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State of the Art: Facebook’s Grab for Your Phone. What Gives?

April 11, 2013 by Leave a Comment

So vast and powerful is Facebook that it didn’t seem implausible when the rumors began: Facebook was about to introduce its own cellphone. Look on our works, Apple and Google, and despair!

The rumors were wrong. The new “Facebook phone” isn’t a phone. Instead, it’s a set of apps for phones running the Android operating system. Starting Friday, you can download them from the Google app store onto certain phones from HTC (One and One X) and Samsung (Galaxy S III, S 4 and Note II). More Android models will be compatible in the coming months, Facebook says. These apps also come preinstalled on the new HTC First, which costs $100 with a two-year ATT contract.

This software suite, called Home, replaces the standard Home screen and Lock screen of the phone.

In their places, what you see is a slowly scrolling parade of full-screen photos from your Facebook news feed. Text-only posts appear, too, using your friend’s primary profile picture (cover photo) as the photographic background.

The company says that at the moment, the Cover Feed — this parade of images on your Lock screen and Home screen — represents only about 80 percent of what you would see on the actual Facebook Web site.

What’s missing? Video posts and ads. Both, Facebook says, are coming soon. Yes, you read that right: the latest billboard for advertising is your own cellphone’s home screen. Are you ready for this?

You can have all kinds of fun on the Cover Feed. If the stately scrolling is too slow for your tastes, you can flick to the next photo, and the next, and the next.

You can double-tap the screen to “like” a post. You can hold a finger down on the screen to see the entire photo, smaller; big parts of it are generally chopped off in the process of enlarging it to fill the phone’s screen. And you can tap a tiny speech-balloon icon to read people’s comments, or to leave one of your own.

Facebook correctly points out that this sort of newsfeed screen saver is an excellent time killer when you’re standing in line or waiting for someone. At the same time, the Home software replaces the Home and Lock screens that Google or your phone maker designed. Unfortunately, you lose some good features in the process.

For example, for most people, the entire purpose of a Home screen is displaying app icons. But there are no icons on Facebook’s Home screens; Facebook thinks you’d rather use that space for reading Facebook updates.

The only icon that appears is your own profile photo. You can drag it to the left to open the Facebook Messaging app, to the right to open the last open app — or upward to open a grid of app icons on a gray background. Ah, here are the apps. But it’s awfully sparse; where are the rest?

They’re on a screen off to the left. Swipe your finger to see, on a black background, the usual Android “all apps” screen. From here, you can hold your finger down on a particular app’s icon to install it onto the gray-background launcher screen, which can have multiple pages.

If it sounds confusing, that’s because it is. In removing the app-launching function from the Home screen, Facebook has wound up having to reinvent the way you open programs on your phone, and the result feels like a hack. The black-background screen to the left lists all of your apps, and scrolls vertically; the nearly identical gray-background screen lists only your favorites, and scrolls horizontally. Got it?

Let’s hope you don’t use Android widgets much, either — those small windows on your Home screen that display news headlines and new e-mail messages. Facebook Home relegates them to Android’s traditional Home screens. They’re still accessible, though buried. (They appear when you tap the More button on the black-background app screen.)

E-mail: pogue@nytimes.com

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/04/11/technology/personaltech/facebooks-grab-for-your-phone-what-gives.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: Facebook’s Play for the Smartphone Screen

April 4, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday.Jim Wilson/The New York Times Mark Zuckerberg on Thursday.

9:20 p.m. | Updated Added more details and analysis.

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Cellphones have long been Facebook’s Achilles’ heel. With its users flocking to mobile phones by the millions — and many of its newest users never accessing the services on computers at all — the company has struggled to catch up to them.

On Thursday, Facebook unveiled its latest, most ambitious effort to crack the challenge: a package of mobile software called Facebook Home that is designed to draw more users and nudge them to be more active on the social network.

The new suite of applications effectively turns the Facebook news feed into the screen saver of a smartphone, updating it constantly and seamlessly with Facebook posts and messages.

In so doing, Facebook has cleverly, perhaps also dangerously, exploited technology owned by one of its leading rivals, Google. Facebook Home works on Google’s Android operating system, which has become the most popular underlying software for smartphones in the world.

The Facebook News Feed appears as soon as the phone is turned on. Pictures take up most of the real estate, with each news feed entry scrolling by like a slide show. Messages and notifications pop up on the home page. To “like” something requires no more than two taps. Facebook apps are within easy reach, making the phone essentially synonymous with the Facebook ecosystem.

“Today, our phones are designed around apps, not people,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chief executive, said at a news conference here at the company’s headquarters. “We want to flip that around.”

Facebook Home will be available for download from Google’s app store, Play, on April 12 for four popular, moderately priced phones that use Android and are made by HTC and Samsung. A fifth one, a new model called the HTC First, will be sold by ATT for $100 with the software already loaded.

For the time being, Facebook will not show ads on the phone’s home screen, which Facebook is calling Cover Feed. Since advertising revenue is crucial to the company’s finances, however, it will almost certainly display ads there in the future.

Facebook Home is also clearly designed to get Facebook users to return to their news feeds even more frequently than they do now. Every time they glance at their phone at the supermarket checkout line or on the bus to work, they will, in essence, be looking at their Facebook page.

“It’s going to convert idle moments to Facebook moments,” said Chris Silva, a mobile industry analyst with the Altimeter Group. “I’m ‘liking’ things, I’m messaging people, and when ads roll out, I’m interacting with them and letting Facebook monetize me as a user.”

Krishna Subramanian, the chief marketing officer at Velti, a San Francisco-based company that buys targeted advertisements online on behalf of brands, pointed out that even without showing ads on the mobile cover feed, Facebook Home could prove to be a lucrative tool.

By nudging its users to do more on the social network, he said, the company will inevitably get “an explosion of mobile data that can be tied back into desktop advertising” to Facebook users.

A majority of Facebook’s one billion-plus users log in on their cellphones. Most Americans now have an Internet-enabled phone, and smartphone penetration is growing especially fast in emerging market countries, where Facebook has substantial blocs of its users.

At Thursday’s press event, Mr. Zuckerberg repeatedly signaled that he wanted the new product to enable a mass, global audience to connect to Facebook, especially those have yet to get on the Internet. “We want to build something that’s accessible to everyone,” he said.

Although HTC is rolling out the first new phone with Facebook Home installed, and ATT has agreed to sell it, other phone makers and carriers may be reluctant to load the software.

Jan Dawson, a telecom analyst at Ovum, said that Apple’s iPhone and many Android smartphones already do a good job of integrating the Facebook application into their phones. And he said phone carriers were unlikely to give a Facebook phone made by HTC much support because the Taiwanese phone maker’s past attempt at a Facebook phone — the ChaCha, which had a physical button for posting photos on Facebook — sold poorly.

“HTC may be desperate enough to do this, but carriers aren’t likely to promote it heavily,” Mr. Dawson said. “As a gimmick, it may bring customers into stores, but they’ll mostly end up buying something else.”

At Facebook headquarters Thursday, HTC’s chief executive, Peter Chou, showed off a model of his new Facebook phone, called HTC First, in lipstick red. “HTC First is the ultimate social phone,” he said. “It combines the new Facebook Home and great HTC design.”

Whether consumers will embrace a phone that emphasizes Facebook over everything else also remains to be seen. Some are likely to have concerns about how much personal information they are being asked to share with Facebook. Additionally, checking Facebook dozens of times every day could result in hefty data use charges, unless users are connected to a Wi-Fi network or negotiate special packages with carriers.

Facebook and ATT executives said they had taken that into account. Users will be notified when they are about to reach their data limits. The software can also be set to download data-heavy content like video only when the user is connected to a Wi-Fi network, and then save it in its memory.

The software’s most powerful feature is to turn the cellphone into a starkly personal gadget.

Facebook employees, current and past, were invited to the product announcement, a sign of how crucial it has been for Facebook to crack the mobile puzzle. Silicon Valley has whispered for months about the prospects of a Facebook phone. Mr. Zuckerberg has consistently denied building one.

Thursday’s announcement signaled that Facebook had stopped short of even building an operating system. Instead, it had simply altered its rival Google’s technology.

The Android platform, Mr. Zuckerberg said, was built to be open to new integrations. Asked at the news conference whether he feared that Google executives would change their mind about Facebook using it to advance its mobile aims, he turned somewhat testy.

“Anything can change in the future,” he said. “We think Google takes its commitment to openness very seriously.”

Google, for its part, was notably genteel. “This latest collaboration demonstrates the openness and flexibility that has made Android so popular,” the company said in an e-mailed statement. “And it’s a win for users who want a customized Facebook experience from Google Play — the heart of the Android ecosystem — along with their favorite Google services like Gmail, Search and Google Maps.”

Brian X. Chen contributed reporting.

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/04/04/facebook-software-puts-it-front-and-center-on-android-phones/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Facebook Shows Off News Feed Redesign

March 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

The new design of the Facebook News Feed presents bigger photos and links, including for advertisements, and lets users see specialized streams focused on topics like music and posts by close friends.

The changes are designed to address the company’s two most vital challenges: how to hold on to users at a time of competing, specialized social networks and how to draw more advertising dollars to please Wall Street.

Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s co-founder and chief executive, said at a news conference that he wanted Facebook to be “the best personalized newspaper in the world.” And like a newspaper editor, he wants the “front page” of Facebook to be more engaging — in particular on the smaller screens of mobile devices.

The topic-specific News Feeds could well persuade users to spend more time scrolling through various streams of content. And the redesign will offer bigger real estate for advertisers, including more opportunities for brands to feature bigger pictures, which marketers say are more persuasive than words.

Facebook’s proprietary algorithms, which try to guess what every user will want to see, will continue to filter the items that show up on each person’s main News Feed. And users will be able to drill down into specific topics they are interested in, akin to the sections of a newspaper.

For instance, they can switch over to specialized feeds that are focused on just the music they are interested in, or they can scroll through a feed that consists of posts from the pages of products and people they follow — a bit like Twitter. If they want to see everything that their friends have posted, they can choose to do that, too; those posts will rush down in chronological order, without any filtering by Facebook’s robots.

Facebook introduced the new design to some users of the Web version of its service on Thursday, and will extend it to all Web users and to mobile apps in coming weeks.

It’s unclear how users will react to the changes; in the past, major design changes have often been greeted by complaints, at least initially.

Investors seemed to welcome the new look. Shares of Facebook rose 4.1 percent on Tuesday, to $28.58. But the company’s stock price remains substantially lower than its $38 initial public offering price last May.

Facebook is clearly hoping the new format will encourage users to stay longer on the site. At the news conference to announce the changes, officials offered examples of content they hoped would be compelling: photos of a cousin’s babies on one area of the page, Justin Timberlake concert news on another, a list of stories your friends liked on National Public Radio on still another.

“The best personalized newspaper should have a broad diversity of content,” Mr. Zuckerberg said. “The most important stuff is going to be on the front page,” he went on. “Then people have a chance to dig in.”

The announcement met with swift praise from the advertising industry. In addition to bigger ad formats, the redesign’s specialized content streams could keep users glued to the site longer, marketers said.

“This will result in more time spent over all on the Facebook News Feed — and of course, increase engagement with content and ads,” said Hussein Fazal, chief executive of AdParlor, which buys advertisements on Facebook on behalf of several brands.

Facebook executives suggested that there would be no immediate changes to the number of advertisements that appear on the News Feed.

Julie Zhou, the company’s design chief, said only that ads would be more visual. “Everything across the board is going to get this richer, more immersive design,” Ms. Zhou said.

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/08/technology/facebook-shows-off-redesign.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Facebook’s Redesign Hopes to Keep Users Engaged

March 7, 2013 by Leave a Comment

Company executives have broadly said they want to make the News Feed, the first page every user sees upon logging in, more relevant.

In an earnings call with Wall Street analysts in January, the company’s founder and chief executive, Mark Zuckerberg, offered some hints of what a reimagined News Feed might look like: bigger photos, more videos and “more engaging ads.”

“Advertisers want really rich things like big pictures or videos, and we haven’t provided those things historically,” Mr. Zuckerberg said at the time.

Facebook declined to comment on the redesign, which is scheduled to be announced at its headquarters in Menlo Park, Calif. But the adjustments will reflect the tricky balance Facebook faces now that it is a public company: to keep drawing users to the site while not alienating them with more finely targeted advertisements, which is Facebook’s chief source of revenue.

The pressures are acute, given Facebook’s still anemic performance on Wall Street. It came out of the box last May with an extraordinarily high valuation of $38 a share, which slumped to half last fall, and has remained for the most part under $30.

“They have to walk a fine line between the user’s needs and advertiser’s needs,” said Karsten Weide, an analyst with IDC. The user, he went on, could use “better, more intelligent filtering,” while the advertiser needs “smarter, more flexible advertising formats.”

Facebook’s challenge is all the more important considering some warning signs of boredom.

Earlier this year came worrying news that 61 percent of users had taken a sabbatical from the social network, sometimes for months at a time; boredom was one of the reasons cited in the survey by the Pew Research Center. Even worse, 20 percent had deactivated their account entirely.

Advertisers have for years wanted to find new ways to show targeted ads to Facebook users, based on the vast data that the social network has about them. But Facebook has at times run into problems with new advertising products.

For example, last year, just before it filed for its public offering, it began to show advertisements in the News Feed, largely in the form of the controversial Sponsored Stories, where one user’s “like” for a brand was deployed to market that brand to a user’s Facebook “friends.”

Last fall, again in an effort to drum up new revenue, Facebook offered brands and individual users a way to pay Facebook to promote a particular post on the News Feed. Those who did not pay could expect an average post to reach about a third of their Facebook friends, according to the company’s own analysis. That immediately drew criticism, including from Mark Cuban, a technology investor and owner of the Mavericks basketball team, who wrote in an angry post on his blog (http://blogmaverick.com/) last fall that Facebook had made it too expensive for a brand like the Mavericks to reach its fans.

This week, responding to fresh criticism, Facebook said it did not “artificially suppress” content to feature paid posts.

The social networking giant has tweaked its News Feed over the years. Since 2009, Facebook has filtered what every user sees on the News Feed, based on the wisdom of its proprietary algorithm, called Edge Rank, which determines which posts a particular user is likely to find most interesting.

In 2010, it allowed users to chronologically filter the contents of the scrolling feed. The next year, it introduced a separate right-hand-side ticker — Twitter-esque, some said — of everything that every “friend” and brand page had posted.

At the heart of Facebook’s business is to hold the attention of its one billion users worldwide. That means keeping them entertained and on the site as frequently as possible.

It seems to be losing this battle somewhat with its youngest users. Teenagers are increasingly turning to other services, including Instagram, which Facebook now owns, so much so that David A. Ebersman, the company’s chief financial officer, said last week in a conference sponsored by Morgan Stanley that Facebook considered the photo-sharing site a competitor.

Instagram is not its only worry. Americans are increasingly turning to Pinterest to share shopping desires with their friends; Tumblr is a popular forum for self-expression, and Twitter continues to grow as a platform for news and entertainment.

Many people may no longer know all their “friends” on Facebook, which makes it difficult for the company to stuff the News Feed with posts that users will find relevant. Then there are ads.

“The bigger opportunity for Facebook is in cracking the relevance nut,” said Travis Katz, founder of an online travel service, Gogobot, that is integrated with Facebook.

“The noise-to-signal ratio in the feed has increased dramatically,” he added, “to the point where I often miss stories that were important to me.”

At the Morgan Stanley conference, Mr. Ebersman said the company’s filtering algorithms get “smarter” the more a Facebook user clicks on what is displayed on the News Feed.

“So of all the information we are able to show you on Facebook, we are trying algorithmically to pick out which pieces of content to put at the top of your News Feed because we think you will find them most engaging.”

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/07/technology/facebooks-redesign-hopes-to-keep-users-engaged.html?partner=rss&emc=rss

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Media Decoder Blog: SFX Entertainment Buys Electronic Dance Music Site

February 27, 2013 by Leave a Comment

SFX Entertainment, the company led by the media executive Robert F. X. Sillerman, has agreed to buy the music download site Beatport, part of the company’s plan to build a $1 billion empire centered on the electronic dance music craze.

Mr. Sillerman declined on Tuesday to reveal the price. But two people with direct knowledge of the transaction, who were not authorized to speak about it, said it was for a little more than $50 million.

Beatport, founded in Denver in 2004, has become the pre-eminent download store for electronic dance music, or E.D.M., with a catalog of more than one million tracks, many of them exclusive to the service. It says it has nearly 40 million users, and while the company does not disclose sales numbers, it is said to be profitable.

The site has also become an all-purpose online destination for dance music, with features like a news feed, remix contests and D.J. profiles. Those features, and its reach, could help in Mr. Sillerman’s plan to unite the disparate dance audience through media.

“Beatport gives us direct contact with the D.J.’s and lets us see what’s popular and what’s not,” Mr. Sillerman said in an interview. “Most important, it gives us a massive platform for everything related to E.D.M.”

Since the company was revived last year, SFX has focused mostly on live events, with the promoters Disco Donnie Presents and Life in Color; recently it also invested in a string of nightclubs in Miami and formed a joint venture with IDT, the European company behind festivals like Sensation, to put on its events in North America.

In the 1990s, Mr. Sillerman spent $1.2 billion creating a nationwide network of concert promoters under the name SFX, which he sold to Clear Channel Entertainment in 2000 for $4.4 billion; those promoters are now the basis of Live Nation’s concert division.

Matthew Adell, Beatport’s chief executive, said that being part of SFX could help the company extend its business into live events, and also into countries where the dance genre is exploding, like India and Brazil.

“We already are by far the largest online destination of qualified fans and talent in the market,” Mr. Adell said, “and we can continue to grow that.”

Article source: http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/26/sfx-entertainment-buys-electronic-dance-music-site/?partner=rss&emc=rss

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New Control Over Privacy on Facebook

August 24, 2011 by Leave a Comment

Privacy worries have bedeviled Facebook since its early days, from the introduction of the endless scroll of data known as the news feed to, most recently, the use of facial recognition technology to identify people in photographs.

At the nub of all those worries, of course, is how much people share on Facebook, with whom and — perhaps most important — how well they understand the potential consequences.

The company has struggled to find a balance between giving users too little control over privacy and giving them too much, for fear they won’t share much at all. Seeking a happy medium, Facebook announced changes on Tuesday that it says will help users get a grip on what they share.

When the changes are introduced on Thursday, every time Facebook users add a picture, comment or any other content to their profile pages, they can specify who can see it: all of their so-called Facebook friends, a specific group of friends, or everyone who has access to the Internet. These will be indicated by icons that replace the current, more complicated padlock menu.

Similar controls will apply to information like users’ phone numbers and hometowns and whether they like, say, death metal bands, on their profile pages. Users will no longer have to seek out a separate privacy page to tweak who sees how much of that personal information. Nor will they have to bother to remember what those settings were.

Company officials say they hope the changes will simplify the process of establishing who knows what about your life on the Internet — and hopefully, save a few people the embarrassment of unwittingly sharing too much.

“We want to make this stuff unmistakably clear,” Chris Cox, vice president for product at Facebook, said in an interview. “It has to be clear that Facebook is a leader in how people control who sees what.”

Implicit in these changes is the challenge brought on by Facebook’s own success. It is used by 750 million people worldwide, with varying degrees of knowledge about what it means to have a life online. There is the looming prospect that the company will go public, along with the abiding concern about potential government regulation or litigation stemming from privacy issues.

Not least, there is the need for Facebook to cultivate the trust of its users, amid growing competition from Google’s nascent social networking service, Google Plus, which emphasizes more compartmentalized communications with different sets of friends and acquaintances.

Facebook dismissed the notion that the changes were fueled by competition. Company officials took pains to tell reporters that they had briefed privacy advocates on the changes — including those who have been critical of Facebook — and solicited their feedback.

It is too early to tell whether users will find the changes more inviting or simpler, or whether they will reduce what Kurt Opsahl, a lawyer with the Electronic Frontier Foundation, called “the amount of unintentional oversharing on Facebook.”

Privacy advocates warned that the new tools did not address a concern about sharing location. One Facebook user can publish information about another user’s whereabouts without his or her consent — whether it’s an employee at the beach on the day he or she called in sick or a husband at a strip club without his wife’s knowledge.

Other privacy experts say that if users believe they have control over who sees what, they are more likely to share.

“I think it’s part of an evolution to push back at the notion that Facebook is trying to trick you into sharing,” said Jules Polonetsky of the Future of Privacy Forum, which is based in Washington. “You’re more likely to do so when you know what you’re doing.”

The new tools represent a departure from Facebook’s more recent approach, in which users found much of what they posted — tags, photos and so on — to be widely accessible unless they explicitly specified otherwise. The default position, in other words, was to opt for sharing.

Mr. Cox said the new tools were meant to demystify privacy controls and ensure that Facebook users were never “surprised” by what others could see about them.

That includes pictures in which they have been “tagged.” No longer will an unflattering or compromising photograph appear on your profile page without your consent, though the publisher of the photograph can still keep it up on his or her own page. Users will be able to approve every picture in which they are tagged before it appears on their profile pages.

Additionally, the privacy option that is now called “everyone” will instead be called “public.” Facebook executives say they want to dispel any doubts about what the setting means. If you click “public,” that means anyone who is online can see what you are posting, including perfect strangers — or, worse, parents, prospective employers and your ex-wife’s divorce lawyers.

“We need to offer fine granularity in order to be a universally usable tool,” Mr. Cox said. With the new settings, “it’s more visual and prominent who the audience is.”

Indeed, company officials say feedback from users suggest that pictures work better than words. So now, icons guide the way. “Public” is represented by a globe; “friends” by a pair of heads.

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=87f32a985805077b6aeb87c6a3f73cd4

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Bits: Facebook Promotes Social E-Commerce

April 6, 2011 by Leave a Comment

No one wants to go concerts or sports events alone.

So its not surprising that when Facebook users see that their friends are going to an event, they’re more likely to go too. What’s more surprising, perhaps, is how much more likely.

Facebook said Wednesday that every time a user posted on their news feed that they bought a ticket from TicketMaster, friends spent an additional $5.30 on TicketMaster (presumably for the same event). At Eventbrite, a social site for selling tickets to lesser known events, every link shared on Facebook generated $2.52 in ticket sales, Facebook said.

Facebook has long promoted the value of such social ads, saying that word of mouth from friends is more valuable for users and marketers alike than generic marketing messages. The company now says that, similarly, e-commerce sites are increasingly benefiting from tying their services into the Facebook platform. In other words, Facebook says a purchase shared on Facebook generates more purchases from friends.

“We now have a direct link between sharing on Facebook and revenue generation at e-commerce sites,” said Dan Rose, vice president of partnerships and platform marketing at Facebook. Mr. Rose said that 18 of the top 25 e-commerce sites are using Facebook features like Facebook Connect or the “Like” button. Giantnerd.com, a shopping site for outdoor gear, saw a doubling in revenue generate from Facebook within two weeks of adding the Like button, Facebook said. American Eagle saw users referred by Facebook spend 57 percent more than average on the site, Facebook said.

Of course, what’s good for commerce sites that embrace social features is also good for Facebook, even if the company doesn’t charge sites for using those features. That’s because sites that use Facebook heavily also tend to advertise on Facebook.

“Our most successful advertisers are marketing Web sites or applications that have already integrated the Facebook platform,” Mr. Rose said. “If TicketMaster does well on Facebook, they will spend money on Facebook.”

Article source: http://feeds.nytimes.com/click.phdo?i=c53db1cc41c03f918bca57db2c22eaec

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