All Facebook

Facebook Sends Cease And Desist To USocial

Nick O'Neill — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 16:28:02 +0000

USocial, a company which sells Facebook friends and fans, has received a cease and desist from Facebook for violating the company’s terms of service. The BBC claims that the issue at hand is that the company is “letting people profit from their profile”, which is strictly forbidden within Facebook’s terms. We’ve reached out to Facebook for clarification on the issue, to see if there were any issues with the company selling fans. In early October we highlighted the growth in the pay per fan business model, and since then we’ve heard an increasing amount of buzz about the space.

More specific to the Cease and Desist sent to USocial were claims that the marketing firm “violates its rights by sending spam, using web tools to harvest pages, getting login names and by accessing accounts that did not belong to the marketing firm.” In other words, USocial’s activity is not kosher. The real question though is whether or not Facebook allows the selling of fans and/or friends as long as user accounts aren’t being harvested or accessed through unauthorized means.

While Facebook has explicitly stated that users cannot profit from their own profiles, it hasn’t been stated if third parties can sell friends or fans without providing monetary incentives to users. There is a rapidly increasing number of companies who sell fans to brands for Facebook Pages and it’s a topic which Facebook has yet to publicly comment on. Instead, “pay per fan” businesses continue to operate under the radar without explicit approval from Facebook.

Based on the BBC article, we’d assume that USocial simply crossed the line and paid users for adding friends and/or accessed user accounts through unauthorized means to generate new connections. We’ve reached out to Facebook for a comment on the issue and will be sure to update this post if we hear back.

Update
While Facebook didn’t clarify what exactly took place with USocial, they did provide the following statement: “We’ll continue to protect our users and the integrity of our site by enforcing our policies. We’re pleased that uSocial has agreed to comply.”

3 Facebook Stories We Didn’t Cover Yesterday

Nick O'Neill — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 15:42:08 +0000

On any given day we receive 5 to 50 stories to post on AllFacebook, however there’s no way for us to currently cover everything that goes on. Determining which stories to publish is part art and part science, however that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t be aware of all the things going on related to Facebook. That’s why we’ve decided to post occasional updates on the stories that we couldn’t get to the day before. Today we have 3 stories from yesterday that you should be aware of.

Initial Class Action Complaint Filed Against Facebook and Zynga

Last week we wrote about an impending class action suit which named a number of companies on the social web including Facebook, Zynga, and a number of offer networks. At the time we reached out to the law firm responsible for the class action to find out more details. They told us that they were currently seeking individuals who had been deceived in order to name them in the suit. One week later it appears as though they’ve found that individual: Rebecca Swift.

On behalf of Swift and other victims, Kershaw, Cutter & Ratinoff, LLP has filed an initial class action complaint against Zynga and Facebook. No other networks appear to be named in this initial complaint, however there could be additional complaints filed in the near future. The turnaround time on this has been extremely quick. You can view the full complaint via Valleywag.

Facebook’s Common Stock Valuation Jumps

In what appears to be an effective press release for SecondMarket, Bloomberg published an article stating that Facebook’s valuation has jumped in private markets over the past few months. While many of us love to speculate about the future of Facebook and what their valuation will be, private markets are also extremely tricky for setting exact valuations. Then again, if someone is willing to pay a specific price, that price determines the value of the company at the time of the transaction.

In illiquid markets however it’s difficult to track bid and ask rates on shares since the information is not complete.

Adknowledge Acquires SocialMedia’s Ad Network

SocialMedia which was previously one of the leading Facebook platform ad networks, sold their ad network to Adknowledge for an undisclosed amount. This is part of a continued roll-up of ad networks which the company began back in 2008. The company currently own Cubics, Adonomics, Lookery’s ad network, SuperRewards, and now SocialMedia’s ad network. Adknowledge has been focused on the performance advertising space, an area which has come under increasing scrutiny amidst new class actions like the one we covered earlier in this post.

Adknowledge has been aggressive in building a large social advertising roll-up, this acquisition being the latest in an ongoing series of acquisitions.

Google Chrome OS Is What Facebook Wanted To Be

Nick O'Neill — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 19:24:17 +0000

This afternoon I’ve been watching the Google OS announcement and all I can say is that this is what Mark Zuckerberg first announced when they released Platform, two and a half years ago. Many assumed that the acquisition of Parakey was a step toward truly building the web operating system of the future. Blake Ross, the developer of Firefox and Parakey, has been working on Facebook Lite though. Joe Hewitt, the other Parakey developer, had been working on the Facebook iPhone application until recently. So where is Facebook OS?

Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed Facebook as the “social operating system” and ultimately it has become just that to a certain extend. The largest issue is that utility focused applications have never done well on Facebook because it doesn’t function as a full blown operating system yet. In other words, you don’t spend all your time from within Facebook. Instead you spend the vast majority of from within a web browser.

If you want to listen to Google’s explanation of the problem in an overly enthusiastic tone, you can watch the video below. Now it’s very possible that Facebook is still working on the truly “social operating system”. Facebook has had a significant impact on all new platforms including the iPhone platform, the Google Android operating system, and all other social platforms on the web. The primary feature that Facebook innovated was notifications (which is now being depricated) as well as the stream, and I’d argue that Facebook was a catalyst for the multi-platform wars.

The number of platforms for developers to build on has increased dramatically in just the past two and a half years and Facebook has proven to be one of the leading platforms. With Facebook appearing to move away from being a destination site in the future, one would only expect Facebook to continue moving forward with the original vision of becoming the “social operating system”. The only question now is whether or not the vision has been lost or if one day we’ll actually have the choice of booting up our devices with Facebook, the social operating system.

American Music Awards Pre-Show Streaming Live On Facebook

Nick O'Neill — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 18:05:53 +0000

Want to get your questions answered by Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez, Rhianna, or Taylor Swift? I don’t, but if you are one of the millions of people who follow celebrities, you can watch the American Music Awards pre-show live on Facebook this Sunday. The “Official AMA Pre-Show” will feature hosts Julie Moran, Jenni Pulos, Jai Rodriguez, Taryn Southern. Don’t forget Facebook’s own Randi Zuckerberg and Communications Director Brandee Barker, who will also be featured hosts of the event.

Just like Shakira’s recent music video debut on Facebook, the event will be streamed using the live streaming application, powered by Ustream. If you want to check out all the red carpet goodness you can visit the AMAs Facebook Page or Celebrities on Facebook Page. Perhaps you can get post a question to Taylor Swift about the Kanye incident, something which I’m sure she has been inundated with for months now.

If you happen to come up with more creative questions for the celebrities, you can post them via the Celebs on Facebook stream.

Zynga Rocketing Past 200 Million Users

Nick O'Neill — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 16:34:05 +0000

Just one month ago at Web 2.0 Summit, Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, told the audience that the company had surpassed 150 monthly active users. One month later, the company’s user base has grown by a third, rocketing it past 200 million users. Monthly active users are a relatively broad metric when analyzing a company though, as daily active users are a more effective metric for measuring a company’s ability to monetize.

During the same period when Zynga’s monthly active users grew by 50 percent, daily active users grew approximately 27 percent from 47.8 million to approximately 61 million. All other things being constant, Zynga’s revenue should grow proportionally to the growth in daily active users. When it comes to total daily active users, no company comes close to Zynga. The second largest company is Playfish, who recently sold to Electronic Arts for up to $400 million on estimated annual revenues of $30 million to $40 million.

That means Zynga should easily be making more than $250 million annually at this point, although the company recently took a hit as Facebook became more aggressive on some of the questionable IQ Quiz advertisements. The company also had Fishville shut down for a few days after Facebook found advertisements which violate their advertising terms. That application has recovered though and is growing at upwards of 10 percent a day, currently reaching over 12.3 million monthly active users.

Under two months ago we wrote about Zynga surpassing 100 million monthly active users and the growth isn’t slowing. At this rate we could be talking about the company surpassing 500 million monthly active users in only a few months. With the company’s rapid ascent, a projected 2010 IPO doesn’t seem so ridiculous.

Facebook Enables Page Administrators To Target Stream Stories

Nick O'Neill — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:23:08 +0000

While Facebook has let Facebook Page administrators target Page updates to fans for a while now, the company just extended targeting to stream updates. The service mimics the functionality provided by the new status update privacy settings first demoed by Facebook back in July. While the new privacy settings have yet to go live almost 5 months later, it appears that Facebook wants to enable granular stream publishing filters for page administrators as well.

By clicking on a new stream filter toggle that shows up next to the “Publish” button, Page administrators can select which fans they’d like to make stories visible to based on their country and language. For international brands, this is extremely valuable. We even have a French version of our site however non-French speaking users probably won’t find the content on the site valuable. With this new feature we can target our French readers.

While we have not confirmed whether or not this is a site-wide rollout, I’d expect this feature to be available for all Page administrators in a short amount of time. We’ll reach out to Facebook for more information but considering that it’s almost midnight on the west coast, I doubt we’ll hear back until tomorrow.

Update
As Jim Burnell points out in the comments, the feature has been rolled out to all Page administrators as announced via the Facebook Pages notes.

Facebook Almost Doubles Video Streams In One Month

Nick O'Neill — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 07:08:58 +0000

While Facebook is the largest photo platform on the web, the company only recently became a dominant force in the video streaming space. In the past month, the company doubled the number of video streams from 110.418 million streams to 216.765 million streams according to Nielsen’s latest VideoCensus numbers. That’s a dramatic increase, making the site the third largest video site on the web, behind YouTube and Hulu.

The fact that Facebook can remain profitable while scaling the largest photo service on the web and one of the fastest growing video services is incredible. At this rate, Facebook could surpass Hulu to become the second largest video platform in a couple months and could eventually be contenting with YouTube, the most dominant video site on the web with over 6.6 billion streams a month.

With over 14 million videos shared on the site each month, each video would need to be watched 16 times in order to hit Nielsen’s estimates. Given that each user has 130 friends on average, it’s easy to understand how video views on Facebook continue to grow. As video becomes a standard feature of mobile devices, I would only expect the number of videos shared on Facebook to continue to grow overtime.

If the numbers continue to grow as fast as they are right now, Facebook could be larger than YouTube in 6 months. It’s a bold statement, but Facebook continues to experience unmatched growth.

Facebook Upgrades Their Photo Uploader Tool

Nick O'Neill — Thu, 19 Nov 2009 04:49:08 +0000

This evening Chris Putnam of Facebook announced that the company is launching an upgraded version of their photo uploader, immediately available for testing as on of Facebook’s Prototype applications. Over time Facebook has had issues with their automated uploading tool, and as such they’ve been working on developing an improved version. If you want to test it out yourself, you can go install the “New Photo Uploader” immediately.

There are a number of upgrades with this new service on the technical side. The most significant is that uploading takes place in the background, which means you can navigate to anywhere on Facebook while your images are being uploaded. The entire user interface is built using HTML and CSS, and the background upload thread takes advantage of JSONP (something you’ve probably used if you’ve played around with JQuery or other JavaScript libraries extensively).

The new service should increase reliability and remove the previous dependance on Java, which was a problem for many users. For the most part, Chris Putnam’s post discusses the technical accomplishments of this new project (which makes sense considering it was posted to the Facebook Engineering page). If you’ve ever come back from a trip and want to upload a bunch of photos, you have no doubt experienced problems with the Facebook photo uploader breaking.

This new tools should resolve most of the previous problems, making uploading much more efficient. To learn more about the new tool view Chris Putnam’s note from this evening or just install the New Photo Uploader application.

77Agency Launches Second Third-Party Facebook Ads Manager

Nick O'Neill — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:26:34 +0000

On Monday we wrote about the first third-party Facebook Ads manager to leverage the Facebook Ads API. Today, 77Agency is the second company to announced their own Facebook Ads campaign management software. Additionally, the company is already involved in licensing discussions with a number of third-parties. Just like the Alchemy service which we covered on Monday, the 77Agency Facebook ad manager, enables advertisers to optimize bids in real-time.

The new tool developed by 77Agency provides the following features:

Ability to carry out multiple account management and reporting
Conversion tracking (CPA and ROI)
Range of reporting views (daily, weekly, monthly, multiple campaigns report, etc) with conversion data
Bulk upload functionality which allows the creation of multiple campaigns and adgroups without the need to switch between different pages

As we mentioned on Monday, there will undoubtedly be a number of other companies to release their own tools on top of the Facebook Ads API, however we didn’t expect them to be rolled out this quickly. The team at 77Agency has been working with Facebook for the past few months on developing this tool and have been running tests with a number of clients. Over the coming months, 77Agency will be hosting a series of seminars throughout Europe (London, Milan, Rome, Amsterdam) and in New York, to highlight the opportunities available to brand and marketing managers.

We’ll continue to follow the companies building services on top of the Facebook Ads API over the coming weeks and months.

CrowdStar Launches Fourth Game On Facebook: Happy Pets

Nick O'Neill — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 16:24:08 +0000

After trying to stay under the radar for the past few months, CrowdStar, the company behind the fourth largest game on the Facebook platform, Happy Aquarium, is launching their fourth game: Happy Pets. The application first debuted last Thursday and already has over one million monthly active users, approximately the size of the company’s other two games: Know-It-All Trivia and Restaurant Life. The company has great ambitions, with a goal of taking on Zynga.

While you would expect Happy Pets to be similar to Playfish’s largest game, Pet Society, it’s not. Instead, the goal is to adopt as many cats and dogs as you can and to take care of them. While you can purchase furniture for your house, just as you can in Pet Society, there are no activities to participate in outside of your house. The game is well developed though and has grown quickly in the past week. While none of the company’s new games have grown to be as large as Happy Aquarium, CrowdStar is investing significant development resources.

According to the company’s Executive Chairman, Peter Relan, the CrowdStar believes they have a unique business model. Relan says that CrowdStar recognizes “that the entire value chain, including the way you actually build, deliver and manage games has also changed, and traditional development models aren’t optimal for this new market. We believe we are building the most efficient, agile and profitable business model in the industry.”

While the company isn’t saying how much money they’re making, with one of the top games on Facebook based on both monthly and daily active users, it’s in the millions. We’ll definitely be keeping our eyes on the CrowdStar team over the coming months as they establish themselves as a leading social gaming company.