Facebook Blog, Applications and Developers Directory

This is one thing I wasn’t expecting to pop-up in my inbox. This morning I received an email about an application called “Love Bunnies”. What exactly is a love bunny? Well apparently it is a fairly robust vibrator. How do you get one? Well you have to go install the Facebook application to find it.

The application allows you to adopt a Love Bunny and care for it. You can place it in various locations which appear to be proper locations for using it. You can put it in a hot tub, a bath, the living room, a chamber which appears to have cuffs hanging down from the ceiling (don’t ask me), the bedroom and the kitchen.

Personally, I haven’t been so fortunate as to interact with a love bunny but I’m sure there will be thousands of satisfied customers. This is definitely an interesting way to promote a sex toy. I’m not quite sure that I’d share this application among my friends but maybe this app will work its way into an interesting group of people.

If you want to experience the fun of adopting a love bunny, go check out the Love Bunnies application.

Facebook pushed a couple changes to the redesigned home page tonight that may be of interest to application developers:

1) Publisher shortcuts for Facebook-developed applications have been removed, and publishing status updates has been promoted.

The new design is reminiscent of the Twitter home page:

Previously, links to your own profile page with the Publisher selected for posting photos, videos, notes, and links were located here.

2) Status updates have been removed from the right rail, and application bookmarks have been promoted. Now, status updates are only accessible within the Top Stories feed or filtered Status Updates feed.

Old:

3) And finally, some UI elements have been cleaned up, which may satisfy picky designers.

Since the launch of the Facebook Platform, Facebook’s Platform Application Guidelines have expressly prohibited applications that promote the sale of alcohol:

I. Applications may not promote, or contain content (including any advertising content) referencing, facilitating, promoting or using, the following:

4. Sale of liquor, beer, wine, tobacco products, ammunition and/or firearms;

Today, Facebook announced that, with the launch of its Demographic Restrictions capability for application developers, that policy is changing.

Now, Facebook says it plans to allow application content that promotes the sale of alcohol, provided that developers “specifically use the Demographic Restrictions feature to restrict your application or content to users of appropriate legal age.”

Facebook is currently beta-testing the new Demographic Restrictions feature with a “very limited” set of companies, and the new policy should go into effect in September, barring any big hiccups in the beta test.

This is good news for applications like Booze Mail and Happy Hour, that allow users to send each other virtual drink gifts, as well as other application developers hoping to sell to beer, wine, and liquor brands.

Developers interested in talking with Facebook on any sensitive questions regarding alcohol policy can email developers-help@facebook.com.

Jeremiah Owyang posted about a new type of advertisement that Tim Kendall, Director of Monetization told him about. Yesterday we were first to post about the new types of advertisements that Facebook will be releasing but Jeremiah Owyang provided more details today on what those ads will involve. Apparently the ads will encourage “members to interact with the ads by leaving comments, sharing virtual gifts, or becoming fans.”

Much of this doesn’t actually sound new. The commenting feature that Jeremiah describes sounds eerily familiar to the Facebook video ads that we broke the news about. One thing that currently doesn’t have commenting is sponsored news feed stories, so perhaps that will be an addition to this new feature. According to Jeremiah there will be three types of advertisements:

* Comment Style Ad - Users can post comments on the advertisements. The only thing new here from the sound of it is the ability to comment on news feed stories.
* Virtual Gifts Style Ad - Similar to the Indiana Jones gift campaign that was already run on Facebook, brands will be able to create virtual goods.
* Fan Style Ad - A way to become a fan of products you enjoy. Not entirely sure how this differs from Facebook fan pages but ok!

Ultimately many of these changes don’t sound very new and instead sound like a rebranding of something that already exist. The new commenting feature is really the added value. As Jeremiah Owyang points out, Facebook now has a bunch of different offerings to advertisers and marketers. Now all that needs to be done is a more thorough education for those advertisers.

New social ad network AdParlor started four months ago with one purpose in mind: to help developers of applications on Facebook and other social networks monetize their apps better. Today, the company has hit an important milestone in its growth: it’s now serving 1 million “quality” impressions daily.

How has AdParlor grown? The platform offers straight-forward demographic targeting capabilities, and allows both developers and advertisers to “tag” their apps and ads. CEO Hussein Fazal says that this matching technology helps AdParlor deliver click-through rates that are “double the industry standard 0.04%.”

“A lot of bigger advertisers are worried about where their ad will appear – which applications their ad may be associated with,” says Fazal. “Our tagging technique can be used using a loose match or an exact match – meaning that large advertisers can control exactly what type of applications their ad appears on.”

Advertisers can but on a CPM, CPC, or CPA basis. Currently, AdParlor publicly offers $1 CPM and $0.14 CPC to advertisers, and $0.65 CPM and $0.10 CPC to publishers. Five different ad units are available.

So far, while AdParlor is working with several agencies, many of AdParlor’s early advertisers are actually other application developers. While the eCPM rates on CPI/CPA ads have proven to perform well in the short term, it will be important for AdParlor to broaden its advertiser base to keep its eCPM rates up in the long term. Fazal says the company only currently offers CPA advertising to other app developers on the same platform - not to external sites.

Two weeks after Facebook launched News Feed filters for status updates, photos, and posted items, Facebook tonight launched new custom News Feed filters for individual applications and friend lists. The new filters are available under the “More Filters” drop-down on the top of the News Feed:

The new application-specific News Feed filters allow users to only show News Feed stories generated by a certain application. For example, here’s what my News Feed filtered by the Causes app looks like:

Friend-list News Feed filters work in much the same way, allowing users to only show feed stories from friends in a given friend list.

Facebook also turned on the “All Stories” News Feed tab tonight that allows users to view a full log of all their friends’ activity.

Overall, central to Facebook’s strategy in the coming years is owning the Feed data and providing a robust Feed experience. All user activity, from engagement with core Facebook services to Platform applications to Connect-enabled websites in the coming months, will flow through Facebook’s News Feed aggregation, selection, and distribution service. I expect Facebook to continue investing in News Feed infrastructure and consumption features to create an even more engaging experience.

Facebook’s recent policy update prohibiting incentivized invites, originally announced on July 21, has now gone into effect.

The latest announcement takes Facebook’s February policy update forbidding forced invites further by no longer permitting applications to offer incentives to users for sending invitations to their friends. For example, in game apps where the aim is to accumulate gold, developers have introduced mechanisms whereby users are given more gold for each friend they invite. In other applications, developers have only allowed users to unlocks various features as they invite more friends. Both of these behaviors are now prohibited.

Application developers have been asking for more detail on the Platform Policy in the Developers Forum, and the Facebook Platform team has offered valuable clarifications in responses there. Specifically:

* Facebook says that incentivized invites fall within this policy, but actions within an application do not: “Incentivizing sending a notification is prohibited, but incentivizing an app action (like SuperPoking) is not banned (even if that action typically leads to a subsequent notification). On the other hand, if an app provides bonus points for inviting friends, or just for sending notifications, that would be a violation.”
* Yesterday, the platform team issued this further explanation: “As noted in the blog post, the new policies prevent applications from creating artificial or inappropriate incentives to use Facebook features (including, for example, sending requests and adding profile boxes). Generally, awarding money, or bonus points that can be used to do things in the application or elsewhere, for sending invitations or for the acceptance of invitations, falls under the intended scope of what is prohibited by the policies.”

This new policy isn’t necessarily bad news for developers as some may expect. Facebook is continuing its efforts to improve the quality of messages that applications generate within Facebook communication channels, which should improve the conversion rates of app messages throughout the Platform as a whole.

Kristian Segerstråle, CEO of social gaming company Playfish, welcomes the new guidelines. “We think these changes are an important step forward to improve the overall user experience for games on Facebook and ultimately make the social games market grow faster. We are active supporters of Facebook’s new guiding principles for apps and are working through all our games to ensure we adhere to their spirit,” he told us.

We’ll be staying on top of any further guidance or clarification Facebook issues as it enforces these new policies.

Facebook launched a new kind of ad unit today that has the potential to drive much more engagement than any ad product on the site ever before has: embedded multimedia with comments visible to users’ entire friend list.

Facebook has created new home page advertising inventory with its upcoming redesign. However, this is the first time we’ve seen Facebook fill the sponsored home page slot with this kind of unit. The behavior:

1. Clicking on the ad image opens a video player in-line
2. Comments on the video are visible to your entire friend list.

The comments around the ad dramatically increase engagement with the unit, as the highly visible comments provide an opportunity for users to simultaneously draw attention to the ad by drawing attention to themselves. While this could backfire if comments degrading the advertiser are abundant (I saw a few “LAME!” comments about Tropic Thunder today), the ad comments powerfully take advantage of Facebook’s social dynamics to draw attention to an ad in a way that is impossible without the social graph. When is the last time you heard 9 friends talk about an online ad in the same day?

Ad comments are an interesting step forward in the evolution of “Social Ads.” While this kind of ad may not work as well outside of a few advertiser verticals, I expect that early advertisers will be pleased with its performance.

Unlike the early Facebook platform, the MySpace platform has undergone very controlled growth, as access to various viral channels has been slowly rolled out to application developers. Most recently, MySpace released their long awaited limited application invites offering. Given that in this relatively controlled environment most applications have thus far experienced “organic” growth, the relative popularity of certain application categories thus far is likely indicative of the platform’s future.

We’ve compiled a breakdown of the most popular application categories to date by adding up the total install numbers from the top 10 applications in each of the 23 application categories. Some major applications (mostly games) are counted in multiple categories, and this approach does ignore the long-tail of the application gallery. But generally the results are a fair assessment of the MySpace Platform’s early growth.

As you can see, only a few categories have reached widespread distribution on MySpace, while most have remained relatively small. Just how much MySpace will open additional communication channels for applications to grow remains to be seen.

From gaming conferences to gaming for a cause and from Facebook pets to Facebook movie promotions, here are this week’s highlights from Inside Social Games:

* Space Movers Lets Facebook Players “Game for a Cause”
* Virtual Goods Summit 2008 Coming October 10
* Playfish Keeps Rolling with Pet Society
* Traitor - Special Agent Games Promotes a Movie through Facebook Games
* Videos from 2008 Social Gaming Summit
* Battle of the Bands is Fun but Complex
* Word Twist is Fun, But Could be More Social

Friendster, which has risen to become the largest social network in Asia after its precipitous fall in North America years ago, is today announcing  support for OpenSocial 0.7 as part of the Friendster Developer Program.

The Friendster app platform actually launched in late 2007 - it was the second social network to launch a platform after Facebook. Since then, thousands of developers have joined the Friendster Developer Program and about 500 apps have been released on the Friendster platform. Friendster told us today that 10 million unique users have installed at least 1 application so far, and half a million apps are installed every day. Of those who have installed applications, the average is between 2-3 apps installed per person.

Friendster’s Jeff Roberto says that the company will continue to support existing APIs as it adds OpenSocial support. “We plan to support both. This is really an extension of the Friendster Developer Program to developers of OpenSocial applications, who should now be able to run their apps on Friendster out of the box. We’re the only place that app developers can reach 55 million unique users in Asia on a single social network. And we have very low overlap with other social networks.”

Friendster’s platform as an open revenue model, meaning developers are free to monetize their apps however they like. One unique aspect to monetizing on the Friendster platform is that ads on the profile page are permitted - unlike other social networks.

“Friendster’s launch is another major milestone in the adoption and deployment of OpenSocial throughout the social web and around the world. We’re particularly excited that OpenSocial is helping Friendster bring new social applications to users in Asia, and we look forward to seeing users embrace these apps,” said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google.

Roberto says that while the company is not ready to announce specific dates yet, Friendster does plan on supporting the OpenSocial 0.8 spec. OpenSocial 0.8 adds REST API support - like the Facebook Platform does - something OpenSocial developers have been clamoring for for months.

The newly revised, largely expanded, and hot-off-the-press Facebook Marketing Bible: 35+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook - August 2008 Edition is now available!

The Facebook Marketing Bible contains three detailed sections: Tools for Guerilla Marketers, Tools for Advertisers, and Tools for Application Developers. Each part outlines the best available channels and strategies for reaching your audience inside Facebook. Please see the full table of contents below.

The August 2008 edition includes updates on the following topics:

* New data on Facebook’s international growth. Facebook has been exploding internationally throughout 2008. Get the latest data on where Facebook users are coming from in Europe, Latin America, and Asia, and where opportunity may lie for marketers, advertisers, and developers.
* Details on new ad units and opportunities for Facebook advertisers. With the Facebook redesign, the ad units available to advertisers have shifted. Find out the latest on what’s possible in the new design.
* Implications of Facebook’s latest updates to its Platform policies. Facebook has implemented several new policies in recent weeks, and enforcing significant disciplinary action - one of the top applications was suspended from the Platform for over a week. Learn more about Facebook’s evolving philosophy toward Platform governance and what that means for the future of applications.The latest details on Facebook’s upcoming redesign. Updates on the new Wall, the new Publisher, the tabbed profile design, new application tabs, the Boxes tab, and apps on the Info tab. Plus, new settings for application profile integration.
* Details on Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect, Facebook’s new program which extends Facebook connectivity to third party websites, launched in beta a few weeks ago and will go live this fall. Learn more about what this means for Facebook users and new opportunities for marketing application development across the web.
* Information on Facebook’s new “Great Apps” and “Application Verification” programs. Facebook will be offering additional integration to apps that align with its core values starting this fall.
* Plus, updates on Facebook Platform analytics providers, Facebook for iPhone and Facebook Connect for iPhone, and more.

Facebook Marketing BibleFor those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $39, or $49 with three months of free updates emailed directly to your inbox. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic!

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. Tools for Guerilla Marketers

1. Profile Page
2. Groups
• Strategy: What about spamming existing groups?
3. Pages
• Strategy: Groups and Pages are very similar. Which makes more sense?
• Strategy: I’ve just created a Page. How do I promote it?
• Group to Page Migration
• Guidelines for Promoting Pages Outside Facebook
• Official vs Unofficial Pages
• More Features Coming Soon
4. Events
5. Notes and Photos
6. Messages
7. Marketplace
8. Share / Posted Items
9. Mini Feed and News Feed
10. Feed Importing

> Data: Tracking Facebook’s International Growth by Country

> Recommended Strategies for Guerilla Marketers

II. Tools for Advertisers

11. Social Ads
• Summary of ad units available to Facebook advertisers
12. Localization Opportunities
13. Integrated Opportunities
14. Beacon
• Strategy: Should I try Beacon?
15. Polls
16. Facebook Platform Ad Networks
• List of Leading Facebook Platform Ad Networks
• What eCPMs do apps charge? Data from Facebook application developers
17. Facebook Platform Application Sponsorships
• List of Leading Facebook Platform Sponsorship Resellers/Rep Firms
• Strategy: Why sponsor applications when I can sponsor Facebook itself?
18. Sponsored Facebook Groups

> Recommended Strategies for Advertisers

III. Tools for Application Developers

19. Profile Box
• Strategy: Where do most new application users come from?
• 5 Things Developers May Not Know About the Upcoming Facebook Redesign
• Profile Integration: Tour of New Facebook App Settings
20. Application Tabs
21. Application Info Sections
22. Designing Feed Stories
• Strategy: Designing High Performance Feed Items
• News Feed Optimization: Strategies and Techniques
23. Feeds 2.0
24. Feed Publisher
• Publishing in the Feed with Feed Comments
25. Requests / Invitations
• Policy Updates: Requiring Invites to Access Hidden Features, Offering Incentives for Invites, Ads on Profile Page Prohibited
• Strategy: Facebook’s Evolving Approach to Platform Governance
26. Facebook Notifications
• Chat Integration: Facebook Wants More Synchronous Notifications
• Policy Update: Bulk Pre-Selection Prohibited
27. Email Notifications
• Updates: Email’s Status as Core Application Marketing Channel in Doubt
28. Application Directory
29. Verification and Certification
• Great Apps Program
• Application Verification
30. Translations
• Data: Stats on Facebook Apps Built for International Markets
• Tutorial: Translating Your Applications Using Facebook’s Crowd-sourced Translation Service
31. Facebook Connect
• Overview: Integrating Facebook Connect with Your Website
• Related: Google Friend Connect

32. Analytics Tools
• List of Leading Third-Party Facebook Platform Analytics Providers
• New Metrics for Developers with Facebook Profile Redesign
33. Search Engine Optimization
34. Mobile
• Facebook for iPhone and Connect for iPhone
35. Customer Service

> Poll: Which viral channels do Facebook users hate most about apps?

> Recommended Strategies for Application Developers

Developers waiting for their chance to implement OpenSocial 0.8 on a major social networking platform now have the chance on hi5. hi5 announced last week that developers can begin beta testing their OpenSocial 0.8 apps in the hi5 developers sandbox.

The feature most developers will be interested in 0.8 is the addition of a REST based API. This will allow OpenSocial applications to be architected more similarly to the way many Facebook applications are. The main drawback of doing everything the OpenSocial 0.7 (and before) way is that building everything in JavaScript just gets quite complicated and expensive.

Congrats to the hi5 Platform team on being one of the first to implement the OpenSocial 0.8 spec!

Two weeks after Facebook announced the winners of its first fbFund grants, Facebook kicked off a new $2 million fbFund competition today aimed at fueling the creation of high quality apps for the Facebook Platform.

The fbFund program awards grants to developers (not an investment for equity), with the stipulation that fbFund partners Accel and Founders Fund get a right of first refusal for any future investment rounds.

The new competition has 2 rounds: 25 round 1 winners will receive US $25,000 grants, and 5 round 2 winner will receive US $250,000 grants.

Facebook is looking for “applications that best embody our guiding principles for social applications and have the potential to become Great Apps.” Further criteria:

* Originality of Concept: Does the application introduce a great idea in a new and unexplored area?
* Market: Is this application targeted to key audiences or meet compelling market needs?
* Social/Useful: Does the application enable people to interact with each other? Does it deliver real value to users (including entertainment)?
* Expressive: Does the application allow people to share more information?
* Intuitive: Is the application compelling and easy to use? Does it have a well-thought-out user experience?
* Potential: Can it be a real business someday?
* Team: Do you believe this team can execute and is driven to succeed?

Applications are due August 29, 2008 - in less than a month!

Here’s a promo video for the new fbFund competition:

Hey Rodney, I can appreciate the slide. But just on the surface, the one thing that I can’t quiet understand is how affective those can be when Facebook is a closed system. When I say closed, i mean you really can’t engage all 13 of those marketing points unless you have a Facebook account.

You did mention that some of the features are available through applications, and I think within the last few days, Facebook is going to make it even easier to access Facebook users without actually using Facebook.

Pages was the one I was expecting to see, since it’s really the best, and currently the only, real way you can engage the outside world about your product or service.

I’d love to see some follow up to this on your suggestions for making these 13 points a reality?

13 Marketing Points on Facebook: People are always asking us how they can market their business, brand, product or service on facebook; so here is some food for thought. There are many ways to market effectively on facebook.

I put them all in 1 nice slide. Let these points roll around your noggin for a while and start to think about how you might leverage these opportunities within facebook for your business or brand.

Take note that some of these marketing points are viral carrier mechanisms that are only available if you have an application that you own in facebook.

I was at the Google campfire event tonight for the launch of Google Friend Connect. At first pass there is a LOT to like about this. Social media is going even more mainstream and will start to live outside of “traditional” social networking sites.
Now connections can be effectively “portable” to any site that

This is great news for Google’s Open Social. The Open Social movement continues to increase. AOL purchased social media site BEBO for $850 Million in March. This was a big move into social media by AOL and many developers were wondering if the site would join the growing party on Google’s Open Social standard.
Bebo

Michael Arrington at TechCrunch first broke news about Facebook turning into an open source platform, and the possibility that this could be happening within the next few days. Facebook confirmed this soon after.

The modified Facebook platform is called ‘Facebook Connect’. Once the platform is launched, all social networks will become compatible with Facebook; that is to say, it will be possible to run Facebook applications on other social networks with Facebook acting as the central hub.

AOL-owned Bebo already has a tie-up with Facebook for accessing the site. If the open source project comes through as expected, other social networks will be able to run Facebook applications, without having to ink individual deals. They will be able to map the APIs from Facebook, using FBML (FaceBook Mark-up Language), FQL (the query language), FJS (their JavaScript Library), and the Facebook API.

Putting it simply, users of Facebook Connect will be able to interlink with any partnering website, at any stage. Users will be able to carry their real identity - name, profile picture and other basic information - to all websites. Users will also be able to take their friends from Facebook to any site they wish.

Facebook promises that user information will be protected and be kept up-to-date at all times. In their own words:

“As a user moves around the open Web, their privacy settings will follow, ensuring that users’ information and privacy rules are always up-to-date. For example, if a user changes their profile picture, or removes a friend connection, this will be automatically updated in the external website.“

Reporters on ZDNet as well as TechCrunch see the move by Facebook as direct competition to and an improvement on Google’s OpenSocial. If Facebook follows the same route as OpenSocial, it will be possible for other networks to modify Facebook applications and use them on their own platforms. However, getting these applications on the official Facebook platform, would require prior sanction by Facebook.

Google, MySpace and Yahoo! have all supported OpenSocial, thus cutting off Facebook to a large extent. This did not matter to Facebook while its user volumes were sky-rcoketing. However, now that their user numbers have already started declining in the USA, they will need to take some bold steps to maintain their position among other social networks.

Social media marketing has spread across the web like wildfire, and for good reason; it works. Just knowing it works is not enough for your average marketing manager, though - you’ll need to know how WELL it works.

A lot of online marketing managers are perplexed when asked to determine the return on their investment. Many are missing out on valuable brand building and marketing opportunities because they’re unsure of how to measure their results.

Although measuring social media can be more of a challenge than the traditional web analytics, you can find the answers to what’s working and what’s not if you look. Start with those traditional web analytics. Are you seeing referrals from bookmarks on Digg or del.icio.us? Are your profile pages on Facebook or Plaxo sending you traffic? If you’re actively working your social media marketing, you should be seeing some regular referrals from the sites you’re participating in.

In addition to traditional metrics (like referring sites) there are some other elements you can look at to help measure the success of your social media marketing efforts. Key social media marketing metrics to measure engagement and influence include the following:

* Content Consumption – If you have a blog this is easy to measure since traditional web analytics can be used to measure the engagement of your blog. WordPress, for example, has built in stats that will take care of this for you.
* Content Contribution – Look at your blog or other social media property that allows for comments. Are people interacting with your content? What is the ratio of your blog posts to comments left?
* Emailing Posts – If you allow (or actively encourage) your blog posts to be emailed to others, you can use your blog platform analytics tool (like WordPress offers) to see how many emails are actually being sent through your form.
* Who’s Talking About You – This isn’t an exact science, however you can go to the blog search engine at Technorati and search on your domain for some clues. You can also use the search for your domain in Google, Yahoo and MSN with the following: link:http://www.yourwebsite.com . The numbers won’t match up exactly, but it gives you a good idea if your efforts are making progress.

To measure engagement with your profiles on MySpace or Facebook, you can monitor the number of friends you have, total profile visits, etc. Every social networking site offers some type of metric tool to see what’s going on with the pages you’ve established.

Regardless of what social media marketing methods you’re putting into action, you can usually find some type of measurement to gauge whether or not it’s providing a benefit. Either way, don’t shy away from social media just because you can’t measuring every detail. After all, you’re not going to find what works if you don’t get out there and make an effort.

Go ahead and try new things and monitor them the best you can. You’ll often be surprised at what will work for you!

we wrote about Twitter, a microblogging platform that allows you to have a real-time conversation with your online audience. Since we covered some of the benefits of using Twitter to promote your business, it’s time to discuss the best way to leverage those benefits.

Using Twitter for marketing is a delicate balance, just like using any blogging tool for business purposes. And just like any other social media tool, Twitter has its own unwritten rules of etiquette. These 4 rules will serve as a guideline to help you jump into tweeting without breaking a wing.

Rule 1: If you use Twitter as strictly a sales tool, you will lose followers quickly.

It is in your best interest to seek out others you find interesting and follow them. As with other social media applications, Twitter is about creating conversations and sharing news. It’s not about aggressive selling.

Rule 2: Tweets are limited to 140 characters in total length.

This is a large appeal of Twitter, since followers can quickly get their updates (via their cell phone, Blackberry, iPhone, etc.) and continue about their business. Messages are short and to-the-point, more like a text from a friend than a conventional blog post.

Rule 3: Twitter does not allow you to embed HTML, with the exception of hyperlinks.

So, no formatting. The links allowed all have the nofollow attribute, so there isn’t any SEO link juice benefit. (The SEO benefit comes from all the keywords in content. This is what puts your tweet or your Twitter profile at the top of the search engine results, and then your profile will link to your website.)

Rule 4: Don’t get carried away. If you tweet once a day it’s an event to look forward to. If you tweet every hour, you may be viewed as irritating and lose followers in the process.

So, how often should you tweet? There isn’t a set number of times a day recommended, since it largely varies according to your audience. However, if you intend to use Twitter to promote your website, we recommend tweeting once or twice a day.

Remember, your Twitter profile shows your tweet history, so a new visitor who comes along and sees that you don’t have many tweets may decide that you are not worthy of following. Conversely, too many tweets will get you blocked faster than a Nigerian prince with a business proposal.

Businesses all over the world are using Twitter already. Big name companies using promotional tweeting to market their website and brand include Amazon, Woot, H & R Block, and Zappos.

Making Twitter work as a promotional marketing tool for your website may take some trial and error, and it’s a good idea to check out what others are tweeting about to get a feel for style. But don’t spend too much time being a lurker - get in there, get a feel, and start tweeting!

If you want to view live video of the Mark Zuckerberg keynote today at f8, Facebook will be streaming it online. We of course will be live blogging and posting video of the keynote as well. The keynote will be taking place from 1:30 PM until 3:00 PM Pacific Time. You can view the webcast by visiting visualwebcaster.com/Facebook. You should probably register on the site early as there will be a lot of people visiting the site to view the keynote live.

As I mentioned, we will be providing live, up to the minute coverage of the event so be sure to stay tuned to this site as well.

In the past month, many major application developers have been on the receiving end of policy enforcement measures handed down by Facebook. Here’s an update the current status of each application, including a look at the traffic repercussions of the measures taken.

Top Friends (Slide)

On June 26th, Top Friends was the first major app to disappear completely from the Facebook platform. The application was allegedly punished for violating the TOS by allowing access to non-friends’ personal information.

On July 5th, Top Friends resurfaced on the platform. Before the punishment, Top Friends users could use their profile box as a means to quickly access their friends’ profiles that they visited often. To bring the application in compliance with the TOS, this functionality was eliminated - now, clicking a “top friend” directs to that user’s Top Friends profile within the application.

Despite this loss of functionality and the long outage, Top Friends traffic has rebounded impressively.

Social Me and Compare Hotness (SocialHi.com)

July 1st, Social Me, a top 25 Facebook app, also disappeared from the platform. Compare Hotness, another SocialHi app, was also temporarily disabled.

An outpouring of support was seen for the Social Me app, even in the comments on this blog. On July 15th Social Me made its triumphant return to the platform, only to disappear again temporarily.

The app has now been available since the 16th, but has yet to recover its pre-July traffic levels.

Super Wall (RockYou!)

On July 6th, Super Wall’s traffic decreased rapidly. RockYou’s CTO and co-founder Jia Shen confirmed in an email that the app’s viral channels had been turned off for what he considered “slightly debatable” policy reasons.

Yesterday, Nick O’Neill interviewed Shen, who confirmed that Super Wall’s access to viral channels was back. It remains to be seen whether or not Super Wall can return to its position as the largest Facebook application.