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Facebook’s Page analytics tool Insights is about to get a big update. Currently, Insights offers data that is approximately 48 hours old. That’s when it’s working properly; the data is sometimes up to 96 hours old, or even longer. In any case, Facebook is looking to begin showing Page performance data in real-time or near real-time, according to our sources cited by TechCrunch.
If you’ve been seeing delays in your Page performance data, this is reportedly the reason why. Facebook has been making changes to its system in anticipation of the upgrade, which has not been scheduled yet. The social networking giant is of course not commenting on the issue or the upcoming rumored upgrade.
If you’re wondering whether your Page is the only one with old data, you should probably check out the website WhyIsFacebookInsightsNotWorking.com. At the time of writing, it reads “Facebook Insights are 3 days behind. This is normal. Nothing to see here.”
Currently, only some data is being reported in near real-time: Likes, comments, and shares for a Page’s posts to the news feed. The rest, including impressions, reach, negative feedback, People Talking About This, demographics of engagers, and so on, are all delayed.
By the time the data is available, Page administrators can only learn from their mistakes and try to do better next time. It’s too late to take advantage of a boost in traffic, to delete a post that is doing more harm than good, or to tweak an advertising campaign as it’s still happening.
With real-time Page performance data, all this would be possible, and Page owners could really start to take advantage of Facebook. Given the expected release of Timeline for Pages this month, an overhauled version of Insights will certainly be welcome.
I have contacted Facebook and will update you if I hear back.
Update at 11:00 AM PST: “We have nothing to announce at this time,” a Facebook spokesperson said in a statement.
See also:
Article source: http://www.zdnet.com/blog/facebook/facebook-to-offer-insights-in-real-time-rumor/9513
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The mobile web, not the smartphone or traditional web, is Facebook’s most popular interface. Now those hundreds of millions of users, including prepaid mobile customers in emerging markets who lack credit cards, will be able to make in-app purchases and earn Facebook money thanks to its announcement of mobile operator billing for Credits virtual currency purchases.
This is a big step towards Facebook’s monetization of mobile despite smartphone platform domination by Apple and Google. For people without credit cards where Facebook Credits gift cards aren’t available, operator billing won’t just be a convenience, it could become the main way for them to participate in the Facebook mobile app economy.
In a talk with TechCrunch writer Ingrid Lunden this morning, CTO Bret Taylor said that the Facebook mobile web has twice as many users as Facebook for iOS or Android. Those smartphone platforms had roughly 57 million daily active users and 85-100 million monthly active users when Facebook stopped publicly reporting their counts at the end of 2011, indicating Facebook for mobile web could have well over 110 million DAU and 170 million MAU.
Even if only a small percentage of those buy Facebook’s Credits virtual currency through operator billing, operator billing could turn into an important revenue stream for Facebook. Still, Facebook may have to pay a large chunk of its 30% tax on purchases to the operators, and the credit card-less might not have tons of disposable income.
In the US, UK, and other developed markets, teens and those without credit cards buy prepaid Facebook Credits gift cards at retail stores, and redeem them to make in-app purchases. Similarly, prepaid mobile users accessing the Facebook mobile web site could pay cash at a local store to top up their mobile account, and then use their balance to buy Facebook Credits. This means Facebook won’t have to get prepaid Credits gifts cards available world-wide, it can just piggy back on the already ubiquitous mobile refill cards. Users can earn Credits through offers, but high reward offers often require a large credit card or PayPal purchase.
Facebook is working on operator billing deals with ATT, Deutsche Telekom, Orange, Telefónica, T-Mobile USA, Verizon, Vodafone, KDDI, SOFTBANK MOBILE Corp, and they must be excited. Few have had good luck with their own app platforms, so grabbing a cut of Facebook’s 30% tax on Credits will give them low-effort revenue where they were failing before. If Facebook’s mobile app platform produces sufficient sales, more operators are likely to come calling.
An enlarged population of monetizable users could also make Facebook’s mobile platform more attractive to developers who are already slammed with releasing their apps for iOS and fragmented Android builds. While Facebook tells me it doesn’t view its support of Facebook integrations into HTML5 apps as direct competition with Apple and Google’s platforms, it surely wouldn’t mind developers producing apps for the one platform where it can collect its 30% tax.
The biggest threat Facebook listed in its S-1 to IPO was its inability to monetize mobile. Suddenly mass accessibility via the mobile web doesn’t sound like such a bad alternative to owning a smartphone app platform.
[Image Credit: Time]
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.
The original idea for the term…
Learn more
Article source: http://techcrunch.com/2012/02/27/facebook-mobile-operator-billing/
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In a statement, Facebook spokesman Andrew Noyes said that the permission to access text messages is clearly listed in the app’s terms and conditions, but that the company currently isn’t reading text messages.
“The Sunday Times has done some creative conspiracy theorizing but the suggestion that we’re secretly reading people’s texts is ridiculous,” the company said in a statement. “Instead, the permission is clearly disclosed on the app page in the Android marketplace and is in anticipation of new features that enable users to integrate Facebook features with their texts. However, other than some very limited testing, we haven’t launched anything so we’re not using the permission. If we do, it will be obvious to users what’s happening. We’ll keep you posted on our progress.”
The Facebook app permissions list posted on the Android Market does, in fact, include permissions that allow the company to edit, receive, read or send SMS messages, which would allow the company to integrate its services with text messaging.
In a Facebook note, the company’s European communications lead Iain Mackenzie called the Times piece ”disingenuous” and clarified several points in the article.
“Just as an aside. . . we didn’t say we’re launching a messenger product,” Mackenzie wrote, reiterating that the company only uses the read/write permissions listed in the terms and conditions of the app in limited testing with people who know what is being tested.
According to a survey commissioned by the Times, 70 percent of respondents said that they do not check what permissions apps require before downloading them.
Related stories:
Does Apple consider Facebook a friend or foe?
Privacy controversy over Path for iPhone, iPad should be a wake-up call
Path deletes contact data, updates app
Article source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/facebook-denies-report-its-snooping-through-texts/2012/02/27/gIQAkGPydR_story.html?tid=pm_business_pop
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The logo used on LulzSec Brasil’s Twitter feed
These days if you are a hardened political revolutionary, you’re just as likely to be a computer geek as someone who gets shoved around by cops at a street protest.
That’s largely thanks to the rise of Anonymous, a brand of hacktivism that has also taken Brazil by storm over the last year.
Brazil has seen an extraordinary rise in high-profile hacktivism recently, according to a new report by cyber security firm Imperva. Since May 2011, hundreds of volunteers have taken part in Anonymous cyber attacks while a few skilled hackers have taken part in data thefts under the name LulzSec Brasil.
The group’s name, logo and website are a hat-tip to the Anonymous splinter group LulzSec, which went on a 50-day hacking spree last year and had members mostly from Europe and the United States.
Last year LulzSec Brasil hit the websites of Brazil’s president, the Brazilian oil and gas giant Petrobras, the country’s tax agency, its Ministry of Sports and its biggest newspaper, Redo Globo. A month after LulzSec Brasil went quiet, a wider following embraced Anonymous Brazil, exposing the emails of a federal police agent, details of Petrobras employees and hacking several political parties.
In January 2012 alone, Brazilian supporters of Anonymous attacked nine major banks or government agencies in the country, including Citibank Brazil and HSBC.
Imperva says there’s a simple reason why hacktivists are so active in South America’s biggest nation: Twitter. Since the 1990s, it reasons, Brazil’s government has put extra emphasis on introducing computers into poorer areas to help bridge the technology gap between rich and poor. One result: Brazil now has the world’s second-highest Twitter usage after the United States.
Why does that matter? Because Twitter is also one of the most popular tools for recruiting volunteers for Anonymous. It offers easy anonymity, and the ability to reach a wide audience. Some of the most well-known Twitter accounts for publicizing Anonymous-related news have tens of thousands of followers. By the time the original LulzSec group disbanded, it had more than 350,000 Twitter followers. @LulzSecBrasil currently has 35,499.
There’s a cultural element here too. “In the minds of many Brazilians, the cyber mayhem is no crime,” Imperva says, adding that there is a popular resentment against corporations and government in Brazil that you won’t find in, say, Norway.
Anonymous may have the appearance of a mysterious, global group of hackers, but it is more like a global, crowd-sourced brand that attracts a few hackers and many less-skilled volunteers who vary in their commitment and motivations. Borne out of the Internet itself, it has its own culture, lingo, etiquette and methods of communication.
Anonymous is widely thought to have emerged from image boards like 4chan and 711chan, whose users take part in discussion threads under the forced name “Anonymous.” In the mid-2000s they started organizing “raids” on gaming sites and MySpace profiles, then mass physical protests against high-profile targets like the Church of Scientology.
Article source: http://www.forbes.com/sites/parmyolson/2012/02/27/how-twitter-helped-brazil-become-a-hotbed-for-hacktivists/
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“We, at WKU, have become particularly conscious lately of some who are misusing social media and using some poor judgment,” Ransdell wrote. “So my message here is `Be smart.’ Use social media thoughtfully; always remember what you send is permanent and can be viewed years from now. Employers do their homework. They can and will track ways in which prospective employees have used social media. We, at WKU, track such things as well.”
Article source: http://www.boston.com/news/nation/articles/2012/02/27/ky_school_aggressively_fights_twitter_criticism/
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Article source: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/technology/flashed-at-the-oscars-angelina-jolies-leg-spawns-its-own-twitter-account/2012/02/27/gIQAyaY0dR_story.html?tid=pm_business_pop
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Facebook users may have one less thing to “like” about the social media powerhouse starting this week. A leaked copy of a presentation about a new marketing plan the company is said to be announcing this week offers a detailed glimpse into the future of social media advertising.
Here’s what it might look like: Currently, if I “like” a company, its messages (or “stories,” in Facebook-speak) can show up on my newsfeed. That’s reasonable: If I’m a fan of that brand, I probably don’t mind reading about it occasionally.
(MORE: Is It a Bad Idea to Friend Co-workers on Facebook? How About Your Boss?)
But it appears that in Facebook’s brave new world, any companies my friends like also will be able to insert their stories into my feed. In some cases, the ad will pull what other users have said on the company’s Facebook feed and use it for their “storytelling.” Facebook promises this practice will lead to a “40% increase in engagement” and that these ads will be “80% more likely to be remembered.”
This could be useful, or it could be extremely annoying. If my neighbor likes a nearby fitness center, it’s certainly possible that an ad from that facility might pique my interest. But given how many of us have a grab bag of friends, family, grade-school pals, exes and so forth on our friends lists, what an acquaintance likes might be wholly irrelevant to me.
“It gives you an incentive, honestly, to eliminate some of your peripheral friends,” says Sam Hamadeh, CEO at financial research company PrivCo.
(MORE: Your Facebook Profile Can Predict Your Job Performance)
Facebook is probably willing to risk turning off a few users because the potential benefit is so huge, he adds. Now, an advertiser might have, say, 40,000 fans. That’s a drop in the bucket for big national brands, so they’re not going to want to pay very much to reach those fans. But considering that the average Facebook user has around 300 friends, those 40,000 fans suddenly turn into 12 million pairs of eyeballs. Suddenly, this becomes an audience worth paying big bucks for — at least, this is the pitch Facebook plans to give potential advertisers.
The proliferation of ads based on what your friends like isn’t the only change, Hamadeh says. Ads will also be bigger. And for the first time, advertisers will have the option of including sound and even videos. Those of you who sneak onto Facebook at work, make sure the volume is turned down first, or a loud commercial could give you away.
MORE: This Is Your Life (According to Your New Timeline)
PHOTOS: Around the World with Facebook
Article source: http://moneyland.time.com/2012/02/27/get-ready-for-more-ads-on-facebook/
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Facebook is working with mobile operators to make phone-based payments easier and has launched an effort to standardize HTML5 to help developers write applications for more mobile handsets, its chief technology officer announced on Monday.
Along with partners, the company has formed a new community group at the W3C called Core Mobile Web platform, CTO Bret Taylor said at a session of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona on Monday. For payments, Facebook has partnered with major carriers to create a one-step payment system for carrier billing. The two initiatives are aimed at solving developers’ complaints about the mobile Web, he said.
“There’s rampant technology fragmentation across mobile browsers, so developers don’t know which parts of HTML5 they can use to deliver their app to customers,” Taylor said. There also is no easy payment system with stored customer credentials for the mobile Web as there is in native platforms such as Apple iOS and Google Android, he said.
HTML5 is promoted as a single standard, but it comes in different versions for every mobile device, Taylor said. Issues such as hardware acceleration, digital rights management and access to the phone’s camera are implemented inconsistently. That makes it hard for developers to write software that works on many different phone platforms, and to reach a wide audience, he said.
Facebook started talking with Samsung about the problem last year and then expanded the discussions, Taylor said. Its partners now include mobile operators, browser vendors, device makers and software tool makers. The W3C group will also prioritize features that matter most to developers. That will help bring the right kinds of apps to Facebook as technology evolves in the coming years, he said.
To check how closely mobile browsers follow the standards to be developed, Facebook introduced a test suite called RingMark. The company plans to contribute RingMark back to the W3C group, Taylor said. The suite includes hundreds of tests for features such as WebGL support, he said.
“As a developer, if the phone your customer’s using passes the RingMark test suite, you know your app will work for that customer,” Taylor said.
Facebook’s mobile payment plan is aimed at reducing mobile buying down to a single step to confirm a payment, improving the experiences of both developers and consumers. It’s intended to eliminate SMS device verification, a commonly used system that requires a user to receive a code via Short Messaging System and then enter it manually to complete a purchase. This has been required for many purchases, such as buying items within a mobile game, he said.
“We think this experience can be as good or even better than the native platforms,” Taylor said. “By having a great developer experience around billing we’ll be unlocking the business potential of the mobile Web.”
Facebook will introduce an SDK (software development kit) that will let developers reach consumers around the world with simple technical integration, Taylor said.
The mobile initiatives are needed because so much Facebook use now takes place on mobile devices. It’s now available on more than 2,500 different mobile devices, including feature phones as well as smartphones, he said.
“Fundamentally, Facebook is a mobile product,” Taylor said. He called it the most natural form of the platform, and the one that founder Mark Zuckerberg would have created originally if the technology had been available at the time.
Stephen Lawson covers mobile, storage and networking technologies for The IDG News Service. Follow Stephen on Twitter at @sdlawsonmedia. Stephen’s e-mail address is stephen_lawson@idg.com
Article source: http://www.pcworld.com/article/250766/facebook_pushes_for_html5_standardization_mobile_payments.html
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By Nick Clayton
It is probably a sign of the increasing maturity of social media. Judging your popularity by your number of Facebook friends seems to be falling out of fashion. The findings of a survey from the Pew Research Center are described by Read Write Web:
Social networkers are becoming more selective, managing their accounts and “pruning” people from their lists. More users are untagging themselves from photos, deleting comments and unfriending others. Women and younger users tend to prune more than others: 67% of women with social-network site profiles have deleted users compared with 58% of men… Today, more than half of social networkers (58%) say their main profile is set to friends-only; 19% set their profile as viewable to friends of friends in addition to just friends. Only 20% of users leave their profile completely public. That last set of people are most likely a mix of Facebook power users, whose profiles are meant only as hubs for discussion and conversation, and uninformed users who do not know how to adjust their privacy settings… The study also reveals that 11% of users say they have posted content they regret. Men are more than twice as regretful as women: 15% say they wish they hadn’t shared certain information, versus only 8% of women. But men are more likely to set their profiles to public or partially private, which leads one to infer that perhaps it’s less about the content they post and more about the pruning they should be doing… Most social network users are concentrated on Facebook. According to Pew, 93% of profile owners have an account on Facebook, which is a 20% increase from 2009. Twitter has grown significantly since 2009; more than 55% of social networkers are on Twitter, up from 45% three years ago.
Read Write Web: Facebook Defriending is on the Rise
Article source: http://blogs.wsj.com/tech-europe/2012/02/27/facebooks-disappearing-friends/
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DAYTONA BEACH, Fla. — In the days before social media, drivers would pass the time during rain delays sleeping in their RVs or playing poker with each other, crew members and even the media.
Now, many of them Tweet … a lot.
One thing that sent the NASCAR-related Twitter-verse buzzing Sunday was the lengthy delay of the Daytona 500 due to stubborn rain cells that were passing over the area.
NASCAR drivers, famous for their relationship with fans, began communicating with them and each other through Twitter on their smart phones, beginning after the driver introductions.
Some tweets expressed the obvious.
“I got a feeling this is going to be a long day,” tweeted David Ragan.
Others were comedic, such as this offering by an unknown tweeter using the Stewart-Haas Racing team account: “BREAKING NEWS: Billy Crystal bows out of Oscar hosting to watch rain-delay coverage of #Daytona500. Family Guy’s Peter Griffin fills in.”
Yet another driver used the delay and Twitter to communicate a special offer to his fans, and perhaps answer a question tweeted by Danica Patrick.
Landon Cassill, who drives the No. 83 Toyota Burger King car, tweeted: “I’m headed to Burger King outside [the Speedway] and give these free Whopper cards away. Tweet me if you’re coming.”
That came just a few minutes after Patrick tweeted: “I wonder how busy the restaurants are outside the track?”
Cassill was as good as his word. He followed his earlier tweet with: “I’m here now if anyone wants a free Whopper. Don’t be shy. I’ve got Whopper cards!”
And never let it be said that wives of race car drivers aren’t in tune with the competition. DeLana Harvick, the wife of driver Kevin Harvick, tweeted: “How about not watch golf?” in response to her husband’s tweet, “Well, what should we do now?”
The PGA Tour’s first World Golf Championship, the Accenture Match Play, began on NBC at 2 p.m., under sunny skies near Tucson, Ariz. But not every driver followed DeLana Harvick’s suggestion: Scott Speed was trading tweets with golf fans about the progress of the championship match between Rory McIlroy and Hunter Mahan.
DeLana Harvick has been known to send as many as 50 tweets during a race giving her husband’s status to fans.
Joey Logano used Twitter to try and track Sports Illustrated swimsuit model Kate Upton, who was in town for the race and to jokingly respond to a fan’s request that drivers find some golf carts and race in the infield. Greg Biffle pondered fishing in the infield pond. Austin Dillon implored NASCAR to consider retractable roofs.
Article source: http://news.bostonherald.com/sports/other_sports/auto_racing/view/20120227in_rain_delay_drivers_turn_to_twitter_to_pass_time/srvc=home&position=recent
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