WebProNews

Tag: Facebook Events

  • Facebook’s ‘Maybe’ Button, the Worst Thing About Events, Is Finally Dead

    Facebook’s ‘Maybe’ Button, the Worst Thing About Events, Is Finally Dead

    RIP “Maybe” button. We all really hated you and aren’t remotely sad to see you go.

    Starting today, everyone should see “Interested” instead of “Maybe” as the third option for RSVP’ing to a Facebook event, alongside “Going” and “Not Going”.

    Facebook has been testing the “Interested” option for a few weeks, but now it’s official.

    A Facebook spokesperson told The Next Web that the decision is final. “Maybe” has officially been replaced by “Interested” and is rolling out to all users.

    The “Maybe” button was one of the worst things about Facebook events. People clicked on it because they wanted to received notifications and updates from the event, even if they really didn’t have any intentions to attend.

    And for event hosts, a “Maybe” wound up meaning nothing – one of the most hollow things on the internet.

    The new “Interested” button solves this. People can still receive updates from the event, but “Interested” doesn’t connote the same kind of commitment at “Maybe”.

    RIP in pieces, “Maybe” button.

  • Facebook Wants to Tell Your Friends When You’re Ignoring Their Event Invites

    For a decade, you’ve ignored friends’ event invites. Now, you might have to say “maybe” if you want to preserve said friendship.

    Facebook is testing adding read receipts to Events, meaning that you’ll be able to see when a friend has seen your event invite, but is ignoring it (or at the very least is having to think about it).

    Facebook already has read receipts for Messenger and Groups – which you can’t disable (without third-party help). Allowing event creators to know when a person hasn’t yet seen or has seen but is ignoring an invite could help them better plan – or at least prompt them to nudge the unsure friend along.

    Or it could piss a lot of people off.

    “We’re piloting the ability for private event hosts and guests to know whether their friends they invited have seen the event,” a Facebook spokesperson told The Daily Dot.

    Of course, it’s just a test at this point and Facebook could abandon the idea. Hopefully.

  • Facebook Is Making Events More Prominent

    Facebook Is Making Events More Prominent

    One of the most useful features of Facebook has always been Events. Even if you’re not the type of person to spend hours scrolling through the News Feed, commenting on posts, and liking baby photos – you probably use Facebook to keep track of upcoming events.

    Well, if you’re a fan of managing events on Facebook, good news. Apparently, Events are about to become a bigger part of the Facebook experience.

    Facebook Events product manager Aditya Koolwal shared a handful of upcoming tweaks to Events with Mashable – and the main takeaway is that Facebook wants more people RSVPing to events on the site.

    According to Koolwal, you can expect to see more stories about friends attending events in your News Feed.

    Not only that, but there will soon be a new drop-down list of “related events” that pops up in your News Feed when you join an event.

    Facebook is also integrating events with Messenger. Facebook’s trying to do quite a bit with Messenger these days.

    It’s already possible for event hosts to initiate a group chat with guests, but the Events team wants to take it further, enabling a quick tap or two for easy one-to-one chats in Messenger between an event host and someone they have invited.

    Koolwal also wants to make it easier for users to share an event with a person they’re messaging without leaving the Messenger app itself, an experience he compares to say, sending an attachment, but in this case, the attachment would be an event instead of a photo or audio file.

    Apart from just making Event more prominent, Facebook is actually gearing up to tweak the way the feature works. At some point (by next year), Facebook wants to make it easier to invite people to events – even non Facebook users. In the future, people might be able to join Facebook events without having an account (via email?).

    Oh, and there might be a standalone Events app at some point. Because of course there might be.

  • Facebook Launches New Event Ad Options

    Facebook announced the launch of new advertiser tools for promoting events and giving them more visibility.

    For one, Pages will soon be able to create ads for desktop and mobile News Feed to boost awareness for events. In the past, Facebook has only let Pages run these types of ads in the right-hand column on desktop. Page owners will be able to create vent response ads in the Ad Create tool and Power Editor.

    The feature will be available in the coming weeks.

    Additionally, event hosts will be able to view insights in the right-hand column of an event page. You’ll be able to see the number of people who have seen a link to the event, who have viewed the event, and who have joined, saved, or maybed the event.

    “These insights represent the first step we’re taking to help Pages better understand what’s working and not working when promoting their events,” the company says.

    In addition to the new tools for Pages, Facebook is changing the way events pages look for users. According to Facebook, they’ll better highlight upcoming events and showcase new events, including suggested events based on info like the Pages you like, your location, and the day of the week.

    According to Facebook, 30% of all the events people connect to originate from Pages.

    Image via Facebook

  • Facebook To Unveil “Big Idea” at June 20th Press Event

    Mark your calendars, folks – there’s another Facebook press event on the horizon.

    This one will take place on June 20th at their Menlo Park HQ.

    Facebook usually sends out its press invites via email – but this is not the case for this upcoming event. These invites came the old-fashioned way – snail mail.

    ABC News posted an image of the invite, which keeps with the Facebook tradition of non-specific, no-frills press invites. All it says is “A small team has been working on a big idea. Join us for coffee and learn about a new product.”

    So we know it will be a new product launch, and that’s about it.

    Recent product launches that Facebook has held big press events for include Graph Search, the New News Feed, and Facebook Home.

    Earlier this week, Facebook launched hashtags. They said that it was part of a bigger move to “bring public conversations to the forefront.” They also said it was just the beginning of a series of future roll outs to help with these public conversations.

    “We will be rolling out a series of features that surface some of the interesting discussions people are having about public events, people, and topics,” said Facebook.

    Is this the “big idea” that Facebook is set to unveil? Who knows. As always, we’ll be covering the event.

    [Image via Facebook]

  • Facebook Updates Events With Impressive New Calendar, List Views

    In a move that was a long time coming, Facebook has rolled out an all new events page, complete with two equally useful ways to organize all of your date-specific happenings on the site.

    The Events redesign was born out of a Facebook hackathon, as Bob Baldwin explains in a Facebook Engineering note:

    Together, we built a new list and day view, and incorporated posts, photos and videos. We touched up details like making the Events icon dynamically update to today’s date, rather than showing a permanent “31” as before. After incorporating feedback from an internal test, we were excited to roll it out and take our hackathon project full circle.

    Today we announce a new list and calendar view that makes it easier to scan upcoming birthdays, invites and suggested events. Scroll through these events and respond to invites without leaving the page. Suggested events are recommended to you based on your friends, Pages you like, places you’ve checked in at and the apps you use on Facebook.

    The new calendar view lays out all of your upcoming events, birthdays, and suggested events in easy to navigate grids. Hovering over any aspect of the calendar will trigger a detailed pop up, where you can join, decline, or navigate toward the event’s page.

    Facebook events new calendar view

    Hovering…

    Clicking on a square also opens up the events and birthdays of the day. From the top of the calendar view you can create an event, change the date, or even export your events to iCal, Outlook, or Google Calendar.

    List view organizes all of your events and birthdays in a list, obviously. From that list you can reply to invitations and even post to friends’ Timelines when their birthdays come around – without ever leaving the Event page. Each event is easily removable if you simply click to “x” at the top right.

    A mini calendar on the left hand side assist with navigation:

    Facebook Events, a feature that has stood the test of time with users, really needed and update – and this is a good one. Using the calendar view makes me wonder how we went this long without this setup for Events, it’s that intuitive. Although there are surely tweaks to be made to improve new Events, this is a gigantic step forward.

  • Your Facebook Invites Sound Stupid When Read Aloud

    Coming soon, the next new Facebook feature that everyone is bound to hate: Talking event invitations?

    Okay, as of right now Facebook doesn’t have any plans to bring user videos to event invites, but does that really sound all that out of the realm of possibility? The somewhat frightening concept is explored in the this funny vid from Jared Fried and Chris Distefano, who ask “What If Facebook Invites Could Talk?”

    And here’s the problem: they sound really stupid. There’s no slick James Bond “this message will self destruct” vibe here – just a couple of annoying people reading even more annoying messages. Because the main problem with a large majority of Facebook invites is that they are written in a certain way (which this video captures perfectly), and their absuridty doesn’t become clear until they are read aloud.

    It’s GOIN DOWN. BANG. Check it out below (NSFW language):

    Back to the possibilities here. Although this viral vid was made in jest, what would you think about talking Facebook event invites? Facebook could easily include a “message from the creator” section within the invite, where users could upload their own videos directed toward their possible attendees.

    Would that make you more or less likely to attend? It probably depends on the message. I bet your hipster friend from high school is just dying to be able to play you a few chords in the invite to his show this weekend.

    [Via Buzzfeed]