Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Confirmed: Facebook buys patents from IBM
- Facebook social reader app contributes to record traffic for U.K. news site
- Facebook career postings: engineers, mobile, games, legal, more
- Facebook hires and departures: community engagement, engineering, mobile ops
- Facebook to implement fullscreen, hi-res photo viewing
- Facebook tool helps users divide friends from acquaintances, clean out News Feed
- Facebook to reduce image sizes, lower character count for body copy in ads
| Confirmed: Facebook buys patents from IBM Posted: 22 Mar 2012 04:32 PM PDT Facebook tells us it purchased patents from IBM, corroborating a report from Bloomberg citing anonymous sources. Facebook did not provide details about the purchase, but according to Bloomberg, the company acquired 750 software and networking patents for an undisclosed sum. The new patents are likely to help Facebook's position in intellectual property suits that Yahoo and Mitel recently brought against the social network. IBM's patents will significantly expand Facebook's portfolio. According to a regulatory filing, the social network holds 56 patents in the U.S. and 149 abroad, which it estimates to be worth $51 million. The company has also filed 503 U.S. patent applications and 149 foreign patent applications. With an impending initial public offering, Facebook is likely to face even more patent claims. The company had 22 patent suits brought against it last year, according to Bloomberg. As such, Facebook added corporate and patent counsel to its job listings this week.
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| Facebook social reader app contributes to record traffic for U.K. news site Posted: 22 Mar 2012 03:47 PM PDT The Guardian reached a new record of unique visitors and page impressions for Guardian.co.uk in February, and the news organization attributes 30 percent of referral traffic to Facebook. That’s up from 2 percent only six months ago. The change is largely the result of a Facebook canvas application that lets users read Guardian stories and share them automatically via Ticker, Timeline and News Feed. This is yet another example of Open Graph driving significant traffic to third-party apps and websites. For a few days in February, Facebook even surpassed Google in referral percentage to the Guardian, though it hasn’t maintained the lead. “I believe it is only a matter of time before it [Facebook] becomes the main driver of traffic to many core Guardian products,” said Tanya Cordrey, director of digital development for the Guardian, at the Guardian Changing Media Summit on Wednesday.
Cordrey also discussed statistics and trends related to the company’s social news app. She said more than 8 million people have added the Facebook app in five months, and about 40,000 new users sign up each day. More than 4 million people used the ad-supported app in the last four weeks and many of them read several stories per day, she added. According to AppData, the canvas app has been getting between 200,000 and 250,000 daily active users. Of these users, “only a small percentage” elect to hide or remove stories from their Timeline, Cordrey explained. We previously identified the Guardian’s privacy controls as some of the best among social reader applications. Because most users share all the stories they read within the app, and Facebook highlights social reader activity in aggregate News Feed stories, a new audience is discovering the Guardian. Cordrey pointed out that largest group of users for the Guardian Facebook app are between 18 and 24 years old, a demographic that is hard for news sites to reach. The app's users are also global. According to AppData, 50 percent of users are from the U.K., but the rest are from a range of countries. Cordrey said Facebook is also unique in that the peak time for news consumption appears to be the afternoon, not around morning, lunch and dinner, which is typical for radio, TV and the web.
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| Facebook career postings: engineers, mobile, games, legal, more Posted: 22 Mar 2012 01:30 PM PDT
Posts added this week on Facebook's Careers Page:
Jobs posted by Facebook on LinkedIn:
Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry. |
| Facebook hires and departures: community engagement, engineering, mobile ops Posted: 22 Mar 2012 01:05 PM PDT
Facebook promoted Susan Gonzales to a head of community engagement position this week after she had been working in external affairs in the company’s D.C. office since August 2011. According to its Careers page the company also seems to have brought on some engineers, data center staff, account management staff and a head of mobile operations. Facebook’s LinkedIn feed noted a few additional engineering, data center, marketing and other staff. New hires per LinkedIn and other sources:
Prior listings now removed from the Facebook Careers Page:
Who else is hiring? The Inside Network Job Board presents a survey of current openings at leading companies in the industry. |
| Facebook to implement fullscreen, hi-res photo viewing Posted: 22 Mar 2012 10:43 AM PDT Facebook today announced both a new option to view photos fullscreen and backend changes that improve the color output for photos on the site. The fullscreen option is the most immersive photos experience on Facebook to date, stripping away buttons and ads when users click an arrow in the top right corner of images. Pages can leverage the new viewer by sharing high resolution images and telling users how to view it full size.
In News Feed, photos from pages are still much smaller than those from friends (see below). Users might be likely to skip over page posts without bothering to click on a photo and see it fullscreen. Facebook does this to prevent pages from putting ad-like images in the feed, but it also hurts pages that are posting content fans would appreciate.
According to Facebook, the site sees more than 250 million photo uploads per day. The social network regularly increases the size and quality of images while generally avoiding lag time for viewing. In August 2011, it increased photo width from 720 pixels to 960 pixels. The company has also focused on creating a more aesthetic photo viewer that also encourages social interaction. In January, Facebook changed the design to display photos and comments side by side. The maximum resolution for a photo uploaded to Facebook is 2,048×2,048 pixels.
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| Facebook tool helps users divide friends from acquaintances, clean out News Feed Posted: 22 Mar 2012 08:57 AM PDT
The social network is promoting the tool as a way to "see posts that matter to you," but interestingly it does not suggest using the list to protect certain posts or information — another key benefit of maintaining lists. In any case, the tool addresses an issue many users have after years of using the service and accumulating friends they don't know very well. An algorithm recommends friends to add to the list based on frequency of interaction. We've found the suggestions to be quite accurate. Many of the users Facebook suggests as acquaintances are already those who appear sparingly in News Feed. Still, users can deselect particular friends if Facebook miscategorizes them. There's also an option to remove users from friends completely by hovering over a person's picture and clicking "unfriend." This type of tool is interesting coming from Facebook, which aims to connect people and often prompts people to add more friends rather than delete them. But it reflects the realities of the service and helps people organize their Facebook connections as they do with people offline. When users feel confident that they can control who sees their information, they are likely to share more on the site, which is why it's surprising that Facebook didn't call out how users can hide certain posts or photos from their new list of acquaintances. Nonetheless, the tool serves the other practical need of relevance in News Feed. Helping users indicate which friends they want to see less from will enable Facebook to show more stories that users do care about. Users can access the tool from the link here or by searching “acquaintances,” clicking on the list result and then selecting “see all suggestions” from the right-hand side of the page.
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| Facebook to reduce image sizes, lower character count for body copy in ads Posted: 22 Mar 2012 08:00 AM PDT
Marketplace ads — which are traditional self-serve Facebook ads, not Sponsored Stories or page-post ads — will now allow a 99×72-pixel image and 90 characters of body copy. Previously, ads could have a 110×80-pixel image and 135 characters of body copy. Even though existing documentation on Facebook still refers to the 110×80 dimensions, the site seems to have already begun resizing images to 99×72 automatically. According to the document, copy changes will go into effect March 31. The company has not done anything to notify advertisers of this through its business pages or ad dashboard. We did not find anything about the change in the Help Center or API documentation. The latest ad specs make Sponsored Stories and page-post ads more appealing to advertisers. Facebook wants to promote these new ad units and push traditional ads (headline, image and body copy) out of favor. Last month, Facebook made it mandatory for premium homepage ads to begin as page posts, but it hasn't done so for its self-serve marketplace ads. Instead, it's giving more real estate to its newer offerings. With images in traditional ads now 19 percent smaller, it is harder to catch users’ eyes. The reduction of body copy is not likely to hurt advertisers, as ads with fewer words tend to outperform those that use the maximum character count. Reducing the overall size of ads by making images smaller and text shorter allows Facebook to fit more ads in the same amount of space. The social network recently increased the maximum number of ads per page to seven, which means some ads are not visible unless a user scrolls down. Difference in image size, body copyOld: New: Ads that originate from page posts, however, get up to 90 characters of text, a 118×90-pixel image and a page thumbnail.
Premium homepage ads, which are only bought directly through Facebook representatives, can have 90 characters of page-post copy, a 168×128-pixel image, as well as thumbnails and names of friends that Like the page.
For a further breakdown of Facebook ad types, see the document here. |
Facebook added listings for engineers, counsel, games and more on its 
Facebook introduced a new tool for users to add friends to an "acquaintances" list so these people appear less frequently in a user's feed.
New Facebook ad specs reduce the maximum size of images and number of characters of body copy, according to a Facebook document uploaded by a 
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