July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Facebook page owners have long yearned for more insight than PTAT — Facebook’s people talking about this metric — offers. Starting today, they’re getting their wish.

Facebook announced today that the statistics and numbers that make up PTAT are now going to be available, by default, in their individual elements along with other metrics on page owners’ Insights overviews. That includes:

• Page likes
• People engaged: People who have clicked on, liked, commented on, or shared something from your page.
• Page tags and mentions
• Page checkins

In addition, the former Page Insights virality metric, which Facebook says is often used as a benchmark for post quality, is getting more data. Clicks on post links, which have not been included in virality measures, are now being added in, along with the existing count of how many people saw your posts. Since clicks are being added in, Facebook is tossing the “virality” monicker and substituting “engagement rate.”

Facebook is also adding new metrics and data around page engagement, showing not only who you’ve reached by who you is engaged with your content, down to sex, geography, country, city, and language:

Perhaps most interesting is what Facebook had to say about getting your posts featured in your fans’ news feeds.

We all know that Facebook rewards “quality posts” with greater reach, and that posts with more likes, shares, and comments are more likely to be seen by fans. Facebook said today that one major consideration is the ratio of positive interactions to negative interactions. This means that posts with plenty of likes, comments, and shares — and no hide posts, hide all posts, report as spam, or unlike page actions — will do very well.

But if the negative reactions go up, your post dies.

In the new Page Insights, Facebook will aggregate all those metrics into a single per-post score card, so you’ll be able to see and evaluate those positive and negative interactions, and fine-tune your content strategy for the future.

The changes will be rolling out over the next few weeks and months, and Facebook expects to complete the roll-out by the end of summer.

Sadly, there is no waiting list you can sign up on to speed access.

Image credits: Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat, MailChimp® via photopin cc

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

Facebook’s coming video ads will be disruptive, interrupt people, and run the risk of Facebook becoming the very social network it supplanted, according to at least one online advertising executive.

“Facebook won the MySpace battle because of better and more immediate interaction with people,” Eric Covino says. “The more they get away from that, the bigger the concern.”

Covino is the founder and CEO of CreativeSignals, an online marketing firm that buys Facebook ads, among other things. And he’s not impressed with the new of the impending autoplaying video ads that Facebook is rumored to be adding in the next few months.

Source: John Koetsier

Facebook’s clean, uncluttered new News Feed.

As soon as July, according to some reports, Facebook will be rolling out 15-second video ads right in your news feed. You’ll only see one video ad from one company a day, but the positioning right in your news feed — and the fact that they may be autoplay ads– makes it a risky move. That’s very different than Facebook’s existing video ad proposition, as Wired notes, which is on brands’ own product pages.

The rationale, however, is the pot of goal at the end of the digital rainbow.

“They’re looking to push out millions of dollars of ads,” Covino sayw. “The price per spot is definitely north of a million.”

The challenge, for Covino, boils down to user experience. MySpace bit the dust because of a horrible user experience cluttered with ads. Facebook, which just added retargeted ads in the middle of your news feed, initially had just one ad per page. The social network moved to four in 2011, then to six, and has tested up to 10.

The pressure, especially now that Facebook is a publicly-traded company, is to increase revenue. And there’s also pressure from advertisers, who want new and better ways of splashing their messages in front of social media users.

“With both Facebook and Twitter, you have these tremendously large user groups with advertisers salivating over them,” Covino told me. “I’m worried about the user experience … they keep interrupting people.”

Facebook, of course, is not unaware of these problems, and they test almost everything they do with small groups of Facebook users before migrating the changes slowly to others. So if there is a significant user backlash, Facebook will know, and it will be able to course-correct.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Mark Zuckerberg announcing the updated News Feed

The question, however, is whether the tension between cash and user experience will be resolved in a way that solves both problems.

Covino’s not so sure.

“The core problem of all this is that you have to overcome the psychology of what your users think your service is,” he says.

In other words, people come to Facebook to connect with friends, not necessarily with brands. That is probably largely true, but people are also connecting strongly with companies on Facebook — especially local community businesses. In fact, Facebook trumpeted just a month ago that its users have made more than two billion connections to local businesses, view their Facebook pages 645 million times a week, and comment on them 13 million times a week.

And Facebook fans have never been more valuable to brands — BMW fans are worth $1,613, Starbucks fans $177, and Coke fans are worth $70 to their respective brands.

The core question, to Covino, is how long they’ll stay that way.

“All these things are great, and they sound great, but can that money overcome psychology?” he wonders. “I’m extremely skeptical.”

If advertisers want to take advantage of Facebook’s upcoming video ad platform, they’re going to have to pay up — big time.

The video ads, which will likely launch this summer, will run for $1 million each per day, as AdAge reports. According to sources, Facebook plans to sell four ad spots per day, each of which will target specific demographics. Assuming Facebook actually sells those ads, the video ad platform could pull in an extra $4 million a day — or, if you’re feeling particularly ambitious, over $1 billion a year.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Facebook: More ads, all the time.

Again, that’s assuming Facebook sells those spots.

From the outset, Facebook’s biggest challenge with video ads is proving to advertisers that they will actually pay off. This has traditionally been one of Facebook’s biggest problems, as its high-profile spat with General Motors last year showed.

In that situation, GM didn’t have much proof that advertising on Facebook was worth it, and it wanted to expand its Facebook advertising presence beyond the Facebook sidebar. GM has since returned to the Facebook flock, and the video ads could be the key to reinvigorating its Facebook presence — assuming it doesn’t balk at that price tag. (GM is rumored to have spent $10 million on Facebook advertising in 2011.)

The other problem, of course, is Facebook’s user base, which is particularly sensitive to change and probably won’t be crazy about the prospect of the  News Feeds being bogged down by large, potentially obtrusive advertisements.

Facebook, however, has probably done its homework on this: The ads will be limited to 15 seconds, and Facebook also plans to limit the number of them users see per day. So if users do complain, they won’t have terribly much to complain about. In theory, anyway.

Yup, real ads, not social ads. Retargeted ads: ads from vendors who have noticed where you surf and what you search for, and are presenting ads for products that, based on those actions, they think you might want.

“The owned, earned, and paid media sides of Facebook are coming together really quickly,” says Rob Leathern, CEO of digital ad agency and Facebook API partner Optimal. “This is a great opportunity to reach people within the news feed.”

The new ads aren’t promoted posts, and they’re not native ads. Nor are they ads based on what you’ve liked, posted about, or done on Facebook. Rather, they’re ads straight from marketers who are targeting you based on your browsing interests.

Facebook previously allowed ads like this on the right side of the Facebook page, but this is their first foray into the news feed. There’s a good reason why:

“Allowing advertisers to reach people in News Feed is important because people spend more time in News Feed than any other part of Facebook,” Facebook posted today.

Leathern agrees, saying that it’s great news for marketers. ”We see much better performance of News Feed ads. They get a lot more user attention,” he told me today. “Certainly they come at a higher price point.”

That’s fairly simple, of course: Advertisers want their ads where the people are.

So how will Facebook users react to this new form of advertising? Mobile Facebook users have already told me they’re less than impressed with the amount of advertising that has been showing up in Facebook apps relatively recently.

Facebook knows this, of course, so other ads will be toned down:

“Introducing Facebook Exchange in Desktop News Feed will not change the number of ads people see in their News Feeds,” Facebook added.

This is an important step in monetization for Facebook and an important step in its battle for ad dollars with Google. Social has not monetized as well as search, simply because social is about friends and communication, while search is about active intent. But by adding retargeted ads to the main news feed, Facebook gets intent “for free” essentially and is therefore theoretically able to monetize people’s attention in a social environment for products they might have been looking for in an individual environment 15 minutes earlier.

Another reason it’s a big step is that the new ad units will not necessarily link to brand pages on Facebook; they can link to landing pages outside of Facebook, something that ads in the news feed have never done before.

“It’s a clear signal that Facebook wants a very dynamic ad ecosystem,” Leathern says, adding that Facebook will inevitably fine-tune and tweak this particular ad unit for both advertisers’ and users’ benefit. “If there’s one thing Facebook does really well, it’s test and iterate products.”

The initial test includes ads and participation from TellApart, MediaMath, and Nanigans. Interestingly, retargeting leader AdRoll is not on the list.

So, you saw that Facebook launched a shiny, pretty News Feed redesign, and you want in.

Lucky for all of us, the new U.I. is coming to the web version of Facebook starting today.

Facebook reps also said this morning that the new look and feel would be appearing on smartphones and tablets over the next couple weeks.

But if you just can’t wait and you’ve absolutely got to have it now, you can try the new homepage immediately.

Once you click that link, you’ll get a brief walkthrough of the new features, including our favorite, swapping between different News Feeds for friends, music, photos, and so on.

You can also get more info about the news design or leave Facebook feedback from the drop-down menu on the top left corner. Or you can choose to switch back to the old News Feed from the same menu.

If you’re the cautious type and want to browse around the new features before you jump right in, Facebook has set up a whole page explaining News Feed as it exists now — the bigger pictures, the different feed divisions, the upcoming changes to Facebook’s mobile apps.

Here’s a video explaining some of the changes you’ll see in the new version of News Feed and why Facebook decided to make them:

Today, we got an information dump about Facebook’s changes to News Feed — at least, it was an info dump on the consumer side. Here’s what developers need to know about how apps and News Feed will interact now.

Facebook product manager Greg Marra writes on the company blog that the new look and feel for News Feed also means some changes for devs, starting with pictures.

Like Timeline, News Feed now puts images front and center. That means your apps will need to post big pics at least 600-by-600 pixels — or even larger, if possible.

“We’re suggesting 1500-by-1500 if you can swing it,” said Facebook developer advocate Christopher Blizzard in a comment on the updates. “Mo’ pixels = mo’ bettah.”

For more details on achieving maximum big-picture high gloss, check out the documentation on high-res News Feed options for developers and apps.

Also, the News Feed is now, as CEO Mark Zuckerberg stated in a press conference this morning, designed to be more like a print newspaper. Instead of one big wall of data, you’ll be able to navigate between sections. While your local Courier-Tribune has sections on real estate and op/ed, News Feed will have sections on photos, music, games (great news for game devs), and different categories for friends’ updates.

The new U.I. will start rolling out today on the web and will appear on smartphones and tablets over the next couple weeks.

Other than that, as Blizzard noted, “There are no API changes [with] this rollout. From a developer perspective, this is more or less the same. (Except make images bigger!)”

So, there you have it, devs. No API changes. No canvas changes. Just bigger pictures and a huge dose of “mo bettah” for your app’s content on Facebook.

Change is hard, but with Facebook it always seems so much harder.

The social network announced the latest update to its News Feed today, and you can already hear the wails of those unwilling to play along with what Facebook has planned. Maybe you’re one of those unhappy people, maybe not — either way, here are some changes that some folk aren’t going to be crazy about.

Bigger photos, bigger advertisements

While advertisements warranted nary a mention from Facebook during its event today, make no mistake that the new News Feed is a reflection of the desires of its advertisers as much as those of its members. This means that, while the new News Feed comes with some larger photos of your friends’ cats and babies, it’s also certain to mean larger photos from brands hawking their goods. (Also, big ol’ videos.) When something’s good for advertisers, it tends not to be great for the audience. Let’s hope the new News Feed is an exception to that.

It, um, looks different

It might sound silly, but the fact that Facebook actually made changes to the News Feed is reason enough for some people to complain about it. Leaving aside the question of whether the changes are actually improvements, for some Facebook members, change is universally bad. They have to learn new usage habits, deal with new interfaces, and put up with others complaining about their constant complaining. If you’re this type of person, the new News Feed probably has you looking a whole lot like the guy in the photo above.

So many feeds!

Facebook says that one of the biggest complaints it got from users was that the current News Feed was too cluttered. This explains the cleaner interface of the new version, but also the addition of secondary news feeds for things like music and photo updates. This could be a problem, as history has already shown that Facebook users don’t take kindly to having more than one feed to look at, even if that feed is technically making their lives easier and removing some of the less important updates from the main feed. Hopefully, history won’t repeat itself.

Your phone won’t get it yet

Facebook, cognizant of the usual uproar that greets its interface changes, is rolling out the new News Feed on the web starting today. But it’ll take a few weeks to get the new look and feel on your smartphone or tablet. However, when the new design does land on your phone or tablet, you’ll be seeing pretty much the exact same interface you’ll have on the new web version of News Feed. So, you know, more to hate for you. Hooray!

Photo: Shutterstock

Apparently, you weren’t first in line.

It’s always the same story: Facebook announces some cool awesome new toy, and then slowly dribbles it out to its massive global audience over the next weeks and months. For example, some people still don’t have Graph Search, which was announced two months ago.

So you better get in line quick for the new Facebook News Feed, which Facebook says it is rolling out “very slowly” over the next few weeks on both web and mobile.

Here’s how:

Jump over to Facebook.com/about/newsfeed and start scrolling. Facebook will tell you all about the wonderfulness of the new feed, with its “bright, beautiful stories,” “fresh feeds,” and “vibrant new visuals.” Finally, at the bottom of the very long page, you’ll see a big button to sign up. Click it, and you’ll be on the list.

Now … hurry up and wait. Just be patient — at least a few thousand people are ahead of you already.

Facebook’s presentation — and images — were curiously void of detail on how ads will fit into the new Facebook, but you can bet it’s been a hugely significant part of the conversation as Facebook continues to seek lucrative but appropriate ways of monetizing the social network.

A Facebook representative did tell me via email that businesses now have an “even more visually rich way to showcase content” and that users respond better to more visual stories. In addition, she said, your cover photo is going to be even more important in the new reality, as it will show up in the news feed in all its glory — or lack thereof — when a friend likes a business:

One superimportant point: The new news feed is NOT being accompanied by a new algorithm.

In other words, Facebook is not using this roll-out as an opportunity to revamp EdgeRank, the programmatic method by which Facebook determines how interesting you are, how interesting your content is, and therefore and most critically, how often and where to display your messages.

The early reports from advertisers are agreement with Facebook’s messaging.

“Facebook’s news is unbelievably exciting,” Fiksu CEO Micah Adler says. “Introducing enhanced feeds creates rich contextual advertising opportunities and serves as a perfect complement to Facebook’s unprecedented targeting and measurement capabilities.”

Nothing matters more to advertisers than context, Adler says, saying that while Facebook likes are simple, one-dimensional indications of positive sentiment, interactions between advertisers and people through contextual targeting in the new news feeds will “inevitably increase buyer interest.” He added that Fikus is planning to invest “significantly in new ad units on Facebook, particularly in mobile.

“The new look for Facebook’s News Feed promises new opportunities for advertisers,” Adobe media and ads director Justin Merickel said. “As users tend to show a stronger interest in active, personalized news feeds, embedded ads will likely be more relevant and generate higher ROI for advertisers.”

One concern? The feed choice options that Facebook is implementing.

“The friends-only feed could get a lot of the volume which may be a concern — but it does stop people getting upset with sponsored content appearing around their friends content,” Simon Mansell, the CEO of TBGdigital, said. “Standout will be harder for brands as a result but it’s probably a better user experience.”

Source: Facebook

Facebook’s new news feed options

That said, he added that “the chronological view is interesting — as it removes the argument that there is an algorithm in between users and content.”

Sarah Carter, the GM of social business at Actiance, echoed the concern, but she noted that overall, brands that truly get social marketing could do better with the new feed:

“People can skip content from a business if they want to,” Carter said. “The flip side is that the new design is meant to get people browsing for longer, and improve the overall Facebook experience. So if a business is able to effectively market to its audience on this channel, using content that is visual, relevant and spoken in an authentic voice, the ROI should be greater.”

One other tip from Facebook echoed Mansell’s comments: People will be able to choose the “Following” feed, which will simply display everything that every user and company they are following is publishing. That “reality-bubble free” zone in Facebook could get very interesting as people discover an unfiltered lens into their full social graph.

The new feed roll-out will happen “very slowly” over the coming weeks on mobile and web, Facebook says.

Facebook released its latest redesign to the News Feed today — a long-awaited update to what it is the veritable town center of the social network.

The company knows that it’s News Feed is the hub of all activity on Facebook as well as the place from which it makes the most money. The redesign will help those who use Facebook to have a better experience on mobile, to see more relevant content, and to view bigger photos. It will also help Facebook to target customers with “richer and more immersive” advertising.

Throughout the presentation, Zuckerberg continued to refer to the New Feed as the “personalized newspaper” for all you Facebook-using folks out there. If successful, Zuckerberg could have just created an interesting social news dynamic with Facebook as the newspaper: full of analysis and commentary, and Twitter as the newswire with quick hits of breaking news.

Check out the gallery below and let us know what you think of the new design.

Main image via Facebook event live feed

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Facebook’s News Feed has finally gotten a long-awaited, well-deserved facelift. It’s a design overhaul that fits right in with the company’s shift to a highly visual aesthetic over the past two years.

You will start seeing the new News Feed on the web today; phone and tablet updates should happen over the next couple weeks.

Source: Official Facebook photo

This screenshot from Facebook shows off the old news feed style (left) and the new (right).

As founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg just announced at his company’s headquarters this morning, he wants Facebook’s News Feed to be each user’s “best personalized newspaper you can have” with social and local updates on a variety of topics.

“We also believe [it] should be visual, rich, and engaging,” he continued.

“Because News Feed supports such a broad range of content types, the format has to change as well. … News Feed has become primarily about visual content,” the CEO said, noting that currently, photos make up around 30 percent of all News Feed content.

Not surprisingly, photos are larger and more in-your-face in the new design.

Design is king in News Feed update

The update is not unlike the upgrade to Timelines that launched back in 2011. At that time, the engineering-centric company put a fresh focus on photos, videos, and engaging, interactive content as opposed to text updates.

Zuckerberg continued to say that today’s updates bring to News Feed a triple focus: rich, visual stories; your choice of feeds; and a mobile-inspired U.I.

Facebook design director Julie Zhuo showed off some features of the new design, especially as it pertains to brands. Logos and thumbnails are larger, and pictures and videos take up more of the page. Overall, the interface feels much more like a glossy web magazine than the old, text-heavy Facebook you’ve been used to.

Here’s an image gallery of the new News Feed.

New options for different slices of the News Feed

Chris Struhar, the technical lead for the new News Feed, also gave some updates on new options for it. Facebook is listening to user feedback about its algorithms and the stories those algorithms deliver, he said. People complain that they see too few relevant stories from close friends, so now, they can jump between various types of feeds to focus on different kinds of content.

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Facebook employees, including founder Mark Zuckerberg, discuss getting rid of the News Feed clutter.

An “all friends” feed to give you a full firehose of updates. It also has a “following” feed to show only branded content from news organizations and companies you’re following — a much-requested feature from people. The “music” feed shows music-related sharing and activity, plus photos or updates from musicians’ Pages. And the “photos” feed shows off the visual side of your network.

“We’ve tried photo feeds in the past, but never anything as vibrant as what you see today,” said Struhar.

Mobile continues to play a big role in Facebook’s updates

Also, as Facebook exec Chris Cox pointed out, the design is mobile-inspired. While Facebook got its start a bit too soon to be mobile-first, it’s quickly playing catch up on mobile competencies and mobile interfaces.

Cox said today’s updates will bring more consistency between Facebook on the web and Facebook on mobile, fulfilling the network’s previously expressed goals about delivering Facebook everywhere without regard to platform.

“It’s amazing how much more modern and clean this feels just because we’ve adapted some of the things we’ve done for the tablet and for mobile and brought them to the web,” Cox said.

Hope for revenue fits into Facebook’s ‘three pillar’ model

When Facebook’s Graph Search launched just two months ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said these three products — Timeline, News Feed, and Graph Search — constitute Facebook’s “three pillars” as a company and a web service. And in each of the three, he said the company is striving to focus on its roots, which lie in personal connections and information’s relevance to those connections.

And we Facebook users can’t forget that all this revenue hangs not on Timelines or Graph Search but on News Feed, which remains for now the sole money-maker among those three pillars.

For advertisers, Facebook reps said that ads will, like your updates, be “richer and more immersive.”

Source: Jolie O'Dell/VentureBeat

Mobile is always top of mind for Facebook.

Zuckerberg also said, about creating more ad inventory across the different feeds, “There’s more [user] demand for more content, and we don’t necessarily want to push more stuff to the front page.”

In the company’s most recent earnings call, we learned that advertising made up 84 percent of Facebook’s total revenue: $1.33 billion in the last quarter alone, which makes up 13.3 percent of the total online ad market.

Also, mobile revenue made up nearly one quarter of all ad revenue in Q4, for a (relatively) huge $306 million.

In fact, Facebook’s mobile ads — which didn’t even exist mere months ago — have led to a huge boom in the U.S. mobile advertising market.

“With 25 percent of revenue going to mobile in the fourth quarter, Facebook has cemented its position as the leader in mobile display advertising in the U.S. by a wide margin,” an eMarketer analyst told VentureBeat recently via email.

Additional reporting by Meghan Kelly. Zuckerberg image via Jolie O’Dell/VentureBeat

MENLO PARK, Calif. — Today, throngs of reporters have gathered at Facebook’s Menlo Park headquarters to hear about the social network’s latest updates to News Feed.

News Feed is the single most public-facing Facebook feature. As such, it’s also the most-often complained-about feature.

Leading up to today’s big launch, consumers and news outlets alike have been buzzing about what the changes might bring and what normal Facebook users are hoping to get out of the day’s announcements.

But what most are hoping for is a massive change that would toy with Facebook’s long-cultivated revenue streams and tinker with one of its most precious pieces of IP: The News Feed algorithm.

How News Feed works now

Currently, News Feed is the service’s default landing page for logged-in users, displaying updates, images, and events from all your Facebook-connected friends as well as any brands, companies, or organizations whose Pages you “like” on the site.

From its inception, the Facebook social graph has faced a problem of information overload. Imagine you have just 100 friends on Facebook, and each one updates their profile just twice a day. That’s 200 updates of varying lengths, each with a unique claim on your time and ability to respond, and each with a different degree of relevance to your actual interests and daily life.

The solution is almost entirely programmatic. News Feed’s carefully crafted and constantly updated algorithms (bits of logic like if/then statements that attempt to intelligently sort information and arrive at optimal outcomes) attempt to sort every update in your network not just by its overall relevance or importance but also by its direct relevance to you.

Imagine, for example, that you like Kim Kardashian’s Facebook Page. On Tuesday, she posts a selfie with Kanye West that gets thousands of likes in the first five minutes it’s online. Meanwhile, your mom also posts an update that she got a new dog following the passing of the much-loved family retriever; it’s a Yorkie, and your Dad is not happy, and all your siblings and even your cousins are weighing in.

Facebook would know that your dear, sweet Ma’s update is actually more important and relevant to you than Ms. Kardashian’s, and it would put that update at the top of your News Feed.

The problem with News Feed

What most users we polled are hoping for today is a total revamp of how that algorithm works, or at least how well it works.

“Not seeing the posts of the people and pages I’m following,” said VentureBeat reader Dona Collins, is her biggest problem with News Feed. “The algorithm still seems a bit too random.”

That statement was highly “liked” on the VentureBeat’s own Facebook page and was echoed by many others who said they didn’t see enough posts from their actual friends, that they didn’t see the kinds of posts they wanted to see.

Others complained about the prevalence and placement of advertising in News Feed, especially when it comes to Sponsored Stories. These updates initially appear to be similar to other kinds of content from friends in your News Feed; however, they’re actually paid for by companies and promoted to a huge audience regardless of their relevance to individuals. It’s basically commercial algorithmic override.

Sponsored Stories started popping up in their latest, most subtle form in June last year. And interestingly, they’re also a huge part of Facebook’s plan to monetize its mobile products.

“As companies are promoting services more frequently on mobile, this option gives them the opportunity to focus on specific placements that will impact them most directly,” a Facebook rep told VentureBeat in a recent email exchange.

Most users we talked to said they’d simply like to see more relevance in advertising and more separation between the information they see from people and brands.

A three-headed beast

News Feed, along with Graph Search and Timeline, is one of three main products Facebook is focusing on as core to its site and service.

In fact, when Graph Search launched just two months ago, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said these three products constitute Facebook’s pillars as a company and a web service. And in each of the three, he said the company is striving to focus on its roots, which lie in personal connections and information’s relevance to those connections.

Timeline, the oldest of the three products, came out late in 2011. It represented a complete overhaul in how Facebook designed and displayed personal profiles and information. It was more visually appealing, more personally expressive, and more modern than any product the engineering-centric company had rolled out in the past.

“We looked at a lot of print, and we did entire studies on scrapbooks,” Facebook product chief Sam Lessin told VentureBeat in an interview in San Francisco during Timeline’s initial roll-out period.

“We’d get out a big box of old pictures, flip through the photos and talk about them. We were watching test users reminisce over these things, and we tried to design with that in mind and create that experience.”

Graph Search, on the other hand, is a much more recent launch, and its design is more closely linked to ‘big data’ and infrastructure than pixels and pictures.

At a meeting last month, Facebookers explained in great detail what’s coming next in Graph Search — how the whole product is built on a computer-science understanding of people, places, and things as objects with multiple attributes, nodes in three-dimensional space with edges connecting them to one another. And Graph Search is a powerful new paradigm for finding those nodes based on those connections.

“The biggest problem is the result set sizes tend to increase exponentially,” Facebook engineer Mike Curtiss told us in a recent interview.

“If a node is connected to 100 other nodes … you can get 10,000 output nodes. In another round of execution, you get one million output nodes. This is literally an exponential problem, a difficult problem to scale. … You can’t just solve it by throwing more machines at it.”

These dual challenges — Timeline and Graph Search — and their related disciplines of design and engineering, come together with News Feed to represent everything that Facebook is today and will be for the foreseeable future.

Facebook’s financials

We first got wind of the News Feed changes just a few days ago.

Since then, the company’s stock price has seen a measurable uptick:

In the company’s most recent earnings call, we learned that advertising made up 84 percent of the company’s total revenue — $1.33 billion in the last quarter alone, which makes up 13.3 percent of the total online ad market.

Also, mobile revenue made up nearly one quarter of all ad revenue in Q4 — a (relatively) huge $306 million.

In fact, Facebook’s mobile ads — which didn’t even exist mere months ago — have led to a huge boom in the U.S. mobile advertising market.

“With 25 percent of revenue going to mobile in the fourth quarter, Facebook has cemented its position as the leader in mobile display advertising in the U.S. by a wide margin,” an eMarketer analyst told VentureBeat recently via email.

And we Facebook users can’t forget that all this revenue hangs not on Timelines or Graph Search but on News Feed, which remains for now the sole money-maker among Facebook’s all-important three pillars.

Image credit: Jolie O’Dell

One of the big problems with employing hundreds of engineers is that you’ve always got to give them something to do.

That seems to be what’s going on with Facebook, which will unveil yet another redesign to its News Feed at an event next week.

Details on the event are pretty slim (we know where and when it’s happening, and that’s about it), but I have a pretty good idea of what’s going to happen afterward: Lots and lots of griping from Facebook’s millions of change-averse users, then even more griping from those angry at the initial round of griping.

It’s enough to make you wish Facebook would redesign the News Feed so you don’t have to deal with it.

In case you’ve forgotten, the last time Facebook made a major redesign to the News Feed was in September 2011, though it’s made a bunch of smaller changes to the feature since then. At the time, Facebook said that its focus was making sure users never missed the most important developments, which the social network determined using its secret formula of signals and algorithms.

I don’t have much of an idea about what the redesigned News Feed will look like, but considering Facebook spent $1 billion on Instagram last year, chances are the new News Feed is going to be very heavy on the visuals. Either way, we’ll see next week.

Frustrated by the inability to repost something you love from Facebook’s mobile News Feed? Fret no more, as the social network today launched a mobile share button for its mobile website.

The new button is the mobile equivalent of the share button you already see on the website. It finally gives you a way to repost content from friends and Pages when you’re using Facebook’s mobile site.

The share button is also headed to the social network’s iOS and Android applications in the near future, a company spokesperson told VentureBeat.

The mobile share button sits adjacent to the “like” and “comment” buttons at the bottom of posts, as pictured right. Members can click “share” to repost the status update and add their own comments.

The button is an important one, not only because it satisfies the pleas of people who have asked for the long overdue feature, but because it makes a once complicated process effortless. As such, the additional share button should help brands, businesses, celebrities, and publications get their messages, sponsored or not, in front of even more people.

Facebook now has 604 million monthly active users on mobile, roughly 20 percent of whom only access the social network from their mobile devices. Once the bulk of these users gain access to the mobile share button, we can expect to see a dramatic increase in the number of shares for some posts. More shares will lead to more attention, fans, traffic, and possibly even sales.

[via TechCrunch]

Photo credit: Juan Camilo Bernal/Shutterstock.com

Facebook today launched a new section that allows members to view more updates from the Pages they follow. The release could be enough to proactively stop a dustup from erupting into something bigger.

Called “Pages feed,” the new feature is essentially a Pages-only filter for the News Feed. The option is accessible from the left-hand menu and is rolling out to all Facebook members globally starting today, the company confirmed to VentureBeat.

“This new feature surfaces updates just from Pages you are connected to,” a Facebook representative told VentureBeat. “It’s a ‘Pages only’ view of your News Feed, making it even easier for people to keep up with the Pages they care about most.”

The filter does not affect how the main News Feed works but instead provides a separate feed that just includes content from Pages.

Recently, Facebook has come under fire for how it treats content from Pages in the News Feed. News Feed runs on an algorithm that determines which stories to show members. This approach means members don’t see all posts from friends or favorite brands in the News Feeds. A few vocal Page owners, like Mark Cuban of the Dallas Mavericks, have publicly criticized the social network for this practice, accusing the company of forcing Page owners pay to promote their own posts.

Wednesday’s release of Pages feed should quiet much of the noise surrounding the mostly overblown issue, as the feature gives members a way to view more content from the Pages they follow — if that’s what they desire.

[via The Next Web]

Facebook photo courtesy of Shutterstock

Facebook’s mobile-only users are increasing with each passing quarter. It said in a form 10-Q report filed with the Securities and Exchange Commission on Wednesday that roughly 126 million of its mobile monthly active users accessed the social network exclusively through mobile devices in September.

The new number, up 24 percent from June, means that now nearly 21 percent of Facebook’s 604 million mobile monthly active users are skipping the website altogether.

“While most of our mobile users also access Facebook through personal computers, we anticipate that the rate of growth in mobile usage will exceed the growth in usage through personal computers for the foreseeable future and that the usage through personal computers may be flat or continue to decline in certain markets, including key developed markets such as the United States, in part due to our focus on developing mobile products to encourage mobile usage of Facebook,” the company disclosed in the 10-Q report.

Cue the overly dramatic gasps — except maybe not. Three months ago, these numbers would have given investors and analysts full-blown panic attacks. Then, the social network had not yet demonstrated that it could monetize the attention of its members switching to mobile in any meaningful fashion.

After yesterday’s earnings report, in which the company showed for the first time that Sponsored Stories in mobile News Feed could really bring home the bacon, the mobile-only user figure doesn’t seem so scary. Facebook said yesterday that it made 14 percent of its advertising revenue, or more than $150 million, from mobile during the third quarter. It also said that by the end of the quarter it was pulling in as much as $3 million per day from mobile News Feed ads. The stock price, as a result, is now in recovery mode.

“Exiting 3Q, [Facebook's mobile advertising] run rate had nearly doubled and had an annualized run rate in excess of $1B ($3M a day) — quite impressive given [Facebook] began showing mobile ads only at the end of 1Q this year,” Sterne Agee analysts Arvind Bhatia and Brett Strauser wrote in their post-earnings report. “We feel this was the single biggest take-away from 3Q earnings.”

Facebook’s stock, which had been hovering in the mid $19s, closed Wednesday up 19 percent at $23.23 a share.

Photo credit: JD Hancock/Flickr

Facebook has increased the amount of revenue it generates each day from advertisements that run in the News Feed fourfold over the course of the past 90 days.

The company revealed Tuesday that it now makes $4 million per day from feed placements, with roughly 75 percent of that revenue coming from ads running in the mobile News Feed. For comparison, Facebook closed the second quarter making $1 million per day on News Feed ads.

The News Feed revenue figures, disclosed in an earnings calls with investors and analysts, represent Facebook’s take per day at the end of the third quarter and are not representative of the entire quarter. The $4 million-per-day number, however, underscores the assertions that CEO Mark Zuckerberg and COO Sheryl Sandberg made last quarter about the growth opportunity of these ads.

The ads in question are Sponsored Stories, or targeted status updates that brands and marketers pay to push in front of more people, and are distinguished from the units that run in the right-hand column. Sponsored Stories appear in the News Feed on Facebook’s web and mobile products, and were first introduced in June of this year. Sandberg has called these units the cornerstone of Facebook’s mobile monetization strategy.

Sandberg added today that Facebook has a long way to go in making its feed ads better, more relevant, and of higher value. She promised that people will soon start to see progress in quality and that higher quality units would translate to even more revenue.

Save for mobile revenue growth, Facebook’s third quarter was an ordinary one, at least financially speaking. The social network reported Non-GAAP earnings per share of $0.12, just a tad above Wall Street’s expectations, and revenue of $1.262 billion for the quarter. In the quarter, advertising revenue totaled $1.09 billion, or 36 percent year-over-year growth.

Facebook closed the quarter with 1.01 billion monthly active users and 604 million monthly mobile active users.

Truck image via Shutterstock

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

NewsBlur, a social newsreader that helps you find relevant news and features in the mass of digital content, has released its iPad app.

The Bay Area-based startup has a long road ahead if it plans to topple Google’s popular web-based news aggregator, and with this iPad release, to compete with Pulse, Flipboard and the like. But the timing may be just right.

Founder and chief executive, Samuel Clay, who recently graduated from accelerator program, Y Combinator, saw a golden opportunity when Google announced a somewhat flawed strategy to remove all the “social” features from Google Reader, including friending, following and shared link blogs, to support the expansion of Google+.

Clay figured people still wanted those social features, and he had a way to provide them.

Newsblur’s founder, Samuel Clay

“You can subscribe to friends and people you admire on NewsBlur,” said Clay. “It’s all about sharing the news you read.”

On NewsBlur’s iPhone and iPad apps, you’re prompted to import your feed from Google Reader and then to subscribe to your extended friend network on Twitter and Facebook. For Clay, these social features are the basis of how we consume the news.

The service also lets you curate good reads for your “blurblog,” another strong social component. Friends can peruse your favorite stories on your blurblog and gauge your reactions to hot stories.

The core features of the new iPad app will also be available on the iPhone app. They include:

• Easy browsing of your favorite news sites, folders, and friend’s blurblogs
• Near-instant downloading of news stories
• Visible comments on stories via your blurblog
• Integration with Google Reader
• Blurblogs are now incorporated in your feed list

The web-based service and apps would benefit from a designer, but this is impressive considering that it’s been a one or two-man operation from the outset (Clay had a friend come on board this summer to assist with the development of the iPad app).

Clay told me he developed the first iteration of the product back in 2009 during the morning and evening train ride from Brooklyn to New York. During the 90-minute commute, he hacked a feed reader for his personal consumption. ”I was working in the news space and was dissatisfied,” he told me. “Like any good hacker, I built my own.”

After quitting his day job to work on the product full-time, he was selected as a solo founder for Y Combinator — a rare feat. But no man is an island — Clay plans to raise a first round of funding in the coming months, which he’ll use to build a core team of developers and designers.

NewsBlur is available as a freemium product. Free users can read up to 64 feeds. Paying subscribers can add an unlimited number of feeds. For developers, NewsBlur offers an API and the source code is also available on Github.

July 9-10, 2013
San Francisco, CA

Tickets On Sale Now

News aggregator Wavii wants to build you a Facebook news feed that covers any topic you’re interested in.

“With Wavii, we are building feed items for everything on the planet, not just your friends,” Wavii’s chief executive Adrian Aoun told VentureBeat.

Facebook’s news feed is great, Aoun said, because it’s full of small, easy-to-digest, bits of information. Instead of reading a lengthy email from a friend about her trip overseas, you can see her status updates, check-ins, and photos of the hot guy she met in Rome. You can also hide certain types of updates from your feed, because really, who cares that your friend found a cow in Farmville?

But, as Aoun pointed out, the world is not so simple. We get our news from Twitter, RSS feeds, emails, and websites, but we still read all the chatter and are inundated with more information than we can handle. It’s also not easy to find all the information about a person or topic in any given day.

Wavii’s service connects with your Facebook account, naturally, and learns what you are interested in based on what you’ve “liked” on Facebook. Once you sign up, you can choose which people and topics you want to stay informed about, and they will be added your Wavii feed.

The technology behind the service is unique. The crawler used to find the news uses natural language processing to understand what’s been written and figure out its meaning. The crawler has been programmed to understand context and patterns in written English, so if someone uses flowery language to describe a corporate merger, it can still understand that company A bought company B.

So if you tell Wavii you like Apple and you want to follow news about the company, Wavii will pull obvious results, such as a new iPad or iPhone launch, but will also pull in the news that Ashton Kutcher is playing Steve Jobs in a movie.

Wavii crawls the latest news on your preferred topics to make up your feed. In order to make sure you don’t get duplicates or blatantly false information, Wavii uses several metrics to find legitimate content.

“Our crawler looks at the traffic of a source, spread of the source, how quickly the new is  being talked about, and reputation of source on the topic,” said Aoun, “Wavii is not a truth engine; we won’t tell you what’s true, we’ll tell you what’s being reported as true.”

Wavii looks like a mashup between Twitter and Facebook. The service has social aspects, but it also encourages you to share the news you find on your favorite social network. It is similar to Zite in that it provides personalized news results based on topics. Zite however, relies on tags used in online articles to find news about a topic.

Wavii faces competition from Google News, which displays the news about any search term if available and offers email alerts for any keyword.

The service launches Tuesday evening and will soon include the ability to sign up with Twitter, for those who don’t really use Facebook. Wavii is based in Seattle, Washington.

Globe with pictures image via Shutterstock

Remember when Facebook used to let you sort your news feed (the list of updates from your circle of friends) by most recent stories? Those were the good ol’ days. But wait! Just when you thought the option was gone for good, it’s back and more prominent than ever.

Facebook announced Wednesday that it would allow users to once again sort their stream of news feed stories by most recent items first.

Facebook made several dramatic changes to the news feed a few weeks ago. One change merged the “Most Recent” and “Top News” news feed options to better highlight interesting stories. As usual, the alteration caused quite the stir among the site’s user base.

Now, Facebook is doing a bit of an about-face and branding today’s update as a “new way to sort” the news feed.

“We’re starting to roll out an update that gives people a new way to sort their News Feed: most recent stories first. This option will appear at the top of News Feed,” a Facebook spokesperson told VentureBeat. “People can continue to view highlighted stories first, followed by recent stories, like what they see today.”

“We hope this update makes News Feed easier to navigate while still showing all the news in one place,” the spokesperson added. “The update will be rolling out slowly and should be available over the next several days. As always, we will listen to feedback and refine as needed.”

Facebook today unveiled three new features aimed at making it easier to keep up with your friends’ most important and most recent updates.

The first feature is an adjustment to the site’s news feed (the list of updates from your circle of friends). In the past, this list was displayed in strictly reverse chronological order, with an option to switch between “Top News” and “Most Recent” options. Now, Facebook is merging the two views, so the top of the news feed always shows the updates that you will find most interesting, according to Facebook’s estimates.

Facebook will adjust this list depending on how long it’s been since you last visited Facebook. If you were on the site a few hours or a day ago, it will show a wider sampling of recent updates. But if you haven’t checked in for a week or more, Facebook will prioritize the display to show the updates most likely to interest you.

Below the selected top news items, you’ll be able to view the full, reverse-chronological feed of all updates (what used to be called the Most Recent view).

“What this is about is making sure you can accomplish two goals,” Mike Schroepfer, Facebook’s vice president of engineering told VentureBeat. “One is making sure you don’t miss anything critical. And then when you want to see more, you have an easy way to do that.”

I asked Schroepfer how Facebook decides what I’ll find interesting.

“We look at hundreds or thousands of different signals,” Schroepfer said. For example, the company’s algorithms look at who has published an update, how much engagement it’s generating, how many comments, and other signals. In addition, you can easily click on an update to tell Facebook that it’s not relevant to you, or to flag an update from the chronological feed that you’d like to see in the top news section.

“We’re continuously changing and tuning the ranking,” Schroepfer said. Like Google with its PageRank algorithm, however, Facebook wasn’t about to give me more specific details.

Second, Facebook is increasing the default size of images shown in the news feed, making them twice as large by default. The underlying images are bigger, thanks to recent changes making them 960 pixels wide, so Facebook has more pixels to work with.

It’s a relatively small design change but really makes the feed “pop,” Schroepfer said.

The third feature is called Ticker, which displays short versions of your friends’ updates in real time. For people who live on Facebook (and you know who you are), this display gives you more immediate notifications about what your buddies are up to, whether that’s a post, a shared photo, a check-in or a comment.

You can click on anything in the ticker to see the full update and add your comment, then go back to whatever you were doing in Facebook.

The Ticker appears on the right side of your screen, above the chat pane. You can click and drag on a horizontal divider to give more space to the ticker or more space to the chat window, depending on your preferences.

Social networking titan Facebook today unveiled a “subscribe” feature, which adds news feed updates to a user’s profile from other profiles without having to become “friends” on the site.

Any updates a Facebook user posts publicly go into news feeds of friends and followers. It’s a feature similar to Twitter’s followers and Circles on Google’s latest social network, Google+. Users can now “follow” updates from celebrities on Facebook, such as well-known writers or actors.

“It really lets you, along with the friend list, dial in your Facebook experience,” Facebook vice president of engineering Mike Schroepfer said. “You can see exactly what you want and who you want.”

Users can determine just how many updates they receive from other users they follow. If you choose “only important,” you’ll receive highlights like job moves or a move to a new city. Choosing “most updates” causes Facebook to send updates that would typically show up in a news feed.

Users can make the updates they see as granular as they want — down to removing updates from social games like Zynga’s Farmville.

“Pages are an awesome product for someone trying to maintain a brand presence,” Schroepfer said. ” [The new subscribe feature] allows me to share with my friends and with someone else who might be interested in what I say and do.”

It’s also worth noting that, along with the new follow button, users can now tweet from Facebook — something the social network has been against doing for profiles in the past.  As TechCrunch’s MG Siegler notes, users will soon be able to link their Twitter accounts with Facebook by visiting Facebook.com/twitter.

Facebook has more than 700 million users, compared to Twitter’s 300 million plus users.

The company is testing a new feature that would hide excessive messages from users who send lots of messages in a short amount of time — an ability that has been standard in Facebook for ages.

The “hide” feature is live for a small percentage of Twitter users and may have been active for months before turning up on anyone’s radar, reports The Next Web. The company did not indicate a time-table for full roll out, but the sooner it does happen, the better.

As many long-time Twitter users may have experienced, a handful of over-active accounts can create enough noise to render your main feed useless. The two current options for eliminating that noise are to unfollow certain people, or create a separate “Twitter list” of users who update less frequently — both of which offer a broken experience for handling information overload.

It makes a lot of sense that Twitter would want to address the problem of an increasingly noisy main feed. And now that we know the hiding feature is a reality, it probably won’t be long until the company copies another page from Facebook by giving users the ability to block applications that work in conjunction with Twitter.

Yes, Twitter is indeed following Facebook.

Not long ago, it was the other way around — with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg drastically changing the way his company’s platform operated in an effort to stay relevant and competitive with Twitter, which sounded ludicrous at the time since both Twitter’s user base and valuation were deemed much lower by comparison.

If Twitter wants to remain relevant in the future, it will need to do more than update its welcome screen and keep pace with Facebook.

Users may have noticed the new filters in the top bar amongst “Top News” and “Most Recent”. While Facebook has previously offered individual sorting options in past iterations, the new set of filters seek to give you an unprecedented control over your News Feed. Included are filters for “Games”, “Status Updates”, “Photos”, “Links”, “Pages”, and your friend lists.

The new filters attempt to turn Facebook into something more than just a way to keep up with your friends. For example, much as Facebook aggregators Flipboard and PostPost allow you to do, you can filter by Links to see those posted by friends and, in essence, turn Facebook into a Twitter or Digg-like content discovery platform.

Even beyond that, the Pages filter turns Facebook into an RSS feed reader, as Inside Facebook points out, by letting you see posts from companies, organizations and news outlets you follow (most of which, ironically, may be imported and posted automatically using RSS itself.) And with games being a juggernaut on Facebook, the Games filter is by no coincidence first on the list, showing you friends’ achievements on popular games such as Farmville and Poker.

Facebook’s pace of iteration in the past has shown that it isn’t afraid to test rapidly to find what works. While these new filters are currently being experimented with, as ReadWriteWeb’s Marshall Kirkpatrick points out, there’s no guarantee that they will go live site-wide.

The new version makes it easier to find new sources to follow and connect to friends via Facebook, Google and Twitter accounts. It also offers a custom “My News” page that shows you friends’ story submissions, comments, and Diggs, as well as selected feeds. Users can still access the traditional top news feed, but the “My Feed” section is now the default page for the site for people who have signed up.

The redesign comes on the heels of former Digg CEO Jay Andelson’s resignation earlier this year as the company found trouble staying in the black. Founder Kevin Rose has stepped up in the meantime.

Digg also cut 10 percent of its staff in the second quarter this year as it faded in popularity with the rise of other social outlets like Facebook and Twitter.

Digg recently came under fire after users and publishers were discovered gaming the site to direct traffic to websites they preferred and creating “Digg armies” to kill stories they did not want to reach the front page.

Some bloggers argue that this opens the possibility that Facebook will go after other startups that also have news feeds. But it’s hard to assume this will happen because from a strategic perspective, Facebook would do better by prioritizing development on its advertising, metrics and payments offerings than by pursuing a more litigious strategy of suing other companies.

Plus it would foster a lot of ill will with the broader developer community, which the company relies on to develop either applications on the platform or Facebook-enhanced features on outside web sites.

The patent, which was found by AllFacebook, was filed in 2006.

Officially, this is what the news feed patent covers:

“A method for displaying a news feed in a social network environment is described. The method includes generating news items regarding activities associated with a user of a social network environment and attaching an informational link associated with at least one of the activities, to at least one of the news items, as well as limiting access to the news items to a predetermined set of viewers and assigning an order to the news items. The method further may further include displaying the news items in the assigned order to at least one viewing user of the predetermined set of viewers and dynamically limiting the number of news items displayed.”

Initially protested by 10 percent of the social network’s user base, the news feed has become a core part of Facebook’s experience by distributing shared content, status updates and profile changes through social groups.

“The launch of News Feed in 2006 was a pivotal moment in Facebook’s history and changed the way millions of people consumed and discovered information on the site,” said spokesperson Jaime Schopflin. “We’re humbled by the growth and adoption of News Feed over time and pleased with being awarded the patent.” The company hasn’t yet responded to questions on whether it will actively defend the patent.

First, Facebook has released “News Feed,” a feature that that appears on your homepage to let you know what is happening in your social circles. It pulls in the latest information about your friends or other contacts, notifying you for example when your secret crush breaks up and becomes available for dating again.

Second, it has released “Mini-Feed,” which appears in each person’s profile. This is for when you visit other peoples’ pages, and just want to know what they have changed recently (notes, photos, etc). As opposed to “News Feed” which is pulled into your page, “Mini-Feed” resides only on the pages of each individual member. You can remove the updates, if you don’t like them.

These features seem to be pretty useful, but they are really only update mechanisms. They seem consistent with Facebook chief executive Mark Zuckerberg’s penchant to restrain members’ freedom on how their profiles look (which, btw, can be a good thing, if you consider the ugly, unreadable MySpace pages you see sometimes).

It is noteworthy that Facebook still does not allow things like video-sharing.

YouTube recently added YouTube Colleges, a video-sharing feature for use only from within specific colleges.

Update: The Facebook feature has been heavily criticized.