Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook roundup: Opera, Dubai, friend lists, Pinterest, more
- Investing in Facebook: Rob Winkler of 5th Planet Games
- Facebook lets users play game demos directly within News Feed
- Smarter Than A 5th Grader, Quora, Amazon, Groupon, GifBoom, more on this week’s top 20 emerging Facebook apps by MAU
| Facebook roundup: Opera, Dubai, friend lists, Pinterest, more Posted: 25 May 2012 06:40 PM PDT
Facebook to open Dubai office – Facebook is set to open its first Middle East office in Dubai next week. Facebook asks users to ‘star’ their friends - Facebook is reportedly testing a new way to prompt to users add friends to their “Close Friends” list by suggesting that they “star” them, according to VentureBeat. The “Close Friends” feature, which helps users see more of their closest friends’ status updates, has been around since September 2011. Facebook has recently been experimenting with ways to get users to take advantage of the feature. [Image via VentureBeat]
Pinterest hires Facebook’s Schnitt – Pinterest hired Barry Schnitt, formerly of Facebook and Google, to be the head of communications and public policy. Microsoft releases Windows Phone update - Microsoft released version 2.5 of its Facebook for Windows Phone app, bringing it more in line with its Android and iOS offerings. Among other usability improvements, Windows Phone users can now Like comments and view threaded messages. Facebook introduces user restrictions for Open Graph stories - Developers can now limit their Open Graph app stories to users who meet certain restrictions such as age, country or certain kinds of content, according to Facebook’s Developer Blog. For example, a video app can specify that stories published by the app only appear in countries in which they have launched or to users who are over a certain age. Timeline redesign being tested – Facebook is testing a redesigned Timeline layout that overlays some user information on top of their cover photo and reduces the size of links to users’ photos and map, for example. The redesign seems aimed at making more aspects of Timeline visible at one time without scrolling. [Image from AllFacebook]
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| Investing in Facebook: Rob Winkler of 5th Planet Games Posted: 25 May 2012 02:12 PM PDT
For the final part of our series, we spoke to Rob Winkler, co-founder and CEO of 5th Planet Games, which makes Dawn of the Dragons, Legacy of a Thousand Suns and Clash of the Dragons. Winkler's history with Facebook, like that of many game developers, is a bit different than other companies' experiences. While 5th Planet is on track to make over $10 million in annual revenue this year largely because of the social network, Winkler has seen the landscape shift to become very difficult for game developers to sustain a business by being on Facebook alone. He's hopeful but not quite confident that will change. Seeing the potential of Facebook Winkler started to understand the potential for building a business on Facebook before he even had an account. In 2009, his wife was on the site, but he and his friends weren't. "She used it to gossip and talk to old friends from high school and spam her friends' Walls with hugs and kisses or whatever else," Winkler says. "None of that was even remotely interesting to me." What was interesting was the idea of making a game. Winkler had been going to several gaming conferences that all repeatedly talked about developing on the Facebook platform. Even though the social network was home to more casual games than the one Winkler and his friends had envisioned building, they couldn't ignore the the growing user base. Plus, Facebook could play a key role in the community aspect of gaming. "The social features that are core to Facebook's existence are really good for games," Winkler says. "A strong social network is exactly what you want for a game." Winkler also realized there might be a lot of people like him and his friends who weren't being served yet on Facebook. Developing a business idea
"If we were going to realize our dream of making a game, we needed to go where the users were," Winkler says. In January 2010, the team officially shifted toward developing a text-based social game called Dawn of the Dragons. Winkler says when the game launched on Facebook in May that year, it made $20,000 in the first month. "We were like, 'wow, we can actually make a living making video games,'" he says. The team put most of the money back into "laser-targeted advertising" to acquire users who returned regularly and monetized well. After two months, 5th Planet was making an average of more than $26 per paying user. The team soon got to work on more games. Confidence in Facebook In 2010, Facebook made some debilitating changes for game developers by eliminating game stories from News Feed, removing notifications and making app requests less obvious on the home page. Developers began to rely more and more on ads to acquire new users. But with competition from developers and brand advertisers driving up bid prices, the cost of user acquisition doubled for many games. Facebook also now takes a 30 percent cut of virtual goods revenues via Facebook Credits transactions, which it didn't when 5th Planet and most other developers got started on the platform. As such, 5th Planet has added its titles on games site Kongregate. Although it maintains its games on Facebook, the developer hasn’t bought advertising on the social network in nearly a year. "I would love to grow 10x on Facebook, but it doesn't add up right now," Winkler says. He recognizes the social network is taking some steps to improve games discovery and he's seen a noticeable uptick in monthly active users since Facebook began showing new feed stories and sidebar modules for games. They aren't very engaged or well-monetized users by any means, but Winkler says it's a start. He also calls the App Center "a big step in the right direction." At the end of the day, Winkler says, Facebook has all the users and continues to drive the majority of 5th Planet's revenues so he's hopeful the platform can be mutually beneficial for Facebook and third-party developers. Future of Facebook Winkler says its still quite possible for indie developers to reach a niche audience on Facebook and make a living off games, but he doesn't believe we'll see any new Zyngas emerge. And all developers will be looking to diversify beyond Facebook. "The ship has sailed on anyone putting all their eggs in one basket," he says. Winkler does have an idea for how Facebook might be able to make developers more invested in its platform. He'd like to see developers that generate a certain amount of revenue get a credit toward Facebook advertising. "It'd be a way to reward me for making a financially successful game," he says. "And it's an incentive to keep me on Facebook. [As opposed to] now I'm spending my time looking to international markets." He also thinks it's likely that Facebook will do to other apps what it did to games by reducing virality and taking a cut of revenue. But as long as there are users on Facebook, there will be developers going after them there. "We'll take our lumps and say 'thank you, may I have another?'" Winker says. – Read Part 1 with Clara Shih of Hearsay Social | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook lets users play game demos directly within News Feed Posted: 25 May 2012 12:21 PM PDT Facebook today announces a new feature that lets users try out games directly within News Feed. Part of the social network’s continued effort to improve game discovery, the new “feed gaming“ feature lets developers create a short demo of their game that users can play when they see it mentioned in News Feed and Timeline. These samples don’t need players to authorize an app and don’t collect user data, creating a risk-free environment for users to test a game before they commit and give a game access to their personal information. Once the sample is complete, users are prompted to play the full version of the game.
Feed gaming is already being used by King.com’s Bubble Witch Saga, Rovio’s Angry Birds Friends, Tetris Online’s Tetris Battle and Idle Games’s Idle Worship. Bubble Witch Saga offers players a level to play and then rewards them with extra soft currency if they install the game. Angry Birds Friends challenges users to beat a level score posted by a friend. Idle Worship provides a mini-game designed to generate interest in the full game. Tetris Battle, meanwhile, allows users to publish video replays of two-player battles. Demos are a reliable tactic within other sectors of the game industry, often released before a title’s launch in order to build word-of-mouth hype. Larger games have even had demos come to Facebook, like Majesco’s Cooking Mama Friends’ Cafe, which used Arkadium Stadium to let users directly play the Flash game from their Facebook walls. Users haven’t been able to play samples of Facebook canvas games before now, though. Developers can test the effectiveness of different game samples, images and copy in their feed stories. Facebook app insights will now show the number of impressions, clicks and clickthrough rate of each feed game story. See more details in Facebook’s documentation here. This story originally appeared on our sister site, Inside Social Games. | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 25 May 2012 08:53 AM PDT
A variety of websites with Facebook logins, as well as games, dominated our list of emerging Facebook apps 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. This week’s top apps grew by between 100,000 and 420,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week
No. 1 on our list was Clicker.com, a website which uses Facebook login to provide TV show recommendations based on what users’ friends watch and like. Games were led by Ludia's Smarter Than A 5th Grader?, which came in at No. 2 overall. There were a mix of other gambling-type and virtual world games on the list, as well. Kindle's use of Facebook login pushed the app past 500,000 MAU this week. A social search engine app, Wish, and mobile video effects app, GifBoom, made our list at No. 6 and No. 7, respectively. Open Graph integrations like those from Quora, Break.com, GiveMeFootball and Polish website Informacje WP.PL continue to grow quickly. Social commerce sites Groupon and Amazon also made 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. |
Facebook to buy Opera browser? – Facebook is reportedly 
This week, Inside Facebook asks people who have built businesses on the Facebook platform why they believe in the company. These are the people that are truly invested in Facebook, whether or not they bought stock.
Winkler and his friends who played World of Warcraft together had always talked about making their own game one day. Although they initially wanted to make a browser-based massively multiplayer game, that turned out to be unrealistic.
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