Rev2.org » Trends & Analysis

Interesting Uses of Facebook’s Open Graph

Craig Agranoff — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 12:09:26 +0000

Earlier this month, Facebook launched its Open Graph tools to allow app developers to more easily share user activity data across timelines and on their own sites for integration. While controversial, as the usual privacy concerns were aired, the tools have been utilized in some interesting ways. Here’s a few of them.

Fab.com’s $10 monthly credit for opt-ins. This is really cool. Usually, your data is seen as a free-for-all by companies and Facebook itself. Fab.com, however, is rewarding users for opting in to shar etheir shopping data with them. For ...

Facebook for Android Beating iPhone

Craig Agranoff — Mon, 19 Dec 2011 12:33:01 +0000

For the first time, Facebook for Android is showing more mobile daily active users than is Facebook for iPhone. The Android Facebook app launched in 2009, a year after the iPhone’s app, though both were internally developed by Facebook.

The Android app, according to Facebook’s numbers, is now pulling 58.3 million DAU compared to iPhone’s 57.4 million. Facebook released the latest update to the iPhone app which added Timeline access, previously only available on Android, but with Android phones activating at a blistering 550,000 per day, it may not be enough ...

Are Social Games Losing Their Lustre?

Craig Agranoff — Mon, 28 Nov 2011 12:14:42 +0000

Social gaming is now a multi-billion dollar industry expected to pull in $14.2 billion by 2015, analysts say. Yet developers in this space are finding it harder and harder to get their slice of those billions ($6.1B this year). Growing pains are hitting the social gaming industry hard.

King of the game gang is Zynga, whose titles like Mafia Wars and Farmville have been the most-played games on Facebook for years. The company is about to go public and expects to raise about $1 billion in revenue from that move. Money ...

Ubuntu Coming to Smart Phones, Tablets?

Craig Agranoff — Mon, 07 Nov 2011 12:24:18 +0000

Canonical, the company that markets the open source Linux distribution of Ubuntu, will be porting Ubuntu to smart phones, tablets, and more. The company is expected to make an official announcement at the Ubuntu Developer Summit in Orlando, Florida.

The move is not entirely unexpected, since the entire impetus behind Ubuntu has been to create “Linux for humans” rather than for machines – something that Canonical’s founder, Mark Shuttleworth, has in common with Steve Jobs, whose focus was on user experience rather than machine code perfection.

So can this work? Would Ubuntu ...

Google+ Adds Games, Opens Privacy Concerns

Craig Agranoff — Mon, 15 Aug 2011 13:04:18 +0000

Google added a dozen games to Google+ this week, including popular titles like Angry Birds, Zynga Poker, and more. The Google+ Games service opened quietly, but immediately got attention from users who saw the privacy implications in Google’s permissions agreement when using one of the games.

Of course, games on social platforms like Google+, Fecebook, etc. require some access to the user’s profile. After all, social games aren’t all that social if the game can’t see your network and tie you in with friends who are also playing the game. It’s ...

Tom Anderson – Is G+ Putting FB on Defense?

Craig Agranoff — Mon, 08 Aug 2011 12:57:27 +0000

In a guest post on TechCrunch, Tom Anderson, former President and founder of MySpace, talks about Google + and Facebook and how Google is going to radically change the social networking game and how Facebook must react if they want to be relevant five years from now.

He writes:

If it’s not obvious yet, Google+ is going to be able to “undercut” Facebook when it comes to game developers and platform transactions. Instead of taking a 30% cut of all Farmville seeds (or whatever people are buying), Google will be ...

Tablets Sales are Rising While Computers Get Left Behind

dave — Fri, 15 Jul 2011 15:17:14 +0000

There was a time when it would have been hard to imagine any piece of equipment that could outdo the personal computer. Laptops and desktop computers have become a major part of many peoples’ lives.

But now it seems the tide may be turning – that is, if the latest blog posts and news articles are true. Apparently the sales of tablets are getting better and better, putting a dent in the growth of the PC market. Computer sales in the United States were forecast to grow by approximately 6.7% in the last three month sales period. In reality the growth ...

Pandora Worth Loads Of Money, Doesn’t Make Any Though

dave — Fri, 17 Jun 2011 15:59:15 +0000

Pandora, the popular music streaming service has successfully navigated the choppy waters of floatation, going public – and raising a whopping $235 million in the process. That is an awful lot of money for a company that hasn’t made a dime yet.

The public valuation puts the company at a total of $2.6 billion – which is even more money – and that’s twice as much as the company hoped for when it announced its plans back in February. Consider the planned rise in royalty costs, the fact that again the company haven’t made ...

Apple Goes With Twitter, Not Facebook

Craig Agranoff — Mon, 13 Jun 2011 12:53:50 +0000

Apple has announced that when iOS 5 releases this fall, it will include deep integration with Twitter, but have nothing for Facebook. Why would Apple ignore the world’s largest social networking platform in favor of Twitter?

I can think of two reasons: lack of terms and conflicting strategies.

The first is obvious. Apple has been in talks with Facebook for most of this year, but so far neither company has made any announcements of headway in terms of ironing out what the two companies want to do together. A lot of ...

While the NYT Might Not Get It, Some of Their Reporters Do

Craig Agranoff — Mon, 30 May 2011 12:37:58 +0000

Major newspapers like the New York Time and others have been struggling to figure out where they fit in today’s instant information society. The old paradigm of printing news and delivering it on dead trees to people’s doorsteps is melting away and the once-giants in the industry are paddling upstream to try to preserve it.

The recent addition of a paywall to the paper’s website is proof that the management behind this news behemoth just can’t seem to understand how the Internet functions. Many people, including myself, have stopped reading the ...