Today at I/O, Google rebranded “Hangouts” as a new unified, cross-platform messaging system. It lets people text, photo, and group video message across Hangouts’ Android and iOS apps, plus its Gmail and Google+ site integrations. Hangouts rolls out today, replacing Google Talk [GChat] and G+ Messenger. While it doesn’t support SMS yet, it could challenge Facebook Messaging and Apple’s iMessage.

For over a year, whispers from GigaOm, Droid Life  and others signaled Google would undertake a big unification of its fragmented messaging offering. Today Google will offer new free iOS and Android Hangout apps, the Google+ integration, and you can upgrade from Google Talk to Hangouts by clicking on your photo in the Gmail chat list. There are currently no plans for other platforms like Windows Phone or Blackberry.

Google’s Vic Gundotra said at I/O today in San Francisco that “Technology should get out of the way so you can live, learn, and love.”  Operating systems and devices shouldn’t matter. You just want to talk with those you care about. That’s the point of the revamped Hangouts. It brings humans and conversations to the forefront.

Hangouts Is The Messaging Kitchen Sink

Presence, Circles, And Delivery

Let’s take a closer look at the features Hangouts offer. Presence, or knowing when friends are available to chat, is a big focus. You can see when friends are on Hangouts, if they’re currently typing, and if they’ve seen your messages [also known as read receipts]. Using Google+ Circles, you can select specific friends or a whole group to start a chat with.

Hangouts takes care to deliver your messages to whichever web interface or mobile app your friends are using. If you’re offline, Hangouts will store your messages until you return. Unlike Google Talk, it won’t send you an email every time you get a message while offline. It only pings you by email if someone starts a conversation with you while you’re away. Hangouts won’t send you duplicate notifications on different platforms, and you can snooze notifications all together if you need some quiet time.

The idea is that you can start, stop, and restart a conversation as you move between platforms, and you can chat with friends across the desktop, Android, and iOS devices.

Text, Emoji, Photos, And Video

Of course you can send simple text messages, but where Hangouts shines is in vivid multi-media communication. To spice up your words, you can add any of 850 hand-drawn emoji. You can send photos in Hangouts, which are saved to a saved to a Google+ album that you and you conversation partners can view, edit, and share later. In fact, you can go back and view your photo and messaging history at any time, or you can turn history off so your dispatches aren’t saved.

The crown jewel of Hangouts is its namesake’s video chat. You can talk face to face with up to 10 friends at once. When you’re in a video chat, you’ll see who is talking in a big window while the rest of your chat partners are shown in tiles below. Friends’ Hangouts will ring when you call them, and they’ll get notified if they miss the digital meetup.

But Hangouts video isn’t just a group FaceTime. Google added a bunch of bells and whistles. You can add visual and sound effects or make use of special Hangouts apps. So if you want to wear a virtual pirate hat or set off some fireworks, you can. You can watch YouTube videos simultaneously with friends while laughing together, and take screenshots to capture moments for later.

No SMS, Yet

The biggest feature missing from Hangouts is the ability to send and receive SMS messages to and from friends who don’t have a Hangouts app installed. This means Hangouts isn’t truly universal. Several of its competitors allow it, including Apple’s iMessage and Facebook’s Messenger For Android (but not for iOS).

So if you want to pull mom into a Hangout, you might have to send her a standard SMS from your phone and tell her to install the Hangouts app. That could be significant stumbling block. However, Google tells us SMS support is one of the most requested features from Hangouts testers, so I wouldn’t be surprised if it comes in a future update.

Oddly, Google tells us that in some countries, feature phone users, but not smartphone users, can participate in Hangouts via SMS. This should help it reach more people in the developing world, a core area for growth of messaging apps.

Other missing features include voice messages or VoIP, but you could just use a video call without looking at the screen to approximate voice calling. There’s also no Hangouts On Air broadcasting to YouTube yet.

Why Google Needs Unified Messaging

The messaging space has become a battleground recently with independent messaging apps like WhatsApp and Line competing with Apple, Facebook, and Google to rule private communication. Everyone wants to become the high-tech successor to SMS.

For Google, messaging could create a wealth of engagement and monetization options. Of course Google could monetize Hangouts directly by cramming ads in it somewhere, or selling special effects for video chat and stickers for text.

A stronger, cross-platform chat experience in Gmail could boost time spent there, where Google already shows ads. It could also finally give people a real reason to use Google+.

Most importantly, though, Hangouts could humanize Google. Still viewed as a search and ads company, people don’t think about it first when they want to socialize. Hangouts leverages all of Google’s powerful technology to bring people closer together.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook released an update for its iOS app today with a number of small changes and improvements, including faster loading for events and a way for users to easily save photos from Facebook to their phone.

Events was one of the sections that hadn’t yet been completely rebuilt for speed like the News Feed, photos, messages and other areas have. Now, the main events page and individual events themselves seem to load much quicker. This could lead to more RSVPs and interactions on the event page from mobile now that the product is not so slow.

Now when viewing a photo fullscreen, there’s a new ellipsis icon with options to save the photo, share it or report it. This makes these functions more accessible for users. Previously, a user had to take a screenshot of their phone to save an image, or leave fullscreen view to share or report it.

In this update, Facebook also seems to be testing an emphasis on group messaging with a new group message composer in the messages section and a group chats list in the chat menu. It was possible to start and quickly access group messages before, but this makes the process a bit more efficient, while also reminding users that they can use Facebook for this purpose.

A note in the app’s change log mentions “improved places editing when checking in on iPhone,” but we haven’t noticed any difference yet.

When Facebook first released its latest iOS update on Monday, it included the wrong app icon, but it has since released another version with the correct one.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook plans to announce its 2013 first quarter earnings tomorrow after the stock market closes.

Analysts expect earnings of 13 cents per share on revenue of $1.44 billion during the period of Jan. 1 to March 31. In Q4 2012, which included the holiday season, Facebook had earnings of 17 cents per share on revenue of $1.585 billion.

Here we’ll review the changes Facebook made in the first quarter across each of its areas of monetization.

Ads

Last year advertising made up 84 percent of Facebook’s overall revenue. In the first quarter of this year, the social network introduced new targeting capabilities and made a number of adjustments to the look and performance of its ads. The company also continued to ramp up the amount of ads in News Feed and on mobile, adding a three-in-one “Pages You May Like” unit and a new type of Page-Like ads to the mobile feed.

Partnerships with data vendors Datalogix, Epsilon, Acxiom and BlueKai opened up the opportunities for advertisers to reach new audiences based on third-party data, such as offline purchase behavior. This feature was in limited beta during Q1, but rolled out more widely as “partner categories” earlier this month.

Lookalike Audiences, which help advertisers target users similar to those in their Custom Audience databases, was another exciting new beta feature for advertisers last quarter. Facebook launched it globally in March.

A tool that was available for most advertisers throughout the quarter was conversion tracking. This allows advertisers to measure and optimize their ads leading off-Facebook. It’s particularly important to direct response advertisers and app developers.

Other improvements for DR advertisers were an increase in the size of link previews in News Feed and a redesign for mobile and desktop, which could make ads larger, more visual and even more effective. Facebook also launched a small test to introduce Facebook Exchange Ads in the desktop feed just before Q1 ended.

Tests of the “Promote Page” button, which rolled out globally today, might have started to have in impact on SMB advertising last quarter.

Game Payments 

Developer fees from in-game purchases make up the vast majority of Facebook’s payments revenue. In Q4 2012, only $5 million of its $256 million in payments revenue was from sources besides games.

Facebook announced last quarter that more than 250 million people play games on Facebook each month. The company also said it has seen an increase in users who spend money in Facebook games monthly.

Facebook did a number of things in Q1 to optimize its channels for game discovery and promotion. It tweaked the recommendations bar on canvas games to increase installs 5x over the last several months, improve the bookmarks bar menu 17 percent, notifications 15 percent, and App Center 30 percent. The company also promoted games in a homepage banner earlier this year and started running new News Feed stories about the games a user’s friends play.

However, Zynga, which has made up a large portion of Facebook’s payments revenue in the past has seen drop-off in revenue as players shift to mobile. That could have an impact on Facebook as well, though the social network has been seeking to diversify its platform with international developers and a better range in game genres.

Gifts

Facebook says that it expects Gifts to continue to grow slowly, but believes it could be a big business over time. For now, the company is working to get the user experience right. It is for the most part limited to the U.S., though at the start of April, Facebook began letting international users buy gifts for their friends in the U.S. That happened after Q1 had ended so it wouldn’t have an effect on revenue.

At the end of January, the social network introduced Facebook Card, a resusable gift card that can be loaded with balances for different retailers when a user’s friends buy them gifts through Facebook. It launched with very few partners, Jamba Juice, Olive Garden, Sephora and Target. Since then, Facebook has added Walgreens, Burger King, Outback Steakhouse and Staples, but awareness of Facebook Card still seems very low.

Facebook has expanded its overall Gifts inventory significantly and added many more options at lower price points. The company ran a promotion to give users $4 off a gift of $5 or more. This enabled users to send users to, for example, send a $5 Starbucks gift card for only $1. The social network also heavily promoted Gifts around Valentine’s Day, created a new dashboard with a user’s purchase history and prompts to buy more gifts for friends, as well as began inserting Gift calls to action within News Feed next to stories about friends with good news.

User Promoted Posts

Another small revenue stream is user Promoted Posts, which enable users to pay to get their personal posts to the top of their friends’ News Feeds. Facebook said this feature made up the majority of its $5 million non-game payments revenue in Q4 2012.

This February, Facebook expanded the feature to allow users to promote posts their friends made.

Paid Messages

At the end of 2012, Facebook announced a small test that will allow some users to pay to send direct messages to another user’s inbox rather than their “other” folder. This started as a very limited test in the U.S., but has expanded to the U.K. now as well.

Most messages cost $1 to send to a user’s inbox, but for some celebrities and popular figures, Facebook is testing higher price points, up to even $100 to message CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook has added a new icon to News Feed posts to indicate whether the user is available to chat.

If a user is online, a green dot will appear next to their name along with their post. Users can click the green dot to open up a chat window and start a conversation. This could encourage users to start private messages with friends after they see one of their posts in the feed.

For now the feature applies to News Feed posts but not those on a user’s Timeline.

Facebook is putting increasing emphasis on its chat and messaging system. The new mobile Chat Heads feature in Facebook Home and Messenger makes it easier for users to read and respond to messages even when they’re in the middle of other tasks on their phone. This latest desktop feature also deeper integrates chat into another popular activity: browsing News Feed.

Some users with the new News Feed are also seeing two chat menus, one on the left and one on the right, as seen in the image below from AllFacebook writer Justin Lafferty. Names have been blocked out with white and black, but you can see the chat list in both the left-hand sidebar and in a window on the right. This duplicate functionality may just be a temporary bug.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook names UCSF chancellor to board – Facebook this week named UC San Francisco Chancellor Susan Desmond-Hellmann to its board of directors. Desmond-Hellmann was previously president of product development at Genentech, where Facebook CFO David Ebersman previously served as chief financial officer. Desmond-Hellmann is also on the board at Procter & Gamble, a major advertiser on the social network. Desmond-Hellmann will receive an annual retainer fee of $50,000 and 20,000 restricted stock units, which will vest over four years. Facebook’s other board members are Mark Zuckerberg, Sheryl Sandberg, Marc Andreessen, Erskine Bowles, James Breyer, Don Graham, Reed Hastings and Peter Thiel.

Facebook brings free calling to some Android users – An update to Messenger for Android this week includes free voice calling for users in Canada. The feature is available to iOS users in several territories, but this is the first instance of it in the Android app. Users can call their friends who also have the latest version of Messenger and talk for free over Wi-Fi or using their existing data plan.

iOS Messenger update focuses on group conversations – The latest version of Messenger for iOS released this week includes a number of updates related to group messaging. A new prompt encourages users to name their conversations with multiple friends — a feature that was previously buried. The app also supports search for existing group conversations, whereas before users could only search for friends and other users to message. Facebook also says users can access their group messages from the chat sidebar by swiping left, but we did not find this feature.

15M business pages now on Facebook – There are more than 15 million business pages on the social network, Facebook Director of Small Business Dan Levy announced this week at the Borell’s Local Advertising Conference in New York. That’s up from 13 million announced in December. Overall including fan pages for celebrities, community organizations and other interests, there are more than 50 million pages with ten or more Likes on Facebook. Levy also shared that more than 8 million accounts using the Pages Manager app since it launched last year.

Facebook looks for office space near roots at Harvard – The company is reportedly seeking 7,000 square feet of space in an area of Cambrige, Mass., near Harvard University for three dozen software engineers that would be hired this year. The office would also be near MIT, another top source of talent. Microsoft, Google and Nokia also have offices in Cambridge

Unified updates enterprise software with News Feed in mind – Social marketing company Unified this week announced the latest quarterly release of its Social Operating Platform, which includes new tools to optimize brands’ Facebook posts and help them determine which to promote with paid media. The Minilytics application is a feature that came from PageLever, a Facebook analytics company that Unified acquired in January. Unified also introduced support for Foursquare advertising, adding to options for ad campaigns on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and YouTube.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Clipix, a bookmarking service that lets you organize links, documents, photos and videos, just announced that it is adding email to its repertoire of supported formats. Users can now forward their emails to a private Clipix address to save and organize their messages. This, the company says, will help its users ” to instantly bookmark and organize emails they would like to revisit, making important emails accessible from any device and location.”

The service, which launched in the middle of last year, puts an emphasis on privacy. Clipix CEO and founder Oded Berkowitz tells us that many of his users have “requested the ability to clip emails just as simply as they can clip links, videos, documents and photos. The new feature solves a problem most individuals face each day, and saving emails in a safe location is as easy as forwarding it to a private Clipix folder.”

Once a user has forwarded an email, it will automatically be stored in a designated “Clipboard.” Sadly, though, once the email is in the service, you can’t really answer it from there anymore because Clipix converts them into a PDF file. At first glance then, one could easily discount this feature given that getting to your email isn’t generally an issue and most email clients already make it very easy to organize your messages.

The advantage here, the company argues, is that Clipix gives you a spot to save emails with important attachments like receipts and other documents you want to save. Sadly, though, it currently takes two separate actions to save both an email and its attachments. The next version of Clipix, however, will allow you to save both with just one click.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook yesterday updated its iOS app to version 5.4, giving users a few new features in what could be one of the world’s most complex and layered mobile apps.

The update brings with it the ability to share voice messages, much like iOS’s Voice Memos, letting users record a cute little message and send it through the app to friends. The update also lets users record and share video from right within the app.

Facebook users have long had the ability to send 60-second voice messages within Facebook’s Messenger app, but the functionality has been brought over to the main app.

Users can send a voice message by tapping the plus button under the Messages tab. From there, click Record and simply hold the button to record your message. When you release, your message will be automatically sent unless you slide your finger off the button, in which case the message will be canceled.

Along with video and voice functionality, Facebook has also improved Places support on the app’s Nearby tab, letting users check in with a bit more accuracy.

Facebook has struggled on mobile, but there have been clear improvements in the past year. The company has introduced various mobile apps like Poke, Messenger, and Camera, while still making clear progress on the main Facebook app. In fact, Zuckerberg believes that mobile is where the money is.

The update is available for free in the App Store.

Article courtesy of TechCrunch

Facebook is restricting access to friend data for Voxer, the mobile messenger and walkie-talkie app it now identifies as a competitor, a Facebook spokesperson confirms.

Voxer told AllThingsD today that it was given 48-hour notice that it would lose access to the feature that allows users to connect with Facebook and find friends to message with Voxer. Many apps use this feature to grow their user base and make it easy for users to find value in their services, however, Facebook has a policy against competing social networks using its data this way.

Voxer says it does not consider itself a social network, and Facebook likely didn’t view them as a competing service until recently. Facebook added voice messaging to its platform earlier this month.

A Facebook spokesperson, who could not offer an official statement and asked not to be quoted directly, told us that the company’s stance is that apps that duplicate a core functionality of Facebook should not be able to take data out of Facebook without sharing anything back. That justification is not laid out explicitly in the social network’s platform policy, which simply reads:

“Competing social networks: (a) You may not use Facebook Platform to export user data into a competing social network without our permission; (b) Apps on Facebook may not integrate, link to, promote, distribute, or redirect to any app on any other competing social network.”

So far we have not heard of any other messaging app getting the same notice as Voxer, pictured right. The Facebook spokesperson said he was not sure whether other apps were facing similar situations. HeyTell, a push-to-talk app which uses Facebook very similarly to Voxer, has not responded to requests for information. Sidecar is another messaging and calling app that uses the friend finder feature, but we have not heard back from them.

Messaging apps that use the Chat API to sync with Facebook’s messaging service, such as Microsoft’s Skype and T-Mobile’s Bobsled, seem to be spared because every message within those apps creates a message within Facebook as well, thus “giving back” to Facebook. Voxer does not do this.

Messaging apps that use Facebook login to help users register faster but do not pull in their Facebook contacts also seem to be in the clear. Viber is an example. Viber, like another messaging app Kik, enable users to post about the app on Facebook to encourage friends to join, but they do not use Facebook’s API for sending invites to specific friends. Pinger integrates Facebook to sync users’ photos but it does not use the friend finder feature.

Nonetheless, Facebook’s written policy does not make these distinctions clear. There’s also no guarantee that those messaging apps will be allowed the same access in the future. It’s this ambiguous and volatile environment that makes developers wary of investing too much in building on Facebook’s platform. The idea that an app could be copied by Facebook and then lose access to features because it is suddenly a competitor is sure to give many developers pause. When the social network uses these hardball tactics against smaller developers that could be a threat to its dominance, the image of Facebook as an open platform is tarnished and fewer companies will take the risk of integrating Facebook.

We did not hear back from Voxer for comment, but the company told AllThingsD that only about a third of Voxer users sign in with Facebook and they typically use the friend finder to connect with people who already use the app. The company says engagement tends to be the same for users whether they connect with Facebook or not, so having friends data access revoked might not have a material impact.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Facebook today released an update to its main Android application, which gives users more control over how they share items from mobile News Feed, as well as the option to send voice messages to their friends.

When users tap the share button from the feed, they’ll now have the option to set the location for where they want to share the story. Previously on mobile, users could only post items to their own Timeline, but now they can select a friend’s Timeline, a group or a page. Unlike with the desktop share button, users cannot use the mobile share button to send something to another user via private message.

Android users can now send their friends voice messages from the main app. This feature was recently added to the standalone Messenger application, and because Facebook uses the same code base, it functions the same way now within the main app. Voice calls, which are available for some iOS users, are not yet an option for Android.

Facebook also says photo viewing has gotten faster in this latest update.

Images via AllFacebook

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook

Some users see option to message Zuckerberg for $100 - As part of Facebook’s paid message test, some users are seeing an option to send a message to CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s inbox for $100. When Facebook began the paid message test, the company said it would charge $1 to have messages rerouted from a user’s Other folder to the main inbox, but that it would also try higher price points for public figures and celebrities. As for the $100-price tag for Zuckerberg, Facebook told Mashable, “We are testing some extreme price points to see what works to filter spam.” Image via Mashable. 

Facebook issues grants to local nonprofits – Facebook has given $200,000 in grants to 42 nonprofits in Menlo Park and East Palo Alto, according to the Mercury News. The donations are part of a deal with the city of Menlo Park that gives Facebook permission to expand its headquarters there. The grants range from $2,500 to $5,000 and support causes including youth programs, food distribution, small business aid and clothes for homeless kids.

Facebook solves password security flaw – Facebook has fixed an issue that would have allowed someone to change a user’s password without the user’s knowledge, according to researcher Sow Ching Shiong who discovered the security flaw. Previously, someone could visit Facebook.com/hacked on a logged in account and reset the password without being asked for the original password. Since the discovery, Facebook asks users to verify their password before proceeding.

Facebook customer satisfaction worse than any other social network - Facebook scored the lowest out of any social networks in the latest American Customer Satisfaction Index ratings. Facebook’s score of 61 put it last among social networks and third worst of all companies in the index. Facebook’s score is tied with that of cable and internet provider Comcast. Google+ and Wikipedia came in first among social networks with a score of 78. The ACSI ratings are based on customer surveys.

Article courtesy of Inside Facebook