Facebook Blog, Applications and Developers Directory

Facebook will be holding its first Developer Garage “Connect Edition” next week in Palo Alto. Developers will be able to learn more about how Facebook Connect can be used to let users connect their Facebook identity to a third party site, find friends there, and share info back to Facebook.

While Connect is still in beta, this will be one of the first chances developers have to see early versions of Facebook Connect implementations. Here are the details:

* When: Wednesday, September 3rd
* Time: 6:30 PM- Midnight
* Where: Blue Chalk Café - 630 Ramona St, Palo Alto, CA

For more, check out the event page.

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.

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.

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.

Top Facebook application developer Slide has rebranded FunWall, the biggest application on the Facebook Platform by monthly reach, as “Slide FunSpace (formerly FunWall).” FunWall’s 21 million monthly active users should now notice the chance on their Facebook profile pages and bookmarks.

The move marks the first time Slide has included its company brand in the name of its Facebook applications. While all Slide applications are heavily branded within the canvas page, Slide’s other popular applications - Top Friends and SuperPoke - don’t include the company’s name in the app title.

The change in branding may be partially due to some of the changes in Facebook’s upcoming profile page redesign. The new “Wall” tab on the profile page allows for more types of rich media content in the Facebook Wall (a combination of Facebook’s old wall and feed concepts), which many have argued encroaches on third party “wall” applications.

The change also reflects how easy it is for application developers to rebrand their applications inside the Facebook world. One change to your developer settings page and voila! - your application’s name is updated to millions of users throughout Facebook instantly.

Facebook announced today that is has enabled two new Facebook Platform features that enable developers to restrict access to certain application content - or the entire application itself - from users fitting certain demographic profiles.

Demographic restrictions have been requested by two camps of developers:

1. Those who have licensed content or games only in certain geographic regions - like the US and Canada but not the rest of the world.
2. Those who want to limit access to certain application content or experiences to users of a certain age group - like under 18 or over 21.

Facebook’s new “Demographic Restrictions” APIs will enable developers to limit access to users according to any combination of age and location restrictions.

* The admin.setRestrictionInfo method allows developers to restrict access to the entire application.
* The fb:restricted-to FBML tag allows developers to restrict access to the included content.

So, how exactly is Facebook going about implementing these restrictions? Facebook says it will be using “a combination of what information a user has entered and verified on Facebook as well as IP targeting” for location. Furthermore, Facebook says that developers should not rely on Facebook to implement any restrictions developers are legally obligated to.

[Developers] must use this technology whenever Facebook policies require it… but you can and should consider implementing additional consent or confirmation in your application as appropriate. For example, if for legal reasons your application requires the user to affirm that they are of a certain age or are in a certain location, you should continue to solicit that explicit affirmation, and not regard the fact that the user passed through the Demographic Restrictions as equivalent.

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.

Over the past few days I’ve been writing about the shift of social networks from technology companies to media companies at the Social Times. If you haven’t been paying attention, you might want to check out a post on Techcrunch today in which Mike Arrington argues that Facebook’s lack of a centrally controlled music service is damaging its domestic growth.

Last year I suggested that Facebook is supposed to be launching a music service after a source told me that he had spoken with somebody that interviewed for a position to run a music service. Mike Arrington says that it’s now clear that Facebook is sticking with iLike as its music partner. That was emphasized when iLike was announced as a launching member of Facebook’s Great Apps program.

Hadi discussed this during an interview with the Social Times. For Facebook to launch their own competing music service would be a bad political move but as Mike Arrington suggests, “Music is such a big category that is so completely dominated by MySpace, that it seems like they should have their overall music strategy under their direct control.”

So is music key to Facebook’s domestic growth? It’s clear that music is definitely one way to attract outside visitors. Millions of bands and artists use MySpace as their central location for promoting their work and that means millions of visitors being promoted to the site. Is there another channel that Facebook can target that has the same level of self-promoting activities?

Not that I know of. Is there any other group that you think Facebook should be targeting?

There’s a pretty well known secret among top Facebook application developers: one developer is generating over $1 million a month. Who is that developer exactly? Well, most people won’t talk about it and after some prodding around we’ve narrowed down the suspects. We aren’t going to post them though because ultimately it doesn’t matter who the individual is. All that matters is that a top application that is used for entertainment purposes is generating over $1 million a month.
Facebook Apps As a Business

While it still doesn’t qualify the company as a large business, it does emphasize the potential for applications in this space. As an individual developer or a small team of developers, $1 million a month is pretty damn good and I’m sure a large portion of that is going straight to the bank. Who’s responsible for generating this revenue?

Well there is already multiple ad networks that are generating revenue for their developers, but some of them are going so far as to speak out about how much money is being generated. myOfferpal (who is also a sponsor of and participant in our Social Ad Summit) has said that developers are generating around $75 per 1,000 active daily users on average and $150-$200 for more engaging applications.
How to Generate the Big Bucks

So are you looking to become the next Facebook application millionaire? Good luck! Generating $1 million a month is pretty challenging in the current environment but if you can come up with a creative application, you may have a chance. (fluff)Friends users for instance, are so passionate about the application, that some of them went so far as to participate in a (fluff)Friends video contest. Below are a couple of the top videos.

This application and a few others like Friends For Sale, Mob Wars and Owned, are all highly engaging applications. Each of them continues to attract users months after they were launched and the applications also continue to evolve. If you are looking to build up your revenue base, then you might want to mimic many of the strategies employed by these companies.

Have you hears of any other interesting rumors about application revenue being generated?

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.

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.

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.

Benjamin Ling will be departing Facebook according to Eric Eldon. Ben Ling joined the company less than a year ago and is already on his way out the door. While the company continues to post record-breaking growth numbers, the company can’t seem to hold on to many of their executives. What’s the source of all the problems? It could simply be that some employees would prefer to take stock options and leave, but that doesn’t appear to be the case for Ling.

Eric Eldon questions the reasoning behind his departure. While many have suggested that the reason for the exits was that the new executives, primarily Cheryl Sandberg, were not getting along with the old execs, that doesn’t appear to be the case. One Facebook employee that I’ve talked to, spoke highly of Cheryl and said that the company is finally getting some order, whereas before there didn’t appear to be much order to the organization.

As the company expands, executives appear to be dropping like flies but that may not be the worst thing. Perhaps the company simply has an effective model for wiping out those that aren’t in it for the long-term. At this point it’s all speculation. Ben Ling has been effective at fostering good relationships outside the company. It will be interesting to see how Facebook’s relationships with external companies change with this new departure.

Facebook issued the following statement:

Facebook confirms that Ben Ling will be leaving the company in the coming weeks to pursue other interests. We wish him well and appreciate his great contributions to the early success of Facebook Platform. Platform is poised for continued growth and success and the company is on track to deliver the range of major initiatives announced last month at f8, including Facebook Connect, fbFund and the Great Apps and Application Verification programs. Each of these programs have a strong team of professionals focused on attracting the best developers to Facebook Platform, helping developers succeed on Platform, and helping users find and enjoy great applications on Facebook.

Last night Facebook rolled out a new feature to the newsfeed which enables users to filter the stories that are displayed. You can select to display only stories from specific applications or specific friend lists. This is an interesting feature but I’m not sure that it does all that is expected. Ultimately users want to be able to see more or less stories from specific applications and friend lists. This feature simply displays specific stories that you would like to see from one source.

Also, you are currently limited to the applications that you can filter from. For instance, I am only able to filter activities from within Events, Pages, Groups, FriendFeed and Google Reader. It would be awesome if users could select from any application or their bookmarked applications. Caroline McCarthy suggests that this is possibly a result of the applications that your friends have installed. Apparently my friends on Facebook are all geeks based on the applications showing in my feed!

Filtering feeds is going to become increasingly important as we begin seeing more news items. The model has yet to be perfected but Facebook is definitely taking the lead when it comes to trying various filtering models. Do you find these new filters to be useful?

I think I’m way behind on this but today when searching for Facebook’s advanced search feature, I ended up empty handed. The new search page only displays search by name, school and company. Previously Facebook enabled users to use the advanced search utility to find people by practically all areas of a user’s profile. Now there appears to be no more advanced search feature. I searched the web and couldn’t find any reference to the removal but this is significant.

First, this emphasizes Facebook’s commitment to making the site a social utility to browse among your own friends. There is also no longer a link to browse for users within the new design. While you can access browse by going to the following page, it doesn’t appear to be accessible via any other method. There’s another component of the missing advanced search story which is a little more sinister. It appears that someone has successfully attempted to capitalize on advanced search gone missing.

An application called “Advanced Search” claims to enable users to search through over 80 million users on Facebook. How do they let you do that? Well in the past month alone close to 50,000 people have accessed this application. When you visit the app, it automatically populates a bunch of form fields with you name, gender, birthday, schools you’ve attended, companies you’ve worked at and more. It looks just like Facebook’s standard advanced search which misleads users into submitting their information.

This application would be extremely useful for any of the ad networks that wish to use profile data to target users. The other funny thing about this application? It doesn’t appear to actually provide any advanced search functionality. Instead it simply collects data. When you view the “advanced search application” it states “Welcome to Advanced Search for Facebook - Before you start searching, please check, update and store your details so that other people can search for you.”

It then prompts users to enter there info. If you don’t enter anything, it doesn’t display the search. Yikes! I’ve tried searching for more information on this application which has been popular since last October and I couldn’t find anything. Have you been able to find Facebook’s advanced feature? Have you tried this misleading application? Do you think it should be shut down?

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: