Pulse2 Technology and Social Media News » Bret Taylor

Facebook Paid Game Developers $1.4 Billion In 2011

Amit Chowdhry — Tue, 06 Mar 2012 19:34:01 +0000

Facebook has paid developers over $1.4 billion in 2011. Facebook games product manager Matt Wyndowe made the milestone announcement at the Game Developers Conference. Wyndowe said that Facebook has gotten very serious about supporting games on Facebook despite the market being

“As early as 2010, we didn’t have a dedicated game team. Now we have 40 full-time people on games. We meet weekly with Zuck (CEO) and Bret Taylor (CTO).” Wyndowe said that Facebook has been working on improving game distribution for the past 6 months to make it easier to discover games on the home page and through interactions with friends.

User engagement from the “recently played” notification from the Facebook News Feed has increased 60%. Wooga CEO Jens Begemann and Kixeye CEO Will Harbin talked about their experiences on the Facebook gaming platform. Wooga broke into the top 10 on Facebook. Kixeye is nowhere near the top 10, but they are one of the most profitable game companies on the platform.

“Our game design and approach is a bit unusual.” Kixeye focuses on hardcore games said Harbin. “With 845 million users on Facebook, it is a big slice of the world’s users. We have chosen Facebook out of its hyper accessibility.” Kixeye has a 97% male audience and the average session is 30 minutes. Their retention is seven months or more. There are millions of player versus player attacks per day. Kixeye sells speed-ups, which accounts for 85% of their revenue. Kixeye has been profitable for two years now and their revenue was up 11x in 2010.

Facebook Adds Application Permission Clarifications Pop-Up

Amit Chowdhry — Thu, 01 Jul 2010 17:50:41 +0000

One of the biggest problems with Facebook’s applications is that many people that used them did not know how much data they are allowing to be exploited. As a result Facebook decided to make privacy options simpler and they announced this week that there is now a new pop-up that will show just how much data you are allowing an application to use. The screenshot above is what the pop-up looks like when you are adding the JibJab application.

Every application automatically you add to Facebook automatically has access to your name, profile picture, gender, and networks. “This is information that is publicly available on Facebook to make it easy for your friends to find you, and in this case, to help you get started quickly with applications. You can always control which information you want to keep private through your privacy settings page, and you can remove applications from your application settings page at any time. You can also control which information your friends can share with the applications they use,” said Facebook CTO Bret Taylor.

Facebook Announces Agreement To Acquire FriendFeed

Amit Chowdhry — Mon, 10 Aug 2009 20:04:28 +0000

Facebook has announced today that they will be acquiring FriendFeed. This is not a shocker because Facebook previously made an attempt to buy out Twitter for $100 million in cash and the $400 million in stock. Over the last year, Facebook has rolled several FriendFeed-like features into the social network. One of the features they took from FriendFeed was the concept of “Like.”

One of FriendFeed’s popular features is that the more comments a story receives on the news feed, the more it floats up to the top. This concept is similar to the Reddit and Digg homepage. FriendFeed’s voting system is real-time, but Facebook’s news feed popular stories constantly has to be refreshed.

As part of the acquisition, FriendFeed’s team will be joining Facebook. This includes Paul Buchheit, Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh. Buchheit was responsible for early stage development of GMail over at Google.

Facebook sent out a press release regarding the acquisition. Check it out after the jump:

PALO ALTO, CALIF.—August 10, 2009—Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

[via TechCrunch]