The Pinterest Analytics Platform

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Mar 152013
 

Photo from burgiemediafusion.wordpress.com/

Exciting news from the team at Pinterest this week. They are introducing Pinterest Web Analytics. Data for pins and re-pins is not a new concept and there are companies focused solely on this, but Pinterest releasing this simple analytics product is an important marker in the evolving world of social business. There is real value being created and this is a nice first step by the pinterest team to put some hard numbers around this value.

However, I am sure you analytical thinkers, data junkies and revenue maximizing wizards are feeling a little unsatisfied, because the truth is, this platform doesn’t really answer the hard core questions you are asking. The metrics of pins, repins, pinners, clicks etc., are important for brand building, and allow you to do some quantitative analysis, however, you are still forced to infer the value being created, specifically dollars coming in the door.

Pinterest is a great product and company and they know in order to create a big business (ie. make money) the analytics platform will be a necessity for advertisers.  This is a case of learning from those who came before you; facebook, twitter and other networks released analytics offerings far too late in their existence, allowing upstarts to capture that value. I believe the platform starting with the basics is a strategic move by Pinterest and a good one; I am confident it will evolve into a much more sophisticated tool. In the meantime, those of you who can’t wait should check out Pinfluencer, and keep your eye on this blog. We are striving to make the business of social more data-driven, and it is fantastic to see Pinterest taking the all important first step of acknowledging this need.

Using Facebook’s Social APIs? Then Play Nice.

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Jan 262013
 

For those of us who monitor social API development religiously, it was a particularly interesting several days. Facebook cut off Voxer from its find friends API last week, on Thursday they cut off access to Twitter’s video sharing app Vine and on Friday blocked Yandex’s new app Wander only 3 hours after launching!  The find friends functionality is critical to app developers because it allows new users to import their social graph to make the app social from their first use.  For many social apps, this is the difference between a ghost town and vibrant, engaging experiences.  Without access to facebook’s robust social graph data it can be incredibly difficult to build a social experience.

The decision to cut off these rival, emerging services should send a clear message to developers building on the facebook platform: be careful about your reliance on facebook.  But this really shouldn’t come as news to anyone; facebook has always had the ability to do this at its own discretion—it’s right there in their developer platform policy. As Justin Osofsky explained,

“For a much smaller number of apps that are using Facebook to either replicate our functionality or bootstrap their growth in a way that creates little value for people on Facebook, such as not providing users an easy way to share back to Facebook, we’ve had policies against this that we are further clarifying today.”

If you read between the lines here, Justin is saying ‘if you want to capitalize on our valuable social data, you’d better be adding more value to the facebook ecosystem than you’re taking.’
This line of thinking has been in place for a while, it’s just that facebook has never so adamantly brought down the hammer (which is why it has garnered so much attention).  But the truth is that if an app takes more value than it creates for facebook, it doesn’t really matter if it’s doing something explicitly against the terms of service because facebook “can change these Platform Policies at any time without prior notice as we (facebook) deem necessary.”

Really, facebook is doing what they must to survive the API wars.  After all, twitter cut off instagram’s access to its find friends API after its acquisition.  In a world where the value of data is increasing exponentially and rival social platforms are becoming more and more insular, app developers have to be increasingly thoughtful about how and why they develop on social platforms.  ‘Am I creating as much value for them as I am taking?’ ought to be a requisite question for any developer building on facebook or twitter’s APIs.  Also, developers should try to limit their reliance on any one platform; bridging data sets across these platforms
will be the best way forward.

With great knowledge (social data via APIs) comes great responsibility (a value creation mandate for the platform in question).  Creating value for customers will always be priorities 1-3, but its looks more and more like creating value for your API providers will end up being priority 4, at least if you’re building on a social platform.