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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Data shows social readers have mixed results, but aren’t ‘collapsing’

Posted: 07 May 2012 04:31 PM PDT

Despite reports that social readers are “all collapsing,” an analysis of monthly and daily active users of Facebook-integrated social news applications shows no clear trends in growth or decline across the board.

We looked at 12 media sites and apps that integrate Open Graph to allow users to automatically share their reading and viewing activity with friends, and have concluded there is no single trend affecting these apps the same way. The Huffington Post‘s web and mobile integration, for example, continues to steadily gain new monthly active users. The Washington Post Social Reader, a canvas application with a mobile component, has seen a decline over the past month. Yahoo‘s web and mobile integration has seen a dip in MAU recently, but it has more than doubled its usage since March to become the app with the more MAU than any other built on the Facebook platform.

The slight downward trends within the past week indicate Facebook might have changed something as far as how it displays social reader activity to some users. For example, we’ve seen the site testing a new Trending Articles feature and icons to indicate whether user activity will be shared.

However, a closer look at some of the less popular news integrations show that the decrease in MAU is not consistent across all apps. In fact, MTV.com, Mashable and ESPN have all seen increases in that same period.

It is also worth noting that the dramatic changes in some apps’ numbers around April 10 are related to the fact that Facebook did not return MAU data for a period of five days leading up to that date. As such, the growth or decline appears more suddenly than if the graphs included growth for those five days prior. It’s possible Facebook made some changes during this time that might have affected apps afterward, but there is no universal trend that we can identify.

There are also a number of factors on the publisher side that can have an impact on growth or decline in MAU, for example, ad campaigns or changes in how clearly an app prompts users to log in with Facebook. The Washington Post spent $800,000 in Facebook advertising last quarter, according to Facebook’s filing for an initial public offering. It’s possible that the app’s lower MAU is related to a change in ad strategy or spend this quarter. The Independent‘s decline could be related to a bug. We were unable to log into the site using Facebook, and a number of commenters appear to have had the same issue.

Many users have complained about social reader applications, mostly those that require users to authorize the app and share their activity in order to read any article. We recommend developers add clear controls for users to decide what to share, when and with whom. There also seems to be a lack of explanation of what users gain from enabling this type of sharing. Facebook and news outlets that create these integrations should consider how to reframe the benefits of these applications so that users want to add them to their Timelines, rather than feeling forced into it.

How Glancee acquisition fits into Facebook’s strategy of letting users share where they are, were, will be

Posted: 07 May 2012 12:15 PM PDT

Facebook hasn't shared its plans for Glancee, the location-based app it acquired on Friday, but the app fits well into the social network's location strategy that now goes well beyond check-ins.

"We're looking at location from a past, present, future sort of tense," Facebook product manager Josh Williams said at the Where Conference in April. By that, he means letting users share where they have been, where they are now and where they plan to be.

The present tense is pretty clear: users can tag their location in posts to let friends know where they are. As for the past, Timeline allows users to backdate their posts or add old photos to their map. This means Facebook is beginning to gather information on where users have been, including in years before location-based services were available. And with the recent updates to events, users can tag location to indicate where they will be. There are also Open Graph applications that let users list their future travel plans or places they want to go.

The basis for the Glancee, which has since been removed from the Apple App Store, was that users could continuously share their location as the app ran in the background. Users could then browse to see who nearby shared their interests and they would receive push notifications about close matches. This makes present-tense location sharing even easier, but Facebook will likely also consider how this technology could be used for past- and future-tense sharing as well. The social network won’t reveal whether it plans to release a rebranded Glancee app as it did with Beluga's group messaging app, or simply incorporate Glancee's co-founders with the rest of its location team, as it did with check-in service Gowalla. But here are some ways we can envision Glancee being applied.

Where friends are

Although Glancee sought to help users meet new people, this feature doesn't necessarily have wide enough appeal for Facebook's 900 million users at this time. Many users are sensitive about sharing information with people they don't know. We imagine social network focusing first on helping users know where their friends are.

Currently, the Facebook mobile site and apps include a check-in feed that shows where users have checked in, but it is not very useful because it does not indicate whether a friend is still at a location. Glancee's technology could help solve that, and enable more spontaneous meetups among friends. It could also lay the groundwork for a location-based mobile ad network. If users agree to continuously share their location so friends can find them, they might additionally opt-in to get information about deals or sales nearby.

Where friends were

By aggregating data on where friends have been in the past, Glancee could also be used to help users discover new places or decide where to go. Facebook already shows users how many of their friends have been to a location based on check-ins or location tags, but the data is limited only to what users actively shared. The listing would be more complete if users enabled ambient location-sharing, and then a person could reach out to friends for more information about a restaurant that they had been to, for example.

Where friends will be

On the future-location side, users might use events or some other feature to indicate where they plan to be, and Glancee technology could help track their progress along the way. This might be a useful integration for Messenger, Facebook's standalone group messaging app that already allows users to share their location when they send a message, but doesn't track it in real-time like iOS apps Find My Friends and Glympse. These apps help users coordinate plans, something Facebook has shown particular interest in recently.

Viddy, Instagram, Pinterest, games, Metacafe, Zoosk, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 07 May 2012 08:24 AM PDT

Video sharing apps Socialcam and Viddy remained popular on our list of growing Facebook applications by monthly active users this month. Interestingly, Instagram continues to slide down the list after being acquired by Facebook. Websites integrations were also very popular.

Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 570,000 and 19.3 million MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1.   Socialcam 34,200,000 +19,300,000 + 130%
2.   Viddy 33,800,000 +13,200,000 + 64%
3.   Metacafe 16,300,000 +5,500,000 + 51%
4.   Chill 4,500,000 +4,460,000 + 11,150%
5.   Zoosk 10,200,000 +3,400,000 + 50%
6.   Candy Crush Saga 5,400,000 +1,600,000 + 42%
7.   Daily Horoscope 7,700,000 +1,500,000 + 24%
8.   Instagram 17,000,000 +1,500,000 + 10%
9.   9GAG 2,900,000 +1,300,000 + 81%
10.   Mynet 2,300,000 +1,300,000 + 130%
11.   Marvel: Avengers Alliance 6,900,000 +1,200,000 + 21%
12.   Pinterest 9,600,000 +1,200,000 + 14%
13.   Zynga Game Bar 1,600,000 +1,100,000 + 220%
14.   Skype 12,500,000 +1,000,000 + 9%
15.   Mystic Ice Blast 1,000,000 +950,000 + 1,900%
16.   Photo Love 9,900,000 +900,000 + 10%
17.   schoolFeed 14,400,000 +800,000 + 6%
18.   Younews.in 6,600,000 +800,000 + 14%
19.   Spotify 19,800,000 +700,000 + 4%
20.   Buggle 1,200,000 +570,000 + 90%

Socialcam  grew by 19.3 million MAU and Viddy grew by 13.2 million MAU. These two apps grew far more than almost any other app on the list. Viddy began to gain traction especially after the acquisition of Instagram (it's known as Instagram for video) and Socialcam's daily video posts and feed stories make the app ubiquitous. While video apps began to displace photo apps, Instagram and Photo Love still made the list. [Editor's note 5/7/12 4:43 p.m. PT: An earlier draft of this story misidentified Chill as a photo app. It is a video application.]

There were a series of website integrations that proved to be very popular this week: Metacafe's Timeline app, comedy site 9GAG, and Turkish  integrations Mynet and Younews.in. These apps incorporate different types of sharing, but ultimately result in different feed and Ticker stories.

Candy Crush Saga, Marvel: Avengers Alliance and Zynga Game Bar each grew by more than 1 million MAU. Other popular apps included Zoosk, Skype and Spotify.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned for our look at the top weekly gainers by daily active users on Wednesday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

tirsdag den 8. maj 2012 at 07.42