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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Bubble Safari keeps popping, TripAdvisor runs Sponsored Stories, and more on this week’s top growing Facebook apps by MAU

Posted: 25 Jun 2012 05:00 PM PDT

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

Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any apps on the platform, growing from between 470,000 and 4.8 million MAU, based on our AppData tracking service.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain,%
1.  Bubble Safari 25,500,000 +4,800,000  + 23%
2.  TripAdvisor™ 27,000,000 +4,600,000  + 21%
3.  Socialcam 84,600,000 +2,100,000  + 3%
4.  Song Pop 3,600,000 +1,700,000  + 89%
5.  Terra 10,100,000 +1,200,000  + 13%
6.  Static HTML: iframe tabs 20,400,000 +1,100,000  + 6%
7.  Static HTML… [Second Tab] 6,800,000 +900,000  + 15%
8.  Lost Bubble 7,100,000 +700,000  + 11%
9.  Glassdoor 2,700,000 +700,000  + 35%
10.  Instagram 20,100,000 +700,000  + 4%
11.  Static HTML… [Third Tab] 3,500,000 +600,000  + 21%
12.  Static HTML… [Fourth Tab] 2,500,000 +600,000  + 32%
13.  Spotify 23,000,000 +600,000  + 3%
14.  Microsoft Live 24,200,000 +600,000  + 3%
15.  Dragon City 2,200,000 +500,000  + 29%
16.  DoAlbums 3,300,000 +500,000  + 18%
17.  Static Iframe Tab 4,300,000 +500,000  + 13%
18.  Birthday Reminder 1,600,000 +500,000  + 45%
19.  How Hipster Are You? 660,000 +490,000  + 288%
20.  Yahoo! Toolbar 1,000,000 +470,000  + 89%

 

The TripAdvisor web integration took the No. 2 spot this week, due in part to a Facebook Sponsored Stories campaign to re-engage users.

Cross-platform name-that-tune app Song Pop moved up to No. 4, after a big viral boost this weekend.

Static HTML tab applications from Thunderpenny seem to be experiencing a small resurgence following a steep decline when Facebook removed the option to set third-party tabs as the default view for pages.

How Hipster Are You? and Yahoo! Toolbar made their debut among the top 20 gaining apps by MAU this week after an appearance on our top emerging apps list on Friday.

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 complicates privacy settings and hide users’ email addresses, favoring its own messaging platform

Posted: 25 Jun 2012 03:57 PM PDT

Facebook appears to have hidden users’ third-party email addresses from Timeline, but left users’ Facebook.com addresses visible. It has also added a confusing new setting to the email portion of a user’s contact info.

Although users can choose which of their email addresses are displayed on Timeline and change the privacy setting for each address, it is odd Facebook has hidden addresses that users had previously indicated they wanted to share with friends or the public. This seems like a deliberate move to promote its own messaging service over others, but instead of changing users’ privacy settings to do it, the social network simply added a second setting.

In addition to being able to manage the privacy setting of each email address they have connected to their accounts, users now have another setting to control whether to “show” or “hide” that account on Timeline. This makes it difficult for users to understand which addresses they are sharing. As seen in the example below, the privacy setting for the Yahoo account is “friends,” as it has been for years. The Facebook.com address is set to “only me,” as indicated by the lock icon. But when Facebook added the second setting to the right, it defaulted all non-Facebook.com accounts to “hidden from Timeline” and left Facebook.com accounts as “shown on Timeline.” The social network does honor the “only me” setting so the Facebook.com address is not visible to anyone it wasn’t intended for, but it makes the user experience quite unclear.

In April, Facebook made a vague announcement about “updating addresses on Facebook to make them consistent across our site.” It did not say that it would hide users’ non-Facebook.com addresses. It simply said, “Now, the address people use to get to your Timeline and send you email on Facebook will be the same.” However, users’ Facebook email addresses had always used the same address as their personalized URLs, so this did not seem to be news at the time.

Now Facebook is referencing this press release to suggest that it did, in fact, let users know that it would be making a change to how email addresses appear on Timeline. It provided us and other news outlets with the following statement:

“As we announced back in April, we've been updating addresses on Facebook to make them consistent across our site. In addition to everyone receiving an address, we're also rolling out a new setting that gives people the choice to decide which addresses they want to show on their Timelines. Ever since the launch of Timeline, people have had the ability to control what posts they want to show or hide on their own Timelines, and today we're extending that to other information they post, starting with the Facebook address.”

However, the ability to decide which email address to show or hide on a user’s profile predates Timeline. Users have been able to do this since as early as 2010. What’s new is the confusing second setting we discussed above. Further, we’ve heard from users that this setting has been live for them since last Monday, if not earlier.

Facebook is most often criticized for revealing too much of user’s information, not for hiding it. But when it comes to email, things get complicated for the social network. In 2010, Facebook and Google were involved in a public dispute over the issue of how email contacts should be used. Facebook would not allow users to export their friends’ email addresses, but it helped Gmail users manually download their Gmail contacts and then re-upload them to the social network. Facebook also allowed users to import their friends’ e-mail addresses when they were using Microsoft or Yahoo services.

We wonder whether Facebook’s latest change to hide email addresses is more than just a way to promote its own messaging feature over third-party email services, and if it could be related to preventing contact importing and exporting. A Facebook spokesperson could not comment on this issue.

Facebook adds COO Sheryl Sandberg to board of directors

Posted: 25 Jun 2012 02:14 PM PDT

Facebook announced today that Chief Operating Officer Sheryl Sandberg has joined the company's board of directors.

As COO, Sandberg is already instrumental in leading Facebook, particularly in areas of sales, marketing, business development, legal, human resources, public policy and communications. She has become a trusted partner of CEO Mark Zuckerberg and played a crucial role in helping Facebook better monetize since joining the company in 2008.

Sandberg’s appointment could reduce some of the criticism Facebook has received in the past for having an all-male board of directors. Sandberg joins Zuckerberg; Marc Andreessen, of Andreessen Horowitz; Erskine B. Bowles, president emeritus of University of North Carolina system; James W. Breyer of Accel Partners; Donald E. Graham, chairman and CEO of The Washington Post Company; Reed Hastings, chairman and CEO of Netflix; and Peter A. Thiel of Founders Fund.

Before Facebook, Sandberg was vice president of global online sales and operations at Google, where she similarly took a fledgling Internet company and built it into an advertising powerhouse. She previously served as chief of staff for the United States Treasury Department under President Bill Clinton. She received B.A. and M.B.A degrees from Harvard University. Sandberg also serves on the boards of The Walt Disney Company, Women for Women International, the Center for Global Development and V-Day. She previously sat on the board for Starbucks. Sandberg is also a well-known advocate for gender equality, having spoken about women’s issues at TED and Barnard College, among other events.

Image credit: Facebook Newsroom

This Week in the Facebook Marketing Bible

Posted: 25 Jun 2012 12:01 PM PDT

The Facebook Marketing Bible is being updated daily! The leading resource for marketing and advertising on Facebook, The Facebook Marketing Bible has enabled thousands of brands, app developers, content publishers and businesses of all sizes to do more with Facebook. With new features constantly launching, we are creating content daily and will be providing a comprehensive list of updates every week.

One of the topics we cover this week is the new Facebook App Center. The App Center presents a new way to drive mobile app installs from desktop to mobile. With the emerging emphasis on mobile properties, the App Center provides developers with the potential to drive more users to download their apps.

This week's updates also cover topics such as Facebook Comments and Event Ads, among others.

Recent Additions to the Facebook Marketing Bible


Ready to take your marketing and advertising campaigns to the next level? Subscribe to the Facebook Marketing Bible today.

Facebook tests design and wording changes to encourage users to post more

Posted: 25 Jun 2012 09:36 AM PDT

Facebook appears to be testing a number of changes to the News Feed publisher box aimed at getting users to post more frequently.

Some users are seeing stats beneath the publisher about how long it has been since their last update or about how many friends have recently logged in. These additions could lead users to feel a small sense of obligation to post more frequently.

We've also seen design and wording changes that seem to make posting a status more about personal expression. For example, instead of simply saying "What's on your mind?" within the publisher, Facebook is testing a version that includes a user's first name: "John, what's on your mind?" The social network is also trying a design that brings a user's profile picture closer to the publisher to create what appears to be a speech bubble. These slight changes could have an effect on how often users make status updates or what type of thoughts they share with friends.

Facebook regularly tweaks the site to optimize engagement. It's interesting to see the company place an emphasis on getting users to post status updates as user behavior seems to be shifting toward mobile photo uploads and inactive sharing through Open Graph. However, if News Feed becomes filled with more activity stories — Spotify listens, Pinterest pins, articles read — and doesn’t include more personal updates, users might not feel the same connection with their friends or the site. With Facebook introducing Sponsored Stories and promoted posts to the feed, it is important for users to still regularly see relevant and interesting stories from their friends. It is also likely that users who make more updates are more satisfied with the site. When users make posts and receive feedback, they feel rewarded and are likely to value Facebook more highly.

Image credit: the first two screenshots are from Techie Buzz.

tirsdag den 26. juni 2012 at 07.54