App developer Xyo has released App for Me, a new mobile search app that identifies a long tail of apps based on Facebook Likes. When a user performs a query using the search app, App for Me will deliver relevant app recommendations based on the user's Facebook Likes, as well as offer app recommendations for the user's Facebook friends. According to Xyo, App for Me search results will display Facebook friends, "...most likely to be interested in a long tail of over 600 types of apps and 120 game interests." Xyo cites that 10 percent of apps get 90 percent of the downloads, with users foc [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile Marketing | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Mobile | Mobile Marketing

In a Facebook "whiteboard" session today at the company's headquarters, it introduced press and analysts to its recently acquired mobile app development platform Parse and its former CEO Ilya Sukhar (who heads the Parse unit of Facebook). Sukhar seems like he could be Mark Zuckerburg's first cousin. For those who've never heard of Parse, it was a two-year-old startup acquired in April by Facebook. It's now part of the suite of tools Facebook offers for developers (Facebook Platform). Parse's mission was/is to take the complexity out of developing native mobile apps for multiple platforms (i [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile Marketing | Facebook | Facebook: Acquisitions | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Business Issues | Facebook: Mobile | Mobile Marketing

In an effort to get more app developers on board using sections, the Facebook Developer blog released a list of best practices for creating customized sections and added section timeline analytics to their App Insight tool. After replacing aggregations with app sections last month, Facebook has rolled-out sections to everyone, and according to the blog post, "...are seeing almost 200 million items added daily." With sections, users can rate movie, TV show and book content directly on their timeline, as well as include ratings from apps. By highlighting a number of apps already using section [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Insights | Facebook: Open Graph | Facebook: User Interface | Social Media Marketing

Will Facebook acquire social traffic and navigation app Waze? TechCrunch ran an article today claiming that three Israeli papers, Calcalist, Ynet and The Marker, have reported that Facebook is in talks to acquire the company in a billion-dollar deal that would help further grow Facebook's mobile efforts. According to the article, a private source confirmed the deal along with a price range of $800 million to $1 billion, although a spokesperson from Facebook and from Waze both said they will not comment on rumors or speculation about the business. Waze uses crowdsourcing technology to let [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook | Facebook: Acquisitions | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Business Issues | Facebook: Mobile | Top News

Entertainment software developer Electronic Arts (EA) announced it will be retiring its Facebook games The Sims Social, SimCity Social and Pet Society on June 14, 2013. While The Sims Social reportedly gained as many as 10 million daily active users (DAU) in 2011, EA reports that activity has fallen off for its once-popular titles. With social games moving from browser to mobile devices, Facebook confirmed earlier this year that it is focusing on more action games for hardcore gamers. Currently, AppData reports The Sims Social and Pet Society at 500,000+ DAUs and SimCity Social at 100,00 [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Business Issues | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Popularity & Usage

Facebook is announcing big news next Thursday at its Menlo Park headquarters. Invitations to attend a product announcement invited media professionals to  "Come see our new home on Android." Will it be a Facebook phone? Speculation is that this might be the long-rumored Facebook phone. 9to5Google reported that Facebook joined forces with HTC and has been working on a major marketing campaign to support the upcoming product launch. Marketing Land will be on site during the event with live blogging to cover the product announcement as it happens next Thursday, and updates here and on our [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Business Issues | Facebook: Mobile | Google: Android | Top News

The "Pinterestization" of Facebook continues. The company today introduced changes to Timeline that allow users to more easily and prominently display collections of things they like (via apps). This was part of the introduction of an overall Timeline redesign. Images in posts are larger and are seen on the right (a mirror of some of the recent News Feed changes), while other photos, music and recent activity are clustered in a slightly narrower column on the left. There's also a bigger emphasis on apps as sources of self expression. App-based custom collections (movies, books, im [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Open Graph | Facebook: User Interface | Features & Analysis | Top News

Facebook is holding a press event next Thursday at its Menlo Park, California headquarters. We'll be there live blogging the event at 10 Pacific/1 Eastern. The purpose of the event is to showcase a new look for Facebook's newsfeed. This may be both for mobile and the PC. According to an earlier article on TechCrunch (discussing mobile), the look of the new feed will be bolder and bigger, with new navigation: The news feed of the evolved Facebook app I’ve seen creates separate feeds for a few different content types including news and photos. Users navigate between them by swiping [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Mobile | Facebook: User Interface | Social Media Marketing | Top News

Android wielding Facebook Admins can now rejoice! Facebook Pages Manager has officially made its way to the Android operating system. The app can be found in the Google Play Store for U.S. and U.K. users and is in the process of being rolled out to a a limited number of regions including Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. According to an official press release, the app includes all of the same features of the iOS version that was launched back in May of 2012. This includes the ability to: Check on their Page activity View Page Insights Respond to a page audience  Pos [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Pages

Facebook made many a developer jump for joy last week as a handful of changes were rolled out to aid in development. The two most notable implementations were the ability to create groups around a specific app or game and the addition of alerts for developers' apps. The new developer alerts will deliver messages to the people listed as admins to the app when a number of actions occur. The developer alerts will be triggered on the following actions: Breaking changes - If functionality is being removed or changed that affects an app, an alert will be delivered. These reminders will [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Top News

Talk about stringing something along: Months after removing its dedicated Questions app, Facebook has finally removed the "Ask Question" option from the status update text box above the News Feed. That currently leaves users with two options: Update Status and Add Photo/Video. Facebook Questions first launched in July 2010 and was thought to be an eventual challenger to Yahoo Answers, the king of the Q&A space. But, as I wrote in my August article, Facebook Questions Has Died A Quiet Death, that never happened. At some point earlier this year, Facebook quietly removed the dedicated Q [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Social Media Marketing

So far the Open Graph has been a boon for apps as users can auto-post and share without a second thought given. Well this week Facebook announced a new shared parameter that will help users cut through the inevitable noise that the Open Graph (and auto-posting) causes. Instead of having an action within an app fall into one's ticker, the new explicitly shared update will appear as if a user entered the post directly within Facebook. This new parameter was designed to be mainly used for items that users would want to be sharing on Facebook, not low-signal activities like in-game pur [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Social Media Marketing | Top News

Has anyone seen Facebook Questions lately? Oh sure, you've seen questions on Facebook. And you've probably asked questions on facebook -- the "Ask Question" option is alive and well on the status box, as you can see above. But Facebook Questions, the separate application that launched just over two years ago is nowhere to be found. When Facebook Questions launched in its limited beta, it was accessible at facebook.com/?sk=questions. When it rolled out to all Facebook users in March 2011, the URL changed to facebook.com/questions. That's where you could go to see and search for q [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Social Media Marketing | Top News

Facebook's mobile business strategy may be taking another step later this month with the launch of app-related advertisements -- ads that could be a boon for developers, but could also lead to more privacy-related scrutiny. The Wall Street Journal cites "people familiar with the company's plans" in saying that Facebook will give advertisers a way to "place ads for apps directly in a users' News Feed on their mobile devices." And it doesn't matter if the user has expressed an interest in the company. Facebook would charge companies every time an app is installed on users' smartphones, one [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook | Facebook: Advertising | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Mobile | Mobile Marketing | Social Media Marketing | Top News

Facebook Credits is going away; long live the Facebook payments infrastructure. Today the company is doing two things to boost payments on Facebook and simplify accepting payments for developers. The company is adding subscriptions to enable developers or publishers to establish recurring revenue steams. Right now there are in-app payments and one-time purchases. This new offering allows app developers to charge a monthly fee for content updates or premium content. The second thing that Facebook is doing is getting rid of the "Facebook Credits" name or brand. The company says it wants to [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Top News

Facebook's web & mobile app marketplace deemed "App Center" officially launches tonight.  Announced last month, App Center will be available today and will launch with 600+ apps including Pinterest, Nike+, Draw Something and many more. The App Center will also be personalized to each user, with recommendations coming from app usage, friend data as well as ratings and reviews. This comes on the heels of the iOS6 rumors pairing Apple and Facebook for a deeper integration. Also released were some Facebook app statistics: More than 230 million people play games on Facebook every [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Strategy | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Mobile | Social Media Marketing | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Top News

Later today, Facebook Camera will be available as a standalone app for the iPhone. That's probably great news for a lot of Facebook users, but on a bigger scale, Google+ and Flickr probably have good reason to be worried. As shown in Facebook's announcement, the new Camera app will allow both photo sharing and consumption. Users can publish multiple photos at once, rather than posting one photo at a time. They can tag friends, add a location and/or include a description. There's also a few photo editing tools -- cropping, rotating and so forth. Or, they can use the app to browse through and [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Mobile | Google: Google+ | Pinterest | Top News | Yahoo: Flickr

The stress of page management for mobile may be coming to an end.  The site 9to5mac reported of an iPhone app that was spotted in New Zealand called "Pages Manager."  The app looks quite similar to the current Facebook iPhone app but has more in depth management features. The screens show a lack of messaging which would be a very helpful tool for page managers on the go: The shots of this app look very promising as new functionality exists from the traditional app.  Insights and notifications will included which will help to keep admins dialed into everything that's happeni [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Social Media | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Mobile

Facebook apps are are getting a new centralized, mobile-friendly destination for users.  The App Center has been officialy announced as the new home for all social apps.  Apps can be easily viewed, sorted, search, reviewed and previewed: Not only does the App Center look slicker, it will have a variety of benefits for users and developers.  Facebook stressed that app success revolves around quality (engagement & ratings) and have added new app metrics into Insights: This information will be crucial for App Center visibility.  Facebook states: "Well-designed apps that peo [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Industry | Facebook | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Marketing | Facebook: Open Graph | Top News

Mobile analytics provider Flurry reported previously that people are spending huge amounts of time with mobile apps, more time than with the mobile browser and more time than on the PC. This may seem to some implausible, but comScore adds further credibility to the findings with its first "Mobile Metrix 2.0" report. The data show that "4 in every 5 mobile media minutes" is spent with apps (vs. the mobile browser). Previously comScore had been reporting that apps and the mobile browser have roughly equal audiences. That's still true but the company now confirms that people spend far more tim [...]

Related Topics: Channel: Mobile Marketing | Facebook: Apps & App Center | Facebook: Instagram | Facebook: Mobile | Google: Mobile | Mobile Marketing | Statistics: Mobile Marketing | Top News | Twitter: Mobile | Twitter: Statistics