Social analytics firm Quintly sought to debunk recent news items about Facebook hemorrhaging users and, in particular, younger users.

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Facebook has started to roll out support for emoji in all posts and comments on desktop and mobile, a company spokesperson tells us.

Previously, emoji — a standardized set of emoticons and picture characters – were available for Facebook Messenger, but not within status updates, comments or other posts. Facebook started offering some chat emoticons in comments on desktop last year, but this wasn’t the full emoji set. Now, users have more flexibility in sharing smileys and other icons across Facebook, whether it’s a check-in, photo caption, group post or some other message or comment.

The social network has made a number of moves recently to bring more ways for users to express themselves through small pictures. There are the new structured status updates where users can share what they’re feeling, eating, drinking, watching, reading or listening to. And the new stickers for mobile messages.

These features, along with emoji, help users communicate in new ways or say things that might be difficult otherwise. They can also add a bit more fun into the service, which at points has been seen as a cold or sterile platform compared to the flash and flexibility of other social networks. When Facebook released the Poke app, which was sillier than its typically utilitarian features, we wondered if it was a sign of more to come. So far this year it seems that Facebook is lightening up and giving users new options that are popular in other apps.

The latest emoji support for posts and comments was built at a Facebook hackathon last week and began rolling out to users on Tuesday. To create emoji characters, a user must enable the emoji keyboard on their phone and in their web browser. For example, ShowMeEmoji is a useful extension for Chrome users.

If you’ve noticed more friends posting colorful status updates and more descriptive emoticons in comments, you’re not alone. Facebook announced Wednesday that it is adding more support for emoji — a standardized set of emoticons and picture characters.

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Many Facebook marketers agree that images are the most powerful type of posts for pages seeking engagement. But with Facebook’s page post sorting algorithm (externally known as EdgeRank), only a fraction of a page’s fans will see posts. How can pages optimize their images to get more fans (and friends of fans) to see their messages? PostRocket compiled the answer in an infographic.

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Are You Interested has been in the online dating game since 2007, predominantly focused on the Facebook platform as a way to connect people through the internet. The company has been relatively quiet in the past year, but is now speaking up after launching a new feature in the past few weeks that connects you with friends of friends.

Other online dating startups have added similar features — Coffee Meets Bagel in particular comes to mind — but AYI is the first company with any true scale to implement the feature. And according to founder and CEO Cliff Lerner, “the results have been nothing short of tremendous.”

There are over 20 million Facebook profiles connected to AYI and 3 million active users per month, making it one of the largest and most relevant dating sites in admittedly, a sea of matchmaking wannabees. And since they implemented their friends of friends feature in March, AYI boasts that over 2 million connections have been made through the new feature. Over 72,000 users have been directly messaging their friends to ask about a potential date. Of course, we don’t really know how many connections AYI makes on a monthly basis, so we can’t conclusively say if this friends of friends feature is as popular amongst AYI’s users as the company makes it seem. Still, 2 million is a pretty big number.

AYI is simply capitalizing on a trend that been permeating through dating sites as of late. Matching friends of friends is the “next big thing” of online dating, and there have been a number of startups that have been clamoring for attention with this as their headline feature. At the Entrepreneurs Roundtable Accelerator’s NYC Demo Day this year, one of the startups in the ERA’s graduating class was Acquaintable, a dating startup that links to Facebook and matches friends of friends together. It’s a shame that AYI seems to have stolen its thunder with its already well established user base.

Another little startup that’s been around since last year is Coffee Meets Bagel, and it could be said that they were the first ones to match friends of friends together, albeit at a much smaller scale. Like clockwork, every day at noon Coffee Meets Bagel introduces you to one of your mutual friends. It’s kind of like a “daily deals” for dating.

The appeal of matching mutual friends together, and the reason why it’s taken off to such a degree, can be summarily condensed to one word: honesty. When AYI polled its users last year, the results displayed widespread dissatisfaction. “People were disenchanted with current dating experience,” says Lerner. “Especially women.” 56 percent of their polled users didn’t enjoy online dating, including 77 percent of women. A majority of users said people lied on their profiles.

It’s true. When you’re hiding behind a computer, anyone can make themselves to be some kind of dreamy, Jon Hamm-clone. What AYI found when they introduced their friends of friends feature was that honesty was suddenly a problem their users didn’t have to worry about anymore. People were less liable to lie on their profiles when they were connected to potential mates through their friends. “People prefer to meet through their friends,” says Lerner. “It’s logical and it just makes sense.” AYI claims that 41 percent of their female user base are more likely to message a man when they have mutual friends.

If anything, AYI’s self-proclaimed success with friends of friends tells us that this new method of matchmaking is here to stay. Expect to see a friends of friends feature making its way to your own personal dating network very, very soon.

Social networks including Facebook and Twitter were the most effective marketing channel for developers promoting their applications in terms of user quality, conversion rates, and volume, according to a report by AppsFlyer, a Facebook mobile measurement partner.

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Global digital agency Isobar announced the release of SeeItShopIt, which allows retailers to showcase collections of products within single posts that appear on Facebook users’ News Feeds.

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Facebook appears to be testing expanded availability of emoticons in status updates independent of those available via the menu of emoticons and actions it began rolling out to users last month, as some users are finding that they can add their own emoticons to status updates, independent of the menu, but those emoticons are only appearing on their Timelines, and not on the News Feed.

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Facebook continues to try to push its Gifts feature, with Social Fresh CEO Jason Keath sharing a screen shot with sister blog Inside Facebook in which the social network pushes Gifts without a special occasion as the context.

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Cisco Meraki has launched a new service called Presence that provides data about mobile behavior across location and automatic log-in to wireless hotspots using a person’s Facebook account.

Presence additionally provides an API that allows integration with real-time location data into CRM and other business systems. Presence also allows for third-party data integration that can be analyzed with location-based information.

Meraki was acquired by Cisco last November for $1.2 billion. According to Josh Constine’s post, Meraki began as a research project at MIT in 2006. It provides mid to large-size companies, schools, and organizations with on-premise mesh Wi-Fi networking and security devices plus the software to manage them. Its technology is now integrated into Cisco access points. According to the blog, with Presence, customers get an analytics dashboard that displays real-time metrics such as capture rate, median visit length, and visitor repeat rate for mobile devices in proximity to Meraki access points.

The service has uses in retail to give a marketing manager access to data that may show how long they look at a window display or if an in-store promotion drew them to the store. That data can then be correlated to revenue data and third-party CRM data.

Cisco and Facebook have also partnered to let guests log-in to Wi-Fi networks with their Facebook account. This seems pretty unique and an example of how Facebook is becoming a universal identity provider. It benefits the client who can use the Facebook login to make it simpler for their customers to get wireless access.

Now just think of what all this additional data provides to Facebook. They get data to target ads for the retail customer or perhaps a coffee shop down the street that wants to draw traffic with a special drink offer for a dry latte with extra foam.

Privacy. Well, this is the elephant in the room, isn’t it? The Meraki blog makes a point of saying they do not collect personal data. That it’s nothing more than understanding customer behavior.

In summary, Meraki collects no personally identifiable information (e.g., we don’t see or store a user’s Facebook credentials). Clients’ MAC addresses, used to construct location analytics dashboards, are hashed and truncated before being stored in Meraki’s cloud so they cannot be associated with an individual device (i.e. there’s no data stored that can show that a given device was at a specific location.) Users can also opt-out of Meraki’s Presence data collection across all Meraki networks; we won’t store MAC addresses — hashed or otherwise — and Presence events will not be passed through the API.

But here’s the thing. Data analytics is about correlating information. A retailer may not need to know who you are with one set of data. But they can always cross-reference it with other information to know exactly who the customer is, how they got there, what they did in the store and where they went after leaving.

So sure, everyone takes privacy seriously. But it’s up to the vendor and the client to be responsible in how to handle the power that they gain from all that information.

“Where did my Android go?” is the common refrain of Facebook Home user reviews. We want the widgets and old homescreen we’ve meticulously curated. That’s why Facebook needs to preserve and offer quick access to the phone we’re used to if it’s going to make Home a hit. Facebook’s reading the reviews too, so bet on the early Home updates to make it more of a bonus than a trade-off.

Facebook proclaims “Home is a completely new experience that lets you see the world through people, not apps.” But that completely new experience disrespects the work we’ve done to personalize our phones — arranging apps and putting them into folders, choosing what goes in the coveted first screen spots, and building widgets of real-time information we care about. We shouldn’t have to sacrifice so much to get Home’s added benefits.

Luckily, Facebook has committed to releasing monthly updates for Home, with the first one expected on May 12th. There are plenty of “nice” features it could add, but before Facebook decorates Home, it needs to get the foundation cemented.

Opening The Doors

I spent some time poring through hundreds of Home reviews to get a sense of the public’s perspective. Journalists and techies, including me, focused on features like Cover Feed and Chat Heads. The somewhat complicated install process didn’t faze them much. But the average Joe got quite confused when he downloaded Home only to find his familiar Android experience had been evicted.

Plenty of people like it, and say they get used to it after a while. But many of the 1-star reviews dragging down Home read like this [sic]:

• “Ugh! Not an intuitive app. Made my phone so frustratingly complicated to use that I uninstalled after just four or five hours. Unless major changes are made including an easy way to get to my home screen I will not reinstall.” - Victoria Wiley
• “It literally took over my phone. Its almost as if it a whole new OS and not user friendly.” - joe smith
• “Where are my widgets, not impressed” - David Marner 
• “It gets rid of everything u have and have to reset it” -J Erickson

Judging from these reviews and hundreds more I read, the first change Home needs is to do a better job of walking us through the transformation our phones are undergoing. Many people won’t be sure they’re supposed to select Home when asked which app to “Complete Action Using”. That should be explained up front. Then once Home is fully installed, Facebook should do a deeper tour not only of its own features, but of explaining what happened to the other parts of our phone and how to get back to them.

Preserving Personalization

Home has no widgets and no app folders, and users hate that. It won’t stay that way for long, though. Facebook Director Of Product Adam Mosseri told me when Home debuted that “There’s a lot of stuff we wanted to do in the launcher like folders and widgets. But that’s the beauty of the update cycle. We’re already working on stuff that will come out [in later versions of Home.]“‘

So is Facebook going to build its own foldering and widget-building system? Perhaps, but that doesn’t actually solve the problem prevalent in Home’s negative reviews. Users don’t want to do redundant work to re-personalize their phone.

That’s why I suspect Facebook will look for a way to integrate our existing folders and widgets within Home. This is a pretty fundamental shift for Home from a replacement launcher to a layer that rides on top of what we’ve already done to our phones. Ideally we’d be able to temporarily push Home aside to reveal our old homescreen and all our customization. Importing the folders and widgets we’ve already made into Home’s own app drawer would work, too.

Right now from Cover Feed you can swipe left for Facebook Messenger, right for the last app you used, and up to open your app favorites screen. I’d imagine Facebook would either add a down swipe to surface our former homescreens lying in wait underneath, or swap in this action for the app favorites up swipe.

With these fixes made, Facebook would get most of the prominence and immersive experience it wants from Home without forcing us to ditch our old system. That erases a huge barrier to installing and enjoying its “apperating system” and could help it grow beyond the 500,000 to 1,000,000 downloads it currently has. There’s a lot of people out there who want people to come before apps, just not instead of them.

[Image Credits: Marcio Jose Sanchez / AP, Dashburst]

As the days go by and developers get their hands on Glass, the basic apps that we need to survive in the wild and share our photos are popping up. Today, Glass To Facebook is available for those who want to post the moments captured with Glass to the social network. It’s the first third-party app that allows you

The setup is similar to that of other third-party apps like GlassTweet, but requires you to give Facebook permissions to post to your timeline. It only takes a few seconds to get going:

After you’ve turned on the Glass To Facebook sharing contact within MyGlass and approve the permissions on Facebook, you’re ready to start posting:

Just take a photo and choose the Glass To Facebook option:

The nice thing about the app is that it creates a photo album for you that will start piling up your Glass-taken photos:

Your photo shows up like any other one would in your friends’ News Feed, too. This means that all of those annoying baby pictures that you see on the daily will now come from the vantage point of the parent’s face. Exciting, I know. On a serious note, it’s nice to see photos from Glass being brought to networks other than Google+, which was the only out of the box option.

While we haven’t heard anything recently about an official Facebook Glass app, we’ve heard that there’s a team of four working on something. What could Facebook look like for Glass? We know that there won’t be ads, since Google isn’t allowing them on the Glass platform as of right now. Aside from that, I wouldn’t mind seeing a Poke pop up on the device.

[Photo credit: Flickr]

Facebook released a new version of Messenger for iOS on Monday, bringing its latest stickers feature from the main app to the standalone chat application.

Stickers are now available in Facebook for iOS, Messenger for iOS and Messenger for Android. Facebook also released a new set of stickers available for free in the “sticker store” within Messenger and the main Facebook app. Some chat apps sell stickers, but so far Facebook has made all eight of its sticker sets free. The newest set is called “Skullington.”

Another change that brings parity between Messenger and the main app are photo filters for images users share in private and group messages, as well as the redesigned contact info page in the latest version of Messenger. This design was introduced in a Facebook for iOS update last month. It includes a “shared photos” album that lets users quickly access images that they exchanged with a friend through private messages, similar to what email clients often include.

A feature exclusive to Messenger is the swipe-to-delete feature, similar to other email and chat apps. Before Monday, users could swipe to archive messages, but couldn’t completely delete from the app. Facebook’s main iOS app doesn’t have this feature because swiping right opens the bookmarks menu and swiping left opens the chat menu.

 

To learn more about this topic, join us at Inside Social Apps in San Francisco June 6-7. Our “Mobile Messaging Apps” session will discuss the recent wave of smartphone-based messaging apps that are taking North America, Asia and Europe by storm.

Sometimes, stereotypes hold true. At least on Facebook, anyway. Compass Labs, a Facebook Preferred Marketing Developer, compiled an interesting infographic showing how the pages liked by men and women on Facebook show that guys tend to like cars, while ladies tend to like retail pages.

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Although it’s only available to a super-select few, Facebook already has a home on Google Glass. It’s not the official Facebook application, but TechCrunch reports that recently launched photo sharing app Glass to Facebook uploads photos taken with Google Glass to users’ Facebook accounts.

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Parse, the cloud-based app development platform Facebook agreed to acquire in late April, today announced its latest product: Parse Hosting.

Parse Hosting enables developers to create a web presence for their app without having to manage their own servers or turn to another third party. Previously, Parse offered ways for developers to store their mobile app’s data in the cloud but didn’t host web apps or landing pages on the web for them until now. Parse says developers can deploy their web presence through Parse Hosting with only a single command.

Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar tells us that though the company has been focused on mobile first, many developers have a need for web hosting, and otherwise they have had to use yet another third-party platform.

“It’s a big piece of product infrastructure we’ve had a lot of demand for,” Sukhar says of Cloud Hosting.

The Facebook deal announced April 25 hasn’t closed yet, but the social network says it plans to keep Parse in operation. Sukhar says that the timing of today’s launch wasn’t planned as a follow-up to acquisition announcement, but that it is “symbolic” of the company’s focus on continuing to ship products.

“There are some folks that are a bit worried that the Parse platform will contract rather than expand,” Sukhar says. “I think this [launch] is evidence that Parse isn’t going anywhere.”

He says joining Facebook will allow Parse to grow more quickly in terms of hiring and innovation. Although Parse is a different type of acquisition than most Facebook has made in the past, which are typically for talent and not sustaining standalone products, Sukhar says getting to know the Facebook team and seeing their passion for the product made him confident that Parse would be at home under Facebook.

Currently, Parse has a free model, a $199 model and an enterprise level for its backend services, data storage, social integration tools and other features to make it easier for developers to build and scale apps across different platforms.

To learn more about this topic, join us at Inside Social Apps in San Francisco June 6-7. One of our Vendor Workshops is “Scaling Social Engagement With The Cloud.” SoftLayer Development Community Advocate Phil Jackson will examine what gaming, mobile and social media developers need to consider when building out their infrastructures, including how to deal with massive influxes of users – and what decisions need to be made to make it not only possible, but economical.

Parse, the mobile back-end startup that Facebook recently bought to set up a new developer-focused business, just launched hosting. It’s meant to help mobile developers that have a desktop web presence or companion experience on the web. The acquisition has already given Parse a boost, with the number of apps it hosts up 33% to 80,000 since the deal was announced.

“People were building mobile apps using Parse. But when they wanted a web presence or a dot-com landing page, they were using Parse for the log-in, but the website was being served from something else like Heroku or App Engine,” explained Parse co-founder Ilya Sukhar. “So we’re launching a fully featured web hosting platform.”

Sukhar said the project has been in the works for the last four to six weeks, even while the Facebook negotiations were going on.

The new hosting service lets developers host landing pages, and display user data retrieved using the Parse API. Say if a developer wants to show a leaderboard for their game on the web, they can do it using both the new hosting service and the standard Parse data product.

Parse Hosting comes on top of other products that help mobile developers manage push notifications and user identities and log-ins.

He added that the Facebook deal, which we had independently heard was worth $85 million excluding retention incentives, hadn’t scared away developers. They’re at 80,000 apps now, from the 60,000 apps they said they had when the Facebook deal was announced. “There was an interesting debate about whether people would move off Parse, but all of our metrics are up,” he said.

Facebook had won the deal to buy Parse even as many of the Valley’s best known companies like Apple, Yahoo and Dropbox had looked or expressed interest. They’re starting their very first business-to-business revenue stream through the Parse acquisition and had — like in the case of Instagram — promised the team a fair amount of autonomy to grow their products as they see fit. They’re not tampering with Parse’s SaaS-based revenue model.

He also said that the company hadn’t celebrated the deal yet. “We have a lot of stuff on our plate,” he said.

There is no shortage of advice for younger users on Facebook, but if the same mistakes weren’t being made, the same type of advice wouldn’t be so valuable. The latest rendition comes from Mobistealth, which tailored its advice on the topic to parents and employers.

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Facebook finally named its replacement for former Vice President and Managing Director for Europe, the Middle East, and Africa Joanna Shields, who left the social network last October: Karmarama Executive Chairman Nicola Mendelsohn is on board as VP for the EMEA region.

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The Major League Baseball team atop PageData‘s people talking about this leader board happens to be at the bottom of its division. The Los Angeles Dodgers, who are in last place in the National League West, are the most-talked-about team on Facebook right now, with an increase in 79,737 people discussing the club this week. In second place are divisional rivals the San Francisco Giants.

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