Following our posts last month on Facebook’s 2008 international growth by country and trends in 2008 social networking growth, comScore released additional data today on year-over-year social networking growth since June of 2007. Here are the highlights:
- Social networking continues to explode worldwide
- Facebook and hi5 are leading the international growth
- Facebook is growing everywhere
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.
Google Campfire Monday: Launching Google Friend Connect? We have been hearing some rumblings that Google has some big announcement around a product set of API’s for use with Open Social that is supposedly called “Friend Connect”. In theory it might allow Google Open Social developers to have access to profile information and allow those data
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
While Facebook is rumored to be launching Facebook Connect, a new way for third party websites to connect with users’ Facebook profile and friend information without leaving the site, the Bebo Platform team have launched some interesting API’s of their own: today, Bebo announced new external authorization APIs which will allow third party web and desktop applications to access your Bebo account.
Developers interested in the Bebo external auth APIs can find more documentation here.
Intridea, a development shop with offices in DC and Berkeley, has released a client that provides a Ruby on 
Rails interface for the Bebo Platform called Beboist.
The plugin was designed from the ground-up to be flexible enough to accommodate any changes to the API, while at the same time providing a clean interface that will be familiar to most Rails developers.
This is the first Rails binding for Bebo that I’ve seen. (rfacebook is a popular Ruby interface to the Facebook Platform APIs - thanks Tom). Nice job, Intridea!
Web 2.0 Expo SF is happening this week at San Francisco’s Moscone Center - hard to believe it’s already 
here! This year, there are several excellent focus tracks on different days of the week, including Social Platforms, Marketing & Community, and the Mobile Web.
I’ll be moderating Wednesday’s session on Comparing Social Platforms, which kicks off the day’s Focus on Social Platforms track. I am honored to be joined by a terrific panel:
* Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook
* Allen Hurff, SVP of Engineering at MySpace
* Jessica Alter, Director of Platform and Business Development at Bebo
* David Recordon, Open Platform Lead at Six Apart
Look forward to seeing you there!
This morning at Web 2.0 Expo San Francisco I moderated the Comparing Social Platforms panel, which was 
comprised of awesome folks speaking on behalf of the top social platforms on the web today:
* Allen Hurff, SVP of Engineering at MySpace
* Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook
* Jessica Alter, Director of Platform and Business Development at Bebo
* Patrick Chanezon, OpenSocial Evangelist at Google
* David Recordon, Open Platform Lead at Six Apart
While the panel covered a variety topics that each merit more discussion (there are entire conferences devoted to doing just that), this morning the panel discussed key issues for the social platform economy - such as each platform’s philosophy on key product integration points (profile, feeds, viral channels), aligning user and developer interests (engagement, marketing channels), monetization roadmap (ad networks, commerce), data portability, and potential business conflicts (in verticals like photos and music).
Since I was moderating the panel, I didn’t have time to take notes, but here are some paraphrases of some noteworthy panelist comments:
* Jessica Alter: We’re going to be driving developers to focus more and more on engagement. While I don’t have any specific announcements today, things like time spent and page views are going to become more important on the platform.
* Allen Hurff: On the question of verticals like music, of course MySpace is going to continue to work with major music distribution partners around the world. But we really want to remain as agnostic as possible. In fact, I expect there to be many more app feed items than MySpace system feed items.
* Dave Morin: We’re spending a lot of our time right now thinking about data portability, or perhaps it would better be called “privacy portability.” You should have the option to have your privacy settings follow you around the web.
* David Recordon: The term “data portability” almost can’t be used in that way any more, since the branding of the term now means something else.
* Patrick Chanezon: Unlike most of these social platforms, iGoogle is much more of a social content discovery service than social network. It’s a pretty different type of service that’s built on OpenSocial that we think is really interesting.
* Allen Hurff: The MySpace Platform actually represents a pretty big shift just in the last year from the way MySpace has traditionally viewed opening up its data. We’re going to push this even further in 2008.
* Dave Morin: Creating a platform is like creating a marketplace. You have your arbitrageurs, and we have those, you have your hedge funds, they’re like the guys staying up all night finding ways to tweak their way into the viral channels more.
* Patrick Chanezon: OpenSocial is really just an overlap of the most common set of services needed to run social applications. We may begin to see platforms on top of platforms in the coming year.
Despite the early start time (8:30!), by midway through the panel there were folks crowding in the back of the room. We only had time for a couple audience questions before we had to make room for the next panel. Thanks to everyone for a great discussion! For more, check out GSP East.
It’s been many weeks in the making, but we at Inside Facebook have some exciting news to share today - 
we are launching a new, experimental second blog called Inside Social Games! Inside Social Games is going to be entirely devoted to tracking the convergence of games and social network platforms.
So what are social games anyway - and why Inside Social Games now? Just as I was surprised two years ago by the way my “non-geeky” friends were using Facebook, I’m finding myself repeatedly being surprised by the way those same people are playing new kinds of “social games” inside Facebook (and MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Hi5, and Orkut) now. Games that, despite their apparent simplicity or complexity, are being adopted in large numbers by people outside traditional console, PC, and online gaming demographics. Games on social networks are bringing together family and friends like games never before have - and we think that’s pretty darn cool.
Like Inside Facebook two years ago, I’m starting Inside Social Games as an experiment. An experiment into what “social gaming” really means and how social games may or may not be changing the way large numbers of people play and communicate. What the results will be, I’m not yet sure, but I’m excited to see what conversations emerge over the coming weeks and months, especially between the game design and SNAP communities.
I’m proud to announce that I’ve been able to land Chris Holt (also of PC Gamer) to review current and new releases. Chris would love to receive tips on new games, so feel free to contact him at submit AT insidesocialgames DOT com to let him know what you’re up to.
We’re looking forward to tracking not only the games but also the people and companies behind them that are leading the charge into this new and exciting space. We believe some interesting new companies will be created as the worlds of gaming and social networks collide. It should be a fun ride. Please drop us a line any time!
The Bebo Platform team announced over the weekend that it has launched Facebook-compatible support for
pre-load SNQL. This basically means that developers can make their apps run a lot faster on the Bebo Platform by specifying beforehand what platform data the application requires instead of making lots of queries as you go.
While we haven’t heard any major news out of the Bebo Platform lately, Bebo has told me they are working on new engagement metrics for applications. These metrics (like time spent, etc.) will reward developers that create the most engaging applications.
We’re here at the 1:10pm session and this panel is covering platform options. The panel:
Oren: What are you doing with your platform? What makes it a little different? Whats new with the platform since the last GSP in San Diego?
David: We are the seventh largest website of any kind in the world. We are the third largest social network in terms of traffic. We are the number ones in terms of engagement relative to other social networks. 38% of the entire internet population is in Asia and Friendster is the largest social network in that region. We have 350 applications live on the platform today with 1000 currently under development. The revenue model is completely open on our platform. In the last few months we’ve added some viral channels for every app and every developer.
Jessica: We are a social network focused on community, entertainment, and communication combined together. Our users are really engaged in what they’re doing on our site and that is something we are very focused on continuing to grow. Thus far we have over 4,000 applications on our platform. We currently support the Facebook APIs but we do plan to support Open Social in the future. We built a platform because we realize that outside developers could bring to our site many things that we simply couldn’t offer to our users ourselves. After photos, apps are the most popular thing on the site.
Dan: Last fall we announced our platform Force.com. It is the first platform as a service for business. It is a system of tools and application services that allow both developers and corporate IT departments to developer applications and have them run on the Salesforce infrastructure. It is a very powerful environment not only to developer your applications but also to run your applications. The difference between our business platform and the social platforms is the level of security requirements that enterprises really depend on. We created the eco-system with all of the security functionality built in so that developers can put their applications on our platform and have access to an entire universe of users for free.
Oren: It sounds like the monetizing element is baked into the force.com environment. For Bebo and Friendster, are people building businesses on your platform?
David: We are many seeing many developers generating healthy revenue through CPA.
Jessica: Yes, there are a lot of developers making money. Our approach is how can “we” make money, we including both the developers and Bebo itself. We are looking at our rich data and how can we help use the data we have to help developers monetize. We want to offer increased ad relevance for the entire ecosystem. We think that there needs to be some way to share the data we have so that the CPMs developers are seeing are much higher than the .05 or .10 cent range.
Oren: In terms of access to profile info, what are the trends in regards of the balance between privacy and personal data and allowing the developer to take advantage of the rich data that is being collected?
Dan: Salesforce and Force.com is a little different in that regard. We do not see nor collect data. On Salesforce you can buy directly from the developer, so we are really outside of that ad based model. We should all be watching a lot on the public policy side that may alter the behavioral ad targeting environment.
Jessica: This probably is the most delicate balance we have to deal with given the huge opportunity and huge risk. It is a constant conversation that we have internally in the company. We think there are ways to achieve a balance that doesn’t compromise users.
David: First off, there are tons of granular privacy settings on Friendster. In terms of the APIs and the developer program, a developer can only access certain private information once the user actively consents. We’ve put in place controls to keep a tight handle on this issue so that users know whats going on while developers can still build worthwhile applications on the platform.
Jessica: The question we’ve found when talking about lending this information to developers or any third party is do users understand what they’re doing when they give access to their data? The hardest part is educating the users to understand the significance of their actions.
Oren: People definitely don’t know. Inevitably, the bad news is going to happen and policy will quickly enter into the equation. What do you see as the next big thing over the next six months as the era of throwing sheep passes?
David: Friendster is a founding member of Opensocial and we will be deploying the spec in coming months. We are looking for new, compelling, innovative apps. We haven’t seen as many as we would have expected. We are looking forward to some truly next generation apps to make life easier for our users.
Jessica: I’m for the kind of apps that my users are going to use. To me, thats about engagement. What I think is quality is not what my average 21 year old user thinks is quality. We want things that will be really engaging. In the next few weeks we will be coming out with some new engagement metrics and rewarding based on those. We definitely hope to innovate on the monetization side as well.
Dan: We think this is a terribly exciting time considering all of these new platforms. This is the era of “let a thousands flowers bloom.” We really think that what we’re moving towards is the end of software, and you’ve seen that with applications and you’re seeing platforms take that to the next level. The consumer web is setting the pace that the business web tries to interpret and implement in the business environment. The dynamic combination of these two worlds will lend a tremendous amount of excitement to both the business and consumer side.
Q: For salesforce, for developers how much help do you offer to meet the security requirements?
Dan: Not only do you as a developer code in salesforce, but we do also have a security audit. Our team works with developers to make sure that they are following proper security procedures. All of those security issues are automatically handled by the run time environment.
This is a guest post by Blake Commagere, creator of the “monsters” series of applications on Facebook, Bebo, and other social networks.
How much work is it?
beboSeveral Facebook developers have still not ported their apps to Bebo despite the ease with which it can be done. The team at Bebo has gone to great pains to ensure that porting your app from Facebook to Bebo is very, very little work. Given that you can access Bebo’s audience of 80 million users by spending just a little time on it, you should begin your port immediately - my applications (Zombies, Vampires, Werewolves & Slayers) took me about 9 hours total to port over. Here’s a quick guide to help you get started:
Two very important decisions to make:
1. Whether you allow cross-platform functionality.
2. Whether you use the same code base.
Allowing cross-platform functionality
Cross-platform functionality is simply any set of features that allow users on Facebook to interact with users on Bebo. In general, this is not a good decision because it is a non-trivial amount of work and will add value to your application in very, very few instances.
1. While the average Internet user may have accounts on a few social networks, they are only active on one.
* Keep in mind that engineers are an exception to this rule, but most users are NOT engineers
* Very few active users on both networks means very few that would need a seamless experience between the two networks.
2. Transferring a user’s settings from one network to another would require authenticating them against both social networks.
* This would either have to be done by Facebook and Bebo through some sort of collaboration
* Or, you will have to authenticate the user by prompting for them to log into one social network from an experience in the other - a very confusing user experience.
3. Any tables indexed by user_id will have to be indexed by social_network and user_id to prevent collisions.
4. Friend graphs do not map across the networks - i.e., your Facebook friends do not directly correlate to your Bebo friends.
There are cases where cross platform functionality does make sense and is not much work. If your app creates a synchronous experience with strangers - for example a flash poker game - then the user can be presented with a room that allows them to play poker against members of many different social networks and creates a larger community. However, functionality that allowed you to transfer your poker history and settings from Facebook to Bebo is a feature that would likely get very little use and add a non-trivial amount of work to your porting effort.
Using the same code base
Bebo has gone to great lengths to make using your same code base for both Bebo and Facebook very easy. In general, this is a very good decision for the following reasons:
* Your feature set will always remain in synch
* Bug fixes only have to happen in one place
If you are using MVC architecture, then you should be able to reuse your models and controllers with very little adjustment. As Bebo does not yet have FBJS support, the view portion of your application will require some work if you use FBJS.
If your app is not using an MVC architecture and you extensively use FBJS, then your code will have several places where you have to case out the different social networks and it may be worth branching your code base rather than reusing it.
Recommended Steps
(assumes you want to use the same code base and are not allowing cross-platform functionality)
1. Ensure you are using 64 bit integers for your user ids (e.g. in MySQL bigint rather than int).
2. Create a top level configuration file that determines whether the connection is coming from Facebook or Bebo and sets a parameter or define establishing which network has connected to you.
* You can do something like this:
* if ($_REQUEST['fb_sig_network'] == ‘Bebo’)
define(’CURRENT_SOCIAL_NETWORK’, ‘Bebo’);else
define(’CURRENT_SOCIAL_NETWORK’, ‘Facebook’);
3. Merge the client APIs for Facebook and Bebo. You can start with the Facebook API and add cases that handle connecting to either Facebook servers or Bebo servers based on the parameter you established in Step 1. (Note: I am hoping to open source a merged client API for Facebook and Bebo in the very near future - this will make this step unnecessary!)
4. Handle any cases where you relied upon aspects of the Facebook API that are not yet supported by Bebo. These API calls aren’t supported by Bebo yet:
* AuthCreate/getsession (but this is coming very soon)
* Admin.getAppProperties/Set AppProperties
* Batch:run
* Users.hasAppPermission
* Users.getstatus
* Friends.getlist
* Datastorage
* Marketplace
5. If using FBML, handle any cases where you use facebook tags not yet supported by Bebo. Keep in mind: FBML is supported by Bebo - it SNML has the same syntax, but you do NOT have to switch from using to. Bebo allows you to use either! Currently, here are the tags not yet supported by Bebo:
* mobile
* require log-in attribute
* page-edit-admin-header
* visible to connection
* attachment preview
* if is-in network tag
6. If you want to build functionality supported by Bebo but not Facebook, handle those cases properly. Here are the API components on Bebo that do not exist on Facebook:
* Bands
* Playlists
* Songs of Bands
7. Keep in mind that Bebo does not yet support FBJS (SNJS), but that will be coming very very soon! Additionally, pre-load SNQL launches the week of 6/02/08, so use it!
8. Abstract out Facebook specific links or references. For example, anything specified here: http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?v=1.0&doc=other will most likely not be as trivial as replacing the word “facebook” with “bebo” in these urls.
9. Release on Bebo and enjoy!