During Wednesday's F8 global developer conference, CEO Mark Zuckerberg announced two new features in Facebook: one would allow users to log in anonymously to the site and the other delivers mobile ads to third-party apps.
The new features are said to be strategies of the company to continually focus on enhancing user engagement while at the same time monetizing the mobile platform.
The mobile advertising network is called Facebook Audience Network, which is seen to considerably expand the total addressable market of Facebook. This allows app developers in mobile platform to insert various ads within their software in its effort to focus their ads on particular audiences, hence bringing up a new source of income for them.
Research says the massive user base of Facebook and its capacity to track personal data, whether from its own platform or from non-Facebook apps, put the company in a good position to control mobile advertising pricing in the midst of a similar competition against MoPub of Twitter and AdMob of Google. Because truth be told, these two industry players give Facebook a tough competition. AdMob is already allowing ad distribution to mobile apps, while MoPub is also currently serving app publishers as an ad management tool that now reaches close to a billion of mobile users.
However, Facebook isn't taking advantage of placing any premium pricing for mobile ads. It, in fact, lowers its pricing so that developers can create apps at a lower rate. Also in part of the new ad policy, app developers get to access the updated analytics package for free, receive an offering of development services worth $30,000 and a pledge that Facebook would continue supporting the apps for two years, regardless if changes were made to its platform. These offerings are regarded by analysts as a come-on or goodwill by the company to the distraught developers.
That is because developers admit their trust on Facebook is low, following years of neglect by the company to address their concerns. For instance, the network would often make sudden changes in its platform, frequently affecting the integrated apps of other developers, later getting either only little or no explanation at all. Other times, if the popularity of an app is sensed as a threat to the social network, Facebook would shut access off.
Now, the anonymous log-in. To those who have always been worried over their privacy on the said social network, such log-in feature was created to allow users to have control or to restrict what and how much personal data are being shared with third-party mobile apps, until they finally decide to trust their data to the app developers. The feature is said to be a move of the company to maintain or bring back the trust also of its over a billion users following controversies on privacy.
Yet developers still have misgivings over the new anonymous log-in feature.
"Anonymous login scares the shit out of me as a developer," said an unidentified source of Re/code described to be "intimately familiar" with this platform strategy of Facebook. "So Facebook knows who my user is, but I don't. They know more about my app and user base than me."
