Facebook Blog, Applications and Developers Directory

Popular Facebook game Mob Wars has recently been rumored to be the most profitable app on Facebook. While that will never be known for sure, one thing is clear: Mob Wars is making a lot of cash. Probably in the tens of thousands of US dollars per day. How?

One large reason: Mob Wars has baked incentivized CPA offers from Super Rewards directly into the game, and expertly tuned its virtual economy to drive offer conversions without significantly imbalancing the economy or damaging game play. (Mob Wars also works closely with CPA monetization firm Offerpal Media.)

Super Rewards has largely remained quiet on the PR front to date, but the company is working with many of the top developers on Facebook to monetize their games. Super Rewards partners include Mob Wars, Knighthood, Premier Football, and several of the top apps in Zynga’s family of games, including Texas HoldEm Poker and YoVille. The company has built a 14 person team across its Vancouver headquarters, New York office, and soon to be opened San Francisco office.

We recently spent some time with Super Rewards CEO and Co-founder Jason Bailey and President Adam Caplan to learn more about how the company is working with Mob Wars and other leading apps and social games to make real money.

Jason, how does Super Rewards help social app and game developers make money?

What we do exceptionally well is understanding the nuances of all the games we work with. We work closely with developers to tweak and balance their game play and economies around their virtual currencies. Developers come in making $100 a day and we can take them up to $1000 a day in short order.

How detailed do you get?

We provide a broad range of services, everything from pricing specific items to consulting. Some developers have experience with their economies in current or past apps and want our help putting offers in front of their users. Others come to us while their game is still in alpha and really value our input.

What’s the most important thing developers need to do to make money with CPA offers?

The most important thing is balancing your economy properly. You should support all kinds of players well, while remembering that your hardcore users will generate 90% of your revenue.

You want to make sure users want to obtain and spend points, while preserving the quality of the game play. For example, in Mob Wars, in order to replenish your health you can either wait for the system to revitalize you or you can “go to the Godfather” and earn some “favor points.” (see right)

So how do you measure performance?

The core metric we use is dollars per click. We hope our developers can get 25% of their daily active users through a Super Rewards page at some point. Of those, if the economy is balanced correctly, you should see a 40-50% click through rate, and ultimately a net 8-10% conversion rate. Developers get about $1.00-$1.50/conversion for US users, but less for international users. We’re lucky to get $0.06/conversion in China, but we have games operating in Europe and other parts of Asia at $0.25 and up.

So assuming all of a developer’s traffic is US traffic, the developer could see up to $83 per day per thousand DAUs. However, on an average basis across all geographies, we are about half that number. It goes without saying that there is a wide distribution around the average based on quality of app and balance of virtual currency economy.

What kind of apps are doing the best?

Games! Gifting and poking apps don’t do as well. Games that do the best are ones in which the players want to be on top of the leaderboard, collect items, or play games of chance.

Also, keep in mind at that a majority of the revenue generated per user is generated early in the lifetime of the users’ interaction with the games. People spend money developing their characters, climbing the leader board, and unlocking new elements of the game. Once their character is strong, they have many prizes, and have unlocked all the levels - naturally there is less desire to complete offers and pay. It is those top guys though that motivate the little guys to climb and thus spend.

As another example, there is one app that has about 200,000 MONTHLY active users (4-50k DAU). Yesterday, about 14,000 users hit the Super Rewards page (about 30%). The users were about 35% USA, 55% CA, AU, and UK, the remaining 10% all over the world. 5,500 clicks were generated (40% CTR). Revenues were about $4,500 for the day for an EPC of about $0.80. This is a newer app so its earnings per 1,000 DAU is a touch higher than average. Also it is an engaging game with a virtual currency so it is a great fit for us. It is a fairly international app, but nothing unusual. If it had more US users it would earning higher aver EPCs.

So those numbers scale well at the smaller DAUs, but when apps have 500k DAU the formula gets more complicated. That being said, there are PLENTY of apps making $6,000 a day on various platforms. But no single app that I know of making $60,000 a day consistently.

However, we’re just in the beginning. We’re starting to see bigger players move in to the space with higher quality apps. I expect to see some very high quality games released in the next few months.

And some people think our stuff looks hokey, but we purposely make it match the look and feel of the game, like in Mob Wars. That is just how Facebook games look.

Right. So, how much does the social network context affect monetization potential?

The social factor is definitely important in driving games where there is pride or ego involved in being on the top of the list. However, the main reason our partner apps are doing well is entertainment. Casual MMO’s outside of social networks would do just as well. Social networks are just a great way to grow quickly, and play against real friends and family instead of random people you meet in the lobby.

Thanks Jason. Any final thoughts?

We are very bullish on the space. We’ll be moving into other areas like casual games and web games soon.

Our 200 developers love Super Rewards, but they don’t want us to talk about it. But we’ve been optimizing our system over the last year, and are now ready for prime time.

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.

Facebook has launched a sponsored video ad offering as displayed in the image below.   The videos display on the right hand side of the homepage in the area that Facebook announced would have sponsors when the site was redesigned.  The only thing that the company failed to mention was that those sponsorships would be videos.  The videos also enable comments.  You can then view the comments that your friends have posted pertaining to that video.

Jason Beckerman was able to get me a screenshot and I checked out the site and it displayed as pictured below.  The ad no longer displays for me but I’m guessing it will reappear shortly.  This could be Facebook testing it out as Jason states in the comment, but it’s clear that Facebook would like to enter the video advertising space.  This positions Facebook directly against VideoEgg who is currently one of the leading video advertising solutions providers on the market.

Facebook should also be able to charge a premium for video ad placements.  It’s exciting to see Facebook expand their advertising offerings.  We will update you with any news pertaining to this new advertising offering shortly.

While websites can take many steps to ensure their own code is secure, there’s often no way to completely prevent malicious code running on client computers from abusing stolen website credentials. That’s exactly the type of problem Facebook’s security team has been dealing with over the past two days, as at least two variants on new worms have been spreading to thousands of users across the site.

Responding to the situation, Facebook’s Head of Security Max Kelly said in the company blog earlier tonight,

We spent most of last night working on a fix for a worm, which was targeting people on Facebook and placing messages on Walls urging users to view a video that pretends to be hosted on a Google or YouTube website. We’ve identified and blocked the ability to link to the malicious websites from anywhere on Facebook. Less than .002 percent of people on Facebook have been affected, all of whom we notified and suggested steps to remove the malware.

Kelly encourages Facebook users to never share their password and report any suspicious activity.

While Facebook hasn’t experienced widespread worm abuse in the past, it must continue to invest in early-warning detection systems to shut down these kinds of attacks before they spread very far in order to preserve the trust users place in the company to manage and store great amounts of personal information.

While websites can take many steps to ensure their own code is secure, there’s often no way to completely prevent malicious code running on client computers from abusing stolen website credentials. That’s exactly the type of problem Facebook’s security team has been dealing with over the past two days, as at least two variants on new worms have been spreading to thousands of users across the site.

Responding to the situation, Facebook’s Head of Security Max Kelly said in the company blog earlier tonight,

We spent most of last night working on a fix for a worm, which was targeting people on Facebook and placing messages on Walls urging users to view a video that pretends to be hosted on a Google or YouTube website. We’ve identified and blocked the ability to link to the malicious websites from anywhere on Facebook. Less than .002 percent of people on Facebook have been affected, all of whom we notified and suggested steps to remove the malware.

Kelly encourages Facebook users to never share their password and report any suspicious activity.

While Facebook hasn’t experienced widespread worm abuse in the past, it must continue to invest in early-warning detection systems to shut down these kinds of attacks before they spread very far in order to preserve the trust users place in the company to manage and store great amounts of personal information.

As the Facebook Platform matures in its second year, big upcoming changes like the profile redesign and new policy initiatives have altered the Facebook Platform landscape significantly. Inside Facebook asked Salil Deshpande, General Partner at Bay Partners (which launched its AppFactory application developer fund and incubation program 1 year ago), to share his thoughts on the current state and future of the Facebook Platform ecosystem.

Which of your portfolio companies are significantly invested in the Facebook Platform? How are they doing?

We’ve made a handful of investments. Several are in stealth. Buddy Media, which started out as an investment in a virtual currency (AceBucks) for Facebook, has evolved into an app & ad network. They have significant revenue — can’t talk about how much, but it’s many millions of dollars. So certainly they are monetizing. We have multiple others that are monetizing and are profitable on an operating basis. Some are not yet.

Some of our Facebook investments have abandoned Facebook and chosen a destination site approach. Some of our internet investments have gone to Facebook for customer acquisition, to bring users back to their destination sites. And one of them has reimplemented their destination site experience as a completely on-Facebook experience.

For a handful of post-traction applications that we liked, rather than invest in them directly, we referred them (with permission) to Buddy Media, and they bought them.

Most of our smaller investments have received reasonable acquisition offers along the way, not from Facebook, but from other players in the space, such as media companies, application rollups, studios, or ad networks.

What is your view on the state and future of the Facebook Platform ecosystem?

One of the things we said on the day we announced our program (in the comments of a TechCrunch thread) was that if Facebook wants their social network to be a platform, Facebook needs to behave like a platform company. This is more easily said than done. It took platform companies such as Microsoft, Apple, and Sun Microsystems years to get this right.

Whether a certain service should be provided as part of the platform, or whether it should be left to application developers, is *guaranteed* to be an area of tension. And it was an area of tension for all of the platform companies mentioned above.

Other common mistakes that wanna-be platform companies make include not treating your developers right (by not allocating enough resources for API development, stability, evolution, backwards-compatibility, documentation, support etc.)

There’s been ample blogging on Facebook’s behavior (e.g. here), but it hasn’t always been succinctly characterized as I am doing here - that if Facebook wants to be a platform, it needs to behave as a platform company.

In the particular case of Slide and Top Friends, in Facebook’s defense, it could be argued that Top Friends was not a “deep” application in any case, and keeping track of which of your Facebook friends are your “top”
friends should have been a “feature” of the Friends facility in Facebook in the first place. I’m not taking sides, but it would be a valid argument. And the same argument could apply to a lot of narrow feature-like apps.

So perhaps the lesson here is that (a) developers should work on deeper apps rather than thin or silly ones that are close to being features of the platform, and (b) Facebook should get the virality features right such that the deep meaningful apps (and not the silly stupid ones) find it easier to propagate themselves.

We are still positive on Facebook as a platform, but we are observing their behavior as a platform company carefully.

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!

It’s a known fact that search engines (read: Google) place a weighty importance on one-way inbound links when determining your placement in search results. Unfortunately, successfully link building takes a lot of time and energy, so it’s often put on the back burner. This isn’t only costly - it’s plain foolish.

Inbound links are one of the ways the search engine determines the quality and relevancy of your site. Every link that points to your website is a vote for your relevance. The more votes your site has, the higher it will rank in the search engines.

The web is ultimately nothing but links, pathways for navigation for both humans and search engine spiders (also known as robots, crawlers, and bots). Search engines crawl through links they find on one website to visit other websites, adding them to their index of sites and reviewing them for search relevance. Even within your site, spiders follow links from one page to another.

Some links have more value than others. To be successful at link building, you must learn to recognize each of these links. In the world of link building, there are four general types of links:

* URL Link - This is simply a website’s URL, written in such a way that clicking on it will take you to the site.
* Text Links (or static links) - This is the most common type of link, where you click on a word to follow the link.
* Image Links - Click on the image to follow the link.
* Dynamic Links - These links are in JavaScript. They work like any other link, except they have extra code behind the scenes. The code performs special functions, such as affiliate commission tracking or automatic feeds. Search engines cannot follow dynamic links.

You must also consider the nofollow attribute.

The nofollow attribute (or just ‘nofollow’) is HTML code used to instruct search engines to not count a link as a vote for relevance. This is very common on websites that allow comments, especially blogs, and is intended to reduce the effectiveness of search engine spam.

It’s important to keep in mind that search engines do not follow links that have the nofollow attribute applied. (Hence the name…)

To determine whether or not a page uses nofollow links, look at the site’s code. Right click on the web site and choose ‘View Source’ (From Internet Explorer, choose Page > View Source. From Firefox choose View > Page Source). If the nofollow attribute is applied it will be clearly visible within the page code as ‘nofollow’. You will find it either in the Meta tag section or within the code surrounding the actual link.

Some hardball SEO folks avoid nofollow links like the plague. The mentality behind this is that a link is useless if a search engine spider can’t follow it. Remember, human visitors can still use the links to find you. Don’t shun a web page using the nofollow attribute if the audience is a good fit with your site.

When you are ready to build links to your site, your links can go two ways:

1. One way links - A link from another website to yours with no returning link to theirs.
2. Reciprocal links - Another website links to your site, and you link back to theirs.

One way links have always been more valuable in the eyes of the search engines, much like a politician who gets a vote without giving a favor. However, each link has its own value based upon how relevant it is to your site, the text in and around the link, and how much authority the linking website has with the search engines.

In order for your inbound links to have any significant value, you need to focus on getting high quality links. As a rule, the more websites that link to your site the better. However, there is no question that 20 quality links can be much more valuable from an SEO perspective than thousands of low quality links.

So what makes up a high quality link? Imagine if Google had a link to your website on their home page. That would obviously be a quality link - A highly relevant, highly trafficked, highly linked page with tons of authority with the search engines.

Of course this analogy is a bit extreme, but the point is that value is usually pretty easy to spot. For a more realistic example, let’s say you’re a photographer specializing in wedding photos. If this were the case, links from informational sites or blogs related to weddings and photography would be quality links.

Now that you understand the basics of quality link building, the next step is keyword research, finding the key words and phrases to build into the text in and around your link. Next week, we’ll talk about keyword research that gets your link juice flowing.

CNBC reported this morning that in a call with analysts, Microsoft SVP Satya Nadella announced that the company has reached a web search and search advertising agreement with Facebook. Microsoft PR says the deal will go live by the end of the year.

This is a big announcement, as Facebook has to date provided no web search to users. Facebook and Microsoft will work together to design the best integration of Microsoft’s Live Search service for Facebook’s users.

Late last year, Microsoft made a $240 million strategic investment in Facebook at a stratospheric $15 billion valuation. As part of that deal, Microsoft gained rights to sell Facebook’s US and global ad inventory. Since that time, there has been much speculation as to whether the agreement would extend into search.

Now that the Yahoo deal has seemingly fallen apart, Microsoft is even more eager to expand its search footprint against arch rival Google. Google reached a large search agreement with MySpace a few years ago, guaranteeing $900 million in payments over 3.75 years. Since that time, there have been rumors that Google has been dissatisfied with the monetization performance of MySpace’s search traffic.

Q: Any details on the Payment platform date?

Zuck: I wish I knew.

Q: I’ve heard that the policies are being applied differently to different developers.

Schrage: When there’s a particular issue, what’s evaluated is not just the issue itself, but the context - how they respond to the issue, what they say, and their track record in the past. We’re interested in seeking advancement of the principles of the Platform, and less so any policy in particular.

Ling: We’re trying to be more transparent, and we want to work with developers to correct violations when they occur.

Q: When will developers have access to build on Facebook for iPhone?

Ling: Developers will have access in the fall.

Q: Is Facebook upgrading the way it handles messaging?

Zuck: We recently upgraded the way we handle the Inbox, for example. Our focus for the next few years is helping people share information and increasing the value to its userbase.

Q: What is Facebook’s vision for what it will become when Facebook Connect is successful?

Zuck: We think we’re building the core components of the ecosystem. User information, the feed infrastructure, different communication applications like photos and others. As time goes on, I think we’ll see more growth outside Facebook that will create more different ways Facebook can share. That will add value to users, to the feed system. We don’t think we’re pushing users in this direction, we think the world is moving in this direction. We want to do anythign we can to accelerate that.

Q: What do you think about the clones out there?

Schrage: We believe in innovation, not imitation. We don’t think imitation is fair, but we want to support innovation.

Q: Can you elaborate on your involvement with the Open Web Foundation?

Ling: We will be in dialogue with the group, and we’ll announce when we have more to share.

Q: Is Facebook going to become more of a professional network?

Zuck: We are trying to create value for all different kinds of users, and we’re happy that others are building applications that help people share information in a vusiness context as well.

Q: Do you plan on taking a cut of digital good transactions going on in the apps?

Zuck: We’ve thought about a lot of different things, but that’s not something that we’ve figured out yet. We’re still exploring many different monetization options.

Q: Do you plan on making it easier to publish content I create inside Facebook outside of Facebook, like into Twitter?

Zuck: If you’re using a Twitter app inside Facebook, that can already sync. We’ve thought about different RSS implementations. My guess is we’ll get around to it eventually. It’s not exactly clear right now because there are privacy rules that mean different people will need to see different things.

Q: Facebook is updating user profiles, when will business Pages get an update?

Zuck: We try to make pretty iterative changes. This was a difficult change to make iteratively because we widened the site. There will be some things that are constantly evolving.

Q: Do you have any stats you can share about how Facebook users are taking to the redesign?

Zuck: It’s pretty early because it’s only been live for a couple days, but we don’t have any stats on how much more people are sharing yet. We’re big believers in the concept of feeds and sharing recent information in general.

Q: What improvements are coming for search?

Zuck: We’re not close to launching it yet, so I can’t talk about it that much. We have some ideas.

Q: Regarding Great Apps, are there going to be many or few of them?

Ling: We expect to see 12-15 in the next year. We’d love to see more, but that’s our current expectation.

Q: Today is the first SDK for the iPhone, what will the next SDK be for? Desktop apps?

Hasbro and EA announced today that the two companies will soon launch an official version of Scrabble on Facebook. Interestingly, their press release makes no mention of Scrabulous, although it does mention “the current interest in Scrabble for social networking”.

So will the creators of Scrabulous (the Agarwalla brothers) be quaking in their boots that everyone will migrate away to the official game? Probably not. For one, there is already an official version of Scrabble on Facebook for users outside North America (licensed by Mattel, the owners of Scrabble outside of the US and Canada, and produced by RealNetworks). It currently has less than 6,000 daily active users, compared to Scrabulous with just over 450,000. This version has been out since late March and has shown little growth since then.

Now there will be two official versions of Scrabble on Facebook, with Hasbro owning the rights in North America, and Mattel in the rest of the world. Try to play a game of the new EA Scrabble in the US with someone in the UK (e.g. me) and you won’t be able. Somehow, I just can’t see how making the game “official” is going to take traffic away from the well-established Scrabulous.

This is one of the clearest examples of how older, bigger companies are struggling to meet the needs of social media. Scrabble’s geographical licensing issues currently seem to be hurting the companies involved more than the consumers. The length of time it has taken EA to develop the official Scrabble shows that older companies are not set up to operate as quickly as independent Facebook application and game developers. And as Jeremiah Owyang has previously written, brands are often risk-averse and too slow-moving to capitalize on the current social media opportunity.

We’ll see if the launch of the official versions of Scrabble cause Scrabulous’s earlier legal issues to re-emerge. If EA’s version flounders as RealNetworks’ has, it would not be too surprising if one day we were to log on to Scrabulous and be redirected to one of the official, geographically hobbled versions of one of our favourite board games.

It’s now been 5 days since Slide’s Top Friends application disappeared from the Facebook Platform as a result of an apparent Developer Terms of Service violation. This suspension is the most severe punitive action imposed by the Facebook Platform team that the development community has seen yet, and is at least in some sense emblematic of Facebook’s evolving approach to Platform governance and regulation.

Throughout most of this year, Facebook has taken fairly a fairly algorithmic approach to regulating the Platform economy. By limiting developers’ access to communication channels based on user feedback, Facebook has been able to squeeze much distribution arbitrage out of the system, and align developer and user interests much more than it had before. (Before allocation limits, for example, it was cheaper to make a quiz application than buy inventory.)

However, there are always some types of user experience issues, like privacy concerns, that cannot be managed with automated systems. As such, Facebook has demonstrated that they’re willing to enforce some policies publicly. Public case by case policy enforcement is a necessary approach for more mature economies.

Earlier in the year, Facebook responded to abuse by outlawing the tool being abused (for example, in the case of forced invites). This would be akin to outlawing something like assault rifles that almost everyone agrees are harmful to society. However, in more complex cases, outlawing the tool at hand is not necessarily what’s best for the system. For example, removing APIs that access profile data from the Platform altogether because of one application’s privacy concerns would hurt the overall Platform economy significantly: many developers and users would be negatively impacted. This would be somewhat like outlawing kitchen knives because they were once used in a crime. Instead of removing knives from society, the better solution would be to hire a district attorney and set up a court system and bill of rights: news of verdicts and sentences would deter many future cases. Of course, that’s a very expensive proposition, and sufficient accountability must be enforced for stakeholders to have faith in the system.

While the government analogy breaks down in many senses (policy makers aren’t exactly elected officials in this case ), ultimately most of the “assault weapons” have already been removed from the Platform economy, and we’re beginning to see more cases of “kitchen knives.” Kitchen knife cases are more expensive to police and enforce, but even the libertarian-laden Silicon Valley would agree that policy enforcement is necessary for any mature Platform to be healthy.

Will Facebook choose to publicly comment on future cases, like Facebook’s Director of Platform Product Marketing Ben Ling did on Friday? I’m not sure that they always will, but I think it would help everybody to know as much as possible about what’s kosher and what’s not.

Facebook’s approach to platform governance is becoming decreasingly dependent on algorithms and increasingly based on policy-enforcement. So if you’re looking for a career in (platform) law enforcement, I know at least a couple social networks that are hiring!

Although he’s been rumored to have a seat on Facebook’s board for a long time, Facebook announced today that Silicon Valley luminary and current Ning Chairman Marc Andreessen has officially taken the fourth seat on Facebook’s board.

A long-time advisor to the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg, Andreessen is known for writing the early Mosaic web browser, co-founding Netscape, and staying on as AOL’s CTO after it acquired the company. Andreessen later founded web infrastructure company Loudcloud/Opsware, which was acquired by HP, and then co-founded Ning.

Andreessen joins current Facebook board members Zuckerberg, Jim Breyer of Accel, and Peter Thiel of Clarium Capital and Founders Fund. David Sze of Greylock and Paul Madera of Meritech Capital Partners also sit as board observers.

Commenting on landing Andreessen for the board seat, Zuckerberg said, “Marc is an industry leader, and we’re fortunate to have him join our board. He has experience that is relevant to Facebook in so many ways: scaling companies that are experiencing extraordinary growth, creating successful technology platforms, and building strong engineering organizations. I know Marc will be a great mentor to me and our leadership team.”

One of the partnerships announced at Facebook’s news conference last week was a partnership with Amazon. Currently users can make a list of their favorite books and music. Imagine what will happen when users will not only see their friends that like the same music but will also be able to view the current price on their favorite products. This will be the first major introduction of commerce into social networking. Strong relationships have always been a source of referral sales, and now much of that can take place online. Soon enough we will see add-ons that allow you to:

* Make custom wardrobes (e.g. “My Closet”) with links directly to a purchase page
* Make recommendations on books
* Recommend songs
* General wish lists with links to products
* More!

This is truly a revolution in online marketing. I am willing to bet that as a result of this integration of e-commerce and social networking, Facebook will account for a major percentage of all online transactions by the end of next year. Imagine when they decide to take a cut of all sales. They are looking at some serious revenue potential. This is only the forefront.

Forbes recently released a new Stocks application that allows you to add stocks that you are watching to your profile. All in all it is practically useless. Features include the ability to see which of your friends are tracking the same stocks and links to Forbes. If you want to get news, quotes, or earnings information for any stock you add then you will have to follow a link to Forbes. Honestly, it’s not a very clever way of driving traffic to their site, but apparently 7,000 users found the application intriguing enough to add it to their profile. I’m still waiting on an application that displays a ticker on your profile before I place my stock wish list on the site. If you are interested in using the Forbes Stocks application then go check out the application page.

As a prior Finance club member, I remember playing stock picking games as a useful tool for becoming accustomed to trading stocks. Thanks to Ryan Price, you can now play against your friends and other Facebook members. While there are a few quirks in the system, this seems to be a step in the right direction. If the profile view gets smoothed out, I am willing to bet that this becomes a pretty popular application, especially among finance enthusiasts. If you are into finance or just trading stocks in general, go check out the Stock Pick Competition application.

As a side note, I am noticing a common occurrence on Facebook recently. Not necessarily with the stock pick competition application but in general. Developers have begun adding non-functional applications. I can sympathize given that after launching my own social networking site, I was receiving non-stop complaints from users that were finding bugs. While it is difficult to catch all bugs while developing an applications, all developers should both externally and internally test and iron out as many bugs as possible prior to launching.

Attentionsoft Inc. has made a pretty slick application that gives statistics on the growth of Facebook applications. This application is a necessity for anyone monitoring the virality of Facebook apps. It displays some pretty cool graphs displaying the number of users per hour and the total number of users for any given application. One pretty cool statistic is that the Top Friends application is growing at anywhere from 1000 to 7000 users per hour. Pretty impressive! Soon enough they will cross the 8 million users level. It would be pretty cool to turn this into a virtual stock market that trades applications as virtual assets. Mashable has already covered a few things you can bet on legally on the net, but it would be cool to add Facebook applications to the portfolio. If you want to track the growth of Facebook applications, go grab the Appsaholic application.

Building a successful Facebook App is tough enough without having to worry about plagiarism and idea theft. Indeed, it is not unreasonable to consider why any sufficiently successful application would not simply be amalgamated by Facebook. A brief exploration of the business mechanics behind Facebook, however, put these fears largely to rest.

The Facebook business model is neither new nor particularly complicated: generate as many users as possible and keep them engaged. Revenue comes primarily from local and online advertising, which appears at the lower left and bottom sections of the pages. The bulk of Facebook’s expenses come from development and hosting costs.

This is why the opening up the Facebook Platform works so well for Facebook. On one hand, third-party applications make Facebook more useful, keeping users spending more time and becoming more dependent on Facebook for all sorts of needs. On the other hand, an additional third party application costs next to nothing to produce, considering that the bulk of the original investment, developing the platform, was largely a one-time expense. Furthermore, third-party apps have to be hosted externally, saving Facebook relatively considerable hosting costs, especially with rich-media applications.

For this reason Facebook is highly unlikely to copy a third party application. Why pay for internal development and hosting when the same advertising revenue can be generated for you by somebody else, gratis?

The one concern here lies with Applications which stand directly in the way of Facebook’s future expansion plans, such as its rumored email system or a Web OS. In this way Facebook is like a charging elephant – as long as you don’t get in its way, you’re more than welcome to come along for the ride.

Lately my friends in marketing and advertising have been asking me more and more about Facebook. Everybody knows they’re supposed to be using it, and a lot of people don’t know where to look to find consultants and developers. Their bosses ask them, and they ask me, and I recommend myself.. of course.

Facebook has solved this problem while sharing a piece of the pie with its devoted developers. They have set up a special marketplace for Facebook Platform developers to advertise their services, and they have pledged to send all potential development clients in that direction.

To be clear, this is no small opportunity for developers. It’s a massive market.

According to Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook, “Everyday the team here at Facebook talks with thousands of people, businesses, and some of the biggest brands worldwide who are looking to find contract development services, or developers to join their team. We’re planning on sending every single one of them to the Facebook Platform Marketplace, so the opportunity is huge!”

Those who realize just how important it is for brands to have a presence on Facebook will understand just how incredible it is that Facebook has setup an area for anybody to post ads for free, and that it plans to send customers there.

It will be very exciting for developers and potential clients alike, as it was pretty difficult to find a reputable coder if you were new to the game before. I would really like to see some sort of rating system and some requirements of legitimacy. I would absolutely hate to see it turn into a free, unregulated, unorganized freelance site with no individual accountability.

The only problem so far is that people looking for work seem to be posting in both categories (”developers wanted”, and “developers available”). Come on people.. play fair.

Kudos to Morin and the Facebook team. I’m sure I speak for the whole development community when I say “thanks!”