Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook career postings: engineering, counsel, data centers, more
- Facebook hires: product design, engineering, recruiting, more
- Facebook unveils school-specific groups, allows file sharing among users with designated .edu email addresses
- New this week on the Inside Network Job Board: Offerpop, Spruce, W3i and more
- FanRx brings Spotify play button to Facebook tab apps
- TripAdvisor adds personalization based on friends of Facebook friends
| Facebook career postings: engineering, counsel, data centers, more Posted: 11 Apr 2012 02:30 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: product design, engineering, recruiting, more Posted: 11 Apr 2012 02:15 PM PDT
Ryan O’Rourke of Groupon joined the Facebook design team this week, and according to Facebook’s Careers page, the company seems to have hired a few engineers, marketers and other staff. The company’s LinkedIn feed shows that an engineer, fraud specialist, analyst and a few others were hired since our last post. 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. |
| Posted: 11 Apr 2012 01:42 PM PDT Facebook announced a new groups for schools feature that enables users with active school email addresses join online communities related to their college or university.
Not all schools are eligible for groups yet. Users can check the groups for schools page or wait to see a message appear on the left side of their home page when the feature is available to them. Once users join their school community, they are able to create subgroups for individual classes, study groups, clubs, teams, dorms or friends. Users can join groups for multiple schools as long as they have an active email address for each. This is necessary for study abroad or transfer students. On group pages there will be a tab for files. Users can share non-copyrighted documents and other files with members of a school group. Anyone in a school group can upload and download files within that group. When users upload a revised version of a file, the previous version of the file remains available. Users can also message any confirmed member of their school community without being friends first.
Facebook began testing school-specific groups in December 2011, among Brown and Vanderbilt students. At the time we wondered whether university groups would be a start to a broader initiative to get more people familiar with Facebook's offerings around small-group sharing. Since then the social network has redesigned groups a few times and given events more group-like functionality. The way groups for schools restrict access to users with a designated .edu email address is reminiscent of the way networks operated when Facebook began in 2004. File sharing is another former feature from the social network's college-only days. Founder Mark Zuckerberg built a peer-to-peer file sharing application called Wirehog on top of the social network, but then-Facebook president Sean Parker encouraged him to shut it down to avoid copyright infringement issues. File sharing would be a useful feature for other non-school groups, but preventing illegal media sharing would certainly be difficult.
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| New this week on the Inside Network Job Board: Offerpop, Spruce, W3i and more Posted: 11 Apr 2012 12:00 PM PDT The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities across social and mobile application platforms. Here are this week's highlights from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at: Offerpop, W3i, SponsorPay, Spruce Media, Rebel Entertainment, PopCap, Circle of Moms, Kobojo, Machine Zone, Inc., SpeedDate.com, King.com, GameHouse, Legacy Games, EA, Warner Brothers, Bally Technology, PT Gaming and SoJo Studios.
Listings on the Inside Network Job Board are distributed to readers of Inside Social Games, Inside Facebook and Inside Mobile Apps through regular posts and widgets on the sites. Your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today. |
| FanRx brings Spotify play button to Facebook tab apps Posted: 11 Apr 2012 10:53 AM PDT Social media software company FanRx today added an option for artists to embed their songs from Spotify on Facebook tab applications using the company's free Facebook Page Builder. This feature is possible as a result of the new Spotify "play button" announced today. Web publishers who include a short piece of code on their sites can display a button that lets registered Spotify users begin streaming music instantly. FanRx, formerly known as BandRx, was a launch partner and so is the first to bring the functionality to Facebook tabs. Artists choose which songs to feature, then when users click the play button, the song begins playing in the Spotify desktop app — launching the player if it is not already open. Users who do not have Spotify yet will be prompted to download the app and create an account using their Facebook login. (See how it works here.)
Spotify has a free, ad-supported service, as well as subscription tiers up to $9.99 per month for unlimited streaming and additional features. Users must have a Facebook account to join Spotify. The app prompts users to share their listening activity on Facebook through Open Graph integration, but it is not a requirement, and there is an "incognito mode" to temporarily disable sharing.
Since September 2011‘s launch of Open Graph, Spotify songs have been playable from Facebook News Feed, Ticker and Timeline. Users can start and pause music while they browse the social network, and even have an option to listen to a song simultaneously with friends. On artists' pages, Facebook highlights tracks your friends have listened to. Now with FanRx, artists can customize which songs to include on their tab applications. Although page tabs are declining in use since Facebook removed the default landing tab option with the Timeline redesign, it is still possible to point ads to specific tabs or share direct links in posts to fans. We’ve seen a number of band-focused applications trying to innovate to maintain relevance. Spotify opened its platform to third-party developers in November 2011. We could see a similar platform-on-a-platform model from Instagram, which has some APIs available in beta. For example, users can take photos using the Hipstamatic mobile app, then publish them through Instagram, which can then share to Facebook. With Spotify, developers like FanRx can include song widgets in their apps so that users can play music from Spotify, which can publish back to Facebook. The social network might watch Spotify's growth as a platform and take cues for how it might want to handle Instagram since it acquired the company on Monday. |
| TripAdvisor adds personalization based on friends of Facebook friends Posted: 11 Apr 2012 09:00 AM PDT TripAdvisor today expanded the personalization of its travel site to highlight reviews from friends of users' Facebook friends. When people research hotels, attractions or other vacation information on the site, they will see reviews first from their friends, followed by reviews from friends of friends. Visitors have the option to send the the reviewer a private message with further travel questions. TripAdvisor says this friends of friends feature means visitors are now 10 times more likely to see social context when they use the travel site.
TripAdvisor VP of Global Product, Adam Medros tells us one out of four new reviews on the site is created by users who have logged in with Facebook. He says the site also only shows friends of friends’ data for "opinionated content" — ratings and reviews — not in other features like lists of friends who have visited or lived in a place, where it might not be as relevant. TripAdvisor also includes friends' names and profile photos, but doesn't provide full names or photos of friends of friends, which are not likely to have the same meaning to users. TripAdvisor has a long history developing travel-related apps on the Facebook platform. The travel site created Cities I've Visited in 2007. The app, which let users add pins on a map to the places they've been, quickly surpassed competitors and still has 3.4 million monthly active users today, according to AppData. TripAdvisor became an "Instant Personalization" partner in 2010, and remains one of only eight sites that can access basic Facebook user data without requiring users to authorize an app. With Instant Personalization, TripAdvisor can show any logged-in Facebook user which of their friends has indicated that they've been to a destination or reviewed something on the site. It pulls data from users' profiles like hometown, current city, check-ins and Likes, as well as data from the Cities I've Visited app. The company also launched an Open Graph-enabled version of Cities I've Visited this year and is considering ways it might do the same for the main TripAdvisor site.
Other apps like Yelp, and even Facebook itself, would benefit from showing friends of friends’ information similar to how TripAdvisor now does. Facebook seems to use data from friends of friends to influence its internal search rankings and other algorithms, but it doesn't explain how and where it does so. The most explicit use of friends of friends’ data appears on the social network's careers page which lists "people you might know who work at Facebook." Underneath those words are thumbnails and links to Facebook employees with whom users have mutual friends.
We haven't yet seen Facebook promote social games or personalize pages based on friends of friends activity, but one day it might. For example, if users don't have any friends who play a particular game, Facebook could display how many friends of friends are active users. Facebook could also prioritize page posts or place recommendations from friends of friends, along with a note about how users are connected to the author. If Facebook expands its search product, as it is rumored to, we might see the company put more emphasis on friends of friends’ data in order to provide social context in areas that a person's immediate connections don't cover. Although, seeing how TripAdvisor has incorporated Facebook suggests the social network might not have to improve its own search. It can let Bing, Yelp, Rotten Tomatoes and others make their search features more personalized by including friends of friends’ recommendations. |
Facebook posted a position for IP Counsel this week, as well as several positions for engineers and data center employees, according to the company’s 
Groups for schools differ from Facebook's other groups in that they can be exclusive to students and that members can share documents with each other. The company seems to position these groups as a utility for coordinating schedules, sharing lecture notes and messaging classmates. But university-specific groups might also increase engagement among college users who don't feel comfortable using the social network the way students did before their teachers, parents and bosses joined.
For example, a user might not have any friends who have rated hotels in Istanbul, but there is much higher probability that one of the hundreds of thousands of the user's friends of friends has. You can try it for yourself 
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