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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook roundup: Instagram, IPO, pages, Google+, Pinterest

Posted: 20 Apr 2012 06:00 PM PDT

Facebook’s Instagram acquisition was all Zuckerberg – The Wall Street Journal reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg basically acted independently when pursuing the company’s latest acquisition of photo app Instagram. The board was “told” that the company would be bought.

Facebook IPO set for mid-May – TechCrunch reports that Facebook’s IPO date is set for May 17; The San Jose Mercury News reports it could be as early as May 14.

Class-action suit seeks refund for Credits purchased by minors – Arizona-resident Glynnis Bohannon filed a class-action suit against Facebook this week. She is seeking a refund after her young son bought Facebook Credits without her consent.

Facebook replacing corporate blogs – A recent survey found that companies are increasingly choosing to create and manage Facebook pages rather than blogs.

Google+ developer to bring hangouts to Facebook - Mohamed Mansour is a Google+ extension developer who plans to enable Google-like hangouts on Facebook allowing multiple people to video chat at once. Mansour became frustrated with Google+ after a redesign broke some of his extensions.

PinView turns Facebook into Pinterest – A new app, PinView, visualizes Facebook Timeline as a Pinterest board.

Facebook modifies proposed changes to terms of service, provides explanations in response to user feedback

Posted: 20 Apr 2012 01:14 PM PDT

Facebook today released a new set of proposed changes to its terms of service and offered more detailed explanation of its revisions based on user feedback.

Since 2009, the social network has taken a unique approach with its "Statements of Rights and Responsibilities," which is what it calls its terms of service. Before instituting any new policies, the company shares proposed changes with users, who then have a period of time to comment and ask questions. In some cases, Facebook even puts issues up to a vote.

Most recently, the company made edits and offered answers to questions related to a draft of a new Statement of Rights and Responsibilities it presented in March. It clarified the following points, among others.

  • Some of our users and a number of journalists mistook the proposed update to our SRR for changes to the way we collect or use data. Our Data Use Policy (which used to be called our privacy policy) governs how we collect and use data. We are not proposing any updates to that document at this time. Instead, we proposed some mostly administrative and clarifying changes (e.g., "profile" to "timeline") to the SRR.
  • Some of you wanted us to explain further why we made a change from prohibiting "hateful" content to "hate speech" in Section 3.7. We think the term "hate speech" better captures our policy on prohibited content, which hasn't changed. Sometimes discussions on Facebook include controversial content – even content that someone may view as "hateful." While we allow discussion of controversial ideas, institutions, events, and practices, we do not tolerate hate speech.
  • Some users had questions about the addition in Section 5.9 of the language that says that you will not "tag users if you know they do not wish to be tagged." To be clear, we are not changing how tagging works. This language reflects, and was meant to reinforce, our long-standing principle around tagging – you shouldn't tag someone that you know ahead of time does not want to be tagged. In response to your comments, we have replaced the original change with new language to highlight how you can provide feedback about tagging.
  • We are not creating profiles of non-users. There are lots of instances where we would want a non-user who interacts with Facebook to be subject to our terms. For example, if a third party is on our site but is not a user, they are not permitted to scrape users’ content or information as specified in Section 3.1. Just because someone doesn’t happen to have a Facebook account doesn’t mean they should be free to do whatever they want with the service or our users, and we wanted to make that clear.
  • Section 13 is a new addition to our SRR. Many users asked us why we added it. As you know, Facebook is constantly releasing new products. We want to make sure the products you use are the most current versions. We have added this provision to notify you that we may provide upgrades and updates to your downloaded products as they become available.

Users can visit the Facebook Site Governance page to review tracked changes to the rights and responsibilities document, and provide feedback in the comments section here. The comment period will end April 27 at 5 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time.

Facebook bug temporarily brings down apps, social features on third-party sites

Posted: 20 Apr 2012 10:33 AM PDT

Thousands of Facebook applications and third-party sites that utilize the social network's login capabilities experienced a two-hour outage last night.

An issue with Facebook's central JavaScript files prevented apps and some aspects of Facebook-connected sites from loading. Although the bug was reported and resolved within two hours, developers might notice a temporary dip in their apps' usage for Thursday.

A user filed a bug report about the JavaScript issue, noting that all Zynga games were down, at 7:41 p.m. Pacific Daylight Time. Facebook acknowledged the service disruption at 8:30 p.m. on its platform status page, and declared the issue resolved at 9:55 p.m.

The incident is a reminder for the many developers that depend on Facebook for login and other features how their businesses can be affected when the platform experiences outages. The social network's vision is to have all websites and applications integrate its Open Graph, but the more companies do so, the more critical it becomes to keep the platform stable and prevent issues from affecting users and developers globally. These types of disruptions will come under additional scrutiny after Facebook becomes a publicly traded company, as it is expected to this summer.

Facebook expands capabilities for feature phones, adds support for pages and places

Posted: 20 Apr 2012 08:58 AM PDT

Facebook recently updated its feature phones mobile app to allow users to interact with pages and check into locations, according to posts on the company’s Facebook for Every Phone page.

"Facebook for Every Phone" is a native mobile app compatible with more than 3,600 different Java-enabled feature phones. Previously, the app included the ability to upload photos, read News Feed, view profiles, check messages, see event invites and take other basic actions with your friends, but it did not support fan pages or check-ins.

Now these users can Like pages, view their friends’ Likes and see posts from pages they Like in their mobile News Feed. They can also share check-ins along with a status. Users cannot yet share photos with location information or tag other users in a check-in. Still, these are powerful features for a large demographic of users who do not have smartphones or — as is the case for many users in developing countries — personal computers.

As of Dec. 31, 2011, Facebook for Every Phone had 39.7 million monthly active users, according to AppData. Facebook no longer provides daily or monthly usage data about its native apps, but it's worth noting that the Facebook for Every Phone fan page has more than 75.9 million Likes. Users are given the option to Like the page when they first log-in using the app, a company spokesperson tells us. Despite only being launched on Jan. 20, Facebook for Every Phone is now the most-Liked page on the site, beating out the general Facebook fan page and pages of popular celebrities, according to our PageData service.

It's important for Facebook to continue to improve its offerings for feature phones and the mobile web, not just iOS and Android apps. As the social network grows in markets like India and Africa, where users are primarily accessing the site through feature phones, the company needs to continue to offer new features as it has done to increase engagement among desktop and smartphone users. Pages and location sharing are ways for users to interact with entities besides friends. These features are also related to monetization, since they allow Facebook to collect additional data about users’ interests and offline behavior so that it can deliver relevant ads to them in the future.

Facebook initially overhauled its app for feature phones in January 2011, in partnership with Snaptu. It then acquired the Israeli startup three months later and rebranded the feature phone app as Facebook for Every Phone in July 2011. The app included new features, and Facebook made deals with carriers to offer users 90 days of free data access. The app was designed to require less data transfer than mobile sites or Java apps, so low costs likely encouraged users to pay for access after the free trial expired.

News, tabs, video, more on this week’s top 20 emerging Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 20 Apr 2012 08:34 AM PDT

A news Timeline application, Younews, topped our list of emerging Facebook apps this week.

We define emerging applications as those that ended with between 100,000 and 1 million MAU in the past week. This week’s top apps grew from between 120,000 and 580,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1.   Younews.in 800,000 +580,000 + 264%
2.   내 상위 통계 이번 주 340,000 +300,000 + 750%
3.   Socialcam 860,000 +240,000 + 39%
4.   Static HTML… [Eleventh Tab] 540,000 +220,000 + 69%
5.   Gangs of Boomtown 670,000 +210,000 + 46%
6.   Social Video 920,000 +200,000 + 28%
7.   Angry Words (Apalabrados) 570,000 +190,000 + 50%
8.   Mynet 650,000 +180,000 + 38%
9.   Tab Builder: Document 320,000 +160,000 + 100%
10.   Township 880,000 +160,000 + 22%
11.   Friend Hug 480,000 +150,000 + 45%
12.   Only for Likers 890,000 +140,000 + 19%
13.   Zynga Bingo 460,000 +140,000 + 44%
14.   Fairy Farm 640,000 +130,000 + 25%
15.   Fan Page Tab 14 280,000 +130,000 + 87%
16.   I AM PLAYR 860,000 +130,000 + 18%
17.   Speed City 330,000 +130,000 + 65%
18.   Ustream 630,000 +130,000 + 26%
19.   Waze – Drive Social 340,000 +130,000 + 62%
20.   Oferece uma rosa 230,000 +120,000 + 109%

Younews.in topped our list with 580,000 MAU; the app is basically a news feed on Facebook of popular stories. A Turkish news app,  Mynet, also made our list. 내 상위 통계 이번 주  was also very popular application, but essentially publishes Facebook statistics to the feed. There were a series of tab applications, one for documents, another to create a landing page and a few others.

Video applications were popular on our list, too. Socialcam allows users to capture and share videos for mobile devices, Social Video posts interesting videos to users' feed every day, and Ustream allows users to share live broadcasts online.

Games on our list were led by Gangs of Boomtown. Many of the other games our titles we haven't seen on our lists before.

Then there was Waze – Drive Social, which provide users weather-related traffic information. Finally, two applications that allow users to share virtual gifts with their friends, or to the stream: Friend Hug and Oferece uma rosa.

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 21. april 2012 at 07.34