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Facebook adds app ratings and negative feedback metrics to insights tool

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 05:00:19 +0000

Facebook introduced app ratings and negative feedback metrics to the app insights tool today as a way to help developers gain a better understanding of how users respond to their apps.

Detailed on developer blog post, these new metrics allow developers to go beyond monitoring growth trends and gain. Facebook has used this data to determine what appears in News Feed, but developers previously did not have the ability to see these insights or track their performance over time. Facebook says app ratings and negative feedback will also factor into what apps appear in the recently announced App Center.

The new app ratings dashboard in app insights will show developers how users have rated an app on a scale of one to five stars. Developers can view ratings as absolute numbers or relative percentages across different demographics, including age and gender, country and locale. Before, developers could only see their apps’ average overall rating and could not determine how the rating varied over time or by demographic.

The negative feedback metric will show developers how many times people have chosen to hide stories from an app, reported stories as spam or blocked an app completely. These reports are the same ones Facebook uses in its automated systems to detect spam on the platform, so it will be useful for developers in monitoring their performance over time. The insights will include the ratio of negative feedback to total impressions as well as an overview chart that displays green when an app is doing well and yellow when an app has reached a level for concern. Developers will even be able to compare the type of feedback they get from specific action types, as well as compare how users versus non-users respond to their content.

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Mobile, Adele, Halo, Will Smith, Porsche, Target, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook pages

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 05:00:17 +0000

Lightbox employees go to Facebook, shut down Android photo-sharing app

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 05:00:12 +0000

Facebook has hired the team behind Android photo-sharing app Lightbox, according to a blog post on Lightbox’s website.

The app has already been removed from the Google Play store. It is likely Facebook did not acquire the company or its technology because of its recent acquisition of Instagram. As the social network plans to keep Instagram as a standalone app, the opportunity for Lightbox was diminishing. According to the Google Play store, Lightbox had between 1 million and 5 million installs. Instagram has between 10 million and 50 million.

What Facebook gains is a team that’s focused on mobile and Android specifically. Facebook is seeking to building out its mobile offerings and determine the best way to monetize the rapidly growing user base that accesses the social network from mobile devices. In addition to its $1-billion Instagram purchase, the company also picked up ambient mobile location app Glancee and mobile loyalty startup Tagtile this year.

According to TechCrunch, seven Lightbox employees will join Facebook. This includes Lightbox co-founder Thai Tran, who was previously a product manager for YouTube and Google Maps.

“The Lightbox team has incredible experience developing innovative mobile products that people love. We look forward to welcoming this world-class team of engineers to Facebook,” Facebook said in a statement.

Exisiting Lightbox users can continue to visit Lightbox.com and download their photos here. Lightbox says it will open-source portions of the app’s code for other developers to build upon.

Facebook had 488 million users access its site through its mobile site or mobile apps in March. On Monday, the social network redesigned its mobile News Feed so that photos display three times larger.

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Facebook ups share price range to $34-$38, likely putting market cap above $100B

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 05:00:09 +0000

Facebook today increased the expected share price range for its initial public offering to $34 to $38 a share, according to an amendment to its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission. On the high end, the new price range puts Facebook’s market cap over $100 billion.

Previously, the company set a range of $28 to $35, giving it a maximum valuation of $96 billion. Facebook’s initial price range was relatively low considering that company shares went for $44.10 on secondary exchange SharesPost in March. The increased price range suggests there has been significant demand for the stock as Facebook executives met with investors during its roadshow last week. Some reports had said that investors were concerned with how the social network would be able to monetize mobile usage and were showing less interest than expected. Now this does not seem likely to be the case. According to the S-1, underwriters will also sell an additional 50,612,302 shares of Class A common stock to cover over-allotments.

Facebook made another change to its S-1 today indicating that its acquisition of Instagram could be delayed. Previously, the company said the deal would close in the second quarter of 2012, but now it says the deal is expected to close sometime in 2012. This gives weight to reports last week that the Federal Trade Commission would be investigating the deal. An investigation does not necessarily imply wrongdoing, as the FTC regularly reviews acquisitions over $66 million. Facebook bought Instagram for $1 billion. According to the S-1, Facebook has agreed to pay Instagram a $200 million termination fee if for any reason the deal does not close.

Facebook executives are expected to present its IPO pitch to investors in Kansas City and Denver this week. The company is likely to set a final offering price on Thursday before floating the shares on Friday. Some reports say CEO Mark Zuckerberg will ring the Nasdaq opening bell remotely from Facebook’s offices in Menlo Park, Calif.

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Zynga’s stock recovers as Facebook IPO looms

admin — Thu, 17 May 2012 00:02:46 +0000

Report: standalone mobile app for Facebook page management coming soon

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 23:26:29 +0000

Facebook has created a standalone page management app for iOS devices, according to 9to5Mac. The app, called Pages Manager, is available in New Zealand but could roll out more widely soon.

Based on screenshots provided to 9to5Mac, the app appears similar to Facebook’s existing iOS app, but it adds page notifications and insights, as well as eliminates any features that are not related to pages. The app could help page owners monitor their pages and respond to fans more easily. With the m.facebook.com and the main Facebook iOS and Android apps, page admins can access their pages and write on their Timelines as a page, but there is no ideal way to get notifications or analytics without a third-party service. Pages Manager likely gives admins the option of receiving push notifications about recent page activity.

Making this a standalone app makes sense in order to not further complicate the main Facebook app. Spokespeople from the company did not yet respond to requests for more information about when the app will be available in all countries or whether an Android version would also be released.

From what we can deduce from a few screenshots, it appears that the recently added private message feature might not be an option from the app. It also does not appear that pages can edit their “About” section on the go, but might be able to manage their admins.

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Facebook expands IPO with additional 83.8M shares from existing stockholders

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 21:56:47 +0000

Facebook will make an additional 83.8 million shares available in an initial public offering on Friday, according to an eighth amendment to its S-1 filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission.

Most of these shares are being sold by existing stockholders Accel Partners, Digital Sky Technologies, Goldman Sachs, Greylock Partners, Mail.ru Group Limited, Tiger Global Management and venture capitalist James Breyer. These entities and individuals likely decided to sell more shares after Facebook increased its price range for the IPO from between $28 and $35 to between $34 and $38.

Other additional shares will be sold by IPO underwriters, including Morgan Stanley and JP Morgan. According to today’s amendment, Facebook has granted its underwriters the right to purchase more 63 million additional shares of Class A common stock to cover over-allotments. This is sometimes called a “greenshoe” option. Previously, Facebook was offering only about 50 million shares for a greenshoe, but this increased today because the number of over-allotment shares is typically a percentage of the total number of shares being floated.

Facebook itself is still only offering 180 million shares, which will raise about $6.8 billion for the company at the high end of the range. The remaining shares being sold will come from founders, employees and investors. CEO Mark Zuckerberg will exercise stock options and sell 30.2 million shares worth over $1 billion before taxes. Zuckerberg was not among the investors who decided to increase the amount of shares they would sell in the offering.

Facebook’s IPO will likely value the company at over $100 billion. Executives are expected to set the final stock price on Thursday. According to TechCrunch, the company will hold an all-night Hackathon event before Zuckerberg rings the opening Nasdaq bell from the social network’s headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif., on Friday morning.

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Horoscopes, Yahoo, video, Instagram, Lost Bubble, more on this week’s top 20 growing Facebook apps by DAU

admin — Wed, 16 May 2012 15:57:15 +0000

This week’s headlines from across Inside Network

admin — Tue, 15 May 2012 05:00:13 +0000

A roundup of all the news Inside Network brought you between May 7 and 13.

Inside Mobile Apps

Tracking the convergence of mobile apps, social platforms and virtual goods.

Monday, May 7

Tuesday, May 8

Wednesday, May 9

Thursday, May 10

Friday, May 11

Saturday, May 12

New this week on the Inside Network Job Board: Sojo King.com, Kixeye and more

Inside Social Games

Covering all the latest developments at the intersection of games and social platforms.

Monday, May 7

Tuesday, May 8

Wednesday, May 9

Thursday, May 10

Friday, May 11

Saturday, May 12

New this week on the Inside Network Job Board: Ryzing, Nuukster, King.com and more

Inside Facebook

Tracking Facebook and the Facebook platform for developers and marketers.

Monday, May 7

Tuesday, May 8

Wednesday, May 9

Thursday, May 10

Friday, May 11

Saturday, May 12

New this week on the Inside Network Job Board: Lowe’s, Fiveonenine, SponsorPay and more

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PageLever adds post tagging and alerts to insights platform

admin — Mon, 14 May 2012 23:03:21 +0000

Facebook analytics platform PageLever has added features that let page owners categorize and compare their posts, as well as receive alerts about any changes in key metrics.

With post tagging, PageLever users can indicate which of their posts are related to a particular campaign or employ a certain tactic, for example, asking a question or making a fill-in-the-blank post. Then page owners can quickly compare the performance of different types of posts. PageLever co-founder Jeff Widman tells us one media company that used this feature discovered that posts about Google were, on average, twice as popular as posts about Apple. These insights would be difficult to discover through manual aggregation and analysis.

Another new PageLever feature — page alerts — helps page owners see changes in reach, growth rate and People Talking About This, among other metrics. For example, page owners can see alerts about a higher-than-usual number of fans unliking their page. PageLever users can adjust the sensitivity of alerts to be notified more or less often. Users will see their alerts when they log into the platform, through email or via RSS.

Widman says these features were both part of the original vision for the PageLever platform, which launched in August 2011. He says his team is working on additional features that build upon the existing Facebook Insights API to present information in a way that is more actionable for page owners from small businesses to large agencies.

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