The link to the full story is here
As Facebook is working to build partnerships with big media companies, the company sees a huge opportunity for growth in the sharing and discovery of movies, books and fitness tools on its platform. At the D: Dive Into Media conference today, Facebook VP of Partnerships Dan Rose said the company expects the next wave of its app ecosystem to be driven by those media categories.
When Facebook first launched its app ecosystem, gaming was the first category to really hit it big on the social network, thanks to developers like Zynga. Now, gaming is still a huge business, with Facebook paying out billions of dollars to game developers.
According to Rose, the next wave of media adoption came from news organizations, thanks to the launch of the “Like” button. Suddenly, users were sharing tons of news stories and articles in their news feeds. That was followed by music, with the growth of applications like Spotify building on the Facebook platform. “Music is such a social experience everywhere,” Rose said. Facebook simply made music discovery easier, by letting users know what their friends were listening to at scale.
But now that those categories have been conquered, Rose says that the next round of content discovery apps on Facebook will probably be movies, books and fitness applications.
On the movie and video side, Netflix is finally able to make its social-sharing feature available after a lobbying effort to change the Video Privacy Protection Act. With a new bill effectively nullifying that legislation, we’ll see a lot more mentions of the types of movies and TV shows our friends are watching showing up in people’s news feeds.
Rose said that the company wants to enable partners to use the data that users share about the content that they like, and enabling those developers to provide better recommendations. That will help drive traffic back to services like Netflix. And by enabling users to share what they’re watching back to Facebook, the service creates a virtual cycle of connecting audiences with new types of content.
Tuesday, February 12, 2013
How to Effectively Use Twitter as a Job Search Resource
The link to the full story is here
In the age of social media, we have countless outlets for job searching. Platforms such as LinkedIn are the first to come to mind, but can candidates use Twitter to find jobs as well? This past Thursday the HR teams at Twitter and NPR collaborated in the first live #NPRTwitterChat aimed at helping job seekers use social media as a job search tool.
The chat was centered on six questions that received over 800 tweets from industry professionals all over the U.S., and even some from New Zealand and the UK. Below is a recap of the topics covered in the chat as well as tips you can use in your own job search.
To see a cool Storify roundup of the live chat, check out Amplify Talent, the blog run by NPR's Senior Director of Talent Acquisition and Innovation, Lars Schmidt.
How to Find a Job Using Twitter
The live chat started with a general inquiry into how to use the Twitter platform for job searching. Most responses touched on being an engaging member of the industry in which you want to work, and contributing content to build a social following. NPR's Schmidt talked about Twitter as a job search resource during an interview with Mashable: "Through Twitter you can learn from your peers in whatever discipline you're in, or use it as a platform to share content so you can build awareness of you as a professional, and ultimately position yourself as a thought leader in a particular expertise. Because it is an open network, it affords the opportunity to do that in a very public way."
The following are some of the other themes that came up during the live chat.
Follow the industry you are interested in, and participate in communities you care about.
Don’t just retweet what others are saying; create meaningful content that people care about. Be a thought leader.
Use Twitter as a jumping-off point to your more detailed online profiles — a personal blog or LinkedIn profile, for example.
Many companies have job-related Twitter handles. Following those is a great way to keep tabs on job openings, rather than searching the company's website.
Build your network before you need it; engage with people who do what you want to do.
Don’t be overly professional. Twitter is a great way to showcase your personality and talk to people about your interests.
Thursday, February 7, 2013
Real-Time Yammer Competitor Hall Launches New Apps For iOS And Mac; Hits 10K Businesses, Double-Digit Growth
The link to the full story is here
Hall, an AngelPad-backed business communications app which is taking on the likes of Yammer, Jive and Salesforce.com’s Chatter, is out now with new native applications for iOS and Mac. The company is also announcing some decent traction, with over 10,000 businesses signed up for the recently revamped service.
This startup is interested in building what comes next after the “social intranet.” CEO Brett Hellman explains.
“Now we’re moving into this real-time communications phase, that’s the next wave,” says Hellman, who began work on Hall after finding a need for improved internal communication at his old job back at Intuit. He notes that people aren’t working 9 to 5 any more, we’re working on our mobile devices, many companies have distributed teams, and some companies don’t even have traditional offices at all.
At Intuit, Hellman was the only person on his team at the Mountain View office, which led to the original inspiration that later became today’s Hall. “That’s where I learned we needed a better way to communicate,” he says. But he also realized that there’s a need to extend that communication outside of company, too. “No one has really built a real-time network that works cross-company,” he points out. “They’re all pretty much silos that sit inside the company firewall.” Hall is different, merging the Yammer use case with the broader functionality of something like IM or Skype, perhaps.
Hellman left Intuit in 2010 to found Hall, raised a $580,000 seed round in fall 2011 from Founder’s Collective, PivotNorth and others. After adding in additional funds from 500 Startups, Sand Hill Angels and existing investors in June, the company has grown its seed funding to $975,000. The current product was in September. Originally, Hall had focused more on real-time decision making, but that use case didn’t gain traction, leading to a pivot this fall.
“It failed because it didn’t create habits,” Hellman admits of the original version. “People would show up and they’d love it, but it wasn’t something you needed to do every day, so retention was horrible. But we learned from that,” he says. “That’s why we moved to communications.”
And so far, so good, it seems. The app’s ability to reach users outside the corporate network is contributing to its viral, double-digit growth over these past four months, Hellman claims. Today, Hall’s 50,000 end users, some of whom work at Fortune 500 companies, are spending over three hours per day in the product. Company retention is now also in the double digits after several months. And Hall grew by 50 percent in January. Early numbers, but not bad ones.
On Mac, the new app’s best new feature is the technology it’s been built with – it used to run in Adobe AIR, and now it’s a native app. Meanwhile, both it and the iOS apps have been redesigned with a new look and feel – something which the company plans to continue to improve in the future as well. In the months ahead, Hall’s apps will continue to be polished, the bugs squashed, the speed boosted, and the company will improve the one-on-one messaging feature. On this latter item, the improvement will mean adding in video chat and file sharing, similar to what’s already supported in the group chat interface.
Hall isn’t ready to talk revenue numbers yet, though it does have a strategy for that in place – paying users have the ability to assign an administrator who can manage the company’s end users and permissions. But for now, the focus is on growth, retention and engagement, says Hellman.
Hall, an AngelPad-backed business communications app which is taking on the likes of Yammer, Jive and Salesforce.com’s Chatter, is out now with new native applications for iOS and Mac. The company is also announcing some decent traction, with over 10,000 businesses signed up for the recently revamped service.
This startup is interested in building what comes next after the “social intranet.” CEO Brett Hellman explains.
“Now we’re moving into this real-time communications phase, that’s the next wave,” says Hellman, who began work on Hall after finding a need for improved internal communication at his old job back at Intuit. He notes that people aren’t working 9 to 5 any more, we’re working on our mobile devices, many companies have distributed teams, and some companies don’t even have traditional offices at all.
At Intuit, Hellman was the only person on his team at the Mountain View office, which led to the original inspiration that later became today’s Hall. “That’s where I learned we needed a better way to communicate,” he says. But he also realized that there’s a need to extend that communication outside of company, too. “No one has really built a real-time network that works cross-company,” he points out. “They’re all pretty much silos that sit inside the company firewall.” Hall is different, merging the Yammer use case with the broader functionality of something like IM or Skype, perhaps.
Hellman left Intuit in 2010 to found Hall, raised a $580,000 seed round in fall 2011 from Founder’s Collective, PivotNorth and others. After adding in additional funds from 500 Startups, Sand Hill Angels and existing investors in June, the company has grown its seed funding to $975,000. The current product was in September. Originally, Hall had focused more on real-time decision making, but that use case didn’t gain traction, leading to a pivot this fall.
“It failed because it didn’t create habits,” Hellman admits of the original version. “People would show up and they’d love it, but it wasn’t something you needed to do every day, so retention was horrible. But we learned from that,” he says. “That’s why we moved to communications.”
And so far, so good, it seems. The app’s ability to reach users outside the corporate network is contributing to its viral, double-digit growth over these past four months, Hellman claims. Today, Hall’s 50,000 end users, some of whom work at Fortune 500 companies, are spending over three hours per day in the product. Company retention is now also in the double digits after several months. And Hall grew by 50 percent in January. Early numbers, but not bad ones.
On Mac, the new app’s best new feature is the technology it’s been built with – it used to run in Adobe AIR, and now it’s a native app. Meanwhile, both it and the iOS apps have been redesigned with a new look and feel – something which the company plans to continue to improve in the future as well. In the months ahead, Hall’s apps will continue to be polished, the bugs squashed, the speed boosted, and the company will improve the one-on-one messaging feature. On this latter item, the improvement will mean adding in video chat and file sharing, similar to what’s already supported in the group chat interface.
Hall isn’t ready to talk revenue numbers yet, though it does have a strategy for that in place – paying users have the ability to assign an administrator who can manage the company’s end users and permissions. But for now, the focus is on growth, retention and engagement, says Hellman.
Facebook Launches Developers Live Video Channel To Keep Its Developer Ecosystem Up To Date
The link to the full story is here
Google runs a Developers Live video channel for its developer ecosystem, and, starting today, Facebook will offer a very similar service under the Facebook Developers Live moniker. Starting today, the new channel will feature “the latest news, tutorials, speaking sessions and more.” The channel, Facebook says, will feature both pre-recorded videos and interactive broadcasts, “giving developers a central place to learn about the latest tools and to get access to the product managers and engineers who created them.” The first broadcast is scheduled for February 19 and will feature Doug Purdy, the company’s director of product.
Overall, Facebook says, the channel will focus on mobile developers, game developers and websites and publishers who want to learn how to use the social network to drive traffic to their sites. The new site, Facebook tells us, is yet another part of its “continued commitment to Operation Developer Love.”
Facebook’s Developer Live counterpart at Google currently offers a pretty thorough lineup of scheduled developer office hours using Google Hangouts and an extensive library of videos about virtually all of Google’s developer-related services. On most days, Google offers at least a few live videos on its channel. It’s not clear if Facebook’s channel will offer a similarly comprehensive schedule. [Update: as Microsoft just reminded us, it also offers a similar service through Channel 9.]
With Facebook Live, the company has already been offering a more consumer-focused video channel for quite a while now. That channel, however, still plays a video of the September 2011 F8 conference, so we can only hope that the new developer channel will stay a bit more up to date.
Google runs a Developers Live video channel for its developer ecosystem, and, starting today, Facebook will offer a very similar service under the Facebook Developers Live moniker. Starting today, the new channel will feature “the latest news, tutorials, speaking sessions and more.” The channel, Facebook says, will feature both pre-recorded videos and interactive broadcasts, “giving developers a central place to learn about the latest tools and to get access to the product managers and engineers who created them.” The first broadcast is scheduled for February 19 and will feature Doug Purdy, the company’s director of product.
Overall, Facebook says, the channel will focus on mobile developers, game developers and websites and publishers who want to learn how to use the social network to drive traffic to their sites. The new site, Facebook tells us, is yet another part of its “continued commitment to Operation Developer Love.”
Facebook’s Developer Live counterpart at Google currently offers a pretty thorough lineup of scheduled developer office hours using Google Hangouts and an extensive library of videos about virtually all of Google’s developer-related services. On most days, Google offers at least a few live videos on its channel. It’s not clear if Facebook’s channel will offer a similarly comprehensive schedule. [Update: as Microsoft just reminded us, it also offers a similar service through Channel 9.]
With Facebook Live, the company has already been offering a more consumer-focused video channel for quite a while now. That channel, however, still plays a video of the September 2011 F8 conference, so we can only hope that the new developer channel will stay a bit more up to date.
Yahoo! Signs Global, Non-Exclusive Display Ad Deal With Google
The link to the full story is here
As first reported by AllThingsD, Yahoo has announced an advertising partnership with Google, not unlike working relationships it has with other companies. Yahoo in its current form has quite a few pages for advertising display and it makes sense that its CEO of less than a year, Marissa Mayer, would call on her former colleagues in Mountain View to fill those spots with Google’s contextual ad units.
As we navigate the web, both on desktop and mobile, we’re used to seeing Google’s display ads, and they do very well. Mayer has insight into how those ads perform, so this is basically a no-brainer for Yahoo. Mayer was employee No. 20 at Google, and has been able to see its Ad product mature over the years.
Here’s what the company shared about the agreement today:
Every day, people turn to Yahoo! for their daily habits — like search, weather, news or more. At Yahoo!, we’re focused on doing everything we can to make the user experience inspiring and engaging. One way we do that is by providing relevant and well-targeted content — whether that be editorial or advertising content.
Say you’ve been shopping for boots. If you see an ad for boots, that’s instantly going to pique your attention more than an ad for, say, a car battery. That’s better for users. This is why contextual advertising is such a powerful tool.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we recently signed a global, non-exclusive agreement with Google to display ads on various Yahoo! properties and certain co-branded sites using Google’s AdSense for Content and Google’s AdMob services.
By adding Google to our list of world-class contextual ads partners, we’ll be able to expand our network, which means we can serve users with ads that are even more meaningful.
For our users, there won’t be a noticeable difference in how or where ads appear. More options simply mean greater flexibility. We look forward to working with all of our contextual ads partners to ensure we’re delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time.
As first reported by AllThingsD, Yahoo has announced an advertising partnership with Google, not unlike working relationships it has with other companies. Yahoo in its current form has quite a few pages for advertising display and it makes sense that its CEO of less than a year, Marissa Mayer, would call on her former colleagues in Mountain View to fill those spots with Google’s contextual ad units.
As we navigate the web, both on desktop and mobile, we’re used to seeing Google’s display ads, and they do very well. Mayer has insight into how those ads perform, so this is basically a no-brainer for Yahoo. Mayer was employee No. 20 at Google, and has been able to see its Ad product mature over the years.
Here’s what the company shared about the agreement today:
Every day, people turn to Yahoo! for their daily habits — like search, weather, news or more. At Yahoo!, we’re focused on doing everything we can to make the user experience inspiring and engaging. One way we do that is by providing relevant and well-targeted content — whether that be editorial or advertising content.
Say you’ve been shopping for boots. If you see an ad for boots, that’s instantly going to pique your attention more than an ad for, say, a car battery. That’s better for users. This is why contextual advertising is such a powerful tool.
Today, we’re excited to announce that we recently signed a global, non-exclusive agreement with Google to display ads on various Yahoo! properties and certain co-branded sites using Google’s AdSense for Content and Google’s AdMob services.
By adding Google to our list of world-class contextual ads partners, we’ll be able to expand our network, which means we can serve users with ads that are even more meaningful.
For our users, there won’t be a noticeable difference in how or where ads appear. More options simply mean greater flexibility. We look forward to working with all of our contextual ads partners to ensure we’re delivering the right ad to the right user at the right time.
Kred Owner (And Twitter Firehose Contester) PeopleBrowsr Buys Swaylo, The Loose Thread Of Facebook’s Threadsy Buy
The link to the full story is here
Some consolidation in the area of social influencer sites. PeopleBrowsr, owners of the social influencer analytics site Kred, is buying Swaylo, a specialist in measuring Facebook for influencer analytics and marketing campaigns. Swaylo, you may recall, was a business owned by startup Threadsy. The analytics service, called SwayloPro, was spun out as a separate company when Facebook acqui-hired Threadsy in August 2012. You may also recall that PeopleBrowsr is involved in a lawsuit with Twitter over use of its Firehose of data for analytics. Financial terms of the PeopleBrowsr/Swaylo deal were not disclosed.
The deal will give Kred more ammunition, and maybe more influence, to compete against others in the social influencer space, where companies like Klout and PeerIndex and also crowding for attention.
A blog post by Perer Ferioli, Kred’s “director of recognition,” notes that the combined companies will have some 500 million profiles on their books.
Significantly, the deal will give Kred its first entry into covering Facebook conversations and analytics as part of its overall measurement service. For its part, Kred has largely built out its business largely through Twitter — it took on the Firehose stream early on in its life — and it has also been building up that service to better compete with sites like Klout by adding in rewards for those who use the service to mention products. There will be a Kred for Facebook app now, which will be powered by Swaylo’s technology. It will also offer a Kred for Brands product that will let users measure and look at the influence of fans on their Facebook Pages.
Taken together, the companies say that PeopleBrowsr and Swaylo will have 400 terabytes of data in its Analytics Datamine, including over half a trillion conversations from Twitter and Facebook. That Twitter Firehose access gives the company data from 1,500 days of posts, and real-time access to some 10,000 posts per second, along with metadata collected from profiles, interests and connections.
But at the same time, it could be that Swaylo acquisition will help widen the data pool that PeopleBrowsr and Kred can use for its service — which might come in handy if PeopleBrowsr loses or decides to drop the Twitter Firehose.
Late last year, PeopleBrowsr became embroiled in a lawsuit with Twitter over access to its Firehose: Twitter believes it’s no longer a strategic fit and wants to terminate their $1 million/year deal, with the company instead taking a portion of the data via Gnip or Datasift. Peoplebrowsr ultimately won a restraining order to continue to use it, although Twitter continues to “vigorously defend” itself. We are asking PeopleBrowsr about the latest status of that dispute.
Some consolidation in the area of social influencer sites. PeopleBrowsr, owners of the social influencer analytics site Kred, is buying Swaylo, a specialist in measuring Facebook for influencer analytics and marketing campaigns. Swaylo, you may recall, was a business owned by startup Threadsy. The analytics service, called SwayloPro, was spun out as a separate company when Facebook acqui-hired Threadsy in August 2012. You may also recall that PeopleBrowsr is involved in a lawsuit with Twitter over use of its Firehose of data for analytics. Financial terms of the PeopleBrowsr/Swaylo deal were not disclosed.
The deal will give Kred more ammunition, and maybe more influence, to compete against others in the social influencer space, where companies like Klout and PeerIndex and also crowding for attention.
A blog post by Perer Ferioli, Kred’s “director of recognition,” notes that the combined companies will have some 500 million profiles on their books.
Significantly, the deal will give Kred its first entry into covering Facebook conversations and analytics as part of its overall measurement service. For its part, Kred has largely built out its business largely through Twitter — it took on the Firehose stream early on in its life — and it has also been building up that service to better compete with sites like Klout by adding in rewards for those who use the service to mention products. There will be a Kred for Facebook app now, which will be powered by Swaylo’s technology. It will also offer a Kred for Brands product that will let users measure and look at the influence of fans on their Facebook Pages.
Taken together, the companies say that PeopleBrowsr and Swaylo will have 400 terabytes of data in its Analytics Datamine, including over half a trillion conversations from Twitter and Facebook. That Twitter Firehose access gives the company data from 1,500 days of posts, and real-time access to some 10,000 posts per second, along with metadata collected from profiles, interests and connections.
But at the same time, it could be that Swaylo acquisition will help widen the data pool that PeopleBrowsr and Kred can use for its service — which might come in handy if PeopleBrowsr loses or decides to drop the Twitter Firehose.
Late last year, PeopleBrowsr became embroiled in a lawsuit with Twitter over access to its Firehose: Twitter believes it’s no longer a strategic fit and wants to terminate their $1 million/year deal, with the company instead taking a portion of the data via Gnip or Datasift. Peoplebrowsr ultimately won a restraining order to continue to use it, although Twitter continues to “vigorously defend” itself. We are asking PeopleBrowsr about the latest status of that dispute.
More Facebook Changes Coming March 6th 2013
The link to the full story is here
The following changes can be enabled/disabled using the "March 2013 Breaking Changes" migration until March 6th when they will go into effect permanently for everyone:
No more accessing mailbox FQL tables without a user session
It will not longer be possible to access the message, thread, or mailbox_folder FQL tables without a user session.
Removing apps from /me/accounts/
We will no longer show apps under /me/accounts/ in the Graph API. You can access the list of apps a user is a developer on by hitting /me/applications/developer/.
Removing redirect to docs when hitting graph.facebook.com
We will no longer return a redirect to the Graph API docs when hitting the URL http(s)://graph.facebook.com with no path.
The following changes can be enabled/disabled using the "March 2013 Breaking Changes" migration until March 6th when they will go into effect permanently for everyone:
No more accessing mailbox FQL tables without a user session
It will not longer be possible to access the message, thread, or mailbox_folder FQL tables without a user session.
Removing apps from /me/accounts/
We will no longer show apps under /me/accounts/ in the Graph API. You can access the list of apps a user is a developer on by hitting /me/applications/developer/.
Removing redirect to docs when hitting graph.facebook.com
We will no longer return a redirect to the Graph API docs when hitting the URL http(s)://graph.facebook.com with no path.
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