Bits Blog: Facebook News Feed Draws More Criticism

BikersPost BikersPost, a small business, is being asked by Facebook to pay $7,500 to reach its fans on the Web site.

In my column this week, I wrote about how content I shared on Facebook saw a paltry amount of interaction unless I paid Facebook to highlight it on the company’s signature news feed. Other reporters and bloggers said they had seen a similar drop in connection.

On Monday, Facebook put up a blog post saying “engagement has gone up 34 percent on posts from people who have more than 10,000 followers.” But Facebook did not share real numbers or metrics, leaving people guessing what 34 percent actually equals.

Meanwhile, over the weekend my Inbox filled up with dozens of e-mails from people who owned small businesses and said they had also been affected by Facebook’s news feed changes.

One of those e-mails came from a small father-and-son Web-based motorcycle company in Florida, BikersPost. The company said it had built most of its business around Facebook, but was now unable to reach its fans. Although Facebook is asking public figures to pay $7 per post to reach their subscribers, BikersPost says it is sometimes being told to pay as much $7,500 to reach the core of its subscribers and their friends.

Kris Olivera, who co-runs BikersPost, said that when his fan page had 200,000 fans, it was getting much more traffic than it did today with more than 600,000 fans. “After Facebook introduced promoted posts, we see much less traffic than a year ago,” he said.

In a statement to The New York Times, Facebook said it was not suppressing content to highlight paid posts.

“We want to be really clear that the News Feed algorithm does not artificially suppress free distribution in order to get people to purchase promoted posts or ads,” the statement said.

“News Feed should show you the most interesting stories from your friends, people you follow and Pages you are connected to,” the statement added. “As with other filtering algorithms, we look at numerous factors to decide which will be the most interesting story for each person. Over years of carefully monitoring how people engage with News Feed, we have found that algorithmically showing the most relevant content is a better user experience and leads to more engagement over all.”

Mr. Olivera said he paid Facebook to acquire a large percentage of BikersPost’s 615,000 fans.

“I have spent well over $50,000 with Facebook acquiring those fans, and now I’m being told I have to pay Facebook again to reach them,” Mr. Olivera said. “I don’t even make $7,000 a month, how do they expect me to pay that for one single post.” He noted that because he could not reach his fans anymore on Facebook, he recently had to lay off BikersPost’s only employee.

“We’ve seen dramatic traffic drops over the past year, and the rug just got pulled out from under us,” Mr. Olivera said. “Had I known that we were going to be charged to reach those fans as well, we would of not spent a dime with Facebook.”

New iPhone Draws Big Crowds as Sales Begin in Asia-Pacific

KDDI, a Japanese carrier, said that it had already run out of the new phone. In Australia, Telstra reported that online preorders sold out in a record 18 hours and that it was discussing accelerated restocking with Apple.

When the iPhone 5 first went on sale, last Friday in the United States, Apple booked more than 2 million preorders in the first 24 hours, double the first-day sales of the previous model, the iPhone 4S.

An estimated 600 people lined up around the block from the Apple store in central Sydney, the first in the world to hand over an iPhone 5 to a buyer, at 8 a.m. local time Friday (Apple planned to deliver the first preordered phones to U.S. customers later in the day).

The Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak, in Brisbane, Australia, for a business forum, was among a crowd of several hundred lining up for an iPhone 5.

“I just feel this impulse, like I want to be part of this big adventure, this big revolution and this advance in technology,” Mr. Wozniak, who stopped working for Apple in the late 1980s, told local television.

Masayoshi Son, president of Softbank, the other of the two Japanese carriers selling the phone, said he was concerned that Apple does not have enough production capacity to meet demand. Softbank and Singapore Telecommunications, also known as SingTel, said demand for the iPhone 5 had exceeded previous offerings from Apple, partly because the new phones could work on 4G networks that offer much faster data speeds.

Samsung Electronics of South Korea, both a rival and a component supplier to Apple, moved to crash the party on the eve of the phone’s debut, saying it planned to add the new device to existing patent lawsuits against the U.S. technology company.

In Singapore, SingTel had booths open selling accessories and staff on hand to help buyers transfer data from their old phones, while in a rainy Tokyo, the lines stretched several blocks.

In Hong Kong, whose proximity to China supports a thriving gray market, small groups of people carrying rucksacks filled with cash waited outside the Apple store hoping to snap up phones for resale.

The introductions of the iPhone 5 were more tightly controlled by Apple than the release of the iPhone 4S in 2010, resulting in a more subdued atmosphere — most of the noise in Hong Kong came from staff members, who outnumbered customers and chanted “iPhone 5, iPhone 5.”

In Sydney, guerrilla marketers grabbed the first dozen or so spots in line, with companies paying staff members to line up for several days in the hope of being photographed and interviewed. But most of those waiting were aficionados already hooked on Apple’s earlier iPhones and iPad tablet computers.

“I feel like if I leave it at home, I go a bit crazy,” James Vohradsky, a 20-year-old student said of his current iPhone. He had been in line for 17 hours with his younger sister “I have to drive back and get it. I can’t do my normal day without it.”

Some analysts expect Apple to sell up to 10 million of the iPhone 5 in the remaining days of September and J.P. Morgan has estimated that the phone release could provide a $3.2 billion boost to the U.S. economy in the fourth quarter.

The new phone has a larger, 4-inch screen and is slimmer and far lighter than the previous model. The iPhone 5 supports faster 4G mobile networks and also comes with a number of software updates, including Apple’s new in-house maps feature.

“It’s thin and light. I’ve used Samsung before, but the operation, the feeling of the iPhone is better,” Wataru Saito said of the iPhone 5. The semiconductor engineer had been waiting line in Tokyo since Thursday afternoon with his suitcase because he had a flight to catch Friday.

Some buyers were not completely happy. The iPhone 5 comes with Apple’s own mapping software; previous models used maps from Google. Kim Tudo, a student at the University of New South Wales who had lined up overnight in Sydney, said he was disappointed that the turn-by-turn navigation feature was not immediately available in Australia.

Apple also did not embed near-field communication technology used to turn cellphones into mobile wallets in the iPhone 5. Mr. Vohradsky, also a student in Sydney, said the lack of mobile payment chip was also “a bit of a letdown.”

The iPhone is Apple’s highest-margin product and accounts for half of its annual revenue. Apple has said it will make initial deliveries of the iPhone 5 on Friday in the United States and most of the major European markets, like France, Germany and Britain. The phone goes on sale next Friday in 22 more countries. Apple plans to sell the new phone in 100 countries by the end of the year.

Where God of War Draws the Line on Violence

Not counting a brief foray into mobile, God of War: Ascension will be the sixth game in the series’ short seven-year lifespan. In that time, Kratos has fought some of the most intense battles in videogames, while also taking gory disemboweling and delimbing to a new level of detail. At a press event in New York I spoke with David Hewitt, game design manager for Sony Santa Monica, about the game’s hallmark violence, the difficulty of making sequels, and whether game mechanics can be used primarily for emotional reasons.

IGN: There was a lot of criticism about violence in big games at E3 this year, and God of War: Ascension was frequently mentioned. Do you have any thoughts about that criticism?

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He was tricked into killing his wife and family. He’s literally covered in their ashes during every moment.

David Hewitt: The core of the God of War series is Greek mythology, and that’s blood and guts, vengeful gods, horrific things being enacted on mortals. What we’re doing is injecting a character into that and telling a story of revenge. Kratos has been through this before. He was tricked into killing his wife and family. He’s literally covered in their ashes during every moment. His motivation is violent, bloody revenge, and the milieu of mythology puts us in this distant, exaggerated world. We do revel in it somewhat but the violence is there to show Kratos dealing with his demons and enacting that revenge in a very physical, hands-on way.

IGN: I wonder if a part of it was that many of those games were using violence in an increasingly familiar way, and not necessarily that this year was so much more violent than any other year. People are becoming familiar with that level of gore and exaggeration and the unnerving effect of it has worn off.

David Hewitt:  I think that if all we had was the affect of showing violence in a game then we’d be in big trouble. It’s the mechanics of the game that matter. The presentation plays a big part in drawing people in initially. I think if the context is a wartime setting or something a little more modern than our game it has a different impact. Your reaction to that might be a bit more ambiguous. But we’re far removed from what your day-to-day experience is when we’re in this vastly different and weird mythological world.

The series has wanted to keep upping itself in presentation and making sure we have those moments where people kind of recoil a bit—genuinely uncomfortable moments that are part of the feel of this franchise. We’ve stuck by those, but the game’s not driven by those.

What we’re pushing for is mechanical innovation, making the combat rewarding, having every button press feel magnified with a lot of feedback. Some of that comes from these gory outcomes, but what we’re looking to do is provide that extra level of depth and complexity, to give the player more tools to use -- new weapons and sub-weapons, the new tether mechanics and so on.

IGN: Do you have an internal line of what kind of violence you won’t show in the game? Is there a line that you wouldn’t cross with Kratos?

David Hewitt: We do. In fact the team has a set of rules that define those sorts of things very clearly. Where it shows itself is how the combat designers and animators have designed Kratos’ moves. He’s always leaning forward, he’s always moving forward. He’s seeking revenge and he’s after his ultimate objective and he will tear through enemies -- rip them in half -- as quickly as he can. But there’s not a lot of flourishes, there’s not any kind of enjoying the moment. There’s nothing about this that he’s enjoying.

There are some things we’ve pulled back from. I think where this has been an issue is with violence against women -- the team’s pulled back from some of that and assessed that a little more carefully. There are certain things that carry has a different kind of resonance that we don’t want to get into. This isn’t about statement-making in that regard. It’s about fleshing out this character.

IGN: When I first heard Ascension would be a prequel to all the other God of War games I was excited that it might be a chance to rebuild the game around a totally new idea -- to have Kratos be a mortal and not supernaturally powerful and not be obsessed with revenge. Is it constraining to always have to go back to the same general set of mechanics and that revenge-driven tone?

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There are some things we’ve pulled back from. I think where this has been an issue is with violence against women...

David Hewitt: The game isn’t a reboot; it’s a continuation of the series. We’ve gone back to an earlier point of the story. There are a handful of things that are pillars of this franchise. They want to see ridiculous, epic, over-the-top moments, huge bosses, fluid combat, lots of options for combos, climbing, maneuvering around the environment, puzzle solving. Those are baseline expectations for the series that we need to build on regardless of whether we’re going back in the timeline.

Kratos is really struggling with his demons here, he’ll go through some seriously heavy events. He gets beaten up over the course of the story, he’s more vulnerable with some of the enemies than he was in the past. His movements have changed too. In the previous game he would just stab his blades into walls to climb around and in this one he’s more grabbing on with his hands and using footholds. That’s been a really nice refinement. In combat he’s got the ability to pick up other weapons, he can grab a sword or a spear -- or disarm weapons. So we’ve tried to expand on the toolset. We want to build on those things, but in a way that makes sense for a real human individual.