Modifications to ‘like’ and ‘share’ buttons, embedded posts make Facebook more public

 Facebook announced changes to its “like” and “share” buttons and improved its embeddable posts today, underlining the company’s purpose to grow as a platform for public sharing.

The new “like” and “share” buttons can be embedded on websites, cheering readers to recommend or show content to others. According to Facebook, these buttons increased the amount of liking and sharing activity by 5 percent. The company revamped the buttons back in November, but waited until today to roll them out to the common public. 

As for embedded posts, you can now adjust the width of what you’re embedding, which gives people more manage over how embedded posts appear on websites. And for people accessing Facebook on mobile, embedded posts will mechanically scale to the screen size. 

So if you want to embed, say, a music video posted by awesome Minnesota-based rapper Lizzo you can now control how wide it is. Strangely, you can’t control the height. Width wise, you have to stay between 330 and 750 pixels, presumably to prevent distortion.
Neither of these changes are major, but they emphasize how significant public sharing is to Facebook’s plan for the future.

 Even small adjustments can yield major traffic increases for shared content on Facebook, and since the company is doing everything it can to shift users into making their posts public and cheering them to share newsworthy content, optimizing this type of feature is important. Earlier today we reported about how Facebook is trying to help companies discover what users are saying, and that requires user info to be public.

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Google's DoubleClick To suggest Facebook Ad Exchange

Google DoubleClick announced that they will know be able to use Facebook Ad Exchange (FBX) to sell advertising through their DoubleClick Bid Manager, formerly known as request Media.

This will allow advertisers to pay for Facebook Ads through their DoubleClick Bid Manager, without having to go through Facebook openly for the ad space. It also brings the technology for DoubleClick advertisers to target Facebook users based on their visits to webpages outside of Facebook.

The choice to purchase ad inventory on FBX is not available instantly, but will be starting in a few months, according to Google DoubleClick. 

The connection between Google and Facebook has been contentious over the years, particularly with Google launching a competing social network, Google+. However, Facebook did confirm the Doubleclick Bid Manager to track ad impressions in August 2012. Both Google and Facebook have been short in their respective announcements.

 Google released a short blog post on their Doubleclick blog, while Facebook merely stated “We are happy that Google is joining Facebook Exchange. We think that applicable ads, targeted to the right people, are good for people and businesses.”

Google also purchased social agency Wildfire Interactive, a popular provider of Facebook contest applications, last year. Clearly, Google recognizes it is an significant space to be in, despite the fact Google and Facebook are competitors on many levels.

What seems the catalyst for Doubleclick’s addition is that Facebook advertisers were getting increasingly disgruntled over the fact Facebook Ad Exchange excluded Google. Amazon’s Advertising Platform was also apparently granted access to the Facebook Ad Exchange.
There is no concrete timeline for when FBX and Doubleclick Bid Manager will be formally connected, outside of the “in a few months” comment on their blog post.

Facebook Allows many Users To add To Shared Photo Albums

Up to 50 Facebook users can now add to the new shared photo albums that Facebook is opening to roll out. Each individual user can add up to 200 photos, which means albums could contain as many as 10,000 photos. This is quite a step up from the previous limit of 1000 photos that could only be added to users’ own albums.

Bob Baldwin, the software engineer at Facebook who spearheaded the project, had this to say about one of the frustrations they are trying to solve with this new characteristic:

“Right now, if you were at a party and there were three different albums created, you might not be able to see all the photos .which is kind of confusing and frustrating.”

Speaking of parties, this feature is related to Google +’s party mode, where many users who are visitors of an associated event can share their photos and videos in real time.

The new shared albums feature will also be good for enhancing user appointment in Facebook Groups, and preserving memories of large life events attended by many people such as weddings, graduations, etc.

As far as privacy settings are concerned, Facebook users can choose to make these shared albums visible to the public, friends of contributors, or just the contributors themselves. The idea of shared photo albums supposedly came about as a result of one of Facebook’s company-wide hackathons.

Facebook has begun rolling out shared photo albums to a small number of users already. At first it will be a desktop-only attribute and will expand to all English users before being rolled out internationally.