Facebook Stickiness: 423 Minutes per Month
Users spend 423 minutes on Facebook per month: CNN.com, highest average time, gets 30 minutes only; http://eicker.at/NewsMedia2012
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Gerrit Eicker
Media and Twitter
Pew: How mainstream media outlets use Twitter. Who tweets when, how, and how often? http://eicker.at/MediaTwitter
Gerrit Eicker
Tablet News Reader
Tablets and news are a perfect match: Google and Yahoo are going to add more reader apps; http://eicker.at/TabletNewsReader
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Gerrit Eicker
ATD: “Memo to Flipboard, as well as Pulse, CNN’s Zite and AOL’s Editions: You might want to make some room in the already-crowded news and social reader space, because you’re about to get some bigfoot company. – Next Wednesday, according to sources close to the situation, Yahoo will finally officially unveil its offering, called Livestand. – And perhaps as early as next week or soon after, Google will also weigh in with its version of the genre – code-named Propeller – which also might be the product’s name. Another moniker under strong consideration: Currents. As I have previously reported, Google Propeller is an HTML5 reader for the Apple iPad and Android – essentially a souped-up version of similar apps such as Flipboard, AOL’s Editions, Zite (which was just bought by Time Warner’s CNN) and Pulse. … Yahoo and Google PR declined comment.”
RWW: “Livestand is Yahoo’s take on the personalized reading app for tablets, which ousted CEO Carol Bartz announced earlier this year. Sources tell AllThingsD that the app is expected to be released next week. It was originally slated to be launched on iOS and Android during the first half of 2011. … More than Flipboard and Zite, Livestand looks and feels like AOL’s Editions app for iPad. … It’s a natural extension of Yahoo’s efforts to become a company that specializes, among many other things, in digital content. … Also in the pipeline is a project from Google, code-named Propeller. Less is known about how that app will look and function, but it’s generally understood to be the search giant’s answer to Flipboard, which Google unsuccessfully tried to acquire. … Even with the cross-platform advantage and enormous development resources behind it, products of this nature from Google and Yahoo could simply fail to catch on. The iPad has been in existence for nearly two years and applications like Flipboard, Zite and Pulse have proven very popular among consumers. To compete, the big players will need to offer something truly unique to readers, publishers and advertisers alike.”
VB: “The tablet readers from two of the Internet’s largest technology companies has the potential to disrupt a landscape that has previously been dominated by small, nimble companies such as Flipboard and Pulse. Google previously tried to buy Flipboard, which was valued at more than $200 million in April, which is still chump change for the search giant.”
pC: “Companies like Flipboard, AOL, Zite, and Pulse have found a lot of interest in their apps, which organize Web content through custom filters or by hooking one’s social-media feeds into the app. But given how new tablets still are to the vast majority of the population, and how as a result usage habits have yet to really settle into any established pattern, there’s still a lot of opportunity for both big companies and small startups to attract users.”
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: Read, Watch, Listen
Will Facebook F8 fully embrace multimedia? Read. Watch. Listen. Coming soon; http://eicker.at/FacebookReadWatchListen
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Gerrit Eicker
ATD: “Facebook will unveil its next massive initiative to socialize the Web at its f8 developer conferenceon Thursday. A key focus of this year’s annual event has been well reported: Content. – And that’s the way the social networking giant will play it at the confab, using the basic phrasing, ‘Read. Watch. Listen.‘ … Many of the implicit and explicit content sharing tools at f8 will have a precedent in those Facebook has built for gaming, according to sources familiar with Facebook’s plans. For instance, look for a live-updating sidebar of friends’ content consumption activity, just as the site offers for games, and separate from the news feed wall.”
TC: “The cat is out of the bag that Facebook is going to launchsomething big at its developer conference f8 this week. We’ve heard about the social music services that could be debuting in a few days, but as the New York Times conveyed this past weekend, Facebook is planning for ways to surface personal content better. And we’ve heard from a source that Facebook will introduce new buttons on the wall that will begin introducing some granularity to the ‘Like’ concept. We’re told these new buttons are ‘Read,’ ‘Listened,’ ‘Watched.’ The network will also soon launch new social commerce buttons like ‘Want‘ following the introductions of the aforementioned buttons.”
RWW: “According to reports, Facebook’s f8 developer conference this coming Thursday will have the motto ‘Read. Watch. Listen.‘ Other than reminding me of a certain tech blog’s name, this motto excites me because of the promise it holds that Facebook will fully embrace multimedia. But that has some major implications, which will affect many in the Web ecosystem. In this post we highlight 3 of the biggest potential implications. … Given my recent posts about the battle between Facebook and Google Plus, the ‘Read, Watch, Listen’ services look set to one-up Google Plus. Although who better to implement their own ‘Watch’ button than the owners of YouTube? Also Google has its own services that cover reading and listening – Google Books, Google Reader, Google Music and others – so they have a great opportunity to integrate all of those into Google Plus.”
RWW: “Facebook’s recent release strategy provides a good road map. Since the release of Google Plus, almost all of Facebook’s new features have been to counter Google’s push into its territory. Those are just reactionary moves, blips in the road. Content is going to be heavily featured at f8 and the true ground shaking updates will be announced this week. … The ‘Read‘ portion of Facebook’s announcement is perhaps the most mysterious. Yet, it has themost precedent in what Facebook has rolled out in previous years and may be tied closely with the platform’s social graph. … Facebook is already one of the top destinations for video on the Web. Most of that is shared content from the likes of YouTube, Vimeo and local news. This is going to be rolled out even further and it will likely to two-pronged – content sharing from outside of Facebook and consumption from within. … While we do not know the specific details of the ‘Listen’ products, we have clues. The primary indicators are MOG, Rdio and Spotify, all of which have been tied to Facebook over the summer. ‘Facebook Music‘ will likely be a conglomeration with MOG, Rdio and Spotify that will allow users to use Facebook as an iTunes-like streaming platform. … What does this all point to? Well, a major profile redesign could possibly be in the works to feature all of this new content. Mashable is reporting that Facebook will announce a redesign at f8 and the idea is to become ‘stickier.'”
Mashable: “Facebook plans to roll out a major redesign of user profiles at its f8 developer conference this week, Mashable has learned. – Details about the redesign are sparse, but two sources familiar with Facebook’s plans (who have asked to remain anonymous) have told us that the redesign is ‘major’ and will make Facebook profiles nexuses for consuming content.
IF: “Strengthening Broad Category Interest targeting could produce big revenue gains for Facebook. As we discussed earlier today, the Facebook Ads marketplace is inaccessible to many small businesses because they don’t have the know-how to effectively use the self-serve tool, or big enough budgets to use many of the tools and services built on the Ads API. As Broad Category Interest targeting is far easier to use than Specific Interest targeting, an improvement of the feature thanks to the ‘Read’, ‘Listened’ and ‘Watched’ buttons could help Facebook recruit this long-tail of advertisers.”
TNW: “Read: Facebook is assumed to be partnering with large online publishers like Yahoo, CNN, the Washington Post andThe Daily. – Watch: The platform will be merging with several online video hosting sites, Ooyala rumored to be one of several. – Listen: Facebook Music is coming with companies like Spotify AB and Rdio Inc. publish user activity on Facebook pages. … The Google+ vs Facebook war seems more heated than ever with Facebook putting up a good fight to maintain its lead in the world of social networking. It remains to be seen how Google+ will keep up with the seemingly impressive features Facebook has up its sleeve, and we can only watch and wait to see how it all turns out.”
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Editions
Forbes: Facebook is getting into the news business with Facebook Editions, app versions of news outlets; http://eicker.at/FacebookEditions
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Gerrit Eicker
Forbes: “Facebook is thinking less and less about how to grow that number and more about how to get current users to live more of their lives within its virtual walls. One answer it has come up with: asking a select number of news outlets to produce ‘Facebook editions’ – basically, app versions of themselves that can be read and consumed right there on Facebook. – About a dozen news outlets are currently participating, including CNN, the Washington Post and The Daily, according to sources familiar with the project. The first Facebook editions are expected to arrive later this year, perhaps in September. … Now that Facebook is known to be at work on a parallel initiative, however, it could change the dynamic for publishers, who may find playing one against the other gives them leverage they lacked until now.”
VB: “For years, news organizations have been using Twitter more than Facebook to get their messages out and publicize breaking news. So it makes sense that Facebook would be interested in building customized news applications and improving relationships with major news outlets. Back in April, Facebook even expressed a desire to have better relationships with journalists.”
IF: “Facebook itself has recently been on a campaign to increase its presence in the media ecosystem, which we assume this latest effort is a part of. In the past year it has hired social media marketers to help it develop and promote best practices for journalists, provided training events for media, and published guides and studies showing how to use Facebook features (especially Pages) for maximum value. Media companies, including the BBC and Warner Brothers and various musicians, have also been testing selling media content using its virtual currency, Credits – efforts that have been primarily independent, although presumably encouraged by Facebook. … The speculation around possible Credits and ads revenue here are reflections of Facebook’s oft-stated goal of being the main way that people find and share information that matters with people they care about. Without any additional revenue streams, simply getting a stronger two-way flow of content-driven traffic can help it create more value for users, and make more money from its existing ad inventory.“
Gerrit Eicker
News Media
Rosenstiel on journalism myths: traditional news media, advertising, content, newspapers, hyperlocal; http://eicker.at/NewsMedia
Gerrit Eicker
Shareable News
CNN, Pownar study: Ongoing stories, not breaking news, make content most shareable in social media; http://eicker.at/h
Gerrit Eicker
Colours of the Web
The most powerful colours in the [Web] world: Colors of the top 100 Web brands; http://j.mp/aHmXeB #Blue vs. #Red
Gerrit Eicker
Icons of the Web
A sea of favicons, presented proportional to the sum of reach of sites using it; http://j.mp/Webicons (via @VizWorld)
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Gerrit Eicker
NMAP: “A large-scale scan of the top million web sites (per Alexa traffic data) was performed in early 2010 using the Nmap Security Scanner and its scripting engine. As seen in the New York Times, Slashdot, Gizmodo, Engadget, and Telegraph.co.uk … – We retrieved each site’s icon by first parsing the HTML for a link tag and then falling back to /favicon.ico if that failed. 328,427 unique icons were collected, of which 288,945 were proper images. The remaining 39,482 were error strings and other non-image files. Our original goal was just to improve our http-favicon.nse script, but we had enough fun browsing so many icons that we used them to create the visualization below. – The area of each icon is proportional to the sum of the reach of all sites using that icon. When both a bare domain name and its “www.” counterpart used the same icon, only one of them was counted. The smallest icons – those corresponding to sites with approximately 0.0001% reach – are scaled to 16×16 pixels. The largest icon (Google) is 11,936 x 11,936 pixels, and the whole diagram is 37,440 x 37,440 (1.4 gigapixels).“
Pew – Content Analysis Shows an Evolving Relationship: “For nearly every news organization, Twitter has become a regular part of the daily news outreach. But there are questions about how those organizations actually use the technology: How often do they tweet? What kind of news do they distribute? To what extent is Twitter used as a new reporting tool or as a mechanism for gathering insights from followers? – To answer some of these questions, the Pew Research Center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism and The George Washington University’s School of Media and Public Affairs collaborated on a study of Twitter feeds from 13 major news organizations. … The research, which examined more than 3,600 tweets over the course of a week, reveals that these news organizations use Twitter in limited ways-primarily as an added means to disseminate their own material. … The news organizations were much more similar in the focus of their Twitter activity. The vast majority of the postings promoted the organizations’ own work and sent users back to their websites. … This is not to say that news organizations are not tapping into public sentiment on Twitter through other means. … Still, these findings reveal limited use of the institution’s public Twitter identity, one that generally takes less advantage of the interactive and reportorial nature of the Twitter.”
Pew – Who Tweets When and How Often: “One way they differed was in the overall number of separate organizational Twitter feeds or channels offered. On average, the outlets studied offered 41 organizational Twitter feeds, ranging from the general-such as politics-to the narrow-such as Civil War or cycling. The Washington Post offered the largest number of separate feeds, at 98. The Daily Caller, a conservative web-only news operation led by former cable personality Tucker Carlson, offered the fewest, a single feed. – Major national newspapers tend to offer the most: As a group the four papers studied average 74. The three cable news channels average 45. The rest of the outlets studied-broadcast television, audio, online-only and local newspapers-average 18 Twitter feeds per outlet. … Across the news organizations studied, the number of followers varied dramatically, though that number was not necessarily tied directly to the outlet’s audience size in other platforms (i.e. television ratings or print circulation). CNN had more than twice the number of followers for its main news feed as Fox News did, yet Fox programs have higher ratings on television. The New York Times, which led among national newspapers in number of followers on Twitter, falls behind The Wall Street Journal and USA Today in print circulation.”
Pew – The News Agenda on Twitter vs. Traditional Platforms: “The news agendas of the mainstream media and that of their analog presence on Twitter were strikingly similar during the week in which both were studied. … Even with a similar emphasis on top stories, one difference in the way news functions in the legacy platforms versus on Twitter is priority. While the total number of posts on Twitter may be more about one subject than another, there is no structural hierarchy to posts. No one post is given higher priority, or ‘front-page status,’ other than in how much they are shared. In 140 characters, everything is fairly equal.”
Pew – Sharing and Gathering Information: “In general, the major news organizations studied used Twitter to direct audiences to web content that the news organization had produced and posted online. But by and large, news outlets were not using Twitter in more interactive ways, or as a reporting tool. … Just 2% of the tweets examined from the main organizational Twitter feeds asked followers for information-either to help inform a story or to provide feedback. Even the most active outlets rarely or never solicited information from their followers. Less than 1% of the tweets from The New York Times, 3% from The Washington Post and 3% from The Huffington Post (one of two online-only news outlets studied) solicited information. … One notable exception to this was Fox News. Although the main Fox News feed had light activity on Twitter, fully one-fifth of its limited tweets (10 of the 48 tweets in the period examined) directly solicited information from followers. … Mainstream news organizations primarily use Twitter to move information and push content to readers. For these organizations, Twitter functions as an RSS feed or headline service for news consumers, with links ideally driving traffic to the organization’s website. Ninety-three percent (93%) of tweets on mainstream Twitter feeds contained a link that drove traffic back to its home site.”
Pew – Little Use of Retweet Function: “Researchers found that retweeting is rare, and retweets do not often originate outside the news organization. Only 9% of the tweets examined were retweets. Of these, 90% originally appeared on another Twitter feed connected to the same news organization such as a section feed, reporter’s feed or, in the case of television networks, another show on the network. In all, only 1% of tweets studied originated from an entity outside the news organization. … Taken together, the retweet data and the findings with respect to the use of Twitter to solicit information suggest that mainstream news outlets are not generally using Twitter to expand the conversation or include alternative perspectives and voices.”
Pew – Use of Hashtags: “There is also wide variation in the use of hashtags by the news organizations studied. … The Washington Post, one of the most active news organizations studied on Twitter, regularly used hashtags (21% of tweets studied included at least one hashtag) to categorize tweets. Fox News and the two local newspapers, The Toledo Blade and The Arizona Republic, used hashtags even more.”
Pew – Individual Reporters‘ Use of Twitter: “If the organizational Twitter feed is mainly a way of disseminating their content, might individual journalists exploit the social nature of the tool more-using it to gather information and build connections with their readers? … As with news organizations, individual journalists use Twitter in widely divergent ways. … When these journalists did tweet, very little of that material was information-gathering in nature. Eight of the 13 reporters examined never asked followers to help provide information. On average, only 3% of individual reporters’ tweets did so. … Individual reporters did not retweet other content often during the week studied. The average portion of tweets that were retweets was 11%. … Overall, the findings suggest that when one moves away from the most popular Twitter personalities, usage becomes less personal, but also more interactive. … The practice of retweeting also indicated the levels to which health reporters studied were more interactive-on average, 22% of their tweets were retweets, compared with just 11% among the top-followed journalists.”