Facebook Blog, Applications and Developers Directory

More social marketers seeking to engage their audiences on Facebook are turning to firms like Buddy Media and Context Optional to develop and promote applications that allow for rich interactions between Facebook users and their brands.

This week, the companies released several new applications that agencies should check out:
1. Buddy Media and Fox News

Buddy Media’s Fox News app allows users to visit the Fox News Page, customize the Fox News video player, and integrate it on their profile. “Supporters of Fox News will be able to carry their brand affinity off the Fan Page and onto their personal profile - increasing brand exposure and application engagement beyond the point of first contact,” says Buddy Media’s Greg Roth.

2. Context Optional, Ogilvy, and Kraft

Context Optional’s One Minute Mogul app is a social game that encourages users to try a new line of Oscar Meyer sandwiches through coupons. “It’s a very innovative approach tying online viral marketing to offline store purchases, and we’re excited to see how it goes,” says Context’s Kevin Barenblat.

3. Context Optional, Rapp Collins, and Travel Channel

Context Optional’s Kindap! app is a social game designed to drive traffic to the Travel Channel’s website. Users kidnap their friends to far off places, and in order to escape the hostage must answer a question (the answer for which can be found on TravelChannel.com). “The app includes sophisticated Flash and heavy graphics to meet Travel Channel’s branding guidelines and has seen significant growth since it launched a couple weeks ago,” says Barenblat.

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.

I am excited to announce that InsideFacebook will now be accepting FREE listings for Facebook applications for sale by developers!

With Facebook application acquisitions already happening at a rapid pace (many more have not been announced), my intention with this service is to enable a broader marketplace that will help the hundreds (now thousands) of Facebook application developers gain access to a larger community of investors and entrepreneurs, and help investors gain access to a larger group of developers and opportunities.

By listing their applications for sale using the instructions on our Sell Your App page, developers will be able to solicit offers from interested parties.

To list your application for sale on InsideFacebook FREE, email sales at insidefacebook dot com or send me a Facebook message and include the following information about your application:

• Name and URL of application
• Name and contact information of developer
• Description of application
• Description of technology used
• Number of users
• Historical data on user growth and usage statistics (optional)
• Reserve price and “buy it now” price (optional)

We will respond to all listing requests as soon as possible. However, we cannot guarantee that we will list every request we receive — we will do our best to publish as many listings as frequently as we possibly can.

Thanks and look forward to hearing from you!

Update: TripAdvisor’s Brian Payea has responded: “This is untrue. Beyond that, we do not have any comment.” Payea would not specifically comment on whether acquisition hasn’t happened or simply that the reported price was inaccurate. Take it for what you will…but for now, though this is not a ridiculous price given the canvas page views and CPMs I would expect Where I’ve Been to be generating, it seems like the first big Facebook app acquisition is still yet to happen.

Just two months after asking, “I Have 250,000 Users, Now What?”, Craig Ulliott has an answer.

In what is by far the largest Facebook application acquisition to date, travel company TripAdvisor has reportedly acquired Where I’ve Been from Craig Ulliott for $3 million.

The acquisition marks the first major successful exit of a Facebook application since the Platform launched just under three months ago.

With 2.3 million users, Where I’ve Been established itself as by far the biggest travel application on Facebook, leading #2 Cities I’ve Visited (also TripAdvisor owned) by over 1 million users.

The $3 million price tag values Where I’ve Been users at about $1.30, or almost 30 times the 4.6 cents per user Slide paid for Favorite Peeps two months ago.

If confirmed, this acquisition marks a major step toward validating the value rapidly being created by Facebook platform developers. Many have questioned the liquidity of the Facebook application market beyond the $60k range that Slide paid to acquire Favorite Peeps.

“This means Facebook is a real platform,” said Naval Ravikant, founder of Hitforge, an investor in the Facebook platform.

“I do think he sold too early, but $3M is a great return for the amount of time he invested.”

Certainly! For a developer once unable to afford a server to handle his bustling app traffic, a $3M sale is sure to inspire additional development and investment in the Platform. Congratulations to Craig for hanging on and leading Where I’ve Been to a successful exit!