Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook roundup: Sandberg, Colleran, Seattle and Menlo Park
- Facebook acquires mobile loyalty startup Tagtile
- Facebook tests new way to let users know which links come from social readers and whether their activity will be shared
- Santorum loses fans; competition heats up between Obama and Romney this week on Inside Facebook’s Election Tracker
- Digg, games, Social Video, virtual gifts, more on this week’s top 20 emerging Facebook apps by MAU
- How Facebook Open Graph can enhance a marketing campaign
| Facebook roundup: Sandberg, Colleran, Seattle and Menlo Park Posted: 13 Apr 2012 06:00 PM PDT Sandberg highlights importance of family – In an interview with Time, Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg notes that she leaves the office at 5:30 p.m. daily so she can dine with her children at 6. Essentially, she highlights the importance of making family a priority, despite her professional successes. Facebook Seattle holds open house – Ari Steinberg of Facebook's Seattle office wrote a post in which he described a recent open house at the office where he, Vice President of Engineering Mike Schroepfer, local politicos and more gathered to talk about the office's future. Currently there are 90 engineers at the office, who have worked on video calling, desktop Messenger, the iOS app, security and more. Additionally, there are more than a dozen positions open at the office. [Image via Facebook]
An interview with Kevin Colleran - Business Insider conducted an interview with one of Facebook's first employees, Kevin Colleran, who left the company last year. Facebook cuts expansion deal with Menlo Park – Mercury News reports that Facebook and the city of Menlo Park, CA have cut a deal to allow for the social network’s headquarters expansion. The agreement sees Facebook paying the city millions of dollars in the next few years, kicking off a community fund with a $500,000 donation, sponsoring both internship and job training programs, and support “efforts” for local businesses, affordable housing and improved bike and pedestrian pathways. The deal goes before the city council for a vote on Tuesday. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook acquires mobile loyalty startup Tagtile Posted: 13 Apr 2012 11:59 AM PDT
Facebook started and ended this week with mobile-focused acquisitions, having bought photo-sharing app Instagram for $1 billion on Monday. The price for Tagtile was undisclosed. “We're happy to confirm that Tagtile's founders are joining Facebook, and that Facebook is acquiring substantially all of the company's assets,” Facebook said in a statement. “We've admired the engineering team's efforts for some time now and we're excited to have them join Facebook." According to Tagtile’s website, its service “helps local businesses identify and engage their customers to increase revenue.” The product includes a hardware device, the Tagtile Cube, that merchants place at their checkout counter. When customers make a purchase in-store, they tap their smartphone against the Tagtile Cube and earn rewards. Merchants can access data from the Cub online, and use the information to target messages back to their customers. Tagtile will continue its current operations for now, but the company won’t be taking on any new customers. “Tagtile as it exists today won’t be part of what we do at Facebook,” the post says. This is similar to other acquisitions Facebook has done primarily for talent rather than a product or service. The company’s most recent acqui-hire was location-based service Gowalla that was shut down about three months after being bought by the social network. Instagram, on the other hand, is set to remain in operation under the Instagram name. Facebook is clearly trying to establish a strong base of mobile-minded talent to improve its positioning in that space. Facebook had 432 million mobile monthly active users as of Dec. 31, 2011, and just over 13 percent of these users accessed the social network exclusively through mobile devices. Joining Facebook through the acquisition are co-founders Abheek Anand and Soham Mazumdar. Anand previously worked in product management and Engine Yard and as an investor at Lightspeed Venture Partners. Mazumdar was an early engineering lead who worked on infrastructure and data mining for Google Search. We will continue to update this post as more information becomes available. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 13 Apr 2012 11:27 AM PDT Facebook appears to be testing a new feature to make users aware of their social reader privacy settings before they click on links that could end up being shared on their profiles. Articles from social readers like the Huffington Post, Digg, ESPN, Yahoo News and others now include an icon to designate whether users' friends will be able to see that they read the article. A green circle with a check mark means social reader activity is on. A grey circle with a check mark means a user's activity will be private. When privacy settings are clear upfront, users are more likely to feel comfortable using social readers and other Open Graph application.
Facebook introduced "frictionless sharing" applications at f8 last year. Websites and apps can ask for permissions once and then automatically publish stories to Ticker, Timeline and News Feed when users take action like reading an article, listening to a song or watching a video. This type of activity can be very sensitive and some people might not want their friends, family or coworkers to see certain things they browse online. It is important for Facebook and third-party developers to find ways to ensure that users have full control over their experience with these apps.
The latest addition of green and grey check marks seems to have come from Facebook's end. These indicators appear within News Feed and a user's personal activity log to show whether clicking a link will generate a story about the activity based on a user’s current app settings. When the icon is green, users know they are using a social reader app that will publish activity to their friends. When the icon is grey, they are browsing in private. These icons are helpful to have in News Feed so users do not accidentally share something they did not intend to. From the activity log, users can easily change their privacy settings on individual posts or the whole application. Some users might want to have all their social reader activity set to "Visible to Only Me." This allows them to get experience with these new applications and keep track of their own reading habits without fear of sharing something they don't want to. Users can change their privacy settings for an app at any time from the activity log or application settings page.
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| Posted: 13 Apr 2012 10:00 AM PDT With Rick Santorum dropping out of the Republican presidential primary race on Tuesday, his Facebook page has begun to lose Likes, according to our Inside Facebook Election Tracker. Mitt Romney's page experienced a large surge following Santorum's announcement, as Romney has essentially clinched the nomination to challenge Barack Obama for the presidency. Newt Gingrich, who has not yet ended his bid despite trailing in the polls, has been losing fans for the past few weeks. Ron Paul's Facebook fan base continues to grow, though there is a much wider gap between him and Romney than previous months.
Romney's page has had a lot of engagement this past week, particularly with an anti-Obama post that has more than 58,000 Likes. Now that Timeline has rolled out to all pages, Facebook seems to be showing cover photo stories more prominently in News Feed than it does profile photo changes, for example. Romney's Facebook page managers might have noticed this and have cleverly decided to change his cover photo every few days. This activity generates between hundreds and thousands of fan interactions.
Obama's page has had a number of anti-Romney posts this week that fans seem to be responding to. However, with a fan base of close to 26 million Likes, Obama's page has only a 1.3 percent ratio of People Talking About This to total Likes. Romney's page with 1.5 million fans has a 6 percent ratio of PTAT to Likes.
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| Digg, games, Social Video, virtual gifts, more on this week’s top 20 emerging Facebook apps by MAU Posted: 13 Apr 2012 09:27 AM PDT
Digg topped our list of emerging Facebook applications by monthly active users this week. We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week. Additionally there were a few other news-related apps, a travel app, games, Social Video, a few calendar apps and some virtual gift apps. This week’s top apps grew from between 90,000 and 350,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week
As mentioned, Digg topped our list; the Open Graph app shares stories you read to the stream and allows for easy sharing. There were also two non-English news apps, L’Express and the Russian Look At Me. Another very popular app was The Travel List Challenge, which is a quiz of places a user has traveled that publishes results to the stream and allows for interaction and comparison with the same quiz from a users' friends. Quite a few games on our list were led by Playrix's Township.
Elsewhere on the list were a pair of calendar apps, ปฏิทินของฉัน and ΗμερολόγιόΜου, which request users invite friends before providing the customized calendar. Virtual gift apps Friend Hug and Speziell Für Dich! ≧✯◡✯≦ allow users to send friends gifts, creating feed stories. Then there was a tab app, Static HTML… [Eighth Tab]. Social Video allows users to view and share videos to their stream, and posts videos to a users' stream regularly when used. 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. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| How Facebook Open Graph can enhance a marketing campaign Posted: 13 Apr 2012 08:36 AM PDT Ad agency DDB New York developed an alternative to Facebook's Like button called "I Care," which publishers can embed on their sites and users can click to show support for a cause. MTV is already using the button on its website for social activism and the effort has gotten coverage from a number of industry blogs and publications. It’s a great idea, but the campaign is missing something: Open Graph integration. Here we'll explain what Open Graph is and explore how DDB could benefit from implementing it, so that marketers can get an idea how Facebook can be applied to campaigns in ways beyond fan pages and ads to generate Likes. What is Open Graph?
When Facebook began, users could only connect with other users. With the introduction of the Open Graph protocol in 2010, users became able to connect with objects on Facebook and around the web by clicking Like. By adding a bit of code to their sites, publishers could turn any webpage into a Facebook object. That means the page becomes indexed in Facebook search and gets added to user's profiles. Last year, Facebook expanded Open Graph to allow users to connect to objects with new verbs besides Like. These include read, watch, listen and play. Similar to how developers can create objects, they can now create actions. When a third-party website or app implements Open Graph actions, that app can automatically generate stories in News Feed, Ticker and Timeline. This democratizes Facebook in a way because it means the site can be filled with actions that users take and objects users interact with all over the web and on native mobile apps, not just what users do directly on the social network. When we write about "Open Graph apps" on Inside Facebook, we are referring to any Facebook canvas app, mobile app or website that has integrated "actions" as a means for users to share their activity back on Facebook. Unlike traditional Facebook apps, Open Graph apps can publish stories automatically rather than having to continually prompt users to post things to their Walls. Another unique feature is the monthly and yearly summaries that developers can customize to tell interesting stories about users over time.
How could DDB use Open Graph?
When users see an I Care button, they can click it to add to the tally of people supporting a cause. Currently, however, there's little payoff in doing so. An I Care statement isn’t seen by anyone unless the user chooses to share the activity on Facebook, but that requires two more clicks. With Open Graph integration, the I Care app would ask for posting permission one time and then would be able to instantly send stories back to Facebook whenever users click the I Care button on other sites. Pinterest does this with the Pin It button and now Spotify does so with its Play button. The I Care button — and any website it is included on — would likely get more attention if it was synced with Facebook in this way.
As mentioned before, monthly and yearly summaries are a key feature that results from Open Graph integration. Many users might like to look back at all the things they've said they care about, just like they can see all the books they read on Goodreads or all the movies they rated on Rotten Tomatoes. Currently there's no way for a user to keep track of where they've clicked the Care button or reverse the action.
For the I Care button, this could lead to additional impressions and awareness through aggregate News Feed stories. Someone could click I Care on a news article about global warming and another person could click I Care on a story about overfishing, and Facebook could tell those people's friends "2 of your friends care about environmental issues." DDB indicated that it might start compiling information from the I Care button to show what issues are trending. By integrating Facebook more deeply, the agency could collect additional demographic data about who clicks the button so that it could highlight topics that are most important to people of different genders, nationalities or political affiliations, for instance. There is also the option of targeting advertising based on Open Graph activity. Right now, the feature is in beta for Ads API partners only, but essentially advertisers can explicitly define its target audience by actions and objects rather than simply Likes and interests. DDB could eventually use its app to direct relevant ads — maybe a Sponsored Story about a new electric car — to users who say they care about the environment. And that's something marketers really care about. For more insights into Facebook marketing and advertising strategies, see Inside Network’s Facebook Marketing Bible. |
Facebook has acquired the team and most of the assets of Tagtile, a mobile-based customer loyalty management startup, according to 
Despite the loss in fans, 
Open Graph is the way that Facebook organizes the information and connections on its platform. It is an extension of Facebook's social graph that anyone can build upon, whether by adding simple a Like button to a website or developing full-scale integrations like Spotify's music service.
DDB New York's Chief Creative Officer Matt Eastwood tells us the agency came up with the idea for the 
The I Care button would also benefit from the social context that helped make the Like button so popular. When users visit a webpage that their friends have Liked, they will see those friends' names and photos. With Open Graph, developers can do the same thing. For example, Hulu shows users which of their friends have watched an episode and most social news apps show users who has read an article. The I Care button might be more powerful if users could see who else they know cares about the same topic.
In addition to supporting Timeline summaries, Facebook generates aggregate News Feed stories based on trends it picks up on in Open Graph activity. A common example is "[a number] of your friends listened to [an artist] on Spotify." When developers create a more detailed map for their actions and objects, Facebook can return additional stories like "[a number] of your friends listened to songs from [a particular year] on Spotify."| You are subscribed to email updates from Inside Facebook To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
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