chapter 11: facebook: platforms, privacy, and big business from the social graph
colossal walled garden
A closed network or single set of services controlled by one dominant firm. if increasingly large parts of the Web reside inside a single (and, for the most part, closed) service, innovation, competition, and exchange may suffer
cloud
A collection of resources available for access over the Internet. the big group of connected servers that power the sit
PHP, MySQL
A good portion of Facebook is written in _____ (a scripting language particularly well suited for website development), while some of the databases are in _____ (a popular open source database)
Free Basics
A rebranded effort "_____ ____" after Internet.org failure was meant to seem less like an ominous Internet takeover, but even this effort has had problems
envelopment
A strategy whereby a firm with a significant customer base adds a feature to an existing product or service and eliminates the need for any rival, stand-alone platforms. Think Apple adding video to cameras, crushing the market for the Flip cam.
Oculus VR
A virtual reality company owed by Facebook
localization
Adapting products and services for different languages and regional differences.
security
Allowing data streams that contain potentially private posts and photographs to flow through the Internet and have them land where you want them raises all sorts of concerns. What's to say an errant line of code doesn't provide a back door to your address book or friends list, to your messaging account, or to photos you'd hoped to only share with family? Security breaches can occur on any site, but once the data is allowed to flow freely, every site with access is, for hackers, the equivalent of a potential door to open or window to crawl through.
Cambridge Analytica scandal
Already suffering from public distrust from revelations that its news feed was used as a "fake news" machine, a whistleblower at a UK-based research firm, Cambridge Analytica, detailed a surreptitious campaign to harvest user data on a wide scale, develop psychographic profiles, and sell services that, as the Cambridge Analytica website claimed, will "find your voters and move them to action." Data was accessed, in part, from an online quiz named "ThisIsYourDigitalLife." Sounds innocuous, right? If you haven't taken a quiz with a goofy premise like "Which Harry Potter Character Are You?" and shared the result in your feed, then almost certainly someone else that you know has done this. In the case of "ThisIsYourDigitalLife," only 270,000 people authorized the app to collect data, but all were told the focus was academic research and no commercial ties were disclosed. A Facebook policy (since halted) that allowed app developers to access not only information on a user, but also information on their friend's network, accelerated data access that created working profiles on (as of this writing) some 87 million users, mostly US citizens. To underscore the issue: users were told the quiz was for academic use (data was eventually used commercially for political profiling and targeted campaign advertising), psychographic profiles were built without consent, and friends of the users—who had never even been asked if their data could be collected and shared—had all sorts of personality-identifying data vacuumed up ("likes," demographics, and other identifying data). A #DeleteFacebook campaign trended. At this point there's little evidence that it curtailed Facebook use, and many who have left Facebook are thought to have shifted to Facebook-owned Instagram.
network effect
Also known as Metcalfe's Law, or network externalities. When the value of a product or service increases as its number of users expands.
authentication
And we can add another advantage: ______. Many firms have begun to offer "sign-on with mobile" as an alternative to using passwords. Many think this is an even more secure way to sign in since it's attached directly to a device that follows the user and which many users additionally lock with a passcode.
new, envelop
As Facebook is able to insert itself into _____ markets and ______ markets owned by other firms, we see a key advantage to Facebook's central role in the lives of consumers. Network effects, switching costs, and the firm's influence in catalyzing the spread of new products and services allow the company to quickly apply its installed base in key markets
monthly active users (MAUs)
As of the first quarter of 2016, over 90 percent of Facebook's ______ ____ _____ visited using mobile devices, and over half only access using mobile
business, feature
Budding entrepreneurs beware: Are you building a _______ with sustainable advantage or a ______ that will one day be wiped out by similar technology built into Facebook?
risk, value
By opening its platform to third parties, Facebook exposed itself to _____, as well as ______. The firm has had to deal with apps that infringe on copyright, that annoy, purvey pornography, step over the boundaries of good taste, and raise privacy and security concerns. Firms from Facebook to Apple (through its iTunes Store) have struggled to find the right mix of monitoring, protection, and approval of platform use while avoiding cries of censorship and draconian control
content adjacency
Concern that an advertisement will run near offensive material, embarrassing an advertiser and/or degrading their products or brands. concern over where a firm's advertisements will run Do advertisers really want their ads running alongside conversations that are racy, offensive, illegal, or that may even mock their products? This potential juxtaposition is a major problem with any site offering ads adjacent to free-form social media it's because of _____ ______ that "brand advertisers largely consider user-generated content as low-quality, brand-unsafe inventory" for running ads
trust
Despite the many public privacy concerns the firm has faced, _____ remains one of Facebook's most distinguishing features—bringing along with it a degree of safety and comfort that enabled Facebook to become a true social utility and build out a solid social graph consisting of verified relationships.
social television
Facebook almost certainly wants to play a starring role in your living room, making the TV a platform for social activity: video chat, serving targeted ads, social entertainment recommendations, games, and all sorts of commerce. It will be tough to navigate the tensions of bandwidth-capping cable guys, channel owners, and hardware firms keen to build their own platform, but Zuckerberg has Reed Hastings on his board. No one has built a further-reaching platform with consumer electronics firms than the Netflix CEO, and he should provide keen insight as Facebook spreads further. And don't count out Oculus. Those court-side immersive experiences Zuckerberg imagined would go great with deeply engaging ads, as well.
social networking, smartphones
Facebook accounts for the largest share of the most popular activity (______ ______) on the most widely used computing devices (________)
social context
Facebook allows advertisers to enhance ads with "social context," showing the names of friends who have "liked" the firm or checked-in to advertiser locations These ads attempt to take advantage of the concept of social proof
Haystack
Facebook also developed its own media-serving solution, called ________. ________ coughs up photos 50 percent faster than more expensive, proprietary solutions, and since it's done in house, it saves Facebook costs that other online outlets spend on third-party content delivery networks (CDN)Systems distributed throughout the Internet (or other network) that help to improve the delivery (and hence loading) speeds of Web pages and other media, typically by spreading access across multiple sites located closer to users. Akamai is the largest CDN, helping firms like CNN and MTV quickly deliver photos, video, and other media worldwide. like Akamai
logging in
Facebook also offered a system where website operators can choose to accept a user's Facebook credentials for ______ __. Users like this because they can access content without the hurdle of creating a new account. Websites like it because with the burden of signing up out of the way, Facebook becomes an experimentation lubricant: "Oh, I can use my Facebook ID to sign in? Then let me try this out."
encryption
Facebook are gaining end-to-end ________. Facebook hopes new features in messenger that encourage chat and sharing with a smaller crowd than the legions of people you may have "friended" over the years, and the introduction of threaded discussions, will help people migrate to a more private platform that remains within Facebook's ecosystem
no (Facebook's dominance comes from the size of its user base, network effects, switching costs, and the uniqueness and applicability of its data. You could give everything but data and users to an upstart and they'd still never match the firm.)
Facebook believes sharing will improve products overall and may even attract talent to their innovation-forward shop. Does this dangerously expose a competitive advantage?
promoted posts
Facebook charges advertisers to appear in prominent positions that are likely to be seen increase the reach of an item that a firm shares
rivals
Facebook has paid close attention to _____ Perhaps the best example is the firm's co-opting of Snapchat Stories—a firm that defined the category with its launch in October 2013. Facebook, Instagram, Messenger, and WhatsApp (called Statuses) all now offer time-limited, ephemeral posts, with three of them using the Stories name. Facebook put its Snapchat clone above the newsfeed in March 2017. WhatsApp Statuses launched a month earlier. Instagram Stories led this Stories onslaught the prior August. By mid-2018, Instagram and WhatsApp Story features weren't just larger than Snapchat Stories, they were larger than all of Snapchat's daily active user (DAU) base, and Facebook Stories were bigger than the last reported Snapchat DAU figure
Facebook lost an early leadership into mobile photo sharing to ______
virtual assistant
Facebook side projects include brain controlled wearables, a "______ ______" that listens to every word in your home, and the firm's own government-free cryptocurrency
news feed
Facebook was initially reluctant to place ads in the _____ _____, but such ads have proven to be hugely successful for the firm and pretty much dispelled earlier concerns over "the hike" at Facebook being a poor ad platform. Unlike search ads, ads in the news feed move beyond the easy-to-ignore real estate on the right side of the desktop and instead put a message right in the middle of the exact screen real estate that a user is paying attention to.
cloud brain
Facebook's "______ ______" for artificial intelligence is also custom built. As a category-creating pioneer, Facebook can't wait for the market to catch up with its needs, so it builds its own servers
customer engagement
Firms and products that you "Like" on Facebook can post messages that may appear in your news feed (where you can like and comment on their posts and share the messages virally), making Facebook a key channel for continued ________ _______. The evolving "Like" button now allows users to share "reactions" including "wow," or that they are "sad" or "angry," with each interaction adding to Facebook's data asset and offering deeper insight on users and posts
content adjacency, user attention
First a look at what's different about search advertising and social ads. Firms face two key challenges when advertising on social media: ______ ______ and ______ ______.
competitor
From the perspective of securing a large user base and taking out a potentially threatening _______, Wired labeled the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions as "two of the greatest bargains in recent tech history
revenue sharing
Hosting content (especially photos and rich media) is a very expensive proposition. What incentive does a site have to store data if it will just be sent to a third-party site that will run ads around this content and not share the take? Too much data portability presents a free rider problemWhen others take advantage of a user or service without providing any sort of reciprocal benefit. in which firms mooch off of Facebook's infrastructure without offering much in return.
Libra
If it realizes its goals, Facebook-backed ______ will be a decentralized, blockchain powered, government-less cryptocurrency that lowers transaction costs and enables microtransactions worldwide
deep Web
Internet content that can't be indexed by Google and other search engines.
precise targeting
Large advertising networks have tried to meticulously track users to develop a profile of their demographics, likes, and interests. Facebook knows all about you because you've told it the details—your age, the things you're enthusiastic about, where you live, your relationship status. This opens up all sorts of targeting opportunities to even the smallest of advertisers. In one example, a wedding photography studio targeted ads at women aged twenty-four to thirty whose relationship status was engaged—that's like sticking a flyer in front of precisely everyone you want to reach and not wasting a dime on anyone else
algorithm
Like Google, Facebook uses a secret and constantly refined ______ that attempts to identify what you're most interested in, while cutting "spammy" content Some of the more significant factors include the past interest of a given user in the content's creator, a post's performance among other users, performance of past posts by the content creator, the type of posts a given user prefers (e.g., status, link, photo, etc.), and the recency of the post
discovery, awareness
Many of the ads you'll see on Facebook and related properties are for _______ or ________ building rather than a stated intent to purchase. Are you a pet owner? You've almost certainly seen ads for new pet products, even though you haven't been actively shopping for these on Facebook. Style conscious? Facebook has a good idea on what types of clothing and beauty products you may be interested in.
weakened assets
Mark Zuckerberg's geeks have worked hard to make their site the top choice for most of the world's social networkers and social network application developers. Right now, everyone goes to Facebook because everyone else is on Facebook. But Facebook, or any firm that opens up access to users and content, risks supporting efforts that undermine the critical assets of network effects and switching costs. If you can get Facebook content on other sites, why go to Facebook?
messaging
Mobile _______ posed a bigger threat than smartphone photo sharing, so Facebook ended up writing an even bigger check for WhatsApp
network effects, switching costs
Negative press, massive penalties, and public outrage like this would kill most firms, yet as of this writing Facebook has been enjoying record profits and while its stock price has roller-coastered, it hasn't seen a consistent cratering. All speak to the power of ______ ______ and ______ ______ embedding the firm's services deep within the lives of consumers, worldwide
fan pages
Posts from _____ ______ used to be a free promotion source for any organization hoping to reach the news feeds of those who "liked" their product
application programming interface (API)
Programming hooks, or guidelines, published by firms that tell other programs how to get a service to perform a task such as send or receive data. For example, Amazon.com provides APIs to let developers write their own applications and websites that can send the firm orders.
acqui-hire
Referring to "acquiring" a firm as a way to "hire" talent.
microtransactions
Small value transactions that are normally not viable when transaction fees, such as those in the US credit card market, are factored in. _________ could include payments for public transportation, candy, or anything so small that cash is preferred.
icon
Smartphone apps also get an _____ on the home screen. A constant visual reminder for a service, often with a compelling notification badge that motivates a compulsion to check things out so the badge goes away. Single-tap access is also far better than bookmarking or typing in a URL.
address book
Smartphone apps can access a user's _____ ____. This makes it easier to rebuild the social graph for a new mobile service.
notifications
Smartphone apps can use push _________, a huge benefit for increasing engagement. While new standards now allow some degree of desktop notification, these are often so disruptive that they are ignored or shut off. Desktop services have long relied on e-mail notifications or hoped users remembered to return to a Web site, but mobile push notifications instantly say, "Hey, there's something new here for you to pay attention to within our great app that you signed up for," and offer single-tap reentry into a service.
media library
Smartphones apps can access a phone's _____ _____ and can often plug into cloud storage. This makes it easier to share photos and video than on desktop services.
open source software (OSS)
Software that is free and whose code can be accessed and potentially modified by anyone.
better
Some think that a Facebook ad network might be able to offer ad targeting that performs ______ than Google's AdSense product
walled garden
Some worry "Instant Articles" reinforce Facebook's _____ ______ and give the firm even more power over how journalism is distributed and seen, but if Facebook can placate concerns and deliver value to partners, it may be able to convince more to allow its ad network to serve ads on their content, as well
scale, network effects
Sure Snap moved first, but Instagram, Facebook, and WhatsApp all had user-base _____ and ______ ______ (Snap initially also had a reputation for being less intuitive than its rivals). So it's not as if Snap saw a rock solid competitive advantage eroded-instead the larger firms leveraged their competitive advantage to match and surpass an innovator, putting the bulwark of scale and network effects behind its fast-follower feature match.
content delivery network (CDN)
Systems distributed throughout the Internet (or other network) that help to improve the delivery (and hence loading) speeds of Web pages and other media, typically by spreading access across multiple sites located closer to users. Akamai is the largest CDN, helping firms like CNN and MTV quickly deliver photos, video, and other media worldwide.
true
T/F: A Facebook co-founder has called for the firm to be broken up, as its power gives it "unilateral control over free speech"; while a WhatsApp founder, wildly rich from the acquisition, had grown so disenchanted that he tweeted it was time to #DeleteFacebook (and apparently abandoned $850 million in potential earnings with his departure)
true
T/F: Ads with social context have been shown to perform better
true
T/F: Building such a great infrastructure requires a super-smart and super-creative talent base. In order to keep the ideas humming, Facebook regularly rotates technical staff. Every eighteen months employees are required to leave their teams and work on something different for at least a month. Getting people into new groups helps the firm's geniuses more broadly share their knowledge, generates idea flow, and prevents managers from developing fiefdoms. The firm also runs legendary hackathons, all-night sessions with one key rule: no one is allowed to work on what they normally do. Engineers blue-sky innovate on something new and show it to Zuckerberg and a senior staff brain trust, who then decide which projects go forward
true
T/F: Facebook actively worked on schemes for providing Internet access to areas with no signal
true
T/F: Facebook can do all this, but it could also add in all sorts of data from the dark Web that Google can't see: data from a user's social activity, their highly accurate personal profile, and more. As an added bonus, Facebook can use its ad network to boost revenue without increasing the density of ads in its own products—another win for usability.
true
T/F: Facebook has claimed that its Internet.org efforts have connected over 100 million people to the Internet, but what were likely well-intentioned efforts also exposed unseen and unintended consequences that can often accompany technology use.
true
T/F: Facebook has gradually turned on features that have allowed the firm to leverage its massive user base to encroach on a wide swath of Internet services (link sharing, photo sharing, and messaging to name a few)
true
T/F: Facebook is officially banned in China (although many Chinese have used technical work-arounds to access the site), and Zuckerberg is clearly interested in the Chinese market.
true
T/F: Facebook made public the detailed specifications of its homegrown servers (including custom power supplies, chassis, and battery backup) as well as plans used in building design and electrical and cooling systems
true
T/F: Graph Search results are based in part on the connections in your social graph, but you also have access to your past posts as well as any information that the billion-plus member Facebook community chooses to make public
true
T/F: If at least two of the fact-checkers identify the post as a fake, Facebook will shrink the size of the article, follow the post with links debunking the claim, and downrank posts so that they are buried deep within in a user's news feed. If a user still clicks on the disputed article, a popup box warning "Disputed by 3rd Parties" displays first, allowing the user to continue or cancel their click-through. Any articles identified as fake will also be banned from using Facebook's advertising and promotional products, and Facebook will drop any ads from websites that run such ads or that appear to trick the user into thinking they are real (e.g., abcnews.com.co or buzzfeedfeed.com—catch the differences?). An icon accompanying some posts will allow the user to get additional information about that news source
true
T/F: Libra will use its own separate blockchain, not one tied to Bitcoin or any other effort, and the machines that support this distributed transaction ledger will be run, at least initially, by member organizations
true
T/F: On the Web, Facebook can test an innovation by rolling it out to a subset of users and gauging their reaction. But this so-called A/B testing is harder with mobile
true
T/F: Plans include encrypting message apps (itself controversial to governments who want a peek at potential terrorist communications). And the firm that built the feed into an oft-imitated and wildly powerful communication channel intends to create "living room" style communities, rather than promoting the shouting matches of a town hall
true
T/F: The biggest problem with Beacon was that it was "opt-out" instead of "opt-in." Facebook (and its partners) assumed users would agree to sharing data in their feeds. A pop-up box did appear briefly on most sites supporting Beacon, but it disappeared after a few seconds. Many users, blind to these sorts of alerts, either clicked through or ignored the warnings. And, well, there are some purchases you might not want to broadcast to the world.
true
T/F: While mobile is different, and Facebook hasn't always been a cross-category leader in mobile innovation, Facebook's profitability and IPO provide the firm with cash to try to ensure that it's Facebook that's going to be the next Facebook. Three of the firm's acquisitions, each valued at $1 billion or more, demonstrate this.
true
T/F: With just a few lines of HTML code specified by Open Graph, any developer can add a Facebook "Like" button to his or her site and take advantage of the social network's power of viral distribution. When a user clicks that page's "Like" button, it would automatically send a link of that page to his or her news feed, where it has the potential to be seen by all of his or her friends.
true
T/F: any programmer could write an application that would live inside a user's profile
true
T/F: big advertisers aren't the only ones Facebook (and rivals) are after. Zuckerberg's firm has been used by over one million different advertisers, and many of these are small businesses using the firm's self-service ad platform
true
T/F: fewer than half of global Internet users have disposable incomes high enough to interest major advertisers, meaning that in terms of average revenue per user (ARPU), these new social networking recruits are likely to be far less lucrative in the near future than the firm's current users
true
T/F: more than half of Facebook's revenue coming from outside the United States rising worldwide mobile engagement and a growing middle class in many emerging markets where Facebook operates point to revenue forecasts that suggest the continued trajectory of up and to the right
true
T/F: while many firms can credit Facebook with their success (see Spotify as a prime example), others that were continually reliant on the Facebook sharing model were hurt when app usage began to disappear from the news feed Many developers would complain of being "Zucked over," claiming that Facebook became a poor partner making surreptitious platform changes, altering policies without consulting them, and taking away much of the virality that helped fuel the firm's initial app explosion Zynga (game company)
true
T/F; Facebook beats rivals in driving traffic to newspaper sites, and it's also way ahead of Twitter and Pinterest in overall social traffic referrals.
crowdsourcing
The act of taking a job traditionally performed by a designated agent (usually an employee) and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people in the form of an open call.
switching costs
The cost a consumer incurs when moving from one product to another. It can involve actual money spent (e.g., buying a new product) as well as investments in time, any data loss, and so forth. a move to another service means recreating your entire social graph
fake news
The extent to which so-called "_____ ______" on Facebook has been used to fan the flames of political discord has been astonishing, troubling, and has caused a deep, existential crisis within the firm, its user base, management, and society
meta data
The firm is also using reverse image search to see if an image has been doctored. Many images also carry "_____ ______" added by the phone or camera that took the photo (e.g., time, date, geolocation), and comparing images with the same meta data but alterations in a portion of their content can also surface Photoshopped fakes. Machine learning will be used to focus the fake-finding over time, but AI has its limits.
Big Sur
The firm's AI-focused servers, known internally as "___ ____" devices, use clustered Nvidia GPUs to create a massive network for machine learning, powering all sorts of Facebook artificial intelligence tasks, including object and facial recognition, real-time text translation, and the ability to recognize and describe what's in photos or videos. Development goals of AI include being able to accurately describe photos to blind users, and to recognize if a user is troubled and in need of mental health outreach
social graph
The global mapping of users and organizations and how they are connected. refers to Facebook's ability to collect, express, and leverage the connections between the site's users, or as some describe it, "the global mapping of everyone and how they're related." Think of everything that's on Facebook as a node or endpoint that's connected to other stuff. You're connected to other users (your friends), photos about you are tagged, comments you've posted carry your name, you regularly declare your preferences and things that you "like," you're a member of groups, you're connected to applications you've installed—Facebook links them all
open, connected
The lofty ideals of Facebook's founding ethos - to make the world more _____ and ______ - seems to have crashed and burned in a grisly and unprecedented pileup of bad actors, ham-handed responses, misunderstanding, and justifiable concern The platform has inadvertently streamed a racist's mass murder, fueled conspiracy theorists, served as an organizing force for terrorists, extremists, and holocaust-deniers, and has struggled to balance privacy and free speech
Messenger
The once-scrawny _______ has bulked up, and now includes key features of other leading messaging apps: encryption, group messaging, conversation threads, stickers, location sharing, notifications if your message has been seen, recording and sending audio messages It's also a Skype competitor, offering free VoIP (Voice over IP) Internet calls.
PayPal
To help Messenger realize its potential, Zuckerberg turned on the sales charm and did what many thought impossible: he poached the CEO of another thriving, high-growth, industry leading firm, _____
Facebook Lite
To make Facebook more appealing to low-end users, Facebook has built an app that requires just 1 percent of the computing resources used by its main smartphone app. _____ ______ won't support video, and images will be compressed, but users can post status updates and pictures, scroll through a news feed and get notifications. The firm will sell ads through ______ ____, even though high-appeal video and hi-res images aren't on the platform.
earlier, more
Typically, the ______ a firm accepts VC money, the ______ control these investors can exert (earlier investments are riskier, so VCs can demand more favorable terms
Top Stories
Users can also tweak their news feed settings, and opt to see posts based on recency rather than algorithmically determined "_____ _______."
true
When Facebook filed to go public, Zuckerberg's ownership stake stood at 28 percent, but Facebook created two classes of shares, ensuring that Zuckerberg maintains a majority of voting rights in the public company and virtually guaranteeing that his control of the firm continues, regardless of what investors say. Maintaining this kind of control is unusual (although not unprecedented—Google's founders have a similar ownership and voting structure). Zuckerberg's influence is a testament to the speed with which Facebook expanded
free rider problem
When others take advantage of a user or service without providing any sort of reciprocal benefit. Facebook and Twitter, firms once known for their openness, have erected walls to make it more difficult for users to integrate their services. Twitter users used to be able to click on an Instagram photo and have it displayed directly in the Twitter app or in a pop-up window in Twitter-owned TweetDeck, but doing so prevents Facebook from wrapping Instagram content in messages, collecting "Likes," and—although it doesn't currently do so—running ads. Instagram also blocked user ability to find friends on Twitter.
real estate
While a desktop site can crush a new competitor by adding a feature as a new menu item or icon, on mobile there isn't the screen _____ _____ for this—another reason mobile seems to favor single-purpose, specialized apps
HipHop Virtual Machine
While a good portion of Facebook is written in the popular but slower-executing PHP language, the firm has written (and open sourced) a system it calls __________ ______ ______, which takes PHP code and compiles (translates) it on the fly from something that a programmer can read to the machine language that a computer can more quickly execute
news feeds
While the authenticity and trust offered by Facebook was critical, offering _____ _____ concentrated and released value from the social graph
Google, Facebook
While users go to ______ to hunt, they go to _______ as if they were going on a hike
cost per thousand impressions (CPM)
a common way to express advertising rates which refers to the amount charged every time an ad appears 1,000 times (M is the roman numeral for 1,000)
Internet Research Agency
a fake-news farm in St. Petersburg, Russia highly sophisticated campaign allegedly undertaken by agents acting on behalf of the Russian government
Instant Articles
a new Facebook feature that inserts selected articles from mainstream news outlets in a user's Newsfeed service helps vendors overcome the problem of slow page loads and content that's poorly formatted for mobile
Internet.org
a nonprofit organization crafting nonexclusive partnerships with local carriers to offer a free tier of services, a sort of "Internet dial tone" that includes social networking (of course), as well as vital information such as weather, health care information, education, and food prices, all through a lightweight app that runs on very low- end phones (often called "feature phones" as opposed to app-installing smartphones)
hunt
a task-oriented expedition to collect information that will drive a specific action
social proof
adding legitimacy for a product through its association with your friends
daily active user base (DAU)
amount of users utilizing a service on average daily
short selling
an attempt to profit from a falling stock price. Short sellers sell shares they don't own with an obligation of later repayment. They do so in the hope that the price of sold shares will fall. They then repay share debt with shares purchased at a lower price and pocket the difference (spread) between initial share price and repayment price.
complementary benefits
becoming a platform meant that each new third-party app potentially added more value and features to the site without Facebook lifting a finger (which, in a prior chapter, we learned about as value-adding ______ _______ from network effects)
Open Graph
continues to project Facebook's influence beyond the site itself. The initiative allows developers to link Web pages and app usage into the social graph, placing Facebook directly at the center of identity, sharing, and personalization—not only on Facebook but also across the Web.
Beacon
effort started from a simple question: Could the energy and virulent nature of social networks be harnessed to offer truly useful consumer information to its users? Word of mouth is considered the most persuasive (and valuable) form of marketing, and Facebook was a giant word-of-mouth machine. What if the firm worked with vendors and grabbed consumer activity at the point of purchase to put it into the news feed and post it to a user's profile? If you watched a video, bought a cool product, or dropped something in your wish list, your buddies could get a heads-up, and they might ask you about it. The person being asked feels like an expert, the person with the question gets a frank opinion, and the vendor providing the data just might get another sale.
address book, media library, push notifications, home screen icon, crash resistance, authentication
four areas where the competitive dynamics of smartphone apps differ from browser based desktop services
grew to be the worldwide leader in messaging clients for mobile, while others such as WeChat, Line, and KakaoTalk enjoy hundreds of millions of users in different locations throughout the world
hike
hey have a rough idea of what they'll encounter, but this often lacks the easy-to-monetize, directed intent of search
Graph Search
intends to evolve search beyond the keyword Facebook allows users to draw meaning from the site's social graph and to find answers from social connections. Planning an outdoorsy getaway and looking for ideas from friends you trust? Use Graph Search to collect photos of friends at National Parks. Some have claimed Graph Search could become a primary source for job placement, travel info, dating, and more—all areas where Facebook has, to some extent, experimented.
90
mobile brings in over ___% of Facebook advertising revenue
platform play
moving beyond feature and offering a service that third parties build on and make even more valuable Facebook has also opened Stories up to vetted third-party apps, with initial partners including Spotify, SoundCloud, Musical.ly, GoPro, selfie-editor Meitu, and Indian music app Saavn
venture capitalists
nvestor groups that provide funding in exchange for a stake in the firm and often (especially in early-stage investments), a degree of managerial control (this may be in the form of a voting seat or seats on the firm's board of directors)
timeline
on your personal page offers a sort of digital scrapbook of content that a user has shared online
advertising
the bulk of Facebook's revenue comes from _______
Facebook Audience Network
the firm can make money off its billion-plus users, even when they're not on Facebook's own sites and apps. Mobile app developers can, too. All developers need to do is put a snippet of Facebook code into their apps. Zuckerberg's firm will line up advertisers, select and run targeted ads based on its massive knowledge of individual users and user preferences, measure ad performance, and collect payments to forward on to its partners (after taking a cut, of course). While your Facebook data will be used to target ads outside the service, the firm's ad network doesn't give advertisers or publishers any personal data, it simply performs matching on its own servers, then delivers the appropriately targeted ad to the app
initial public stock offering (IPO)
the first time a firm makes shares available via a public stock exchange, also known as "going public."
offline
three reasons why so much of the population is _______ 1) data is too expensive for many of the world's poorest citizens; 2) services aren't designed for emerging market use by populations who need ultra-low bandwidth services that run reliably on very low-end or old, recycled hardware; and 3) content is not compelling enough to draw in non-users
crowdsourcing localization effort
users were asked to look at Facebook phrases and offer translation suggestions for their local language, helped the firm rapidly deploy versions in dozens of markets, blasting the firm past one-time rivals in global reach.
asset
when Facebook acquired Instagram for a cool $1 billion, Facebook turned the potential rival into an _____ for growth and another vehicle for the firm to remain central to users' lives. Since the acquisition, Instagram has continued to operate a a separate brand, tripling its user base the year following acquisition (and topping 800 million by mid 2018), usage numbers that dwarf Twitter and Snapchat. New features such as video were introduced, and with the introduction of ads, the app has also began to earn money.