Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook roundup: large investors sell shares, Gehry to design new building at HQ, agency learning tool launches and more
- Facebook acquires Threadsy start-up behind Swaylo influence-ranking and marketing tool
- Facebook updates iOS Messenger with option to view Timeline, call friends, more
- Amazon, Chefville, Walking Dead, Songza, quizzes, photos and more on this week’s emerging Facebook apps by MAU
- How Instagram has grown since Facebook announced its intent to buy the company
- Facebook ad budgets increasing faster than search budgets, Kenshoo study finds
| Posted: 24 Aug 2012 06:00 PM PDT
Frank Gehry to design building at Facebook HQ – World-renowned architect Frank Gehry has been tapped to design Facebook’s new building at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. Construction for the 420,000-square-foot project will likely begin in spring next year. The campus extension will be a large, one room building that somewhat resembles a warehouse, though it will be surrounded by trees and include a roof-top garden. An underground tunnel will connect the new building to the rest of the campus.
India government calls on Facebook, Google to remove content – Facebook and Google said Tuesday they are working on requests from India to remove “inflammatory and hateful content,” after the government suggested the rumors spreading across the sites were sparking a mass exodus of people from several cities. Facebook, which has about 50 million users in India, told the Wall St. Journal that it had received the requests and said it is working to respond to the concerns. ”Facebook will remove content which breaches our terms,” it said in a statement. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook acquires Threadsy start-up behind Swaylo influence-ranking and marketing tool Posted: 24 Aug 2012 04:28 PM PDT
Facebook confirmed the acquisition, but did not offer further details or comment. With Swaylo, users can see their level of influence within their social network on a scale of 0 to 10. Rather than pulling in information from several services, it focuses on influence with Facebook where people tend to connect with people they know in person. Swaylo then helps brands discover the people whose influence matters most for their business and get them to work together. The company plans to remove the option for users to be able to access their Sway scores but SwayloPro will live on to help marketers gain insights about their customers.
TechCrunch notes that this isn’t the first time Facebook has taken only part of a company it acquired. In 2010, it took three employees from Zenbe to work on its unified messaging system. Threadsy CEO and founder Rob Goldman did not say what his team would be working on at Facebook, but he shared the following sentiment in a blog post announcing the acquisition, “This is incredibly exciting for us! We built Swaylo because we believe Facebook and other social media services are the digital representation of our lives. There is no better opportunity to take Swaylo's vision to the next level than at Facebook.”
Threadsy began as a product to combine email, Facebook, Twitter, instant messaging and other services into one platform. It didn’t quite take off, but after the Swaylo side project gained million users in its first 10 days, it decided to shift its focus. The company has raised $6.3 million since being founded in 2008. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook updates iOS Messenger with option to view Timeline, call friends, more Posted: 24 Aug 2012 03:17 PM PDT
The app also allows users to see when their friends were last active to better gauge when they might reply to a message. Like the Facebook for Android version released this week, Messenger 1.9 now supports emoticons in messages. When users open up a conversation thread, they will see their friend’s name at the top of the screen. If the friend is not currently online, users will see a note about how many days or hours ago the friend was last active. This along with read receipts, which were added to the app in an earlier version, provide social cues to help users communicate more naturally via mobile. Users can also tap on their friend’s name to pull up a window with the option to view the person’s Timeline or call their phone. Viewing Timeline will redirect the user to the main Facebook app. Clicking “call” will pull up the native phone app for iPhone. The main Facebook for iOS app received a complete overhaul on Thursday, with the app now running twice as fast.
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| Posted: 24 Aug 2012 02:31 PM PDT
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 between 60,000 and 290,000 MAU, based on AppData, our data tracking service covering traffic growth for apps on Facebook. Top Gainers This Week
No. 2 Rotfltube is a polish video site that uses Open Graph to share what users watch. Zynga’s ChefVille came in at No. 3. The developer has been running Sponsored Results, Facebook’s search ads, to promote the game. A number of other games made this week’s list of emerging apps, along with a new swath of quiz and photo apps like Know your date and My Photos+.
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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| How Instagram has grown since Facebook announced its intent to buy the company Posted: 24 Aug 2012 12:23 PM PDT
Although a Federal Trade Commission investigation delayed the deal from closing sooner, the commission voted earlier this week to end its review and allow the acquisition to proceed. Facebook hasn’t announced that the deal has officially closed, but CEO Mark Zuckerberg supposedly had a celebratory sushi dinner with co-founders Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger last night. Now, Facebook is getting an even stronger addition to its mobile app lineup with Instagram quickly gaining new users and increasing engagement, while also expanding its feature set. In late July, Instagram announced that it had surpassed 80 million users and nearly four billion photos shared. AppData indicates that the app has 28 million monthly active Facebook-connected users and 10 million daily Facebook-connected users. That’s more than 20 million MAU and 8 million DAU since the social network announced its intent to buy Instagram. It also shows that larger percentage of Instagram users are connecting with Facebook and returning monthly. About 30 percent now versus 21 percent in April. See a breakdown of this over time at the end of this article. Much of Instagram’s growth has likely come among Android users. Instagram released its first Android app less than a week before the Facebook deal was announced. The acquisition also raised the profile of the photo-sharing app, which led to a spike in downloads and monthly active Facebook-connected users. Monthly growth has steadied since June, though daily growth has accelerated since July, according to AppData. It was on June 25 that Instagram released an iOS update that made the app faster and allowed users to share more activity to Facebook, which seems to have resulted in users returning more frequently.
Instagram has also been increasing its web presence. In June, it expanded the functionality of its website to allow users to post comments and like photos. Previously, the site allowed users to manage their account settings and view a permalink of a photo, but not take any actions or browse user profiles.There have also been hints that full Instagram profiles could be coming to the web soon. ComScore reported Thursday that Instagram experienced a 38 percent traffic gain between June and July, with unique visitors rising from 16.5 million to 22.7 million. Instagram was the top gaining web property in terms of percent change in unique visitors during that period. Total Instagram users versus Facebook-connected users over time
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| Facebook ad budgets increasing faster than search budgets, Kenshoo study finds Posted: 24 Aug 2012 09:47 AM PDT Marketers are increasing their Facebook advertising budgets at a faster rate than they are for search ads, digital marketing software company Kenshoo has found. For the first half of 2012, Kenshoo clients’ Facebook ad budgets are up 36 percent, whereas paid search budgets are up 12 percent. At a time when many are questioning the effectiveness of Facebook ads, Kenshoo and other social ad software and services companies are finding that clients are regularly spending more. Kenshoo CMO Aaron Goldman says he’s seen signs that Facebook is becoming a part of brands’ “always-on” advertising. Kenshoo did not offer data from previous years or quarters, but Goldman says Facebook ad spend growth is generally more consistent than in the past. He cited May as an anomaly when clients increased their Facebook budget more significantly. Search spend is still increasing, showing that brands aren’t necessarily cutting search budgets in favor of Facebook. Instead, marketers are spending more across the board. With Facebook launching its own search advertising product this week, Kenshoo and others are watching closely to see whether this dynamic changes.
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Facebook co-founder and early investor sell shares – Facebook co-founder Dustin Moskovitz and early investor Peter Thiel both sold a portion of their shares since the IPO lockup period ended last week. Thiel, of venture capital firm Founders Fund, 
Facebook agency learning tool rolls out – Facebook 
Facebook has acquired San Francisco-based 
Facebook released 
Instagram has gained more than 50 million new users in the four and a half months since Facebook 
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