Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- Facebook introduces payments reporting API, ending email reports
- Facebook to push new code twice a day on web, update Android every 4-6 weeks
- Yahoo, Instagram, YouTube, WashPo and more on this week’s top 20 non-game Facebook apps growing by MAU
- Facebook prompts users to Like pages they check into; could it foreshadow a new location-based ad type?
- This week’s headlines from across Inside Network
| Facebook introduces payments reporting API, ending email reports Posted: 06 Aug 2012 05:54 PM PDT
Facebook says the new system, which is available beginning today, will be more reliable, secure and flexible. The API has built-in checks to ensure developers receive all the data. The new report is formatted as a structured csv file, instead of the former flat tsv file. Developers are likely to find this more useful than emails. Previously only one person from a company could receive the payments report. Now multiple people can download the report. It will also allow developers to better integrate transaction data into their own systems, and with the csv file, it will continue to work regardless of whether Facebook adds more data fields in the future. This API will also support Facebook’s transition away from Credits to local currency later this year and subscription payments. Details about how to implement the API are available here. The payments reporting API can be downloaded securely via https using an OAuth-secured HTTP interface. Facebook will stop sending daily email reports on Nov. 7. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook to push new code twice a day on web, update Android every 4-6 weeks Posted: 06 Aug 2012 01:24 PM PDT
The social network previously pushed changes to the site once a day, no small feat for a site of Facebook’s scale. Now with a recently hired release engineer in the company’s New York office, Facebook will push new code twice a day. That means more new features, tests and bug fixes, but it could also mean more breaking things. Third-party developers often have trouble keeping up with all of Facebook’s changes and bugs. At the TechCrunch CrunchUp event on Friday, Facebook VP of Engineering Mike Schroepfer announced that the company is moving to a four to six week release cycle for its Android app, and that it hopes to do the same for iOS later this year. This could benefit users who often complain about the apps’ slow performance and bugs. Schroepfer and Director of Product Peter Deng said Facebook had previously been focused on scaling its mobile presence to accomodate the 7,000 different devices that access the social network every day. Now the company will be concentrating on individual platforms to take advantage of native features and provide better user experiences. In a note on the Facebook Engineering page, release engineer Chuck Rossi said the addition of a New York code push will give more power to the company’s engineers who are on different time zones. It will also give California engineers two chances to get code shipped and features launched each day. Rossi says that when he joined the company in 2008, he was the only release engineer, supporting about 100 developers in Palo Alto, Calif. Now his team supports hundreds of developers in Facebook offices around the world, who are producing 6 times the amount of code per week. He says the twice-a-day code pushes will keep the company’s release process as efficient at 1000 engineers as it was at 100.
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| Posted: 06 Aug 2012 11:43 AM PDT
Titles on our list gained the most MAU of any non-game apps on the platform, growing from between 300,000 and 1.2 million MAU, based on our AppData tracking service. Top Gainers This Week
Yahoo! Social Bar is an Open Graph integration that shares what articles users read on Yahoo. No. 4 Washington Post Social Reader also shares what users read, but the app lives in the Facebook canvas and as a standalone mobile app, not on WashingtonPost.com. Both apps are gaining again after a period of decline while Facebook made some changes to the way social reader stories appeared in News Feed. No. 3 YouTube has doubled its Facebook-connected MAU, likely because more users are turning to the video sharing site to watch clips and live streaming of the Olympics. A number of customizable page tab applications from Woobox made the list, as did mobile apps from HTC Sense and Samsung Mobile. At No. 20 was desktop chat client Microsoft Live, which has seen a steady increase in MAU over the past few months. 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. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Posted: 06 Aug 2012 10:31 AM PDT
The module, which appears on Timeline and in News Feed, suggests the page that users just checked into. For now these seem to be organic results, but this could be an early test for a new location-based mobile advertising product. [Update 7/6/12 2:22 p.m. PT - A Facebook spokesperson tells us, "We launched a feature that allows people to Like a Page after they check in. This is currently not sponsored."] We previously heard from sources that Facebook was working on a type of real-time location-based advertising, but did not get details on how it might work. Based on this latest test, we wonder if businesses will soon be able to show ads to users who make posts at or near their location. Because they are served within seconds of a user indicating that they are at a place, the ads could be highly relevant. This would also be useful to local businesses and retailers who currently can't send messages to users who check into their location. However, if businesses can get users to Like their pages, they can remarket to them with posts in News Feed.
While growing its mobile revenues, the company must be careful not to interrupt the user experience, which is why it seems to favor new ad types that some users might not even recognize as advertising. For example, Sponsored Stories promote the organic actions of a user's friends. Facebook has been slowly rolling out Sponsored Stories to mobile devices since the end of February. Last week was the first time we saw Facebook showing more than one mobile Sponsored Story at a time. We have reached out to Facebook for more information about the latest test that recommends pages that users have checked into. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| This week’s headlines from across Inside Network Posted: 05 Aug 2012 11:13 AM PDT A roundup of all the news Inside Network brought you between July 30 and August 4.
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Facebook today 
As a company, Facebook goes by the saying, “Move fast and break things.” Now it’s planning to move even faster with new code pushes for Facebook.com twice a day and Android app updates every four to six weeks.
Facebook appears to be testing a new mobile module that prompts users to Like a page moments after they check into a location.
At the end of June we saw Facebook testing a "Pages You May Like" module in the mobile feed. The unit originally included organic page recommendations, but 
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