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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook Roundup: fellowship, Africa, shareholders, Windows Phone, more

Posted: 17 Feb 2012 06:00 PM PST

Facebook announces 2012 fellows - Facebook announced 12 picks for its Fellowship Program this week. The company had about 300 applicants for the positions which include a year’s worth of tuition, a $30,000 stipend, $5,000 for travel and $2,500 for a computer.

Fellows have specialties including mobile computing, computer networking and cloud computing, machine learning, storage systems, search, distributed systems, programming language technology, computer security, programming languages, computer security, distributed data storage and programming languages and computer security.

Mobile coverage in Africa could mean growth for Facebook – French mobile carrier Orange announced a new service for low-end mobile phones in Africa, meaning that about 70 million subscribers may now be able to access Facebook.

ISS criticizes Facebook's shareholder rights – Institutional Shareholder Services analysts wrote this week that Facebook's dual-class share structure may cause problems if the structure ever changes. Analysts wrote that this dual structure potentially divides owners into opposing groups, creating potential for future conflict.

Microsoft's Windows phone Facebook app upgraded - A new version the Facebook app for Microsoft's Windows Phone, was introduced this week and includes a new profile design, banner images, access to pages, groups, the ability to view Likes and more.

Australian film simultaneously released in theaters, Facebook - "Tomorrow, When the War Began" is an Australian film that is set to be released into U.S. theaters, Facebook and VOD at the same time, on Feb. 24. The film is being distributed by Milyoni's Social Cinema technology. [Image via Facebook]

Paul Ceglia owes Facebook $76K – The man who claims to own part of Facebook, Paul Ceglia, owes the company a hefty sum of legal fees, according to U.S. Magistrate Judges Leslie Foschio. The judge ordered Ceglia to pay about $76,000 in legal fees to the company.

Vitrue's SRM livestreams Coldplay across 240 pages – iHeartRadio used Vitrue's SRM technology to livestream a Coldplay concert across 240 Clear Channel-affiliated pages last week.

Brighter Option combines Page Insights, Ads API to improve Facebook ad planning

Posted: 17 Feb 2012 03:14 PM PST

Facebook Ads API partner Brighter Option announced an update to its Social Ads Manager tool that makes ad creation and optimization more efficient. Most notably, the company now integrates the Page Insights API to help businesses choose effective ad creative for page post ads.

Page post ads are a relatively new offering from Facebook. Instead of developing creative with a headline, body copy and image, businesses can promote posts they already made on their Facebook pages. Brighter Option now shows posts' engagement metrics within the ad creation section, which gives advertisers more context than Facebook's self-serve dashboard and other ad tools provide.

Brighter Option CEO Peter Goodman says part of the goal with this feature is to solve some of the problems that result when companies have different agencies doing advertising and page management. Bringing page insights to the ad builder increases efficiency and we imagine it will encourage advertisers to rethink what type of content works best in Facebook ads.

The Social Ad Manager has come a long way since we profiled the tool in 2010. The London-based company has introduced several features that make Facebook ad planning and campaign management less onerous. We liked the easy navigation between analytics and scheduling, the find-and-replace feature for making copy changes across multiples ads, the ZIP code area map and shortcuts in the creative builder. For advertisers seeking a software solution rather than managed services for Facebook advertising, Brighter Option is worth testing. The company offers a free trial of its tool.

Santorum gains most new fans; Gingrich gets Timeline this week on Inside Facebook’s Election Tracker

Posted: 17 Feb 2012 12:06 PM PST

Rick Santorum continues to gain more new Facebook Likes per day than other Republican primary candidates. His page averaged more than 2,600 new fans per day, according to our Inside Facebook Election Tracker.

Santorum also has a very high ratio of People Talking About This to total Likes — about 48 percent compared to Newt Gingrich's 18 percent, Ron Paul's 9 percent and Mitt Romney's 6 percent. Part of this is attributable to the influx of new fans after Santorum swept the Super Tuesday elections. The other factor is how active his team has been making between 9 and 17 posts each day.

Gingrich has had the slowest fan page growth of all the candidates this month. He is the only candidate, however, to create a Timeline profile and enable subscribers. He has fewer than 2,800 subscribers as of this post, but if he can work with Facebook to get a verified account, Gingrich could start to see more subscribers. So far his team is making more posts to the fan page than Timeline, but we will watch how the use of each space evolves over the course of the campaign.

The next primaries are in Arizona and Michigan on Feb. 28.

Tabs, Jewels of the Amazon, Walmart, Angry Birds, more on this week’s emerging Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 17 Feb 2012 11:12 AM PST

Page tab and other page applications were popular on our list of emerging apps by monthly active users, there were a group of games led by Jewels of the Amazon, an app from Walmart and Angry Birds, too.

The apps grew from between 130,000 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.   Static IFRAME Tab 940,000 +310,000 + 49%
2.   Jewels of the Amazon 730,000 +260,000 + 55%
3.   Static IFRAME Tab : Page Icon 770,000 +240,000 + 45%
4.   Static HTML… [Ninth Tab] 780,000 +220,000 + 39%
5.   Woobox Custom Tab | Arrow #2 790,000 +220,000 + 39%
6.   Sweepstakes 1,000,000 +210,000 + 27%
7.   我的王國(My Kingdom) 880,000 +200,000 + 29%
8.   My Local Walmart 270,000 +190,000 + 238%
9.   Hoop De Loop Saga 650,000 +160,000 + 33%
10.   FBML Tab Maker 470,000 +150,000 + 47%
11.   Tab Builder: Basic Blue (3) 650,000 +150,000 + 30%
12.   Tower Blocks 820,000 +150,000 + 22%
13.   Woobox Custom Tab | Arrow #3 550,000 +150,000 + 38%
14.   Woobox Custom Tab | Arrow #4 490,000 +150,000 + 44%
15.   Angry Birds Seasons 630,000 +140,000 + 29%
16.   Lucky Cruise 690,000 +140,000 + 25%
17.   Static IFRAME Tab 800,000 +140,000 + 21%
18.   Tab Builder: Badge 810,000 +140,000 + 21%
19.   What’s Hot 140,000 +133,000 + 1,900%
20.   21 Preguntas 620,000 +130,000 + 27%

Tab apps, ranging from sweepstakes, iFrame, HTML, FBML and badges on our list grew from between 310,000 MAU to 140,000 MAU. The My Local Walmart app helps users locate their local stores via zip codes. Angry Birds Seasons is an app that allows users to send cards to their friends. Quiz app 21 Preguntas asks users to invite all their friends to the app before using it.

Games were also popular on the list, as we mentioned, ranging from Jewels of the Amazon which grew by 260,000 to Lucky Cruise with 140,000 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 18. februar 2012 at 07.14