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Facebook updates Timeline design with cleaner layout, focus on content

Eliza Kern — Wed, 13 Mar 2013 17:49:20 +0000

Less than a week after rolling out a brand new news feed design that emphasizes recommended content and a cleaner layout, Facebook announced similar tweaks to its Timeline product on Wednesday, involving a simplified layout and sections for users to note their favorites books and movies.

The updated Timeline, originally launched in September 2011, will allow users to designate their favorite books, movies, and music, which makes sense as the updated news feed has specific tabs where users can view recommendations and news related to categories like music (Om wrote last week that he thought adding an emphasis on music was a smart element to the re-design). Clearly, Facebook needs more users thinking of the site as a place to talk about music, and emphasizing this on Timeline could help.

If users see a book or movie that a friend has marked as a favorite, Facebook will make it easier for the user to mark it as their favorite as well.

When asked about the influence of the news feed changes on the Timeline updates, a Facebook spokesperson replied that “The new News Feed and timeline work together to now show a more visual experience. Both make you and your friends’ activity and app stories more prominent,” and it’s hard not to draw a link between the timing and similarities between the two changes.

Users will also have a dedicated space on the Timeline to show their activity in other apps, and Facebook used Instagram as an example in announcing the Timeline tweaks. While CEO Mark Zuckerberg said last week that Instagram wouldn’t receive preferential treatment on the Facebook platform, it’s clear that the new Timeline is a way for users to incorporate their photos on the site, a feature that didn’t get much mention last week. And it could encourage other third-party developers to integrate more heavily with Facebook’s platform.

The Timeline is also getting an updated design that’s more in line with the new news feed, with a cleaner look and simpler layout. The company said it would be rolling out the changes over the next few weeks.

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Facebook opens the door to how it organizes your newsfeed

Eliza Kern — Fri, 16 Nov 2012 21:36:47 +0000

After a spate of complaints and controversy surrounding Facebook’s newsfeed algorithm and complaints that it wasn’t showing all sponsored content, the company sat down with reporters at its headquarters Friday in Menlo Park to explain why the newsfeed looks like it does, and how people can keep their content flowing. Mainly, Facebook engineers said they want to make the newsfeed full of things you’re interested in (so you’ll keep clicking and engaging) and cut down on posts that seem spammy (since that irritates users and drives them away from Facebook).

The actual Facebook whiteboard using theoretical user Yoda as an example.

The motivations themselves weren’t surprising, but the degree to which the Facebook representatives outlined and explained their motivations in creating the newsfeed was interesting. Will Cathcart, a Facebook product manager for newsfeed, said the algorithm relies on three things when deciding how high to rank a post by a particular publisher: How a user has reacted to that publisher in the past, how other people on Facebook have reacted to the publisher’s story so far, and how the user has reacted to similar types of stories in the past. (Cathcart used the Facebook user Yoda as an example, reacting to a relationship story that Darth Vadar had listed Luke as his son on the network.)

“We make changes to the algorithim all the time, at least weekly,” Cathcart said. “We work all the time to say, ‘Can we better predict what people are looking at? Can we better predict what people won’ want to see or are less likely to interact with?’”

The company works to make each person’s newsfeed as reflective of that person’s interests as possible, Cathcart said, meaning no two users’ newsfeeds will look the same. He said they even try to make the mobile and desktop newsfeeds particular to the platforms, not showing games on mobile that only work on desktop, for example.

Cathcart confirmed that the company has started to respond to posts that cause negative reactions, beginning in September by trying to gauge how likely it is that users will mark to hide or spam a particular item. In other words, if your post seems spammy or unpleasant to users, it might show up less, even if you pay to promote it in the feed.

And this fits with Facebook’s overall goal, as my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote, which is not to serve as charitable organization to spread information, but to respond to customers — both the users who pay to advertise in the feed, and the consumers who dictate whether that information is consumed.

In response to this criticism, Facebook explained — both in a post by one of its engineers and in comments to TechCrunch and Ars Technica — that the newsfeed filtering was designed to eliminate spam and noise, and that it was constantly being tweaked in order to show users things they were actually interested in, not just things that brands wanted them to see. The message seemed pretty obvious: don’t be spammy with your posts and lots of your users will still see them for free. And if you want to spam them anyway, you will have to pay for sponsored posts in order to do that.

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AT&T shoots for 2015 launch of new LTE network

Kevin Fitchard — Wed, 17 Oct 2012 22:20:12 +0000

AT&T isn’t going to waste too much time putting a new LTE network into service over its freshly minted 4G airwaves – at least not by mobile industry standards. Shortly after the FCC gave its blessing for AT&T to launch mobile broadband in the previously useless 2.3 GHz band, AT&T wrote in its public policy blog it could have a network up by the end of 2015.

From the blog post:

“While we have not yet seen the final Order, we anticipate that the service rules adopted today will permit deployment of LTE technologies in the WCS band while ensuring that satellite radio services are protected from unreasonable interference. AT&T took real risks to develop this under-utilized band and is committed to devoting the resources necessary to unlock its full potential. We expect to commence deployment of LTE infrastructure in the band in as early as three years, allowing us to enhance our wireless broadband services. Our customers will also win, as additional spectrum capacity becomes available to support surging mobile Internet usage.”

In the fast-paced world of tech three years may seem like an eternity, but in the plodding world of telecom, three years is the flap of a hummingbird’s wings. AT&T has to get the Wireless Communications Services (WCS) band approved for LTE use by the standards bodies, it has to buy up many of the remaining WCS licenses it doesn’t already own, and it has to secure commitments from equipment vendors and handset makers to build gear and phones for the new band. After that it presumably has to test that gear to ensure that it doesn’t interfere with Sirius XM’s satellite radio signals – problems that have prevented AT&T from using those airwaves for more than a decade.

To be honest, AT&T can probably take care of all of that in a year or two, but carriers don’t like to be pinned down to specific timelines. For instance, when the FCC tried to impose on Dish Network a three-year deadline launching LTE in its satellite spectrum, Dish insisted it couldn’t get even a modest network up in fewer than four years, and it fabricated all kinds of technical excuses to support its claims. You’ll notice by AT&T’s wording it isn’t guaranteeing a new network in 2015, but by even suggesting it could move that quickly, AT&T is behaving distinctly un-carrier-like.

Of course, AT&T has plenty of strategic and political reasons for targeting a relatively quick rollout over its new airwaves. AT&T has been lobbying Washington hard for new airwaves, claiming it faces a looming spectrum crisis. If it were to simply sit on its newly 4G-ified airwaves, it would not go over well with regulators and lawmakers, to say nothing of the public policy and consumer advocacy groups that dog the carrier’s every move. Ma Bell at least has to go through the motions.

But AT&T may have legitimate need of this WCS spectrum sooner rather than later. Its current LTE network in the 700 MHz band is constrained in some key markets. While it has backup spectrum in the Advanced Wireless Services (AWS) airwaves, it was forced to part with a lot of those airwaves after its failed merger with T-Mobile. It doesn’t have near enough AWS licenses to double down on 4G capacity nationwide. But as we’ve pointed out in the past, these rejiggered WCS airwaves are AT&T’s best bet for building a consistent, high-capacity 4G network coast to coast — something it’s never had the luxury of doing until now.

Image courtesy of Flickr user kaibara87.

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France calms fears over Facebook Timeline scare

Jeff John Roberts — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 13:54:38 +0000

After French newspapers set off a 24-hour privacy panic over Facebook messages, the country’s privacy regulator moved quickly to tamp down the furor.

After interviewing Facebook executives for three hours on Tuesday, France’s Commission nationale de l’informatique et des libertés is now debunking rumors of a privacy bug in Timeline, the Facebook feature that shows a user’s personal chronology.

The investigation came after the French tabloid Metro reported on Monday that private messages were appearing unexpectedly on users’ Timelines. The rest of the European press and some US tech blogs quickly repeated the allegations, leading to widespread fear that Facebook had exposed people’s personal lives.

The French privacy regulator, however, has now accepted Facebook’s explanation that the “messages” were simply old public Wall posts that became visible once more. According to a report yesterday in Le Figaro, French ministers had initially proposed that the regulator file a complaint with the public prosecutor. Now, any legal action appears to be out of the question.

The CNIL did, however, find that Facebook’s decision to make the old Wall posts visible with relatively little notice had led to confusion among users.

Le Figaro adds that the French ministers have accepted the explanation, but stated that Facebook’s actions had stirred up “a lot of emotion” among users. They also said the matter highlighted the importance of protecting personal data and showed a lack of data transparency by actors like Facebook.

(Image by InfinityPhoto via Shutterstock)

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Social-TV apps and consumer behavior

Nicole — Tue, 17 Jul 2012 06:55:18 +0000

A new category of digital media has emerged in the living room: social TV. This relatively new concept can be defined as any application, website or software that allows viewers to interact with television programming and share that interaction with others. Currently social TV occurs in three ways: organically, as pure play or through TV- or set-top-enabled communication. This report will focus on the pure-play aspect of social TV as it relates to content providers, television networks and advertisers. It answers key questions relating to the segment’s growth potential, important companies, their competitors and likely business models for the future.

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How social discovery is transforming entertainment

Mark Mulligan — Wed, 23 May 2012 06:55:39 +0000

Gone are the days of traditional content recommendations, which were previously the exclusive domain of professional media outlets. Now, with the growing abundance of social networks and recommendations tools available to anyone, recommendations come from Facebook, Twitter, friends, email newsletters and countless other methods. This report examines the new world of discovery and recommendations and how their influence is creating opportunities and challenges for traditional media marketers.

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3 fascinating (and pretty) portraits of personal life through data

Derrick Harris — Wed, 14 Mar 2012 16:15:24 +0000

For most people, the only data they’ll ever really see about themselves are the pretty charts generated about their finances or weight loss by applications like Mint or Jawbone. Some people, however, take their personal data a little more seriously, meticulously tracking their lives for years, and then showing the world what that looks like.

Three particularly insightful and well-done visualizations have popped over the past month, each taking a different approach to showing far more about their authors’ lives than most of us will ever be able to do for our own lives. Well, unless Facebook Timeline counts.

Stephen Wolfram: The Personal Analytics of My Life

Wolfram Research (maker of the Mathematica technical-computing software and the Wolfram|Alpha knowledge engine) Founder and CEO Stephen Wolfram released a trove of information related to his email, phone call and file-backup activity dating back decades. As you’ll soon notice, and as Wolfram explains, it’s so much more than a log when he did that: when visualized, you can determine how busy he was, what his sleep habits were and even how a book shaped up over time.

Nicholas Felton: The 2010/2011 Feltron Biennial Report

The comment above about Facebook was only partly tongue-in-cheek. That’s because Nicholas Felton actually inspired Facebook Timeline with his series of annual reports on his life — and now he works for the company as a product designer. His reports, which date back to 2005 and track both geographical, personal and interpersonal data, paint a picture of how someone moves throughout the world, what he did and with whom he chose to do it.

Aaron Parecki: Everywhere I’ve Been: Data Portraits Powered by 3.5 Years of Data and 2.5 Million GPS Points

No doubt done in part to show off the power of Geoloqi, the geo-location-data-for-mobile-apps company he co-founded, Aaron Parecki released a series of visualizations showing years’ worth of movement throughout various cities based on his phone’s GPS data. It’s a little creepy, yes, but also powerful for getting a sense of how people actually move around the places in which they live and visit. No wonder the Supreme Court just shot down warrantless GPS tracking of criminal suspects and the FBI had to turn off about 3,000 devices.

We’ll explore more interesting ways companies (and individuals) are using data at Structure:Data, March 21 and 22 in New York City.

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New Facebook ad offerings fill some holes

David Card — Mon, 05 Mar 2012 15:51:37 +0000

Facebook needed to change the way it sold advertising inventory and add some glitzier formats. Last week, at its fMC event for marketers, it made some progress towards addressing those needs. Let’s see what Facebook is doing right and where it still has holes.

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Poll: The older you are, the more you hate Facebook Timeline

Colleen Taylor — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 17:53:32 +0000

An image from the SodaHead poll results (click to enlarge)

Facebook is in the process of converting all user profiles to the new Timeline design. But according to a new poll, the majority of people aren’t so keen on the new look.

Seventy percent of respondents to a poll of 1,900 people held by online opinion site SodaHead.com said they did not like the Timeline design and that Facebook should get rid of it. Just 20 percent of respondents liked Timeline, and 10 percent said they did not have Facebook profiles.

And it turns out that the older people are, the less they like the new design: Only 10 percent of people over 65 liked Timeline, compared with 34 percent of people age 18 to 24.

That won’t come as a big surprise to the folks at Facebook, since it lines up with the research the company itself did before Timeline was announced this past fall. At a press Q&A during the f8 conference, in September, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said that older users tended to respond more negatively to Timeline than younger ones. But, he said, that would not stop Facebook from making big changes: “The world is moving quickly, and we want to be innovative and try new things,” he said at the time.

Either way, it seems that Timeline is here to stay. With the Open Graph API, scores of third-party developers have invested significant time and money into building apps that work within the Timeline interface. So now it is not only Facebook that is tied to the new look but also an entire ecosystem of other companies. Besides, this is certainly not the first time Facebook users have reacted negatively to a change in the site’s look, and it seems that by now the people who run the social networking company have learned to ride out the initial jeers.

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Social Media Gets Stickier: Twitter/Summify; Facebook/Apps, Video Too?

Ingrid Lunden — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:53:57 +0000

This week saw a number of developments at Twitter and Facebook, two of the world’s biggest social networking sites, that are signs of them looking to capitalize more on their already-hefty user bases by creating services that keep them on their sites for longer.

Twitter bought up Summify, a news summary service, and Facebook introduced some 60 new apps to its network. And Facebook could soon be extending time spent on the site even more: a report out today says that Facebook is in talks to replace YouTube (NSDQ: GOOG) as the host for premium music video service Vevo.

The report, from CNET, says that Facebook has held talks with Vevo to move its video service over to Facebook when its contract with Google’s YouTube expires in a year. The report cites sources close to the matter, but has not confirmation from any of the named parties.

The arrangement, CNET writes, would be similar to what Vevo already does with Google on YouTube: Facebook would host and stream the videos, and Vevo and Facebook would both sell and share revenues for ads that run alongside those videos.

Vevo could be a lucrative partner for Facebook in its bid to grow advertising on the site. According to November 2011 figures from Nielsen, Vevo is second to YouTube in terms of unique users (43 million versus 130 million). Facebook itself has made a lot of moves to add video partners to its service too, and it comes in fourth at 30 million. When it comes to the total number of streams, however, Vevo pales to YouTube (535,000 vs 13.4 million), and Facebook does not rank at all. Ditto on time spent per user, where neither Vevo nor Facebook make the top ten, and YouTube is in fourth place (Netflix (NSDQ: NFLX) is the king of time spent per user, by the way).

A deal with Vevo would also follow a pattern of moves that Facebook is making to increase user engagement.

The company this week also introduced a lineup of new apps — some 60 of them — specifically designed for users to add into their Timeline, the new graphical homepage view that Facebook has introduced.

These apps will add more functionality — and hence, the hope is, engagement — in its new Timeline feature. They cover all manner of special interests, from food (a Foodspotting app) to crafts (a Pinterest app) and travel (TripAdvisor) and of course those social games that are a cornerstone of Facebook’s regular apps catalog. Facebook says that the list will grow over time.

Timeline has seen some controversy — some complain they don’t like the look of it; others question how Facebook will use the new layout and information manipulation for commercial gain. In that sense, the apps will either win skeptics over with their usefulness, or make them even more suspicious of how Facebook is encouraging information sharing, even when it does provide some options for limiting that.

When you think about it, it’s not too surprising to see Facebook adding more usefulness and stickiness to its site, as it seeks to grow its primary form of making money: advertising. Eyeballs are the currency of online advertising and so social networks have to figure out not just how to grow their user bases, but how to keep them interested once they are there. That’s an area where Twitter is also focusing:

Yesterday, it was announced that it would be acquiring Summify, a Vancouver-based startup that developed a way to read users’ feeds from Twitter, Google Reader and Facebook and pull out relevant news into a summarized list. The selections, which can be viewed via an app or the web, are made based on your own browsing history, as well as the popularity of particular stories (eg, those that have been retweeted a lot).

Twitter has not revealed much about the deal: no details of the price, or how, exactly, Summify will work as part of Twitter. From a blog post at Summify, we do know that the company has stopped taking new users and will evenutually shut down the standalone service. Also, its employees are packing their bags and moving to Twitter’s HQ in San Francisco.

But given that Twitter, too, is looking to grow engagement on its site — a recent hire in the UK from BBC’s Sports division also demonstrated that — you can see where a service like Summify could potentially fit in: a secondary view of your followers, perhaps, maybe integrated to have a better experience around a user’s lists and favorited tweets. The added information a curated list of news would provide on content consumption could also come in handy for figuring out what ads to point a users’ way, too.

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