Posts tagged Facebook’s
Facebook’s Next Advertising Move is Mobile
Feb 6th
Mark Zuckerberg says he has always been reluctant to make Facebook all about the ads and less about the user experience. This is surprising, however, coming from a freshly minted billionaire who owns more than 25% of his own company and holds more than 50% of the voting power.
“Mark has an evangelical approach to advertising,” Martin Sorrell, chief executive of WPP Plc, the world’s largest advertising agency told Reuters. “He sees Facebook as a vehicle to open up communication, not to monetize.” Facebook’s attitude toward advertising is finally changing. Users have started to notice, too. Today Facebook took that first step, claiming that sponsored stories for mobile will be coming “within weeks.”
Sponsor
In its S-1 filing, Facebook described mobile as one of its biggest risk factors. Yet about half of Facebook’s users visit the site through mobile devices. As more people begin accessing Facebook primarily through mobile, Facebook is going to have to make major changes in its mobile advertising platform.
As soon as early March 2012, Facebook will soon start dropping “featured stories” into users’ mobile news feeds. Currently Facebook has 425 million mobile users. HTML5 app buttons have started popping up on Facebook’s mobile site. A Facebook spokesperson confirmed with Reuters that Facebook will not work with an agency to create paid ads on the mobile platform.
Facebook started integrating sponsored stories into the news ticker and the news feed. It was only a matter of time before Facebook decided to move forward with ads in the mobile space.
When it comes to Facebook ads that are built around a user’s data, questions about privacy laws come up. In fact, in its S-1 filing, Facebook noted the “evolving nature” of privacy and data protection laws as two major risk factors – not to mention the fact that Facebook doesn’t have a mobile advertising platform. At least, not yet.
How will Facebook’s mobile ad strategy evolve? Take the poll on ReadWriteMobile.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Facebook’s Incredible Growth Story In Charts
Feb 3rd
Facebook’s IPO filing, released this week, is fascinating for many reasons: We’ve already covered several angles.
Perhaps the most exciting, though, is the wealth of data about the company that is finally public – from its user statistics to its growth around the world to its finances. I’ve highlighted and visualized some of the most interesting data in this series of charts.
Sponsor
One of the most powerful things about Facebook is how many of its users log on every day.
Facebook’s IPO filing includes quarterly stats of its Monthly Active Users and Daily Active Users, both worldwide and broken down by region. (Also, how about some appreciation for Facebook to sticking with “active” users in its stats, not just total, all-time sign-ups?)
Worldwide, you can see that 57% of the people who use Facebook within a given month also use Facebook on an average day, up from 47% in early 2009.
This varies, of course, by region, which gives an idea of how “sticky” Facebook is in different parts of the world. In the U.S. and Canada, it’s 70%. In Asia, where Facebook isn’t as established – but is growing fast – it’s only about 50%.
Facebook is increasingly a global story. Its user base is now almost equally concentrated in the four regions it breaks out. That’s a pretty big change from 2009, when it was primarily focused in the U.S. and Canada.
In 2011, about 30% of Facebook’s new users came from Asia, and about 40% in the “rest of world” category. Only about 10% of its new users came from the U.S. and Canada.
Facebook’s IPO filing also brings us new access to its finances. Here, we can see one reason why Facebook’s revenue growth (88% in 2011) is outpacing its user growth (39% in 2011) – because Facebook is bringing in more revenue per user than it did in the past.
How did that happen? Significant growth in both Facebook’s ad business (85% of its revenue) and its payments business (part of the 15% of “other” revenue).
Facebook’s future success, of course, relies on both its ability to attract new users and its ability to generate more revenue per user.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
[Poll] What Is Facebook’s Best Mobile Monetization Strategy?
Feb 3rd
You would think that a company with 423 million monthly active mobile users would find a way to squeeze some revenue out of them. Easier said than done. The biggest question to come out of Facebook’s S-1 filing for its IPO was how the company could monetize its robust mobile app ecosystem. How will Facebook do it? Stitching in mobile banner ads is not likely a solution for Facebook. We explore Facebook’s opportunities and ask for your opinion in this week’s ReadWriteMobile poll.
Sponsor
From Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s letter to shareholders:
By helping people form these connections, we hope to rewire the way people spread and consume information. We think the world’s information infrastructure should resemble the social graph – a network built from the bottom up or peer-to-peer, rather than the monolithic, top-down structure that has existed to date. We also believe that giving people control over what they share is a fundamental principle of this rewiring.
One of the beautiful (or creepy) things about Facebook ads on a desktop browser is that they are targeted straight to the user. Facebook knows where you are, what you are sharing, who your friends are and what they are doing. If you “Like” pages, it knows what brands you like, what books you read, what TV and movies you watch. With the Open Graph and Timeline, it also knows other verbs associated with your lifestyle, such as when and how far you run when exercising, what you eat and what music you listen to. All of this, of course, if you choose to share it.
It has been pointed out several times after Facebook filed its S-1 that the key to the company’s billions has been the “Like” button. The Like button turned a mammoth but disorganized social graph into a skeletal body that permeates both the front and back end of the Internet. Facebook was then able to correlate users’ interest graph and advertising against that. If you think about it, the Like button isthe most brilliant inventions of the Web 2.0 era. The Like button organized the social Web, gave it backbone, structure… and money.
One of Facebook’s challenges will be to take the data it already has through the Like button and burgeoning Open Graph ecosystem and apply it to mobile. What will this look like? Will we see the same banner and targeted ads that we see on our desktop? How does Facebook do this without ruining the mobile user experience and angering its most dedicated users?
On the other hand, targeted advertising actually has larger potential when it is taken off the desktop and put into the pockets of users. Smartphones are sophisticated sensors that recognize the world around them. The capability of knowing where a person is, what they are doing and who they are with will only grow as devices evolve over the next several years. The social Web in the physical world. This is where Facebook’s biggest opportunity is. Geo-fenced push notifications, proximity alerts when near something or someone on your interest graph, location-based deals. To a certain extent, you have heard it all before. Startups have been working on how to bring push advertising and messaging to mobile since smartphones became location aware. Yet, none of those startups have the user base that Facebook has.
Google will also likely turn to more of a messaging-based mobile advertising strategy in the future. With an Android in 50% of smartphone users pockets, Google has the potential to know more about you than any other company on Earth. It probably already does.
Facebook could also set up a platform, much like AdMob for Facebook, which serves as a real-time bidding (RTB) exchange for keywords based on the social and Open Graph. By making it an ad platform, Facebook takes a lot of the work out of building its own internal ad infrastructure. Google has employed the RTB method to great success.
Or, it could be a mixture of all of these avenues.
There is also the idea of payments through the app ecosystem. Mobile Web-based games built on top of the social graph with in-app payments. This harkens to the so-called “Project Spartan” that Facebok was rumored to be working on last year. It does not have to be only games either. Brands could create Facebook Page mobile Web apps and tie incentives and payments through Facebook Credits. The ability to turn Pages into mobile advertising or payment revenue could be a huge vertical for Facebook.
As you can see, there are a lot of opportunities and avenues for Facebook to take when monetizing its mobile user base. What is the likeliest choice? What will be the best money maker for Facebook in the mobile realm? Take the poll below and let us know your thoughts in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Facebook’s Biggest Risks Explained
Feb 1st
Facebook is about to jump into unfriendly waters. If founder Mark Zuckerberg thought the company faced fierce competitors in Silicon Valley, he is about to find that the denizens of Wall Street are not nearly so forgiving. There are risks to going public. How does the world perceive your company? Can the platform grow and maintain its edge? The trick for Facebook will be to balance the concerns of its shareholders with the need to push the boundaries of innovation. This is no easy task.
In its S-1 filing today, Facebook outlined a litany of risks for the company going forward. Monetizing the mobile user base in a system dominated by its competitors will be a major challenge going forward. Diversifying its portfolio away from its reliance on advertising will be a big task, one that Google has never quite figured out. We take a deep dive into Facebook’s risk factors below.
Sponsor
Jump to:
What Are The Risks?
Facebook’s risks are fundamentally tied to the fact that nearly 85% of the company’s revenue is tied to advertising. When most of your assets are tied to one cash vertical, any fluctuations in the vertical can lead to dramatic swings in performance. Facebook also ha concerns with competition, global expansion, infrastructure and retaining top talent. Here is the summary breakdown from the prospectus with the exception of some specific stock risks.
We have enlisted Antone Johnson, founder of the Bottom Line Law Group to help with the analysis of Facebook’s risk factors. Johnson is a respected Silicon Valley lawyer that has spent 15 years representing technology and media companies. He was vice president, legal affairs at eHarmony as well as assistant general counsel to Intermix Media which included serving as director of business and legal affairs at Myspace, culminating in the company’s $650 million sale to Fox.
Johnson on Facebook’s reliance on advertising:
“Main story here is the drop from 98% to 85% of revenue being generated by advertising. Obviously a good risk mitigation approach to diversify with revenue from virtual goods, etc. Again, mobile jumps out as an important theme; given they admittedly don’t make ad revenue from mobile users, this could be a significant headwind for FB in coming years as smartphones become near-universal and people become accustomed to using them as their primary means of accessing social media.
The rest of this risk factor is par for the course.”
The major risks for Facebook include user retention in the face of competition, dealing with data breaches, malware and privacy concerns, how to monetize its robust mobile ecosystem and what is to be done about its peculiar Zynga problem.
Mobile
According to the S-1, around half of Facebook’s users access the website through mobile devices. Facebook has a robust mobile presence it iterates its native apps constantly. As an advertising-based business, Facebook has a distinct problem here.
It does not serve ads in its mobile apps.
Facebook has 425 million monthly active users on its mobile platform as of December 2011. Mobile is rapidly becoming a replacement for personal computers and that threatens Facebook’s advertising model at this stage. The key for Facebook will be able to turn mobile users into mobile dollars.
“They are forthcoming about the challenges,” Johnson said. “No revenue currently generated from mobile advertising; unclear how much mobile use could be monetized; failure to solve this puzzle combined with a dramatic shift toward mobile usage could be a serious problem for FB; and per the next risk factor, they don’t control the iOS and Android platforms. Frankly, if there were one thing that persuaded me not to invest in FB (given the growth assumptions built into current valuation), this would be it.”
As we have written before, Facebook iterates constantly. Its philosophy in mobile is to “move fast, break things and fix things fast.” The company’s managing engineer for mobile, Dave Fetterman, said at Facebook’s f8 developer conference last September.
“Being able to write it once today and ship it tomorrow? That is something that Facebook is really good at and that we love doing and that is at the center of being able to move fast. Move fast has an implicit third clause – move fast, break things, and fix things fast,” Fetterman said.
Now that Facebook is a public company, will it be able to keep that mentality? When things break, that directly affects a company’s stock price.
Reliance On Mobile Platforms
Facebook also has the problem that it does not control the mobile platforms that its app is featured on. That means that part of Facebook’s prosperity is tied to the stability of Apple’s iOS, Android, BlackBerry etc.
Many of the major technology companies are in one way or another dependent on the others. While we think of the Big Five (Apple, Google, Facebook, Microsoft and Amazon) as stand-alone entities, there is also a bit of an incestuous relationship between all of them. Each is a pillar that supports a much larger structure. When one of those pillars is weakened, another may become stronger but the overall ecosystem may suffer. This is exemplified in Facebook’s mobile predicament.
“The best way to view this might be as the ‘Google Risk Factor,’ and I think recent Android sales/market share figures must have FB running scared. Apple has never been a significant player in social and seems unlikely to be anytime soon,” Johnson said.
Elaborating, Johnson compares the Google/Facebook relationship to the trouble caused when Microsoft built Internet Explorer into Windows in the late 1990s and how that affected the biggest player at the time, Netscape.
“‘…any changes in such systems that degrade our products’ functionality or give preferential treatment to competitive products’ presumably means Android being optimized for G+ in every iteration going forward, giving it unfair advantages vs FB mobile. (Shades of Microsoft building IE into Windows years ago?) It would probably raise some serious antitrust concerns, but the wheels of antitrust enforcement turn so slowly that it might not matter much in the end (as was the case with Microsoft and Netscape).”
Competition
Right next to reliance on advertising, one of the biggest risk factors is the fact that Facebook faces a vibrant social ecosystem that wants to chip away at the company’s user base. Google+ and Twitter are both mentioned in the S-1 while other entities worldwide, such as Orkut, could hinder Facebook growth.
Growth vis-a-vis the competition is not to be overlooked. The way Facebook defines itself in the S-1 is directly correlated to how it describes the competition. More or less, that means the denizens at Google at this stage.
“Competition is always a highly ranked risk factor, in this case the broad range of what FB considers competitive is striking,” Johnson said. “This is also the second ‘Google Risk Factor’ with references made to G+, Orkut, ‘Google Search plus Your World,’ Android, and war chests for acquisitions (presumably Google and Microsoft’s). International competition plays a greater role than I would have expected, but it make sense given how much of FB’s growth in recent years has been driven by international.”
User Growth, Retention And Revenue
Facebook’s first bullet point in its risks section is the ability to retain users and get them to spend longer amounts of time on the site. While Facebook is the dominant social platform on the Web, it position as the top dog is not guaranteed in the long run. Look at what happened to Myspace.
Johnson’s analysis:
“We anticipate that our active user growth rate will decline over time” reflects the “law of large numbers” — i.e., don’t expect metrics to grow at these rates forever. This is a common-sense observation. What will be interesting is how FB responds. “To the extent our active user growth rate slows, our business performance will become increasingly dependent on our ability to increase levels of user engagement in current and new markets.” That suggests FB is rightly focused on increasing site engagement per user over time rather than merely squeezing more revenue out of each user through aggressive monetization tactics. This language sends the right message that FB is focused on the product/user experience long-term and is willing to trade off short-term monetization against that principle.
The striking contrast here is MySpace. I didn’t see this myself because I left in August 2006, but many MySpace execs who stuck around longer argue the UX was degraded and ultimately ruined post-News Corp. acquisition because the mandate to hit revenue targets undermined the product itself. This risk factor might as well go on to name MS explicitly the way it continues, “A number of other social networking companies that achieved early popularity have since seen their active user bases or levels of engagement decline, in some cases precipitously.”
Zynga and The Zynga Ecosystem
When Zynga filed for its IPO, we noted that the company was overly-reliant on Facebook for all of its revenue. We also wondered why Facebook does not just buy Zynga. That would eliminate this entire risk category. Well, the inverse is also true. Right now, Zynga drives about 12% of Facebook’s revenue. Zynga is important to Facebook in two aspects: direct advertising revenue and payments. Much of Facebook’s Credits program is tied to games and Zynga is the largest provider of games to Facebook. Overall, Zynga contributes 80% to Facebook Credits revenue.
Zynga is not exactly a company conquering the world right now. Its own stock has been more or less flat since it went public, its management has been criticized heavily and outside of a few major hits like Mafia Wars and Words With Friends and many of its other titles are lackluster. It is also in Zynga’s best interest to diversify its portfolio and rely less on Facebook. That will include its own mobile strategies, websites and social platforms like Google+.
Zynga is also indicative of the third-party ecosystem that Facebook relies upon. The growth of the Facebook application ecosystem ties in with the company’s ability to grow the platform and monetize each user either through ads or payments.
“Much of this just sounds like variations on the theme of trading off user experience vs. monetization – in this case through viral promotion of social gaming,” Johnson said. “The wording, ‘We are continuously seeking to balance the distribution objectives of our Platform developers with our desire to provide an optimal user experience, and we may not be successful in achieving a balance that continues to attract and retain Platform developers’ suggests that users will always win (probably wise) at the expense of developers. Reliance on Zynga apps for Payments revenue is also a theme.”
The Zuckerberg Effect
To its credit, Facebook recognizes that its mercurial CEO is one of its biggest assets and could be one of its biggest detriments. Zuckerberg owns the single biggest majority of Facebook’s post-IPO stock and hence has a great degree of control over what the company does. With that comes a fiduciary responsibility to the stockholders. We will see how well he handles that responsibility.
“As a stockholder, even a controlling stockholder, Mr. Zuckerberg is entitled to vote his shares, and shares over which he has voting control as a result of voting agreements, in his own interests, which may not always be in the interests of our stockholders generally,” the report states.
“This may be the first time in history a sole founder has had this degree of enduring voting power over a company going public at such a size and valuation — not just for the foreseeable future, but beyond the grave,” Johnson said. “I’m frankly shocked to see language that would allow all of Zuckerberg’s extraordinary governance rights to be transferred to his designated successor in the event of his death. That’s admittedly a remote occurrence given his young age, but as an investor or Board member, I would vehemently object to that provision. It’s one thing to have complete trust in Mark to run the company, quite another to entrust his appointed successor with that kind of domination as a matter of corporate governance. It has the feel more of a family dynasty business than of a modern publicly traded tech company.”
The S-1 also mentions Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg specifically several times. Many of Facebook’s original founders have left the company to start their own enterprises. Zuckerberg is the important pin, but Sandberg is important glue to holding the company together on a day-to-day basis. One of the biggest jobs for Sandberg will be to monitor Zuckerberg and remind him of his responsibility to the stockholders. Neither individual is going to relish that position but as Facebook grows up and goes public, it is a necessary for the C-suite to police itself.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
How Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg Became one of the Most Powerful Women in the World
Feb 1st
Mark Zuckerberg is on his way to becoming one of the richest people in the world, but when it comes to influence in the worlds of politics and business, he sits in the shadow of his chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg.
Sandberg, 43, is credited for the success of Facebook’s advertising strategy. When she joined Facebook in 2008 it had 130 employees and no cash. Three years later Facebook was profitable, 2,500 people worked there and the userbase had jumped from 70 million to almost 845 million. But her career – and influence – began long before Zuckberg sought her out.
Sponsor
“Don’t leave before you leave.”
Sandberg was born in 1969 in Washington, D.C., and at the age of two her family moved to Miami, where she grew up. She is the oldest of three siblings, David and Michelle.
As an undergraduate at Harvard, Sandberg majored in economics and took Lawrence Summers’ class in public sector economics. Her midterm and final grades were the highest in the class, and Summers ended up becoming the adviser on her senior thesis, “how economic inequality contributes to spousal abuse.”
When Summers became the chief economist at the World Bank in January 1991, he recruited Sandberg, hiring her as his research assistant. After two years of working for Summers, she took a job at McKinsey & Company, and married (and later divorced) a businessman named Brian Kraff. When Summers became the Deputy Treasury Secretary in the Clinton Administration, he asked Sandberg to join as his chief of staff. She accepted.
In Sandberg’s talks about women in the workforce, she reinforces the fact that women need to stand up for themselves, and speak up.
“Sit at the table,” she said in her 2010 TEDWomen Talk. “At the corporate level, women in C-level jobs the number of women tops in at 15%. How do we change those numbers? She asks a willing audience. “By keeping women in the workforce.” She adds that she is not here to judge anyone – and those who don’t want to stay in the workforce is okay. But her one caveat: This talk is specifically for women who do want to be in the workforce. “Success and likeability are positively correlated for men and negatively correlated for women,” says Sandberg. “And men are reaching for opportunities more than women.”
The Sheryl Sandberg resume
- Currently:
Center for Global Development – Director
Walt Disney Company – Director
Starbucks Corporation – Director
World Economic Forum 2012 – Co-chair
President’s Council on Jobs & Competitiveness – Member - Formerly:
Google – VP of global online sales & operations
McKinsey & Company – management consultant
Secretary of the Treasury (Lawrence H. Summers) – chief of staff - Education:
Harvard Business School – 1993-1995
Harvard University – BA, Economics, 1987-1991
That was the first of three points she delivered. Second, she tells women to “make sure your partner is a real partner.” At the Grace Hopper Conference, Sandberg expanded on that statement, speaking to an audience of young women. She told them that it was okay to get involved with those “crazy types” when they’re young, but do not marry them. In 2004 she married her long-time best friend David Goldberg, who is also the CEO of SurveyMonkey. Together they have a five-year-old son and a two-year-old daughter.
Her third point speaks to her choice to have a family and a career. “Don’t leave before you leave,” she told the TED audience. Don’t leave the workforce to have kids and not return because you didn’t get that job you wanted before you left.
Sandberg demonstrated that first point during her time with Summers. She always made sure she was at the table, even if it meant asking others to move. In 1999, at 29-years-old, Summers became Treasury Secretary; Sandberg was his chief of staff. “If I was making a mistake, she told me,” Summers told The New Yorker. “She was totally loyal, but totally in my face.”
In 2000, the Clinton Administration came to an end. Sandberg left Washington for the Silicon Valley shortly thereafter. Google had been aggressively recruiting her – and finally she accepted their offer. She joined in 2001, at a time when Google was still new and not-at-all profitable. But she joined Google for the same reason that she decided to get involved in politics: there was a bigger mission at stake. At Google, that mission was to make the information more accessible and freely available. Sandberg is credited with making Google AdWords profitable. These ads don’t really affect the user experience; but on the flip side, they are gathering keywords from personal data found in email exchanges.
By 2008, it was time for a change again. Zuckerberg sought out Sandberg after they ran into each other at a party in the Valley. After months of negotiations, Sandberg decided to leave Google for Facebook, whose goal was “to make the world more open and connected.” It was a perfect fit.
The Business & Culture of Facebook
Sandberg started working at Facebook in 2008, when she was 38 years old. When she joined under the title of “director,” she was granted .1% of the company. That means that when Facebook begins to trade on Wall Street later this year, she will became one of the richest self-made women in the world. She just bought a house down the street from Facebook, and she’s going to stay there – at least, for the time being. In 2011, Forbes listed her as the number 5 most powerful woman in the world.
As an influencer, Sandberg focuses her energies on companies with broad, powerful missions. In politics, it’s about the greater good; at Google, she focused on making the world’s information accessible to all. And now she is at Facebook, where the goal is “to make the world more open and connected.”
At Facebook, Sandberg’s work not only influences politics and information-sharing, but is shaping the way humans think about communication. Because Facebook is not only a freshly minted public company – it’s a culture we live in.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Why Facebook’s Data Sharing Matters
Jan 13th
Facebook has cut a deal with political website Politico that allows the independent site machine-access to Facebook users’ messages, both public and private, when a Republican Presidential candidate is mentioned by name. The data is being collected and analyzed for sentiment by Facebook’s data team, then delivered to Politico to serve as the basis of data-driven political analysis and journalism.
The move is being widely condemned in the press as a violation of privacy but if Facebook would do this right, it could be a huge win for everyone. Facebook could be the biggest, most dynamic census of human opinion and interaction in history. Unfortunately, failure to talk prominently about privacy protections, failure to make this opt-in (or even opt out!) and the inclusion of private messages are all things that put at risk any remaining shreds of trust in Facebook that could have served as the foundation of a new era of social self-awareness.
Sponsor
We, ok I, have long argued here at ReadWriteWeb that aggregate analysis of Facebook data is an idea with world-changing potential. The analogy from history that I think of is about Real estate Redlining. Back in the middle of the last century, when US Census data and housing mortgage loan data were both made available for computer analysis and cross referencing for the first time, early data scientists were able to prove a pattern of racial discrimination by banks against people of color who wanted to buy houses in certain neighborhoods. The data illuminated the problem and made it undeniable, thus leading to legislation to prohibit such discrimination.
I believe that there are probably patterns of interaction and communication of comparable historic importance that could be illuminated by effective analysis of Facebook user data. Good news and bad news could no doubt be found there, if critical thinking eyes could take a look.
“Assuming you had permission, you could use a semantic tool to investigate what issues the users are discussing, what weight those issues have in relation to everything else they are saying and get some insights into the relationships between those issues,” writes systemic innovation researcher Haydn Shaughnessy in a comment on Forbes privacy writer Kashmir Hill’s coverage of the Politico deal. “As far as I can see people use sentiment analysis because it is low overhead; the quickest, cheapest way to reflect something of the viewpoints, however fallible the technique. Properly mined though you could really understand what those demographics care about.”
Several years ago I had the privilege to sit with Mark Zuckerberg and make this argument to him, but it doesn’t feel like the company has seized the world-changing opportunity in front of it.
Facebook does regularly analyzes its own data of course. And sometimes it publishes what it finds. For example, two years ago the company cross referenced the body of its users’ names with US Census data that tied last names and ethnicity. Facebook’s conclusion was that the site used to be disproportionately made up of White people – but now it’s as ethnically diverse as the rest of America. Good news!
But why do we only hear the good news? That millions of people are talking about Republican Presidential candidates might be considered bad news, but the new deal remains a very limited instance of Facebook treating its user data like the platform that it could be.
It could be just a sign of what’s to come, though. “This is especially interesting in terms of the business relationships–who’s allowed to analyze Facebook data across all users?” asks Nathan Gilliatt, principal at research firm Social Target and co-founder of AnalyticsCamp. “To my knowledge, they haven’t let other companies analyze user data beyond publicly shared stuff and what people can access with their own accounts’ authorization. This says to me that Facebook understands the value of that data. It will be interesting to see what else they do with it.”
I’ve been told that Facebook used to let tech giant HP informally hack at their data years ago, back when the site was small and the world’s tech privacy lawyers were as yet unaroused. That kind of arrangement would have been unheard of for the past several years, though. Two years ago, social graph hacker Pete Warden pulled down Facebook data from hundreds of millions of users, analyzing it for interesting connections before planning on releasing it to the academic research community. Facebook’s response was assertive and came from the legal department. Warden decided not to give the data to researchers after all. (Disclosure: I am writing this post from Warden’s couch.)
“Like a lot of Facebook’s studies, this collaboration with Politico is fascinating research, it’s just a real shame they can’t make the data publicly available, largely due to privacy concerns” bemoans Warden. “Without reproducability, it loses a lot of its scientific impact. With a traditional opinion poll, anyone with enough money can call up a similar number of people and test a survey’s conclusions. That’s not the case with Facebook data.”
“Everyone is going ‘gaga’ over the potential for Facebook,” says Kaliya Hamlin, Executive Director of a trade and advocacy group called the Personal Data Ecosystem Consortium.
“The potential exists only because they have this massive lead (monopoly) so it seems like they should be the ones to do this.
“Yes we should be doing deeper sentiment analysis of peoples’ real opinions. But in a way that they are choosing to participate – so that the entities that aggregate such information are trusted and accountable.
“If I had my own personal data store/service and I chose to share say my music listening habits with a ratings service like Neilson – voluntarily join a panel. I have full trust and confidence that they are not going to turn on me and do something else with my data – it will just go in a pool.
“Next thing you know Facebook is going to be selling to the candidate the ability to access people who make positive or negative comments in private messages. Where does it end? How are they accountable and how do we have choice?”
Not everyone is as concerned about this from a privacy perspective. “There are many things in the online world that give me willies for Fourth-Amendment-like reasons,” says Curt Monash of data analyst firm Monash Research. “This isn’t one of them, because the data collectors and users aren’t proposing to even come close to singling out individual people for surveillance.”
Monash’s primary concern is in the quality of the data. “There’s a limit as to how useful this can be,” he says. “Online polls and similar popularity contests are rife with what amounts to ballot box stuffing. This will be just another example. It is regrettable that you can now stuff an online ballot box by spamming your friends in private conversation.”
It doesn’t just have to be about messages, though. Social connections, Likes and more all offer a lot of potential for analysis, if it’s done appropriately.
“We need trust and accountability frameworks that work for people to allow analysis AND not allow creepiness,” says Hamlin.
Two years ago social news site Reddit began giving its users an option to “donate your data to science” by opting in to have activity data made available for download. Massive programming Question and Answer site StackOverflow has long made available periodic dumps of its users’ data for analysis. “You never know what’s going to come out of it,” StackOverflow co-founder Joel Spolsky says about analysis of aggregate user data.
The unknown potential is indicitive not just of how valuable Facebook data is, but potentially of the relationship between data and knowledge generally in the emerging data-rich world.
That’s the thesis of author David Weinberger’s new book, Too Big to Know. “It’s not simply that there are too many brickfacts [datapoints] and not enough edifice-theories,” he writes. “Rather, the creation of data galaxies has led us to science that sometimes is too rich and complex for reduction into theories. As science has gotten too big to know, we’ve adopted different ideas about what it means to know at all.”
The world’s largest social network, rich with far more signal than any of us could wrap our heads around, could help illuminate emergent qualities of the human experience that are only visible on the network level.
Please don’t mess up our chance to learn those things, Mr. Zuckerberg.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Foursquare Explore Threatens Google & Facebook’s Place Recommendations
Jan 12th
Foursquare has released a new Web version of its Explore tab at foursquare.com/explore. The mobile version of Explore, which launched last March is for finding stuff to see and do nearby. Today’s release of Explore for the Web helps with planning interesting things to do from the desktop or iPad.
In the announcement of Explore, Foursquare says its mission is “adding an ‘interesting’ layer to the whole world, tailored just for you.” Foursquare Explore draws on the check-ins, tips, lists and interests of your friends to put a layer of “interesting” – which is apparently a noun at Foursquare – on a map. This is a challenge to Google Places and Maps, which is racing to add “interesting”, but Foursquare’s 1.5 billion check-ins give it a strong position.
Sponsor
Foursquare’s Google Moment
When Foursquare recommendations launched in March, our Marshall Kirkpatrick called it Foursquare’s Google moment. It was a Facebook moment, too; both Google and Facebook are trying desperately to get users to check in to places, so they can monetize the recommendations to users’ friends.
Unlike the big kids on the playground, though, Foursquare is a mobile-first company, and that’s where all its data comes from. Today’s launch of Explore on the Web brings that wealth of information back to the desktop (and tablet).
Mobile-First Makes Desktop-Best
Foursquare has earned 15 million users so far. That’s no Facebook. That’s not even a Google+. But all the Foursquare users are there to check in and recommend places. That’s a strong signal for a service like Explore.
This isn’t the first desktop Web feature Foursquare has added lately. In November, the whole Foursquare website got a makeover, setting the stage for today’s additional recommendation layer. That month, Foursquare also launched a save-to-Foursquare button for websites, allowing users to save places to their Foursquare to-do lists.
Google’s Foursquare Moment
Google has been hurriedly adding these kinds of features, too. It acquired Zagat for a reservoir of professional place recommendations, and it’s added lots of gee-whiz visual stuff to its desktop Maps interface.
In November, as Foursquare made its key desktop moves, Google started to turn the screws on Yelp, highlighting Google Places recommendations on Google Maps. But this is a very basic interface. It’s not much of a threat to Yelp, let alone Foursquare, whose place recommendations are much more detailed.
Your (Fun) Homework Assignment
Reading about the features isn’t as fun as actually exploring, so try Foursquare’s homework assignment.
- Find a place to go to lunch today that you’ve never been before (hint: look for the ‘I haven’t been to yet’ checkbox).
- Search for a nice spot to try out tomorrow night (try searching “fun,” “romantic,” or “Friday”).
- Pick a city you’ve been wanting to visit (Chicago? Paris? Rio?) and look at our personally-tailored top picks for you there, based on your check-ins from your hometown.
Now try the same at maps.google.com. How did the experiences compare? Let us know in the comments.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Facebook’s Frictionless Sharing Comes to Your TV With Boxee
Jan 11th
Whether you love it or hate it, Facebook’s so-called frictionless sharing concept isn’t going away anytime soon. From songs played on Spotify to articles read on the Washington Post, everything your friends consume via participating sites is broadcast to the news ticker in real time.
Today, the social TV and streaming media center service Boxee became the latest to join in on the trend when it announced a new partnership with Facebook. Users who opt in can automatically update Facebook about TV shows and other videos they watch through Boxee’s interface.
Sponsor
Like any good content app worth using, Boxee has always allowed users to manually share items via Twitter and Facebook. The service even took its social integration a step further by including Flipboard-style channels of video that are auto-curated based on what one’s friends and followees are sharing online.
With this latest update, the process is streamlined and updates are posted automatically based on what users are watching. The feature will work with Boxee’s new Live TV dongle, so even if you’re watching the latest episode of “The Office” during its original broadcast time, your Facebook friends will all know about it.
Like some other implementations, the Boxee and Facebook integration has its limitations. When you click on a link on the News Feed or Timeline, you’re not taken directly to the content itself, but rather to a landing page with more information abdout the show. This may be annoying to some users, who expect to be able to consume the content immediately.
Mindful of privacy concerns, Boxee makes very clear that the feature is opt-in so one needn’t worry about blasting their friends with excessive or updates.
Boxee Facebook Live TV Integration from boxee on Vimeo.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
Zynga Is Not First On Facebook’s Top Games Of 2011
Dec 22nd
Yesterday Facebook released its list of top games for 2011. Only four of those games were Zynga-owned. The number one and number two slots were filled by Disney Playdom’s Garden of Time, a game about locating hidden objects through time travel and EA’s The Sims Social, which is most similar the “real-world” virtual game Second Life. Zynga’s CityVille, a game all about building “the city of your dreams,” came in third. In the top casino games of 2011 category, Zynga took first place with Zynga Poker. Right now, 95% of Zynga’s gaming strategy relies on Facebook, and just last week Zynga went public. What does this mean for Zynga?
Sponsor
Facebook based this list of games on which games had the most users and the highest recommendations. Interestingly, today Gardens of Time ranks number 40 on AppData’s MAU (monthly average users) app leaderboard with 8.5 million users, while CityVille ranks number two with 48.8 million users.
On Facebook, Fantasy Beats Reality
In Gardens of Time, the top Facebook game of 2011, users travel through history, traversing distant lands in order to find objects hidden in time. In terms of popularity and the fantasy aspect, this game feels very much like the Harry Potter of social media pop culture.
Sims Social, on the other hand, is about building your personal life, and Zynga’s CityVille focuses on building virtual cities.
Zynga’s games are focused on games that one can play with their friends and less about escapism and fantasy. Its game references (Scrabble) and movie references (Indiana Jones) are easily identifiable by mainstream users. For example, Zynga’s Indiana Jones Adventure World is the number five game on Facebook, followed by Words With Friends. Another example of a real world “life lessons”-type game is Zynga’s PrivacyVille, which was released in early July 2011. It is aimed at teaching users how to securely play online.
Will a gaming company founded on the real world task of connecting people through games rather than engaging in individuals’ fantasy-scapes ever become number one on Facebook?
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
After Years of Missteps, Facebook’s Timeline is an Epic Win
Dec 16th
Facebook’s new Timeline profile feature is great, even if it is a little strange. It’s narcissistic, that’s a big part of the fun of it, and I’m not sure that other peoples’ timelines are nearly as interesting as mine is to me.
It’s an incredibly feature-rich new type of social network profile. It’s a re-imagination of what a profile can be. It makes me want to use Facebook more, to share more data with Facebook so that it can be preserved and displayed so nicely, years into the future. While other Facebook features have pushed users into posting publicly by default, or posted their activities from other places they didn’t understand would become part of the public record, I think Timeline is a genuine value add to incentivize users to share more. I think it’s great.
Sponsor
Data is at the heart of the Facebook Timeline, your data – about your life, about your activities as recorded on Facebook and about your social connections. The music you listen to, the places you go and the things you. People say that insights and experiences built on top of data are going to be a big part of the future of human/computer interactions. Facebook Timelines are a great first look at that for hundreds of millions of people. They are also something that Twitter can never do, for both technical and cultural reasons.
It’s one thing to see this data all in a News Feed as Facebook has long showed it, it’s fundamentally different to see Yourself and Others presented like a work of art in this new Timeline layout.
By highlighting the content you’ve published that has received the most social engagement, in the form of comments and Likes, your Facebook Timeline takes its best shot at presenting your Best Self to the world. The mundane updates are hidden in the background and the highlights of your life, if you posted about them on Facebook, are programmatically discoverable and now displayed in an attractive page layout.
It doesn’t work perfectly, my Timeline says that I married my wife 3 times on 3 different dates, but generally speaking it works really well. It looks great on m.facebook.com too.
The Facebook Timeline represents the Instrumentation of Your Life, making things measurable and then building on top of those measurements. It’s a big deal in the world of social software.
That Facebook launched such a bold new implementation of every user’s data about themselves just months after getting slapped with a 20 year privacy audit requirement from the US government is bold.
As Not Seen on Twitter
Meanwhile, over on Twitter, that competing social network can’t remember what you did two weeks ago. It does remember, it just won’t let you remember. Historical content on Twitter is severely limited.
The company has said officially that’s because Twitter is all about the here and now, it’s real-time. Unofficially it’s said though that the root of the problem was in a series of database creation decisions that were made years ago. It would now be super expensive to change that.
There is something about Twitter that’s more conversational, more News focused and less conducive culturally to something like Timeline.
For the vast majority of its users, I’d also guess that Twitter accounts post fewer messages and get fewer responses that can be measured to determine highlights than is the case on Facebook.
Facebook also has a lot of structured data in the user’s profile and changes to that become events, which social activity swarms around and which then become notable points in your life. You changed your marital status? That’s probably going to get a lot of discussion. There is no equivalent on Twitter. Were Twitter to highlight your biggest Tweets, they would likely be the wittiest quips you’ve made over the years, not the real life events.
Twitter is working on convincing people that Tweets are great for reading, that it’s largely a reading experience. Facebook, on the other hand, has always wanted you to share, share, share.
In theory, many of us are doing things outside of Facebook though. A lot of that is being shared back into our Newsfeed, but not all of it. I am very impressed with what Facebook has done, but I wish there was some more effective competition out there. There are various startups who have tried to do this, none anywhere near as well as Facebook’s hired and acquired team of world-beating design pros though.
I joined Facebook 5 years ago this Fall, according to my Timeline. It’s cool to see all that history presented so nicely and it makes me want to put more content into Facebook so I can see it later. I imagine that’s the point.
View full post on ReadWriteWeb
