke certain permissions. This can now be handled as users install an app. Developers should reference the tutorial Facebook posted this week to ensure their apps run properly if some permissions are revoked. This granular control may improve app install rates from users who are sensitive about a certain type of privacy, such those who don’t want to provide contact information or have content published to the stream on their behalf. Authenticated Referrals is another option available in the Auth Dialog settings that when enabled causes users clicking a link to an app to see the authentication flow in-line being being brought to the app. This is useful for apps that require user data or permissions to function. It allows them to remove the awkward pre-permissions landing page and provide a personalized experience when users first arrive.
Authentication Data in App InsightsApp Insights now displays impressions and accepts, sources of users, and the what privacy setting users are selecting for the authentication dialog and authenticated referrals. The authentication conversion rate will help developers determine if they are asking for too many or unnecessary permissions, or that they need to reword their their explanation for asking for permissions.
The way applications use or abuse the permissions process has been a problem for Facebook in the past. Without enough transparency, some users would end up regretting that they installed an app that published or content or used their data in ways they didn’t want. They might then blame the Facebook Platform rather than the developer, leading them to avoid using applications in the future. This increase in transparency and enhanced granular app privacy controls should give users a much clearer sense of what and with who they’re sharing. With time, Facebook may be able to remove the privacy stigma around apps and create a Platform more users want to engage with and more developers want to work on. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Updates Formula for Counting Active Users Posted: 14 Oct 2011 10:45 AM PDT Today, Facebook announced that, along with the redesigned permissions dialog it introduced at f8, it's also making a change to the way it counts active users on canvas applications to only count those who are logged in as active users. This means that users who hit the permissions dialog but choose to not authenticate the app, or who visit the app without logging in (for those apps that allow that behavior), will no longer be included in active user counts. Thus, because most apps at least have users who see the permission dialog but don't log in, we are expecting to see a one-time decline in those stats as documented on AppData.com associated with this change. This will appear in AppData starting 15 October. It's important to note that this change doesn't correlate to any actual change in traffic to apps. The numbers will now simply no longer include users who don't log in. Facebook says this change will not affect Connect apps or Page tabs. Since the Facebook Platform launched in 2007, Facebook has updated the methodology it uses to count active users for platform applications a few times. For example, last August, Facebook tweaked its formula to no longer include people who like or comment on feed items shared by applications. As we said at the time regarding that change, "We think this change to the way Facebook calculates active users for applications makes a lot of sense. People who like or comment on stream content published by an app shouldn't be counted as active users like canvas page viewers are." Similarly, we think this update by Facebook is a good one, as it will mean that the active user counts now more accurately reflect actual "active usage" of applications. People who choose not to log in to applications, but bounce from the permissions dialog, should not be counted as active users. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| “Recently Read Articles” Aggregated News Feed Stories Give Facebook Reader Apps a Viral Boost Posted: 14 Oct 2011 08:36 AM PDT Facebook is now prominently displaying a new “Recently Read Articles” story type in the news feed. It shows articles read by one’s friends who use any of the recently launched news reader open graph applications. Since the stories aggregate recent activity from multiple friends, Facebook is giving these stories a high EdgeRank score and often displaying them at the very top of the news feed. The Recently Read Articles news feed story has created a powerful viral channel for news reader apps that may be contributing to the rapid growth of apps by The Washington Post, The Guardian, and other news outlets.
Typically, if several friends engage in the same activity such as listening to the same artist on Spotify or an activity story receives several Likes and comments it can move from the Ticker to having its own full-sized news feed story. With Recently Read Articles, Facebook has made it easier for news reader apps to gain this exposure. The special story type shows the article that is currently most popular with a user’s friends at the top with an image and blurb. This is followed by a list of other reading activity that can come from across any reader app that uses the official Open Graph noun ‘article’ and verb ‘read’. Each article displays the logo of the app is was read in and profile picture thumbnails of the friends that read it. Recently Read Articles may help the most widely used reader apps grow larger because their articles can claim the especially visible top slot. The faces of friends create an powerful social recommendation to click through to an article and install its reader app if necessary.
In part thanks to the Recently Read Articles story type, London newspaper The Guardian’s reader app has grown to 2.25 million monthly active users and 240,000 daily active users since its launch three weeks ago. The Washington Post’s app has experienced rapid growth as well, gaining 800,000 monthly active users and 70,000 daily active users since its launch at f8, according to AppData. The news feed may be becoming the place people go to discover articles on Sundays, judging by The Guardian’s spike to 509,000 DAU and The Washington Post’s spike to 240,000 DAU last Sunday. Facebook might even be displaying the Recently Read Articles story more frequently on Sundays to match that day’s traditional role as when people catch up on news.
Fledgling reader apps and those by niche outlets can also benefit from the special news feed story type. They can ride the heavy engagement of larger apps to the top of the news feed where they can draw clicks by securing one of the last slots in Recently Read Articles. This could help prevent a ‘winner takes all’ scenario where only the most popular reader apps appear in the main column of the news feed. Many of the popular reader apps including The Washington Post and WSJ Social don’t seem to be compatible with Facebook’s new mobile application platform yet. Once they are HTML5-ready and people can read articles from their couch or while commuting, usage could grow even faster. Recently Read Articles delivers a high quality, socially vetted set of content that enriches the news feed. It will also help Facebook get users accustomed to installing new Open Graph apps. By providing this unpaid viral growth channel, Facebook makes its Open Graph development platform more attractive to more developers. It could boost return on investment for reader apps such that more newspapers becoming willing to spend money to develop them. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Music, Halloween, Friend Photos and More on This Week’s Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU Posted: 14 Oct 2011 08:11 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
The top app on our list this week was State Farm Welcome, which didn't appear to be working as an app directly on Facebook. Nonetheless the app grew by 413,300 MAU. Then there was a Page tab app, Static IFRAME Tab : Pin Icon, with 319,000 MAU. Music app Tracks.by grew by 299,900 MAU. Then a few Halloween-themed apps were on our list. Halloween Treats asks users to invite their friends before using the app, thus growing 284,400 MAU. Abrazotes! also asked users to invite friends, but also incorporated an auto-share pop-up and published a feed story when you send a "hug" to a friend; it grew by 147,300 MAU. Then the Spanish language Disfrázate grew by 269,000 MAU; the app asks users to try different costumes by overlaying them with Facebook photos, then publishing to the stream.
A few apps utilized similar methods this week, incorporating friends and photos, tagging them as they publish photos to the stream. 7 Wonders Around Me grew by 219,600 MAU, Har Ek Friend Zaroori Hota Hai by 197,800 MAU and Zoozoo Friends by 139,900 MAU.
Other apps included Name Meaning with 178,400 MAU, telling your the meaning of your name in different languages, ASOS Fashion Friendsy Win free fashion for a year! is a contest app that grew by 175,500 MAU. Friends in my NAME grew by 173,100 MAU, Pieces of Flair grew by 167,600 MAU and the inactive app by JibJab grew by 158,600 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. |
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