gravatar

Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook Launches HTML5 Resource Center, but Early Mobile App Platform Traffic Is Slow

Posted: 19 Oct 2011 05:56 PM PDT

Last week, the Facebook finally opened up viral channels to both iOS and HTML5 mobile developers, which could make it much easier for apps to acquire users cheaply. To push its nascent mobile platform forward, Facebook launched several resources around HTML5 this week to help lure developers away from building purely native apps. The new resource center contains things like example HTML5 apps from the Financial Times and Scribd and games like Angry Birds and Words With Friends.

Continue reading “Facebook Launches HTML5 Resources to Boost Newly-Launched Mobile Platform” center at Inside Mobile Apps.

A week after launch of the HTML5 app platform and new viral channels for third-party mobile apps, the amount of traffic the social network is driving to individual HTML5-based titles seems to be in the low thousands of unique users. We looked at a handful of the apps that appeared on the company’s HTML5 mobile app showcase via AppData. Moblyng’s Word Racer Live and Social Poker Live each show 1,000 monthly active users or lower.

HTML5 is a key part of Facebook’s big play into supporting an ecosystem of mobile developers. However, because Facebook doesn’t own lower parts of the mobile stack like a phone or an operating system, its options are somewhat limited despite its more than 800 million active users.

For more on Facebook’s negotiations with Apple around HTML5, graphs and analysis of third-party Facebook mobile app traffic, and the current barriers to growth for these apps, continue reading “Early Traffic Results for HTML5 Part of Facebook’s Mobile Platform Seem Tepid” at Inside Mobile Apps. 

Facebook Releases Messenger for BlackBerry, Now Shows Who’s Online With Top Friends First

Posted: 19 Oct 2011 02:57 PM PDT

Today Facebook released its Messenger standalone mobile messaging app for BlackBerry, and added several new features and languages to the existing iOS and Android versions. Users of all the versions of Facebook Messenger will now be able to see when a conversation partner is typing, view the online status of all their friends, and can quickly add their top friends to a new or ongoing thread. Many additional languages are also now supported for iOS and Android.

Now available in App World via Facebook’s About page, the BlackBerry version of the push notification and SMS app could become a competitor to RIM’s native BlackBerry Messenger service. With the feature additions Messenger now more closely approximates the web version of Facebook Chat, and surpasses the built-in Chat functionality of the primary Facebook mobile apps. Facebook Messenger can now better achieve its purpose of allowing low-friction, cross-platform instant messaging.

The initial release of Messenger in August gave users a way to communicate with Facebook friends and their phone contacts without having to decide what device or platform to route a message to. Friends without Facebook receive messages as SMS, those with the app receive push notifications, those online on the web version of Facebook receive Chats, and those offline receive Facebook Messages in their inbox.

However, users had to search for friends individually to determine their online status and add them to a conversation. There was no way to easily add friends they frequently Chatted with to a conversation. There was also no way to tell if someone else was typing a Message to you, leading people to cut each other off in mid-sentence. BlackBerry users couldn’t access the app and had to Chat using the primary Facebook app or SMS, leading some to stick to BBMing with their other BlackBerry-carrying friends.

Today’s update solves all these problems. When users go to start a conversation or add friends to an existing thread, they’ll first see a list of their closest friends and their online statuses — whether online on the web, on their mobile device, or offline. Below this, users see an alphabetical list of all their online friends, and can also search for offline friends. This means that if users just want to Chat but not with anyone in particular, they’ll see options of readily available friends, which could increase usage of the app.

In addition to new features, 22 new languages have been added to the Android versions, and 12 more have been added for iPhone. In September, Facebook also made the app available in the UK and Ireland.

According to AppData, the iOS and Android Messenger apps have been growing relatively steadily, but have still only reached 1-2% of the audience of the primary Facebook apps for those operating systems. Messenger for iOS has 530,000 daily active users and 1.9 million monthly active users compared to Facebook for iPhone’s 52.3 million DAU and 92.5 million MAU. Messenger for Android has 780,000 DAU and 1.6 million MAU compared to Facebook for Android’s 47.9 million DAU and 70.9 million MAU.

With BBM already ingrained in BlackBerry user behavior patterns, we expect Messenger for BlackBerry to achieve less than 1% of Facebook for BlackBerry’s 28.6 million DAU. Still, the ability to chat for free regardless of a friend’s device should be appealing to BBM users and could steal some of them away. Meanwhile, the new features should boost the DAU of the iOS and Android Messenger apps by making users more likely to choose them over the primary Facebook apps.

New This Week on the Inside Network Job Board: Acquinity Interactive, King.com, TinyCo and More

Posted: 19 Oct 2011 11:53 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 King.com, Acquinity Interactive, Storm8, Lolapps, Games Cafe, Sociable Labs, Natural Motion Games, TinyCo and CrowdStar.

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 Condenses the Groups Interface, Leaving More Space for Ads

Posted: 19 Oct 2011 09:41 AM PDT

Facebook has changed the interface of its Groups product, relocating several navigation buttons from the center of the right sidebar to the top of each Group page. The subtle redesign frees up space in the sidebar to show more ads and Facebook’s own modules such as People You May Know. This could help Facebook better monetize time spent on Groups.

Groups launched in October 2010 with the goal of creating designated spaces where a limited set of friends could share private information, such as family, a sports team, or a group for friends organizing a vacation. Since then, Facebook has revamped its privacy controls to make it easier to share with specific Friend Lists, reducing the need for Groups. Many strong use cases remain, though, such as facilitating sharing between non-friends around an interest topic.

In April, Facebook has made a few changes to Groups. It added an in-Group search bar for finding specific posts, began allowing users to upload whole photo albums, and added Questions to the Publisher. It gave admins of closed and secret Groups the option to require administrative approval for all new members. This can help keep Group content from being exposed to unauthorized users by one of the Group’s members, and also helps admins control the size of their Groups. It also launched the Send button, a social plugin that publishes content from an external website to a specific Group.

Now, the top center of each Group displays the number of photos and docs that have been uploaded there, and users can click though to view them or add their own. Previously, links to view photos and view or create Docs were somewhat buried down in the right sidebar and took up a lot of space. By relocating their links to the top of Groups, Facebook is reminding users that rich media can be shared to Groups and making it easier to access this content.

Links to create a Group event, and edit or leave a Group have been relocated into a settings drop-down menu in the top right corner. The edit Group interface tabs have been combined into a single screen. A Group’s description is now shown in the right sidebar. If a Group has a long description, it will be folded into a “See More” link, but will still occupy much of the room freed up by the other changes.

Except for Groups with long descriptions, these updates to the interface create enough additional space in the right sidebar to show roughly two more ads or Facebook modules above the fold. This will allow Facebook to derive more ad revenue, content engagement, and encourage more connections between users from Groups traffic.

Spotify, YouTube and More on This Week’s Top 20 Growing Facebook Apps by DAU

Posted: 19 Oct 2011 08:47 AM PDT

Music applications like Spotify continued growing in the wake of Facebook's most recent redesign on our list of the fastest growing apps by daily active users this week. There were also a few mobile apps, social network integrations and a few others. The titles below grew from between 80,200 and 987,800 DAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

Name DAU Gain Gain,%
1.  Spotify 2,300,000 +987,824 +75%
2.  MyPad for iPad 2,100,000 +573,828 +38%
3.  Mafia Wars 2 360,000 +359,959 +877,949%
4.  Ravenskye City 430,000 +326,811 +1,409%
5.  YouTube 720,000 +276,975 +63%
6.  Bubble Witch Saga 1,300,000 +265,150 +28%
7.  Yahoo! 12,800,000 +175,755 +1%
8.  FarmVille 7,600,000 +150,270 +2%
9.  Test Console 420,000 +135,137 +47%
10.  BandPage by RootMusic 1,500,000 +108,601 +8%
11.  Words With Friends 4,100,000 +104,528 +3%
12.  WhoIsNear? 460,000 +103,763 +29%
13.  Grooveshark 180,000 +100,912 +128%
14.  60photos 160,000 +99,033 +162%
15.  MindJolt Games 900,000 +98,744 +12%
16.  Twitter 1,100,000 +83,130 +8%
17.  Foursquare 490,000 +81,906 +20%
18.  MyPad for iPhone 320,000 +80,537 +35%
19.  Pandora 960,000 +80,463 +9%
20.  Samsung Mobile 2,800,000 +80,202 +3%

 

Spotify topped our list this week with 987,800 DAU, beating out the other three music apps on our list by a lot. BandPage by RootMusic grew by 108,600 DAU, this app is for use by musical acts to create Page on Facebook, then music sharing app Grooveshark grew by 100,900 DAU. Finally the music streaming app Pandora's Facebook integration grew by 80,500 DAU.

 

Mobile apps on the list included MyPad for iPad with 573,800 DAU, Samsung Mobile with 80,200 DAU and MyPad for iPhone with 80,500 DAU.

Social network integrations on our list included some big names this week. YouTube was on top with 277,000 DAU, followed by Yahoo with 175,800 DAU. The WhoIsNear? app, a location app on the Facebook platform, allowing users to check in geographically with what they're doing, find new friends, publish their whereabouts to the stream, grew by 103,800 DAU. Then there was Twitter with 83,100 DAU and Foursquare with 81,900 DAU.

Last on the list was photo publisher 60photos with 99,000 DAU; the app allows users to rate photos and publishes the ratings to the stream. Then there was Test Console with 135,100 DAU, but appeared to be inactive.

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 20. oktober 2011 at 07.29