Tag Archives: facebook

New leak shows feds can access user accounts for Google, Facebook and more

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It’s worse than we thought.

Just one day after disclosing the existence of a secret court order between the National Security Agency (NSA) and Verizon, The Guardian and The Washington Post both published secret presentation slides revealing the existence of a previously undisclosed massive surveillance program called PRISM. The program has the capability to collect data “directly from the servers” of major American tech companies, including Microsoft, Google, Apple, Facebook and Yahoo. (Dropbox is said to be “coming soon.”)

The newspapers describe the system as one giving the National Security Agency and the FBI direct access to a huge number of online commercial services, capable of “extracting audio, video, photographs, e-mails, documents, and connection logs that enable analysts to track a person’s movements and contacts over time.”

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Facebook To Simplify Ad-Buying Process By Eliminating Half Of Its 27 Ad Units

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fidji

Facebook is wrapping up a press session at its Menlo Park headquarters where it talked about the progress that it’s making with advertisers and announced it will be eliminating and consolidating a number of ad units.

The big vision, according to Product Manager Fidji Simo, is to simplify the general process of running ads on Facebook. She said that when Facebook looked at its 27 different ad products, it found that “every single product is really good on its own,” but “the whole is less than the sum of its parts.” The process is too complicated right now, she said (which could potentially scare businesses away or mean that they run less effective campaigns). Ultimately, advertisers should just tell Facebook “who you are, what your message is, and what your objective is,” then they should be able to run the kind of campaign that works for them without any “guesswork.”

Somewhat confusingly, given that vision, it sounds like Facebook actually isn’t announcing changes to the ad-buying workflow. When one of the reporters asked about this, Facebook’s Andrew Bosworth said that the bidding process isn’t changing at all. Simo said the announced changes fall into three different categories — streamlining the number of ad formats, “really bringing the best of Sponsored Stories to all ads,” and increasing the consistency in how ads are displayed. Basically, it sounds like Facebook is eliminating and consolidating of a number of different ad products. Simo argued that this gets Facebook closer to its vision “by reducing the possibility of choosing the wrong thing.”

For example, Facebook is eliminating the Questions product and instead adding the ability to ask Questions within a regular Page Post. It’s also eliminating the product for online offers, because advertisers are just promote a link that points users to an offers on their website. (It’s keeping the product to promote in-store offers.) And it’s also eliminating Sponsored Story units and instead integrating Sponsored Story into a number of other ad units — instead of allowing advertisers to buy a Sponsored Story, Facebook will automatically add “social context” to an ad whenever such context exists. (You can see an example of an ad with social context below.)

Most of these changes won’t happen until the third or fourth quarter of this year, Simo said, although some of them may come sooner.

There are more details in a just-published Facebook blog post. The company says, “In the next six months, we plan to streamline the number of ad units from 27 to fewer than half of that while mapping all of our ads to the business objectives marketers care about — be it in-store sales, online conversions, app installs, etc.”

Facebook Messages Just Went Down For 90 Minutes For Some Web And Mobile Users, Back Now

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Facebook-Messenger-Logo1

Facebook confirms that Facebook Messages experienced a limited outage today. It prevented some users from sending or receiving messages on both the web and mobile for 90 minutes, but chat is back at full-strength as of 7:30pm PST. The outage comes at an inconvenient time as Facebook seeing increasing competition in messaging from Google and mobile-first startups.

Facebook says a small percentage of users were were affected. We saw complaints of the outage from California, Texas, and New York, and I experienced it myself.

When some mobile users experiencing the problems tried to press the Messages icon at the top of their Facebook app, the overlaid list of message conversations that’s supposed to pop up appeared blank. On the web, other and I received the message “Down For Maintenance: Sorry, messages are temporarily unavailable. Please try again later” when trying to send a message.

Instability is a big issue for Facebook as it tries to fend off new competition from Google’s unified Hangouts chat system which launched last month at I/O. Meanwhile, novel image-based messaging apps like Snapchat and Line threaten to pull away younger users. Reliability is critical to making users feel confident that they’ll always be able to communicate with Facebook friends at a moment’s notice. At least Facebook has come a long way from 2009, when outages were much more frequent.

It’s been a day marred by social network outages, as Twitter suffered some breakdowns earlier today, June 3rd.

Facebook NY Signs 10-Year Lease To Move Into ~100K Sq Ft Office With 2X Space, Designed By Frank Gehry

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770broadway

After weeks of rumors, Facebook has just signed a ten-year lease to move its New York office into a new, nearly 100,000 sq ft space over two floors at 770 Broadway, Manhattan. The interior will be designed by famed architect Frank Gehry who is masterminding its Menlo Park Headquarters expansion. Facebook NY’s engineering, design, marketing, sales, and comms teams will move there in early 2014.

The upgrade comes from the 55,000 sq ft space at 335 Madison Ave it opened in 2008 for sales and marketing. Crain’s New York originally leaked that Facebook was eying the 770 Broadway real estate but implied it would take over the whole building rather than just two floors. The space at the west edge of the East Village falls in the increasingly techie “Silicon Alley”. It will house all of Facebook’s New York operations and give it room to grow.

Facebook tells me it chose Gehry after being impressed with his work at 1 Hacker Way, including his ability to achieve cutting edge design at an efficient price. Facebook says “we expect the space to be very similar to our West Campus plan. This will include open floor plans, natural lighting, and an emphasis on space for collaboration.” Gehry says “ We are looking forward to creating a space that speaks to the values of Facebook and allows them to continue to do their best work.”

770 Broadway was originally built in 1906, designed by Daniel Burnham, and spans from east 8th to 9th street. It was the home of the Wanamaker department store, but now its main tenant is AOL [disclosure: TechCrunch is owned by AOL]. The building is “groundbreakingly green” with ultra-efficient lighting and water systems.

The two floors will give Facebook room to offer more perks to employees, which are helpful for signing new hires in a very competitive talent marketplace. Serkan Piantino, the head of Facebook New York’s engineering team, wrote in a Facebook Note announcing the new office that  ”We’ll have plenty of video conferencing equipment to make meeting with our colleagues in other offices really quick and easy. We’ll have room to build out a full service kitchen and serve great food throughout the day.”

Even New York’s Mayor Michael Bloomberg is excited about the new space, noting “Facebook’s investment in New York City is another vote of confidence in our bright future and booming tech scene.” The ten-year lease shows that while nimble mobile competitors are hoping to disrupt the social network, it sees a long future for its business of connecting people.

[Image Credit: NYC Office Space Leader, Green Buildings NYC]

Policing Hate Speech Is Harder Than Nipples

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hatespeech-tilt

No automated system can identify what will offend people. What some humans find disgusting, others find controversial, and others still find funny. Computers just don’t understand.

That caused trouble for Facebook this week when activism groups got advertisers to boycott after the social network failed to suspend accounts accused of publishing hate speech and encouraging violence against women via image memes — photos of injured women with overlaid text laughing about it. Some of the images Women Action Media denounced truly did call for violence against women, and could understandably be pulled. Other less direct references to violence could be interpreted as obscene jokes.

Facebook had reviewed some of the accused offenders and allowed some to persist. However, the loss of ad dollars seems to have spurred it to action as it’s now vowed to do a better job responding to complaints.

Now let’s be clear, violence against women or anyone is wrong. Encouraging it is in some cases is illegal. Joking about it is insensitive. But just because this kind of content appears on Facebook doesn’t mean it promotes violence. There is no misogynist conspiracy. There is a technological deficiency, a human deficiency.

Facebook first line of defense is a set of objectionable content detection algorithms. They can pick out the shape of a nipple or penis, and automatically pull down the image. But they’re not perfect. They miss things and flag innocent images accidentally. Most critically in the current situation, they can’t decipher that a string of words and an image combine to mean something horrible.

That’s why the second line of defense is Facebook’s users. Content flagged by too many people too quickly can be taken down automatically and reviewed later. This system has its flaws too, as a group of trolls working in concert can bring down innocent content, as has happened to Pages promoting women’s rights and other just causes. When content is flagged, it’s sent to Facebook’s Site Integrity team.

I’ve had friends who worked on this team. It’s a tough, draining job. They are the ones who have to look at the threats of violence, the revenge porn, the racism, bigotry, and hatred. In the early days when Facebook’s own employees reviewed this content manually, I heard the company had to frequently rotate people through the team because the nightmarish content would drive staffer to depression if they did it too long. In one case, I heard about a man who each weekend would create multiple fake accounts bearing his ex-girlfriends name and post naked photos he had of her. Each week the Site Integrity team would work with her to take them down. It sounded like an awful job.

Now Facebook outsources much of this work overseas, but the edge cases bubble up to its in-house staff. They have to make tough calls about where to draw the line. A blurry, jagged, subjective line that some will say is repressive and others will say promotes hatred. Humanity has had to draw this line since we learned to express ourselves. And there will never be an exactly right answer to where it belongs.

That doesn’t mean Facebook handled this situation properly. Each of us can judge if it drew the line wrong, but what appeared to move the line that I found so unsettling. Though Facebook didn’t mention advertisers, and was already working on many of the reforms mentioned in its apology, it seems like the advertisers boycott made it spring into action. Facebook needs a firm stance on hate speech independent of its finances. That won’t be easy, and exceptions will have to be made from time to time.

This is an issue of freedom of speech. We’re right to demand sensitivity and ever improving systems for delivering it. We must also remember, though, that the Internet’s ability to connect a diversity of opinions is one reason it is so powerful. Moving to block someone else’s should be used with great discretion, not just when we disagree.

Facebook Advertises That You Can Turn Off Home “If You Need Some Alone Time”

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Facebook Home Ad

Desperate to make its homescreen replacement Home seem less invasive, Facebook is advertising that you can temporarily deactivate it and use your HTC First or other Android phone as normal. The fact that Home replaces your widgets and app folders has been a core complaint. Facebook vows to fix that, but until then it’s reminding people they can leave Home for stock Android or their old launcher.

The post by the Facebook Mobile Page which was also being shown as an ad in some peoples mobile feeds, says “Cover feed on the HTC First keeps your friends close by. But if you need some alone time, simply turn off Home and use your phone as usual. http://bit.ly/htcfirsthome“.  When turned off, the HTC First reverts to stock Android 4.1, and the downloadable version of Home gives way to whatever launcher users had installed before.

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg addressed the issue of users’ disappointment with how Home takes over their phone this week at D11 when asked if the product was a success:

“Facebook Home is v1 of what we think is a very large transformation that we think will absolutely happen, which is rebuilding your phone around people.

The way [phones are] organized is still around activities and apps. We think that phones will be reorganized around people, and we think Facebook Home is the first version of that. We consider it v1, very early. We’d love if we could put out a v1 version and get everything right. The feedback we’re getting is very bi-modal. If you look at our stars, we get fives and we get ones. We get almost no threes.

The people who love it, they’re heavy Facebook users. They want that experience. Not only do they love it but the metrics are working very well for us. They’re using Facebook 25% more and they’re doing 10% more more messaging. So this is a win, both in terms of how this will drive our business and for them.

For the people who don’t love it, they don’t like how it takes over their phone. They don’t like how the launcher re-organizes the apps they’ve already launched, but for the most part they actually like the two core features we launched which are Cover Feed and Chat Heads. So what we are doing is getting that feedback. I don’t know how long it will take. I think it will be a long road. but we really believe we’re on a path to making phones more social.”

As Sheryl explained, a big issue with Home was the sacrifice you have to make to use it. Android users gain some features, but have to give up much of the personalization they’ve worked to build into their phone in the form of widgets, folders, and app organization. I believe their omission from Home is related to some of the team that built Home being iPhone users who don’t have these options normally, so they didn’t miss them.

Supporting these customization features could make Home more of a bonus than a trade. When Home launched, Facebook Product Director Adam Moserri told me there were a lot of features he wished had made it into the initial build, including app folders.

Now Facebook is trying to get some of that functionality added through its monthly updates to Home. On May 9th at a small press conference at Facebook headquarters, Moserri unveiled Dock, a tray of a user’s favorite apps that’s persistently visible at the bottom of homescreen app launcher. Facebook plans to let users import their Dock of most frequently used apps from their previous Android launcher into Home.

Many are calling Home a flop already, and maybe it will be, but it’s early to make that judgement now. Facebook has a very long-term view for the software. Mark Zuckerberg’s belief is that we’re destined to share more and more with our friends, so some will want to prioritize them ahead of utility applications in their phones.

Zuckerberg told Wired’s Stephan Levy, “Three years from now, people are going to be sharing eight to ten times as much stuff. We’d better be there, because if we’re not, some other service will be.” That’s the goal of Home. But for Facebook to get to that future, it needs Home to gain traction. It’s hasn’t yet, having only hit one million downloads on May 10th. The active user count is suspected to be much smaller. As Sandberg said, it will be a long road to success…if Facebook’s even going in the right direction.

Expect Facebook To Turbocharge ‘Notes’ Into A True Tumblr Competitor

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Facebook-Notes

Facebook used to have a blogging feature called Notes. It still does, but it got buried by the Timeline redesign and widely forgotten. Facebook needs to overhaul Notes, and signs say a refresh may already be in the works. It could help people express themselves, make Notes a legitimate competitor to Tumblr, and soften the blow of Facebook reportedly failing to buy Yahoo’s new baby.

Back in March, Facebook acqui-hired the team from Storylane, a sort of blogging platform its founders described as the “the home for personal thoughts and stories that go deeper than a quick Facebook or Twitter update.” It illustrated the rift between Facebook and Tumblr. Twitter is defined by its simplicity, so we’ll leave it out of this discussion.

When it comes down to it, Facebook is more limiting but consistent and easy for the masses. Tumblr gives you more freedom and control. Facebook’s brevity is sufficient for some, but others crave a more customizable presence on the web that’s separate from reports about their day-to-day life. If Facebook wants to house our whole digital lives, it may need to get serious about blogging. It’d be a big undertaking for the social network that could take a while to come to fruition. But better Notes could fill it with high-quality content, pull in ad views, and box out competitors trying to pick away at the Facebook empire.

Updates Vs Blogs: The Difference Matters

On Facebook, you write ‘status updates’ — short descriptions of your current life to keep your friends in the loop. They’re typically concocted for the news feed, rather than your Timeline, and have to adhere to Facebook’s style and format standards. They don’t have a home you’d be proud to show off.

Tumblr blogs feel like you’re writing for yourself. Strange, longer-f0rm dives into niche ideas that might weird out your Facebook friends fit naturally on your own blog alongside quick hits of images and content you’ve stumbled across or created. Tumblrs reach a like-minded audience of those who seek them out, rather than being forced on your social graph. There’s an emphasis on reblogging — lending your audience to content you appreciate. On Facebook there’s not much of a re-sharing culture. You just ‘Like”, which nets creators much less added influence.

When Notes launched in 2006, Facebook’s user base may not have needed it. It was around the same time the site was opening up to the public, and launching the news feed and status updates. For most of the social network’s users, short-form updates were enough. But the world has grown more tech savvy in the seven years since. People increasingly long for a place to call their own on the web. That desire, along with network effect and an improving state of mobile, led to massive, hockey-stick growth for Tumblr in 2010.

Now the signs say it’s time for Facebook to get back in the blogging game. There’s the Storylane acqui-hire. When that went down I asked Facebook about Notes and it was atypically cagey, which made me suspect something was in the works for the feature. Then there was Forbes’ report that Facebook was in talks with Tumblr about a potential acquisition before Yahoo successfully bought the startup. When I asked Facebook’s spokespeople flat-out whether the social network was redesigning Notes, I was met with a coy look and vague advice to watch out for something.

If you remember, Facebook launched its own Camera app just weeks after announcing it would buy Instagram. It had been working on it for a while and decided to launch it anyways. Similarly, a Notes overhaul may be in store, but without a successful acquisition of Tumblr running in parallel.

Fixing Facebook Notes

Facebook’s got a long way to go if it wants Notes to seriously compete with Tumblr and other populist blogging platforms. As of a few years ago I was one of the few people I knew using the feature. I’d employ Notes to host sets of links and descriptions of mixtapes I’d made or a calendar of upcoming concerts I’d compiled. Now I pretty much only see Notes used by outgoing Facebook employees leaving a long goodbye message, or Facebook divisions like Engineering posting deep descriptions of their latest coding adventures. I’m friends with a lot of power users, and if they’re not Noting, I bet the feature has quite poor traction overall.

It’s not hard to see why. First, Notes is totally buried. You have to fish the bookmark out of your massive list of third-party apps. Writing a Note presents you with a sterile white canvas, with no hint of personalization. You can add basic text formatting and some markup, plus embed photos. However, you can’t add videos or animated .Gifs, Tumblr’s lifeblood. Once you publish, the Notes get published to the news feed (probably their greatest strength), but live on a boring white feed hidden within Timeline’s “More” drop-down or the optional Notes section.

Compare that to Tumblr where there’s a wealth of customization options, and the ability to embed most kinds of media. Posts are distributed to a Tumblr’s followers. The Tumblr dashboard might not be as popular as the Facebook news feed, but there, posts don’t have to compete with the barrage of other content types.

To make Notes competitive, Facebook would need to make the product instantly accessible from the home page. It could become a selectable feed in the recently launched news feeds menu, and you could opt to write them straight from the status update composer. If someone actively writes, Facebook would need to prominently display a link to their feed of Notes on their profile so friends could discover their posts beyond the feed. Notes would need to offer stylish themes, accept more media types, and preferably support drag-and-drop uploading and formatting.

Figuring out privacy could be a challenge. Typically, blogs are public but Facebook is usually about sharing with friends. Defaulting to public would make Notes more sharable and help Facebook rack up ad impressions through page views, but it’d need to ensure people don’t accidentally expose themselves. Tumblr’s optional anonymity, NSFW content, and it simply not being Facebook all give it a coolness edge is some respects.

As for incentivizing authors, making it quick to reshare a Note (like reblogging on Tumblr) could give people wider reach than just their friends. That could attract both average Joes who don’t have much of an audience (similar to the intention of Quora’s new blogging feature), as well as public figures looking for massive influence.

On the business end, highly viral Notes could bring in traffic, but also box out Tumblr, which wants to monetize with sponsored posts in the dashboard that could compete with Facebook for ad dollars

In the end, the goals would be to:

  • Make it so even kids or Grandma could create a personalized, simple-to-update blog,
  • Allow the Tumblr demographic of hardcore Internet users to publish beautiful posts that reach their Facebook friends via the news feed so they don’t have to cultivate a new following elsewhere
  • Be classy enough for big names to want to house their opinions on Facebook’s blogging feature.

If given a proper reintroduction, Notes might be a departure from Facebook’s highly standardized look. Keeping tighter control of how people expressed themselves made Facebook easier to use and differentiated it from the chaos of Myspace. But if done right, Notes could give people a vivid way to share and connect. It could make sure Facebook hosts not just our pasts with Timeline, or our day-to-day with news feed, but also be the manicured nest for our deepest thoughts and the content we love.

Considering Facebook’s penchant for naming things what they are, I wouldn’t be surprised to see Notes eventually revived as “Facebook Blogs”.

Postscript: Too bad it didn’t do this a few months ago before Tumblr became such a media darling. Now whatever Facebook does in blogging may be cast as a copy in Tumblr’s shadow.

[Image Credit: Iconspedia / Phan Văn An]

Teens Tire of Facebook—But Not Enough to Log Off

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Has Facebook lost its cool? That’s a question TIME posed earlier this year to dozens of teenagers, who mostly insisted that newer social networks like Instagram, Tumblr, and Twitter were more engaging, even if (and partially because) everyone they knew in real life wasn’t on them. Now, a new study by the Pew Research Center has confirmed that teens are growing a bit weary of the world’s largest social network. The study, part of the Pew Internet & American Life Project, found that teens on Facebook are feeling stressed by “drama,” one of the great burdens of adolescent life. The social confrontations found in high school hallways are now playing out online too. “I think Facebook can be fun, but also it’s drama central,” a 14-year-old female interviewed for the study said. “On Facebook, people imply things and say things, even just by a like, that they wouldn’t say in real life.” Parents, now omnipresent on Facebook, are also a buzzkill. About 70% of teens are Facebook friends with their parents, according to the study — but that doesn’t mean they’re all happy about it. “It sucks…Because then they start asking me questions like why are you doing this, why are you doing that,” a 17-year old male said. “If I don’t get privacy at home, at least, I think, I should get privacy on a social network.” (MORE: A Year Later, Instagram Hasn’t Made a Dime. Was It Worth $1 Billion?) Teens have become acutely aware that anything they post online might be analyzed parents, friends, or colleges; 57% of them have chosen not to post something because they thought it might reflect badly on them in the future, the study found. About one-fourth of teens go a step further and use a fake name, age, or location to protect their privacy online, even though the use of fake names violates Facebook’s terms of use. “We heard a lot of kids talking about the burden of the space, the drama associated with the space,” says Mary Madden, a senior researcher