What kind of ads would you 'like'? Facebook wants to know

September 27, 2013 04:08 PM ETIDG News Service - Facebook wants to make its ads less annoying to users by only showing them what they want to see, even if it means a dip in ad exposure for some marketers.

The company is changing its ads algorithms to provide users with advertisements that are more relevant, and desirable, to them, it said Friday.

Facebook already takes information both from marketers and end users into account when deciding how to place advertisements. But the social network will now put more emphasis on feedback from users to decide which ads to show them.

"We are currently working on some updates to the ads algorithms to improve the relevance and quality of the ads people see," Hong Ge, Facebook's engineering manager of news feed ads, said.

To do this, Facebook will be looking more at when users click, "like," comment on, or share ads, for instance. When someone hides an ad, Facebook will show that person less of those types of ads, the company said.

By placing more emphasis on these types of signals, Facebook hopes people will see more ads that are relevant to them and fewer that are not. So if someone hides ads for, say, vitamin supplements, fewer of those types of ads will appear in their news feed, Facebook said.

If marketers are miffed by these alterations, Facebook wants them to know it has their interests at heart too.

The ads algorithm tweaks may produce some unanticipated changes for how marketers' ads are distributed in the coming weeks, Facebook said. But, "this is ultimately better for marketers, because it means their messages are reaching the people most interested in what they have to offer," the company said.

Traditionally, marketers tell Facebook which people they think will be most interested in their ads. A restaurant, for example, might tell Facebook to show an ad to people living in the same city aged 18 to 35, Facebook said.

Facebook has been making a series of changes to the news feed over the past several months. In August the company said it would be changing its sorting algorithms to rearrange the order in which certain stories and posts from friends are displayed.

Zach Miners covers social networking, search and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow Zach on Twitter at @zachminers. Zach's e-mail address is zach_miners@idg.com

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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Zuckerberg: Facebook wants to take the pain out of building apps

Facebook is seen as a website for connecting people. Now the company also wants to make it easier for outside developers to build their apps and connect them with users, by providing back-end hosting tools.

On Thursday the social network held its first Parse Developer Day, a conference geared toward third-party app developers. Parse is a cloud service company that provides a hosted back-end infrastructure to make it easier for developers to build their mobile apps. Facebook announced its acquisition of Parse in April.

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Facebook already provides software tools to let outside developers plug into the social network's data with Facebook Platform. But that service is focused more on the distribution of apps, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg said during a surprise appearance at the conference in San Francisco.

"We want to do more than that," he said. What Facebook is trying to do with Parse, he said, is to give developers new tools to build and grow their apps.

In other words, Facebook wants developers to focus less on things like managing servers, maintaining connections to other services and building push notifications, and instead focus more on the user's front-end experience.

Parse addresses those issues, Zuckerberg said, by eliminating the pain for developers and letting them just focus on building a great app.

During a keynote address, Parse CEO Ilya Sukhar likened the company's goals to applying for a driver's license, but not wanting to stand in line at the Department of Motor Vehicles to fill out all of the paperwork.

"You just want to get out there and drive," he said.

The goal has big implications not just for developers but for Facebook. The social network claims to have more than 1 billion active users, and already lets those people log into certain apps through Facebook, giving the app permission to access their list of friends and other profile information.

But by getting into the business of selling application development tools, Facebook wants to support an even tighter bond between apps and the site.

To provide more ways to simplify the app development process, some new products were unveiled by Parse's Sukhar during Thursday's event, which drew more than 600 attendees.

The two biggest new products are Background Jobs and Parse Analytics, he said. Background Jobs is designed to let developers schedule tasks into their apps, such as messages or notifications, by sending simple code to Parse's servers. Prior to that product's launch, developers could not run arbitrary code on the company's servers, Sukhar said.

Parse Analytics, meanwhile, will let developers monitor various activities within their apps to see what's working and what's not. With the feature, developers can see, for instance, whether their app has more action on Android or iOS, and whether certain demographics are spending more money within the app than others.

Developers could use work-arounds to gather some of this data before, Sukhar said, but now they can get it all in one place, visualized on a dashboard.

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Facebook tells employees, 'build something' -- with a table saw

IDG News Service - Facebook's motto may be "move fast and break things," but the 3,000 employees at its headquarters in Menlo Park, California, now have the chance to do just the opposite.

To attract workers and keep them happy, the social network offers many well-known perks including free on-campus dining, a gym, and shuttle buses to and from San Francisco. But if those aren't cutting it, here's one that might do, literally: a woodshop.

The 3,000-plus square-foot facility houses more than a dozen pieces of machinery including table saws, lathes, drill presses, sanders and a laser engraver. The idea is to give employees an opportunity to exercise another part of their brain, get their creative juices flowing and build something beyond their usual output of webpages, mobile updates and other products that don't exist outside of a computer screen.

And, Facebook hopes the shop will inspire employees to apply some new thinking to the jobs they were hired to do.

Hans Lintermans, a Facebook product manager in marketing, visits the woodshop at least once a week, sometimes during his lunch break, to work on any number of projects. On Thursday he was busy doing some polishing on a cutting board for cooking. Before that he made a two-by-six-foot table out of solid redwood he picked up from a local lumber yard.

Next on the list? Maybe a butcher block, the craftsman said.

Facebook is famous for its hackathons -- usually anything-goes, all-night coding workshops that are meant to spawn new product concepts and prototypes.

But the woodshop, Lintermans said, is just as exciting, if not more so. "It helps me to unwind and think outside the box," he said.

Some other Facebook employees are still making up their minds.

"It's a perk," said Sean Nicolay, a software engineer who had stepped in for an introductory three-hour training session on how to safely use the machines.

Ted Kalaw, another software engineer, called it an extension -- albeit a more hands-on one -- of the culture the company tries to foster around creativity.

The woodshop is located just off the busy boulevard of cyclists and walkers that bisects the company's main quad. It sits adjacent to Facebook's Analog Research Lab, a screen printing studio and workshop.

There are all sorts of stylized posters adorning the walls of Facebook's buildings, bearing corporate mantras like "Stay Focused and Keep Shipping," or "The Foolish Wait." The Analog Research Lab is where those posters and other "offline" handiwork is produced.

Think of the woodshop, then, as the 3-D cousin to that lab, with sawdust.

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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Security expert kick-starts fund to pay Facebook bug finder a $10K bounty

Computerworld - After a Palestinian researcher was denied a bug bounty by Facebook, Marc Maiffret, CTO of BeyondTrust, kicked off a crowd-sourced fund yesterday to come up with a reward.

The researcher, Khalil Shreateh, expressed his gratitude today to Maiffret and others who have contributed to the fund. "Thank you so much. I never imagined what they will do for me," Shreateh said in a telephone interview.

Seventy-nine people have contributed nearly $9,000 in the last 24 hours to an account that will be handed over to Shreateh once it reaches the goal of $10,000.

Maiffret seeded the fund with $3,000 of his own money after appearing on CNN to talk about the Facebook vulnerability that Shreateh found.

Earlier this month Shreateh reported a vulnerability to Facebook's bug bounty program, saying that he had found a way to post content to any user's timeline, even when not on a victim's friends list. Facebook rebuffed him in return emails and ultimately claimed his discovery wasn't a bug.

Frustrated, Shreateh took matters into his own hands and planted a message on CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook timeline.

That got the attention of Facebook's security engineers, who quickly locked Shreateh out of his account. After restoring his access, Facebook said it would not pay him a bounty.

"The more important issue here is with how the bug was demonstrated using the accounts of real people without their permission," said Facebook software engineer Matt Jones in a Sunday entry on Hacker News. "Exploiting bugs to impact real users is not acceptable behavior for a white hat."

Jones did acknowledge that Facebook should have asked Shreateh for more information before dismissing his report, but he also ticked off a list of reasons, including the fact that Facebook receives "hundreds of reports each day" and the lack of detailed proof in Shreateh's original report. He also intimated that Shreateh's poor English skills had been a problem.

In an interview on CNN Monday, Maiffret took exception to Facebook's decision not to reward Shreateh.

"Ultimately, he helped kill a bug that could have been used by pretty bad guys out there to do things against Facebook users," said Maiffret. "Ultimately, he did a great thing and I don't think that should be lost in all this."

The vulnerability was certainly worth money to criminals, Maiffret asserted. "It would have been something that was very useful to folks in the underground to be able to post different content on celebrity sites or whatever it might have been, to be able to lure people to websites that would then attack them," he said. "With the nature of the severity, it would be good for Facebook to pay the guy."

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Facebook blames a bug for lost posts about same-sex marriage

IDG News Service - Some recent cases of news articles about same-sex marriage disappearing from the newspaper page on Facebook appear to have been caused by a bug and not a policy violation, the social network said.

Several regional daily newspapers, such as The Mercury serving Pottstown, Pennsylvania, started seeing in late July that stories covering developments on the issue of same-sex marriage were mysteriously disappearing from their pages on Facebook. A post Friday at the website for the Poynter Institute, a journalism education and training center, called attention to the issue.

"In all likelihood this was a bug and not a policy violation," a Facebook spokeswoman said Friday, referring specifically to The Mercury's issues. If it had been a policy violation, the page administrators would have received a notification of the article removals, which they did not, Facebook said.

The circumstances surrounding some of the posts' disappearances are a bit odd. At The Mercury, for instance, online editor Eileen Faust noticed the trend when a local county began issuing licenses to same-sex couples on July 24. Roughly five to six articles disappeared from Facebook after they were posted, she said, but no stories covering other topics disappeared in a similar way.

The articles that disappeared covered news dealing with both support and opposition to same-sex marriage, she said.

The paper has not experienced any major issues with articles disappearing since then, but that may only be because The Mercury has not been posting as many articles on same-sex marriage, Faust said.

"We're going to keep an eye on this," she added in an interview.

The Mercury's posts on same-sex marriage have since been restored to the paper's page on Facebook, the social network said.

Other regional newspaper companies, such as 21st Century Media papers in the Philadelphia region and papers owned by the Los Angeles News Group, have also noticed that their stories on same-sex marriage have disappeared from their Facebook pages, The Mercury reported in its coverage of the issue.

21st Century Media and the Los Angeles News Group could not be immediately reached to comment.

Though The Mercury paper's issues were probably caused by a bug or some kind of glitch, Facebook said, the issue did arise just before the company announced an aggressive new strategy to better detect controversial content on its site that may be violent, graphic or sexual in nature.

Facebook has a complicated way for classifying what is offensive content and what is not. In terms of graphic content, "We understand that graphic imagery is a regular component of current events, but must balance the needs of a diverse community," the site says in its community standards.

The Mercury's Faust said she would like to have a more direct contact at Facebook to communicate with when issues occur. "We can't easily connect or get a response from them," she said.

Zach Miners covers social networking, search and general technology news for IDG News Service. Follow Zach on Twitter at @zachminers. Zach's e-mail address is zach_miners@idg.com

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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Facebook eyes mesh networks to connect users and businesses

IDG News Service - Facebook has designed a system that would allow individuals and advertisers to make direct connections to those physically nearby that share similar interests or are open to receiving certain advertisements.

The company's work was outlined in a U.S. patent filing for a "wireless social networking" system that was published this week and represents a further step towards advertising and communication that is locally targeted.

Under the envisioned system, a wireless device would establish a connection with other wireless devices nearby. The communication wouldn't run via the Internet but would be based on a direct link between the devices. Each device might be linked to one or many other devices, depending on the density of people in a certain area, and each would be open to sending, receiving and relaying messages as part of the mesh network.

Because the network is based on direct connections, the approximate location of users can be determined. For example, if a device has a 100 meter range then all other devices it is in direct contact with could be determined to be within 100 meters. If those devices acted as relays, then a second level of devices could be determined to be within 200 meters and so on. The number of relays, or "hops," lies at the heart of the envisaged system.

The system outlined in the patent application envisages users setting preferences for receiving or communicating with others based on interest and proximity. Facebook calls the combination of these two factors an "interest metric."

"In general, the wireless device may enable messaging communications with wireless neighbors that have higher interest metrics and avoid enabling messaging communications with wireless neighbors with lower interest metrics," the application said.

Users would categorize themselves as individuals, businesses and advertisers with further sub categorize for finer distinctions.

"In one example, the neighbor type 'restaurant' may be sub-divided into multiple sub-groups, such as 'Italian,' 'Thai,' 'French,' and others. In another example, the neighbor characteristics depend on the content advertised by the neighbor, such as the specific value of store discounts. In addition, the neighbor characteristics may indicate a neighbor's interests or social activities, such as interests in poker, science fiction, or kung-fu movies," the application said.

"The user may assign different interest metrics to different neighbor characteristics. Hence, the user may set the interest metrics to the highest value for the individuals interested in poker, the medium value for the stores advertising free pizza, and the smallest value for stores advertising discounts on winter clothes that are less than 20 percent off. As a result, the wireless device may prevent messaging communications with the stores advertising discounts on winter clothes, because these stores' have interest metrics that are too low for the user."

Reprinted with permission from IDG.net. Story copyright 2012 International Data Group. All rights reserved.

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Media Alert: July 31, 2013 - Facebook Stock Rebound: UMD-Smith Expert Comments

MEDIA ALERT: July 31, 2013
Attention: Finance Reporters

Facebook Stock Rebound: UMD-Smith Expert Comments

COLLEGE PARK, Md. - David Kass, Tyser Teaching Fellow in finance at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, comments on Facebook’s price per share rebounding to near its $38 IPO level (from May 2012) after trading as low as $17.55 last September.

The Smith School has an in-house facility for live or taped interviews via fiber-optic line for television or multimedia content.

"The reason for this increase is a much better-than-expected earnings report. Revenues and profits were higher than analyst forecasts, especially for mobile users. Revenue increased 53 percent versus second quarter 2012, while operating profit increased 54 percent. Revenue from advertising ($1.6 billion) represented 88 percent of total revenue and a 61 percent increase from the same quarter last year. Mobile advertising revenue represented 41 percent of advertising revenue for second quarter 2013.

"If Facebook can continue to grow its advertising revenues rapidly, especially in the high growth mobile area, the outlook for its stock performance is very good. However, Facebook's price-earnings ratio, which exceeds 50:1, leaves little room for disappointment.”

Kass has held senior positions with the Federal Trade Commission, General Accounting Office, Department of Defense, and the Bureau of Economic Analysis. His teaching includes advanced financial management and business finance, and he has launched a Smith School “Warren Buffett” blog. He has appeared on Bloomberg TV, CNBC, PBS Nightly Business Report and others.

Phone/Email: 301-405-9683, dkass@rhsmith.umd.edu
Bio: www.rhsmith.umd.edu/finance/faculty/kass.aspx
Twitter: twitter.com/DrDavidKass

About the University of Maryland's Robert H. Smith School of Business
The Robert H. Smith School of Business is an internationally recognized leader in management education and research. One of 12 colleges and schools at the University of Maryland, College Park, the Smith School offers undergraduate, full-time and part-time MBA, executive MBA, online MBA, MS in business, PhD and executive education programs, as well as outreach services to the corporate community. The school offers its degree, custom and certification programs in learning locations in North America and Asia.

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