gravatar

Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Facebook roundup: Outages, Apple, HQ, hackers, awards, Ceglia, Bing and more

Posted: 01 Jun 2012 06:00 PM PDT

Facebook offers little information on outages — Facebook went down for many users over the course of several hours Thursday, but the company won’t share the extent of the outage or what caused it. Facebook said in a statement that some users had “issues loading the site,” but it would not confirm whether its social plug-ins or other platform features were functioning during this time. The company told TechCrunch that the outage was not the result of an attack, despite rumors that the hacker group Anonymous might have been involved.

Apple CEO hints Facebook integration could be imminent — Apple CEO Tim Cook told the audience at AllThingsD's D10 Conference to “stay tuned” regarding possible collaboration between Facebook and Apple. Many expect the company’s next iteration of iOS to integrate Facebook, similar to how it currently integrates Twitter.

Facebook to expand in Menlo Park — The City of Menlo Park voted to allow Facebook to expand its headquarters to eventually support about 6,600 people, up from the current headcount of 3,600.

Facebook gives hackers $300K — Facebook’s bug bounty program, which awards hackers who find security problems with the site, has paid out more than $300,000, according to Forbes.

Facebook partners with Access to offer innovation award — Access, a digital activism organization, is partnering with Facebook to offer the Access Facebook Award as part of its yearly innovation prizes for individuals or organizations that have the best ideas of how to use information technology to promote human rights or other social good.

Ceglia’s lawyers set to dump him as client — The Los Angeles Times reports that attorneys for Paul Ceglia — the man who claims he’s owed a 50-percent stake in Facebook — asked a judge if the firm could withdraw from the case.

New Bing Facebook integration live — Bing’s latest redesign, which includes deeper integration with Facebook through a “social sidebar,” is now available for all users after three weeks in open beta. The sidebar helps users find and connect with friends who are likely to have information about a search query based on information from their Facebook profiles.

Identified reaches 10 million users – Identified, a career site built on the Facebook platform, announced this week that it has reached 10 million registered users eight months after launch. The company is relocating its headquarters to San Francisco's China Basin to accommodate its now more than 50 employees.

Polygraph releases reports products — Polygraph Media released its Polygraph Reports product, which allows for real-time data collection, data mining, analytics and visualizations of Facebook page metrics.

Complete walkthrough of Facebook’s mobile Pages Manager app

Posted: 01 Jun 2012 04:09 PM PDT

Facebook recently released a standalone page management app for iOS devices which gives page owners better moderation tools and alerts about fan activity.

Pages Manager has a similar format to Facebook's existing iOS app, but it adds notifications and insights, as well as eliminates any features that are not related to pages. Here we'll walk through the available features and address the areas where the app would benefit from additional functionality.

Viewing pages

After users download and connect the app with their Facebook account, Pages Manager will allow users to visit and take action on any page they have admin privileges for. Users can switch between pages from the menu that appears after tapping the button in the top left of the app. Also from that menu, users can access their page's insights, admins, the help center and log out.

When visiting a page from Pages Manager, users can filter between all posts, page posts only or hidden posts. Hidden posts are something that are not available from the main Facebook app, however we'd like to also see an "only others" view to more quickly browse posts from fans and people besides the page.

Insights

Page owners can see how many fans have been reached and how many people are talking about a given post. Tapping on this area will bring up additional post metrics, including organic vs. paid vs. viral reach, the number of clicks on a post and the number of shares. Unlike on the desktop version of Facebook, users will not be able to see the number of shares directly from the post itself. There is also no way to view who shared a post or what they said about it from the mobile app. Still, Pages Manager is an improvement over the main Facebook app, which does not include information about shares or any other insights besides Likes and comments. We'd like to see Facebook add "negative feedback" metrics to the mobile app — as well as make it more prominent on the desktop site — to let page owners know when their posts are being hidden or marked as spam.

Page owners can get a snapshot of their overall page metrics by tapping the gray bar at the top of their page or by visiting "Insights" from the main menu. This is useful for being able to refer to in a meeting, for instance, but actual analysis will need to be done from the desktop site. In future versions of the app, it might be useful to provide basic demographic data or a list of the most engaging posts in the past month.

Moderation

Admins can use Pages Manager to moderate comments and posts more easily than they can with the main Facebook app. First, users will receive push notifications about recent activity. Page owners who see a lot of hourly activity might want to turn off push notifications for those pages. Unfortunately, this is not possible from the mobile app and has to be done from the "edit page" dashboard on the desktop site. Facebook's Help Center suggests this feature will come to a future version of Pages Manager. Interestingly, Facebook seems to automatically turn off push notifications for pages over a certain size, but leave the default on for smaller pages.

Even without push notifications enabled, users can access notifications from the top of the app, just as they can for their personal accounts in the main app. Page owners can see Likes, comments and Wall posts here.

Admins can read and respond to comments on behalf of the page, just as they would on the main app. However, Pages Manager offers additional options to hide posts and ban users, whereas the main app only allows admins to delete posts. Users can take one of these actions by swiping across a post or comment, either to the left or right. The app will offer a "confirm delete" dialog to prevent accidents.

Creating posts

Page owners can create posts from the new app. Similar to the main app, they can make text posts, link posts and photo posts. There is not a way to create events, customize how links appear, or upload multiple photos at a time. There is also no option to schedule posts or post to past points on a page's Timeline, as is available on desktop. Of these features, being able to upload multiple photos in a single post is likely to be the most useful for page owners on their mobile phones. The other actions are fine to be reserved for desktop.

Admins

The mobile app allows page owners to see all the admins of their pages, but they cannot take any action here to add or remove admins. There's also no indication here what level of admin access a user has, but since Facebook added that feature to the desktop site this week, we could see it in a future version of the mobile app. Currently, the main Facebook mobile app does not include any way to view page admins.

What’s missing

One important feature that has been left out of Pages Manager is messages. On the desktop site, pages have the option of accepting private messages from users and being able to respond as the page. Facebook says this will be available in future version of the app.

There is also no way to view or edit a page's "info" section from Pages Manager, though this isn't particularly necessary to have on a mobile device. If admins want to see what their info tab says, they can view it from the main Facebook app or mobile site.

There's also no way to "use Facebook as a page" in the same way that is available on desktop. This feature lets admins take actions — Liking and commenting on other page's posts or writing on another page's Timeline — on behalf of their page rather than their personal accounts. It also allows page owners to see a feed of recent stories from other pages that they've Liked as their page. These features make it similar to using a company Twitter account rather than a personal one. It's unknown what percentage of page owners use Facebook in this way, but this could be useful for the standalone pages app to include one day.

Download Pages Manager from the App Store here or directly on your iOS device. Facebook has not indicated when the app would be available for Android.

Top 25 Facebook games of June 2012

Posted: 01 Jun 2012 01:30 PM PDT

May proved a slow month for the social game industry, based on our lists for the Top 25 games of June 2012. Both lists saw notable traffic declines, few gains and no new game debuts.

We start with the list of top 25 games by daily active users, which is the best way to evaluate a title's core audience. Only four games showed gains over last month, the largest belonging to recently-launched Zynga Bingo with 1.8 million DAU. King.com’s Candy Crush Saga continued to climb the charts, gaining 1.4 million DAU (100,000 more than it gained last month). Disney Playdom’s Marvel: Avengers Alliance shows also strong traffic a month after The Avengers hit theaters, gaining 920,000 DAU. Nordeus’s Top Eleven – Be a Football Manager is still making gradual gains, up by 100,000 DAU.

As was the case last month, the two biggest losses belong to Zynga’s CityVille and Hidden Chronicles. CityVille dropped by another 1.4 million DAU, while Hidden Chronicles lost 1.1 million DAU.

Now it’s time to look at monthly active users, which measures a title's overall reach on Facebook. Zynga's CityVille lost 6.2 million MAU and its declining traffic caused it to drop to the No. 2 spot on the list. The top spot is now held by Texas HoldEm Poker, which lost 1.7 million MAU. After CityVille, the largest loss belonged to Hidden Chronicles, which dropped 4.3 million MAU.

Only three games on this list saw gains over the past month. The largest increase was with King.com’s Candy Crush Saga, up by 5.2 million MAU. Disney Playdom’s Marvel: Avengers Alliance grew by 3.5 million MAU. Finally, Geewa’s Pool Live Tour was up by 600,000 MAU.

All data in this post comes from our traffic tracking service, AppData. Stay tuned next week for the beginning of June’s  Top 25 gainers and losers, when we look at the continued performance of games that appeared on the top 25 DAU list.

This article was originally posted on our sister site, Inside Social Games.

Facebook puts proposed policy changes up to a vote following activist campaign

Posted: 01 Jun 2012 11:17 AM PDT

Facebook has made proposed revisions to its Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities open to a user vote between now and June 8.

The vote is the second of its kind since Facebook decided in 2009 to give users the option to review proposed policy changes and then offer a vote if more than 7,000 users comment on those changes. User Max Schrems, who leads the activist group Europe Vs. Facebook, encouraged users to comment "I oppose the changes and want a vote about the demands on www.our-policy.org." More than 10,000 users did so on the English-language version, and there are thousands more on other pages.

Facebook's Chief Privacy Officer for Policy Erin Egan told TechCrunch that the company will consider changing its voting threshold to promote quality over quantity, and prevent spam-like comments from triggering votes in the future.

"[Schrems] is interested in us changing our product, but these revisions are about our policy. We can’t please everyone”, Egan told TechCrunch.

The proposed revisions do not include any major changes to how the social network collects or uses user data. The changes are mostly updated wording — for example, using "Timeline" instead of "profile" — and added clarification about existing policy. Clearer examples and user tips have been added to the Data Use Policy per recommendations from the Irish Data Protection Commissioner's Office, which audited the social network's data collection practices last year.

Users can visit the Facebook Site Governance page to review all changes, compare these with the existing policies and read Facebook's explanation of the changes. Through an application, users can vote for either the new policies or the previous policies. To the dismay of Schrems and Europe Vs. Facebook, there is no option to vote for an alternative policy. His group, for example, calls for all Facebook features to be opt-in rather than opt-out and for Facebook to provide users with full access to all personal data in raw format within 40 days upon request.

Voting will end June 8 at 9 a.m. If 30 percent of active users vote, the results will be considered "binding." That means if fewer than 270 million of Facebook's 901 million monthly active users vote, the results will be considered "advisory" but non-binding.

Video, photos, House MD, smileys, Chinese music, more on this week’s top 20 emerging Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 01 Jun 2012 08:59 AM PDT

A digital photo app, DoAlbums, 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. This week’s top apps grew by between 100,000 and 490,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1.  DoAlbums 720,000 +490,000 + 213%
2.  Vidd 660,000 +450,000 + 214%
3.  ooVoo 730,000 +360,000 + 97%
4.  Crush Meter 460,000 +290,000 + 171%
5.  House M.D.: Critical Cases 740,000 +200,000 + 37%
6.  Dragon City 350,000 +180,000 + 106%
7.  Jetpack Joyride 420,000 +180,000 + 75%
8.  Baseball Heroes 260,000 +180,000 + 225%
9.  Waze – Drive Social 410,000 +160,000 + 64%
10.  Cute Smileys 590,000 +150,000 + 34%
11.  Smarter Than A 5th Grader? 710,000 +150,000 + 27%
12.  Friend Hug 320,000 +150,000 + 88%
13.  GifBoom 830,000 +150,000 + 22%
14.  Zombie Island 910,000 +140,000 + 18%
15.  Especially for You friend ≧✯◡✯≦ 330,000 +140,000 + 74%
16.  The Fan Machine 310,000 +140,000 + 82%
17.  Gourmet Ranch 570,000 +120,000 + 27%
18.  KKBOX 300,000 +120,000 + 67%
19.  Rabbids Invasion 650,000 +110,000 + 20%
20.  ❤◠❥ LoVe to YoU ❤◠❥ 430,000 +100,000 + 30%

DoAlbums helps users create photo albums on Facebook by uploading photos from their computers or Instagram accounts. Video apps were popular as well. There was Polish video site Vidd, group video chat app ooVoo and mobile video effects app GifBoom.

House M.D.: Critical Cases led the games, and quiz apps continue to be popular. Cute Smileys grew by postings a photo to the stream of a user's name designed with smiley faces. Crush Meter tells a user which of their friends has a "crush" on them.

Finally, online community Waze – Drive Social, page app  The Fan Machine and Chinese music platform KKBOX (not available in the U.S.) rounded out our 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 2. juni 2012 at 07.12