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Inside Facebook

Inside Facebook

Yahoo, Bing, Power Editor, Causes, BranchOut and more on this week’s top 20 non-game Facebook apps growing by MAU

Posted: 13 Aug 2012 06:07 PM PDT

Yahoo! Social Bar again takes the No. 1 spot on our list of top non-game Facebook apps growing by monthly active users this week, adding 1.1 million MAU.

Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any non-game apps on the platform, growing from between 280,000 and 1.1 million MAU, based on our AppData tracking service.

Top Gainers This Week

Name MAU Gain Gain%
1.  Yahoo! Social Bar 37,700,000 +1,100,000 + 3%
2.  Bing 25,100,000 +1,000,000 + 4%
3.  Washington Post Social Reader 4,700,000 +900,000 + 24%
4.  Power Editor 869,562 +869,562 N/A
5.  Zoosk 14,000,000 +800,000 + 7%
6.  Instagram 26,700,000 +700,000 + 3%
7.  Scribd 20,800,000 +600,000 + 2%
8.  Causes 2,300,000 +600,000 + 35%
9.  HTC Sense 6,400,000 +500,000 + 8%
10.  BranchOut 2,400,000 +400,000 + 20%
11.  Ask.fm 3,100,000 +400,000 + 15%
12.  The Fan Machine 1,900,000 +400,000 + 27%
13.  Windows Live Mail 378,363 +378,363 N/A
14.  Birthday Calendar 2012 ★ 3,200,000 +300,000 + 10%
15.  Static HTML Iframe Tab 4,100,000 +300,000 + 8%
16.  Static HTML… [Third Tab] 5,100,000 +300,000 + 6%
17.  Static HTML: iframe tabs 21,600,000 +300,000 + 0.93%
18.  Pedido de contato 6,300,000 +300,000 + 5%
19.  Samsung Mobile 19,800,000 +300,000 + 2%
20.  Tab Builder: Like 1,100,000 +280,000 + 34%

 

Bing‘s social sidebar integration came in at No. 2 with an additional million MAU. No. 3 Washington Post Social Reader continues to enjoy a resurgence this month.

Facebook’s own Power Editor, which is an ad creation tool for advanced advertisers, made an appearance on our this week, which could be related to the Ads API being updated to include new News Feed metrics. Typically Facebook doesn’t report figures for its own apps, so the 869,562-user increase was not actually the result of new users. That is likely the total MAU for the tool.

Similarly, No. 13 Windows Live Mail, which is a Facebook integration for Microsoft’s desktop email client, does not typically report MAU data, so today’s spike is an anomaly.

No. 5 Zoosk, No. 6 Instagram, No. 7 Scribd, No. 8 Causes and No. 10 BranchOut are likely growing due to their integrations with Facebook Open Graph, which allows structured publishing to Timeline, Ticker and News Feed.

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 Thursday, and the top emerging apps on Friday.

Facebook now reports average News Feed position for Sponsored Stories

Posted: 13 Aug 2012 04:16 PM PDT

Facebook is now offering advertisers new metrics about how their Sponsored Stories perform in News Feed, including the average position within the feed where the story was inserted.

This additional data will help advertisers understand how their ads are performing on the social network and how they might better optimize campaigns. Several early tests have found that News Feed-based ads have significantly higher clickthrough rates than sidebar ads. As Facebook provides data to show how well ads work within the feed, advertisers will increasingly want to run ads in that placement. However, with News Feed inventory much more limited, competition for the space will drive up prices.

Until recently when Facebook began allowing advertisers to choose where to run Sponsored Stories, there was no way for advertisers to know where their ads were appearing and how each placement was performing. Since June, advertisers have been able to get some of this data if they created separate ads for each placement, but this is only possible to do through the Ads API or Power Editor. Now, even if advertisers select all placements or create their ads in the self-serve tool, Facebook will report News Feed results separately. However, it does not break out mobile versus desktop metrics.

Average News Feed position is an entirely new metric that Preferred Marketing Developers learned about in June, but apparently wasn’t available through the Ads API until late last week. It has also begun appearing the the reporting section of the self-serve ads manager. With sidebar ads, Facebook has not let advertisers know what position their ad appeared in.

Thanks to Justin Oh for the tip and the screenshot.

Facebook gives developers new setting to publish more prominent stories from Open Graph apps

Posted: 13 Aug 2012 02:41 PM PDT

Facebook today announced an “explicit sharing” parameter for Open Graph apps, which will allow developers to publish more prominent News Feed stories on behalf of their users who want to share actions like taking photos, checking into locations or providing commentary.

When Facebook introduced the concept of Open Graph apps last year, the idea was that users would consistently share their app activity after a one-time authorization. This activity would be added to a box on a user’s Timeline and distributed to friends through Ticker. Whether the story would appear in a friend’s News Feed would depend on the weight of the action — for example earning a rare achievement within a game — and a user’s relationship to the friend and affinity for a certain category of app — for example, showing more news activity to users of social reader apps. These algorithms, as any, are a work in progress that will require more signals to be truly relevant.

Not only was this somewhat difficult for developers who want to maximize their reach, it could be quite unclear to users who wanted to share something from an app with all their friends. Facebook uses the example of how when people choose to share a run they took with a fitness app, they expect the content to appear as if they had posted it directly to Facebook.

Now with explicit sharing, developers can indicate which actions should be shared more prominently in the feed, for example, location sharing or a user-generated photo or message. Activity that happens naturally through using an app — listening, reading or watching — or lightweight actions such as following, favoriting or saving, will continue to be distributed and aggregated as before.

This change is likely to help developers drive more traffic to their apps and improve the experience for users. When Facebook debuted Open Graph apps at f8 last year, the company emphasized “frictionless sharing.” This term led some developers to focus on the auto-sharing aspect at the expense of user experience and trust. Now Facebook has to do damage control on the user and developer side. Users need more ways to control how they share, and developers need resources to understand how Open Graph apps work and what their value is besides auto-publishing.

One benefit is the noun-verb construction, which lends itself to powerful stories on a user’s Timeline and rich aggregations in the feed. For instance, Ticker stories about what a person’s friends are listening to right now might be considered noise, but being able to see that three friends listened to the same album in one week might be interesting. This information is even more useful when it appears not in the feed but when someone is actively searching for information about a musician, which is why Facebook displays these stories on artists’ pages. And for many app users, it’s valuable to be able to see their own activity over time, either to recall something in the past or to learn something new about themselves.

These situations are possible because of the structure of Open Graph. With the new explicit share option, we may see more developers begin to think beyond auto-sharing and build apps that take advantage of this unique format. Developers who want to make their existing Open Graph actions eligible to explicitly shared will have to resubmit their actions for review. Facebook says it may take up to seven days to provide feedback to developers. Documentation for the new parameter is available here.

Anti-Facebook social platform App.net raises more than $700K from users and developers

Posted: 13 Aug 2012 10:46 AM PDT

App.net, a paid social platform being built as an alternative to ad-supported Facebook and Twitter, surpassed its $500,000 crowdfunding goal this weekend, raising more than $700,000 from more than 10,000 backers as of Monday morning.

The project was launched by Dalton Caldwell, who previously founded photo sharing app Picplz and music streaming service imeem. App.net began as a paid service for mobile application developers to get distribution and track performance data. Caldwell has refocused App.net to become a real-time feed API & service that he promises will never monetize with ads. Instead, users and developers will pay for access. App.net’s focus on the real-time feed puts it closer to Twitter than Facebook, but Caldwell’s vision is to create a legitimate alternative to what he calls the “advertising-supported monoculture” of Facebook, Twitter, Google+ and others “vying for the opportunity to sell you/your clickstream to advertisers.”

Earlier this month Caldwell wrote an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg expressing frustration with the Facebook platform, claiming that the social network protects its advertising business at the expense of developers and users. He says Facebook tried to acquire his company after he had begun working on a service that Facebook saw as competitive to its own App Center. He also called out Twitter for pursuing an ad-supported model rather than being an open API-focused platform.

“Personally speaking, I am resolved to never write another line of code for rotten-to-the-core ‘platforms’ like Facebook or Twitter,” he wrote.

The result is a basic-looking alpha site with profiles, 256-character updates, a real-time feed and asymmetrical following structure similar to Twitter or Facebook Subscribe. The platform, which released the API less than a week ago, already supports about two dozen third-party apps for the web and mobile. For now, the community seems mostly made up of developers and other early-adopter tech types who paid $50 or $100 to support the project. There are also 60 backers who donated $1,000 to the effort.

The App.net team has a lot of work to do as far as building features and infrastructure, as well as putting together a terms of service, Caldwell acknowledges in a blog post. Perhaps the greatest challenge, however, will be determining a growth strategy. All services, but social networks in particular, are greatly defined by their early users. Few services are able to make the leap from niche community to mass user base, and the network effects of Facebook and Twitter are perhaps stronger than ever. Still, there is growing frustration and distrust among many Facebook users. Whether or not a developer-first platform can evolve into a genuine alternative to the existing social networks will be interesting to follow.

In 2010, four NYU students set out to create a nonprofit, user-owned, distributed social network called Diaspora. That effort garnered a lot of media attention and even a donation from Zuckerberg himself, but has made little dent since then. The social network’s so-called “pods” are hosted by many different individuals and institutions, with each pod operating as a personal web server. There are currently about 333,000 active Diaspora accounts, according to the site.

tirsdag den 14. august 2012 at 07.54