Oops, they did it again: popular Facebook games maker Zynga last month trademarked the name FishVille and promptly launched the game by that name less than a month later. This time Games.com reports it could be pets the social games giant is going after next, with another trademark filing on the term PetVille.

It makes perfect sense. In the same way that FishVille targeted rival company CrowdStar’s popular Happy Aquarium game concept, PetVille would neatly knock on the door of rival Playdom’s successful title Pet Society.

Zynga is perhaps best known for its wildly popular game FarmVille, but is clearly not content to rest on its laurels and is aggressively building out social games with similar casual mechanics and a reportedly impressive revenue stream from in-game currency sales. Just how big is the social games space? Big enough to prompt industry-leading video game publisher Electronic Arts to snap up Playfish for as much as $400 million.

With shorter development cycles and growing revenue streams, it’s no wonder the traditional video games industry is taking notice, as sales data from consoles and software continue to plummet. For many of the same reasons, the industry should be worried about Apple’s iPhone too.

Do you play casual games on Facebook? Have you ever spent real money on virtual goods?

Tags: casual games, facebook, farmville, fishville, petville, social games, Zynga

The entire social gaming industry has been criticized in recent weeks for running deceptive advertising offers. But how bad has the problem been, really? After all, low-quality ads for weight loss, teeth whitening, and a range of other dubious promises run in major ad networks and appear on prominent web sites all over the web. So here is the result of our investigation into the past and present problems with offers as they have affected social games and other applications on social networks.

Based on our research, we believe that offer companies have run many deceptive offers. Yet the majority of offers have not been deceptive, but rather legal and also low-quality. These offers have been some of the most lucrative for offer networks and developers. However, a meaningful minority of offers have been high-quality, and point the way forward for the concept of incentivized advertising in social networks.

To really understand the scope of the problem, one has to first understand how it fits into the larger, yet still-young social gaming industry. Here, we’ll lay out the history of offers on social networks, include what most offer companies who are active on Facebook and MySpace told us about the issues, discuss ongoing enforcement measures, and look at what’s needed to improve the ecosystem.

A Brief History of Offers



How long have offers been running within social networks? Since the rise of social gaming. Games began getting traction on social networks starting when Facebook launched its developer platform in May of 2007, but developers needed revenue to support themselves. Many users had never paid for virtual goods before, and they didn’t necessarily want to start paying out of pocket — and anyway, most developers had little or no experience building virtual economies. So offer companies sprang up, or in many cases migrated over from the advertising industry.

In social networks, these companies let users earn points to buy things like virtual currency by signing up for a Netflix subscription… or a mobile quiz subscription. To make this possible, offer companies, at their simplest took (and still take) advertising inventory from dozens if not hundreds of ad networks, then display that inventory within “offer walls” that appear in the payment page on social games. At its most basic, an offer wall is simply targeted ad inventory displayed within a window on a game. Like “scotch tape between two pieces of string,” as one industry source described them; it’s not as if many offer walls are fine-tuned technological marvels, although some companies are more sophisticated than others.

But how bad were offers in the beginning? As another person in the industry told us, it was not as if offer companies and developers said “how can we scam users.” Instead, many of the more legitimate advertisers who found their ads running within social applications also found themselves being burned by some users. A game player who wanted to get points didn’t necessarily care about the offer, so they’d sign up for the offer, get the points, then cancel — or some variation of that scheme. A few big advertisers, like Netflix, have internal methods that allow them to survive in this harsh environment, but others cut off social offers due to these issues.

So what sort of advertisers were left entering this environment? Mostly the ones that have been dealing with hard-to-monetize users for many years on the web: performance advertisers. Over a decade in to this industry, you can still spot their handiwork in such places as in the remnant ads of well-respected tech companies like Google and Yahoo, and on major news sites. Many of the ads that you’ll see in these locations are exactly the ones being criticized for appearing in offers: mobile ringtone subscriptions, IQ quiz ads, etc. They are not all illegal, or even necessarily deceptive, but when you see them, you wonder who would want them.

What Offer Companies Told Us

We reached out to almost every company in the space about these issues, and we heard back from most, including the largest ones. But not every company was willing to speak to us on the record — and most of those who did gave incomplete responses. Also, in order to define how big the scam problem is within offers, you first need to define what a “scam” is. On Facebook, for example, a variety of offers are permitted as long as they clearly disclose payment terms, and include an opt-in checkbox when asking for payment information.

Here are the aggregated, anonymized answers. We believe they are the most detailed information published yet about the current (and recent) state of the offer industry.

• Around 20 percent of offers have been clearly legitimate brand ads, along the lines of Netflix subscriptions.


• Another 60 percent have run a wide quality range, from the sorts of ads that aren’t illegal but also aren’t clearly valuable (like some ringtone subscriptions)


• The last 20 percent have been offers that willfully trick users into things like paying more than advertised or providing private personal information

Of course, these numbers are according to the offer companies themselves.

Regardless of what happens with scammy ads elsewhere on the web, the industry’s own estimates do not reflect well on offer companies, or on application developers that have been running offers. However, people should not think that social gaming revenue only comes from offers. We have estimated that about 30% of overall revenue for social gaming companies comes from offers. The other 70% comes from some form of direct payment, like PayPal, credit cards, mobile payments, prepaid cards, and other methods.

Beyond the stats mentioned above, here’s what companies told us:

Where have the ads come from? Most companies we spoke said they have worked with many, many different ad networks, including Azoogle, Adteractive, Valueclick, and dozens of others. There are literally hundreds of ad and affiliate networks out there whose ads could show up in social media via an offer wall. Many offer companies also said they work directly with major brands. But when we asked each offer network to specifically provide us with the names and contact information of their advertisers, only a couple did. It’s not clear to us how many offer networks actually have very many direct advertiser relationships. Meanwhile, the brand advertisers we have spoken with say they are having some success, but they want the overall offer quality to improve in order for the space to become a safer place for them to invest. As you can see from any offer wall these days, several brands do have ads that run within offers.

Are the users who take offers valuable to advertisers? Most offer companies said that advertisers discount offers on social networks, due to people not following through on offers, with the range we heard running between 20% and 40%, depending on the offer company. In other words, because of the incentivized nature of the offers, there are well-known issues that affect lead quality, and so advertisers are still adjusting bid prices accordingly.



How do offer companies provide data to advertisers? Some offer companies said they provide specific information about the customer source to advertisers, such as the application the customer came from. Many said they did not always do this. In general, we have not been able to get specific information from any of the offer companies on what data, exactly, they provide to advertisers. In many cases, from our understanding, there are multiple ad networks between an offer company and the actual advertiser, and the data does not get passed through the middle-men. So advertiser visibility is often, but not always, low. Ad industry experts say this is one of the main reasons that advertisers have been slow to invest more intelligently, and thus heavily, in offers.



Who handles user complaints? Because many offer companies operate behind the scenes, users typically do not report ad problems to them. Instead, they report to the developer or the advertiser. According to offer companies, the main reason users find and report issues to offer companies concerns virtual points they’ve earned through offers, that they have yet to receive. In many of these cases, a payment may take hours or days to clear, while users expect their points within minutes — but this is a small issue compared to users complaining about deceptive or unclear offers themselves. In most cases, there are not automated feedback loops for developers to tell offer networks which ads to stop running. Right now, that feedback happens manually. Given the potentially millions of ads and hundreds of networks that can pipe in ads, accountability is hard to create.



What portion of users are blocked from taking offers? The consensus ranged from less than 1% to around 5%. The offer networks are blocking users who are known to be trying to game the system in order to mitigate fraud from the user side as well. Many have large operations teams that handle this.

Have offer rates declined in recent months? Netflix hit most offer providers with a rate reduction recently due to the quality of offer leads, we heard from multiple networks, although some say they are seeing higher rates again. However, while some offer rates have been decreasing, others have stayed steady or have been growing — at least until a massive number of offers got taken out in recent weeks.

Offer Providers

Here’s an alphabetical list of the companies we consider to be offer providers for social games, although some may only run offers as a small and non-essential part of their business.

- AdParlor

- Boomerang Networks

- Deal United

- DoubleDing

- Fatfoogoo

- Firecue

- Gambit

- Gratispay

- gWallet

- Offerpal Media

- Peanut Labs Media

- Q Interactive

- RockYou

- SocialCash

- Sometrics

- SponsorPay

- Super Rewards

- SupersonicAds

- Tatto Media

- TokenAds

- TrialPay

Punishment

A couple weeks ago, Facebook said it had banned two more ad/offer networks. It didn’t say at the time who the companies were, but Facebook recently confirmed their identities to us: Tatto Media and Gambit. The reason in both cases, Facebook tells us, is “repeated policy violations.” The company is not providing more detail on what the exact violations were because the bans are a legal matter.

Here’s what Facebook said last week:

In addition to legal notices that have been sent to many ad networks to mandate ongoing compliance on Facebook Platform, today we are disabling two additional offer and ad networks who have repeatedly violated our policies.

Tatto Media has a history of trouble. For example, it was fined by the Washington state Attorney General earlier this year for running the deceptive “luv crush” ads where users were shown a fake email interface that tricked them into paying for horoscope subscriptions. More recently, it served as the poster child of scammy ad networks in TechCrunch’s “Scamville” offer scam exposé — for selling similarly deceptive ads within offer walls. Zynga chief executive Mark Pincus followed up by calling it the “worst offender” on Facebook, mentioning that it had already been banned.

Gambit is a bit of a different story. The company has articulated itself more clearly than most of its competitors about offer issues, including this in-depth post on its company blog. It has also recently looked to diversify away from advertising offers; for example, a few weeks ago it announced a partnership with online labor services company Crowdflower, where users can earn points in a game through doing online-based jobs for companies. In terms of the ban, the company says that it was “working closely with Facebook employees on compliance, accidentally showed some non-compliant ads, and [was] shocked to learn of Facebook’s reaction” — although we have not been able to verify this claim.

A ban isn’t necessarily for life. It’s possible Gambit and Tatto could return at some point in the future, but Facebook had no comment on the chance of that happening.

MySpace recently toughened its terms around offers, too. And Zynga, the largest social game developer, has also taken all of its offers offline until it can be sure of offer quality. Running clean offers, in other words, is now a necessity for anyone hoping to continue on in the business. That means less inventory, at least for the time being.

A final point about punishment: Facebook has been disciplining individual apps when they run ads that violate its policies for a long time. The company slaps developers with punishments like turned-off feed stories, etc., often. Most of the time the public never finds out about it, because the developer doesn’t want anyone to know. It is our understanding that Facebook has taken at least 50 apps offline in recent months that have 1 million monthly active users apiece.

Solutions

At its most basic — and as many industry observers have noted in recent days — offer companies need to be more transparent with users and with advertisers about how their businesses work. Valuable offers must either be for something that users want to purchase already, and so they will want to buy using the discount provided in the offer, or else be for a product that is actually good, but might require a trial or other incentive to get the users to see for themselves (like Netflix).

There are historical examples for what happens to incentivized advertising on the web. The free iPod-style incentivized ads boomed then busted — or in some cases evolved — earlier this decade. On the other hand, many ads that appeared in search engines early on were of very low quality. Google succeeded in targeting ads to what users were searching for, then brought on more and more legitimate advertisers. The latter example, in some sense, is what the offers industry hopes to do now. The good news is that users clearly do care about offers as a concept. They have clearly shown, after all, that they are willing to use them instead of paying for a good directly.

On the consumer side, offer companies should provide clear descriptions of what, exactly, users are signing up for, as Andrew Chen writes. Is the offer a subscription? Is information going to be shared with third parties? If advertisers have nothing to hide, why not have a Facebook page about their products? Some of these changes already appear to be in the works, driven by Facebook, MySpace and some game developers, but now is the time for every offer company to prove it can self-regulate.

The same focus on transparency and self-regulation needs to happen on the advertiser side, too. Many offer companies say they have direct relationships with advertisers, but they should be more transparent with developers about when this is or is not the case. Legitimate advertisers need to clearly understand the value of offers to their businesses. Where are offers showing up? What’s the incentive in the app for the user?

The first step is for offer networks to improve filtering controls over what offers apper, as many low-quality offers are not valuable to users, and skirt the rules of what platforms and developers now find acceptable. High quality advertisers have told us they don’t like showing up next to low-quality ones, and more may get scared away if quality is not improved.

And from that last point, there’s also the question of how offers can innovate to become more valuable to advertisers, developers and users. Some offer companies have started integrating ads directly into games, associated with relevant virtual goods. See TrialPay’s integration of FTD’s real-life flower sales into Playfish’s Pet Society for a good example of that. And perhaps offer companies should take a closer look at AdNectar, and other companies that integrate branded virtual goods into games. As Jay Weintraub writes, “Facebook pages are necessary, but they don’t compare to an experience that is more powerful and safer than Second Life. For example, 65mm and growing virtual farmers should all be using Miracle Gro to plant, John Deere tractors to till, and Whole Foods to sell their food to.”

The industry will lose some money as a result of higher standards for offer quality in the short term, but in the long run, advertising must become higher quality if it’s going to play a meaningful role in the mass market of social games. Social games are the largest and fastest growing segment of the US virtual goods market, according to our Inside Virtual Goods report, and about 30% of all social game revenues will come from offers this year. We don’t know exactly what portion of offer revenues came from scammy offers, but we estimate it could be significantly more than the 20% of offers that offer networks now admit were scammy. And, given that offers have served as an important on-boarding experience in getting users to get engaged enough with games to make direct payments for virtual currency, the decrease in the number of available offers might at least slow down the growth rate of the number of new users who decide to start paying for virtual goods as well.

Still, 70% of virtual goods revenue comes from some direct payment method, and the decrease in offer inventory is likely to mean more users use direct payments — benefitting direct payment providers. And companies that have run a minimal amount of offers, like Playfish, obviously are not being significantly affected.

The offers issue has also raised questions for the industry as a whole. The scam problem could have been solved before now.

The fact that offer companies were willingly running what they acknowledge to be scammy offers goes to show that regulation is needed. Facebook and MySpace are in the best position to enforce this regulation, as they can put the burden on developers to self-regulate by suspending their apps if bad offers are found. Facebook has been criticized for not acting more quickly.

Facebook has said that it will continue to be an open platform, which means that people are free to build applications and monetize as they choose, but they need to follow Facebook’s policies. If developers don’t, Facebook will try to enforce it. It is also building out its policy enforcement team to weed out more bad ads, and suspend ad networks that repeatedly violate its policies, though it could always be improved more quickly.

As it has shown with the two most recent bans, it is quite serious. Indeed, the scammy ads issue is getting more serious in other industries, too. Google recently decided to draw a hard line against violating advertisers, immediately banning any perpetrators; this is after years of softer enforcement. Meanwhile, Congress is holding hearings on a wide range of large brands that have used scammy ads, while European regulators are going after tricky ringtone providers.

And, the press also needs to do a better job. Specifically, blogs like ours that cover the industry need to be more focused not just on what companies are doing right, but what they are doing wrong. We and others have covered offer and social network advertising problems that have been long-running issues on Facebook and other platforms. One challenge has been in going beyond pointing out that a few bad offers exist and instead trying to quantify the scope of the problem. So we will continue to investigate these and other industry issues.

Finally, some of you may wonder where some of our advertisers stand on these issues. We take this issue seriously. We have rejected some prospective advertisers in the past because they were doing things that didn’t meet our standards, and we are aware of some problems with offers some of our sponsors are running. In recent months, we have been working on gathering more information on how big these problems are. We are continuing to review each advertiser on a case-by-case basis.

[Quiz ad images via VentureBeat]

While Facebook’s userbase has been consistently growing for years, its monetary value has been less than consistent. Facebook stunned the world in October 2007 when a Microsoft investment valued the company at $15 Billion. The recession hit Facebook’s value hard though, dropping it all the way to $3.7 Billion in February of this year.

Facebook’s value has been fighting back ever since. In July, its value reached $6.5 Billion after a fresh $200 million investment. And now, according to Bloomberg, Facebook’s valuation has reach $9.5 Billion, a 42% increase in just four months.



The $9.5 billion number is derived from the value of Facebook’s stock. While Facebook is a private company, stock of the social networking company is still getting exchanged. The value today is around $21 per share, a big jump from the price Digital Ventures paid in July: $14.77 per share.

The rising value of Facebook makes complete sense to us. It now has over 325 million users and continues to gain new users at a clip of half a million every single day. Plus, with Facebook now cashflow positive and exploring new revenue possibilities, its value will only keep rising.

Tags: facebook, valuation

This afternoon I’ve been watching the Google OS announcement and all I can say is that this is what Mark Zuckerberg first announced when they released Platform, two and a half years ago. Many assumed that the acquisition of Parakey was a step toward truly building the web operating system of the future. Blake Ross, the developer of Firefox and Parakey, has been working on Facebook Lite though. Joe Hewitt, the other Parakey developer, had been working on the Facebook iPhone application until recently. So where is Facebook OS?



Mark Zuckerberg proclaimed Facebook as the “social operating system” and ultimately it has become just that to a certain extend. The largest issue is that utility focused applications have never done well on Facebook because it doesn’t function as a full blown operating system yet. In other words, you don’t spend all your time from within Facebook. Instead you spend the vast majority of from within a web browser.

If you want to listen to Google’s explanation of the problem in an overly enthusiastic tone, you can watch the video below. Now it’s very possible that Facebook is still working on the truly “social operating system”. Facebook has had a significant impact on all new platforms including the iPhone platform, the Google Android operating system, and all other social platforms on the web. The primary feature that Facebook innovated was notifications (which is now being depricated) as well as the stream, and I’d argue that Facebook was a catalyst for the multi-platform wars.

The number of platforms for developers to build on has increased dramatically in just the past two and a half years and Facebook has proven to be one of the leading platforms. With Facebook appearing to move away from being a destination site in the future, one would only expect Facebook to continue moving forward with the original vision of becoming the “social operating system”. The only question now is whether or not the vision has been lost or if one day we’ll actually have the choice of booting up our devices with Facebook, the social operating system.

Facebook is not only the world’s biggest social network, it’s also one of the most popular places to share photos. For users with lots of photos, however, the process of adding albums or collections to Facebook can be kind of a chore.

Sure, there are apps available to minimize the time it takes to tag people in your pictures, but the upload process itself is slow, dated, and buggy. Facebook agrees and today has introduced a new Photo Uploader Prototype.



Facebook describes the prototype as “a preview of an upcoming replacement for the existing Facebook photo uploader. This brand new experience makes use of the new Facebook Plug-In, a light-weight browser plug-in.” And you can activate it and start using it on your account immediately.

The new photo uploader is a huge improvement over the old version. This is how it works: the first time you launch the uploader, you’ll be asked to install a new Facebook Plugin. The plugin works with Windows, Mac OS X and Ubuntu Linux 8.04 and up (the plugin only works in the 32-bit version of Ubuntu at this time). The plugin should install right in your browser, but you might have to download it separately and run the file, like I did on my Mac.

In any event, you don’t have to restart your browser to use the plugin. Once the plugin is installed you’ll see your standard “Create an Album” screen, but now when you select “Select Photos,” this is what pops up:

It’s fast and allows you to access photos from your computer (you can easily select folder or folder within folders). You can then add photos from all over your computer and when you’re ready, select upload. At this time, the upload process will take place in the background, meaning you can go back to using Facebook instead of waiting for your files to upload.

This is still in the testing phase, so you might find some bugs — if you have issues — you can always deactivate the prototype and go back to the old way of uploading. The Facebook team hopes to roll out the new version to all users as a replacement soon.

We have to say, the new uploader is a huge improvement over other options. In fact, stand-alone apps like the Flickr Uploadr not-withstanding, this uploader is one of the best ways we’ve seen to upload photos to an online service.

What do you think about Facebook’s new photo uploader?

Tags: facebook, facebook photo uploader, photo uploader, Photos

For those of you waiting for the Facebook integration on the PS3 to roll out, the new version 3.10 firmware is now available. You’ll have to install the update, then look for the new Facebook Settings under the Account Management section of the PlayStation Network area of the cross-media bar (XMB).

Once enabled you’ll be able to toggle your settings for the three areas we described earlier: send updates from trophies, PSN purchases and/or “game events” to be determined by developers.

Have you installed the update yet and connected your accounts? Let us know if you spot any interesting game events as developers (hopefully) start building them into titles.

Tags: facebook, gaming, playstation 3, PS3, PSN, social networking, sony

Want to get your questions answered by Lady Gaga, Selena Gomez, Rhianna, or Taylor Swift? I don’t, but if you are one of the millions of people who follow celebrities, you can watch the American Music Awards pre-show live on Facebook this Sunday. The “Official AMA Pre-Show” will feature hosts Julie Moran, Jenni Pulos, Jai Rodriguez, Taryn Southern. Don’t forget Facebook’s own Randi Zuckerberg and Communications Director Brandee Barker, who will also be featured hosts of the event.



Just like Shakira’s recent music video debut on Facebook, the event will be streamed using the live streaming application, powered by Ustream. If you want to check out all the red carpet goodness you can visit the AMAs Facebook Page or Celebrities on Facebook Page. Perhaps you can get post a question to Taylor Swift about the Kanye incident, something which I’m sure she has been inundated with for months now.

If you happen to come up with more creative questions for the celebrities, you can post them via the Celebs on Facebook stream.

Live webcasts of red carpet events are an emerging trend with social networks and live video. In the last few weeks, we’ve seen the red carpet events for Michael Jackson’s “This Is It” and “The Twilight Saga: New Moon” bring in big viewers. The “Twilight” event, which was a collaboration between MySpace and Ustream, broke Ustream records by delivering 3 million viewers.

Unsurprisingly, the biggest social networking site on the web — Facebook — has also picked up on the trend. The American Music Awards will be streaming its first ever digital pre-show on Sunday, November 22 on the popular Celebs on Facebook Page.



Facebook is teaming with Ustream (Facebook was also hosted the Ustream/Sony “This Is It” red carpet premiere) and fans at home will have a chance to post questions for the hosts — which include Facebook’s Randi Zuckerberg and Brandee Barker — to ask the music artists as they prepare to enter the award show.

The AMA’s air Sunday night on ABC from 8-11 EST. The pre-show will start at 6 p.m. EST. You can tune in at Facebook’s Celebs Page, the AMAs Facebook Page or via Ustream or ABC.com.

What do you think about the trend of live events cross-promoting across social networking sites?

Tags: AMAs, facebook, livestream, ustream

Just one month ago at Web 2.0 Summit, Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, told the audience that the company had surpassed 150 monthly active users. One month later, the company’s user base has grown by a third, rocketing it past 200 million users. Monthly active users are a relatively broad metric when analyzing a company though, as daily active users are a more effective metric for measuring a company’s ability to monetize.



During the same period when Zynga’s monthly active users grew by 50 percent, daily active users grew approximately 27 percent from 47.8 million to approximately 61 million. All other things being constant, Zynga’s revenue should grow proportionally to the growth in daily active users. When it comes to total daily active users, no company comes close to Zynga. The second largest company is Playfish, who recently sold to Electronic Arts for up to $400 million on estimated annual revenues of $30 million to $40 million.

That means Zynga should easily be making more than $250 million annually at this point, although the company recently took a hit as Facebook became more aggressive on some of the questionable IQ Quiz advertisements. The company also had Fishville shut down for a few days after Facebook found advertisements which violate their advertising terms. That application has recovered though and is growing at upwards of 10 percent a day, currently reaching over 12.3 million monthly active users.

Under two months ago we wrote about Zynga surpassing 100 million monthly active users and the growth isn’t slowing. At this rate we could be talking about the company surpassing 500 million monthly active users in only a few months. With the company’s rapid ascent, a projected 2010 IPO doesn’t seem so ridiculous.

Facebook is the largest photo sharing service in the world, with over 2 billion photos uploaded by users each month. So when the company is testing a brand new way for users to get most of those photos onto the site, it’s a big change.

Although the current photo uploading tools are obviously working well enough to support the current volume of photo sharing on Facebook, many users have some technical problems when uploading photos. As a result, Facebook has decided to forego relying upon ActiveX controls, Java applets, and even Flash in a new version of the photo uploader tool it’s testing. Instead, it’s built entirely in JavaScript, CSS, and HTML. Users can test the new uploader by activating the “prototype” app.

When you activate the new photo uploader, here’s how it looks:

Here’s how it works, according to Facebook’s Chris Putnam,

The photos in thumbnail view are served by a light-weight local web server thread, while the filesystem information is provided through a JavaScript API. After selecting photos and starting an upload, you’ll discover another great feature–asynchronous uploading. The plug-in spins off a background thread to perform the upload regardless of what the browser is doing in the foreground. Then the local web server provides JSONP endpoints to retrieve progress information or cancel the ongoing upload, without needing to re-embed the plug-in itself. With this approach you can even navigate away from Facebook entirely without worrying about your uploads.

Facebook goes into detail on its approach to the security model in the new uploader here.

Obviously, maintaining security around user data is a primary concern for Facebook, so the team behind the new photo uploader is going to be doing a lot of testing and observing to see how the new tool is used. “Depending on the results of these tests, we hope to roll it out to all users soon,” Putnam says.