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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook Roundup: DC Hires, Fellowship Expansion, Patents, Beluga, and More

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 06:56 PM PDT

Facebook Hires 3 DC Staffers – Facebook announced the hiring of Director of Privacy Erin Egan and Director of Public Policy Louisa Terrell, and Manager of Public Policy Chris Herndon.

Facebook Fellowship Prog Expands - Facebook Engineer Sanjeev Kumar wrote a note this week explaining that the  2012-2013 Facebook Fellowship application is now available and the company has doubled the number of slots to 10. Of interest was that he noted that the company is "increasing focus in 'systems' areas (Compilers, Databases, Distributed Computing, Fault Tolerance, and Networking)" because this is the direction in which the company may grow.

Patent Lawyer Targets Facebook – Prominent patent attorney John Desmarais recently filed a suit against Facebook that alleges the company infringes on a series of patents for "publishing voice and fax messages on the Internet." This is the same attorney who, in 2007, won $1.5 billion in a verdict against Microsoft.

Messaging Service Beluga to Close Down - Beluga, which was acquired by Facebook in March, is set to shutter starting November 11 and all messages will be deleted December 15.

23% of Companies Offer Facebook Support – Research company MarketTools published a study recently finding that 23% of companies provide customer service via Facebook and only 12% via Twitter.

App Provides COPD Test - The COPD Alliance published an app on its Page in the name of COPD Awareness Month in November. It is a disease that's the fourth leading cause of death in the U.S., and the app tests users for their susceptability to the disease.

Zooppa Releases Crowdsource App – Zooppa announced a Facebook version of its crowdsourcing advertising service, allowing brands to post creative briefs, allow members to shoot commercials for them and then receive submissions via Facebook.

Messages Could Contain Malicious Attachements – Security researcher Nathan Powell blogged about a specific way Facebook Messages can be used to transmit malicious executable files, though Facebook normally doesn’t allow .exe files to be attached to Messages. Facebook’s Security Manager Ryan McGeehan downplayed the threat, noting that this kind of attack would require “an additional layer of social engineering.”

BrightEdge Releases S3 – BrightEdge, the social management platform announced a new integration of its platform this week, BrightEdge S3. One new feature of interest is the social site audit, which promises a tight web integration with Facebook, specific to Open Graph compliance.

Facebook’s Hybrid News Feed May Be Helping Big Brands, Hurting Local Businesses

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 02:42 PM PDT

Initial analysis of the Facebook’s move from a two-tab news feed to a single hybrid news feed showed Page posts receiving fewer impressions but more Likes and comments — overall a positive change. However, new stats from Page analytics vendor EdgeRank Checker a month after the changes show that while popular Pages with over 100,000 fans may be receiving 27.8% more engagement, small Pages with less than 5,000 fans may receiving equal Likes and comments than before, and those with under 1,000 fans have seen engagement drop 11.6%.

Facebook’s news feed visibility algorithm may be rewarding Pages with high fan counts — including those of big brands. This is because these Pages have essentially been endorsed by hundreds of thousands of users and have more to lose, and therefore may be more likely to publish high quality content. However, the hybrid news feed may make it difficult for newer Pages and those of local businesses to grow organically, increasing their need for paid Facebook ads.

EdgeRank Checker’s data is based on sample of over 600 Pages that have used its service, not just any random Pages. This means these stats are for Pages that have some serious interest in the performance of their Facebook Page. The data isn’t likely to be distorted by Pages with low fan counts that aren’t really trying to produce good content.

We analyzed an EdgeRank Checker released a study two weeks after the news feed changes that showed that show comments up 21%, Likes up 9%, and impressions down 25% on average for Pages across sizes. Now a month after the changes the trends are similar, with comments up 14%, Likes up 16%, and impression down 22%. However, Pages of different sizes show different trends and outliers can skew these averages.

To show what’s happening to the average Page, EdgeRank Checker looked to see what percentage of all Pages grew or shrunk in each of these stats. It found that most Pages were receiving fewer impressions, but that an equal number of Pages were losing and gain Likes and comments. This meant some Pages that were receiving many more Likes and comments were making the average data look for positive than it really is.

As there are many more Pages with low fan counts than those with high fan counts, EdgeRank Checker looked at the median size Page and found some unsettling stats, along with a 24% drop in impressions, Likes were down 15% and comments were down 20%. If the average across all Page sizes was positive but these stats for the median size Page were so negative, fan count must be a contributing variable.

It turns out that the changes have aided popular Pages but hindered unpopular Pages. For Pages of different sizes, here is the average change in the volume of Likes and comments per post:

  • Over 100,000 Fans – Up 27.8%
  • 10,000 – 100,000 Fans – Up 8.76%
  • 5,000 – 10,000 Fans – Up 3.96%
  • 1,000 – 5,000 Fans – Up 1.73%
  • Less than 1,000 Fans – Down 11.64%

Most major brands tend to have at least 10,000 fans, so this may come as good news — they’re receiving a lot more Likes and comments. However, fledgling brands and local businesses than only appeal to a limited audience may find they’re receiving fewer impressions and engagement. This reduces return on their Facebook marketing investment and make their posts less likely to be reshared, a core way of organically growing their fan counts.

In reality, Facebook’s news feed visibility algorithm was likely tweaked to show users higher quality content, and this reduction in engagement is the unfortunate repercussion for some Pages. Facebook probably wasn’t trying to punish smaller businesses and other types of Pages, its just that smaller Pages are less likely to be devoting as many resources to creating and publishing compelling news feed posts.

If Facebook won’t make the posts of smaller brands and local business more visible to their existing fans until the accumulate more fans, these Pages may need to jump-start their Facebook marketing with paid advertising campaigns. In this way, Facebook is rewarding high quality content producers, but also getting smaller businesses hooked on Facebook ads that it can continue to sell to them as they grow.

Facebook Growing Up, Focusing on Infrastructure Efficiency and Security

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 09:39 AM PDT

Facebook is showing new signs of maturity and a willingness to tackle tough, unsexy problems. In the last few days it’s made four announcements around hardware efficiency and cybersecurity: the opening of a self-cooling server farm in the Arctic, the launch of its Open Compute foundation for infrastructure open sourcing, details on its Facebook Immune System for thwarting hackers and spammers, and the release of new login security features for users.

Even though Facebook is a fail fast-style startup run by a young CEO, it’s concentrating on stability. This means reducing both server costs and the vulnerability of the user experience to malicious parties trying to exploit it. As the company heads towards an IPO, these long term efforts could bolster confidence in potential investors.

Facebook stepped up efforts to create cheap, environmentally friendly data centers today with the announcement of plans to build a new server farm in Luleå, Sweden. Just south of the Arctic Circle, the area is cold enough that no air conditioning will be required to cool the 11 football fields-worth of servers, reports The Telegraph. The site was specifically chosen because of its proximity to hydroelectric dams on the Lule River and the prevalence of fibre optic cable in the region

With no cooling costs, low-cost energy to power the servers, and high data transfer speeds means that the Luleå Data Center will be even more efficient than Facebook’s stateside Prineville, OR and Rutherford, NC centers. Facebook’s willingness to scout so far from home for a location shows its global orientation.

Facebook launched the Open Compute Project in April to open source server and data center designs in hopes of improving efficiency for itself and all other data-heavy companies. It could also be designed to reduce the competitive advantage of companies such as Google that don’t reveal their designs. Now Facebook has formed a non-profit foundation to run the project. Partners include Microsoft, Goldman Sachs, Intel, Baidu, and Mozilla.

By spearheading the open source project, Facebook intends to cull innovation from around the world to make sure its hardware is efficient as possible without tackling the research and associated costs all on its own. This will allow it to focus resources elsewhere so it can retain its efficiency and small headcount.

Less than 0.5% of Facebook users experience spam each day in part thanks the the Facebook Immune System. The defense system, run by a 30- person security team, is designed to weed out spam and malicious links. It analyzes up to 650,000 user actions per second and 2 trillion link clicks per day, the company recently revealed to New Scientist. Though it may temporarily annoy users, new stats show that Facebook blocks 220 million malicious actions and 250,000 to 600,000 accounts a day to keep threats from spreading.

In case a user’s account is hacked, Facebook is providing more ways for them to regain access. These include Social Authentication that lets users identify friends in photos to prove they’re an account owner, and the Trusted Friends feature announced this week, that sends an access code to a locked out user’s closest friends who can share it with them so they can login again.

These security features on the front and back end keep users from having the terrible experience of a sustained loss of access to their account that can push them and the friends they complain to away from Facebook. In the future, the combination of security precautions and Facebook’s 300-person security and safety team could help it fend off massive attacks that could disrupt service and shake faith in its reliability as a communication medium.

The past few years have seen Facebook grow its user base to 800 million, producing a network effect that protects it from competitors. It has relentlessly evolved its product, even when users were resistant to change, allowing it to incorporate ideas that could have disrupted it had it remained stagnant. It’s created a lucrative Platform developers want to build on. Finally, its turned its Pages and advertising products into central components of brand and local marketing, giving it the money to fund innovation elsewhere. All the core pieces of its business are in place.

These latest improvements to efficiency and security might not be as flashy as a redesign or product launch, but they strengthen the service in ways it was moving too fast to focus on when it was younger. While only seven years old, Facebook is looking more and more like an established, sophisticated company ready to deliver value for a long time into the future — in time for the initial public offering that it is said to be planning for next year.

[Image credit: Fast Company]

Red Bull, Halloween, Quora, Grooveshark, Pixable, “Twilight,” and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU

Posted: 28 Oct 2011 08:02 AM PDT

There was a trio of contest applications, a few media-related apps such as Grooveshark and Pixable, and then a mixed bag that included Quora and a Halloween app on our list of emerging ones by monthly active user growth. The apps on our list grew from between 80,000 and 310,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1.  Red Bull Home Tab 550,000 +310,000 +129%
2.  Amazon Sweepstakes 470,000 +260,000 +124%
3.  JibJab 890,000 +230,000 +35%
4.  夢幻商城 220,000 +160,000 +267%
5.  Grooveshark 880,000 +130,000 +17%
6.  Win Free ASOS For A Year 620,000 +130,000 +27%
7.  Pixable 900,000 +120,000 +15%
8.  Halloween Treats 520,000 +120,000 +30%
9.  Stardoll 910,000 +120,000 +15%
10.  Quora 210,000 +120,000 +133%
11.  Playboy – Bad Girls 150,000 +110,000 +275%
12.  Fbp 990,000 +110,000 +13%
13.  Profile Banner 490,000 +100,000 +26%
14.  Spa Life 480,000 +100,000 +26%
15.  Pieces of Flair 310,000 +90,000 +41%
16.  Slots Farm – Slot Machines 330,000 +90,000 +38%
17.  Big Photo 290,000 +90,000 +45%
18.  3D Slots 1,000,000 +85,559 +13%
19.  開心農場3 活力莊園 330,000 +80,000 +32%
20.  Breaking Dawn – Part 1 360,000 +80,000 +29%

First the contest-ey apps. There was Red Bull Home Tab,  topping our list with 310,000 MAU, but the app just appeared to be a tab on the Page. Then Amazon Sweepstakes with 260,000 MAU and Win Free ASOS For A Year with 130,000 MAU appeared to work with Connect.

JibJab continued to grow on our list despite the fact the app says it does not work, it saw 230,000 MAU this week. Halloween Treats with 120,000 MAU appears to allow users the chance to send a virtual gist to friends, but first it asks you to invite all your friends to use the app. Quora's app works with Connect and grew by 120,000. Another broken app, Playboy – Bad Girls, grew by 110,000 MAU. Dating app Fbp grew by 110,000 and Pieces of Flair, which says it provides personalized buttons as virtual gifts, grew by 90,000 MAU.

Then the media apps.

Grooveshark grew by 130,000 MAU; the app uses Facebook Connect to allow users to utilize a separate website as a music player with which they can search and share music. Photo apps Pixable with 120,000 MAU, Profile Banner with 100,000 MAU and Big Photo with 90,000 MAU made the list. Finally, Breaking Dawn – Part 1, which is just a video app, saw 80,000 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.

lørdag den 29. oktober 2011 at 07.21