Facebook’s Analytics Tool - Insights

In the era of internet and social media, even the person running a small business is going behind Facebook to promote his / her  business. You can create a Facebook page / application to promote your business on Facebook. To make your campaign a successful one on Facebook, you may want to know who is accessing the page and the effectiveness of your engagement, etc. Facebook has built an analytics tool called “Insights” and it is live for about six months now.  Facebook Insights give an insight into some of the key performance indicators like Monthly fan size growth, The average number of likes and comments, Unlikes and attrition rate, Demographics, etc.

Facebook Insights

“Facebook Insights provides Facebook Page owners and Facebook Platform developers with metrics around their content. By understanding and analyzing trends within user growth and demographics, consumption of content, and creation of content, Page owners and Platform developers are better equipped to improve their business with Facebook.” – Facebook

  

Insights dashboard is the single source for all your Facebook analytics needs for:

• Websites: Fully-integrated sites and those that use social plugins, or add a non-integrated domain in one easy step
• Applications: Including canvas, mobile, device, and desktop applications
• Facebook Pages: Including Pages created on Facebook.com and those that are part of the Open Graph protocol

Facebook has been continuously improving the dashboard with new metrics and making it easy for the admins to monitor. Apart from viewing the metrics on the Insights dashboard, you can also export the data as an excel sheet(xls) or Comma-separated file(csv). The accuracy of the count and external referrers for the page has been improved recently. Access Insights dashboard here. More information can be found here.

-- Varun

Facebook Developer Garage, Hyderabad

After being successful in several cities across the globe, Facebook Developer Garage finally came to the city where Facebook India office is located - Hyderabad. The idea of the Garage is to offer attendees a great insight into Facebook Open Graph and discuss about new technical ideas. The first edition of Developer Garage was organized at Hotel Golkonda, Hyderabad and was sponsored by Facebook itself, Intel and iridiumInteractive. David Recordon and Jonathan Hsu from Facebook gave an insight into the Facebook platform and talked about some of the open source projects which Facebook is working on.

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Highlights

• The event was kick started by Siddharth from iridiumInteractive who was also the host for the event. He talked about the evolution of social media, its need and the role of it in our life.
• David from Facebook was the next speaker. His presentation was all about Open Graph API and Social plug-ins. He started with the Facebook usage stats and the work culture at Facebook. "A lot of Facebook work starts as a hack". Then, he briefed the capabilities of the Graph API. The API has been built with the goal of making it simple and modern. Graph API supports simple authentication of OAuth 2.0. Real-time updates is another exciting thing part of the Graph API. Know more the Graph API here.
• Jonathan’s talk was focused on the technical pieces involved in Facebook. He walked us though the technical overview of the Facebook application. He introduced to us some of the open source projects contributed by Facebook. Some of the notable ones include Thrift, HipHop for PHP, Cassandra, etc. Facebook uses a wide spectrum of technology. PHP for UI. MySQL database. Apache Web Server. MemCached for caching. Varnish as HTTP accelerator. Other open source initiatives from Facebook can be found here.
• Then, it was time for the application developers to share their experiences in developing Facebook applications. Hasan from Merxius shared his experience in building Facebook application for football fans. He talked about the different monetization methods available for Facebook developers – Impression Ads, Pay per click Ads, Social Ads.
• The most exciting part of the event was catching up with Kalpana, the first Facebook India employee. Before joining Facebook, she has with Google for around six years. I have interacted with her earlier on twitter and just got the chance to catch up with her in person. She appreciated some of my scripts and gave me suggestions to improve them. She also expressed her interest in testing few other scripts that I am currently working on. Thanks for the appreciation. That will definitely boost my morale to do more. :)

Lowlights

• It looked like some of the developer sessions were planned on the fly. It would have been great had the agenda been planned in advance. Wish there were hands-on sessions as well.
• No free WiFi and poor mobile wireless signal. This has been a major hindrance for me in live tweeting / blogging.

Overall, it was a good learning experience. Came to know about some of the cool things Facebook is working on. Hoping that the events in the future get better from here on.

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [Sep 05, 2010]

In an effort to make the Twitter news available on a daily basis, I have created Varunkumar Nagarajan daily based on my tweets and the tweets of people whom I follow. I will continue to post the “This week on Twitter” series here.

Science & Technology

• Smallest Full Moon of 2010. Link.
• TEDxAmazonia. In the middle of world’s largest rain forest. Link.
• Eclipse day at GooglePlex 2010. Link.
• After Apple & Google, Yahoo jumps into TV. Link.
• Firefox 4 Beta 4 out. Link.
• MIT testing self-assembling solar cells. Link.

Industry News

• Kevin Rose steps down as CEO of digg. Link.
• Google acquires Angstro to compete with Facebook. Link.
• Google buys SocialDeck. Link.
• Google backs out of JavaOne. Link.

Social Networks

• Facebook testing “Subscribe” – its version of follow. Link.
• Twitter in Real Time. Link.

Google

• Call phones from Gmail. Link.
• Gmail gets priority inbox. Link.
• Blogger turned 11 and Google organized BloggerFiesta worldwide.
• Useful Gmail shortcuts. Link.
• Google releases Chrome 6 on its second birthday. Link.
• Google mobile gets a cool new YouTube channel. Link.
• Google can read SVG documents now. Link.
• Google reader gets full screen mode. Link.

Gadgets

• One-click rooting for Nexus One. Link.
• Unicode fonts on Android. Link.
• Apple Music event 2010. New iPod Touch, Nano announced. Link.
• Official page of Samsung Galaxy Tab. Link.
• The great big spreadsheet of all known Android devices. Link.

India

• Landline telephone number may soon sport a 10-digit number. Link.
• Book KSRTC bus tickets from your mobile. Link.

Programming

• Lazy loading of JavaScript. Link.
• Binding Python and Mozilla DOM. Link.

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [August 15, 2010]

Science & Technology

• Street level imagery from Microsoft. Street Slide. Link.
• Sun eruptions spit plasma at Earth. Link.
• Eco-friendly USB rechargeable batteries. Link.
• Kindle games. Link.
• Helicopter game using HTML5. Link.
• Make your old add-ons work with Firefox 4. Link.
• Skype files for IPO. Link.
• Mathematical breakthroughs. Link.
• JQuery for mobile announced. Link.
• Amazon opens UK Kindle store. Link.

Social Media

• “Who to follow” is live on Twitter.
• Twitter’s short link service. Link.
• “You both follow” feature is live on Twitter.
• Twitter now even more Torrent friendly. Link.

Google

• Google launches multiple account sign-in. Link.
• Google discontinued Wave. Link.
• Google’s Ultimate demo system. Link.
• Google updates the Contacts in GMail. Link.
• Flipping for Gesture search. Link.
• Product development at Google. Link.
• Google unveils Voice actions for Android. Link.

Gadgets

• JailBreakMe, the first web based Jailbreak for iPhone. Link.
• RIM announces its first touch phone. Blackberry Torch. Link.
• Two new Android based smart phones from Moto. Link.
• HTC Wildifre available in India for 16K. Link.
• Nexus One officially became a developer phone. Link.

India

• Malaysia plans new Visa system (VFS) for India. Link.
• Indian Govt. forms programmers’ army to hack systems of hostile nations. Link.
• Mobile Number portability by Oct 31. Link.

Sports

• Stumpy is chosen as the mascot for the 2011 cricket world cup. Link.

Events

• Speakers announced for TEDxChennai. Link.

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [August 01, 2010]

Science & Technology

• Why People think computers can’t. Link.
• Yahoo! Japan to use the Google search in future. Link.
• Oracle rebrands Java. Breaks Eclipse. Link.
• Time saving auto hotkeys for windows. Link.
• Firefox 3.6.8 released. Link.

Social Media

• Twitter testing inline photos and videos. Link.
• Twitter begins user stream testing. Link.
• Facebook questions beta is out. Link.

Google

• Google’s CEO says there is no need for ‘Google Me’. Link.
• How to get a Google Nexus One. Link.
• Google docs to get a new file type “Punch”. Link.
• Google CEO announces Zynga partnership. Link.
• Upcoming GMail features. Link.
• YouTube launches a music video discovery page. Link.
• YouTube’s new embedding code supports HTML5. Link.
• Google places for Android gets Yelp like interface. Link.
• Play hidden snake game in YouTube. Link.
• YouTube increases the max video length to 15 mins. Link.

Gadgets

• Jailbreaking iPhone is legal now. Link.
• Apple announces new products on its store including Mac Pro and Magic Trackpad. Link.
• Froyo for Samsung Galaxy S leaked. Link.
• Froyo for HTC Incredible leaked. Link.
• Amazon reveals new Kindle. Link.
• Smartpen – a pen which records and playback what you wrote. Link.
• Android user interface stencil kit. Link.

India

• ISB iDiya 2010, a national social idea challenge announced. Link.
• IT dept has extended the last day for tax filing to 4-Aug-2010 due to technical issues on e-filing site.Link.

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [July 25, 2010]

Science & Technology

• OpenStack. Open source cloud computing software. Link.
• Nokia Siemens acquires Motorola wireless unit for 1.2Bn USD. Link.
• Deploy your own satellite for $8000. Link.
• Regular expression for finding prime numbers. Link.
• Windows 7 keyboard shortcut. Link.
• What the hack? Link.
• Yahoo! Open hack day Banagalore 2010 was a grand success with 430 hackers and 110 info geeks.
• Intel Capital invests in cloud-based game streaming service Gaiki. Link.
• Piezoelectric batteries. Link.

Social Media

• Yahoo! Pulse available for everyone. Link.
• Facebook officially crosses 500 million users. Link.
• Apple’s real problem with the white iPhone4. Link.

Google

• Google introduces user policy management for Google Apps. Link.
• Google re-designs its image search interface. Link.
• Screen capture extension for Google Chrome. Link.
• Google Chrome tells you when sites are down for other users. Link.

Gadgets

• Apple iPhone 4 coming to India in October. Link.
• Swype Input interface sneaks into Windows 7 demo. Link.
• Google Nexus One sold out. Link.
• 58.8% of Android handsets run a recent OS version. Link.

India

• How to use the Indian Rupee symbol on websites? Link.

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [July 18, 2010]

Science & Technology

• The most important algorithms. Link.
• Space saving furniture. Link.
• Mouseless, the invisible computer mouse. Link.
• Amazon hooks students with a free year of Amazon Prime. Link.
• Amazon opens Super Computing service. Link.
• "SiteOnMobile" takes internet to the masses with low-end mobiles. Web access via SMS. Link.
• Which came first? Chicken or egg? Scientists say its chicken. Link.
• Apple buys Google Earth like product. Link.
• OpenSuse 11.3 released. Link.
• The world's only immortal animal. Link.
• Firefox 4 Beta 1 released. Link.
• Adobe Flash is going 3D. Link.

Social Media

• Employees challenged to crack Facebook security, succeed. Link.
• Twitter confirms analytics product. Link.
• Facebook's Open Graph going mobile. Link.

Google

• Google's URL shortener for your domain. Link.
• GMail gets rich text signatures. Link.
• Update on China. Link.
• Google Maps gets shortened URLs. Link.
• Google secretly invested in Zynga, preparing to launch Google Games? Link.
• Google's anagram easter egg. Link.
• App Inventor to ease application development on Android. Link.
• Picasa web integrates with Picnik. Link.
• Google Maps celebrated its fifth birthday. Link.
• YouTube hit by HTML vulnerability. Link.
• 4K videos coming to YouTube. Link.

Gadgets

• Android targets China and India for growth. Link.
• Browsing experience Android vs iPhone 4. Link.
• Apple iPhone 4 catches fire. Link.
• World's first mobile phone projector. Its Android based. Link.
• Apple to give away free cases to iPhone 4 users suffering from death grip. Link.
• Nexus One changes in availability. Link.

India

• New Delhi Traffic Police issuing notice to violators using photos on Facebook wall. Link.
• Indian Rupee gets a symbol. Link.
• Tatkal booking made easy for common man. Link.

Sports

• Spain won the FIFA World Cup 2010.
• World's best off-spinner Muttiah Muralitharan to retire from Test cricket. Link.
• Tickets available for World Cup Cricket 2011. Link.

-- Varun

This week on Twitter [July 04, 2010]

Science & Technology

• Firefox 3.6.4 released with crash protection. Link.
• HTML5 showcases of Google, Apple and Microsoft. Link.
• Firefox 3.6.6 released for patching the frequent Flash player crashes. Link.
• Cell phones as eye doctors. Link.

Social Media

• Facebook launches Hover-cards. Link.
• Twitter to publish shopping deals through @EarlyBird account. Link.
• Google Me social networking to take on Facebook. Link.
• Facebook unveils suggested interests list. Link.
• Facebook unleashes Open-Graph search engine. Link.

Google

• Google Spreadsheet adds format painter. Link.
• YouTube’s world cup Easter egg. Link.
• Google apps training and certification tools for teachers. Link.
• Google to use more HTML5 features in GMail. Link.
• Google’s update on China. Link.
• Google adds real-time web analytics to Blogger. Link.

Gadgets

• Infibeam, India has announced its Windows and Android based tablets named “Phi”. Link.
• The newly launced Apple iPhone 4 has reception issues. Link.
• Microsoft Kin discontinued after just 48 days. Link.
• Android Vs iPhone 4 multitasking compared. Link.
• Yahoo gets serious on Android development. Launches Y! Mail and Messenger for Android. Link.
• Android 2.2 Froyo rolled out to all the Nexus One users. Link.
• Amazon Kindle for Android released. Kindle for iPhone to have audio and video support. Link.

India

• Infibeam has launched its own brand of mobile phones in India. Link.
• Facebook, Hyderabad India is hiring 500 people. Link.
• Mukesh Ambani, D.E. Shaw close to Joint Venture. Link.
• Get address proof from Indian Postal department. Link.

Events

• TEDx events in India. Link.
• Dev Camp, Chennai on July 10. Link.
• Seth Godwin in India on July 07. Link.

Misc

• The next version of Eclipse IDE “Helios” is out. Link.

-- Varun