I read with. Clarifying Our Platform Policies. What I Really Think About Facebook. Lets talk Facebook First, I’m not recommending to any of my companies that we leave facebook. I am recommending that we de-emphasize pushing consumers or partners to like us on FB and focus on building up our followings across all existing social media platforms and to evaluate those that we feel can grow a material following. In the past we put FB first, twitter second. FB has been moved to the bottom of a longer list. At the core of the issues I have with FB is how FB thinks about itself .
This is from their page on Newsfeed, Engagement and Promoted Posts : “In this way, we can keep news feed an engaging service where people come to get the information that is most interesting to them.” FB believes that their news feed is an engaging information source. This has to be a good thing, right ? People go to Google Search with every intention of leaving it. FB is what it is. Being a time suck that people enjoy is a good thing. So how does this relate to brands and sponsored post ?
Why? Hey Mark Cuban: Of course Facebook is charging you — what did you expect? The war on noise. George Takei believes its his right to make sure every single message he posts to Facebook gets through to his fans’ screens. Jason Calacanis says that Facebook is in a bad war with George Takei. I told Jason he’s wrong. What we’re really in is a war on noise. Our computers bring us HUGE amounts of noise. On my screen right now is a new tweet every half a second. New email arrives every few seconds. It’s gotten to the point where I simply can’t answer more than about five percent of my email now.
I’ve been swimming in this noise for a while and I’ve noticed a few things. 1. We are great at generating noise. So, what does this mean now that we’re leaving the social age and entering the contextual age? Noise is about to get worse. Why? Sensors are generating noise. The contextual age means we’re going to have to go to war on noise. That means that George Takei will have to sit down and shut up. Here’s another way to look at it. George Takei, in the past 24 hours, has published seven items. Facebook giveth, Facebook taketh: A curious case of video apps. Nick Bilton, in today’s The New York Times, writes about Facebook’s ability to look at what is happening on its network and predict the future.
He says since more than nine million apps and services use Facebook Connect, the Open Graph developer platform, the company can essentially predict what comes next. Maybe! In reality, what is more likely is that Facebook can turn on or turn off the traffic spigot and hence play the king maker. Bilton quotes an anonymous source as saying, “Facebook is now understanding the type of information it has about what is successful online, or what is a potential threat to Facebook.” I would take that comment with a pound of salt. Why? Not all videos are equal A few months ago, Viddy, a mobile video creation and sharing app, started to use Facebook’s Open Graph to post videos to people’s timelines. The timing for the app couldn’t be more fortuitous.
Viddy wasn’t the only social-mobile video app benefiting from Facebook’s Open Graph largesse. Blurry Picture. Snapchat rises: Why Poke’s decline shows Facebook’s inability to invent. Remember last week? You know, the week when Facebook indulged in yet another act of wanton xeroxing and released Poke to compete with the red-hot insta-communication app, Snapchat. Well, a week later, the world has returned to normal. Snapchat, the insta-sharing app is once again among the most popular apps — at third place.
And Poke… Well, it is languishing at the 34th spot on the top free apps list, way behind Instagram, Messenger and the official Facebook apps. It is yet another example of why just because you can copy something it doesn’t mean it will become successful, even if you are Facebook who is doing the copying. This quick decline in downloads raises some questions about Facebook’s ability to be kingmaker. Poynter’s Jeff Sonderman writes: In April, The Washington Post’s Social Reader had 12 million monthly active users. Invent something Why does it have to look at others to come up with new user behaviors and new features?
The contextual and exponential future of Facebook. Rocky Barbanica and I visited Facebook’s headquarters today and interviewed a bunch of people for the book “Age of Context” that I’m writing with Shel Israel. What’s the age of context? Five radically expanding technologies/data types. 1. Sensors. 2. Wearable computing. 3. What will that bring for consumers? I met with people like Mike Shaver, director of engineering, at Facebook. He talks about context, and how different contexts, like, say, when you’re driving, which is different than when you are reading Facebook on your couch, and is different than if you were skiing down a slope, could be used to bring different items to you. He told me before we started recording that Facebook is, indeed, trying to pick the best items for you to see. Facebook has to pick, out of millions of potential messages, only about 30 for us each to see, each time we refresh the page (or, better yet, drag down on the mobile app).
Finally, I met Mike Schroepfer, vice president of engineering. 1. 2. 3. 4. Facebook tests threaded comments on some pages. Facebook Tests Ranked Comments to Boost Engagement. Facebook is testing a new comments format on brand and subscriber pages by placing the most engaging comments up higher on posts, the company confirmed on Monday. "We are testing a new format for comments on Page posts," Facebook said in a statement to Mashable. "As part of this test, the most engaging comments appear higher up. You will also be able to reply to individual comments as well as the original post. "' SEE ALSO: Facebook Testing Sound Notifications This means brand pages in the test, which range from journalists such as Fareed Zakaria and New York Jets player Tim Tebow, include ranked comments based on Likes, responses and hides.
Those with the most engagement appears higher up on the list. Page administrators are also able to reply directly to comments via a "reply" option. If the test sticks, it would allow Facebook to promote more interesting and engaging content, as well as enable more conversations about posted content across the site. Image via iStockphoto. Update: Facebook Plans To Build Out Pinterest-Style Collections Feature For Web And Mobile. Very Pinteresting, in fact.
Last night I asked Facebook why its Collections feature had disappeared, and it confirmed “the test is now complete”. But now it tells me that’s because the product is being built out, presumably for a full launch, not being shut down as I originally published. Facebook will improve Colletions and port it to mobile, but had to shut down the existing version to do that.
[Update: This article has been heavily edited. Facebook gave me this statement on Collections: “Product development on Collections has not stopped. Pinterest is an undeniable success. Facebook seemed to think if this nesting and product photo sharing was so popular, maybe it could improve itself by offering Collections. Maybe they did, maybe they didn’t. Collections was also rather limiting and overly commercial, since you could only pin products from partnered businesses, not just anything you found on the web. A revamped version of Collections may launch sometime in the future. FACEBOOK: I WANT MY FRIENDS BACK. If you want to send Facebook a message, please feel free to use our graphics for your Facebook page This has been brewing since around May. At least that’s when we first started noticing it here at Dangerous Minds and we certainly weren’t the only ones.
Spring of 2012 was when bloggers, non-profits, indie bands, George Takei, community theaters, photographers, caterers, artists, mega-churches, high schools, tee-shirt vendors, campus coffee shops, art galleries, museums, charities, food trucks, and a near infinite variety of organizations; individuals from all walks of life; and businesses, both large and small, began to detect—for it was almost imperceptible at first—that the volume was getting turned down on their Facebook reach. Each post was now being seen only by a fraction of their total “fans” who would previously have seen them. When we first noticed the problem, our blog had about 29,000 Facebook “likes.” It’s no conspiracy. That’s true. What else would come even close? Publications Three Things Facebook Needs To Nail With Search 09/17.
Mark Zuckerberg took the stage last week at Techcrunch Disrupt to discuss all things Facebook, including the inevitability of a true Facebook search engine. It was the piece of information that most technology writers gravitated towards; even the stock price took notice (Facebook shares rose more than $2 per following the Zuckerberg interview). Zuckerberg noted, among other things, that Facebook currently processes “1 billion queries a day” without really attempting to productize a search capability. He goes on to say, “Facebook is pretty uniquely positioned to answer the questions people have. What sushi restaurants have my friends gone to in New York in the last six months and Liked? Or which of my friends or friends of friends work at a company that I’m interested in working at -- because I want to talk to them about what it’s going to be like to work there. Why is the promise of a Facebook search engine so exciting to users and shareholders alike?
What is my Facebook UID? - Easy finding your Facebook UID? Facebook’s plan to find its next billion users: convince them the internet and Facebook are the same - Quartz. This is the story of Facebook’s rapidly unfolding plan to take over the world, or at least the world wide web. It’s a tale that’s been hiding in plain sight for years, and it begins with an explanation of how Facebook has reached almost a billion users. It continues with a roadmap for how the seeds of Facebook’s future growth – to two billion and beyond – have already been planted. In both cases, what matters is emerging markets in Asia, Africa, and Latin America: the striving, proto-middle class “next billion” whose first impression of the internet is often that it seems to consist entirely of a site called Facebook.
By the end of this year, there will be more mobile phones on earth than people, and 73% of those phones will be something other than smartphones. Africa, or how “Facebook Zero” took over an entire continent in 18 months In May 2010, Facebook announced Facebook Zero. When you first visit the site, you don’t see the standard Facebook homepage, only text. Facebook’s DR Problem. It’s just the kind of headline that Facebook rues: “Fewer Than 1 Percent of Sales Can Be Tracked Back to Social Media.” The natural conclusion: Facebook will never reach its ad potential because that means social advertising doesn’t work. Business Insider’s Henry Blodget quickly declared the study “bad news for Facebook.” On the other side, early participants in Facebook’s nascent ad exchange are declaring it quite successful.
In fact, the gobs of Facebook ad inventory convert better than regular Web publishing inventory for retargeting campaigns. As demand-side platform Triggit’s CEO Zach Coelius told me recently, “It’s tons of cheap inventory. We’re seeing the post-click conversion rates are exponentially higher.” These contradictory arguments will likely go on with Facebook, particularly as it moves to mobile. As I’ve noted previously, Facebook is not Google. Facebook doesn’t have this. The brand business will be more complicated but has more potential for Facebook. Facebook Handled their IPO Exactly Right. Andrews Ross Sorkin wrote a piece for the NY Times that was just ridiculous. He put the blame squarely on the back of the CFO of FB. Talk about getting it 180 degrees wrong. Have you ever been to an auction where the selling party told a buyer to reduce their price because they were worried that the item might not hold its value ?
Neither have I. Facebook was able to raise about 10 BILLION DOLLARS in this IPO. Who’s job is it to help manage the portfolio’s of FB investors ? As far as traders who bought the stock hoping for a pop. I bought and sold FB shares as a TRADE, not an investment. If the goal of the company is to maximize the cash obtained from the IPO, then the CFO should absolutely price the stock to maximize the return. Andrew did try to make one cogent argument that Facebook faced the risk of employees leaving because their options were underwater.
February 11, 2009 1:43 PM. How Eduardo Saverin Sold Facebook Ads in 2004. The knock on Facebook is often that it doesn’t have its ad strategy figured out. That might be, but the company courted advertisers pretty much from the get-go. As captured in “The Social Network,” Facebook’s then-CFO Eduardo Saverin was in New York City right after the launch of TheFacebook, as it was then called, to sell ads. One of those who met with Saverin in April 2004 saved Facebook’s first media kit, which was provided to Digiday. TheFacebook was a far cry from the global behemoth it is today. Just a bit over two months old, the media kit details its 70,000 users at 20 major colleges. But Facebook’s grand plans are evident in its projections, which include launching in 200 colleges in six months. Facebook’s original pitch was a bit different than the message it bring to marketers today.
Below is the media kit Saverin was using to pitch potential advertisers that spring, obtained from a New York-based marketer he met with personally. Facebook Needs New Revenue Streams, Fast. By Erin Griffith On July 26, 2012 From here on out Facebook will be forever evaluated by whether it hits or misses a group of analyst’s expectations, not on its future vision, its dominance of social networking, its investments in long term growth or its potential to make money. At the moment, there are two ways Facebook does that: Advertising and Zynga. And since the company went public three months ago, each of those two sources of income have been ripped to shreds. Put mildly, today’s earnings call could be brutal. Surely you caught the Zynga mess yesterday. The company missed its earnings estimates so badly that one analyst actually apologized to investors in a note titled “We Are Sorry and Embarrassed by Our Mistake.”
Zynga contributed 15% of Facebook’s $3.71 billion in revenue in 2011. Facebook’s ads business has come under just as much fire since its IPO. By now, I imagine anyone holding Facebook stock believes in the company’s long-term vision. Facebook Want Button - Tom Waddington. Facebook testing ‘Want’ button plugin. Facebook testing ‘Want’ button plugin Facebook appears to be testing a new “Want” button plugin similar to its popular Like button.
Developer Tom Waddington from Cut Out + Keep discovered that a Want button has been added to the Facebook Javascript SDK as an XFBML tag – <fb:wants>. The button is not publicly listed among the other social plugins on Facebook’s developer site. Waddington says the button will only work on Open Graph objects marked as “products.” With Open Graph, developers have been able to create their own “want” actions, but users have to authorize a third-party app in order for those buttons to generate stories on Timeline and News Feed. Just as the Like button allowed Facebook to collect massive amounts of data about users’ interests, the Want button could be a key way for the social network to collect desire-based data.
Although publishing “Want” actions is currently disabled by Facebook, Waddington was able to implement a version of the button on his own site. Which Facebook apps are people really using? Facebook’s Brilliant Disaster. Never Take Your Eyes Off This Hacker Metric. (133) Facebook: What was it like to be a user of TheFacebook.com in 2004. Facebook's First Article: Zuckerberg Admits 'Friendster Was a Model' INFOGRAPHIC: The History Of Facebook, Timeline-Style. How to get more likes on Facebook. In Facebook Deal for Instagram, Board Was All But Out of Picture. Facebook's New Advertising Strategy Is Brilliant and Unexpected. Facebook's missteps, criticisms, and failures. Fashion Tag. Rewarding Users. Study of Facebook News Feed Changes: Page Post Comments Up 21%, Likes Up 9%, Impressions Down 25%