Inside Facebook

Facebook lets users know how many interest lists they’re featured on, but still no info for pages
Bubble Safari, Socialcam, Terra, TripAdvisor, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by MAU
Facebook launches portal page to help users follow Olympic Games and athletes
Facebook acquires facial recognition company Face.com
Facebook looking to introduce real-time location-based ads to monetize mobile market
This week’s headlines from across Inside Network

Facebook lets users know how many interest lists they’re featured on, but still no info for pages

Posted: 18 Jun 2012 05:46 PM PDT

Facebook users who allow public subscribers can now see which interest lists they have been added to by visiting the subscribers tab on Timeline.

The change gives public figures a more complete understanding of their reach on Facebook. Previously, users could see the number of users directly subscribed to their public updates, but they could not see whether users were following interest lists that they appeared on. Facebook pages, however, still don't seem to get any information about how many users see their content through interest lists.

Facebook introduced interest lists in March as a way to let users organize their News Feed by topic. Users can add pages and users to lists without Liking pages or subscribing to users directly. This is similar to Twitter's list feature, but with Twitter, any account can see which public lists it appears on and how many subscribers that list has.

Interest list numbers are useful for users who have enabled subscribe since they do not otherwise get any analytics about the reach or audience for their public posts. Pages can track reach and demographics through the insights tool, but it's unclear whether the "Reach" metric tracks users who don't Like the page, but who see its updates through an interest list.

Like brands can do on Twitter, Facebook page owners should be able to get a full picture of how users are following their accounts. Now that the social network has made this information available to individual users, perhaps it will release it for pages soon.

Users who allow public subscribers can see whether they appear on any lists and how many people they reach through those lists by visiting the subscribers tab on Timeline. This information is also available to the public, which could help more users discover interest lists to follow.

Bubble Safari, Socialcam, Terra, TripAdvisor, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 18 Jun 2012 02:37 PM PDT

Zygna’s Bubble Safari leads our list of top growing Facebook apps by monthly active users for the second week in a row.

Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 500,000 and 7.2 million MAU, based on our AppData tracking service.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	MAU	Gain	Gain %
1.	Bubble Safari	20,700,000	+7,200,000	+ 53%
2.	Socialcam	82,500,000	+6,400,000	+ 8%
3.	Terra	8,900,000	+2,600,000	+ 41%
4.	TripAdvisor™	22,400,000	+2,300,000	+ 11%
5.	Viddy	22,600,000	+1,500,000	+ 7%
6.	Song Pop	1,900,000	+1,110,000	+ 141%
7.	Lost Bubble	6,400,000	+1,100,000	+ 25%
8.	MiCalendario – Cumpleaños	15,200,000	+1,000,000	+ 7%
9.	Bubble Blitz	5,100,000	+900,000	+ 21%
10.	Glassdoor	2,000,000	+800,000	+ 82%
11.	Instagram	19,400,000	+700,000	+ 4%
12.	Birthday Reminder	1,100,000	+680,000	+ 162%
13.	Candy Crush Saga	11,900,000	+600,000	+ 5%
14.	DoAlbums	2,800,000	+600,000	+ 33%
15.	Zynga Bingo	10,400,000	+600,000	+ 7%
16.	Dragon City	1,700,000	+500,000	+ 55%
17.	Static HTML IFRAME Tab : Bookmark Icon	2,700,000	+500,000	+ 29%
18.	Custom Tab	3,900,000	+500,000	+ 15%
19.	The Guardian	2,200,000	+500,000	+ 29%
20.	Spotify	22,400,000	+500,000	+ 3%

No. 2 on our list was video sharing app Socialcam, which surpassed 80 million MAU for the first time on Friday. Another video sharing app Viddy hasn’t grown as quickly as Socialcam, but it picked up 1.5 million additional MAU after Justin Bieber linked to several of his videos on the site.

Social reading apps Terra and The Guardian came in at No. 3 and No. 19, respectively.

Name-that-tune game Song Pop took the No. 6 spot with 141 percent growth this week. No. 12 Birthday Reminder was the only other app with a triple-digit growth percentage.

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.

Facebook launches portal page to help users follow Olympic Games and athletes

Posted: 18 Jun 2012 01:47 PM PDT

Facebook has launched the Explore London 2012 page in collaboration with the London 2012 Olympics to help users find and Like pages related to the games.

Described as a way "to help everyone get the most out of the Games," the dashboard includes links to the main Olympics pages, as well as those of athletes, national teams and sports. Although the page does not include advertisements, Facebook says it will soon include pages of broadcasters and sponsors. Available in 22 languages, the page already has 100 million connections between fans and athletes with the potential to reach more than 900 million people.

Similar to Facebook’s Pages Browser, clicking on a name or image does not direct users to the fan page, but instead makes the user Like the page. In order to reach the actual athlete or sport page, users must click “View Page” in the bottom right corner of the section.

Although the Olympics already has its own portal to find and follow athletes on Facebook and Twitter, it seems as if the London Olympics is trying to take advantage of the already established Facebook community. The games may find more success using the Facebook space instead of leading fans to register for a separate service.

Mark Adams, the Director of Communications of the International Olympic Committee said in a press release, "It makes sense to give fans the best experience we can and these will be the first truly ‘social’ Games."

Facebook acquires facial recognition company Face.com

Posted: 18 Jun 2012 11:44 AM PDT

Facebook has agreed to acquire facial recognition technology company Face.com, according to a post on Face.com.

The Israeli company builds facial recognition software for web and mobile applications, which can identify and tag people in a photo or help users discover photos of themselves they didn’t know were online. TechCrunch reports that the acquisition price was around $100 million.

Facebook has used face recognition to suggest photo tags on its desktop site since 2010. Its latest mobile camera app doesn’t include this feature, but following the acquisition, it could do something similar to Face.com’s Klik app. Klik uses face recognition to let users tag their friends in real time. It also allows users to apply and adjust photo filters based on faces found in an image.

Face.com founder and CEO Gil Hirsch suggested in his blog post that his team would be focused on mobile when it joins the social network company.

“We love building products, and like our friends at Facebook, we think that mobile is a critical part of people's lives as they both create and consume content, and share content with their social graph,” Hirsch wrote. “By working with Facebook directly, and joining their team, we'll have more opportunities to build amazing products that will be employed by consumers – that's all we've ever wanted to do.”

Face.com says it will continue to support the developer community that uses its APIs, though it did not say what would happen to its own apps like Klik.

Rumors of Facebook acquiring Face.com began in 2011 and resurfaced last month. The company, which was founded in 2007, has about 14 employees, according to LinkedIn. It has raised a total of $5.3 million from Yandex and Rhodium.

The following screenshots are from Klik:

Facebook looking to introduce real-time location-based ads to monetize mobile market

Posted: 18 Jun 2012 10:48 AM PDT

Facebook is working on real-time location-based mobile ads, according to Bloomberg.

[Update 6/18/12 12:10 p.m. PT - Facebook tells TechCrunch it did not confirm that such a product is in the works, though we have heard previously from sources that it is.]

The company has been testing several new ad products, and apparently showed almost a dozen ideas in April to a client council including corporate and agency executives. Although Facebook did not share details about how location-based ads would appear on users' phones, it seems they could involve the social network's new offers product.

"Phones can be location-specific so you can start to imagine what the product evolution might look like over time, particularly for retailers," Facebook VP of Global Marketing Solutions Carolyn Everson told Bloomberg. "We've had offers being tested over the last couple of months."

[Update 6/18/12 1:11 p.m. PT - This is the quote Bloomberg extrapolated to claim Facebook will release a location-based ad product. Although our own sources have told us they are aware of a new location-based ad offering being developed, Facebook says in a statement, "We're always looking at different opportunities across mobile, but we have nothing to announce this time."]

A real-time location-based advertising option would be most significant to retailers and restaurants, which want to reach consumers when they are nearby. It's unclear whether Facebook would use push notifications to show users these ads. A few months ago, we suggested this would be unlikely unless it was opt-in for users. Since the Facebook Marketing Conference, however, the company has gotten more aggressive about testing new forms of advertising, including asking users to pay to highlight their posts and allowing cookie-based retargeting ads to appear on the site.

The social network will need to be cautious about how it implements mobile advertising, however, because with screen space so limited, ads are more disruptive than they are on desktop. Offers will have to be extremely relevant and high value to warrant a push notification or an ad at the top of a user's News Feed. Location-based ads also run the risk of making users feel like they are being constantly tracked.

Currently, Facebook allows mobile advertising in the form of Sponsored Stories, which are page posts or interactions that advertisers pay to promote to more fans or friend of fans. Because Sponsored Stories require a person's friend to validate a piece of content by interacting with it in some way before it is shown as an ad, Facebook is not giving companies a direct ticket into the News Feed. The company might begin with something similar for its location-based ads. For instance, a user or one of their friends might have to have Liked a page or checked into a location previously in order for a mobile offer to be served to them.

This week’s headlines from across Inside Network

Posted: 17 Jun 2012 09:30 AM PDT

A roundup of all the news Inside Network brought you between June 11 and 16.