To Drive More Clicks, Twitter Is Testing A Popular Tweets History Feature

The link to the full story is here

Twitter has started to test a new feature related to its embedded tweet service: a list of links, below the tweet, where a tweet has been referenced. It’s the latest move in Twitter’s longer-term strategy to make the platform more interactive, which started a little over a year ago and has brought us Twitter cards with previews, as well as the shortcodes for users to create pictures of the tweets — aka embedded tweets — elsewhere.

For now, this looks like only a limited test.Mikko Hypponen, the outspoken chief research officer at F-Secure who first brought this to our attention, has also noted that the feature has come and gone, and returned during the day.

I haven’t been able to see the links myself, but you can in a screenshot (shown here in a Twitter embedded tweet link:)

The links in turn go directly to the pages on the sites, not to tweets, Hypponen told me.

I asked Twitter about what is going on, and a spokesperson pointed me in the direction of this blog post noting tests of “hundreds of variations of new features and designs.”

Regardless of whether or not this feature eventually rolls out to a wider public, listing where a tweet has been used is another sign of how Twitter hopes to continue to make its platform more interactive and less lean-back.

Getting the balance to tip further in the direction of engaged users will mean that Twitter can sell itself better as a broadcasting platform to advertisers hungry to go not just where registered users are congregating, but specifically to where users are logging on, paying attention, and clicking. Conversely, giving users a list of links showing where else a tweet has “travelled” outside of Twitter is a good way of driving more usage of the embedded link feature, and getting more people to effectively become marketers of Twitter itself.

There is also a practical need for something like this to help “close the loop,” as online marketers like to say, between presenting information and actually acting on it. Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that dozens of retweets (much less favorites) of a link do not necessarily translate to traffic to a particular page. It seems that many Twitter users, lured in by the fast pace of Twitter, are happy to use it as its chief source of information as well. Offering one more bit of context — in the form of the history of the embed — could be one way for Twitter and would be users of the embed service to drive more actions from that tweet.

You can also see how a list of links may potentially also come to include a sponsor in the mix, taking advantage of the Google-Adwords-style keyword targeting advertising that Twitter has been rolling out.

Leaked Details Of Facebook’s New Chat Rooms Feature

The link to the full story is here

Facebook has built a new feature codenamed “Host Chat” that lets people set up chat rooms their friends can join without an invitation, a source familiar with the feature tells us. I’ve contacted Facebook and it confirms it has begun testing this feature in the wild. Reminiscent of the old AOL chat rooms, it could get Facebook users to meet friends of friends and spend more time on the site.

Facebook verified with me that it’s testing the feature, but wouldn’t comment on details beyond saying “we do test things from time to time with a small percentage of users.” These tests can be a small as a fraction of a percent of all users, and are sometimes isolated to particular countries, so it’s unlikely you’ll see this in your own Facebook unless the feature does well and receives a wider roll out.

The leak comes as Facebook is fighting a war for messaging. It’s own cross-platform chat competes with SMS, Apple’s iMessage, and now Google’s new unified messaging system Hangouts. Meanwhile, it’s battling independent international players like WhatsApp, sticker-focused products like Japan’s Line, and novel communication forms like Snapchat.

The stakes are high as messaging generates huge amounts of engagement, direct monetization opportunities through ads and sticker sales, and valuable data on who someone’s closest friends are. For tech giants like Apple, Google, and Facebook, messaging encourages platform lock-in, driving time spent on their other products.

Chat rooms could be a powerful weapon in this fight because of their relatively passive nature. With direct private communication, users typically pop in and out just to send and read messages. But people often keep chat rooms open for long periods of time. That meshes well with Facebook’s strategy of driving high amounts of time-on-site. Facebook users might browse the news feed or friends’ profiles for longer and see more ads to fill time while they gab in chat rooms.

HOW FACEBOOK CHAT ROOMS WORK

Our source provided extensive details on how the feature works. There’s always a possibility that the feature gets scrapped rather than rolled out, its interface evolves significantly, so know the details might change if Facebook decides if it is worthy of a wider release.

The Facebook chat rooms feature creates an option to “Host Chat” in the Facebook home page’s status update composer. Currently users see buttons for “Update Status”, and “Add Photos/Video”. The “Host Chat” button would be a third option there.

When clicked it opens a chat room that the host can name if there’s a specific purpose for the room, such as discussing a certain topic, planning an event, or working on a project. The host can add specific friends to the room, similar to Facebook’s existing ad-hoc private group chat feature. Those participating see the room as a window similar to traditional one-on-one Facebook chat, though I’d expect it to be a bit bigger to accommodate a higher pace of conversation.

What makes Host Chat special is that any of the host’s friends can join without being invited. They see a story in their news feed that a friend is hosting a chat room and they’re given the option to jump in. This works similar to the chat feature within Facebook Groups, where anyone in the Group can join a discussion. The use of the news feed to spread and grow rooms takes advantage of Facebook’s ubiquity and the relatively large number of a person’s friends likely to be browsing the feed at any given time.

Hosts can set privacy restrictions to limit who is allowed to join their room, and can expel people they don’t want present. There may be an option to allow friends of friends to join so a room could grow virally, but this isn’t confirmed. Figuring out the best way to handle privacy when people who aren’t friends interact in a chat room may be one of Facebook’s goals for the test.

A mid-sized group of Facebook employees including some of the existing chat team have been working on the feature. Early internal tests of Host Chat only supported text — no photo or video. Emoji would likely be included but no word on whether chat rooms will allow Facebook’s cutesy new messaging stickers. Tests were also limited to the web, though Facebook’s insistence that it’s a mobile company means it might be cranking on small-screen support, which could launch eventually if the feature is well received. It’s possible that you might be able to participate in a chat room but not start one from mobile in the initial tests happening now.

SPICING UP THE SOCIAL GRAPH

Facebook’s chat rooms could compete with Google’s Hangouts, to which they bear many similarities. Hangouts can also be openly joined by people in a Google+ user’s selected Circles. Hangouts’ big draw is video chat with up to 10 people, and it also offers many other advanced media sharing features. The strength of Facebook’s chat rooms will be in spontaneity and distribution. Thanks to heavy engagement with the Facebook news feed compared to the Google+ stream, more friends are likely to see you have an open Facebook chat room they can join than if you started a Hangout.

The generally fun, irreverent atmosphere of chat rooms could help Facebook attract and retain younger users, which critics fear are slipping away to newer social networks and communications platforms like Snapchat and Tumblr.

Chat rooms could also breathe new life into Facebook’s social graph. Since anyone who is friends with the host can join a room, people will end up interacting with friends of friends. Similar to the chat rooms of the late 90s when you might begin private messaging with someone you met in a room and then add them to your buddy list, Facebook users might friend people they meet in chat rooms.

This could inch Facebook closer to the “social discovery” industry populated by companies like Tagged and Badoo. But instead of meeting total strangers, you’re likely to have a trusted mutual friend to bridge the gap in Facebook chat rooms. This adds value to Facebook. It wouldn’t just be a place recreate your offline social graph, but to expand it.

There’s certainly a chance that feature’s privacy implications will prove too complicated, or it will flop in its test and end up like the rarely used Facebook video chat option. But in this case, Facebook is building out a tried and true online social interaction. If chat rooms succeed, they might not just move the needle for Facebook in terms of engagement. They could make the social network a more exciting, serendipitous place to spend time — a kick of spice that could keep the 9-year-old site from growing bland.

Facebook Launches First Branded Stickers, Previewing A Potential Sponsorship Biz

The link to the full story is here

One day, brands might pay Facebook to become downloadable sticker packs. Facebook just launched its first branded sticker pack for messaging — a collection based on the new Universal film Despicable Me 2. While the studio didn’t have to pay to have them appear in the sticker store, and they’re free for users, Facebook might eventually be able to charge brands for the viral exposure.

I’m fascinated by stickers right now. A lot of people think they’re dumb, no different than emoji, and won’t have an impact on the messaging landscape. I disagree. The whole point of messaging is to accurately communicate, but text without body language or vocal tone strips out emotion that stickers can provide. I see them as a resurgence of pictographic communication, a way for functionally similar messaging apps to differentiate themselves, and a possible revenue generator.

Many startups, from Line to Path, make money by selling stickers. Line actually earned $17.6 million in revenue from selling stickers to users in Q1 2013 alone. Facebook has instead made all 15 or so downloadable sticker packs freely available from a store inside the smiley button in Facebook and Messenger for iOS and Android. Just yesterday it turned Mark Zuckerberg’s dog Beastinto a sticker pack.

While Facebook’s user base is about seven times the size of Line’s, selling sponsorship opportunities would likely be less lucrative than sales to users, but still a nice addition to the social network’s bottom line.

People are looking for unique and efficient ways to express emotions without typing, and stickers are a fun way to do that. Facebook’s strategy of giving them away could keep people on its messaging system rather than switching to Google Hangouts or new independent messaging apps, or falling back on SMS or iMessage. The advantages of keeping people loyal to its messaging system likely outweigh the revenue Facebook could earn by nickel-and-diming users with $1 sticker fees.

But sponsorships could turn Facebook’s vast messaging traffic into dollars. Since stickers are inherently viral, intimately sent from person to person, brands could be willing to pay a lump sum or per-use fee to get exposure for their imagery.

That won’t work with all brands. Most people probably don’t want to send a Honda Accord sticker. But anything with cute characters associated with it could become a nice branded sticker pack.Despicable Me, known for its funny yellow minions, works well.

Everyone’s wondering why the tech giants and startups are fixated on messaging. The answer could be a (a little yellow monster) staring back us.

Facebook Launches Related Hashtags And #Mobile Site Support

The link to the full story is here

Facebook’s on a quest to get you involved in real-time global conversations. Today it takes the next step towards challenging Twitter by adding hashtag support to its mobile site and launching related hashtags. Starting this evening, when you click or search for a hashtag, the results page will show other hashtags often posted at the same time. Search #equality and you’ll see #lgbt and #pride.

Facebook brought Twitter’s hashtags to the masses earlier this month, turning #-preceded words into hyperlinks you can click on to see mentions by your friends, Pages, and people who post publicly. Users can also search for hashtags to bring up a stream of mentions.

At the time there was no mobile support, and Facebook’s popular iOS and Android smartphone apps still don’t work with hashtags. But Facebook tells me its HTML5 mobile site m.facebook.com gets the hash hookup tonight. That’s pretty important since publishing hashtagged posts about events your attending is a core use case. Now anyone with a mobile browser can pump some ### into Facebook.

Related hashtags, also present on Twitter, will make sure you don’t miss parallel conversations. Facebook tells me it analyzes which hashtags are frequently posted together to discover which are associated. After viewing the results for one, you can click down the row of related hashtags to get a wider perspective on whatever’s caught the world’s attention.

You might expect Facebook to jump right into trending topics or other advanced hashtag features, but it’s still learning. By rolling out the product bit by bit, it can see how people use it, and get enough data to tell how to slice and dice the conversations in the tastiest ways.

At first, I expected a lot of backlash to Facebook hashtags. “Oh, what copy-cats.” But instead I’ve actually heard a lot of “I finally get to use hashtags!”

The fact is that while Twitter is a household name with exposure on TV and in ads, it’s still not quite mainstream. When non-Twitter users saw a hashtag, they might have felt left out. Sure hashtags exist on Pinterest and Instagram, but users of those services are more likely to be on Twitter too. Facebook hashtags could unlock the real-time web for a whole wave of casual Internet surfers. Between Twitter’s pioneering work and Facebook’s new support, these conversations can finally include everyone like they’re supposed to.

Facebook Announces New Review Policy To Prevent Ads From Running On Controversial Pages And Groups

The link to the full story is here

Facebook just announced a new review policy for Pages and Groups that’s aimed at reducing cases where ads run alongside content that the advertiser or their customers might find objectionable.

Earlier today, a BBC report stated that Marks and Spencer and BSkyB had pulled “all or part of their spending” on Facebook after a BSkyB ad (which was “promoting an M&S voucher”) was shown alongside a Facebook Page that was titled “cute and gay boys” and included photos of teenage boys. The story said Facebook was going to make an announcement to address these types of concerns later today.

The Facebook post doesn’t mention any specific advertisers, and regardless of whether the decision was prompted by this incident, it seems to address a larger issue — leaving room on the site for potentially controversial content without making advertisers uncomfortable. Facebook already had restrictions on both content and on the types of Pages and Groups where ads could be shown, but it says the new policy “will expand the scope of Pages and Groups that should be ad-restricted”:

For example, we will now seek to restrict ads from appearing next to Pages and Groups that contain any violent, graphic or sexual content (as determined by our guidelines). Prior to this change, a Page selling adult products was eligible to have ads appear on its right-hand side; now there will not be ads displayed next to this type of content.

The company says that the reviews will be conducted manually at first, but it plans to develop “a more scalable, automated” process in the next few weeks. Ads should be removed from existing Pages and Groups that fall onto the “new, more expansive restricted list” by the end of next week.

In a statement provided via email, Sprint Vice President of Digital Scott Zalaznik said, “We appreciate our continued corporate partnership with Facebook and are pleased with their rapid response to addressing brand-protection issues.”

Why Facebook Needs Trending Links

The link to the full story is here

Facebook is not working on an RSS product, we hear, but it
still has a huge and truly social opportunity in news discovery.
Facebook could turn what links we share with friends into an
automatic Digg for the world. Over a billion people are on
Facebook, and many share links to news stories and offsite content
along with their commentary. Yet rather than post publicly like on
Twitter, most posts are shared semi-privately with friends and
acquaintances. Right now there’s no way for people to glean the
collective opinion of Facebook users on what’s important. Only
Facebook’s algorithms see what the most popular links and words
are across the entire social network. If Facebook took data on what
people shared and used it in a privacy-safe, anonymous, aggregate
form, it could create a list of the world’s most popular web pages
at any given moment. Conveniently linked to from the Facebook home
page and mobile app, the list could become an informative and
addictive window it our collective consciousness.

CODING
ON THE SHOULDERS OF GIANTS REDDIT

There are places to
get a peek into what the world is sharing or interested in today,
but none with Facebook’s data set or mainstream user base. Reddit
is amazing. It’s a wildly diverse community of people picking the
day’s most important content across a near-limitless array of
categories. Their votes surface what’s most interesting, and their
voices are arranged into intelligible threads and conversations.
Its threaded design is so good, in fact, that I think we’ll see
other less-formatted comment systems move towards Reddit’s style
with time. You could argue whether it’s an advantage or
disadvantage, but Reddit is based on active submissions. For
something to appear on Reddit, someone must have the initiative and
take the time to purposefully post it. Once there, it’s only the
Redditors who vote and comment that determine a post’s rank. That
makes what tops Reddit’s homepage more of a reflection of the
Reddit community than the web as a whole. Sure, there are R/’s for
everyone, but as a whole, Reddit carries a bit of a proudly nerdy
attitude mixed with doses of skepticism and humor. Facebook’s
opportunity comes from the potential to scan everything shared on
it and use a wider, more mainstream definition of popularity to
rank a list of what’s interesting. No one would have to actively
vet the list. It would simply evolve organically based on how
frequently things were shared on Facebook, and maybe how many
clicks, likes, and comments they received. Offering lists by
country or international region could make sure the content is
somewhat localized.

TWITTER TRENDING TOPICS

The Facebook news discovery experience I’m imagining shares some
similarities with Twitter’s Trending Topics. It too doesn’t have to
be actively vetted by users. People just go about their days
tweeting, and popular words and hashtags bubble to the top of the
list. But do you find yourself addicted to checking Twitter’s
trending topics? No. At least I sure don’t. They can be briefly
shocking or amusing but they rarely teach me much or spur me to
click. Twitter Trends don’t even have their own web page. They’re
just stuck on the left rail of Twitter’s home page. On mobile
they’re lumped into the Discover tab. In what I see as their
critical shortcoming, they have no context. No way to understand
why they’re being shared. Clicking them simply opens a search for
that word or hashtag, which can produce results that are a mess,
tough to decipher, and don’t provide any definitive answer to what
the trend is about. For obvious things like sporting events and
huge international news, these streams can offer a fascinating
insight into what the world is thinking. But even a Google search
couldn’t quickly tell me that #FOTunis referred to the Freedom
Online conference in Tunis, the capital of Tunisia. Organizing news
discovery around individual words or short phrases doesn’t seem
very efficient or easy…at least not with this design or without
context. If Facebook centered a news discovery product around
links, it could make it much clearer what people are discussing.
Links typically come with some combination of a headline, a photo,
and some text that can be used as a blurb. All Facebook would need
to do is show a list of links with this info, just like it does
when you post websites to the news feed, and people could get the pulse
of the planet in a quick skim. While we’re on the topic of Facebook
hashtags, signs indicate the company will eventually create a list
of trending hashtags. Facebook launched hashtags, similar to
Twitter’s, earlier this month, and on Thursday launched Related
Hashtags, which displays other tags frequently added to the same
post as a hashtag you’ve searched for or clicked on. I believe
Facebook is rolling the hashtags product out slowly so it can learn
to slice and dice the data in order to create a trending hashtags
product.

FACEDIGG

http://tctechcrunch2011.files.wordpress.com/2013/06/digg-top10-screenshot.jpg” width=”297″ height=”474″ />Let’s be clear. A Facebook news
reading product wouldn’t replace Reddit or Twitter, or necessarily
even compete with them directly. But it could take the theme of
surfacing what people care about, make it less subjective, and
house it in an easy to use and accessible design. I personally
think I would visit this “Facebook Trends” page frequently.
Whenever I read through my news feed and started getting bored, I
could click to it for inspiration. I’d skim through it, clicking
through to different links and then going back to the Trends page for
more. If it had lists based on geography, or a personalized list
that tuned itself to my behavior, interests, and what people
similar to me enjoy, I might visit even more. From Digg to Reddit
to 9Gag to Techmeme, great lists of trending content have proven
addictive. Yet there hasn’t been
one with a truly mainstream focus. If Facebook nailed
this, it could generate a ton of traffic. I think some people would
click to refresh it and see what’s happening in the world often —
almost as often as they read the news feed for content from their
friends. The two could be seen as parallel pillars of information —
that which is interesting specifically to you, and that which is
interesting to everyone. Private and public. Subjective and
objective. A Facebook trending links section could also spark high-quality conversations within Facebook. If it shows me something
that resonates with me, I might not just click, but share and talk
about it with my friends. Ideally, if friends had already shared
it, I’d see that and the conversations that followed in-line on the
trends list. Facebook already has a nifty way of doing this in the
most recent design of the news feed. It shows a stack of profile
pictures next to a shared link, and you can hover over each to see
how that friend described the content and what their friends
replied. Using that design for Trending Links my friends had
already shared could be a great alternative to one long, messy
comment thread of strangers. If you’re thinking “I don’t need this.
My friends already share great links and clue me in to what’s
happening in the world”, you’re lucky, and you’re probably in the
minority. Remember that the average user had around 180 to 250
friends last I heard. I worry that great swaths of Facebook’s user
base, especially in emerging markets and countries where the
service bloomed later, are missing out on one of the great joys of
the social web — the instant, collective conversation surrounding
the day’s news, tragedies, and triumphs. It would just take one
person perusing Facebook Trends to enlighten an entire social
cluster. Since there aren’t real character limits on posts, and
comment threads are clearly displayed, people would have plenty of
room to voice dissenting opinions about the world’s most popular
links. In that way, Facebook’s format and the way it diverges from
Twitter could keep it from becoming an echo chamber. In fact, the
aggregated “5 friends shared this link” design makes it quick to
view a variety of perspectives on a piece of content. With any
discovery medium comes opportunities to monetize through sponsored
placement. Brands could pay to have their links inserted within the
list of trending links. This could become a premier channel for
content marketing. Traditional ads might not work there, but links
to branded content or apps, fun marketing stunts, or contests could
do well when not jammed into the news feed where they don’t quite
fit with organic content from friends. Top-tier advertisers have
been pushing Facebook for ways to reach large audiences all at
once, and this could be the ticket. If Facebook wants to house our
digital lives, it can’t just be about who we are and what we’ve
done. It must also encompass what we think, and to get us to
volunteer our thoughts, it should strive to inform us, inspire us,
and seed our discussions with friends by surfacing what’s popular
around the globe. [Image Credit: Brian Shaler]

Facebook Is Experimenting With Becoming A Mobile Games Publisher

The link to the full story is here

Facebook is testing what could finally bring it direct revenue from the mobile gaming ecosystem beyond advertising.

The company is working with a handful of small mobile game developers to do publishing by offering distribution through mobile ads in exchange for a cut of revenue, according to sources familiar with the program. Facebook confirmed it’s working on tests for new mobile game distribution, but didn’t share more details publicly.

While Facebook has been earning a little over $200 million per quarter from payments and other fees, with most of that coming from virtual currency transactions inside social games, it hasn’t been able to replicate that business on mobile devices, because Apple and Google both control the world’s two major smartphone app stores and already take a 30 percent cut on digital transactions. It does, however, earn a big chunk of revenue from mobile game developers through normal mobile ad buying, a business that made Facebook $373 million in the first quarter.

The thinking is that publishing is a very, very old model that goes back to the world of console gaming, so it’s a structure that is already familiar for gaming studios. In the console era, a big gaming company would market, distribute (and often edit) games from smaller studios that lacked the resources to promote their work.

At the same time, smaller developers are having a hard time finding audiences when they are competing against bigger companies like Kabam, King and Supercell, which now have the power to spend millions of dollars per month on marketing. The initial costs of producing and distributing a competitive mobile game have gone from the hundreds of thousands into the millions of dollars for titles that have a shot at the top-25 grossing spots.

So in this experiment, Facebook is partnering with smaller, independent developers, not the bigger guys. They’re also primarily focusing on distribution. They aren’t really editing or tweaking games for content or financing their production, which is what other publishers sometimes do.

From a global perspective, other social networking platforms in Asia, such as Kakao in South Korea and WeChat in China, are starting to exercise power on mobile platforms in some fascinating ways, despite operating on platforms like Google’s Android and Apple’s iOS.

Kakao is the publisher of nine of the top-10 grossing games in South Korea on Android, the biggest smartphone platform there. Tencent has said it will bring games to its hit messaging app WeChat later this year.

So again, perhaps we’re seeing Western social networking platforms and messaging apps taking cues from Asia, instead of the other way around. Facebook introduced sticker packs earlier this year, a feature that became popular on Japan’s dominant messaging app Line.

But sources familiar with the program at Facebook say that the Kakao model is not exactly what the company is aiming to replicate, since Kakao’s distribution methods might be a bit too untargeted and spammy to make for a good user experience. Instead, Facebook is emphasizing highly targeted ads.

On the developer side, some of the feedback I’m hearing is the typical skepticism that comes with the publishing model in general. Today, since mobile developers can simply “self-publish” just by putting their apps in the store, there’s a pretty longstanding debate about what value publishers can really add. When games aren’t successful, neither the developer or the publisher make very much money.

But when games are hits like with the original Angry Birds, which was published by EA’s Chillingo label, there can be friction later when the original developer questions why they’re paying a massive revenue share to another party. They can also go down other routes by releasing games that are similar to the original and re-routing users to the new version of the game, where they won’t have to pay the original publisher.

Then there is some historical tension between app developers and Facebook, with the company tweaking and dialing up and down traffic for certain categories of apps like the original quiz and vampire biting apps back in 2007, to news readers and social video apps last year, and so on. Developers might be wary about partnering with a company that has a record of being sometimes capricious with delivering traffic to certain apps.

In any case, Facebook may feel that it isn’t fully realizing the potential of the mobile app economy. Through mobile advertising, the company basically turned on a $1.5 billion-a-year business in about six months. While advertising has always been the mainstay of Facebook’s model on desktop PCs and mobile devices alike, there are many revenue possibilities on mobile devices that the company has yet to fully explore.