Josh Constine is a technology journalist who specializes in deep analysis of social products. He is currently a writer for TechCrunch.
Previously, Constine was the Lead Writer of Inside Facebook, where he covered Facebook product changes, privacy, the Ads API, Page management, ecommerce, virtual currency, and music technology.
Prior to writing for Inside Facebook, Constine graduated from Stanford University in 2009 with a Master’s degree in Cybersociology, examining the influence of technology on social interaction. He researched the impact of privacy controls on the socialization of children, meme popularity cycles, and what influences the click through rate of links posted to Twitter.
Constine also received a Bachelor of Arts degree with honors from Stanford University in 2007, with a concentration in Social Psychology & Interpersonal Processes. He became fascinated with social networking theory after joining Facebook as a freshman a month after the service first launched.
Josh Constine has spoken at the South By Southwest Interactive and Music conferences, and has been quoted by The Wall Street Journal, CNN Money, The Atlantic, BBC World Magazine, Slate, and more.
Everyone wants a piece of Facebook, so the company’s underwriters will likely exercise their option sell a “greenshoe” of up to 50.6 million additional shares, and Facebook will definitely increase its IPO share price range from between $28 and $35 to $34 and $38, I’ve confirmed with sources very close to the IPO. This means Facebook could sell up to 388 million shares to raise between $13.1 billion and $14.7 billion at a CNBC-reported valuation between $92B and $103B.
A greenshoe is an SEC-permitted over-allotment option that can stabilize a stock’s price by allowing underwriters to sell up to 15% more stock than the company originally planned to sell, but with the option to buy back the stock at the offering price if the actual price drops below this. By exercising the greenshoe, underwriters including Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan, and Goldman Sachs could help Facebook raise up to an additional $1.72 billion to $1.92 billion by selling up to 50.6 million shares, which could prevent high demand and limited supply from causing the share price to skyrocket and making the stock seem volatile.
“Quite likable indeed, har har” laughs some monocle-wearing banker on Wall Street.” → Read More
He’s not taking off the hoodie, and he’s not going to NYC. TechCrunch has learned and confirmed that Facebook will IPO on Friday with CEO Mark Zuckerberg ringing the NASDAQ bell remotely from his company’s new Menlo Park headquarters. This follows the trend of companies like Zynga who also rung the IPO bell from home base rather than New York. CNBC tweeted the news this morning and we’ve verified this with another source close to the IPO proceedings.
Some investors worry about Facebook’s ability to earn revenue on mobile as more users migrate away from its classic web interface. But now Bloomberg reports that Facebook will cease taking orders for shares tomorrow and that the IPO will be massively oversubscribed, despite citing underwhelming demand from investors a few days ago. Wall Street pros aside, national fervor over the popular social network’s entrance into the public market has amateur investors pleading with their brokers to get them stock. → Read More
If you’re sick of interrupting your news feed reading to open and load photos, you’ll like a new Facebook mobile site, iOS, and Android app redesign rolling out today that makes photos three times larger. Shares of single photos now look a lot like Instagrams, as they appear full width so there’s less need to stop and open them. Meanwhile the bigger previews of photo albums will help you instantly assess whether to dive in or breeze past.
As Facebook’s user base shifts to mobile where it can’t show as many ads as easily, it will need to keep mobile session length and return visit frequency high. Making the news feed less tiring to browse should keep us scrolling for longer as we ravenously peer into the lives of our friends our friends. Here’s the before and after photos…of photos. → Read More
All those minutes reading your news feed in bed, messaging friends over lunch, and browsing photos on the bus really add up. Time spent on Facebook’s mobile site and apps per month (441 minutes) has finally surpassed usage of its classic website (391 minutes) — for Americans who do use Facebook on the go according to the latest report from comScore. And that’s actually a big problem for the social network.
Facebook usually shows four to seven ads per page on its website, but only a few ads per day in its mobile news feed. That means it makes a lot less money when you visit from your little devices. In fact, yesterday Facebook had to warn potential investors for upcoming initial public offering of stock that the more people who access it from mobile instead of the web, the worse its business is doing. → Read More
Today Facebook will start sending the first of three billion notices to users about proposed changes to its privacy policy, which were made to comply with a Spring deadline for implementing recommendations from an audit by the Irish Data Protection Commissioner. The three biggest changes Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer for Policy Erin Egan told me about when we spoke this morning are several clarifications of existing but sometimes vague policies:
Facebook’s goal is to make it as easy as possible for users to understand how their data is used, and how that’s changing. So Facebook is also launching the “Facebook Terms and Policies Hub” to house its 10 policy documents, including a redlined changes version of today’s privacy policy (known as the Data Use Policy), and explanations of those changes. Facebook will hold a live-streamed Q&A about the changes on May 14th. Users will have seven days from now to give feedback on the changes before they’re implemented barring major objections. → Read More
Only 12% of your friends see your average status update, but Facebook is testing an option called “Highlight” that lets you pay a few dollars to have one of your posts appear to more friends. Highlight lets users, not Pages or businesses, select an “important post” and “make sure friends see this”, but not color it yellow as Stuff wrote when it first spotted the feature. A tiny percentage of the user base is now seeing tests of a paid version of Highlight, but there’s also a free one designed to check if users are at all interested in the option.
Highlight could show Facebook’s willingness to try more aggressive ways of making money, which should delight potential investors. But Facebook is playing with fire here. The service has always been free for users, and a pay-for-popularity feature could be a huge turn off, especially to its younger and less financially equipped users who couldn’t afford such narcissism. → Read More
Twitter has just finalized a deal to hire the team and buy the technology of RestEngine, a personalized email marketing service, which could help Twitter deliver email digests of great tweets you’ve missed. The deal fits well with Twitter’s recent talent acquisition of Summify, which creates these kinds of personal news digests. RestEngine had been powering re-engagement emails for social game companies like Crowdstarthat enticed users to start playing again by telling them what their in-game friends had been achieving.
Three of four founders will be joining the flock, and the company’s technology will come along with them. RestEngine’s founder Joe Waltman called this is an acquisition since Twitter’s gaining both employees and tech, though Twitter views it as an acqui-hire. Co-founder Joe Waltman won’t be moving to Twitter as he tells me his entrepreneurial spirit is too strong and he’ll be working on new projects after a vacation.
It looks like Twitter’s got a plan to get more of its inactive users tweeting again… → Read More
Today Facebook begins rolling out file sharing to all Groups, and while it’s got many restrictions, it could be good enough to limit the long-term growth potential of cloud storage / file sharing services like Dropbox, iCloud, and Google Drive. Music and any copyright files aren’t allowed and file size is capped at 25mb, as Mashable first reported. But this is just the first version, and you can be sure Facebook will keep hacking away at it.
Last month, the social network started letting users share files within Groups for Schools, but now we confirmed with Facebook that within a few days all Facebook users should have the option to upload and share files from the Groups post composer. → Read More
Bing today begins the rollout of a major redesign that separates search results into three panes: pure, algorithmic, text-focused results in the center; context like maps, reviews, and actionable input fields to the right; and social assistance like friends and experts who can help on the far right. The redesign is Bing’s answer to “Search Overload” — the exhausted feeling people get from today’s search results pages that have become a cluttered mess of links, tools, social, maps, and actions.
Microsoft is looking to take advantage of public discontent with Google recent missteps in design and social. Bing aims to frame Google as impure, with its desire to highlight Google+ distorting the quality of search result ranking. If it works it could claw market share away from Google and make search a real two-horse race. The rollout will reach the U.S. over the next few weeks, then the world, but you can sign up here for early access to the new Bing (and unfortunately its newsletter too). → Read More
Facebook has just filed a sixth amendment to its S-1 filing to IPO in order to provide more transparency about how the shift of its user base from the web to mobile is causing it to show fewer ads per user, which could hurt revenue in the long term. Facebook also granted about $796 million in restricted stock units to employees less than a week ago, which was in the previous S-1 amendment but wasn’t widely reported. I’ve excerpted the significant changes and embedded the whole S-1 below. Specifically, Facebook is warning investors that daily active user count is rising faster than the number of ads the site is showing, which it predicts will lead to a lower average revenue per user.
As we noted when Facebook originally filed, it hasn’t proven its ability to monetize mobile yet. It now has Sponsored Stories ads running in the mobile news feed, but it can’t show nearly as many ads in this format as it does on the web, where it often shows four to seven ads per page, though less prominently in the sidebar. → Read More
Today, Facebook app discovery too heavily favors the loudest apps with the most users, so Facebook today announces it will soon launch the App Center, a single, personalized hub for discovering the highest quality Facebook-integrated games and utilities from across the web and mobile. And for the first time, Facebook is beta testing the option for developers to sell pre-paid web and HTML5 apps. You’ll be able to access App Center via the web or mobile, and you can send apps you discover on a the web to your littler devices.
App Center could be a huge boon to app growth on Facebook, especially for those that are beloved but not inherently viral. With any luck, App Center will usher in an age where your news feed is filled with apps you actually want use, not just the spammiest ones or those with the biggest marketing budgets. → Read More
Here’s a heart-warming tale of why you can’t second-guess yourself. Robert Cezar Matei had the chance to work for Instagram long-before it was acquired by Facebook for $1 billion, but followed his passion for knowledge and became the growth hacker for question & answer site Quora instead.
This is his answer on Quora (fittingly) for why he declined Instagram, and why he’s still smiling. “You make a gut call, then you walk into the future with serenity.”
Question – Did anyone decline an offer to work at Instagram?
Answer - Robert Cezar Matei: “Yeah, I had an offer to be the second engineering hire.
Kevin and Mike grew the team very slowly for most of their history: they’d hired only one engineer, Shayne, until just a few months prior to the acquisition, and they’d only made one other offer before me. They were picky, but they also weren’t taken that seriously as a business by many people. → Read More
Facebook has a plan to squeeze more ad dollars out of ecommerce sites and anyone else selling products on the web. It’s quietly testing a new version of its Offers coupons that can be redeemed at online stores, not just at physical shops. Sources clued us in and Facebook has now confirmed with me that users will see Offers in the news feed, ads, and Sponsored Stories that feature a promo code or special link to click through for a discount on off-site purchases.
Similar to how the existing version of Offers lead to foot traffic and revenue for brick-and-mortar stores, big brands with web stores, ecommerce hubs, and celebrities with merch to sell could soon use Offers to drive sales. Coupons like “Take $5 Off A Purchase Of $50 Or More” can produce real return on investment. So while they’re free to run, businesses will pay Facebook to show their Offers to more people. → Read More
Airtime looks to be finally ready for takeoff, as Sean Parker and Shawn Fanning’s stealth video startup just put up a blog stating “We look forward to saying hello on June 5th. Sign up to be first in line.” Airtime took a limited round of pre-registrations last month but is now letting people sign up for early beta access.
No one’s sure what exactly the startup does, though many believe it will help people meet each other through live streaming video. → Read More
No, Facebook news reader apps aren’t declining because users suddenly got fed up with auto-sharing. The user loss is likely due to the transition to “trending articles”, a new way of surfacing recently read articles in the news feed that Facebook is testing. Update: The Washington Post confirms my hypothesis: “Social reader “collapse” is b/c of evolving FB modules. Before: “double-double,” 4-5 stories down in a list, w/ friend icon – drove growth.”
Previously, Facebook had been driving huge numbers of installs and re-engagements to news reader apps with a “recently read articles” box that would often appear at the top of the news feed. But in mid-April following a massive reader app user count spike it replaced this with a redesigned “trending articles” box that shows fewer articles, and that seems to appear less prominently. The transition period where Facebook may not have been showing any “recently read article” box is likely to blame for the decline, along with a leveling off from the spike and reduced traffic from a weaker “trending articles” design.
What the these user count fluctuations really mean is that Facebook is in firm control of what apps and content types receive traffic from its news feed. → Read More
Despite fears that streaming access cannibalizes sales, classical music record label X5 tells me when it launched an app within Spotify and saw streams of one album increase 412% in a month, that album’s iTunes sales shot up 50%. The Swedish label’s “The 50 Greatest Pieces of Classical Music” soon reached #1 on the iTunes Classical charts, and broke into the iTunes Top 200 album charts for the first time, hitting #152.
The stats back up claims by some record labels and Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek that there’s no evidence of Spotify or other streaming services negatively impacting music sales. More data like this could encourage artists and labels to promote their streaming music presences, and push acts like The Black Keys and Paul McCartney who’ve pulled their catalogues from Spotify to come back. → Read More
An automated Facebook spam filter, not purposeful censorship, is to blame for startup enthusiast Robert Scoble and some other commenters getting blocked, according to a company spokesperson.
Users attempting to comment on blog posts have recently been prevented from doing so, with warning text from the company saying that “this comment can’t be posted” because it is “irrelevant or inappropriate.” We’ve heard back from Facebook, and here’s what it says has been going on. → Read More
Facebook thinks mobile messaging should feel like you’re having a face-to-face conversation, so today it updates its Messenger for iOS and Android apps with the ability to see if someone’s read your message, and easier ways to tell if someone’s typing and where they’re messaging from. Facebook Messenger “read receipts” are even easier to understand than those long-found on BlackBerry Messenger, and they work for group messaging too. The apps now display “Seen by Peter, Josh, Justin” right under a sent message.
Director of Product Peter Deng tells me “SMS has been around for 20 years, built it was for these T9 phones. We’re focused on leveraging all the capabilities of today’s devices to create a new messaging experience.” (Update: Unfortunately, Peter Deng doesn’t actually talk like Yoda, and his quote was “but it was built for these T9 phones”) He also says these are just the start of app updates designed to make mobile conversations feel more real, as if you had body language cues and more to go by. The read receipts definitely accomplish this, as you won’t have to send any “did you get that?” messages or wonder if someone missed you message, or read it but just didn’t respond. → Read More
How much should you pay for a used iPhone, TV, or bicycle? Spark Capital, Andreessen Horowitz, SV Angel and more think you need to know, so they’ve invested $1.5 million into Priceonomics, a Y Combinator winter 2012 startup. The seed round that shall be announced later today will go towards hiring front-end developers and back-end engineers to make the site beautiful but simple and beef up its machine learning technology.
The site saw 250,000 page views in March and is still growing traffic by a brisk 65% every month. Investors see gold in possible business models built around the data Priceonomics crawls and ads shown to people about to make a purchase. Co-founder Rohin Dhar says the startup aims to beat general search engines by immediately knowing you’re looking to buy when you type in the name or maker of a laptop, appliance, camera, or stereo. → Read More
Aliens are streaming our music! A crop circle bearing a striking resemblance to the Spotify logo has appeared in Wiltshire, England near Stonehenge. The Swedish startup denies having anything to do with the formation pressed into a canola seed field.
Sirius XM satellite radio must feel a little jealous, as it’s been beaming music into space for years. Hopefully the extraterrestrials like to party, as Fun.’s drunken anthem “We Are Young” has been topping the Spotify charts for weeks. Otherwise, we may need to assemble Will Smith and others with experience fighting aliens. → Read More
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