Facebook Blog, Applications and Developers Directory

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.

While 10% of Facebook employees may have come from Google, the tide is now flowing in the opposite direction too. Ben Ling, who decided to leave Facebook this week, is headed back to Google to lead YouTube’s monetization efforts, Kara Swisher reports.

The move back to GOOG comes only 10 months after Ling left Google Checkout’s e-commerce platform group to run Platform product marketing for Facebook. YouTube’s former head of monetization, Saschi Shef, recently left Google to become chief revenue officer at KP-backed startup Cooliris.

With the upcoming release of Facebook’s redesign, a couple new communication channels have been opened allowing application developers to communicate with users in new ways. Facebook has expanded the notifications API to include a new type of “announcement” notification, now being referred to as “application-to-user” notifications. These new notifications can effectively be used as general announcements and updates to users. Previously, the best solution for publishing this type of notification has been through the use of automated CRON scripts set to run daily.

There are no set “best practices” for application-to-user notifications yet, as Facebook is still making tweaks to their allocation limits for these new notifications. However, the current limit (7 notifications per user, per week is the maximum and default) seems to discourage any type of “real-time” application notifications and places more of an emphasis on general daily updates. For example, sending a notification to a user to alert them of new application features. They are not limited to application updates, though, and can be utilized in more creative manners, so long as you stay within allocation limits.

Application-to-user notifications can only be sent to current application users. Also note that they may be sent to any application user whether or not that user has an active application session-key.

Finally, when a user receives an application-to-user notification, it does not have any text pre-pended to the front of it. It simply displays your application icon next to the notification text. This is in contrast to user-to-user notifications which pre-pend the name of the user who performed the action to the notification. You can see an example of an application-to-user notification at the top of this post.

Technical details for the new application-to-user notifications have been slow forthcoming. Even the most recent PHP Client doesn’t include support for the new type yet. However, you can easily add support into the latest PHP Client by adding a small code snippet to your facebookapi_php5_restlib.php file (click here for code).

For more information on application-to-user notifications, see the Developers Forum and the Developers Wiki.

New statistics are out for comScore this month which reveal Facebook’s ongoing expansion has yet to slow. The company attracted over 132 million users over the year ending in June versus MySpace which attracted 117 million. The real story here is that the company continues to surge past the competitors internationally. In Latin America Facebook has grown over 1,000 percent over the past year, helping to catapult it’s worldwide growth to 153 percent in comparison to MySpace’s paltry 3 percent growth.

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.

Want a way to stop having to refresh your browser every few minutes to see what they are up to? Would you prefer to have instant access to all of your Facebook items directly from your desktop? I came across a new Mac desktop widget yesterday called “Facebook Watch.” The widget allows you to view your wall, friend’s recent changes, friend, group, and detail requests, your inbox, and new pokes. I know I love getting updates about new pokes and I’m sure you do to. So if you have a Mac and want an easy desktop widget that keeps you up to date on all your personal Facebook news, go download Facebook Watch.

There is a new desktop application in the works that is going to integrate an instant messenger application with the Facebook platform. This is pretty slick. The application will display all of your friends and allow video chat, video messaging, and more. Airwaves is a combination of Adobe’s AIR (previously Apollo) and the Yahoo! Messenger Vista client. While there has been much discussion throughout the blogosphere already, I couldn’t help but comment on it. This is what I always expected of an instant messaging client. I have always theorized about an instant messaging application that gives you access to all of your friend’s profiles, pictures, videos, and friends directly from the application itself. Having access to all of your contacts and their self-expressive media from one simple application would be a revolution in communications. The upcoming Trillian Astra is a perfect example of such an application. It integrates your MySpace (not Facebook …. boo!) IM account, personal profiles, widget plugins, web chat, and more! While the AirWaves applications looks like a far cry from the Trillian Astra (especially since one developer is working on it), it is a step in the right direction. I will be interested to see how this one turns out.

Want your friend’s and your Facebook photos to be displayed on your screensaver? Look no further. Mark Johns has developed an insanely slick desktop application that automatically grabs selected friends’ photos and places them directly in your screen saver. The only restriction is that you have a Mac operating system. While many people won’t be able to take advantage of this application, it will surely inspire some PC developers to create a similar application (or at least I hope so). I have to be honest, this looks like one of the slickest applications that I have seen yet. If this is any sign of things to come, we are in for an amazing ride. If you have a Mac and want to have a Facebook screensaver, go grab the Friend Photos Screensaver application.