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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook roundup: lobbying, engineering, Power.com, Credits, Oscars, more

Posted: 24 Feb 2012 06:00 PM PST

Facebook loses lobbyists – Politico reported this week that three contract lobbying firms working for Facebook pulled their services after content providers who were also clients raised concerns. The story implies that Internet providers and content creators are at odds, noting that Facebook increased its lobbying expenses 285 percent from 2010 to 2011. [Image via Facebook]

Facebook engineers now designing hardware – As part of its Open Compute Project, Facebook staff has begun to design its own storage hardware, according to a report from Wired.

Facebook wins Power.com court fight – Facebook finally won its case against Power.com, a now-defunct website that used to aggregate data from social networks. The lawsuit began in 2009.

Facebook used to serve legal claims in UK – Facebook may now be used as a platform with which to serve legal claims in the United Kingdom. A judge in a court case recently allowed Facebook to be used in a commercial case where one of the parties was difficult to locate.

Study: users managing privacy controls better – The Pew Internet and American Life Project released a study this week that found that users of online services are becoming more active at controlling their privacy.

Crowdtilt launches funding platform – Crowdtilt publicly launched its group fundraising platform this week. The site uses social media platforms like Facebook to allow groups of people to raise money for anything from art projects to vacations.

Miloyni releases Credits whitepaper – Miloyni has written a report called "Facebook Credits 2012: A Merchant's Perspective" examining the benefits and drawbacks of Facebook Credits.

Oscar buzz on Facebook – Banyan Branch put together an infographic with buzz for Oscar nominees ahead of the ceremony this weekend.

Platform update: Open Graph submissions, app reporting flow

Posted: 24 Feb 2012 02:41 PM PST

Facebook says it has responded to 90 percent of the thousands of Open Graph submissions it received, and the company is on track to complete the review process in the next few weeks, according to a blog post.

The social network also improved its app reporting flow to allow developers to get direct feedback from users. Previously, some users were reporting bugs to Facebook rather than reaching developers who could address issues more quickly. Now when a users selects "Report/Contact this App" from the bottom of a canvas page or "Report App" from the auth dialog, they will see more specific options for different issues they might want to report. (See below.) Some of these reports will be routed to Facebook; others will go directly to a developer's help center or email address.

For more details on changes to Facebook's APIs and bug activity, see the company's developer blog.

Facebook highlights ability to drive traffic to third-party mobile apps

Posted: 24 Feb 2012 01:30 PM PST

Facebook shared some new statistics today about the growth some mobile apps have seen since integrating with the social network's platform.

In the past month the company has been building a case that it can help drive traffic and engagement to apps and websites off-Facebook. For years many developers felt they had to build on Facebook's site rather than their own to achieve scale. The social network seems to now be urging developers to create experiences wherever they want — third-party sites, iOS, Android — as long as they incorporate Facebook's social capabilities. This strategy could improve the perception of the company among developers and investors.

Today Head of Mobile Developer Relations James Pearce wrote a blog post about how BranchOut, Diamond Dash, Foodspotting, The Washington Post Social Reader and Yahoo apps have grown as the result of mobile Facebook integrations like single sign-on and Open Graph.

Professional networking web app BranchOut, now has more than 350,000 visitors from Facebook mobile every day, a 20x increase since the start of the year. According to our own AppData tracking service, the BranchOut app has about five times as many total monthly active users than it did before integrating Open Graph in January, and is growing at a much faster rate than it had been.

Diamond Dash, a native iOS game, gets more than 1.9 million monthly visitors to its mobile app from Facebook. This is three times as much as they saw before implementing Facebook single sign-on. Foodspotting, a native mobile app that lets people recommend and discover food dishes, experienced a 3x increase in visits and activities shared on Facebook with single sign-on and Open Graph. Daily and monthly active users are up again this month after a period of decline and stagnation last year, according to AppData.

The Washington Post Social Reader, which has a canvas app, mobile web app and native mobile apps, receives more than 10 million visitors from Facebook every month.The company says this is five times higher than its projected target. The Washington Post has the second most popular Open Graph news application, as we covered Monday. First is Yahoo, which Facebook says gets 1.6 million mobile web visitors a day from the social network.

Fan Appz launches Social Database

Posted: 24 Feb 2012 10:19 AM PST

Social media marketing platform Fan Appz announced a feature this week to help companies gather information about their fans that can then be applied to other marketing efforts.

With the new Social Database, marketers can begin to create individual customer profiles as users interact with Fan Appz applications. For example, a retailer might use the sweepstakes app to give away a prize on Facebook and then later use the poll app to drive additional engagement. Instead of those being isolated efforts that result in unclear business value, now the company can associate users' contact info with their preferences, and run a more personalized email marketing campaign.

Fan Appz Founder and CEO Jon Siegal, who previously worked in the CRM space, says this function is about understanding fans and followers in order to provide a better experience for them and ultimately achieve business goals. He makes the comparison to a waiter who knows your name and what you like to eat.

"It's about how well you know somebody. When you know their preferences, you do a much better job," he says.

Siegal says the vision for his company is to apply CRM to social media, and Social Database is a key piece of that. Facebook quiz and coupon apps were just a start to get businesses up to this point. For many companies, 2009 and 2010 were about establishing a presence on Facebook and building a following, Siegal says. Last year was focused on the abstract goal of "engagement." But the point of marketing is to drive sales of products or services.

"Social Database helps complete that last important piece." Siegal says.

This seems to be a logical progression for the industry, and we expect other social media marketing platforms to add similar functionality in the near future. We've already seen Shoutlet launch Social Profiles this month. Ultimately these systems will enable more companies to serve consumers with a level attention and personalization that wasn't previously possible on such a large scale.

Fan Appz also made several updates to its suite of applications, including new:

  • Publisher apps
  • Customizable designs and ways to share using engagement apps
  • Sweepstakes engine and refer-a-friend feature for promotion apps
  • Data analytics capabilities for publisher, engagement, promotions and white label apps
  • More secure admin panel from which to manage several social media pages at once

Tabs, Lucky Cruise, RaceTown, video, greetings, more on this week’s top 20 emerging Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 24 Feb 2012 08:45 AM PST

Tabs were a big part of our list of emerging Facebook applications by monthly active users this week. Games, greetings, friend and video apps were also popular.

The apps grew from between 120,000 and 430,000 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.   Woobox Custom Tab | Arrow #3 980,000 +430,000 + 78%
2.   Lucky Cruise 980,000 +290,000 + 42%
3.   Hoop De Loop Saga 920,000 +270,000 + 42%
4.   MyVideo 290,000 +220,000 + 314%
5.   Static HTML… [Ninth Tab] 970,000 +190,000 + 24%
6.   Tab Builder: Badge 1,000,000 +190,000 + 23%
7.   Tab Builder: Music 430,000 +180,000 + 72%
8.   Tower Blocks 1,000,000 +180,000 + 22%
9.   Parking Mania 850,000 +170,000 + 25%
10.   @Hearts 920,000 +160,000 + 21%
11.   RaceTown 320,000 +160,000 + 100%
12.   21 Preguntas 770,000 +150,000 + 24%
13.   Tab Builder: Basic White 1,000,000 +150,000 + 18%
14.   Lucky Slots – Free Slot Machines 630,000 +140,000 + 29%
15.   Smeet 900,000 +140,000 + 18%
16.   Super Mario Classic 820,000 +140,000 + 21%
17.   FBML Tab Maker 600,000 +130,000 + 28%
18.   Greetings 510,000 +130,000 + 34%
19.   Best Friends 170,000 +120,000 + 240%
20.   Greetings 500,000 +120,000 + 32%

Woobox Custom Tab | Arrow #3 topped our list of apps this week; other tab apps included HTML, badge and music apps. Games on the list included Lucky Cruise, Hoop De Loop Saga, RaceTown, Lucky Slots – Free Slot Machines and Super Mario Classic.

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 25. februar 2012 at 07.21