Facebook Phone Flops

Wow, it’s even worse of an idea than I thought.

Zach Epstein, HTC First discontinued by AT&T: First ‘Facebook phone’ a flop

The HTC First, or “Facebook phone” as many prefer to call it, is officially a flop. It certainly wasn’t a good sign when AT&T dropped the price of HTC’s First to $0.99 just one month after its debut, and now BGR has confirmed that HTC and Facebook’s little experiment is nearing its end. BGR has learned from a trusted source that sales of the HTC First have been shockingly bad. So bad, in fact, that AT&T has already decided to discontinue the phone.

Our source at AT&T has confirmed that the HTC First, which is the first smartphone to ship with Facebook Home pre-installed, will soon be discontinued and unsold inventory will be returned to HTC. How much unsold inventory is there? We don’t have an exact figure, but things aren’t looking good. According to our source, AT&T sold fewer than 15,000 units nationwide through last week when the phone’s price was slashed to $0.99.

I wonder if that’s the end of Facebook Home, or just this variant?

Source: bgr.com

14 May 2013 Permalink

Tech Writers Surprised At Facebook ‘Pay-For-Play’

I confess that I was surprised to read Nick Bilton’s piece the other day, where he finally realized that Facebook’s EdgeRank is siphoning off his followers as part of an ‘advertising’ model that is more like a Mafia shakedown than advertising. Other tech writers (Anthony De Rosa, Felix Salmon) also seemed surprised. But EdgeRank is year-old news, and many have griped a long time ago:

Ryan Holiday, How Facebook Gets Away With Being Broken On Purpose

I don’t mean to pile on any of these well-meaning writers. (Some, like Zach Seward at Quartz, pretty much nailed it with his analysis of how Facebook tweaks “the black box that is EdgeRank,” in order to promote and incentivize features). They are right to be outraged and perplexed. Facebook’s pay-for-placement program is ridiculous. Except it’s been ridiculous for quite some time. And apparently part of the reason Facebook has been able to get away with it is that few media gatekeepers, who are supposed to follow this stuff for a living, know how the platform really works.

The common dismissal I’ve seen from far too many journalists–“how else should Facebook make money?”–implies that they or their sources just don’t understand the ad business. They aren’t able to see that Facebook’s sponsored story play is fundamentally different from most ad models.

Take Tumblr’s new ad platform Radar, on which I have done six-figures worth of buying for my client American Apparel. To create it, Tumblr designed entirely new advertising space on the platform that people have to pay to be a part of. In that case, buyers didn’t previously have access to it so if they want it, they have to pay for it. Tumblr’s interest is to make that space as attractive and valuable as possible to buyers, so they’ll pay for it. In this case, our interests are aligned–however long it took Tumblr to get here.

That’s very different from Facebook’s model, in which the worse Facebook posts ‘work’ for brands, the more brands will need to pay Facebook. That means that Facebook and I now have divergent interests. Intentionally or not, the less my posts show up, the more I need to spend to cover the difference, especially since brands have invested in and become dependent on Facebook over the years.

And all the more reason for all of us — including brands — to ditch Facebook, just like all the teenagers are.

Source: betabeat.com

5 March 2013 22 Permalink

Silent Circle: Encrypted Messaging

Nicole Perlroth, Security Pioneer Creates Service to Encrypt Phone Calls and Text Messages

Phil Zimmermann, the creator of Pretty Good Privacy, is widely considered the godfather of encryption software. After making his software available for download in the 1990s, he was the subject of a criminal investigation that was eventually dropped in 1996. Today, his P.G.P. software is the most widely used e-mail encryption software in the world.

But these days, Mr. Zimmermann is busy with his new venture, Silent Circle, which provides encryption for smartphone users. At a security conference in San Juan, Puerto Rico, Mr. Zimmermann introduced the service, which is available for Android and iPhone. Silent Circle lets users make encrypted phone calls, send text messages and do  videoconferencing. Messages are scrubbed completely from the phone after a predetermined amount of time. Communications are secured using a new, peer-reviewed open-source encryption technology

[…]

His target market, Mr. Zimmermann said, is soldiers based overseas, business people who operate in known surveillance states, human rights activists, dissidents and (more recently) journalists. Since starting Silent Circle in October, Mr. Zimmermann, said, he has spent nearly all his time in Washington signing up government agencies and contractors.

He was adamant that the service be subscription-based. Individual users pay $20 a month, while businesses are charged per employee. He said he was often asked why people would pay to use the service when they could just as easily make free calls with Skype.

“I tell them go ahead and use Skype — I don’t even want to talk to you. This is for serious people interested in serious cryptography,” he said. “We are not Facebook. We are the opposite of Facebook.”

A large and growing number of people, including perhaps employees who don’t want their employers snooping at email or messages.

6 February 2013 11 Permalink

Study Suggests Kids Way Over Report Facebook Use, But Didn’t Track Mobile Use

Asking students about their Facebook use leads to answers that are wildly unreliable:

Rebecca J. Rosen, Report: You Do Not Use Facebook Nearly as Much as You Think You Do

A new study reports (pdf) found that college students estimated that they spent 149 minutes *per day* on Facebook, but when monitoring software was installed on their computers, the data revealed a much smaller number: just 26 minutes.

Reynol Junco, a scholar with Harvard’s Berkman Center, says that the students in the study did have a pretty good sense of their relative Facebook use: Students who were heavier users estimated higher; those who were lighter users suggested as much. But ALL were wildly off when it came to the absolute estimate. (Though the number of students participating in the study was quite small — just 45 — Junco says the effect was so huge that the result is nevertheless reliable.)

Why were the students so off in their self-reports? Junco has four theories.

“It could be,” Junco said to me, “that the self-report questions aren’t specific enough.” The question students answered was “how much time do you spend on Facebook each day?” which seems pretty straightforward — except that that phrase “spend on” is actually a bit ambiguous. In focus groups after the study was complete, when Junco asked for their own theories about the results, “a lot of them — and this was very surprising — a lot of them said that they would take the question to mean how much time to do they spend *thinking* about Facebook,” Junco explained. Spending time on something doesn’t just mean the act of being on Facebook, but the act of expending mental energy on it. That ambiguity may have led students to overestimate their time on the site.

Another explanation — one that Junco particularly likes, though he needs more research to support it — is that students might have internalized societal expectations about their social-media use. “Society tells youths that they use technology a lot. They hear it from everybody. They hear it from the popular media; they hear it from adults; they hear it from their teachers,” he said. “That would lead them, not very consciously but possibly subconsciously, to give very inflated estimates.”

The third possibility is that student might be using Facebook from mobile devices that the software used in the study doesn’t track, in which case the whole study might be wrong. This is my bet. The kids might be Facebooking on their mobiles half the time they are hanging around with pals.

And the fourth possibility is that they are just bad at estimating how much time they are doing something.

Source: The Atlantic

19 January 2013 33 Permalink