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Monday, September 9, 2013

Twitter Plans to Sell Ads for Other Companies With MoPub Acquisition

Twitter has been focused on building up a business selling advertisements that blend into the flow of 140-word messages that make up its social network.

Now it plans to sell similarly unobtrusive ads on other companies’ mobile apps, too.

Twitter announced on Monday that it had acquired MoPub, a mobile ad technology firm whose offices are a short bike ride from Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters. Neither company disclosed the price, but a person with knowledge of the deal said it exceeded $300 million.

MoPub offers a variety of services. But two are of particular importance to Twitter, which is trying to rapidly increase its advertising revenue, estimated at $583 million in 2013 by eMarketer, ahead of a probable initial public offering of its stock next year.

One is MoPub’s system for allowing advertisers to bid in real time, in an automated fashion, for ad space on mobile apps. Twitter plans to use that technology very quickly to automate bidding for ad space on Twitter.

Currently, Twitter ads require a high level of manual intervention by advertisers, which must adjust various parameters for targeting the ads, such as keywords and the age or interests of the Twitter user.

Advertisers, especially large ones, want a faster, simpler process.

“To whatever extent Twitter can make it easier for advertisers to buy ads on Twitter, that’s good for Twitter,” said Debra Aho Williamson, principal analyst for social media at eMarketer, a research firm.

The second, and longer-term play for Twitter, is MoPub’s role as a matchmaker between advertisers and mobile application developers. The company helps manage the process of placing ads within apps, such as games.

Twitter plans to continue and expand that business, giving Twitter its first foothold outside its own microblogging service and potentially opening up a new stream of revenue for the company.

“We are going to continue to invest and extend MoPub’s existing business, and that means selling ads in other apps on iOS and Android,” said Kevin Weil, Twitter’s vice product of product for revenue, in an interview.

Twitter even plans to work with MoPub to design new “native” ad formats that resemble the content they are appearing in. So a game might feature a level sponsored by an advertiser, or sell in-game items with an marketer’s logo.

“In addition to investing in new capabilities for our publisher platform, we believe there are opportunities to bring better native advertising to the mobile ecosystem,” MoPub’s chief executive, Jim Payne, wrote in a blog post announcing the sale of his company.

Brian Blau, a research director at Gartner who studies social media, said that the purchase made Twitter a bigger player in online advertising. “It will help give them access to advertisers they don’t have yet,” he said.

And that’s important as the company considers an I.P.O., Mr. Blau said. “They need to make sure they are firing on all cylinders.”



Daily Report: Microsoft’s Growth Raises Concerns About Its Focus

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Sony’s Next PlayStation Will Be Late to Japan

TOKYO â€" Japan has a reputation for getting the latest electronics gadgets before the rest of the world. But the Japanese will have to wait for the latest video game console from one of their own companies, Sony.

Sony said Monday that it would not sell the PlayStation 4 in Japan until Feb., 22, 2014, about three months after scheduled release dates in the United States and Europe, which are Nov. 15 and Nov. 29.

Andrew House, chief executive of Sony Computer Entertainment, said the main reason for the delay was a shortage of games aimed at Japanese players. Japanese game developers have been slower to adapt to the trend toward networked, multiplayer games than their counterparts elsewhere, he said in an interview Monday after Sony announced the release date at a news conference.

“It has been something of a learning curve for Japanese developers in getting up to speed with the networked style of play,” Mr. House said. “We need to make sure we have great games for Japanese consumers in place.”

Sony also wants to make sure that it does not repeat supply chain glitches that plagued the release of the PlayStation 3.

Mr. House said the company was not seeing any shortages this time around, even though it had already received more than 1 million pre-orders for the console. At the current pace, he said, Sony was on track to do better than the PlayStation 3; Sony says it sold about 3.5 million copies of that console in the first fiscal year in which it was available.

“I have every hope that this will be our largest launch for any holiday season console,” Mr. House said. “We are experiencing demand that, in my experience in the industry, we have never seen before.”

The PlayStation 4 is a vitally important component in the plans of the Sony chief executive, Kazuo Hirai, to turn around the performance of Sony’s electronics business. The console has received favorable early reviews from the gaming community thanks in part to a $399 price, $100 less than Microsoft’s Xbox One, which will also be released in the United States in time for the holidays.

Like Sony, Microsoft does not plan to release its new console in Japan until next year, easing some of the pressure on Sony in its home market. And Japan has been tough for the Xbox to crack, so Sony can probably count on doing well in in its domestic market anyway.

While Japanese consumers will have to wait for the new console, they can console themselves with the PlayStation Vita TV, a new version of Sony’s portable game system. Vita TV will give users access to more than 1,300 games, as well as a variety of online video services, via their television sets.

Vita TV will also act as a sort of set-top box for PS4 and televisions, so that the console can be used without physically connecting it to a TV.

With Vita TV, at least, Japan gets bragging rights; while Sony said it would begin selling the device here on Nov. 14, there was no word on international availability.



Ultranationalist Britons Wage Online Battle for Assad

Having described Western support for the Syrian opposition as a Zionist plot during a visit to Damascus this summer, Nick Griffin, the leader of the xenophobic British National Party, spent part of Monday encouraging his followers to support President Bashar al-Assad in online discussion forums read by American voters.

Mr. Griffin, who represents England in the European Parliament and is a committed foe of what he calls the “creeping Islamification” of Britain, toured Syria in June with a group of far-right, ultranationalist politicians from across Europe. In video dispatches from Damascus posted on his fringe party’s YouTube channel â€" which is otherwise dedicated to reports on “Fighting the Horror of Mass Immigration” and “Muslim Sex Monsters” â€" Mr. Griffin made it clear that he takes the Syrian president at his word when he claims that opposition to his autocratic rule is entirely a plot by foreign-backed, Islamic extremists.

To head off the American bombing campaign, Mr. Griffin’s party called on readers of its Web site “to help spread the message” on American news sites and Internet forums that “Obama’s plan would turn the U.S. Air Force into Al Qaeda’s Air Force and the U.S.S. Nimitz into the U.S.S. Bin Laden. On the eve of 9/11, it would be unforgiveable to use American tax dollars to bomb Al Qaeda into power in Syria.”

Mr. Griffin, who rails against the leaders of Britain’s major parties as the lackeys of “Zionist warmongers,” had much kinder words for Mr. Assad’s close ally, Russian President Vladimir Putin.



Today’s Scuttlebot: Hacking Fingerprint Logins and the Cowboy of the N.S.A

Every day, The New York Times’s staff scours the Web for interesting and peculiar items.

Here’s what we noticed today:

If the New iPhone Has Biometrics, Can It Be Hacked?
Wired |  Unlike keys or passwords, fingerprints aren’t a secret. You leave them everywhere you touch. - Jenna Wortham

The Cowboy of the N.S.A.
Foreign Policy |  Inside Gen. Keith Alexander’s all-out, barely-legal drive to build the ultimate spy machine.(Subscription required.)  - Ashwin Seshagiri

The Data Factory Lets Tech Giants widen the Wealth Gap
TechCrunch |  Michael Moritz, a venture capitalist, says tech executives aren’t just rich, their handiwork eviscerates the middle class. - Somini Sengupta

Facebook Pushes Back October Start of Video Ads
Advertising Age |  Everyone is worried about how Facebook users will react to video ads in their news feeds. - Vindu Goel

Extracting Editable Objects From a Single Photo
YouTube |  With modest human interaction, it’s now possible to extract three-dimensional images from ordinary two-dimensional photographs. - Quentin Hardy

The Once-Bright Future of Color E-Paper
Engadget |  No answers here on whatever happened to the promise of color electronic ink readers. But it explains the industry. - Damon Darlin

The Internet Must Go
Theinternetmustgo.com |  A new online “documentary” takes a Daily Show-style swipe at net neutrality. - Amy O’Leary

Remodeling the Internet as One Giant Computer
Wired |  DotCloud, a San Francisco start-up, wants to build a computer the size of the Internet. - Ashwin Seshagiri

TechCrunch Disrupt Kicks Off With ‘Inappropriate Presentations’
Valleywag |  TechCrunch’s hackathon was marred on Sunday by what editors called presentations that were misogynistic. - Ashwin Seshagiri



Tech Companies Escalate Pressure on Government to Publish National Security Request Data

As more details emerge about how the government spies on online data, technology companies are escalating their efforts to publicly disclose information about government data requests.

On Monday, Yahoo and Facebook each filed suit in the secret Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Court to ask the government for permission to reveal information about the number and types of national security requests for user data that the companies receive. Meanwhile, Google and Microsoft, which filed suit in June to ask for this permission, amended their petitions Monday to compel the government to publish even more detail about the requests.

The legal moves are partly a public relations effort, as new reports have revealed the extent of the cooperation between tech companies and the government. The companies hope to show that government requests affect just a small percentage of their users, and to bring transparency to a very secretive process. When reports about a program called Prism and the government’s other spying efforts first came out, tech companies had limited ability to respond because they are not allowed to talk about even the existence of a national security request.

“To appropriately and effectively respond to these inaccurate news reports and the related public concerns, Facebook seeks to be as transparent as possible regarding its receipt of orders,” Facebook’s motion said.

Two weeks ago, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said it would release more data about national security requests, a move the companies said did not go far enough.

“We believe that the U.S. government’s important responsibility to protect public safety can be carried out without precluding Internet companies from sharing the number of national security requests they may receive,” Ron Bell, Yahoo’s general counsel, wrote in a company blog post. “Ultimately, withholding such information breeds mistrust and suspicion â€" both of the United States and of companies that must comply with government legal directives.”

Still, while releasing detailed numbers of national security requests would shed some light on the topic, it would be only a small data point about the government’s broad spying. And despite their public efforts to push back, privately the companies are still compelled by law to cooperate with the government on many such data requests.

Also Monday was the first meeting of a group President Obama formed in August to discuss technology surveillance, the Review Group on Intelligence and Communications Technology. Representatives of Google, Microsoft, Facebook, Yahoo and other companies attended, in addition to experts on intelligence and privacy.

In a blog post, two Google lawyers who attended the meeting summarized the message they said they would present there: “that the levels of secrecy that have built up around national security requests undermine the basic freedoms that are at the heart of a democratic society.”

Google’s amended petition asked that the government let it report national security request data every six months instead of every year; publish the types of requests it received, like requests for business records or wiretaps; and conduct oral arguments about the issue in open court. Microsoft’s petition made similar demands, including asking for permission to reveal whether requests asked for user data like the text of an e-mail or metadata like subscription information.

The companies also argued that they have a First Amendment right to publish data on government requests, and that disclosing this information would not imperil national security because the online services have so many users that it would be impossible to decipher whom the requests targeted.

In June, soon after the Prism revelations, the government gave the companies permission to publish for the first time the number of national security requests they received, but only if they were grouped with all other requests, including those from state and local governments and for criminal cases. Google called this a step backward because combining national security data with other data made it impossible to glean relevant information.

In recent weeks, negotiations with the government fell apart, several of the companies said.

In response to the original motions from Google and Microsoft, the government asked for six extensions to consider their requests. Late last month, the Office of the Director of National Intelligence said it would release annually the number of national security requests and the number of people they targeted, but not break them out by company or indicate the type of user data requested.



Video of the Kerry Remark Russia Seized Upon

Video of Secretary of State John Kerry suggesting that Syria could avoid an attack by surrendering its chemical weapons this week.

At a news conference in London on Monday, Secretary of State John Kerry was asked by Margaret Brennan of CBS News if there was anything President Bashar al-Assad of Syria “could do or offer that would stop an attack?” As video posted online by Britain’s ITN shows, Mr. Kerry replied: “Sure. He could turn over every single bit of his chemical weapons to the international community in the next week. Turn it over, all of it, without delay, and allow a full and total accounting for that. But he isn’t about to do it, and it can’t be done, obviously.”

After Mr. Kerry’s remark was greeted with enthusiasm by Russia’s foreign minister, Sergey V. Lavrov, the State Department suggested that it was not a proposal at all, but simply a “rhetorical” device employed by the secretary, as Hannah Allam of McClatchy Newspapers reported from Washington.

As our colleagues Michael R. Gordon and Steven Lee Myers report, although “there is no indication that Mr. Kerry was searching for a political settlement to the Syrian crisis,” his Russian and Syrian counterparts quickly seized upon the remark to suggest that putting chemical weapons â€" which Syria has threatened to use but never officially acknowledged having â€" under international control could offer a way out of the crisis.

Last year, before he defected, Syria’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Jihad Makdissi, told reporters, in English: “Any stock of W.M.D. or unconventional weapons that the Syrian Army possesses will never, never be used against the Syrian people or civilians during this crisis, under any circumstances.”

In video broadcast on Syrian state television on July 23, 2012, Jihad Makdissi, a foreign ministry spokesman who later defected, seemed to acknowledge that Syria did have chemical weapons.



A Data Weapon to Avoid the Next Financial Crisis

Many economists see a data revolution that could transform their field, opening a window to seeing and measuring economic behavior in greater detail than ever before. The potential â€" and limitations â€" of what can be thought of as Big Data economics was the topic of my column over the weekend.

The idea is that better measurement will inform better management of the economy. It is true, as they say in business, that you can’t manage what you can’t measure. But just because you can measure something doesn’t necessarily mean you can manage it â€" especially in the messy realm of human affairs.

What about a more targeted approach? That is, trying to get a better reading on one crucial slice of the economy to guide policy and perhaps behavior. That, in broad strokes, is the animating philosophy behind the Office of Financial Research, a unit of the Treasury Department established by the Dodd-Frank Act of 2010.

The precise recipe of causes â€" and apportioning responsibility â€" for the financial crisis is open to debate. But it is clear that leaders in the financial industry and policy makers were largely blindsided. Regulators and bankers lacked the data and analysis to see all the hidden risks in the financial system.

One of the lessons of the crisis, said Richard Berner, director of the Office of Financial Research, is that there were “serious deficiencies” in financial measurement. More stringent reporting requirements is one way to close some of the gaps. “The crisis really did spawn a lot of data collection efforts,” said Mr. Berner, a former adviser to the Treasury and former chief economist at Morgan Stanley.

After delays, Mr. Berner was nominated by the Obama administration and confirmed by the Senate this year.

The data analysis by the Office of Financial Research, Mr. Berner said, needs to balance the need for more detailed data collection with the need for data security, protecting the trade secrets of investment banks and other financial institutions.

Yet added collection of data on money market funds, credit-default swaps, financial leverage and counterparty risk exposure, he said, could make it possible for financial institutions themselves, as well as regulators, to have early-warning signals of trouble.

Mr. Berner said his office was looking at a “variety of approaches” to get a faster handle on emerging risks. One that looks intriguing is a proposal in a research paper that combines data analysis, financial economics and computer science.

In the paper, the authors contend that new streams of financial data â€" aggregated, properly encrypted and then analyzed â€" could give strong clues to hidden risk bombs in the system, like the institutions that touched off the crisis in the fall of 2008, Lehman Brothers and the American International Group.

Such data, the article argues, could “have played a critical role in providing regulators and investors with advance notice of A.I.G.’s unusually concentrated position in credit-default swaps, as well as the exposure of money market funds to Lehman bonds.”

“This is an effort to use technology to simplify some of the challenges created by our technology-driven financial markets,” said Andrew W. Lo, one of the article’s authors and an economist and finance expert at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s Sloan School of Management.

The other co-authors of the paper, “Privacy-Preserving Methods for Sharing Financial Risk Exposures,” are Emmanuel A. Abbe, a computer scientist now at Princeton University, and Amir E. Khandani, a financial engineer at Morgan Stanley.



The Cloud Era Begins for Enterprise Tech

Let’s say it: Last summer was the beginning of the end for the old guard in what is still the biggest part of technology - business spending on everything from servers to software. This fall begins a new competition for the hearts and minds of corporate customers.

Consider a few of summer’s events. Dell started to go private in the face of eroding personal computer demand. Hewlett-Packard once again announced lower revenue, and had more executive reshuffles. Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, resigned, then in the last big weekend of summer bought the handset business of a deeply weakened Nokia.

That last step, an effort to build up mobility, is at the heart of Microsoft’s efforts to be relevant in a new world of cloud computing, smartphones and tablets. So was VMware’s announcement that it is building out its cloud business and changing its sales strategy globally.

With autumn, we begin the new round of tech announcements, the way Detroit used to announce next year’s car models. What you should look for is how the old guard adapts to the cloud, and how the new guys aim to consolidate disparate offerings and win trust.

The world now passing away consisted of business systems dominated by computer servers and personal computers. The new one subsumes these into cloud computing and devices like smartphones and tablets. The inability of companies like Microsoft and Dell to cope quickly enough with this change led to their current problems. The steady, thorough way that companies like Amazon and Salesforce have used the new technology to go after their elders’ business is what makes them contenders.

Other challengers include Google, Workday and NetSuite. There are many more, but these companies in particular have both the assets and the money to build comprehensive offerings in software and services, and also to afford something like service guarantees in what many see as a still-unstable and security-challenged world.

One way to do that is to become the unifying agent for all the data that companies are spreading across their servers and cloud services. On Friday, Salesforce announced Salesforce Files, which searches through things companies have stored in Sharepoint, Dropbox, Google Drive and other storage and collaboration services.

“The way to remove friction among all these repositories is to virtualize everything into a common repository,” said Nasi Jazayeri, general manager of Salesforce Chatter, the company’s corporate collaboration product. He added, “We’re not trying to compete with the other repositories - we’re trying to make it easier for people to find things.”

Salesforce wasn’t trying to compete with the repositories because Chatterbox, its effort to do so, was a dud. But if Salesforce becomes a central hub for sorting diverse information, that loss can be a win.

Workday, which has announced that it is putting data-analysis services in its cloud-based human resources and financial software, may be making a similar move to consolidate information for customers. “Big data analytics is unifying,” said Dan Beck, Workday’s vice president of financials and analytics, since it may draw from information in, say, a Workday database and an SAP or Twitter database. “We’re broadening out our applications footprint. Customers expect that.”

In the past several months, Amazon has introduced a “trusted advisor” program that inspects a company’s use of Amazon Web Services, its cloud service, and suggests ways it can be better used. It has had a global series of “summits” aimed at ordinary business people along with skilled technologists, and built out a lot of big data offerings.

Google has also expanded its corporate cloud strategy, enlisting more developers and guaranteeing higher performance for its cloud. It is also selling new and different ways people can use Google for big data analysis.

Big data is being sold as a way to build efficiency and gain insights. But for many of these companies, offering big data services is also a way to consolidate data for customers. If you control information, you are almost by default the trusted partner, or what is known in the business as “the single throat to choke if something goes wrong.” Jobs like that pay a premium.

Some of these older enterprise tech companies, which also include Cisco and Oracle, will make the transition, just as incumbents like I.B.M. made it from mainframe computers to servers and PC’s. Oracle’s approach is to offer a complete system, making it a single throat to choke. I.B.M. already seems to be working both camps in the new world, offering its own systems and consulting with the new players. But just as surely as all of them, in their time, supplanted big incumbents, there will be other companies coming along to topple them.



The Cloud Era Begins for Enterprise Tech

Let’s say it: Last summer was the beginning of the end for the old guard in what is still the biggest part of technology - business spending on everything from servers to software. This fall begins a new competition for the hearts and minds of corporate customers.

Consider a few of summer’s events. Dell started to go private in the face of eroding personal computer demand. Hewlett-Packard once again announced lower revenue, and had more executive reshuffles. Microsoft’s chief executive, Steven A. Ballmer, resigned, then in the last big weekend of summer bought the handset business of a deeply weakened Nokia.

That last step, an effort to build up mobility, is at the heart of Microsoft’s efforts to be relevant in a new world of cloud computing, smartphones and tablets. So was VMware’s announcement that it is building out its cloud business and changing its sales strategy globally.

With autumn, we begin the new round of tech announcements, the way Detroit used to announce next year’s car models. What you should look for is how the old guard adapts to the cloud, and how the new guys aim to consolidate disparate offerings and win trust.

The world now passing away consisted of business systems dominated by computer servers and personal computers. The new one subsumes these into cloud computing and devices like smartphones and tablets. The inability of companies like Microsoft and Dell to cope quickly enough with this change led to their current problems. The steady, thorough way that companies like Amazon and Salesforce have used the new technology to go after their elders’ business is what makes them contenders.

Other challengers include Google, Workday and NetSuite. There are many more, but these companies in particular have both the assets and the money to build comprehensive offerings in software and services, and also to afford something like service guarantees in what many see as a still-unstable and security-challenged world.

One way to do that is to become the unifying agent for all the data that companies are spreading across their servers and cloud services. On Friday, Salesforce announced Salesforce Files, which searches through things companies have stored in Sharepoint, Dropbox, Google Drive and other storage and collaboration services.

“The way to remove friction among all these repositories is to virtualize everything into a common repository,” said Nasi Jazayeri, general manager of Salesforce Chatter, the company’s corporate collaboration product. He added, “We’re not trying to compete with the other repositories - we’re trying to make it easier for people to find things.”

Salesforce wasn’t trying to compete with the repositories because Chatterbox, its effort to do so, was a dud. But if Salesforce becomes a central hub for sorting diverse information, that loss can be a win.

Workday, which has announced that it is putting data-analysis services in its cloud-based human resources and financial software, may be making a similar move to consolidate information for customers. “Big data analytics is unifying,” said Dan Beck, Workday’s vice president of financials and analytics, since it may draw from information in, say, a Workday database and an SAP or Twitter database. “We’re broadening out our applications footprint. Customers expect that.”

In the past several months, Amazon has introduced a “trusted advisor” program that inspects a company’s use of Amazon Web Services, its cloud service, and suggests ways it can be better used. It has had a global series of “summits” aimed at ordinary business people along with skilled technologists, and built out a lot of big data offerings.

Google has also expanded its corporate cloud strategy, enlisting more developers and guaranteeing higher performance for its cloud. It is also selling new and different ways people can use Google for big data analysis.

Big data is being sold as a way to build efficiency and gain insights. But for many of these companies, offering big data services is also a way to consolidate data for customers. If you control information, you are almost by default the trusted partner, or what is known in the business as “the single throat to choke if something goes wrong.” Jobs like that pay a premium.

Some of these older enterprise tech companies, which also include Cisco and Oracle, will make the transition, just as incumbents like I.B.M. made it from mainframe computers to servers and PC’s. Oracle’s approach is to offer a complete system, making it a single throat to choke. I.B.M. already seems to be working both camps in the new world, offering its own systems and consulting with the new players. But just as surely as all of them, in their time, supplanted big incumbents, there will be other companies coming along to topple them.



Tracking the Syrian Crisis and the International Response

The Times is following the conflict in Syria as the United States and its allies consider military action and will provide updates, analysis and public reaction from around the world.

Today’s Scuttlebot: A Cranky Cryptographer and Taking the Internet Back

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Facebook Offers New Windows Into Social Conversation

Facebook is releasing two new search tools on Monday designed to give news organizations â€" and potentially, marketers â€" more insights into the real-time social conversation occurring on Facebook, particularly around television shows, big news and sporting events.

One of the new tools will allow news organizations to use keywords such as “Syria vote” or “Tokyo Olympics” to search Facebook for posts on those topics that an individual user or a company has designated as public.

The other will allow similar topic searches of private Facebook posts, but pull up only aggregate, anonymized demographic data, such as the geography, gender and age of the commenters.

“This is a way for news organizations to tap into and understand what people are talking about,” said Andy Mitchell, Facebook’s director of partnerships, in an interview. “The possibilities are kind of endless, once we have this in the hands of talented, creative journalists.”

The new tools are the latest salvo in Facebook’s recent campaign to catch up to and perhaps surpass Twitter as the leading platform for online public conversation.

Because most Twitter users set up their accounts to broadcast their posts publicly, the microblogging service has become invaluable for those looking for insights into the broad social zeitgeist as well as the momentary obsessions of the public. (On Sunday, for example, Twitter users in the United States were obsessed by football, according to its trending topics tool.)

Twitter is also wooing advertisers and television stations by helping them target users tweeting about popular TV shows and sporting events while they are occurring.

Facebook, which has roughly five times as many users globally as Twitter, has a similarly valuable trove of data. For example, the company said that last week, the beginning of the N.F.L. season garnered over 20 million likes, comments, and shares on Facebook by over 8 million people.

However, most posts on Facebook’s social network are not public, but instead limited to friends or even smaller groups of people. So Facebook must carefully weigh what information it can release, particularly as it endures another round of attacks over proposed changes to its privacy policies.

Still, the company has been more aggressive recently in its efforts to establish its bona fides as an online town square. It June, it began giving its 1.2 billion users the ability to search posts using hashtags, such as #NFL, much the way they can do on Twitter.

It is testing a “trending topics” module on the main news feed page that would show users the most popular subjects that people are talking about on Facebook. And it recently rolled out embedded posts, which allows anyone to include public Facebook posts, including video, in their own Web page.

The newest tools are another step in that direction.

Initially, they will only be available to a handful of news organizations â€" Buzzfeed, CNN, NBC News, Sky Television and Slate â€" for testing and improvement. Facebook will also provide access to Mass Relevance, a firm that helps companies analyze and use social media to improve their interaction with customers. But Facebook said it intends to extend access to other media and marketing firms soon.

Those selected to test the tool are eager to try it out.

“As a news organization, we’re always trying to answer what our people talking about,” Ryan Osborn, vice president of digital innovations and social media at NBC News, said in an interview.

He said that NBC plans to use the tools to help it conduct an online town hall this week called “Taking Sides: Should the U.S. Strike Syria?” ahead of the Congressional vote on President Obama’s request for authorization to conduct military action against Syria’s government for its apparent use of chemical weapons. It may also be used on the Today show.

KC Estenson, senior vice president and general manager of CNN Digital, said that CNN hopes to get different insights from the Facebook data than it currently gets from Twitter.

“You might get a little bit more personal and intimate sense of who a person is off their Facebook usage than their Twitter usage,” he said.

He said that the tools will not supplant on-the-ground reporting by correspondents, but will supplement it. “This is the social media equivalent of man-on-the-street reporting,” he said. “Over time, we’ll be able to put a lot more intelligence against that.”

It’s less clear how news organizations will be able to use the aggregated, anonymized data about private discussions, but Mr. Estenson said that he expects it will provide another way to take the pulse of the public, much like formal opinion polls do.

“As a glimpse of what people are talking about, and how it breaks down, those can be clues as to what’s going on in this world,” he said.



Facebook Offers New Windows Into Social Conversation

Facebook is releasing two new search tools on Monday designed to give news organizations â€" and potentially, marketers â€" more insights into the real-time social conversation occurring on Facebook, particularly around television shows, big news and sporting events.

One of the new tools will allow news organizations to use keywords such as “Syria vote” or “Tokyo Olympics” to search Facebook for posts on those topics that an individual user or a company has designated as public.

The other will allow similar topic searches of private Facebook posts, but pull up only aggregate, anonymized demographic data, such as the geography, gender and age of the commenters.

“This is a way for news organizations to tap into and understand what people are talking about,” said Andy Mitchell, Facebook’s director of partnerships, in an interview. “The possibilities are kind of endless, once we have this in the hands of talented, creative journalists.”

The new tools are the latest salvo in Facebook’s recent campaign to catch up to and perhaps surpass Twitter as the leading platform for online public conversation.

Because most Twitter users set up their accounts to broadcast their posts publicly, the microblogging service has become invaluable for those looking for insights into the broad social zeitgeist as well as the momentary obsessions of the public. (On Sunday, for example, Twitter users in the United States were obsessed by football, according to its trending topics tool.)

Twitter is also wooing advertisers and television stations by helping them target users tweeting about popular TV shows and sporting events while they are occurring.

Facebook, which has roughly five times as many users globally as Twitter, has a similarly valuable trove of data. For example, the company said that last week, the beginning of the N.F.L. season garnered over 20 million likes, comments, and shares on Facebook by over 8 million people.

However, most posts on Facebook’s social network are not public, but instead limited to friends or even smaller groups of people. So Facebook must carefully weigh what information it can release, particularly as it endures another round of attacks over proposed changes to its privacy policies.

Still, the company has been more aggressive recently in its efforts to establish its bona fides as an online town square. It June, it began giving its 1.2 billion users the ability to search posts using hashtags, such as #NFL, much the way they can do on Twitter.

It is testing a “trending topics” module on the main news feed page that would show users the most popular subjects that people are talking about on Facebook. And it recently rolled out embedded posts, which allows anyone to include public Facebook posts, including video, in their own Web page.

The newest tools are another step in that direction.

Initially, they will only be available to a handful of news organizations â€" Buzzfeed, CNN, NBC News, Sky Television and Slate â€" for testing and improvement. Facebook will also provide access to Mass Relevance, a firm that helps companies analyze and use social media to improve their interaction with customers. But Facebook said it intends to extend access to other media and marketing firms soon.

Those selected to test the tool are eager to try it out.

“As a news organization, we’re always trying to answer what our people talking about,” Ryan Osborn, vice president of digital innovations and social media at NBC News, said in an interview.

He said that NBC plans to use the tools to help it conduct an online town hall this week called “Taking Sides: Should the U.S. Strike Syria?” ahead of the Congressional vote on President Obama’s request for authorization to conduct military action against Syria’s government for its apparent use of chemical weapons. It may also be used on the Today show.

KC Estenson, senior vice president and general manager of CNN Digital, said that CNN hopes to get different insights from the Facebook data than it currently gets from Twitter.

“You might get a little bit more personal and intimate sense of who a person is off their Facebook usage than their Twitter usage,” he said.

He said that the tools will not supplant on-the-ground reporting by correspondents, but will supplement it. “This is the social media equivalent of man-on-the-street reporting,” he said. “Over time, we’ll be able to put a lot more intelligence against that.”

It’s less clear how news organizations will be able to use the aggregated, anonymized data about private discussions, but Mr. Estenson said that he expects it will provide another way to take the pulse of the public, much like formal opinion polls do.

“As a glimpse of what people are talking about, and how it breaks down, those can be clues as to what’s going on in this world,” he said.



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