Jim Breyer to leave Facebook board – Accel Partners venture capitalist Jim Breyer announced today that he is stepping down from Facebook’s board of directors in June after holding a seat since April 2005. Breyer was recently elected to the Harvard University Corporation Board. He also sits on the boards of Brightcove, Dell, News Corporation and Walmart. Facebook’s current board lineup includes Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen, Erskine Bowles, Susan Desmond-Hellmann, Don Graham, Reed Hastings and Peter Thiel.

New Facebook data center coming to Iowa – Facebook this week announced plans for a new data center in Altoona, Iowa. Altoona will be the company’s fourth owned and operated data center. Its others are in Prineville, Oregon; Forest City, North Carolina; and Luleå, Sweden. The facility will feature its Open Compute Project server designs, outdoor-air cooling system and other innovations to be more energy efficient. Facebook says it plans to break ground this summer and begin serving user traffic in 2014.

Stickers come to Messenger for Android – Facebook updated its Messenger for Android app this week to include support for the new stickers in chat. Stickers are larger emoji that are popular in Asian messaging apps like Line, KakaoTalk and WeChat. Facebook offers a number of sticker sets, which are available for free download from its mobile Sticker Store. This feature came to the main Facebook for iOS app last week, but it is not yet available for the main Android app or Messenger for iOS.

Facebook Home passes 500K installs – According to the Google Play Store, Facebook Home was download more than 500,000 times in the week since it launched. So far the app has only a two-star rating.

Facebook tries new image format – Facebook is testing a new WebP image format, which could make the site faster and reduce network costs, according to CNet. Now, when users upload JPEG images, Facebook converts them to WebP and delivers them this way to people using browsers like Chrome and Opera, which support the format. WebP, however, is not always compatible outside of the web, which means it is harder for users to download and share images they get from Facebook.

Facebook today announced a deal with Rovi Corporation to use Rovi Video, a database of information about movies, TV shows and celebrities that can be used to improve search and discovery across its platform.

Rovi’s data helps power experiences like on-screen TV guides, iTunes, Flixter, BestBuy.com and many others. Facebook has been building out its “entity graph,” which are all the people, places and things that are represented with pages. Users primarily connect to these objects by Liking them, but now Facebook is making a push for users to do so through actions like “watch/want to watch,” “read/want to read” or “listen/want to listen.” Improving the metadata associated with these objects could give Facebook new opportunities when it comes to search, News Feed relevance, recommendations and offering new features for developers

Before the Rovi deal, Facebook used Wikipedia and Freebase to populate information about movies, TV shows and other entities, for example for the module on the “Star Wars: Return of the Jedi” page below. However, those sources are community-curated and not necessarily as reliable as what Rovi provides for many of the largest companies in the world.

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Facebook today announced the availability of new “partner categories,” audience segments created by third-party data providers that U.S. advertisers can use for targeting via Power Editor or the API. Grocery habits, occupation and car ownership are among the new options self-serve advertisers have access to on the social network

Partner categories are similar to Facebook’s broad category targeting, but they are created with data from third parties that many advertisers already work with, Acxiom, Datalogix and Epsilon. These categories are informed with transactional data, survey information and other online or offline behaviors. User profiles are anonymously matched, and Facebook only allows advertisers to target categories of users, not specific people. Nor does Facebook give advertisers any personal information about the users they target.

Through partner categories, advertising on Facebook could be better targeted and more relevant. Not only is this a boon for advertisers, but is important for users as ads become front and center in News Feed.
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Zuckerberg and Brin collaborate to launch Foundation – Mark Zuckerberg, Google co-founder Sergey Brin and technology investor Yuri Milner are joining forces to launch the Breakthrough Prize in Life Sciences, which will award 11 scientists $3 million each. The prize will spotlight outstanding minds in medicine and hopes to enhance medical innovation.

Twitter announces Ads API – Twitter has officially launched its Ads API which it began testing last January. Marketers will be able to work with Ads API partners to manage Twitter Ad campaigns and both desktop and mobile ads. The initial partners include Adobe, Hootsuite, Salesforce, SHIFT and TBG Digital. This means advertisers will be able to buy Twitter’s promoted products in similar ways to how they purchase Facebook ads, and many Facebook Ads API companies are likely to incorporate Twitter’s Ads API in their platforms soon.
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As Facebook puts more emphasis on monetization and more advertisers are spending on its platform, measurement is increasingly important.

The social network is still so new and comes with unique ad types and its own vocabulary, so many advertisers still aren’t sure how it fits in with the rest of their marketing efforts. The Facebook measurement team is working to put its ads in a more familiar context for advertisers and apply its research findings to offer better ad types and systems.

We spoke to Head of Measurement Research Development and Partnerships Sean Bruich about the questions Facebook is trying to answer, the value of a Like, how Facebook ads compare to more traditional channels and what needs to happen as marketers begin thinking cross-platform instead of in silos.

The following is an edited transcript from that interview.

Tell me more about your role and what your team does.

My team is the research development team, we also work on partnerships with third-party research companies like Nielsen and Datalogix. Our goal is twofold: to help build the right tools to help advertisers buy media to capture the value they’re trying to get, and the second piece to build out the measurement systems that help quantify that value and optimize campaigns, not just for e-commerce transactions, but a broader set of marketing outcomes like offline sales. It’s pretty simple, we’re trying to solve how you value an ad campaign online if one of your objectives is offline sales impact or one your objectives is staying top of mind. And the second piece is how do you translate all of those things that you know about other forms of marketing and understand whether online is accomplishing those same goals and how you would execute against those goals online.
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“Facebook for Every Phone,” the official page for Facebook’s feature phone application has become the first page on the social network to surpass 200 million Likes, according to our PageData tracking service.

The page was created in August 2011, and back in June 2012 it was the first page to surpass the 100 million Likes mark. It’s still the only page to have done so. By comparison, the No. 2 page on the social network is its official community page, “Facebook,” with 87 million likes. YouTube holds the No. 3 spot with 70 million Likes.

Facebook for Every Phone is a native mobile app compatible with more than 3,600 different Java-enabled feature phones. The growth of the app’s fan page is an indication of how many of the social network’s mobile users are on feature phones. Facebook for Every Phone users are given the option to Like the page when they first log in to the app, a company spokesperson told us in April last year.
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Facebook is testing a new feature called “Lookalike Audiences” that helps advertisers target users similar to those in their Custom Audience databases, a spokesperson from the company tells us. Advertisers in the beta have seen lower costs per action than with traditional targeting options.

Lookalike Audiences can be created after an advertiser has uploaded a list of first-party data, such as customer email addresses, phone numbers or user IDs to make a Custom Audience. Facebook’s algorithms analyze the Custom Audience and produce another audience segment that is likely to have a similar customer profile. The advertiser can then create any Facebook ad type and target it to the Lookalike Audience. No personally identifiable information is shared back with advertisers and Lookalike Audiences can only be used within Facebook, not exported for email marketing or other ad targeting.

The feature is in limited beta from the Power Editor tool in the U.S. Lookalike Audiences cannot yet be created through the main self-serve ad dashboard or the Ads API. Advertisers can optimize for reach, which will return Lookalike Audiences that are larger but a bit less precise, or optimize for similarity, which will return audiences that are smaller but more similar to the advertiser’s existing Custom Audience. Lookalike Audiences can be combined with other interest or demographic targeting options, so an advertiser could limit its ads to a similar audience that lives in Ohio, or a similar audience who is not already a fan of the advertiser’s page, for example.
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Even at the overwhelming Consumer Electronics Show, it’s hard to miss the large Salesforce monitors in the Las Vegas Convention Center’s North Hall. Every second the screen is spitting CES stats, ranging from the reactions to certain announcements to the ranking of the most discussed gadget categories. The graphs, charts and numbers are pulled from about 500 million different sources.

It is called the Social Media Command Center, a nerdy collaboration between CES-owners Consumer Electronics Association and cloud computing giant Salesforce. Inside Social Commerce talked to Michael Peachey, Salesforce Senior Director of Solutions Marketing, about how the partnership came about and what trends they were already seeing early in the conference week.

Read the Q&A and learn how Salesforce is monitoring social media conversations and engaging consumers live from CES on our sister site, Inside Social Commerce. 

Instagram today introduced a new privacy policy that will allow data sharing with Facebook and a new terms of use agreement that includes language suggesting that an advertising product similar to Facebook’s Sponsored Stories could be in the app’s future.

Instagram is updating its terms to reflect its new ownership by Facebook, just as Facebook recently amended its data use policy to allow data to be shared among its affiliates. Instagram notes that nothing has changed about who can see a user’s photos, but explains:

“Our updated privacy policy helps Instagram function more easily as part of Facebook by being able to share info between the two groups. This means we can do things like fight spam more effectively, detect system and reliability problems more quickly, and build better features for everyone by understanding how Instagram is used.”

Logically, this may also involve sharing data for advertising purposes. Facebook has been aggressively monetizing its own mobile app through Sponsored Stories and a number of new ad units this year. It’s unclear how long the company will wait before bringing ads to Instagram, but when it does, they may include social context similar to ads on Facebook. New language in Instagram’s terms of use states:

Some or all of the Service may be supported by advertising revenue. To help us deliver interesting paid or sponsored content or promotions, you agree that a business or other entity may pay us to display your username, likeness, photos (along with any associated metadata), and/or actions you take, in connection with paid or sponsored content or promotions, without any compensation to you.

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Facebook today instated a new Data Use Policy and Statement of Rights and Responsibilities that will allow the company to share information with affiliates like Instagram and put an end to site governance voting, among other more minor changes.

The social network put the proposed terms up to a user vote, following a protocol established in 2009. Only 668,872 users voted, so even though the majority voted against the proposed changes, Facebook decided to move forward with the new governance documents. Results are only binding if at least 30 percent of users participate. In this case, less than 1 percent voted.

It’s largely for this reason that Facebook is removing the voting option with the terms adopted today. This was the third instance of user voting in the company’s history and each time only a small percentage participated. The small turnout ends up not being representative of the user base. Earlier this year and again with this latest proposal, activists copy-pasted the same comment over and over to trigger a vote on policy changes. At Facebook’s scale now, and especially as a publicly traded company, it will face government and other third-party regulation that could hold the company more accountable than a user vote ever could.

Facebook is also leaving in language requiring the company to provide a seven-day comment period in advance of any change. The social network is adding new ways to educate users about site governance issues and receive feedback. A new feature will allow users to submit questions to Chief Privacy Officer Erin Egan through Facebook’s official privacy pages, and Egan will begin appearing in livestreamed events where users can share their concerns or request more information.

The new Data Use Policy also includes new language about “affiliates” to cover Facebook’s relationship with Instagram, which it acquired this year. Facebook and its affiliates can share information to understand user activity or provide customized experiences, including personalized ads.