Inside Facebook
Inside Facebook |
- New Facebook platform industry hires: FreshBuzz, Kenshoo Social, Nanigans, Offerpop, Shoutlet, TBG Digital
- Facebook design manager leaving to help lead angel fund for designers
- Facebook subscription payments come out of beta, now available for all app developers
- Facebook mobile app ads give developers new opportunities for growth
| Posted: 08 Aug 2012 04:05 PM PDT 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. Also, please note that information about most new hires, below, comes either from the companies themselves or from company updates from LinkedIn. Looking for new opportunities? Check out the Inside Network Job Board, which shows the latest openings at leading companies in the industry. Here's this week's list of hires:
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| Facebook design manager leaving to help lead angel fund for designers Posted: 08 Aug 2012 02:18 PM PDT
Blumenfeld, who started working at Facebook in 2007, has been on sabbatical since December, so this doesn’t come as much of a surprise. However, the news comes shortly after a number of other high-level employees announced their departure, raising questions about how Facebook will evolve post-IPO. After working on growth and platform, Blumenfeld managed the design communications team, which focuses on guiding users through changes and educating them about products. Most recently he helped with the transition to Timeline. "We were building great products, but not doing a great job of guiding people through the changes, or telling them why they were important,” Blumenfeld told TechCrunch. Now with Timeline, for example, Facebook provided a number of resources to understand the change, a nearly year-long rollout and a seven-day curation period for each user. The team has also expanded significantly over the years. Facebook has 45 designers, including some that have come through acquisitions of well-known teams in the industry.
Blumenfeld, who helped create the group in April 2011, will co-direct Designer Fund with Enrique Allen. He says its mission is to invest in designers who create businesses with positive social impact. The fund also provides mentorship and education events to help entrepreneurial designers. “This is an ambitious undertaking,” Blumenfeld wrote in a blog post. “As one of my mentors told me – ‘If you leave Facebook, it has to be for something important. Something huge.’ For me, helping the next generation of designer entrepreneurs build world changing companies is exactly that.” |
| Facebook subscription payments come out of beta, now available for all app developers Posted: 08 Aug 2012 10:53 AM PDT
The company originally announced the program in beta with Zynga, Playdom and Kixeye as partners in June. Now any developer can offer subscriptions for virtual goods, premium experiences or updated content within their apps for a monthly fee. Developers can set different prices based on a user’s local currency and offer different levels of subscriptions. They can also offer free trial periods. This flexibility could help developers better monetize their apps. The model could also lead players to spend more in games and also makes Facebook a better option for developers of free-to-play browser-based massively multiplayer online role-playing games. It might also be a start to getting non-game developers to try the social network’s payment platform. For example, professional networking app BranchOut or news apps like Washington Post Social Reader might find uses for subscriptions. However, Facebook will take a 30 percent fee from these transactions. Developers can combine subscriptions and in-app payments. For instance, a game might offer a monthly subscription for energy or supplies and sell vanity items through in-app purchases. Users can pay for subscriptions with a credit card or PayPal account, and they can cancel from their Facebook payment settings. Facebook recommends that developers provide a cancel option from within their apps as well. Developers can learn more about implementing subscription payments here. Daily transaction data about subscriptions will be available for download through the payments reporting API introduced on Monday. See an example of subscriptions in Disney Playdom’s Gardens of Time below.
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| Facebook mobile app ads give developers new opportunities for growth Posted: 08 Aug 2012 10:48 AM PDT
These new ads leverage the vast targeting options of the Facebook platform, allowing mobile developers to laser in on their desired audience. For instance, unlike any other ad network, Facebook can guarantee that impressions are seen by only people of a certain age or gender. As such, the other benefit of Facebook ads is the ability to segment audiences, test creative and optimize campaigns to a very specific degree. Facebook is also unique in being able to know whether a user or their friends has previously connected with an app. Developers can then ensure that they are not wasting ad impressions on people who have already downloaded their app and connected with Facebook. The ads will also indicate how many of a person's friends use the app. This type of social context has been found to increase clickthrough rates.
Facebook says it is working to make it easier for developers to measure the performance of their campaigns, including number of installs, in the future. With single sign-on, the company could one day provide information about how many users who clicked on an app from an ad, News Feed story or App Center, and then ultimately authorized permissions for that app. This could be especially useful considering Apple's moves away from Unique Device IDs (UDIDs) to track and identify users, but Facebook doesn't seem to have closed that loop yet. Until recently, advertisers couldn't select whether they wanted their ads to appear on desktop or mobile devices. In June, Facebook made this possible, but few developers have been advertising their apps this way yet. One reason might have been that previously mobile ads had to be Sponsored Stories, which means that they could only reach users who have a friend connected to the advertiser — by using an app or Liking a page, for instance. With the ads Facebook announced Tuesday, there is no such requirement. A developer can instantly reach millions of users. These mobile ads will be sold on a cost per click basis through a bid model, similar to Facebook's other ads. With large brands and other businesses all competing for the same ad space, the cost of advertising on Facebook has risen. Many social game developers have found that Facebook's desktop ads are no longer a valuable source of new users since the returns aren't high enough to justify the cost. With mobile ads being new and directly in the feed, early tests of Sponsored Stories have shown improved clickthrough rates and lower costs per click than traditional Facebook advertising. It remains to be seen how these mobile app units compare. Facebook says this ad unit is only available to a limited number of beta partners for now, but mobile developers can sign up to be part of the beta here. In the meantime, mobile developers can advertise their apps by running Sponsored Stories in the mobile feed and take advantage of organic distribution through App Center, News Feed, bookmarks and notifications. |
Facebook design manager Ben Blumenfeld is leaving the company to co-direct Designer Fund, an angel fund of designers, TechCrunch 
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