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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Priced to perfection or underwhelming: Facebook stock closes at $38

Posted: 18 May 2012 02:45 PM PDT

After intense build-up and a decent initial pop when the market opened, Facebook’s stock ended the day at $38.23.

Some analysts are calling the IPO a dud because the stock did not trade well above its offering price. Underwriters including Morgan Stanley, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs had to prop up the stock to keep it above $38. However, the company and its early investors will be pleased that they did not miss out on an opportunity to sell shares at a higher price to begin with. Facebook raised $16 billion at more than $100 billion valuation.

Because of unprecedented demand, the Nasdaq delayed trading by about 30 minutes. Once the floodgates were opened, Facebook shares hit $42. The stock hovered around the $40 range most of the day before falling in the final hours of trading. Overall, the Nasdaq was down 1.24 percent today. The Dow and S&P also finished down, as they have all week. Other social media stocks, including LinkedIn, Yelp and Groupon, ended the day on a low note. Zynga fared especially poorly because of its deep connection with Facebook. The social gaming company hit all-time lows that triggered halts on trading this morning.

Despite what some might see as a weak performance, Facebook traded 566 million shares today, the most ever for a U.S. stock the day of its IPO. The social network displaces GM as the record holder since 2010. Coincidentally, GM was in the news this week questioning the effectiveness of Facebook advertising and suggesting it would cut its $10 million paid media budget for the site. The Wall Street Journal followed up today with a report that GM would also cut its Super Bowl spend, implying the company is struggling outside of social media as well. Many advertisers across industries say they are increasing their spends on Facebook, even if they aren’t always able to quantify the results. Facebook will need to continue to develop its ad model and provide advertisers with the assurance that their time and money is well-spent on the social network. However, the company has a number of options for future growth, including a fledging payments business, which could make the stock a better long-term investment than immediate boon.

Perhaps as part of a continuing effort to show that it is focused on its product not its stock performance, Facebook announced after trading hours ended that it had acquired mobile commerce and gifting company Karma. Critics often point to Facebook’s uncertain future in monetizing mobile use. Whether the acquisition gives some investors any new confidence in the company may be reflected in how the stock performs on Monday.

The official total of the IPO today was $16,006,877,370 with about $6.8 billion going to Facebook itself, $9.1 billion going to selling stockholders and $176 million going to the underwriters. Here is a breakdown of how many shares each underwriter was granted to sell today, according to Facebook’s latest regulatory filing:

Facebook makes fifth mobile acquisition this year with Karma

Posted: 18 May 2012 02:12 PM PDT

Facebook has acquired the mobile gifting and commerce service Karma, according to a blog post on Karma's website. This is the social network’s fifth mobile-related acquisition in 2012 after Lightbox, Tagtile, Glancee and Instagram.

Launched just months ago in December, Karma positions itself as a user-friendly way for consumers to pick out and pay for gifts culled from a curated catalogue of items. The service hasn’t been a breakout hit; Karma's Google Play listing shows the app has been downloaded between 10,000 and 50,000 times and it is not currently featured in any of our iOS app leaderboards on AppData. Even so, the blog post says it will continue to operate.

While not a pure-talent based acquisition as with Lightbox or Glancee, Facebook’s Karma purchase nets the company a team with expertise in sales and monetization on mobile. This is a smart move as the company seeks to ensure it can still take in revenues from its increasingly mobile user base. The deal is also the second successful sale for Karma founders Lee Linden and Ben Lewis, the pair behind the original incarnation of Tapjoy, which was sold to Offerpal in March 2010.

The terms of today's acquisition were not disclosed, but according to SEC filings, Karma had previously raised $4.5 million in funding from  Kleiner Perkins, Sequoia Capital and others.

Redesigned activity box, notification center give Facebook users in-line controls for privacy, app alerts

Posted: 18 May 2012 12:20 PM PDT

Over the past week, Facebook has been rolling out redesigns for the “recent activity” box on Timeline and the notification center at the top of the site. Besides visual changes, the features now include in-line controls for adjusting the privacy level of a recent action and choosing whether an app or group can send notifications.

The new activity box includes larger images and text, as well as an additional app icon. When users hover over their own activity stories, they see the current privacy setting of the action and have the option to change its visibility to “only me.” These settings are important to give users the confidence that they control what they share using Open Graph applications. If Facebook makes it too difficult or confusing how to manage privacy settings for certain actions, users could begin to avoid these apps all together.

The larger size of photos and text in the activity box gives apps further exposure on Timeline, which could lead to discovery among friends and promote re-engagement with existing users. This is the second time the social network has increased the size the recent activity section of Timeline since it launched. The design fits Facebook’s current trend of increasing the size of images across the site and its mobile apps. See below for a comparison.

The redesigned notification center also has in-line controls so users can easily indicate when they want to stop receiving notifications from an application, group, event or comment thread. See a sample app notification in an image to the right from TechCrunch. Visually, the notifications drop-down now looks inspired its mobile counterpart, with rounder edges and the notification icon lighting up in white. See below for a comparison.

New activity box

Previous activity box

Original activity box

New notifications center

Previous notifications center

Mobile notifications center

Pages, Bubble Safari, GifBoom, Groupon, Disqus, more on this week’s top 20 emerging Facebook apps

Posted: 18 May 2012 09:49 AM PDT

There were a few notable additions to 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.

GifBoom, a mobile app that produces animated gifs, made the list for the first time. Facebook's developer site made the list, as did Disqus and Kindle. This week’s top apps grew from between 20,000 and 220,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1.   Developer Site 650,000 +550,000 + 550%
2.   GifBoom 490,000 +310,000 + 172%
3.   Bubble Safari 280,000 +278,000 + 13,900%
4.   Clicker.com 440,000 +250,000 + 132%
5.   Html 680,000 +250,000 + 58%
6.   Groupon 740,000 +240,000 + 48%
7.   Taringa! 900,000 +220,000 + 32%
8.   Bubble Blitz 210,000 +203,000 + 2,900%
9.   Fanpage.it 890,000 +190,000 + 27%
10.   Top Shot: The Game 870,000 +190,000 + 28%
11.   MinuteClinic Special Offers 170,000 +169,990 + 1,699,900%
12.   GiveMeFootball 220,000 +160,000 + 267%
13.   Kindle 400,000 +160,000 + 67%
14.   Zombie Island 660,000 +160,000 + 32%
15.   5th Grader 210,000 +150,000 + 250%
16.   DISQUS 580,000 +150,000 + 35%
17.   Koramgame Login! 590,000 +140,000 + 31%
18.   QBet Casino 380,000 +140,000 + 58%
19.   Profile Covers 770,000 +130,000 + 20%
20.   Banjo 430,000 +560,000 + 43%

Facebook's Developer Site topped our list this week. GifBoom is a mobile app that creates animated photos. Games were led by Bubble Safari, and then there appeared to be a gambling app, too, QBet Casino.

There were a few page-related apps, Html and Fanpage.it allows allows users to customize page tabs. There were a few website integrations: Clicker.com, Taringa! and GiveMeFootball.

Groupon's app, the Kindle and social commenting app DISQUS were also on the list.

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 19. maj 2012 at 07.10