Tag Archives: Facebook

Facebook iOS 6.2 Lets You Easily Change Who You Just Shared That Racy Pic With

June 18, 2013   admin   No comments

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It happened to me. Yes, I once uploaded a pic of my friend to Facebook from my phone, forgot to change the setting from “Public” to “Friends” and had the friend get told that day by a random person: “Hey I just saw a picture of you on Alexia from TechCrunch’s wall!” So now I’m circumspect.

Apparently this social media disaster was happening to more people, because Facebook just fixed it — at least on iOS. Android has apparently had the new feature for over a week.

Now iPhone users too are able to easily edit Facebook’s photo privacy settings — by selecting the drop-down arrow on the status update and selecting “Edit Privacy.” Though you still can’t edit the update text or any comments themselves from your iPhone, this is pretty useful. The last time I messed up on a photo privacy setting, I had to access Facebook’s Mobile Web page on a foreign connection to fix it. Not pretty.

In addition to this nod to paranoid people, Facebook iOS Version 6.2 allows users to post the emotion and action updates they’ve come to know and love on the web, including Happy, Sad, Wonderful and, my favorite, Loved.

You can also now start a new conversation with a photo sent to you in messages in Version 6.2, though I don’t think this feature will be remembered enough to see that much traction, unless teenagers are exhibiting some novel group photosharing behaviors on Facebook Message that I don’t know about.

And speaking of Facebook Message, let me take this post about an app update to let you know that a standalone Messenger for iPad is likely not happening, though a trial app was in the works when we reported on it. Basically Messenger was not seeing the growth Facebook hoped for (turns out people don’t want a messenger app PLUS a Facebook app) after Facebook’s primary app became less buggy and slow. So, nixed.

PSA: Update your apps periodically, people.


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Facebook Tries Letting You Message From Homepage Status Box To Battle Google Hangouts

June 02, 2013   admin   No comments

Status Composer Messaging

Sources confirm Facebook will test the option to send private messages from its website’s homepage status composer to increase messaging rates. It will also help Facebook compete with Google, whose web chat presence is strong, and just combined its Gmail, Google+, and mobile chat systems into Hangouts. It’s a risky move, as users could accidentally post private messages as status updates.

Multiple sources say that starting with a small percentage of users, Facebook plans to integrate messaging into the prominent status update and photo uploading box that sits atop the homepage. Users will be able to switch between posting to the news feed and privately communicating with select friends. I’ve reached out to Facebook for an official confirmation and statement regarding the test of status composer messaging.

Currently, users have to click a relatively tiny, untitled messaging icon in the top right of the screen to start or continue a private message thread. That means users might forget or be less likely to send messages than if the feature was better highlighted.

Boosting The Pace Of Conversation

The intention for status composer messaging is similar to that of the recently launched Chat Heads mobile feature, which overlays message conversation on top of all pages of the Facebook app for iOS and all apps on Android. Facebook hopes to increase the pace of conversations that generate notifications and speedy return visits from their participants on the web and mobile.

Getting people to return to its site and apps more frequently forwards Facebook’s mission and business model. Conversations create more intimate connections between friends, and the return visits for messaging can lead to browsing of the news feed where Facebook shows ads. The plan follows Facebook recently adding a “Post” button to the the persistently visible navigation bar at the top of its website. It encourages users to share more by letting them compose a post from any screen on the site.

Status composer messaging creates a critical user experience design challenge. If it’s not clear whether users are posting to the feed or messaging privately, they might mistakenly expose a message to all of their friends when then meant it to be seen by just one person. Expect Facebook to use some kind of highly noticeable design flags to signify the difference. Facebook already adds a striped border to the status box when you set the privacy on a post to “Only Me”.

Making sure it gets this right is likely one of the reasons the feature will start as a small test. If it gets negative feedback or sees people quickly deleting posts and then resending them privately, it might scrap the the plan for status composer messaging.

The Messaging Battle Rages On

Cross-platform messaging has become a hotly contested space. While independent, mobile-first messaging apps are nipping at their heels, Apple, Google, and Facebook are focusing on systems that sync web and mobile communication.

Apple’s iMessage is a popular SMS replacement for iPhone to iPhone messaging, but its desktop app has less traction. Google excels on the web, with the long-running Google Talk aka GChat in Gmail linking users as they spend hours emailing. Now it’s trying to drive Google+ adoption and mobile with the unified Hangouts messenger it unveiled at Google I/O last month. That app has the advantage of free group video chat.

Facebook launched its cross-platform messaging system in 2010, and its become quite popular. It turned its acquisition Beluga into Facebook Messenger, a mobile app that’s evolved to offer location sharing, VoIP, and recorded audio messages. It works seamlessly with Facebook’s desktop Chat system, which benefits from the large amounts of time users spend on the social network’s site. Facebook’s weakness is that it doesn’t own a mobile operating system or prevalent hardware line. That puts it in danger as Apple and Google could box it out by more deeply integrating cross-platform messaging into the default SMS apps on iOS and Android.

Facebook hopes that its device-agnostic approach, high engagement, and global ubiquity can make up for it being a layer rather than a OS / device platform on mobile. If status composer messaging succeeds and it rolls out the feature to all users, it could ensure private communication is top of mind every time someone visits its site, whether their plan was to check notifications, upload photos, or browse the feed.

It that slays SMS and assumes the throne will rule a critical part of the web.


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SV Angel’s Brian Pokorny Says Facebook Isn’t As Much Fun Anymore – It’s A Utility

May 01, 2013   admin   No comments

sv angel disrupt

Brian Pokorny, who recently rejoined SV Angel as a general partner, weighed in this afternoon on the future of a number of high-profile companies — Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo.

Pokorny was interviewed at Disrupt NY, where he was joined on-stage by his partners David Lee and Ron Conway. When TechCrunch founder Michael Arrington asked them how they felt about Facebook and whether it was going to “pull a Myspace,” Conway and Lee deferred to Pokorny as the youngest of the three of them.

In response, he acknowledged that a lot of the fun social behavior from younger users like high schoolers may have moved elsewhere: “New mobile social apps like Instagram, Vine, Snapchat, things like that are where those behaviors are persisting.” Not that he thinks that means Facebook is in trouble, because it’s has become something we all use and depend on.

“It’s a utility,” Pokorny said. “It’s not going anywhere.”

He also said that Facebook won’t suffer Myspace’s fate — Myspace failed due to a lack of product innovation, while Facebook continues to innovate.

“Plus, Myspace didn’t have identity,” Conway said, later adding, “Facebook did it right when it authenticated people’s identity.”

Arrington then asked about Twitter, and Pokorny said, “It’s becoming the place you go to look for real-time information. It’s just going to grow and grow and grow in its importance.”

The last company they discussed was Yahoo. Arrington said that he spoke to CEO Marissa Mayer backstage at Disrupt and she showed him a cool mobile app, but his response was, “Okay, what else you got?” So he wondered: Is there really a chance to turn Yahoo around? Lee said the answer is yes, pointing specifically to Mayer’s experience as a computer scientist and background at Google, which should help her attract good engineers.

“There aren’t many precedents [for a turnaround] but there are a few,” Lee said. “But I do think it starts with the talent.”

The SV Angel partners also discussed the state of startup innovation, which we covered in a separate post.


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After Testing It With Facebook Messenger, Mozilla Signs Up Weibo, Mixi, MSN Now And CliqZ To Firefox’s Social API

April 05, 2013   admin   No comments

Mozilla_Nightly_icon_2011

Last November, Mozilla announced that it had worked with Facebook to launch a first preview of its Social API for Firefox by integrating Facebook Messenger into Firefox 17. The Social API allows social networks, blog networks or news sites to easily add persistent social sidebars, toolbar notifications and chat features to the browser, no matter which site a user is looking at. At the time, Mozilla wasn’t quite ready to announce any additional partners for this API. But today the organization announced that it will soon expand this effort with additional services in Firefox Nightly, including Japanese social network Mixi, Microsoft’s MSN Now, new site, CliqZ and the Chinese microblogging service Weibo.

“We are really excited about the possibilities that Social API brings to the future of browsing, including ways to integrate even more social providers, e-mail, finance, news and other applications and services into your Firefox experience,” Mozilla writes in today’s announcement.

When Mozilla launched the Facebook Messenger integration, Mozilla’s VP of Firefox Engineering Jonathan Nightingale told me that the organization wanted to see how it could marry the trend toward more social experiences on the web with the browser. Firefox’s App Tabs were a first attempt to solve this, but, as Nightingale told me, “people still had to work around the limitations of browsers because they were treating social just like any other sites.”

The current Facebook Messenger integration is pretty straightforward and adds a set of Messenger buttons to the toolbar and pops up a sidebar to start chats (see image above). Last November, the Firefox team wasn’t sure how to integrate more than one service yet, but that obviously wasn’t an issue at the time, given that only Facebook Messenger was integrated in the service so far. It’s not clear how the Firefox team has solved this issue, but we’ll surely see the solution once these new providers go live in one of the next Firefox Nightly releases.


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Android Launchers Are A Small Market, Can Facebook Home Change That?

April 05, 2013   admin   No comments

chat-facebook-home

Facebook is getting into the “Android launcher” market, the company has confirmed, thanks to its new Facebook Home application announced today. The app, as previously reported, is new software that integrates the Facebook experience deeply into the Android operating system. But Android launchers today aren’t a very large market, relative to the reach Facebook has in mind. Will the Facebook brand be able to change that?

Facebook already has an incredible presence on mobile. It’s the most-used application on your phone. And of Facebook’s more than 1 billion active users, 680 million are active on mobile. It only makes sense for Facebook to build something that takes better advantage of this major shift in computing by putting its service front and center in people’s everyday lives.

But compared with the enormity of Facebook, the Android launcher market is much smaller. According to Google Play data, Go Launcher EX, the top free Android launcher, has somewhere between 50 million to 100 million installs worldwide. But that includes users who are installing it on multiple devices, or again and again as they change phones. According to app-store analytics firm Distimo, the launcher has actually only been installed on 6 million unique devices in the U.S. since mid-August 2012.

Facebook Home To Join The “Android Launcher” Market

Launchers are mobile applications popular among Android users that allow you to further customize the look, feel and functionality of the native Android experience, replacing the user interface experience that ships with your phone.

They allow you to do things like install themes, customize icon skins, change the way you navigate between screens or access the application drawer, for example, and much more. Some have 3D effects, others include their own widgets, and some offer a variety of widgets, themes and other add-ons for download or sale separately. But the one thing they have had in common is that they’ve generally appealed to a more advanced, more technically inclined crowd that likes to tweak and customize their devices. They appeal to those who feel confined by the locked-down experience on iOS and want more control.

This is the competitive market that Facebook Home is joining, and Facebook’s Launcher, though beautifully designed, is an entirely different experience from the launchers available today. Although like the others, Home is about changing the default Android interface, it differs in that it changes it to one of Facebook’s liking, while other launchers are about offering users tools to make their phones their own.

What About The Others?

Today, Facebook Home’s launcher competitors include dozens of apps, including Go Launcher EX, ADW.Launcher, Nova Launcher, Apex Launcher, Launcher Pro, Regina 3D Launcher, Zeam Launcher, Holo Launcher, MXHome Launcher, Launcher 7, Launcher 8 SPB Shell 3D, Trebuchet Launcher, and many more.

You might now be wondering how popular these types of programs are among users, especially here in Facebook’s largest market, the U.S. Of those listed above, the most popular free launcher in Google Play is the GO Launcher EX, which ranks No. 70. The only others ranked in the top 1,000 free applications on Android are the Nova Launcher (No. 324) and the Apex Launcher (No. 505).

In the chart below, you can see the estimated installs per device for these launchers for March 2013. To be clear, this is not unique downloads per user, but installs per unique device. It’s not an exact science here, but this helps give you a feel for the size of the market in the U.S. for these types of customizations.

The Go Launcher EX has an estimated 786,948 app installs in the U.S. Android app store in March 2013, and, as noted above, it has 6 million installs since August 2012.

Among paid apps, Nova Launcher Prime is tops, ranked No. 6, which shows that a good many Android users care enough about customization to actually pay to achieve such a thing.

However, because it’s a paid application, the number of installs here is even lower – around 138,794 in March. Other popular launchers in the top 1,000 paid Android apps are ranked even lower still, and have fewer installs. These include: Apex Launcher Pro (No. 32), ADWLauncher EX (No. 54), SPB Shell 3D (No. 147), Holo Launcher Plus (No. 299) and Launcher 7 – Donate (No. 974).

By revenue, these apps also fall further down the charts: Nova Launcher Prime (No. 195), GO Launcher EX (No. 264), SPB Shell 3D (No. 339), Apex Launcher Pro (No. 513) and ADWLauncher EX (No. 584) are those that make a showing here. This indicates that only some portion of the audience is happy to pay for the extended features outside of the initial one-time download.

That also speaks to Facebook’s ability to sell add-ons within its own “Facebook Home” experience. Other messaging apps (messaging is a key feature in Facebook Home) often sell things like sticker packs/emoji, games, and other upgrades to generate revenue. Facebook doesn’t do this, nor does it display ads within the private messaging interfaces of either Facebook Messenger or its iOS-only private messaging app Poke.

And from the experience described today, Facebook Home doesn’t include ads, either (at least, not yet). But it could take advantage of its deep presence on users’ devices to improve its ad-targeting capabilities in the future.

“It is a bit difficult to say something about the market size for launchers,” admits Hendrik Koekkoek, a data analyst at Distimo. “The three apps in the top 1,000 free together generate 0.38% of all device installs of the top 1,000, so this is not particularly large,” he says.

“For paid apps, the six apps in the top 1,000 together generate 2.9 percent of all device installs in the top 1,000. So proportionately, they generate quite a lot of all paid device installs,” Koekkoek adds.

In terms of revenue, launchers don’t do all that well; the five apps in the top grossing generate only 0.22 percent of all revenue of the top 1,000.

Facebook specifically chose not to do its own phone because an install base of 10 million to 20 million units was too small. “Our community has more than a billion people in it. We want to build the best experience for every person on every phone,” said Zuckerberg. But even extrapolating the above U.S. numbers out to a worldwide audience, it seems that being a consumer-facing app will take Facebook Home only so far. The company will need to target its integrations at OEMs that are bringing the next billion mobile users online to have a real impact here.

Then again, maybe it’s wrong to look at the current launchers on the market and draw any conclusions about the potential for Facebook Home whatsoever. It’s a very different experience. Still, as a consumer app, Facebook will have to convince the Android customizers and tweakers that its app is better than their current overlay, and it will have to educate the more mainstream users that such customizations even exist.


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Facebook Adds Weather Forecasts To Events And Public Places In Quest To Show Useful Info Where People Need It

March 21, 2013   admin   No comments

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Facebook has come up with another way to stop you from leaving its site. While you’re setting up an event, especially one that’s going to take place outside, it makes total sense that your potential guests would want to know what the weather conditions are for that day. Today, Facebook rolled out a project that was a part of a hackathon, which drops weather information onto event pages and unowned pages for places like parks and cities.

The positive here is that Facebook is carefully placing this information in places on the site that make sense for users, rather than jamming it all over the place. For example, seeing the weather on an event page is fine, but it’s not something I want to see on my News Feed. By providing this information, it’s just one less step you have to make when you’re making decisions on where to go.

The addition of events are great for the guests, but when you’re setting up an event, you’ll also see the weather prediction for that day, which can help you form your description, suggesting that people bring a sweatshirt, perhaps:

For people that you invite, they’ll see the predicted forecast for the location on the date of the event, as well as the the estimated high and low temperatures. For locations like cities and parks that have pages, a ten day forecast will be displayed. All of this data is provided by Weather Underground:

These details are also available on Facebook’s mobile app:

For examples of the integration for location-pages that aren’t owned by any particular user, check out the city of San Francisco, and more specifically Dolores Park, here in our neck of the woods.

Once you see the weather information, you can choose to leave Facebook to get more detailed information, like satellite imagery, from Weather Underground’s site.

This reminds us a little bit of Google’s move to beef up its search results for things like sports scores and schedules, displaying the important data so that you don’t have to click around to sites to find it. While this might take traffic away from third-party sources, it is helpful for users. Regardless, it’s a fine line to walk for Facebook, as there is probably a host of relevant information that it could start slapping up all over the site hastily. Nobody wants to see scores attached to status updates that mention specific sports teams, for example. For now, weather seems to be a nice place to start and it’s doubtful that anyone will complain.


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To Earn Trust, Facebook Could Declare News Feed Changes Like Google PageRank

March 06, 2013   admin   No comments

facebook-transparent

Too much bad press and too many confused users. That’s what Facebook got from silently tinkering with the news feed. BiltonGate was the last straw. Signs now point to Facebook beginning to announce news feed algorithm changes the way Google does for PageRank. Combined with education, Facebook could use transparency to try to convince people it tweaks the feed to help users, not sell more ads.

Facebook walks a tightrope. It has to balance the interests of marketers, content creators, app developers, its bottom line, and most of all, the user experience. Over time, its power, ubiquity, wealth and privacy issues have led people to jump to the worst conclusion at the first sight of change — that Facebook just wants to gobble up more private data and make more money.

That’s only half true. It definitely wants more data and money, but Facebook is a fundamentally mission-driven company. After reporting on Facebook for three years, interviewing dozens of employees, and knowing some from the San Francisco scene, I am heartily convinced it actually wants to make the world more open and connected.

Doing that means gobbling up private data and making money. The data goes to personalizing the service, and the money goes to hiring people to build it. But the real kicker is that the only way it can accomplish its mission and make a fortune is to generally prioritize the user experience. If it allows advertisers and viral app developers to overpower Facebook, a few years from now there won’t be a user base to advertise or sell apps to.

So when Facebook changes the news feed, it’s typically to the benefit of the end user. The problem is it often comes at the expense of Page admins and professional content creators like The New York Times’ Nick Bilton. Facebook alters its algorithm to show people news feed stories they’re more likely to Like, which can mean fewer stories from journalists and business pages searching for eyeballs.

Facebook’s done a poor job of communicating why it makes these changes, and it makes them silently. Both lead people to assume greed is responsible. Facebook had a huge issue with this over the summer. It started more intensely penalizing Pages for being marked as spam, and generally reduced the reach of Pages whose posts didn’t get many Likes per fan. Around the same time it introduced Promoted Posts, which let Pages pay to reach more people. People immediately accused Facebook of extorting Pages by reducing their reach unless they buy these Promoted Post ads. One blog post by Dangerous Minds (illustration to the right) got 162,000 Likes by calling Facebook “the biggest bait’n’switch in history.”

In reality, Facebook was going to beat back spammy Pages anyway, and the Promoted Posts feature is actually just an easier way to buy Sponsored Stories, which Facebook has had for a long time. Even if the algorithm change and ads were related, it’s not to Facebook’s benefit to make the feed worse on purpose. Otherwise people will read it less and, boom, any profits from Promoted Posts are offset by less usage.

The issue reared its head again last weekend when Bilton wrote a screed suggesting Facebook was showing his posts to fewer of his Twitter-style Facebook Subscribe followers than a year ago because it was showing more ads. Facebook admitted some public publishers are getting less engagement now, but claimed this was anecdotal, that users didn’t want to see Bilton’s posts, and that most public figures were getting more views now. But in the end Facebook came off sounding defensive, and, shall we say, unbecoming of one of the world’s most powerful companies.

If Facebook had been more proactive about communicating its fight against spam fighting and the changes to public-post reach, it wouldn’t have gotten itself into these messes. I sense Facebook has now realized this, and suspect it will soon begin announcing at least when it makes major news feed algorithm changes. As I’ve written about terms of service changes, “you always fear what you don’t understand” so Facebook’s goal will be to increase understanding.

It’s worked for Google. Every few months it publishes a post like “Search quality highlights: 65 changes for August and September,” outlining dozens of specific changes to PageRank so webmasters know to expect their Google search rank and traffic to fluctuate.

For example, the one change is listed in August was ”nearby. [project 'User Context'] We improved the precision and coverage of our system to help you find more relevant local web results. Now we’re better able to identify web results that are local to the user, and rank them appropriately.” This lets non-local site admins know their traffic may drop because Google is giving users a better experience by directing them to relevant local results.

Facebook makes minor tweaks constantly, and big changes to the feed occasionally, like the one it’s making tomorrow announcing new content-specific news feeds. It could go with a live-updated list with more in-depth posts about the big changes. Alternatively, it could release scheduled dumps of changes like Google does, but also call out the major modifications. It would need to combine this with general education about why it makes the changes in the first place. Ideally, the tone would be something like Tron’s “I fight for the user!” but that doesn’t frame marketers, publishers, and developers as self-serving spammers.

Dissuading conspiracy theorists will be no easy task for Facebook. Many just inherently think corporations are evil. A transparency push will only succeed if Facebook can convey that for it to win, for businesses to win, its top priority is making itself a place where people love spending time.

Read More:

Facebook’s News Feed, A Skittish Gift Horse

Facebook Admits Likes Are Down For Some Celebs

Facebook Will Launch Content-Specific News Feeds, Bigger Photos And Ads On Thursday


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Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency: The Nerdy Way Facebook Sorts Graph Searches

February 21, 2013   admin   No comments

Graph Search mobile Feature

Ask Facebook Graph Search for “books liked by founders” and you won’t see The Da Vinci Code or The Bible first, though they’re amongst the most Liked books. Instead you’ll see books disproportionately Liked by founders compared to the general population thanks to what’s called “Term Frequency–Inverse Document Frequency”. Surfacing The Tipping Point, and Design For Hackers shows how smart Graph Search is.

TF-IDF was just one of the things discussed today at Facebook headquarters in Menlo Park when the company’s top engineers laid out the state of its new internal Graph Search feature and how it works. The number of people with access to the beta now number in the hundreds of thousands.

That number is poised to rapidly grow, though, as this morning I saw Facebook is now admitting more people from the waitlist. And it’s trying to make their friends jealous. When they get the new feature, Facebook automatically publishes a news feed story noting “Eric Eldon just got Graph Search.” Click through those last words, and people can sign up for earlier access too. Facebook tells me this is a viral driver meant to increase waitlist sign-ups.

Lead engineer Tom Stocky noted that early usage patterns show people using Graph Search for the same things they use the social network for: looking at friends and photos. “But Places is third” said Stocky, an encouraging sign for local businesses. Interests aren’t getting as many queries.

One thing that surprised Facebook was the ways people search for their friends. Rather than asking for something like “photos of my ‘friends’”, users frequently typed in terms like ‘chums’, ‘besties’, ‘buddies’, ‘homies’, and ‘peeps’. At first those stumped Graph Search, but a dedicated natural language team has now built those in so they’re recognized as synonyms.

Next, Facebook is working to scale up Graph Search — both the back-end system called Unicorn so it can support more users and the roll-out can continue, and in terms of foreign languages so it can expand beyond English. However, that second part may require it to hire linguists in each language to identify sentence structure and synonyms, or figure out a way to crowdsource this process the same way it did to translate the whole site.

It’s also trying to work out syntax problems so people can run “Or” queries. Right now you can ask for “friends who Live in New York who Like Game Of Thrones and Downton Abbey”, but not “Friends who live in New York who Like U2 or The Rolling Stones” which could help you quickly find someone to go to a rock concert with.

But where I see the real potential of Graph Search is intelligent sorting of results in a way only Facebook could do. For example, if you search for “people who work at TechCrunch” you get all our real employees, but lots of people who just list TechCrunch as their employer as a joke or too look like a techie. Luckily, Graph Search is smart enough to identify which people who “work” at TechCrunch are friends with each other. Since groups of real employees are often friends, it knows which are more likely to be real and to show at the top of the results. Facebook also looks at which people have listed a verified @techcrunch.com email address in their profile as another sign of legitimacy.

As for how Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency can help, Facebook Mike Curtiss explained it to me using the example of “TV shows Liked by my friends”. He says “There’s a tough balance with TF-IDF. If you don’t use it you’d just be promoting the most popular TV shows. But if you can bias it towards the preference of these individuals and not what’s objectively the most popular, you get different results. It’s nice to use that when you can. It’s a good signal. You can show the things with the most Likes, or you can show the things that are very unique to people [you're asking about], but often you want a balance of those to provide the most interesting results.”

Facebook is trying to leverage its social data to essentially create a custom search engine for every user. Then by sorting results further with TF-IDF, it could build something not just different than Google, but potentially better where they overlap as well.

For more on how Graph Search works straight from the horse’s mouth, watch my interview with former Google employees and the current Facebook Directors of Graph Search, Tom Stocky and Lars Rasmussen. 




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Facebook Ramps Up News Discovery Battle Against Apps Like Flipboard With “Articles Related To”

February 02, 2013   admin   No comments

Microphone and Facebook Logo

Rather than trust your friends and favorite Pages to post interesting stuff, Facebook is taking news discovery into its own hands with “Articles Related To…”. This special feed story shows you popular links that lead to content mentioning Pages you Like. It could be the next step in Facebook’s master plan to take on apps like Flipboard, Pulse, and Zite, keep you on site, and make publishers pay.

Say you Like rapper Lil Wayne. You might see a feed story titled “Articles Related To Lil Wayne” followed by a preview blurb and link to an post about him on music site that’s getting shared a lot on Facebook but that none of your friends posted.

At the very least, the story type could become Facebook’s personalized version of Twitter’s Trending Topics. About a year ago Facebook was frequently showing a “Trending Articles” block in the news feed. However, those links could be about anything and were mostly sensational stories auto-shared by your friends via Open Graph news reader apps. Articles Related To instead relies on the wisdom of the Facebook crowd, and notes the total number of times the article’s been posted.

It could also lay the groundwork for a “Sponsored Articles Related To” ad unit.

But the real reason this new way to find links is so fascinating is because it could foreshadow a dedicated news-only feed on Facebook. Devoid of random status updates and pics of your friends’ children, it could use the habits of Facebook’s one billion users and everything it knows about you to deliver a super relevant personalized news paper. That could be a real challenger to news discovery services from Flipboard all the way to Twitter.

Facebook already has dedicated Pages and Music feeds. A news-only feed also appeared to be part of the secret, radically redesigned visual news feed mobile app we know Facebook is building.

The one problem is that while Facebook wants to help you discover content, it doesn’t like pushing traffic off-site. That’s what links do…normally. But lately some apps like RockMelt have built special fast-loading, pop-up reader views that recreate off-site content within their apps so people never leave. By striking revenue share deals with news publishers, Facebook could show ads on reader views of their content and earn a fee for delivering eyeballs while keeping you firmly planted in its walled garden.

[Image Credit: The Get Smart Blog]


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SocialSafe, The Social Media Back-Up Tool, Raises $400K To Out-Archive Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn

December 24, 2012   admin   No comments

socialsafe_-_your_digital_journal

SocialSafe, the social media back-up tool co-founded by Julian Ranger‘s iBundle and 1minus1, has announced that it’s raised £250,000 (~$ 400k) in what’s being called a Series A round. That’s because Ranger, who is a prominent angel investor in the UK, has already funded the startup to the tune of £300k, bringing the total raised by SocialSafe to £550k (~$ 885k).

Today’s round comes from Marco Sodi, plus other unnamed UK-based angels, and is said to be used to “fast-track” the technical development of the app to add new functionality such as analytics and support for more networks, including Pinterest.

SocialSafe is a Mac/Windows app built using Adobe Air which lets users download and back-up their content from social media accounts, with support for Facebook, Google+, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter and Viadeo. The resulting archive is then searchable or can be browsed via a handy calendar view.

Interestingly, however, unlike the likes of Backupify, SocialSafe shuns the Cloud for the actual back-ups. Instead all data is stored locally on a user’s PC where, of course, it can still be manually pushed to the Cloud using a complementary online back-up service. I’m told that this is in-part because the Term of Service of most social networks and their associated developer APIs prohibit storing a full duplicate of their data in the Cloud. It also ensures that SocialSafe never sees a user’s data, significantly strengthening its privacy card. In the future, however, the company plans to add third-party Cloud storage support to make a DIY approach simpler.

As for why you’d use SocialSafe over Twitter’s own slowly rolling out back-up functionality, or Facebook and LinkedIn’s existing archive support, it’s fair to say that the app goes a lot deeper in terms of exactly what data is backed up and the way it makes it browsable. For example, Twitter only exports a user’s Tweets, not their follow/follower graph, DMs, or mentions, all of which SocialSafe retrieves.

In the future, SocialSafe’s competitive advantage should also extend to what the startup is calling “smart visualisation of usage insights”, which presumably pushes the app towards social media professionals/companies, not just consumers. In fact, when I met up with Ranger recently, he did suggest that one use for an app like SocialSafe is for regulatory compliance, where in the UK, for example, companies can be required to keep a record of all official communication. And, yes, that could include Tweets and Facebook Page updates.


TechCrunch

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