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Leaked Details Of Facebook's New Chat Rooms Feature
Facebook has built a new feature codenamed “Host Chat” that lets people set up chat rooms their friends can join without an invitation, a source familiar with the feature tells us. I’ve contacted Facebook and it confirms it has begun testing this feature in the wild. Reminiscent of the old AOL chat rooms, it could get Facebook users to meet friends of friends and spend more time on the site.
Facebook verified with me that it’s testing the feature, but wouldn’t comment on details beyond saying “we do test things from time to time with a small percentage of users.” These tests can be a small as a fraction of a percent of all users, and are sometimes isolated to particular countries, so it’s unlikely you’ll see this in your own Facebook unless the feature does well and receives a wider roll out.
The leak comes as Facebook is fighting a war for messaging. It’s own cross-platform chat competes with SMS, Apple’s iMessage, and now Google’s new unified messaging system Hangouts. Meanwhile, it’s battling independent international players like WhatsApp, sticker-focused products like Japan’s Line, and novel communication forms like Snapchat.
The stakes are high as messaging generates huge amounts of engagement, direct monetization opportunities through ads and sticker sales, and valuable data on who someone’s closest friends are. For tech giants like Apple, Google, and Facebook, messaging encourages platform lock-in, driving time spent on their other products.
Chat rooms could be a powerful weapon in this fight because of their relatively passive nature. With direct private communication, users typically pop in and out just to send and read messages. But people often keep chat rooms open for long periods of time. That meshes well with Facebook’s strategy of driving high amounts of time-on-site. Facebook users might browse the news feed or friends’ profiles for longer and see more ads to fill time while they gab in chat rooms.
How Facebook Chat Rooms Work
Our source provided extensive details on how the feature works. There’s always a possibility that the feature gets scrapped rather than rolled out, its interface evolves significantly, so know the details might change if Facebook decides if it is worthy of a wider release.
The Facebook chat rooms feature creates an option to “Host Chat” in the Facebook home page’s status update composer. Currently users see buttons for “Update Status”, and “Add Photos/Video”. The “Host Chat” button would be a third option there.
When clicked it opens a chat room that the host can name if there’s a specific purpose for the room, such as discussing a certain topic, planning an event, or working on a project. The host can add specific friends to the room, similar to Facebook’s existing ad-hoc private group chat feature. Those participating see the room as a window similar to traditional one-on-one Facebook chat, though I’d expect it to be a bit bigger to accommodate a higher pace of conversation.
What makes Host Chat special is that any of the host’s friends can join without being invited. They see a story in their news feed that a friend is hosting a chat room and they’re given the option to jump in. This works similar to the chat feature within Facebook Groups, where anyone in the Group can join a discussion. The use of the news feed to spread and grow rooms takes advantage of Facebook’s ubiquity and the relatively large number of a person’s friends likely to be browsing the feed at any given time.
Hosts can set privacy restrictions to limit who is allowed to join their room, and can expel people they don’t want present. There may be an option to allow friends of friends to join so a room could grow virally, but this isn’t confirmed. Figuring out the best way to handle privacy when people who aren’t friends interact in a chat room may be one of Facebook’s goals for the test.
A mid-sized group of Facebook employees including some of the existing chat team have been working on the feature. Early internal tests of Host Chat only supported text — no photo or video. Emoji would likely be included but no word on whether chat rooms will allow Facebook’s cutesy new messaging stickers. Tests were also limited to the web, though Facebook’s insistence that it’s a mobile company means it might be cranking on small-screen support, which could launch eventually if the feature is well received. It’s possible that you might be able to participate in a chat room but not start one from mobile in the initial tests happening now.
Spicing Up The Social Graph
Facebook’s chat rooms could compete with Google’s Hangouts, to which they bear many similarities. Hangouts can also be openly joined by people in a Google+ user’s selected Circles. Hangouts’ big draw is video chat with up to 10 people, and it also offers many other advanced media sharing features. The strength of Facebook’s chat rooms will be in spontaneity and distribution. Thanks to heavy engagement with the Facebook news feed compared to the Google+ stream, more friends are likely to see you have an open Facebook chat room they can join than if you started a Hangout.
The generally fun, irreverent atmosphere of chat rooms could help Facebook attract and retain younger users, which critics fear are slipping away to newer social networks and communications platforms like Snapchat and Tumblr.
Chat rooms could also breathe new life into Facebook’s social graph. Since anyone who is friends with the host can join a room, people will end up interacting with friends of friends. Similar to the chat rooms of the late 90s when you might begin private messaging with someone you met in a room and then add them to your buddy list, Facebook users might friend people they meet in chat rooms.
This could inch Facebook closer to the “social discovery” industry populated by companies like Tagged and Badoo. But instead of meeting total strangers, you’re likely to have a trusted mutual friend to bridge the gap in Facebook chat rooms. This adds value to Facebook. It wouldn’t just be a place recreate your offline social graph, but to expand it.
There’s certainly a chance that feature’s privacy implications will prove too complicated, or it will flop in its test and end up like the rarely used Facebook video chat option. But in this case, Facebook is building out a tried and true online social interaction. If chat rooms succeed, they might not just move the needle for Facebook in terms of engagement. They could make the social network a more exciting, serendipitous place to spend time — a kick of spice that could keep the 9-year-old site from growing bland.
Personal Assistant App Donna Goes Live, With Better Battery Performance And Instant Uber Requests
Personal assistant app Donna is ready to help simplify users’ lives, and is being launched on the Apple App Store today to do just that. With the general release also comes a few new features, like instantly hailing an Uber or sending email notifications to people you’re meeting to tell them that you’re late.
We’ve written about a lot of personal productivity apps over the last few months, including companies like Sunrise and Tempo, which seek to re-imagine the way you manage your mobile calendar. Donna seeks to differentiate itself by not just alerting you to what’s happening in your day, but anticipating when you’ll need to leave for a meeting, or how you’ll get there.
While going live on the app store, Donna has added a couple of things that should help busy people get through their day. First and foremost, the startup worked a lot behind the scenes to make sure it wasn’t taxing the phone’s battery quite so much. But there are other, more apparent changes as well.
One of those is the way that Donna now provides you with the ability to instantly dial in to a conference call when you receive an alert, or being brought right to the directions screen when you have to leave to physically go to a meeting. It also provides you with information about attendees that you’ll be meeting with.
One other feature that busy people will probably like is the addition of the “Get an Uber” button. For those who are in a rush or don’t have their own car, being able to instantly be taken into the Uber app will help some folks get on their way when late for a meeting. Speaking of being late — users can also now send email notifications from directly within Donna, and it’ll tell the recipient how far away they are, based on location data saved in the app.
Those who are already using the app in beta will probably also notice a big change in appearance in the new app: Gone is the Donna logo, which hinted at a female personal assistant, as well as the handwriting motif throughout. Instead, it’s been replaced with a more staid change in colors and a lowercase “d” in serif font. Incredible Labs CEO Kevin Cheng says that the startup received a lot of feedback about the logo and decided to change it.
“We still feel that it’s important to feel like it’s a human technology, where someone is bringing business to you,” Cheng said. He believes the typewriter motif still does that. “Productivity apps don’t have to be boring. They don’t have to be stark gray and black.”
Donna was created by Incredible Labs, a San Francisco-based startup that has raised a total of $2.5 million from a group of investors that includes Khosla Ventures, Betaworks, Maynard Webb, CrunchFund, Ashton Kutcher, and a group of other angels.
Check out a preview of an older version of Donna in this TechCrunch TV interview:
Hasty Plans To Take On GrubHub With Super Healthy Take-out App In SF
GrubHub or Seamless – and if you’re in Europe, Just Eat and many others – is, as we all know, something of a guilty secret. On demand food ordering has exploded in recent years. But trying to pick the healthy option is rarely that easy. Step in Hasty, a new bootstrapped startup which is starting in San Francicso first but hopes to expand in the US and internationally. To join the waiting list for the private beta of the iPhone app, visit the site. Instagram’s lead designer, Tim Van Damme, happens to be an advisor to the company. There are 200 private beta invites for TechCrunch readers via this link.
It’s very simple. You use the app to order healthy food from a curated set of local restaurants, prepared your way, and delivered via the restaurant’s own takeaway service. Hasty gets a cut of the transaction and the restaurant gets to tap a very discerning customer interested in (probably) higher cost dishes.
The startup has worked directly with restaurants in SF to ensure no MSG or additional sugar is used along with minimizing salt and oil. They look for the healthiest and tastiest dishes on any menu, calculate the nutrition facts for each dish, and take high quality photographs of each dish, then put it into a good looking app.
You can order based on dietary preferences (e.g. paleo, low carb, gluten free) from a curated set of the best and healthiest restaurants in a given city. The startup claims that early testing has seen users migrating from other food ordering apps and ordering 2-3 times per week.
They are tapping a section of the $250 billion takeout and delivery market in the US, which has yet to wake up to healthy fast food in much volume, and is subject to – pretty legitimate – attacks from health campaigners.
Hasty is founded by Oxford graduates David Langer and Chris Hollindale. Previously Langer founded GroupSpaces, the UK-based membership software company that was backed by Index Ventures and today hosts around 5M members. Hasty is being advised by Van Damme and Jude Gomila, co-founder of Heyzap.
How Do You Break Into iPhone App Store Top 50? Try 23K Free Daily Downloads, 950 Paid, Or $12K In Daily Revenue
An iPhone app needed 23,000 free downloads per day to reach spot number 50 in the top Free charts in the Apple App Store, says mobile app analytics firm Distimo, based on research performed during the month of May 2013 aimed at discovering what it takes to break into the App Store’s top Free, Paid, and Grossing charts. For paid applications, that number was 25 times lower, at 950 downloads. Meanwhile, to reach the #50 spot in top Grossing charts, an app needed daily revenue of $12,000.
In this analysis, the company looked only at iPhone downloads and revenues, not downloads of universal apps on iPads.
Though reaching the top 50 brings an app greater visibility, getting into the top 10 is more ideal, but a lot tougher, as well. According to Distimo, a free iPhone app in May needed to see more than 70,000 downloads per day to reach a top ten free position, and a paid app need more than 4,000 downloads on average to do the same. To reach the top 10 Grossing chart, an app need $47,000 in daily revenue.
While those are the high-level figures that come by looking back at App Store trends over the course of a month, Distimo also found that on a day-to-day basis, the numbers required to break into the top charts vary. For example, on weekdays (M-F), significantly fewer downloads are needed to reach a top position for free iPhone apps, and on Sunday, that number is 11 percent higher. Apps needed the fewest number of downloads on Thursdays.
Trends were similar for both paid and top grossing rankings: apps required more downloads (or dollars) to break into the top charts over the weekend. (No wonder app launch announcements are always happening on weekdays!)
All the above trends, however, only apply to the U.S., as the numbers required to reach the top positions will vary by country. Distimo looked at a sample of other App Store markets, to see how the U.S. data compared, and found that the U.S. is still the hardest to break into among those studied.
In Japan, for example, an app needed less than 40 percent of the downloads that it would need in the U.S. to reach the top 25. In the U.K., that number is only 21 percent.
iPad App Store
Though the large majority of Distimo’s study examined the challenges for iPhone apps in particular, the company did offer a brief comparison of other app stores, including the U.S. App Store for iPad. Here, it’s easier to reach the top 50, with only 8, 200 daily downloads on average needed for a free iPad app, and fewer still for paid iPad apps at 480.
Amazon Appstore
On the Amazon Appstore in the U.S., free apps needed 2,500 downloads on average per day to reach the top 50, which is roughly 9 times less than need in the iPhone App Store. The number of paid apps needed was 2.8 times lower than the iPhone App Store, at just 340.
iPhone vs. iPad vs. Google Play
Unfortunately, the report largely skipped over Google Play, which provides apps for what’s now the world’s largest mobile operating system by market share: Android. The report only offered a look into the top grossing charts, but didn’t detail the number of apps required to reach Google’s top free and paid lists.
Not surprisingly, Google Play apps don’t need to generate as much daily revenue to reach a top 50 grossing position, but they do need to generate this daily revenue for a longer period of time in Google Play to obtain their position. That speaks to the differing natures of Apple’s and Google’s app stores, namely that the former is more volatile due the ever-increasing number of apps, which was recently revealed to number 900,000. This trend shows no sign of slowing down either, which means breaking into the top charts is going to become even harder over time.
In a report from earlier this year, Distimo found that only 2 percent of the top 250 publishers in the iPhone App Store are “newcomers,” and that figure was only slightly better (at 3 percent) on Google Play. Meanwhile, only 0.25 percent of the total revenue from the top 250 applications goes to new iPhone app publishers, while 1.2 percent reaches new Android app publishers on Google Play.
Even though the app store gold rush as not yet subsided, Apple will eventually have to address some of the challenges facing its third-party developers in the future by offering better tools for app discovery, or risk having them turn their attention to other platforms where visibility and findability is better. To some extent, this is what the Apple’s acquisition of Chomp was supposed to assist with, but to date, all the learnings and techniques from that app discovery startup have not made their way into Apple’s store. Plus, at this year’s WWDC, the only notable improvements to App Store search and discovery were new categories for kids’ apps, and booting out Genius for an “Apps Near Ne” section instead, neither of which are major changes.
Distimo’s full report is available here.
Revealers, A New Social-Meets-Gaming App, Launches Today
A new social game called Revealers is launching today, and it’s betting on the feature of letting players add content to the game to make it more than a flash in the pan hit.
Israeli founder Muly Litvak has an extensive background in entertainment, so we’ll see how his experience translates into gaming.
Here’s how it works: players select to play against their Facebook friends or against a random opponent and are shown a photo fully obscured by a grid of squares. Both players are given four hints to help figure out what the picture is. As the picture uncovers square by square, the challenge is to identify the photo before your opponent.
Users can then add their own photos and hints to change the game up. Eventually there will be private categories between friends, but for now games are scanned for relevancy in the world or country.
Winners earn “brain cells” and advance to higher “brain levels” accordingly. You can only play against another user if they have challenged you back.
It’s a pretty simple game, so we’ll see if that — and the vanity aspect of getting to upload your own photos — will be enough to make it as addictive as Litvak is hoping.
Kickstarter Allowing Canada-Based Projects Beginning This Summer
Kickstarter just announced via its Twitter account that it will be opening up its crowdfunding platform for Canada-based projects as of “later this summer.” Thus far, that’s as specific as the company is getting, but anyone interested in finding out more can sign up at Kickstarter’s Canada launch page with their email and project category of interest to get an alert when things go live.
Kickstarter competitor Indiegogo already offers support for Canada-based projects, and in fact recently expanded its Canadian payment options, but this marks the first time Kickstarter has extended its platform to the great white north. Already, Canadians have been using the platform, but they require a U.S.-based bank account to process pledges. Late last year, Kickstarter opened up project support for the U.K., with funding goals and pledged based in British pounds, and funds being managed via U.K.-based bank accounts.
This is great news for Canadian creators, and should help alleviate many of the hoops required for project founders to jump through in order to use Kickstarter currently. Ottawa-based Teknision learned first-hand what can go wrong when trying to cross borders to fund projects on the platform, as it encountered a payment issue when it started its project to fund an Android tablet OS modification which ultimately resulted in it having to scrap the project entirely and start over.
Kickstarter has been slow to roll out its international platform expansions, and is clearly picking prime targets based on community demand. The intricacies of launching an ecommerce business in other countries is always a challenge, but is likely even more of one when you’re doing something as nuanced as building a crowdfunding platform. The Canada launch is a sign of progress, however, and should give hope to founders in other countries watching and waiting for the crowdfunding giant to make landfall in their own backyard.
YouTube Celebrates Pride With #ProudToLove Spotlight Channel
As Pride month comes to a close, YouTube is following in the footsteps of parent company Google in showcasing a collection of LGBT-themed videos on the YouTube spotlight channel to celebrate a historic month in the LGBT community.
Just yesterday, the Supreme Court of the United States weighed in on two major cases that could affect the rights of the gay community with regards to marriage equality. SCOTUS struck down parts of the Defense of Marriage Act as unconstitutional, and dismissed an appeal by defenders of Prop. 8, thereby clearing the way for same-sex marriages in California to resume.
With these decisions setting the stage, this weekend should be the best Pride celebration ever (at least in NYC), and YouTube is here to help usher in the gayness.
Here’s what the company said in an official blog post:
At YouTube, we’re proud to stand with the LGBT community to support equal rights and marriage equality – we believe that everyone has the right to love and be loved. Pride Month may be coming to a close, but we hope YouTube is a place where you can feel proud and build a community all year long.
Google has always been a huge proponent of gay rights, and YouTube has been one of the most important online destinations for the LGBT community to find a voice. The “It Gets Better” campaign, which saw participation from some big-name celebrities like Ellen DeGeneres and Aleksander Skarsgard, was one of the biggest pro-LGBT campaigns in the world, and surely helped some young people find some hope and comfort.
Other tech companies have chimed in as well, including Facebook’s release of the particular statistic that over 70 percent of Americans are friends with someone who is gay on Facebook — something that should make us think twice before posting a thoughtless status update.
Those who want to participate in YouTube’s #ProudToLove campaign should include the #ProudToLove hashtag in their videos for a chance to be featured in the YouTube spotlight channel.
Happy Pride, everyone!
Warning: This video may induce tears.
Andreessen-backed Enterprise App Startup Tomfoolery Launches Anchor, A Real-Time Conversation Platform With Consumer Demands In Mind
Tomfoolery, the mobile app lab founded by ex-Yahoo and AOL execs that aims to make enterprise apps capturing some of the light and free nature of consumer services, is today debuting its first product: Anchor, a real-time conversation app. Tomfoolery has two aims for Anchor, which is coming out first as an iOS and web app: for it to become a central repository for all kinds of work conversations; and for Anchor to become, literally, the anchor for its bigger strategy to create many more enterprise services down the line.
Tomfoolery announced in January 2013 a $1.7 million seed stage round from Andreessen Horowitz, David Tisch, and a number of Yahoo and AOL veterans including Jerry Yang at AME Cloud Ventures, Brad Garlinghouse of YouSendIt, Ash Patel at Morado Ventures and Sam Pullara at Sutter Hill Ventures, among others. And it comes amidst a number of other startups that are tapping into the surge of interest in smartphones and mobile apps to make IT services for businesses more engaging and useful. Coincidentally, just earlier today another Jerry Yang-funded startup aimed at small business apps also announced its entry into the world: NumberFour, based out of Berlin and headed by ex-Yahoo exec Marco Boerries, is hitting the ground with a $38 million Series A.
Kakul Srivastava, the ex-Flickr exec who is the CEO and cofounder of Tomfoolery, says that the impetus for launching a conversational app first comes from the fact that conversation apps that exist today, such as Yammer, Convo and Socialcast, are still lacking in some of the basic features that consumer apps can bring. Yammer for example still does not have real-time updates; Convo has buggy mobile apps; and so on. The other side of it is that — at least in the way that Tomfoolery envisons Anchor being used — work apps should be built to be used for more than work. “Many of us spend more time at work than anywhere else,” she notes, adding that to work better with people, you need to know them better.
Anchor provides one way of doing that. The app lets and encourages users create any number of groups for conversations, with some dedicated to, say, sales prospects, or the progress of a certain task; and others dedicated to things that are completely unrelated, such as food that people like to eat. The whole experience is just as visually focused as it is around text updates, with a camera button right next to a texting window to upload pictures on the go, and location tagging built in.
Having a look around the app during a demo yesterday, which Srivastava did using her own account on the app, I caught an accidental glimpse of a lot of different directions the company is taking the app, and I can say that if and when these different come through Anchor could actually prove to be something quite interesting. There are plans not just for more apps for established smartphone platforms like Android, but for wearable devices (with some testing already happening on some of them) and more. What do wearables have to do with enterprise? This is almost the point of Tomfoolery: they’re trying to think ahead for times when this might be a problem that needs a solution. In the meantime, Srivastava points out that apps like these could be one more way for people to keep up to date and check in with their colleagues — for example when they’re on a run, or using Google Glass to navigate an unfamiliar territory.
On top of that, the company is talking with a number of other startups and founders for how Anchor could integrate into other apps — for example cloud services to provide storage for images, videos and other files. The bottom line for me is that Tomfoolery is small (only 10 people), full of experience, and hungry. This makes them more likely to move fast — faster than a now very large Yammer, owned by an even larger Microsoft — and maybe break a few things in the process.
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