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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook


Facebook Roundup: Swedish Data Center, Solar Energy, Politics, Messages, Seattle and Ceglia

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 10:00 PM PDT

Swedish Govt May See All Data in New Servers – Sweden's 2008 law, FRA, allows the government to see any Internet data passing its borders without a warrant. Since the company is set to build a data center there, this potentially means Facebook users' data could become a target of this law, according to a report.

Cogenra Solar to be Installed at Facebook's CA HQ – Cogenra Solar is set to install a renewable energy project at Facebook's new headquarters in Menlo Park, California. According to a statement, the project will provide on site electricity production, hot water, and be integrated into the top of the building's fitness center to power gym equipment, light and water for the showers.

Most Expect Candidates to be on Social Media – Digitas released a study this week noting that 61% of social media users expect to see candidates on social media platforms like Facebook.

Facebook Seattle Changes Offices - Facebook Seattle is changing office location. There are currently 60 employees but room for up to 200.

Facebook Not Worried About Messages Threat – CDW consultant Nathan Power found a way to send a malicious attachment to other Facebook users. Facebook responded that this threat is no different than the ones faced by other email providers, and requires “an additional layer of social engineering." Plus, there are easier ways to get malware to users.

Ceglia Ordered to Return to the U.S. – Paul Ceglia, who claims to own half of Facebook, had fled to Ireland but was ordered by a federal judge to return to New York in order to search for a missing flash drive which may contain pertinent evidence. Ceglia claims the flash drive was lost.

Instant Message, Music Services Are Now Among the Most Engaging Facebook Apps

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 04:29 PM PDT

When it first launched its developer platform back in 2007, Facebook had meant every company in the world to somehow use it. Instead, most of the hits have turned out to be social games and lightweight quiz and dating apps.

But the original vision is still alive and growing, mostly in the form of established web services — from Microsoft and Yahoo to Scribd and Yelp — plugging in some type of Facebook integration as a social layer on top of whatever they already offer.

Here’s our latest look at the largest apps of this type, based on AppData, our tracking service for Facebook apps, and following up on an article we did a couple months ago on the trend. For the most part, we’ll look at apps based on daily active users in order to illustrate just how engaging they are to Facebook users.

By the DAU measure, the largest app on the platform now is Windows Live Messenger. It has been reaching nearly 18 million people a day for the past few weeks, after seeing a slight drop that may have been due to recent methodology changes by Facebook to the data that we track.

The overall trend is that Messenger has been steadily gaining Facebook users since the integration launched in 2010, and we expect that to continue given that Messenger has hundreds of millions of total users. However, Microsoft will need to see if Facebook ends up helping its massive, aging instant message service grow (or at least maintain users), and make money.

The third-largest app on the Facebook platform is Yahoo’s integration of Facebook into its homepage (Zynga’s CityVille game is at second). The homepage has been fluctuating between 11.3 million and 12.5 million DAUs in the past few weeks, in what could be a reflection of Yahoo’s overall traffic patterns. As the social layer on Yahoo’s content and services portal, Facebook helps users see things like articles that friends like, thereby helping engagement — and Yahoo’s ad business.

Bing, with 4.2 million daily active users, gets an especially obvious win from Facebook. First of all, Facebook has provided its strategic investor with special access to user data for social search results, and also features Bing as the web search results page within Facebook.com. The result is that users who want a social experience can’t get the equivalent social results — such as your Facebook friend Liking an article on the topic you searched for — from market leader Google. That differentiation in turn can help Bing increase engagement, and search-related revenue streams like ads. The result is the steady weekly patterns of engagement that you can see in the graph above, that make Bing the app with the 12th-highest number of DAUs on Facebook.

Streaming music startup Spotify‘s special business relationship with Facebook landed it a dominant spot in the launch of a new Facebook profile at Facebook’s f8 conference in September. Millions of users Facebook suddenly started seeing every single song that their Spotify-using friends were listening to through the service, and the result has been some viral growth. Over October, the app has been surging up in DAU, and for some reason shot up yesterday from less than 2 million DAU to nearly 4 million. Clearly this is an app to keep watching.

European instant message service eBuddy hasn’t gotten a lot of press out of its Facebook integration, but it has gotten results: 2.5 million daily active users, and growing, and the 21st spot on our top 50 DAU list. Like Messenger, eBuddy makes it easy to sync and chat with Facebook friends through its service.

Not to be outdone, new Microsoft property Skype has been climbing up the charts especially fast. It has grown by half a million DAU in the past month, to reach around 2 million today. The Skype-Facebook tie-up has been coming for some time, and the results so far are not surprising when you consider how well some of the other chat services have done with integrating Facebook.

 

It might not have been included in Facebook’s Spotify-focused music launch, but internet radio service Pandora has been adding more and more daily active users on Facebook. Today it is near 1.4 million at the peak of the traffic waves you see above, following a good couple of months.

YouTube‘s dominant position in online video has translated to Facebook a little bit, with some 1.5 million DAU these days.

Twitter has also seen more and more Facebook usage — presumably through some of the Facebook-Twitter integrations that Facebook has not blocked in past years.

Photos, Halloween, Pixable, Washington Post Social Reader and More on This Week’s Top 20 Emerging Facebook Apps by MAU

Posted: 04 Nov 2011 08:23 AM PDT

Photo applications were popular on our list of emerging apps by monthly active users this week. There were also horoscopes, a few brand apps, a Halloween app and the Washington Post Social Reader. The apps on our list grew from between 80,000 and 590,000 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.  My Photos+ 810,000 +590,000 +328%
2.  Mejores Amigos 560,000 +410,000 +513%
3.  Zombie Island 830,000 +380,000 +97%
4.  Horoscopes 550,000 +340,000 +227%
5.  Red Bull Home Tab 850,000 +270,000 +49%
6.  ShareAndTell.com 350,000 +250,000 +1,250%
7.  Endomondo 470,000 +230,000 +121%
8.  My Photos 800,000 +190,000 +34%
9.  Your Fa.ce in a Hole | Tu Cara en un Hueco 280,000 +180,000 +300%
10.  Chat Pro by mSonar 490,000 +170,000 +59%
11.  Puss in Boots Fan Tab 130,000 +110,000 +550%
12.  Wasteland Empires 360,000 +100,000 +40%
13.  Auto Collect Games Bonuses 200,000 +100,000 +125%
14.  Gol Mania 720,000 +100,000 +17%
15.  Huddle To Fight Hunger 190,000 +100,000 +111%
16.  Le Mie Foto 430,000 +100,000 +33%
17.  Stardoll 1,000,000 +90,000 +10%
18.  Halloween Treats 630,000 +90,000 +17%
19.  Washington Post Social Reader 490,000 +80,000 +26%
20.  Pixable 990,000 +80,000 +9%

My Photos+ with 590,000 MAU, Mejores Amigos with 410,000 MAU, My Photos with 190,000 MAU and the Italian version of this latter app, Le Mie Foto with 100,000 MAU, were basically the same. They presented users with a photo gallery of their friends' photos, allowing them to Like or save them. Liking them publishes a feed story. Then there was a leftover Halloween app, Your Fa.ce in a Hole | Tu Cara en un Hueco, with 180,000 MAU, and the app allowed users to add their own photos, or those of their friends, to Halloween costumes, then published the photo to the stream. Finally there was Pixable with 80,000 MAU.

The next most interesting addition to our list this week was Washington Post Social Reader, which grew by 80,000 MAU. The rest of the list was a mixed bag of different types of apps.

Horoscopes grew by 340,000 MAU and asks users to sign up for daily horoscope Wall posts. The Red Bull Home Tab grew by 270,000 MAU. ShareAndTell.com grew by 250,000 MAU and appeared to be little else than a website on a tab that then asks users to login via Connect. Endomondo with 230,000 MAU and Chat Pro by mSonar with 170,000 MAU were not available to review.

The Puss in Boots Fan Tab grew by 110,000 MAU. Auto Collect Games Bonuses grew by 100,000 MAU and is an app that allows you to see all your game bonuses in one interface and then collect them at once. Kraft's Huddle To Fight Hunger also grew 100,000 MAU and basically is an app on the Page that lets you Like it to donate a meal for charity. Finally there was Halloween Treats with 90,000 MAU; this is one of those apps that asks you to invite all your friends to use the app before it does anything. It also asks you to sign up for an email list.

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.