Company / division: Facebook
Introducing the New Privacy Basics – Facebook (Jan 26, 2017)
Facebook’s busy week for news continues. This update to Facebook’s privacy mini site is timed to coincide with Data Privacy Day later this week, but it’s a useful reminder of how far Facebook has come on privacy. Facebook has always had two distinct privacy issues. One is the same that affects all ad-based companies: gathering lots of information about users and using it to target advertising. The other, however, has always been more Facebook-specific, which is that users have often been unaware of how broadly their content was being shared with other users and potentially the general public. It’s come a long way on both points, but especially the latter one. The new Privacy Basics site has lots of information about how to exercise more control over how posts get shared and with whom, and Facebook has done a nice job here. The fact that there are 32 separate interactive guides is perhaps unintentionally funny – protecting your privacy on the service can still be a complex proposition – but at least Facebook is now effective at walking users through some of that complexity. And in general it now does much better at being transparent and reminding users about how they’re sharing, and most importantly seems to have stopped deliberately or merely carelessly getting users to share more broadly than they intend to.
via Facebook
Facebook has hired former Xiaomi and Google exec Hugo Barra as its new virtual reality chief – Recode (Jan 26, 2017)
Earlier this week, Hugo Barra announced that he was leaving Xiaomi, and now the other shoe has dropped – he’ll be taking over as head of VR at Facebook. It looks like that will make him effectively CEO of Oculus, though I wonder whether he’ll also be responsible for some of the less platform-specific stuff Facebook is working on, like taking Facebook’s social experiences into VR (Mark Zuckerberg’s post about the news features a picture of him and Barra – still in China – together in such a VR environment). Facebook certainly wants to have a major stake in the next user interface, and sees that as VR, but also seems realistic about the fact that no one platform – Oculus or otherwise – will have a dominant role there, and so it needs to evolve Facebook for VR in a way that works on lots of different systems. Whether or not Barra will run this broader set of VR activities at Facebook, hiring him is a big coup for the company – he’s a well-known and well-respected name, especially among developers.
via Recode
Continuing Our Updates to Trending – Facebook (Jan 25, 2017)
It’s a big day for Facebook news – I’ve already covered the new Facebook Stories feature and ads in Messenger, both of which are being tested. This is the only one that’s been publicly announced by Facebook, however, and it concerns Trending Topics, which appear on the desktop site. The changes are subtle but important – each topic will now come with a headline and a base URL such as foxnews.com, topics will be identified based on broad engagement by multiple publications and not just one, and the same topics will be shown to everyone in the same region rather than personalized. Though Facebook doesn’t explicitly say so (perhaps because it fears a backlash, perhaps because it would be a further acknowledgement of a thorny issue), but all of these can be seen as partial solutions to the fake news issue. Citing specific headlines and publications allows users to see the source and make a judgment about whether it’s a reliable one, prioritizing broad engagement will surface those stories that are widely covered rather than being promoted by a single biased source, and showing the same topics to all users could be seen as an attempt to break through the filter bubble. These all seem like smart changes, assuming Facebook can deliver better on these promises than some of its abortive previous changes to Trending Topics.
via Facebook (more on Techmeme)
Facebook is testing News Feed-style ads inside Messenger – Recode (Jan 25, 2017)
It looks like Facebook has finally caved and started testing what are effectively banner ads within Messenger on a limited scale. The closest parallel is the right rail ads on Facebook’s desktop site, because almost all the other ads Facebook shows across both the core product and Instagram are essentially native – that is, they borrow the format of the content itself, and Facebook has never done plain old banner ads on mobile at all. This is just a test, but it’s certainly starting to feel like Facebook is pushing up against the limits of what consumers will bear when it comes to ad load. Though it’s been warning that ad load was going to near saturation in 2017, it doesn’t seem to have quite given up on finding yet more places to show ads, and this feels like one of the least inspired efforts we’ve seen from Facebook so far. I’m very curious to see if the test ends up making it into the finished product, but ads in communication services are notoriously tough – they get in the way of the user, and feel far more invasive than in other settings, especially on mobile. I’d hope that Facebook would think long and hard before pulling the trigger on releasing this to its broader base.
via Recode
Facebook testing Snapchat clone called Facebook Stories – Business Insider (Jan 25, 2017)
Instagram Stories seem to have worked out really well for Instagram, increasing engagement and gaining rapid adoption, while Snapchat’s growth seems to have leveled off a little lately. It now appears Facebook plans to bring stories into the core Facebook experience too, which makes lots of sense: for all Instagram’s popularity, Facebook’s user base is several times as large, and so Facebook can easily extend the feature to many more people in this way. The attraction of the Stories format (and Snapchat’s ephemeral approach in general) has always been that users didn’t have to work so hard to post the perfect picture to live forever on the site. Snapchat users gravitate towards the throwaway nature of sharing on the platform, and Instagram’s Stories feature has been a nice antidote to the false perfection that’s characterized a lot of sharing among teens in particular there. Facebook should benefit in the same way from this feature, especially since organic sharing is said to have fallen recently. Live Video was supposed to be part of the solution here, per Mark Zuckerberg, but it hasn’t quite worked out that way.
via Business Insider
DCN report shows publisher revenue from Google, Facebook, Snapchat – Business Insider (Jan 24, 2017)
This article (and the report it’s based on) frustratingly focuses on average numbers across a range of very different publishers, rather than providing something more detailed, which limits the usefulness of the data, but there’s some interesting stuff in here regardless. For one, this reinforces the sense that publishers are between a rock and a hard place when it comes to supporting the major new content platforms – on the one hand, they feel they can’t afford to be absent, and on the other systems like Facebook Instant Articles and Google’s AMP don’t seem to allow them to monetize as they do on their own sites. One surprising finding is how strongly Snapchat shows here relative to its overall share of ad revenue. The picture is muddied by the fact that the report covers both video and news content, and so YouTube makes a very strong showing overall too. The key takeaway for me is that these companies continue to tread a difficult and dangerous path as they work with these platforms, ceding a lot of control to them and potentially seeing less revenue as a result.
Update: the actual report is now available here in full.
via Business Insider
Inside Instagram’s reinvention – Recode (Jan 23, 2017)
This is a great little profile of Instagram, with lots of little tidbits of information. There are several overarching themes: the mimicking of Snapchat features is definitely one of them, but the broader context is that Instagram is generally moving really fast to ship new features, which is particularly striking given that Kevin Weil, who runs product, came from Twitter, a company that often seems paralyzed by indecision when it comes to tweaking functions. The whole piece reinforces the sense that Instagram is the vehicle through which Facebook is both iterating more quickly and trying to compete more directly with Snapchat, while the evolution within the core Facebook product is slower and more deliberate.
via Inside Instagram’s reinvention – Recode
How Facebook actually isolates us – CNN (Jan 23, 2017)
This isn’t a new idea – it’s been around at least since Eli Pariser’s Filter Bubble was published in 2012. But this study dives a little deeper and provides a scientific foundation for the claims made. However, it also demonstrates how much of the filtering and bubble behavior on sites like Facebook is really tapping into deeper human tendencies like confirmation bias, of which content shared through the mechanism of a social network is a massive enabler. Though the article doesn’t mention Facebook once beyond the headline, the study itself was focused on Facebook, so these findings are specifically about that specific network, though the patterns would largely apply to others too. Because so many of these features are grounded in fundamental human behaviors, they’re very tough to change too, so although Facebook may share some blame for enabling rather than challenging those tendencies, it’s going to be very tough to change them unless Facebook makes a very deliberate attempt to break up the filter bubbles and actively challenge users with new information that contradicts their existing views, which seems very unlikely.
via How Facebook actually isolates us – CNN
What happened to virtual reality? – Business Insider (Jan 21, 2017)
This piece argues that VR is currently underperforming expectations, and hasn’t panned out the way many of its proponents hoped. In reality (no pun intended), I think most of the companies have been pretty realistic about the prospects for the current generation of VR technology – Facebook in particular has said it doesn’t expect Oculus sales to be material to its overall financial picture, for example. So this is as much about inflated expectations around VR that came from others – observers, proponents, fans – than from the companies themselves. But in some ways that doesn’t matter – the narrative was that VR was finally here and going mainstream, and now it’s becoming that VR is falling short of expectations. The first was misguided, and now the second flows from those misguided expectations rather than from actual performance in the market. VR is still at a very early stage, and though Samsung has sold 5 million mobile VR headsets, it’s mostly still a niche proposition today, limited largely to the hardcore gaming market. It’ll take both technological advances and much more compelling content to appeal to non-gamers.
via What happened to virtual reality? – Business Insider
Errors in Facebook ad metrics could lead to more independent audits – Silicon Valley Business Journal (Jan 19, 2017)
This is the fallout from Facebook’s series of admissions towards the end of 2016 about its metrics relating to both content and ad performance: major advertisers are now going to be calling for more third party auditing of ad performance on Facebook. To the extent that Facebook is already said to be working with some outside groups on this, that effort needs to accelerate and come to a rapid conclusion to satisfy advertisers. On the other hand, it’s also clear from the same survey that Facebook is far from the only company whose ad metrics are mistrusted by advertisers – only Google has the confidence of over 50% of buyers, while AOL has the confidence of just 26%. But having said all that, advertisers don’t seem to feel they have alternatives to the big two, on which they plan to continue spending more money this year than last.
Facebook temporarily blocked RT — and Moscow isn’t happy – The Washington Post (Jan 19, 2017)
This is the latest in a string of occasions when Facebook has blocked specific content or an entire account on the basis of a supposed violation of its terms, only to reverse itself. But in this case, it’s a bit different – RT is a highly controversial Russian state-funded news outlet at a time when Russian interference in the US electoral process is a hot topic. The account’s privileges were quickly reinstated in this case, but there now appears to have been no legitimate reason to withdraw them in the first place, raising questions about who at Facebook made the decision to suspend the account and why. At a time when Facebook is trying to be more responsible about policing fake news and also working more closely with news organizations, this kind of thing won’t inspire a lot of confidence either among news organizations or among those inclined to belief Facebook’s fake news clampdown has a partisan bent.
via Facebook temporarily blocked RT — and Moscow isn’t happy – The Washington Post
Facebook looks like it’s going to stop paying publishers to make live videos – Recode (Jan 17, 2017)
Facebook has made a huge push around live video, and still is on the consumer side, but it looks like it’s backing down from paying professional video content creators to produce more of it for the site. That can be read in one of two ways, and this article doesn’t make clear which it is: either Facebook has the product where it wants it and so can afford to take its foot off the gas, or the push hasn’t been working and it’s pivoting to other things. My suspicion is that it’s the latter – we’ll continue to see prompts for users to share live video, but Facebook is giving up on professional live video. I think that’s sensible if it’s the case – Twitter’s strategy of simply licensing existing linear live video feeds seems to make a lot more sense here, even if the revenue opportunities are limited. Professional live video on Facebook just doesn’t seem to be taking off.
via Facebook looks like it’s going to stop paying publishers to make live videos – Recode
Facebook’s Testing Discussion Topics in Groups – Social Media Today (Jan 13, 2017)
The Groups feature is one of those that flies somewhat under the radar at Facebook when it comes to media coverage – it doesn’t get talked about much, but it’s been mentioned in every Facebook earnings call over the past year, so it’s clear that Facebook itself sees it as important. This is a minor feature upgrade which appears to be undergoing testing at the moment, but it’s intended to enrich the Groups feature even further, with more enhancements supposedly coming in the near future.
via Facebook’s Testing Discussion Topics in Groups | Social Media Today
Silicon Valley Takes a Right Turn – The New York Times (Jan 12, 2017)
The headline is an exaggeration – two of the four big companies mentioned are based in Washington, not California, and it’s their corporate PACs which have begun to favor Republican candidates, while their employees remain very firmly left-leaning. But the article does do a great job talking through some of the changes in recent years as big tech companies have shifted their donations towards Republicans while a Democratic president was in office. The data doesn’t go back far enough to indicate whether this is just a cyclical thing, but there’s some evidence the donations were motivated by hopes for more lenient regulatory and taxation policy under a Republican administration. Now that we’re heading into Republican control of both Congress and the presidency, we’ll see how that pans out in practice.
via Silicon Valley Takes a Right Turn – The New York Times
WhatsApp ‘enterprise’ platform for businesses already in app – Business Insider (Jan 12, 2017)
The reporting here is based on a Twitter account that claims to be looking into WhatsApp’s code to find hints about what the app’s future business features might look like. Facebook has already said it wants to take WhatsApp in a similar direction to Messenger, with more hooks for businesses to communicate with users manually and through bots, and these would appear to be early signs of that happening in practice. WhatsApp is a challenging property for Facebook in this respect, because it has always eschewed advertising, and anything that smacks of that direction will likely be poorly received by its users, so Facebook is going to have to tread even more carefully than usual as it pursues this strategy. On the other hand, Facebook didn’t spend $22 billion to buy WhatsApp just to shut off its only revenue stream – this was always inevitable.
via WhatsApp ‘enterprise’ platform for businesses already in app – Business Insider
Facebook tests product similar to Snapchat Discover – USA Today (Jan 11, 2017)
Though the narrative about Facebook copying Snapchat is generally fairly accurate, and Facebook has largely used Instagram as its vehicle for this cloning recently, this doesn’t feel like part of that narrative. Yes, there’s a carousel of sorts within Snapchat’s Discover section, but that’s really where the similarity ends. This is news- and importantly article-centric, while most of the Discover content is lifestyle-centric and highly visual (video and photos). And this is about bundling content from a single news publisher, potentially around a topic, which also feels quite distinct. This is also all directly related to Facebook’s other announcement today about news, which explicitly referenced this testing.
via Facebook tests product similar to Snapchat Discover – USA Today
Facebook says it’s going to try to help journalism ‘thrive’ – Recode (Jan 11, 2017)
This news (FB’s own blog post here) should obviously be taken together with the hiring of Campbell Brown as head of news partnerships at Facebook, announced last week. It’s easy to see this as being about the whole fake news story, and there’s an element of that, but this goes much further than that. What’s interesting is the number of value judgments in Facebook’s own post about this – it isn’t neutral here when it comes to fostering news sites, and local news in particular. That’s clearly in its interests, but it goes further than that too. It’s also very sensibly looking at business models beyond display ads for monetizing news content on Facebook, something the industry needs as Facebook becomes the place where many of their readers consume their content.
via Facebook says it’s going to try to help journalism ‘thrive’ – Recode
Instagram Starts Rolling Out Video Ads Inside Instagram Stories | Fortune (Jan 11, 2017)
As well as copying Snapchat’s Stories feature for the purposes of capturing more users and more of its existing users’ time, it appears Facebook/Instagram was creating a new channel for ads too. Instagram has already ramped up ads quite a bit to the point where roughly every 10 posts in my feed is an ad, and that’s probably about as far as it can go in the feed. But Stories offer another venue for advertising, and with users who have lots of Stories to view they’ll simply slot in between Stories from friends. Stories are easy to skip, so this shouldn’t disrupt the user experience too much, while delivering decent growth in ad revenue.
via Instagram Starts Rolling Out Video Ads Inside Instagram Stories | Fortune
Apple, Facebook and Google top Greenpeace’s clean energy report | TechCrunch (Jan 10, 2017)
Apple has invested enormously in its green initiatives under Lisa P Jackson, arguably one of the biggest and most visible changes under Tim Cook, who seems determined to use Apple’s power for good beyond the influence of its products alone, to a much greater extent than Steve Jobs was. For Apple to come out on top of the major tech companies is still quite an achievement, though Google and Facebook also did well. It’s not clear that most consumers care all that much about any of this, but there’s an argument to be made that these companies are seen as leaders in the field, and Greenpeace’s endorsement puts pressure on others to fall in line, which has broader environmental benefits.
via Apple, Facebook and Google top Greenpeace’s clean energy report | TechCrunch
Facebook is going to start showing ads in the middle of its videos and sharing the money with publishers – Recode (Jan 9, 2017)
Given Facebook’s massive push into video over the past year, it was inevitable that it would eventually begin monetizing – the question was always how. Since video autoplays on Facebook by default, pre-roll would never work, whereas post-roll ads simply cry out for abandonment. Some sort of mid-video ads therefore always seemed the likeliest option, and here they come – they’ll play at 20 seconds in or later. In an autoplay video, I suspect these will still be a user turnoff, but in the context of a longer live video they’ll be more palatable. As ever, the question is how many ads users will stand for – the beauty (for users, if not for monetization) of Facebook video is that there’s always more to choose from if one puts you off.