Facebook Home Hits 500K Downloads In Five Days, Pales In Comparison To Instagram’s Android Shift

It would appear that Facebook Home has just surpassed 500k downloads on Google Play since launching on the platform five days ago on April 16. The app’s Google Play listing notes the milestone, and Ben Evans confirmed on Twitter.

Facebook Home isn’t so much of an app as a user interface for the phone, putting Facebook smack dab in the center of Android user’s smartphone experience. Users with Facebook Home can post status updates and view the newsfeed straight from the lock screen, and conduct messaging without ever being interrupted thanks to Chat Heads.

In essence, it’s Facebook’s push past being an app like every other app and being a central force of the smartphone, a launch pad. Hopes are seriously high, as foreshadowed by Zuckerberg’s sweaty brow at the announcement, but word had originally circulated that users weren’t all that into Facebook Home around launch day.

Clearly, that’s not true as the app has garnered over 100,000 downloads a day since launch. Still, these aren’t blow-out numbers. Remember when Instagram launched on Android, and hit over 1 million downloads in a day? And then hit over 5 million downloads in six days? Yeah, those were blow-out numbers.

You also have to consider that Facebook has over a billion users, so 500K doesn’t really move the needle.

But in Facebook’s defense, the Home application is only available on select devices, including the Samsung Galaxy S III, Galaxy Note II, HTC One X, and the HTC One X+, along with the Facebook Phone itself the HTC First.

Oh, and Facebook is now quite happy for Instagram’s success on Android, after that slight $1 billion acquisition.

Tags: facebook home, facebook, instagram

Another Win For Flat Design As Facebook Gives Its F Logo & Other Icons A Flatter, Cleaner Look

Facebook has given its main “f” logo icon a makeover, flattening the design by removing the pale blue bar along the bottom, which gave the icon a reflective sheen/slight 3D effect, as well as moving the position of the f so it now bleeds right off the bottom. The overall effect is a simplified, unfussy and clean looking design with the f more clearly leaping out. Facebook posted the new logo as a downloadable resource for journalists today.

The refresh was flagged to TechCrunch by designer Tom Waddington who notes in a blog about the change that it appears to be part of a wider icon spring clean at Facebook, with a whole host of other icons used on various official Facebook pages also getting made over in the same flattened and more visually striking style. These icons including a developers icon, privacy- and security-related icons and a mobile icon, among others. Updates seem to have occurred last week.

Here are some of the other icon redesigns — see Tom’s blog for all the examples he’s noticed:

Flat design has spread its levelling influence all over the tech industry and its interfaces in recent years — from Microsoft’s flat, tile-based Windows Phone UI, to Google’s penchant for streamrollering its product interfaces, to scores of other apps and websites. Standing out — or rather above — all this levelling is of course Apple, which continues to prefer a skeuomorphic style of icon and interface design that tries to recreate the look of real-world objects or shapes, by incorporating shading and/or texture.

Cupertino has been roundly mocked for sticking out while the rest of the digital world is shedding pixels and going flat (there’s a great dissection of both sides of the flat vs skeuo debate here) but from a usability point of view, flat design can create confusion about which portions of the website or interface are designed to be clicked on, for instance. However when it comes to something as visible as Facebook’s f logo there seems no reason to hold onto the pale blue bar. As a marketing message, the new icon is much louder and prouder, even though it’s flatter.

According to Facebook’s logos & trademarks guidelines page, the “f” logo can be used for:

1. Your Facebook Page
2. Your Facebook Group
3. An application you offer via Facebook Platform
4. Your implementation of Facebook Connect

It’s also clearly one of Facebook’s most visible bits of brand furniture — appearing on its favicon, for instance, and its mobile app icons. The new look logo is already  up and running on Facebook’s own Facebook page. While an inverted version of the logo (white square, blue f) appears on the Facebook search bar (if you have Graph search enabled). In his blog Waddington notes that the new f logo download is fully transparent, ie with the f fully cut out — which may explain the inverted search bar version.

The original f icon was designed by New York-based design house Cuban Council back in 2006 which told TechCrunch it has not worked with the logo or with Facebook since. ”Cuban Council produced the primary word mark for Sean and Mark in 2006,” Mike Buzzard wrote us in an email, “and have not worked with the logo or the company since.” His speculation is that the new icon system could be the the result of Facebook’s 2011 Sofa acquisition. Mike and some others from Cuban Council joined Google last year in an acqui-hire to work on Google+.

Facebook declined to comment when we asked about the icon redesign.

In addition to the general industry push towards flatter design, TechCrunch’s in-house Facebook stalker, Josh Constine, suggests the decluttered design could be a sign of internationalisation — i.e. to better communicate the Facebook brand to non-English language users who may have been confused by the horizontal line apparently connecting and extending the f symbol. He notes that the original design was conceived when Facebook was a domestic company targeting just U.S. users.

Just Who Uses Social Media? A Demographic Breakdown

You think you know social? How about who uses it? Well, you might not know it as well as you would have guessed.

A new study from the Pew Research Center and Docstoc shed some light on just who uses social and on what platforms. Some of the findings seem in line with what you would probably guess, but others were surprising.

If you think the smarter, more attractive sex is more socially prolific than us men, well ... you're right. Women use social media 9% more than men do. Despite having more distractions, people living in cities have the most social media activity, at 70% of the population. Perhaps it's the connectivity of large-city life.

In terms of racial and ethnic groups online, Hispanics lead the pack at 72% engagement, with African-Americans trailing at 68%, who are ahead of Caucasians at 65%. And in a strange twist, despite being somewhat economically disadvantaged, 72% of adults with annual household incomes below $30,000 use social networks, more than those with higher wages.

How about most popular social networks? That would be Facebook, with 67% of adults using the Zuckerberg-founded service. A distant second was LinkedIn with 20%, with Twitter coming in third at 16%, and Tumblr falling dead last at 6%.

Take a look at the details below:

LEAKED: Here's What Facebook's New Phone Software Will Look Like

Facebook is reportedly set to announce new software for Android, Google's mobile software, tomorrow.

Today, @evleaks, an anonymous mobile leaker, posted photos of what it's going to look like at 9to5Google. Facebook's modification of Android appears to make the operating system simpler.

By most accounts, Facebook isn't totally taking over Android. It's just providing a "skin," or its own layer of design atop the operating system. This is widespread with Android. HTC and Samsung each have their own tweaks to Android. HTC has "Sense" and Samsung has "TouchWiz".

This is just going to be the Facebook "Home" or something like that.

Yesterday, @evleaks published a photo of the HTC First, which will be the new phone Facebook uses to demonstrate the new Android software. According to the leaked specs, it'll be a mid-range phone with relatively weak specs.

Yahoo Buys A Mobile News Startup Founded By A 15-Year-Old For $30 Million

Yahoo announced today that it has acquired Summly, a mobile news aggregation app from British entrepreneur Nick D'Aloisio.

D'Aloisio is only 17-years-old. When he started Summly, he was only 15.

Summly scans the Web for news and uses an algorithm to find the type of content you want to read. Then it summarizes it for you.

Yahoo is going to shut down Summly as a stand alone app, but it says it's going to incorporate Summly technology into its own mobile apps and sites.

Clearly, Yahoo CEO Marissa Mayer wanted to hire D'Aloisio. She has been making a lot of small acquisitions like Summly. She wants to bring young, fresh, mobile-focused talent to Yahoo.

Humoursly, Aaron Levie, CEO of cloud storage company Box, notes on Twitter that D'Aloisio was born after Yahoo was founded.

There was no price announced with the deal. However, All Things D reporter Kara Swisher says Yahoo paid just under $30 million. The app generated no revenue.

According to Crunchbase, Summly has raised $1.53 million in venture funding from an impressive list of investors.

Summly

 Hong Kong billionaire businessman Li Ka-shing put $300,000 in the company in September of 2011. A year later, the rest of the money came from people like Brian Chesky, the CEO and founder of AirBnb, Mark Pincus, the founder and CEO of Zynga, Ashton Kutcher, Yoko Ono, Wendy Murdoch, and a few other big names in tech.

When Steve Jobs opened the iPhone's App Store, Nick D'Aloisio was only 12-years-old.

D'Aloisio taught himself how to make an app. Three years later he launched his own startup, Trimit, which truncated a news story into 140 characters for people that wanted to tweet out stories.

He realized people didn't want to truncate the news. They wanted the news truncated for them. So, he flipped the app and made Summly.

Previously it was reported Summly only had 500,000 downloads, which is not much for an app. D'Aloisio says Summly has had "90 million summaries read," whatever that metric means.

Here's the release from Yahoo announcing the deal:

Today, we’re excited to share that we’re acquiring Summly, a mobile product company founded with a vision to simplify the way we get information, making it faster, easier and more concise.

At the age of 15, Nick D’Aloisio created the Summly app at his home in London. It started with an insight -- that we live in a world of constant information and need new ways to simplify how we find the stories that are important to us, at a glance. Mobile devices are shifting our daily routines, and users have changed not only what, but how much information they consume. Yet most articles and web pages were formatted for browsing with mouse clicks. The ability to skim them on a phone or a tablet can be a real challenge -- we want easier ways to identify what’s important to us.

Summly solves this by delivering snapshots of stories, giving you a simple and elegant way to find the news you want, faster than ever before. For publishers, the Summly technology provides a new approach to drive interest in stories and reach a generation of mobile users that want information on the go.

Nick and the Summly team are joining Yahoo! in the coming weeks. While the Summly app will close, you will see the technology come to life throughout Yahoo!’s mobile experiences soon. So stay tuned!

Mobile devices are at the center of how we engage with the people, experiences and interests we love. Across Yahoo!, we’re focused on creating beautiful experiences that people are excited to use every day -- products that inspire and delight. We can’t wait to work with Nick and the Summly team to do just that.

And here's Summly's announcement:

In true Summly fashion, I will keep this short and sweet.

I am delighted to announce Summly has signed an agreement to be acquired by Yahoo!. Our vision is to simplify how we get information and we are thrilled to continue this mission with Yahoo!'s global scale and expertise. After spending some time on campus, I discovered that Yahoo! has an inspirational goal to make people's daily routines entertaining and meaningful, and mobile will be a central part of that vision. For us, it's the perfect fit.

When I founded Summly at 15, I would have never imagined being in this position so suddenly. I'd personally like to thank Li Ka-Shing and Horizons Ventures for having the foresight to back a teenager pursuing his dream. Also to our investors, advisors and of course the fantastic team for believing in the potential of Summly. Without you all, this never would have been possible. I'd also like to thank my family, friends and school for supporting me.

Most importantly, thank you to our wonderful users who have helped contribute to us receiving Apple's Best Apps of 2012 award for Intuitive Touch! We will be removing Summly from the App Store today but expect our summarization technology will soon return to multiple Yahoo! products - see this as a ‘power nap' so to speak.

With over 90 million summaries read in just a few short months, this is just the beginning for our technology. As we move towards a more refined, liberated and intelligent mobile web, summaries will continue to help navigate through our ever expanding information universe.

Sincerely,

Nick
Founder

Here's a demo video of Summly, which helped launch it:

Summly Launch from Summly on Vimeo.

Twitter gets into April Fools' action, announces vowel-less 'Twttr' service

Who needs vowels, right? Especially if you’re on Twitter and already hate the 140-character limit on the micro-blogging site. Twitter has announced that it is going to launch a new service called Twttr that will skip the vowels and will turn the main site Twitter into a $5 a month premium service. Of course, one needs to keep in mind that it’s April Fool’s day today.

“Starting today, we are shifting to a two-tiered service: Everyone can use our basic service, Twttr, but you only get consonants. For five dollars a month, you can use our premium 'Twitter' service which also includes vowels,” the scl ntwrk wrote in a blog post.

World's most retweeted tweet on Twttr

Being very considerate, though, Twitter has letter “Y” for free. Saying that the letter “Y” will be free, “always and forever,” Twitter also said that vowels in URLs will also be free of charge. These changes will thankfully not be rolled over to Twitter users who access the website in other languages. 

Twitter is also expanding the length of tweets to 141 characters (yayy!) from the original 140, “for those moments when you need just one more character to finish your thought.” This extra character will come with a price tag, sadly. Using a bidding system, Twitter will decide the price of the extra character keeping in mind its demand at the time. You can choose to go over limit with one character, not two, said the social networking website.

So how did this genius idea come about? Michael Sippey, Twitter’s VP of Product said, “I was carpooling home after Twitter’s seventh birthday party. With my head filled with images from our past, like our early logo where we spelled it TWTTR, in neon green toothpaste. And then Prince’s song “I would die 4 U” came on the radio. I felt like there was something there, but I wasn’t sure what or how to bring it to market.

Then later that night, I was watching “Wheel of Fortune” with @adambain, and a contestant yelled out ‘I wanna buy a vowel’. Everything just sort of clicked. Adam and I turned to each other and high-fived. It was one of those product moments that just felt like magic.”

Twitter said that it has already started testing Twttr with a small group of users, and this change will be rolled out to 100 percent of them over the next few days. Very considerately Twitter has advised users to practice tweeting with merely consonants and the letter “Y”. It has made available hashtags #novwls for people on Twtter and #icanhashashtag for users on premium Twitter.

April Fools!

A website that converts your Tweets into “Twts” has also been provided. Heading to the website will write a tweet out for you to send to your followers, letting them know you’ve been April Fooled by Twitter.

Twitter joins the ranks of other companies who are pulling gags on the internet today. Google has launched a bevy of prank services including Google Nose, a website that allows you to smell products using your monitors. Google also announced that YouTube would be shutting down in order to find the best video, before the service launches again in 2023 with just the winning video.

What is twitter?

What is Twitter? - Explania

Facebook Unveils a Radically Redesigned News Feed

Facebook announced Thursday it is giving its venerable news feed a new look and feel.

The new news feed represents the first major overhaul of Facebook's core service since the launch of Facebook Timeline at the end of 2011.

"The news feed is one of the most important things we've built," Facebook co-founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during the press event. Likening news feed to "the most personalized newspaper," Zuckerberg added that "the stories around you deserve to be displayed with more than just text."

"How we're all sharing is changing and the news feed needs to evolve with those changes. This is the evolving face of news feed."

The new news feed features three major components:

• Bigger Images
• Multiple Feeds
• Mobile Consistency

A New Focus on Imagery

The new look is a radical departure from the Facebook of old. It's mobile-inspired and consistent across devices.

When it comes to the feed itself, the focus on stories is now much more visual. Greater emphasis is given to images — which are now much larger. Photos now make up nearly 50% of news feed stories and are now front and center.

If you see shades of Instagram — or Google+ — in the new feed, you aren't alone. We see them too. Facebook says it is following trends on where design is headed and it is clear that trend includes big photos and a clean, navigable design.

More Feeds, More Control

As for the "feeds" aspect of news feed, users now have access to more types of feeds and have more control over how those feeds are displayed.

Users can subscribe to different types of feeds, including feeds from all friends, close friends, music, photos, games and those who a user "follows."

And, for those of us who hate how Facebook sorts news feed content, a chronological view is now available.

It's not clear how these new feeds will affect promoted stories and content or the longer-lasting impact it may have on brands and pages.

Mobile Consistency

The new news feed design was inspired by mobile. It takes significant cues from the Facebook mobile apps for phones and tablets, adding a new side navigation bar and more white space.

Understanding that more users are accessing Facebook from mobile than ever, Facebook is focused on making the overall experience more consistent, regardless of platform.

The new feed will start rolling out today on web.

Let us know your thoughts on the changes in the comments.

Four Ways Publishers Can Optimize for Facebook's New News Feed

Facebook unveiled its "new" News Feed Thursday, and while we won't know the full range of effects it will have on the pages of brands and publishers for some time, Facebook has provided a few clues to help administrators optimize their pages ahead of its rollout.

First, let's take a look at the changes. The new News Feed is cleaner, more visual and has more filtering controls. The size of photos and videos have been enlarged, making the quality of visual media more important than ever before. That's great news for magazines and other publishers with deep photo resources; for publishers that rely largely on Creative Commons or stock imagery, the challenge is greater.

In addition to larger photos and videos, Facebook has introduced a number of "sub feeds" to give users greater control over what updates appear in their streams. Users can opt to view updates from All or just Close Friends, only photo updates, only music updates, only updates from pages and public figures they follow (i.e., subscribe to), only updates from Groups and only updates from game apps. They can also view updates in reverse-chronological order.

While these changes could have a negative impact on publishers' pages, particularly if users opt to spend all or most of their time viewing updates from their Close Friends, Facebook insists it could be a boon as well, because users can switch over to the "Following" feed to get updates outside their friend circles precisely when they want them.

Beyond those changes, the look of the new News Feed is far more consistent across smartphones, tablets and desktops than previously. For a visual overview of the alterations, click through our slideshow, or check out Facebook's official overview.
Optimization Strategies

Publishers can make some changes to their content to take advantage of the coming changes. Here's a few recommendations:

1. Invest in high-quality, high-resolution images. High-quality imagery is more important than ever before. Photos now make up nearly half of all News Feed stories, according to Facebook, up from 30% just a year ago. That growth is likely to accelerate now that Facebook is enlarging the size of photos in the News Feed. Facebook recommends publishers use images with a width of at least 552 pixels. As a bonus, publishers no longer need to upload full-sized images next to their story links. According to one Facebook source, Facebook will now display thumbnail photos pulled from story pages at the same size as images uploaded directly to the News Feed. As such, it's important for publishers to upload thumbnail images with a width of at least 552 pixels on their sites.


2. Improve your cover photo. Publishers may have had little incentive to invest in a great cover photo until now because it never showed up in the News Feed. That's about to change. When a group of friends Like or otherwise interact with a Facebook page, that Page may be highlighted in the News Feed with its cover photo on display. As Facebook says, "Having an engaging cover photo that tells your or your Page's story is even more important to improve your discovery through connection stories."

3. Post about trending topics. News stories about a single topic will be highlighted in thumbnail-rich carousels in the News Feed, like the one featuring Taylor Swift stories, below. Thus it may be more advantageous to share trending rather than outlier stories on Facebook.

4. Share different types of media. If publishers want to have a presence in users' sub feeds — namely, their photo and music feeds — consider sharing more photos, and linking a company Spotify or Rdio account to Facebook.

Identify any other optimization strategies for the new News Feed? Please share them in the comments section below.


Images courtesy of Facebook

source

If You’re Worried About Likes, Avoid Posting To Facebook From Twitter

Facebook is showing your content to far fewer people than they used to, says Nick Bilton at the NY Times, pointing out that while his subscribers have soared, the number of likes per post has declined rapidly. Josh Constine writes his thoughts here.

Bilton’s theory is that Facebook wants to incent people to pay to promote their content, so they show unpaid content to far fewer people. Hunter Walk has other theories (and correctly points out that comparing old data to new could be explained in other ways as well).

Occam’s Razor suggests Bilton is right, simply because Facebook has the incentive to make the free views scarce to increase demand for the paid views. But I just don’t know. As an aside, when I promoted a post back in November, Facebook told me I “had 969x as many views because you promoted it.”

Here’s what I do know – if you really care about Facebook likes, don’t just post your stuff to Twitter and then rely on it being republished automatically to Facebook. In my sample size of one, Facebook penalizes you significantly for that and shows that content to far fewer people.

I have Twitter auto post to my Facebook page, and I occasionally post things directly to Facebook as well. I’ve always noticed that the direct-to-Facebook approach generates far more likes, but I’ve never actually gone back and run the averages. Today I did, although only for the last few weeks of posts.

Here’s what I found. The average post published to Facebook by Twitter gets 13.6 likes. The average direct to Facebook post gets 81.1 likes.

I don’t care enough to change the way I publish to social networks. But you might.

Disclosure: I am a partner at CrunchFund, a venture firm. I and CrunchFund each own shares in Facebook. CrunchFund owns Twitter shares. More information is here.

Social Media Optimization Plans

 SMO Plans
Social media marketing is all about marketing through social networking sites.

1. Facebook

• Fan page
• Likes
• Status posts
• Comments

2. Twitter

• Custom Background
• Following
• Followers
• Tweets
• Reply

3. Linkedin

• Profile setup
• Connections
• Group Creations
• Status posts

3. Pinterest

• Profile setup
• Followers
• Pins

4. Video

• Creation
• Submission
• Optmization

5. Social Site submission

6. Classified Ads Creation & Posting

7. Article

• Creation& Submissions

8. Press Release

• Creation, Submission & Distribution

9. You can put your site’s link by initiating and participating in discussions related to your services: 

• Blogs 
• Forums 
• Groups on Linkedin 
• Groups on yahoo 
• Groups on Facebook 
• Yahoo answers

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