Inside Facebook

Over the past week and a half, Facebook has posted to the Developers Blog announcing several new tools, protocols and capabilities for developers. These include

• Better ways to submit bugs and track the API heath of the Platform,
• Changes to the DealSpot and Games Dashboard Featured Status incentives for developers who have integrated Facebook Credits
• A migration system where breaking changes are only pushed on the first day of the month
• Support for OAuth 2.0 with XMPP
• The deprecation of Auth 1.0 and the FB.Data call
• The ability to manage Events and upload high-resolution photos via the Graph API
• A more direct way for games to handle link clicks on the canvas page
• The option to detect and control flash object visibility in apps

New Platform Tools

High Level Changes

On October 14th, Facebook will open to all Facebook Credits developers several of the special incentive features that were initially used to encourage early adoption of Credits as a currency and payment method.

Developers will gain the ability to target specific demographics with DealSpot, a TrialPay-developed system that shows in-game icons leading to offers users can complete to earn Facebook Credits. DealSpot presents offers to users that might not have visited the offer wall, so developers looking to augment sales of virtual goods with another revenue stream should strongly consider activating the feature.

All developers will also gain access to broad category targeting, which lets them target Facebook Ads to users based on their interest in anything related to a selected topic. Facebook actually began testing this feature in April as an alternative to targeting specific keywords. The ability to target all social gamers rather than just fans or the Pages of certain games, Broad Category Interest targeting could help developers attain more new customers with less effort spent on ad targeting.

Facebook’s free marketing system known as Games Dashboard Featured Status and Social Placements will also become available to developers of games integrated with Credits. Games eligible for the promotions are “evaluated on a case by case basis, such as for game quality, genre and new functionality”. The system will be especially helpful to developers that are building great games but that don’t have big marketing budgets.

Recently, Facebook announced that developers would have a minimum of 90 days between the announcement of a breaking change and its implementation. To make adapting to these changes more predictable, Facebook now says it will only push breaking changes on the first day of any given month. This will reduce stress for developers, since they won’t have to worry that they may have missed an announcement about a breaking change that could suddenly take their app down.

For example, Facebook announced on September 16th that the FB.Data calls for waiting until specific queries were completed to perform an action will be deprecated. As such, the FB.Data calls will be deprecated on the first day of the month following the minimum 90 day period, January 1st, 2012.

Developers of XMPP Facebook Chat clients can now begin migrating to OAuth 2.0. They can use access tokens over SSL rather than sig and session_key parameters. As such, Facebook will deprecate Auth.promotesession on October 1st. The move to OAuth 2.0 will protect Chat clients from some types of data leaks.

A reminder, mandatory migration to OAuth 2.0 is coming on October 1st. Developers will need to have switched to the new JavaScript and PHP SDKs by then.

Specific Changes

Developers can now manage invite lists and check RSVP status for Events using the Graph API in addition to creating and deleting Events. This could help developers create powerful interfaces for professional event managers, or create an Events dashboard for users.

Facebook improved its Photos product last month, increasing the maximum photo size from 760 to 920 pixels. Photos uploaded through the Graph API can now have a maximum size of 920 pixels as well. However, photos returned through the API will still have a maximum size of 720 pixels, so there are no actual changes to what’s received from the API or FQL. The change will keep users from abandoning photo upload and editing apps when they want to upload high resolution photos.

By using FB.Canvas.SetUrlHandler, developers can now select to have clicks of links related to their apps from ticker stories, bookmarks, bookmark drop-down Requests and Request Notification stories be handled in-line in the apps. Previously, these clicks would needlessly redirect a user when they were already viewing the app the link led to.

For example, if an app employs FB.Canvas.SetUrlHandler, a user who clicks on a ‘your move’ Request or an achievement story while already viewing the app that published the Request or story wouldn’t be sent to the corresponding URL, but would be brought to the corresponding screen within the app. This should decrease load times and bounces from users clicking links on the Canvas page.

Flash applications using wmode=”window” rather than the recommended wmode=”opaque” can now pass a callback function to hideFlashCallback to FB.init to customize the visibility of flash elements when popups are shown. Previously, Flash objects could become hidden when popups were shown.

UK Won’t Ban Facebook – Facebook, Twitter and Research In Motion met with United Kingdom officials Thursday regarding the social networks’ role in summer riots there. The government ended up not moving to restrict access to the social networks in emergencies such as riots.

Facebook Takes Third Spot for Video – Facebook becomes the third largest video site on the Internet, comScore reported. That is 51.5 million people who watched videos on the platform in July.

AT&T to Discontinue Facebook Phone – AT&T is reportedly set to drop its “Facebook phone” called the Status, according to TechCrunch.

Places More Popular Than Foursquare – London developer Golden Gekko reports its clients report much more Facebook check-ins than Foursquare in Europe. Magnus Jern reported that the ratio ranged from 5-10 to 1. However, the future of the service is unclear.

Facebook Hit 1 Trillion Pageviews - Facebook surpassed 1 trillion pageviews according to Google’s Ad Planner tool, although comScore says otherwise.

Facebook Mobile App to Offer Photo Filters - Facebook looks to be competing with Instagram’s classy mobile app by offering almost a dozen photo filters to its mobile own application — following Facebook’s attempt to buy the startup, according to The New York Times. News of the feature first leaked out in June.

Recapping Facebook’s Bug Bounty – Neal Poole did a basic rundown of Facebook’s Security Bug Bounty program, which included information about multi-line JavaScript URI, redirects preserving fragment portions of URLs, XSS filters and more.

Facebook Wraps Up Farm Bureau Dispute – Facebook and the Farm Bureau had a dispute over Facebook trademarking “FB,” but it seems like the lawsuit is set to be wrapped up.

Milyoni Chart for Credits – Milyoni created a nice chart and whitepaper that includes ways that Facebook Credits can, and cannot, be used.

Facebook to Open Second Campus - Facebook is set to open up an additional campus from its current Menlo Park, Calif. headquarters. The second campus pwill be southwest of the current location, to be constructed in 2013 to accommodate about 2,800 employees.

Ticketmaster Allows Users to Find Friends – Line Nation’s Ticketmaster service launched an app that allows users to see where their friends are sitting on seat maps and tag themselves.

BBC Does Facebook On-Demand Video – BBC has developed an on-demand Facebook application allowing users to rent episodes from the show “Top Gear” for 48 hours.

ShopIgniter, Involver Partner – The two companies are entered into a partnership to help online retail businesses with a management content system.

Facebook can be a powerful tool for promoting live events. Not only can organizers create a Facebook Event for their conference, party, concert or other function, they can create a Facebook Page and applications for it, and encourage users to checkin via Facebook Places. This past weekend, the San Francisco’s Outside Lands Music Festival used several of these channels to achieve strong attendance, including selling out all 60,000 tickets for Saturday of the three-day concert.

Here we’ll look at how Outside Lands successfully used its Facebook Page and apps to promote the event, and how it could have improved its Facebook Places strategy to get more users to check in.

Facebook Page

The center of the Outside Lands marketing strategy was its Facebook Page. This was the fourth year of the festival, so when it came time to announce this year’s lineup it already had roughly 35,000 fans.

By placing both Like button to share the URL, a link to the Page, and a Like Box to directly drive Likes of its Page, Outside Lands gained a big batch of new fans when it announced the artists that would play this year’s festival. Fan re-sharing links to the website posted to the news feed by the Outside Lands Page also likely secured Likes for the Page.

Following the event, Outside Lands added a big Like Box social plugin to the home page of its website so it could secure more fans to market next year’s festival to. Now the Page has 67,380 Likes — double the amount it had a year ago and more than the total capacity of the festival.

People often buy tickets to events because their friends are going. To keep people excited and talking about the festival, the Outside Lands Page posted updates to news feed almost every day in the months leading up to the event, and ramped up to multiple posts per day in the last two weeks.

It posted compelling news and content such as updates to the lineup, ticket giveaways,  interviews and videos of artists set to play, and links to its website, Facebook Event, mobile app, and Twitter account. During the event, it posted photo albums and videos of performances, set time changes, and questions about what attendees were enjoying. The festival’s Page strategy could have benefited from reposting content uploaded by fans and recognizing contributors to engender additional good will.

Facebook Event and Apps

Outside Lands set up its official Facebook Event five months ahead of the festival date. Its info included a punchy description of the festival, the full lineup of artists playing, and links to its other web presences. The Outside Lands Page posted links to the Event multiple time, and RSVPs triggered news feed stories for the Event seen by the friends of attendees.

The festival worked with SonicLiving to develop a RSVP app for their Facebook Event that it embedded on its website. It allowed users to if which of their friends planned to attend and add their own RSVP. The app was a big success, with 5,961 monthly active users, meaning a significant portion of its total 21,714 ‘Attending’ RSVPs were made from the app.

The Outside Lands mobile app allowed users to login to Facebook and then post status updates about the festival from within the app. Quick links let them easily cross-post to Twitter and  add an Outside Lands Twitter handle mention or hashtag. The Facebook integration was relatively buried, so it only saw 2,955 logins in the last month.

Event promoters should strongly consider creating or licensing their own Facebook Event RSVP app for embed on their website. Outside Lands’ Facebook Event could have been better used as an archive of important information, such as set time changes, that otherwise could easily be missed in the churning stream of updates from its Page. A more prominent Facebook integration in the mobile app and a prompt to share some Outside Lands branded content and links to the news feed could have helped promote the event.

Facebook Places

The one major flaw in Outside Lands’ Facebook strategy was how it used Facebook Places. The address of the festival wasn’t added to the Facebook Page or Event, so neither had Places functionality — the ability for users to check in and notify their friends that they were at the festival. Without an official Place to check in to, users had to create their own unofficial Places.

Outside Lands still received approximately 7,000 checkins, but they were splintered across 40 unofficial Places. This prevented users from getting a comprehensive list of friends at the festival through the “Here Now” feature. It also reduced the likelihood of the festival being featured in aggregated Places checkin news feed stories that cluster checkins by multiple groups of friends into one big, compelling story.

The lack of an official Place also meant that users accidentally Liked the unofficial Places, costing Outside Lands’ Page valuable fans. All event promoters should be sure to add the address of their venue to their Facebook Page and Event to improve the checkin experience for users and gain more Facebook exposure.

As a whole, Outside Lands executed a strong Facebook marketing strategy. It provided compelling content, cross-promoted its presences and apps well, and was able to gain a lot of fans and checkins. These efforts will pay off next year when it comes time to market the fifth edition of the festival, as more people will have heard of Outside Lands and receive updates about it in their news feed.

When Facebook shows users news feed stories about events their friends have RSVP’d to, it now also shows photos uploaded to the event’s wall. These photos should make event stories more eye-catching and increase earned RSVPs. Event admins should therefore add wall photos to their events to gain news feed visibility.

The Events feature hasn’t received many major changes over the years, to contrast with other Facebook products that seem to be in constant flux. Here are the minor changes that have been implemented since 2009:

• August 2009 – Facebook makes it easier to invite the same set of friends to multiple events by adding friend list and characteristic filters to the event inviter.
• May 2010 – Facebook begins showing upcoming events and allows users to manage RSVPs from the home page. It also adds an event creator to the home page to facilitate spontaneous and last minute even creation.
• July 2010 – Facebook redesigns event pages to look more similar to business Pages.
• December 2010 –  Facebook introduces a special news feed story about people becoming friends after attending the same event.
• March 2011 – Users gain the ability to check in to events, rather than just Places.

Now, if users RSVP to a Facebook event that has had photos uploaded to it’s wall, these photos will be displayed in the news feed story about the RSVP. A user’s friends can then click to view these photos in-line. Unfortunately, these stories don’t appear to pull in photos accompanying check-ins by friends. The inclusion of check-in photos in the feed story could help users find out what an event in progress looks like in real-time.

Because the RSVP stories about events with wall photos appear much bigger in the news feed, we recommend that all event promoters upload additional photos to the walls of their events to take advantage of this opportunity for more news feed exposure. This will help them attain more RSVPs, and remind those have RSVP’d to attend.

[Thanks to Eti Suruzon for the tip]

BranchOut’s 1 Year Anniversary - BranchOut celebrated its one-year anniversary this week and has become the largest professional networking site on Facebook with 3 million job board listings, has millions of monthly active users in 60 countries and can now be viewed in 10 languages.

China Facebook Investment Rumor – A rumor that an official Chinese government wealth fund, SWF, was interested in a $1.2 billion stake in Facebook was shot down in part this week.

GSV Purchases Facebook Stock — The small investing group has put nearly $6.6 million in Facebook, via buying the company’s stock through a second market. The move sent the small public company’s shares up by 20% as more investors in turn bought into its Facebook stake.

Zuckerberg Uses Nature to Court Tech Talent - Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg reportedly takes select potential employees on nature walks in Palo Alto, Calif. in which he shows them the layout of Silicon Valley companies and gives them his Facebook pitch.

Facebook to Grow Seattle Office – Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg mentioned that he wanted to expand the Seattle engineering office from 40 people, about 60% a year.

ProPublica Uses Facebook for Investigative Journalism – Non-profit investigative journalism organization ProPublica recently revealed that Facebook was used to help the organization compile a database of how resources are distributed to schools.

Austin City Limits Utilizes Credits – Austin City Limits released some information about a recent live concert in which 1,900 comments were made during teh show from 2,300 people watching and 100% of the people paid using Facebook Credits.

Google+ Aids Social Tracking – Google’s analytics tools now allow for more precise information about social engagement.

Import Facebook Friends to Google+ with Chrome – A Google Chrome extension allows users to automatically import Facebook friends into Google+.

British Govt to Offer Services on Facebook – The British Cabinet Office announced that some government services might soon be available via Facebook and Twitter.

Fellows App Generates Facebook Groups – The DNET team from the École Normale Supérieure de Lyon released a Fellows app this week that automatically generates groups of people in your profile based on your connections. The group conducts research on social networks.

Announcements

American Express OPEN Finalists – American Express’ contest, Facebook Big Break for Small Business, selected 10 finalists. Facebook users will vote to select the finalist by July 19 on the Facebook Page.

Charity Buzz to Auction Off Facebook Tour - Facebook’s Director of Product Blake Ross has partnered with CharityBuzz.com to raise funds for the Peace Corp Morocco Country Fund.

Parature Summer ‘11 Released – Parature released its Parature Summer ’11 its most recent cloud platform, this week.

Music Pages just about took over our list of top 20 growing Facebook Pages this week, occupying 12 of the 20 slots. The remainder of the list included YouTube and Facebook, a few TV shows, Harry Potter, Cristiano Ronaldo and Coca-Cola. The Pages on our list grew from between 1 million and 2.4 million Likes, we measure the growth of Pages with our PageData tool.

Top Gainers This Week

	Name	Likes	Gain	Gain,%
1.	YouTube	36,335,231	+2,437,371	+7%
2.	Facebook	43,385,322	+2,249,789	+5%
3.	Shakira	31,709,723	+1,910,576	+6%
4.	Rihanna	35,369,725	+1,864,514	+6%
5.	Eminem	38,421,560	+1,789,255	+5%
6.	The Simpsons	28,449,683	+1,652,544	+6%
7.	Lady Gaga	36,330,897	+1,524,035	+4%
8.	Katy Perry	26,620,056	+1,512,412	+6%
9.	Coca-Cola	28,776,669	+1,509,262	+6%
10.	Beyoncé	22,357,915	+1,422,326	+7%
11.	South Park	28,444,691	+1,326,110	+5%
12.	Family Guy	31,902,867	+1,290,165	+4%
13.	AKON	23,996,778	+1,249,427	+5%
14.	Usher	19,573,724	+1,208,733	+7%
15.	Black Eyed Peas	19,333,205	+1,129,260	+6%
16.	Avril Lavigne	20,577,148	+1,109,198	+6%
17.	Lil Wayne	25,695,689	+1,058,421	+4%
18.	Linkin Park	29,118,054	+1,051,655	+4%
19.	Cristiano Ronaldo	27,436,242	+1,042,969	+4%
20.	Harry Potter	24,965,738	+1,033,571	+4%

YouTube grew by 2.4 million Likes to 36.3 million and Facebook by 2.2 million to reach 43.3 million, the pair of Pages occupied the one, and two, slots respectively on our list this week. Elsewhere on the list was Coca-Cola with a respectable 1.5 million new Likes to add to its 28.7 million; the Page features a landing tab encouraging visitors to Like the Page and frequent product-related status updates. Portuguese football (soccer) star Cristiano Ronaldo added more than 1 million Likes to his Page. totaling out at 27.4 million, talking about his professional experiences and threatening to sue media outlets for publishing photos of his son.

The only other non-music Pages on the list were TV shows and a movie. “The Simpsons” grew by 1.6 million Likes this week to 28.4 million partly because the Page involved fans in an intrigue as to whether or not two long-time characters should become a couple. “South Park” created an event for its most recent episode, which generated thousands of replies and comments; the Page grew by 1.3 million Likes to hit 28.4 million. “Family Guy” grew by just under that by just promoting the show to 31.9 million. The “Harry Potter” Page has begun a countdown to the release of the next film, supplementing the suspense with new posters and trailers; the Page added more than 1million Likes to reach 24.9 million.

The rest of the list was comprised of music Pages. A quick note, it becomes rarer and rarer not to see a musician’s Page that does not incorporate one or both of popular music apps:  BandPage by RootMusic or VEVO for Artists; the Pages below are no exception.

Shakira’s Page grew by 1.9 million Likes to 31.7 million; she’s promoting her album and releasing personalized Facebook vlogs. Rihanna was close behind with 1.8 million new Likes; she’s also promoting her songs and related products to her 35.3 million fans. Eminem’s Page grew by 1.7 million Likes to 38.4 million; he’s been promoting his album and singles with frequent updates. Lady Gaga was all over Facebook this week, resulting in 1.5 million new Likes, as she promotes her new album and its singles to her 36.3 million fans.

Katy Perry added 1.5 million Likes by promoting her album and related tour to 26.6 million. Beyoncé just released a single and is promoting her upcoming album, performed on “American Idol” and recruited 1.4 million new Likes this week to total out at 22.3 million. Akon’s 1.2 million new Likes may have resulted from his very frequent status updates and his fanbase now totals 23.9 million. Usher is currently promoting his tour and media appearances to the tune of 1.2 million new Likes to his 19.5 million fans. The Black Eyed Peas did pretty much the same thing, ending the week with 1.1 million new Likes and a total of 19.3 million.

Avril Lavigne added 1.1 million Likes to her 20.5 million total by promoting her new single on a landing tab. Lil Wayne grew his Page by more than 1 million Likes to 25.6 by updating his status frequently. Finally, Linkin Park’s million-plus new likes pushed the Page past 29.1 million as the band offered fans the chance to a free concert or place at the “Transformers” movie premiere.

In Facebook’s latest monthly Facebook Ads Newsletter, it announced that advertisers now have the option to include or exclude existing fans of their Page, users of their app, or attendees of their Event in ads targeted to “Friends of Connections” — friends of existing fans, users, or attendees. Previously, those already connected to an advertiser’s Facebook property were automatically excluded.

The change allows advertisers to gain new connections and re-engage their existing connections with a single ad, or specifically target ads to those who are connected and have friends who are connected as well. The change has been applied retroactively, so any ongoing Friends of Connections ad campaigns will now appear to existing connections unless they’re explicitly excluded.

Launched in November 2009, Friends of Connections ads show social context, or the names of a viewer’s friends who are already connected to the Facebook Page, app, or Event being advertised. This social context creates an implicit recommendation for the ad’s destination by a friend, increasing trust and click-through rates.

Now the “Connections on Facebook” targeting section of the ads creator shows a check box to activate Friends of Connections targeting for the destination of the ad. Radio buttons allow advertisers to refine Friends of Connections targeting to “Anyone” — connections and non-connections alike, only people who are connected, or only people who are not connected.

Advertisers can click the “Advanced connection targeting” button to reveal options to include or exclude connections to other Facebook properties they control.

In some cases, advertisers may only be seeking to generate new connections  not re-engage existing connections. They would then want to check the Friends of Connections box, and set their radio button to “Only people who are not fans/using/attending”. Meanwhile, apps or Pages that depend on network effect can now choose to only target existing connections with friends that are connected too.

President Barack Obama, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg, and Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg will answer questions from users as part of a Facebook Live townhall to be held at the Facebook headquarters in Palo Alto. Users can post questions about economic recovery and funding innovation to the Facebook Event’s wall starting today, and then watch the live stream of the town hall at at 1:45pm PST on April 20th, 2011.

The event has been organized by The White House’s Facebook Page, which is asking users to Like it before RSVP’ing. The Page includes the option to share with friends an invitation to “Join President Obama for a Facebook Townhall” and a link to submit questions.

Obama will be the first acting President of the United States to speak at a Facebook Live event, though former President George W. Bush spoke with Zuckerberg in December 2010. Facebook previously held the Vote 2010 Town Hall in conjunction with ABC during the last presidential election. By taking questions online opposed to from a physically present audience, the event will allow even those abroad to join the discussion.

Obama met with Zuckerberg and other tech leaders including Steve Jobs during the President’s trip to Silicon Valley in February. They discussed how the government could promote job creation by investing in the tech sector. Startup America, a new partnership between the White House and innovation industries, has been founded to further these goals. Facebook is participating in the initiative by planning to hold 12 “Startup Days” this year to encourage development on the platform that can lead to successful new companies.

Facebook has been looking to strengthen its relation with the US government lately, staffing a new policy office in Washington with lobbyists, and attempting to hire former Press Secretary Robert Gibbs to lead its communications team. Zuckerberg has been taking an active role in this courtship, most recently sitting down with Senator Oren Hatch at Brigham Young University, and visiting Capitol Hill last year.

The latest Platform Update to the Facebook Developer’s blog announced a change to how data about Facebook Events is accessed through the Graph API that should improve the performance of Event data-dependent apps. It also announced that domains no longer need to be on a whitelist in order to publish video to the news feed, and explained how developers can now use the Like button to receive updates about documentation changes.

Currently, when developers query the event_member FQL table via the Graph API, all of a user’s Facebook Events are returned, taxing the API and causing apps that require this type of data to run slowly. To fix this issue, starting May 3rd, 2011, calls for a user’s events will only return those from the last two weeks. The change will also impact calls to https://graph.facebook.com/[USER ID]/events.

The update should be especially helpful for developers of real-time Event recommendation apps, such as The Hotlist, as their users will be less likely bounce while enduring long loading times. For developers who want older Event data, or data in a specific range, Facebook will release a new start_time specification tomorrow. For example, to retrieve all of a user’s events since April 1st, 2010, developers would call:

SELECT eid from event_member where uid=260300016
  and start_time > 1270098000

To retrieve all of a user’s Events, as was the default before, developers can specify start_time > 0

Previously, developers who wanted to publish video content to the news feed had to submit an application and wait for their domain to be added to Facebook’s video publishing whitelist. Facebook no longer requires this, opening video publishing to all domains.

Developer now merely need to append the Open Graph tag og:video to the webpage hosting the video, and optionally add tags for height, width, and video player type. Facebook will infer the player type if none is specified.

Developers looking to keep up-to-date with specific pieces of Facebook’s documentation can now click the Like button on those pages. They’ll then receive news feed updates whenever that documentation Page is significantly updated.

In Facebook’s first update to its iPhone app in five months, the company added a new map view for seeing friend’s locations and check-ins for events.

Facebook also changed the user interface for notifications, putting bigger profile pictures in, and added the ability to unfriend people from the iPhone app. Overall, the changes are pretty modest.

The map view will also help people better visualize how close their friends are, which might help if they’re in unfamiliar or new cities (see right).

By allowing users to check-in to Events, Facebook may be able to cross-promote the two features, inspiring users to RSVP and check in more often. As you can see below, users can not only see Nearby Places, but they can also browse Nearby Events. This means users will probably need to exercise a bit more care around making their events private.

> Continue reading on Inside Mobile Apps.