Inside Facebook
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- Facebook Roundup: White House, Insider Trading, Intifada, Jive, MTV, HipHop, Fish and Baseball
- Facebook Running Google AdSense Ads to Gain Users
- Top 25 Facebook Games for April 2011
- Save Facebook Updates to Read Later, Chat With Multiple Friends in RockMelt Beta2
- Facebook-Enabled, Social Recommendations of Mobile Apps Are Here With Apptitude
- Video, Books, Sports, TV and More On This Week’s List of Top 20 Emerging Apps by MAU
| Posted: 01 Apr 2011 09:00 PM PDT Inside Facebook extends a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting the continued growth of Inside Facebook. Check them out below!
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| Facebook Roundup: White House, Insider Trading, Intifada, Jive, MTV, HipHop, Fish and Baseball Posted: 01 Apr 2011 06:45 PM PDT
Insider Trading Scandal Led to Termination of Facebook Employee – Michael Brown, former corporate development manager for Facebook, abruptly left the company after it was discovered he had engaged in insider trading, reported TechCrunch. Brown purchased Facebook stock on secondary markets, reportedly in September according to TechCrunch, which counts as grounds for immediate termination. Facebook Grapples With Israel-Palestine Conflict - Facebook recently removed a Page supporting the Third Palestinian Intifada with more than 340,000 Likes after comments devolved into direct calls for violence. This is an example of Facebook's growing struggle to figure out how to deal with discussions of conflict and controversial political views. Now, an American activist is suing Facebook for $1 billion for not removing the Page fast enough. It needs to balance freedom of speech, human rights, and staying business-friendly.
Facebook Featured on MTV Show "Diary" - Facebook was featured in a half-hour show called "Diary” which included interviews with CEO Mark Zuckerberg and a Facebook engineer. The show presented a very positive impression of the company.
Facebook's HipHop Conversion Very Efficient – Facebook's Engineering Team wrote a note this week about exactly how efficient the HipHop conversion in early 2010 was for the company, allowing them to reduce average CPU usage by more than 50%. Facebook Helps Fish Scientists Identify Species – Facebook was at the center of an interesting success story of ichthyologists, or fish scientists, who were able to identify more than 5,000 specimens from Guyana in a week with the help of the social network. Basically, the scientists were in a time crunch to identify these specimens and in 24 hours were able to do 90% of the job with Facebook. Most of those helping out had a Ph.D. in ichthyology. Facebook and Baseball - Facebook's data and science team culled some interesting information from baseball fans' status updates and profiles. Less than 50% of any baseball team's fans were female. Baseball fans have higher than average numbers of friends, averaging 300, even though the Dodgers and Angels have the least number of friends while the Athletics and Nationals have the highest number of friends. Cross-town rivalries such as the Dodgers/Angels don't break friendships. And the Phillies have the most devoted team, which is to say the most fans not fans of any other team. Interesting, but there are many confounding variables here. Take the cross-town rivalries: it's obvious that users who live in the same city would be more likely to be friends. When it comes to baseball fans being friendly, any user with Likes is a more engaged Facebook user, so it's natural for them to have more Facebook friends.  | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook Running Google AdSense Ads to Gain Users Posted: 01 Apr 2011 05:24 PM PDT Facebook has recently been running Google AdSense ads informing viewers that they can “Find Friends on Facebook” by registering for an account. The ads, likely part of a very limited test, could be a sign that Facebook is looking for ways to continue its growth in certain key markets. A strong core user base of influencers is important to maintaining the public perception of Facebook’s as cool and valuable.
This instance may be part of a very limited test. There weren’t readily available mentions of anyone else seeing theses ads. Facebook constantly tests interface changes on its own site, so its reasonable to believe it might do the same in marketing itself. Some might infer that this is a bad sign for Facebook — that organic growth has slowed and it needs to pay to keep sign ups flowing. However, Facebook hasn’t shown any significant reduction in its growth rate in the U.S. or abroad. It gained 23.8 million new users worldwide to reach 641.1 million monthly actives as of March 1st. This includes 3.3 million more in the US to reach 152.2 million MAU, according to Inside Facebook Gold, our data and research service covering Facebook's growth, demographics, and monetization in global markets. Daily engagement is also still holding strong, with Google’s cookie count showing Facebook rising past 300 million daily unique visitors in March.
As penetration rates grow, Facebook may need to try new strategies to lure in those who’ve purposefully abstained from the service. This could take the form of web advertising, more traditional broadcast advertising, or event sponsorship. Its largest marketing effort, though, isn’t costing Facebook anything directly, as over 2.5 million websites now display its name or logo in the form of social plugins.  | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Top 25 Facebook Games for April 2011 Posted: 01 Apr 2011 04:52 PM PDT April kicks off with 14 games shrinking in terms of monthly active users and 15 with fewer daily active users than they enjoyed a month ago. Between the two charts, generated using AppData‘s Top Applications Leaderboard, we see that Mafia Wars sits higher in MAU versus DAU as the result of a late month cross-promotion campaign in CityVille. On the day the campaign launched, Mafia Wars hit a high of nearly 5.6 million DAU compared to its April 1 showing of 2.3 million DAU. > Continue reading on Inside Social Games.  | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Save Facebook Updates to Read Later, Chat With Multiple Friends in RockMelt Beta2 Posted: 01 Apr 2011 09:59 AM PDT Later today, social browser RockMelt will roll out its first major update today, adding a Facebook Chat bar, an Instapaper-esque “View Later” option, and deeper Twiter support. It also runs on the latest Google Chromium 10. The new features bring RockMelt Beta2 closer to becoming a full-fledged replacement for leaving a window of these services open at all times. RockMelt first launched in November of 2010 with the goal of building an internet browser with social baked into the chrome, allowing users to access much of their Facebook, Twitter, and bookmark functionality without visiting a URL. Instead, notifications for wall posts, @ replies, blog updates and more are pushed to RockMelt as alerts, eliminating the productivity-fracturing process of checking each site manually. There are several deficiencies in the product’s Facebook integration, though. Users can’t see Facebook’s relevancy sorted Top News feed or activity stories about friends, just the real-time feed of full stories. The status update publisher also doesn’t let users edit the caption of a link’s preview. Still, for those wanting real-time social updates, RockMelt has a lot of promise. The social browser’s Facebook Chat already had some advantages over the canvas site, including the fact that photos and videos linked to would appear in-line. It was one of RockMelt’s most popular features, with users Chatting an average of three times a day, but users requested a better way to Chat with multiple friends at once. Now Chats can be parked as tabs in the bottom Chat bar of Rockmelt Beta2. The Twitter improvements include the ability to edit retweets (something annoyingly absent from Twitter’s website), read direct messages, reply to all users mentioned in a tweet, and simpler Twitter search. View Later makes it easy to favorite a Facebook update, tweet, or URL that users didn’t have time to experience. The option, quite similar to Instapaper, improves on traditional bookmarking by making important items easy to consume and then delete, allowing saved content to be accessed from anywhere users log in to RockMelt rather than trapped on a single machine, and enabling users to save social media content in addition to full websites. The update won’t be available for download until later today, so we can’t tell exactly how smooth the flows of these new features are. In concept, though, the Chat update will make RockMelt Beta2 a viable Facebook substitute for those carrying multiple conversations at once. View Later for Facebook updates adds something unavailable on the canvas, and could be especially helpful for pulling longer form content such as videos and news articles out of the stream and saving them for when a user has time to consume them. The Andressen Horowitz-backed RockMelt has combined both incremental updates and another valuable web service into the Beta2 release. Judging by the source tags on items published to our news feeds after RockMelt launched, users played with the browser for a few weeks but soon returned to their old habits. Time will tell whether these changes make RockMelt any stickier.  | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Facebook-Enabled, Social Recommendations of Mobile Apps Are Here With Apptitude Posted: 01 Apr 2011 08:36 AM PDT
Vivek Agrawal and Shalin Mantri, who were behind a music app last year called Hitmaker, have built Apptitude — a way to learn about the mobile applications your Facebook friends use. It’s on a soft rollout now and has climbed the iTunes charts to #50 on the free app list today. “The top 25 chart is essentially broken,” Mantri said. “It’s rigged and it’s unfair to independent app developers. We need to democratize the playing field for developers and more importantly, for users.” > Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.  | |||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Video, Books, Sports, TV and More On This Week’s List of Top 20 Emerging Apps by MAU Posted: 01 Apr 2011 07:53 AM PDT
Top Gainers This Week
There were a pair of Analysis of Brain apps in Chinese and Thai that made our list. The Chinese 大腦分析 added 641,700 MAU while the Thai การวิเคราะห์สมอง grew by 293,000 MAU; the app's viral features include publishing feed stories after use or creating a photo album published to the stream tagging friends in the process. Ever-popular video apps made our list, too. Sınırsız Video with 175,000 MAU, Yeni Videolar with 166,400 MAU and Video75 Video Ara with 109,300 MAU made the list. Yeni Videolar has the viral feature of automatically publishing a feed story every time you watch a video while the other two allow users to share and Like videos to the stream. There were some interesting social apps. Social Connect is a Facebook Connect integration for a a dating website of the same name, it grew by 163,300 MAU. Then there was LiveProfile, with 134,800 MAU; the app is a messenger platform for use on mobile devices. FBClient is a downloadable program for Windows, a Facebook client, that saw a rise of users of 114,000 MAU this week. ABC.com's app grew by 131,600 MAU. A tool for Page administrators, Welcome Tab for Pages, grew by 121,200 MAU; the app allows Page admins to create their own Twitter, poll, news, video and other content. Book List Challenges provides a list of other book lists, once you select one, you click on the books you've read, publish your score to the feed and the app shows you how you fared compared to other users, allows you to invite friends and shows a leaderboard. The app grew by 112,200 MAU. Finally Yahoo Sports' Citizen Sports app saw an increase of 97,100 MAU this week; the app drives virality by publishing trivia questions to the stream. A user first must select their favorite sports teams, then they have the chance to answer questions about their favorite teams, and if they don't know, publish the question to the stream to ask their network for help answering.  |
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