Archives: June 2009

There’s a new feature within the email notifications area of Facebook which enables users to receive an email every time somebody “Connects to me as a fan”. We first heard about this new feature last night and were able to confirm it this morning. Just yesterday we wrote about how Facebook Pages have become your friends, which is another step in the merging of profiles and Pages. The combination of profile fans and the new granular publisher controls will help complete the twitterfication of Facebook.
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Michael Jackson’s Facebook Page experienced a surge in fans after news of his death spread around the web. Currently the page appears to be attracting around 20 fans a second with a good chance that the page will become one of the top Pages is a short amount of time. The page wall has turned into a virtual memorial for the pop legend who’s life impacted much of the world and who’s music transformed an industry. While he may be a controversial figure, one thing is certain: until today he was the world’s largest pop icon. Not surprising considering that he defined pop.
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This afternoon Facebook made a small modification to the friends page which changed “All Friends” to “All Connections”, integrating Facebook Pages and friends. It’s a small change but it’s a step in the direction of decreasing the distinction between Pages and profiles. Mark Zuckerberg previously stated that the two products: profiles and Pages, would increasingly become similar. This is yet another step in that direction.
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Facebook has been offering advertisers a number of new types of engagement ads from their homepage which are intended to increase user interaction and drive new fans to Facebook Pages. The most recent additions are the combination of video ads and poll ads as well as video ads and event ads, as pictured in the Bruno advertisement on the right. A large number of these advertisements include integration with Facebook Pages, attempting to drive up the number of fans, helping to build a community around products and services.
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While there are many uses for Facebook, the most popular use of the site within applications has become games by a large margin. 7 of the top 10 non-Facebook applications based on daily active users are all games and the trend continues on down the Facebook application leaderboard. I’ve been speaking with a number of new developers who are looking to build successful applications and I keep emphasizing the importance of integrating some sort of game feature.
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This afternoon Facebook updated some users’ friend confirmations to include two check boxes. One asks you to select whether or not you’d like to have that user’s info displayed in your news feed and the other asks if you’d like to receive SMS messages. It’s a subtle change but what’s becoming increasingly clear is Facebook is trying to streamline the communication process after integrating all of Twitter’s functionality within their site.
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Remeber CNN’s live stream of the inauguration? How about the TNT’s live stream of the NBA All Star game? All services implemented the Facebook Connect-enabled live stream widget and now all websited and developers can have a version of their own. Later today Facebook will announce details about this new feature which will make it easy for instant conversations to take place across the web.
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Today Facebook announced that they will begin rolling out support for 14 new currencies within their advertising system. The company also stated that they won’t be charging any extra fees for currency transactions. This is a huge bonus of using the Facebook advertising platform internationally. As the company expands abroad, it’s important to support not only other languages but also additional currencies.
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Today Facebook officially launched a beta version of the new publisher controls which enables users to publish to anybody. You can set custom privacy settings for every single post that you publish to your stream, making granular privacy settings even more widespread. Want to publish to everybody on Facebook? Now you can. Perhaps you only want to make a story visible to your friends that are in your “Family” friend list. That’s possible as well.
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There’s been a lot of buzz about the soon to be released book, “The Accidental Billionaires” by Ben Mezrich. It’s understandable considering Facebook’s ongoing growth and the book’s salacious plot. According to Amazon, the book is a story about Mark Zuckerberg and co-Founder Eduardo Saverin’s path to success and the conflicts between the founders that are created along the way. There are all sorts of ridiculous stories about what’s included in this book, but one thing is for sure: it’s not necessarily historically accurate.
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