Social | Page 117 of 182

Failing App Blames Facebook

March 12, 2013, 12:00AM

Video-sharing site Viddy recently fired its chief executive and laid off nearly half of its staff due to plummeting user numbers. The company blamed the slump on what was the secret sauce to its success — easily reaching users on Facebook. The 30-person startup was hailed as the “Instagram of video,” had Justin Beiber among its investors and was valued at $370 million at its peak. According to AppData, at one point it boasted 35 million users before falling to half a million recently.

Viddy’s story is now one of several where developers have seen their fortunes rise and fall because of changes to how Facebook allows apps to get their messages in users’ feeds. The main culprit is EdgeRank, Facebook’s mysterious algorithm which limits what users see.

“Everyone has known for years that Facebook can be a huge driver of traffic, but Facebook also frequently changes who gets traffic,” said Viddy Director Brian O’Malley.

There are those who stand behind Facebook, saying that the company has a right to prioritize its users and make sure they’re not overwhelmed by constant push notifications soliciting apps.

It used to be that way, led by Zynga. The game maker shot to popularity, and a lucrative IPO, with viral Facebook games such as FarmVille. Its games were notorious for drawing users by distributing a deluge of notifications in players’ feeds designed to lure in their friends. Since then Facebook has scaled back on the practice, and it has put in place a better infrastructure for ads with Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories.

“Facebook thinks first and foremost about the users,” said Riccardo Zacconi, chief executive of game maker King.com. “For companies that were relying 100 percent on virality, there’s been a negative impact, but it’s been a better user experience.”

Nabeel Hyatt is a partner at Spark Capital, a venture capital firm that has backed Facebook rivals such as Twitter and Tumblr. He sees Facebook making a mistake by driving away app makers.

“Facebook is in a platform battle that they’re losing right now,” said Hyatt. “When we have startup companies coming in and presenting about where they’re going to get users, most of those conversations are about iOS and then Android, and then maybe Facebook.”

Viddy’s O’Malley said in hindsight the boom in traffic from Facebook, and the stratospheric investor expectations that followed, set the company on the wrong track.

O’Malley admitted, “With the Facebook traffic and with the larger [investment] round, did we lose focus on what was important? Yes. If you can get traffic from Facebook, great. But don’t bank on it.”

Source: NDTV

New Facebook Leaves Brands Guessing

BY Lauren Arevalo-Downes

March 8, 2013, 12:00AM

Facebook has announced an all-new News Feed showcasing a more visually rich interface, mimicking the aesthetic of Timeline in some ways and giving users options that amount to Reddit-like filters for different categories of content. For now, the revamp doesn’t seem to offer anything that brands and Facebook advertisers can immediately take advantage of, with early feedback that the changes in-fact seem to help users filter out ads.

The unveiling took place at the company’s Menlo Park headquarters, where Facebook presented News Feed as its new and improved ‘third pillar’ of social networking, the other two being Timeline and Graph Search. It also positioned the revamp as enabling three major new functions for users: an influx of media rich content, a way to create feeds based on interests and, in what it seemed to stress most, a “mobile-inspired” user interface. Underlining the first two benefits, Facebook highlighted how the overhaul is more visual, displaying larger thumbnail and logo images and highlighting video content.

Mark Zuckerberg said News Feed could become “the best personalized newspaper,” where users can now categorize content under headers such as music, photos, games and close friends. Facebook Software Engineer Chris Struhar described the change by saying, “Facebook is getting out of the way as much as possible.”

The reaction so far has been that the News Feed change is meant to win over users but with unclear benefits to brand pages and even advertisers on the site. In fact the current feeling is that it’s going to help people filter out more ads, a growing complaint from users. It’s a change from post-IPO Facebook, which has been primarily focused on changes and new products, such as Promoted Posts and Sponsored Stories, designed so advertisers can reach more of its audience.

As far as brand pages go, Mashable quickly outlined four ways publishers and brands can begin their journey into the new News Feed, most of it revolving around improving rich media content.

Facebook’s mobile users won’t see much change yet. In fact, the new News Feed is borrowing from features that were already part of Facebook’s mobile interface such as the scrollbar. Facebook put out a video highlighting what the changes mean.

Users are being allowed to sign up and test the new News Feed. Facebook says it plans on rolling out for everyone in the next couple of weeks.

Source: Facebook

Tweet On Your Feet For A Pizza Hut Gig

BY Lauren Arevalo-Downes

March 7, 2013, 12:00AM

Pizza Hut is planning to hire a new manager of digital media, and it’s launching the search at SXSW with 140-second interview sessions with interested candidates. The restaurant chain says the exercise reflects the real-life demands of a marketing position in an environment fueled by digital media. The quickie in-person interviews are meant to put candidates on the spot and see if they can be brief yet on-point, memorable, even creative, just like communicating through social media. The 140-second limit is an obvious homage to Twitter’s character limit.

Yum! Brands-owned Pizza Hut is not alone in taking a creative approach to job interviews with questions meant to test qualities that go beyond just qualifications. Google is probably best known for it, mixing practical interview questions with probing designed to throw candidates off their game. Potential product managers there better polish up on conundrums such as how much they’d charge to wash all of the windows in Seattle or how they’d evacuate San Francisco in a disaster, while a software engineer should know why manholes are round.

Hewlett Packard seems to want to separate the wheat (the logic-driven) from the chaff (everyone else) with this one: “If Germans were the tallest people in the world, how would you prove it?” Online shoe store Zappos’ CEO Tony Hsieh likes to ask, “On a scale of one to ten, how weird are you?” It probably works as one of those lines that’s ice breaker to some, iceberg in the water to others.

The overriding goal with these types of questions is largely to see whether people can go beyond rambling off what they’re good at, showing if they can tackle unforeseen problems, gin up new ideas, and perhaps innovate on the fly. All are important qualities in today’s corporate world.

For Pizza Hut’s part, chief people officer Tracy Skeans said the ‘tweet on your feet’ first interview is to see “how the candidates hold up.”

After SXSW, Pizza Hut is giving other candidates the opportunity to participate in 140-second interviews for the same position over Skype. It has also launched the Twitter hashtag #becauseimgreat and put out a video spelling out the process for anyone interested.

https://youtube.com/watch?v=Qj0EF9mWzwk

Source Media Post