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Random Posts from Blogs about Facebook
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other company executives visited Washington, D.C. this week, the latest moves to fend of possible legislation around privacy and online advertising.
National politicians have begun paying more attention to online business in the last couple of years, with Facebook getting special attention around issues like privacy policy changes.
Zuckerberg’s first official trip to Capitol Hill included private meetings with politicians, including with Utah’s Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, as well as other members of the Senate’s Republican High-Tech Task Force. Hatch came out of the meeting talking about job creation, not privacy. “It was a productive meeting that underscored technology’s importance as a key engine in fueling job creation and putting the nation on the road to economic recovery,” he said in a statement, according to Politico.
Meanwhile, other company executives testified along with other technology employees from AT&T, Apple and Google at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing about online privacy where senators said they’d be eyeing new online privacy rules by next year.
Democratic Massachusetts Senator John Kerry said during the aforementioned hearing that he was working with Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, also a Democrat, on proposed legislation for 2011. Politico reported that Kerry is likely to have “the full support of the committee’s top Democrats,” who have been involved in several privacy hearings this year. A separate online advertising regulatory bill has been drafted by some members of the House.
Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor also testified that vague legislation could ultimately harm technological innovation. AT&T’s Senior Vice President of Public Policy Dorothy Attwood and Google’s Engineering Lead for Privacy Alma Whitten had similar messages, advocating a loose regulatory framework around online businesses.
Privacy changes, security problems and other issues — along with rapid growth — have put Facebook in the political spotlight.
Facebook has been busy this year taking on the issue of online privacy, with other executives meeting with the Obama administration. Much of this prepping included hiring people to oversee global policy, D.C. legal expertise and even a California lobbyist. Of course Zuckerberg’s first trip to D.C. coinciding with Senate hearing testimony is also a part of the company’s committment to address privacy.
[Zuckerberg photo via Gabriel Bouys AFP/Getty]
Our list of Facebook hires this week is a little thin but includes new adds to engineering, and advertising staff. The list, generated via LinkedIn, in alphabetical order:
- Roger Chen has joined Facebook as an engineer and comes from similar work at Greater Boston Area Information Technology and Services and Panjiva. He also interned for Qiming Venture Partners and Microsoft and previously did research at MIT’s Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Lab.
- Jocelyn Goldfein is now Director of Engineering at Facebook, which we previously reported. Her previous work was as a VP and general maanger at VMware.
- Richard Sim has joined the company as a product marketing manager of performance ads; before, Sim held a similar position at Anchor Intelligence, although he also worked as a product manager at MSN/Microsoft and atKeynote Systems.
Mazda’s new Mazda2 is the star of the company’s new Facebook game called DriverVille, a title that has you souping up your car then racing it. It is also, of course, meant to get more people paying attention to the launch of the new Mazda2 model, with an accompanying sweepstakes also running on the Mazda Facebook page.
The game appears to have been built by Frima, a Quebec-based game developer that creates branded titles. All in all, the quality is good. There’s plenty of built-in advertising, but it doesn’t feel overblown or forced. And it’s actually informative, so it should appeal to casual gamers and those actually hoping to learn a little more about the Mazda2.
The gist is pretty simple — you complete missions to level up, earning Driver Bucks and items along the way that range from a pair of cowboy boots to your very own virtual Mazda2. The Driver Bucks earned can be used to purchase items to accent your Mazda2, your home garage or your DriverVille avatar.
All the activities in the game can be broadcast through your newsfeed to share with friends, and several of the trophies that can be earned in the game center around bringing more people into the game, adding to the viral element.
Once inside the DriverVille universe, you and your friends will be able to move between several locations, including an arcade with interactive games, a movie theater with video clips of Mazda2 advertising, an outlet to use your Driver Bucks to buy items and a Mazda dealership, complete with a brochure rack full of PDFs for all Mazda’s 2011 models.
The actual driving in DriverVille is done on one of several race tracks and leaves a little to be desired. It’s Spy Hunter-esque. The controls are simple and intuitive, so it should appeal to the broad range of people that will probably be playing the game. Most of the attention has been placed on the social elements of the game, and those are well thought-out and complete.
As you wander through the world of DriverVille, you’ll encounter the avatars of other players. You can engage them to see their garages and cars, and you can also choose to visit their actual Facebook pages.
The game coincides with a sweepstakes run through the Mazda2 Facebook page, with the grand prize being an actual Mazda2. Several 64GB iPod Touches will also be awarded as weekly prizes. The campaign is being run by the ad agency Doner, which also worked on the Mazda3 launch for Mazda.
The Inside Network Job Board is dedicated to providing you with the best job opportunities in the Facebook Platform and social gaming ecosystem. When you place job listings on the Inside Network Job Board, they’ll be distributed to readers of Inside Facebook and Inside Social Games. That way, you can be sure that your open positions are being seen by the leading developers, product managers, marketers, designers, and executives in the Facebook Platform and social gaming industry today.
Here are this week’s new listings from the Inside Network Job Board, including positions at EA2D, MeYou Health, HumaNature Studios, Neoedge, Ohai, and Days of Wonder:
- QA Manager (San Francisco, CA)
- Senior Game Designer (San Francisco, CA)
- Art Director (San Francisco, CA)
Check out more top Facebook Platform and social gaming jobs on the Inside Network Job Board.
Those with access to Facebook’s Questions feature are seeing a new design of the home page publisher used to share status updates and other sorts of content. Users must now decide whether they want to publish a simple status update, a question, upload a photo, or post a link and website preview. While displaying the different things you can do with the publisher, the design change hides the status update prompt “What’s on your mind?” and the rest of the publisher behind an additional click, which could reduce sharing.
Previously, users were always greeted to the home page with the status update prompt, which folded out to reveal options to post photos, video, events or links. However, a user could simply input a Facebook event URL or a link to a website, and the publisher would adapt to the post. Video and event options have now been removed. If one tries to post an event URL into the status box, it only shows the URL, while posting it into the link publisher returns an error stating “Application sent an invalid response”.
When a user chooses to upload a photo, a status update-esque input field appears prompting them to “Say something about this photo…”. You could add text to be published with the photos using the old publisher, but no prompt explained the relationship between the text and photo.
Using the publisher to post a question instead of the Questions application itself will increase the likelihood that it will be seen by friends, according to a Questions answer by Facebook’s Zach Ritter. In an effort to educate users about the privacy implications of using the Questions applications, the Question input field with the prompt “What do you want to know?” is accompanied by a warning “Your questions will be visible to everyone”.
Splitting up the publisher may help remind users of the different types of content they can share. Facebook wants to strengthen their position as a portal to third-party sites, and placing a “Post Link” button on the home page may increase traffic driven. However, requiring an extra click to use the publisher could decrease sharing and increase spectating, stagnating the news feed.
If you had told developers during the time of the earliest generation of social games on the Facebook Platform – games like Vampires and Zombies, circa mid 2007 – that The Walt Disney Company would be acquiring an app developer for somewhere between $550 – $750 million three years later, most would have been very skeptical, if not incredulous.
But Disney’s acquisition of large social game developer and publisher Playdom yesterday marks another symbolic moment in the evolution of social gaming on Facebook (and MySpace, where Playdom invested early and has had success). Following EA’s acquisition of Playfish last November, Disney is the first media giant to pull the social gaming acquisition trigger in a big way.
It wasn’t that long ago that social games and apps were thought of as just another vast repository of low quality advertising inventory – if not worse. But Disney’s acquisition of Playdom, even more so than EA’s acquisition of Playfish (given Disney’s breadth of brands and media interests, and how careful they are with protecting their IP portfolio from potentially scarring issues), will now validate the virtual goods model to many media executives and investors who were hesitant to believe that something as trivial as inviting your friend to mop your restaurant might be a promising way to build a business on the internet.
As social gaming has become increasingly mass-market throughout the west and – this year – increasingly popular in the east as well, media companies like Disney are betting on the idea that new brands and IP can only take you so far; existing IP will become increasingly important in separating from the pack of developers vying for consumer attention, especially as customer acquisition costs increase.
We continue to hear of many social game developers and media companies interested in talking more with one another. If anything, we’ve been seeing that developers are getting more eager to have conversations than was the case six to nine months ago, but the number of potential acquirers sniffing around has also been increasing throughout the year as well.
Overall, we continue to expect to see more M&A activity in the space over the coming months. There are a lot of companies who are now confident enough that virtual goods inside games on social networks will be sustainable and are trying to figure out what exactly their move will be.
To dig deeper into the social gaming market, check out our recent Inside Virtual Goods reports:
- Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010,
- Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience, and
- Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009-2010.
Today, Facebook launches a new in-house application called Questions which aims to make it easy for users to get recommendations, advice, and opinions on any subject. Users can pose questions which are displayed in the Questions Dashboard or the news feed of the author’s friends, friends of friends, and people who like things related to a question’s tags, though all Questions content is public. Facebook scans each question for keywords, auto-generating these topic tags, which users can augment by manually adding tags.
Answers are voted as helpful or unhelpful, surfacing the best responses and hiding the worst. Facebook says that users frequently used status updates to ask questions, and they wanted to facilitate this behavior while making the knowledge created available to anyone interested.
Facebook is slowly rolling out the feature to ensure the application’s content is of high quality. Users who create top voted questions and answers may be asked to become community moderators to help guide the application’s users towards best practices.
When a user clicks the Questions navigation button on their home page’s left sidebar, they are brought to the Questions Dashboard. Here they are shown a list of relevant questions based on your interests and the questions you’ve asked, answered, and followed in the past. The dashboard also suggests topics and lists trending topics, a term pulled directly from Twitter, in the right sidebar.
Stay tuned for more information on Questions as we test the product.
[Editor's Note: The data cited in this article is excerpted from Inside Facebook Gold, our membership service tracking Facebook's business and growth around the world. Visit Inside Facebook Gold to learn more about our complete data and analysis offering.]
Today we present our monthly look at Facebook’s language leaderboard and growth.
Facebook recently announced that it had reached an astonishing 500 million users around the world. However, the relevant question for developers, advertisers and marketers is not simply how large this total audience is, but how to reach more and more of these users through strategies including language localization.
While the overall ranking of the site’s top languages remains unchanged since June, with English-speaking users outnumbering the next group of language users by over 3:1, this hasn’t stopped many leading developers and marketing firms operating within the ecosystem from significant localization investment.
Such efforts are for good reason, too — among Facebook’s top languages, those that saw the greatest rate of growth were Portuguese, Arabic, Spanish and French. (Stay tuned to see how this maps to country market growth — we’ll be presenting July total audience numbers in the upcoming Facebook Global Monitor).
Here’s a look at growth rates for Facebook’s Top 10 languages:
What you can see from the chart above is that some of Facebook’s fastest-growing languages aren’t yet even part of the site’s top 5 overall. This is unsurprising — any change to the leaderboard will likely be slow, if it happens at all. Nonetheless, major markets in North America and Western Europe are reaching, or have already achieved, Facebook saturation. Users in those markets are also correspondingly savvy in their attitudes and receptiveness towards ads, applications, and fan page marketing campaigns.
The full Facebook Global Language Report, and extensive audience demographic data for Facebook’s markets around the world, is only available to members of Inside Facebook Gold, our data membership service. To learn more or join, please visit Inside Facebook Gold.
With thousands of applications saturating the Apple App Store, its impossible to find all the games and apps that might suit your fancy. Granted, there are networks such as OpenFeint, Plus+, and Scoreloop, but these barely put a dent in the total, and even then one ends up searching these for what they might like. That’s where Toronto-based Kibboko comes into play with its Facebook Connect enabled application, Appblast, making recommendations to its users based on their own Facebook activity.
Using Kibboko’s “Bamboo personalization platform,” Appblast actually digs through everything the user has done, both recently and otherwise, on Facebook. People start out by selecting their device of preference — be it an iTouch, an iPhone, or an iPad — followed by a country of residence and Bamboo does the rest.
After digging through one’s Facebook activity, Appblast will make recommendations based on two elements: Your interests (“Liking” something) and recent activity. Digging back to when we “Liked” the Facebook game World at War months ago, it recommended any number of war-based games such as Call of Duty.
The second means of discovery, and also the most amusing, is based on recent activity; namely, status updates. It’s certainly a great idea, but as with any program that recognizes words, it usually can’t understand context. During our coverage of StarCraft II and Battle.net, we quoted the game: “Shields up, weapons online. Not equipped with shields? Well then, buckle up!” Appblast recognized “shields” and “buckle” and deduced that we might be interested in lifestyle apps about medieval shields and bucklers. However, one of the recommendations was about protection and held a bunch of fantasy quotes, so it wasn’t terribly far off.
Should users find something they do find interesting, Appblast has quick and convenient links that instantly bring up descriptions, screenshots, and any existing user reviews directly from within the app (no need to load up iTunes – unless you wish to buy it). Moreover, users can also mark each app as owned, if they have it, so that it does not pop up again.
This is actually where Appblast begins making use of Facebook’s social capabilities, as, if friends also use the app, they can see what their friends are buying and/or playing. That said, it is worth noting that while users can search for apps based on iDevice, the tab that houses all owned applications does not clearly state what device they are on. Also, the app does not appear to ever make recommendations based on the apps marked as owned.
Anyways, if your friends don’t own an iDevice, there’s little point for them to use Appblast, thus that discovery method goes out the window. Not to worry, though, as the application also includes a feed of best selling apps an what other Appblast users have been up to. In truth, it’s not nearly as effective as the recommendations (it’s basically the same as any of the App Store top selling lists), but it at least adds a small extra way to find apps.
In the end, Appblast is a pretty nifty little creation. It’s recommendation tools aren’t quite as sophisticated as one might think in that it appears to make most of its recommendation based on Facebook Likes, and it’s word recognition for status updates doesn’t always recognize context (though this can often be kind of fun). Overall, however, once players start adding in all the apps they own, Appblast does at least provide yet one more means of discovering something worthwhile for their devices.
Out of the last five startups that Facebook has bought, four of them have had something to do with sharing information in a social news feed interface or sharing location data, if not both. All of the sale prices have been relatively low, too, with the acquisitions largely intended to bring in talented developers. So it makes sense that Facebook may be buying Hot Potato, a startup that lets you create and share a stream of information about events, and anything else.
The acquisition is close to finalized, according to TechCrunch, and like Facebook’s other purchases, the main point may just be to scoop up talented people who have generally relevant product and engineering experience. The company has raised $1.4 million in funding from well-known angels, with the price being somewhere in the $10 million to $15 million range, according to MediaMemo.
But there are a few areas where the Hot Potato team, headed by veteran product leader Jake Schaffer, would be the most relevant. Facebook is “supposedly looking to bulk up the projects under Facebook Director of Product Blake Ross, and on the mobile side of things,” TechCunch says. “This Hot Potato deal could fulfill either of those — or both.”
Location, a long-tested feature that, one way or another, would involve people sharing their locations into the news feed — probably from their phones — then talking about what they’re doing. That seems relevant to Hot Potato.
Another area is Facebook Questions, a product currently in private beta, that Ross has been working on directly. It lets users ask and answer questions in a threaded-comments format, somewhat like Yahoo Answers or Quora. Questions hasn’t fully launched yet, and it’s possible that the Hot Potato team could end up here.
Of course, Facebook’s news feed has been a key part of the site for years, the company has more experience designing (and redesigning) it at scale than anyone else in the world, and maybe it just wants more help here.
Most of the other startups that Facebook has bought recently have somehow been working on social sharing products. FriendFeed, which Facebook bought almost a year ago, had its own social activity stream service. Nextstop, acquired earlier this month, let travelers share their experiences with each other. ShareGrove, bought in May, focused on private conservations. The other two companies are less relevant: Octazen made an effective contact importer for social sites; Divvyshot made online photo products.
Hot Potato might go the way of FriendFeed, whose employees are now working in a variety of areas across the company, or it might emerge with a soon-to-be-launched Facebook product.
