Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- New Facebook platform industry hires: Adaptly, Blinq, GraphEffect, PageLever, Unified and Wildfire
- Facebook creates new ‘follow’ action to allow users to get updates about other users’ app activity directly in News Feed
- Is a Twitter Open Graph app on the way?
- Admins can now change their page URL without having to submit a request
- Facebook building ‘blazing fast’ iOS app, New York Times says
- AllFacebook Marketing Conference Kicks Off Tomorrow – June 28th and 29th in San Francisco
- Facebook promotes user education with new icon above ads
| New Facebook platform industry hires: Adaptly, Blinq, GraphEffect, PageLever, Unified and Wildfire Posted: 27 Jun 2012 05:17 PM PDT Here's this week's list of hires in the Facebook platform industry, per LinkedIn and the companies themselves:
If your company is hiring new people or making a notable promotion, please let us know. Email mail (at) insidefacebook (dot) com, and we'll get it into our next post. Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry. |
| Posted: 27 Jun 2012 04:22 PM PDT
With the new built-in “follow” action, users will be able to get updates about other users’ app activity within the Facebook News Feed, rather than needing to visit the app to find out about it. For example, a person might follow a journalist within a social news app to see what they are reading or follow a celebrity chef within a food review app. Having these stories within News Feed could lead more users to see this activity and then visit the app or share it with friends. Some apps like Pinterest and Quora have already been using their own Open Graph “follow” actions to share this type of activity back to Facebook, but now Facebook has made “follow” built-in, just as it has done with “read,” “watch,” “listen” and “like.” Built-in verbs can include additional benefits. In the case of “follow,” developers will get additional distribution through News Feed, Ticker, Timeline and notifications. The action of following someone will generate a story in Ticker and in the recent activity box on Timeline. Users will also get a Facebook notification when they follow someone. These features promote re-engagement and viral growth, though it’s odd that users who are followed don’t receive a notification that someone followed them. Likely to drive even more re-engagement is the feature that will put any user’s app activity in News Feed. Many users visit Facebook several times a day, but they don’t always visit other services as frequently. Now users won’t have to think to visit another app or site on their own. They will see prompts in News Feed that will take them there.
We saw evidence of Facebook testing a new “follow” action earlier this week, and wondered whether it might have been related to a deeper Twitter integration. Now it seems what we saw was likely related to today’s announcement. However, this might be further reason for Twitter to build an Open Graph app and take advantage of Facebook’s viral mechanics to engage users who aren’t as active as others. Facebook says it will no longer approve custom follow actions. Apps that currently use a custom follow action must migrate to use the built-in follow in the next 90 days. Technical documentation about the built-in “follow” action is available here. |
| Is a Twitter Open Graph app on the way? Posted: 27 Jun 2012 03:21 PM PDT
A test application on Facebook suggests the social network may be working with Twitter on Open Graph integration that will share more of a user's Twitter activity on Facebook Timeline. The test app, under the alias of “Sports Betting,” uses the Open Graph action "follow." Although other services allow following, it is primarily associated with Twitter, and Twitter is one of the few that hasn't already released a Timeline app. Quora launched an Open Graph integration using "follow" last month. We've previously suggested that Twitter could benefit by integrating with Open Graph. Social sites like Pinterest, Path, Foursquare and others already do and are seeing lifts in users, referrals and sharing activity. The Sports Betting app is being tested by Facebook product manager Austin Haugen who focuses on Timeline applications. Interestingly, Haugen used the same app to test the "listen" action for Rdio a few days before Facebook announced Open Graph apps at f8 last year. If Facebook were helping Twitter with an integration, Haugen would likely be involved, however it’s possible the “follow” action is being tested for another service, not Twitter.
In tests this week, Haugen indicated that he "followed" a number of people. Some of those people are Open Graph objects with the name "Ahimel," which is engineering manager Alex Himel's username for both Facebook and Twitter. These objects link off-Facebook to austinhaugen.com/opengraph/profile, which brings up a blank page. Other people that Haugen has followed using the test app include Mark Zuckerberg and a dummy profile, "Helen Diijffbgj Te." These link to Facebook profiles. Twitter already has a Facebook integration that lets users post tweets to their profiles and friends' News Feeds, but it does not use the new model of sharing to Timeline, Ticker and News Feed via Open Graph actions. It also does not share retweets or @replies. An Open Graph app could help users easily share their tweets and other actions, like following or favoriting, and organize them in a box on Timeline and in News Feed aggregations. Third-party app, Twittus, already does this so it is likely that Twitter would want to have its own official version. Twitter recently made changes to its existing cross-posting feature so that tweets shared on Facebook include more rich media, so the company is clearly interested in optimizing how its content appears on Facebook. Facebook and Twitter did not offer comment on a potential partnership involving Open Graph.
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| Admins can now change their page URL without having to submit a request Posted: 27 Jun 2012 12:29 PM PDT Any Facebook page owner can now change a page’s vanity URL once without having to submit a request or work directly with a Facebook representative. Previously, pages with more than 100 Likes could not change their URL unless they filled out a form, and that wasn’t always a guarantee that Facebook would accept the change. Now, Facebook has removed that contact form from its site and given page owners the option to change their URL a single time. To do so, users can follow this flow: Edit Page –> Update Info –> Basic Information –> Change Username.
Upon doing so, users are reminded that they can only change their username once. From this page, users can check the availability of their desired vanity URL. This is similar to what Facebook has allowed for user profiles since 2009.
Page owners, however, still cannot change the overall name of their page if they have more than 200 Likes. |
| Facebook building ‘blazing fast’ iOS app, New York Times says Posted: 27 Jun 2012 12:07 PM PDT
The app is reportedly being built primarily with Objective-C, a language that should make the app significantly faster than it is now. Facebook’s mobile apps are much slower than other apps because the company uses HTML5 within an Objective-C shell. The existing method allows Facebook to push out changes without requiring a full version update in the App Store. It also means engineers can reuse code across multiple mobile platforms. But the result is often frustrating for users who have to wait longer for items to load or restart the app after it crashes. The New York Times’ Nick Bilton says he spoke with Facebook engineers involved with the project and got to see the new app live. He describes it as “blazing fast.” The app is not getting a visual redesign, he says. The update is about speed and reliability, he says. There is no set date for the update and Facebook hasn’t confirmed the story, but Bilton says engineers told him it is expected to be released this summer. |
| AllFacebook Marketing Conference Kicks Off Tomorrow – June 28th and 29th in San Francisco Posted: 27 Jun 2012 12:00 PM PDT AllFacebook Marketing Conference Kicks Off Tomorrow – June 28th and 29th in San Francisco Join us at the AllFacebook Marketing Conference tomorrow in San Francisco for two full days of Facebook marketing immersion. Learn how to put Facebook to work from leading social media and marketing experts. You will leave the conference with a stronger understanding of how to brand your business and generate results using Facebook's evolving tools and apps. Register before midnight tonight for $599, a savings of $200. The program will feature more than 50 leading experts, including:
View the full speaker lineup and program here. Register now and save. We hope to see you there!
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| Facebook promotes user education with new icon above ads Posted: 27 Jun 2012 11:35 AM PDT
This gives users a quick way to learn more about how Facebook ads work and why users see the ads they see. Rather than burying this info page in the Help Center, the social network is including a link to it above every group of ads on the site. As the company introduces new types of ads and makes headlines for its evolving advertising model, user education is crucial to avoiding misunderstanding and backlash. Facebook seems to be tracking which ad campaign was running at the top of a group of ads when users click the icon, which could deliver insights about which type of ads users might be concerned about. The new icon uses the megaphone symbol Facebook uses to denote its ad product. It is different from the small “F” logo on Zynga.com, where Facebook is testing off-site ads for the first time. In the short term, the ads icon next to “Sponsored” could help draw users’ eyes to the right-hand sidebar because it is new. This might temporarily help advertisers get noticed, but if users click on the icon, they are taken to a new page so they might be able to see or take action on an ad. Either way, users are likely become quickly accustomed to seeing the icon so any of these effects won’t be lasting. This change seems more aimed at user education than affecting ad clickthrough rates. In December, Facebook promoted the ”About Facebook Advertising” page at the top of some users’ News Feeds. The page positions ads as a way to keep the social network free for users. It emphasizes that ads are shown without personally identifying users, and reminds people that they can choose not to see certain ads by clicking the X in the corner.
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Facebook now offers developers an easy way to allow users to follow other users’ activity within Open Graph applications, even if those users are not friends.
[Update: The "follow" action we saw being tested appears to be related to a 
Facebook is working on making a faster version of its mobile app, according to the 
Facebook has added a small icon linking to an “
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