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.

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.

So when Ben Bernake isn’t in meetings discussing how he plans on running the entire economy, what does he like to do? According to a Washington Post article out yesterday, he likes spending time on Facebook. While the article leaves room open for the profile being a fake (my guess it is as I can no longer find it), there are many items in the profile which have similarities to the actual Ben Bernake. The dead giveaway that it’s fake?

Well there are actually a few. The profile listed his activities as “maintaining economic data, giving speeches, economic analysis.” His interests are “reducing inflation and stimulating growth.” Finally, his favorite quote is one of Alan Greenspan’s: “I guess I should warn you, if I turn out to be particularly clear, you’ve probably misunderstood what I’ve said.” The profile appears to instead be the work of a college student looking to have a little fun rather than the actual person in charge of running the U.S. economy.

We all need a little break from our day jobs though, right? There appear to be a number of fake celebrity profiles on Facebook though. There are over 20 Paris Hilton profiles, 11 Angelina Jolie profiles, 30+ Brad Pitt profiles and more. Facebook is known for shutting down fake profiles so I’m somewhat surprised that there are that many fake celebrity profiles. Then again with more than 250,000 profiles (and probably 300,000 at this point) set up per day, a large percentage of them must have fake information in them.

Have you befriended Ben Bernake on Facebook? Do you have any other celebrity friends?

Over the weekend I noticed a number of new e-cards from the hilarious site, someecards. I figured that this would be a great opportunity to post some of the entertaining e-cards that were uploaded recently to the site. Some of them are pretty entertaining.

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.

Over the past few days I have been seeing an increasing number of holiday applications show up on Facebook. Given that this is the holiday season I thought it would be worthwhile to post a couple of the holiday applications available to users. One of the best ones I’ve seen so far is the Hanukkah Lights application. As you would imagine, the Hanukkah Lights application provides you with a menorah for your Facebook profile. On each night of Hanukkah, your menorah will automatically be lit at around sundown. If you celebrate Hanukkah, check out the Hanukkah Lights application.

The other holiday application is the Be Santa application. Created by the same people that developed the Lotto application. Be Santa enables you to create your own wish list of presents by writing “letters to santa” as well as give gifts to your friends. Those gifts are then given to your friends on Christmas day. An additional bonus to this application is a giveaway on Christmas day. $2500 of the gifts that have been given by users will be purchased and delivered to the recipients. If you want to Be Santa this Christmas, go grab the Be Santa application.

I wasn’t able to find any Kwanza applications but there were a few Ramadan applications but usage appeared sparse. Given the large base of Muslims on Facebook I see this as an opportunity for application developers. Additionally there is a large Turkish and Muslim base on Facebook that would be a great target for this type of application. Unfortunately I don’t enough about the holiday and don’t have the time to develop an application. If you want to create a popular application, I would suggest trying to develop the Ramadan celebration application.

Are there any holidays that I’m missing? Have you seen any other interesting holiday applications?

Searching, as I do, for a non-useless application, I was thrilled to find GoAnimate! To put it simply, the app lets you create your own animation which can be a real blast. The app has some serious programming behind it and provides a ton of fun if you have time to play around.

You get to pick from a bunch of pre-made images, settings, items, speech bubbles, music, animations and special effects, and you can customize them however you want. You then animate your frames and make some funny stuff go down. The app has a political bend, with tons of politically charged characters to choose from like “Barack O.” and “Hilary C.” but you can also upload your own images or borrow uploaded images from others in the community.

After you’re finished with your animations, you can share them with the community. Honestly, his application might be the absolute coolest thing I’ve seen on Facebook so far.

I’m not nearly creative enough… but if you make something funny let us see in a comment

There is a good deal of buzz on the net today about ’secret-crush’ and how it is really a viral program that installs the much loved ZANGO! Our own Jonathan Kleiman wrote about it before the rest of the web even cared. By the way , great piece Jonathan.

Does this really come as a shock to anyone out there that adware and spyware are finding their way into Facebook applications. The real shock to me is always that there isn’t more of them out there.

I am always amazed about the copious amounts of data people put about themselves on the web. I myself have more information about myeslf out there than I really care to think about.

I have always had a love hate relationship with spy and adware. I, like the rest of the world, hate it. At the same time however I always find it interesting to see how many of my fellow citizens hap-hazardly install applications and agree to pop up windows with out reading what they are agreeing to.

I just want to take another moment to thank Jonathan for breaking this story long before the rest of the web got wind of it, keep up the great work

Every artist needs a medium, be it paint, music or rock, all great works need something to work with. This is no different in the digital age. The LA Times is reporting an interesting story about a Facebook application called Graffiti (I am pretty sure you have heard of it).

Graffiti recently held a online competition through Facebook that allowed artist to use its application to create works of art. Not all the art was static either. Some participants decided to use Graffiti’s ‘replay’ function that allowed them to save their work as it was being created so anyone could watch the creative process.

The competition yielded around 150 finalist with work that ranges from the truly beautiful to the amazingly thought provoking. I am simply amazed by the level of talent that this competition was able to attract. The creators of Graffiti should be proud of the repsonse they were able to generate and the artist should be equally as proud.

The competition focused on creating pieces that illustrated the importance of conservation and protecting nature. It is an interesting contrast to see something completely digital (the art) represent the protection of the purely natural.

I would love to see more artistic competitions and projects begin to emerge on Facebook. If any of you know of any other artistic competitions; be it poetry, music or whatever, let me know. This is by far my favorite entry, it practically screams digital green. What’s your favorite?

This past weekend I was browsing through the Facebook applications directory and came across the “Send Ben & Jerry’s” application. My initial response was that this is yet another gift giving application. I then noticed that close to 4,000 people had used the application the previous day and almost 200,000 people had installed the application. This is an impressive number for a general Facebook application.

The reality is that non-generic versions of standard Facebook applications can actually succeed. Apparently popular brands can produce simple applications that grow virally. I would have thought that gift giving applications have already been dominated but it appears as though some applications are still figuring out ways to launch and succeed. What extra features does the Ben & Jerry’s application provide that traditional gift giving applications doesn’t already have?

Truthfully, not much. The one addition is the ability to unlock other gifts based on the volume of ice cream that you send to your friends. I decided not to barrage my friends with a bunch of Ben & Jerry’s ice cream goodness but it looks like a lot of other people are. If you want to send ice cream to your friends as well, check out the Send Ben & Jerry’s application.

We’re here at the 1:10pm session and this panel is covering platform options. The panel:

* Oren Michels, CEO of Mashery
* Jessica Alter, Director of Platform and Business Development at Bebo
* Daniel Burton, Senior Vice President, Global Public Policy for Salesforce.com
* David Jones, VP, Global Marketing at Friendster

Oren: What are you doing with your platform? What makes it a little different? Whats new with the platform since the last GSP in San Diego?

David: We are the seventh largest website of any kind in the world. We are the third largest social network in terms of traffic. We are the number ones in terms of engagement relative to other social networks. 38% of the entire internet population is in Asia and Friendster is the largest social network in that region. We have 350 applications live on the platform today with 1000 currently under development. The revenue model is completely open on our platform. In the last few months we’ve added some viral channels for every app and every developer.

Jessica: We are a social network focused on community, entertainment, and communication combined together. Our users are really engaged in what they’re doing on our site and that is something we are very focused on continuing to grow. Thus far we have over 4,000 applications on our platform. We currently support the Facebook APIs but we do plan to support Open Social in the future. We built a platform because we realize that outside developers could bring to our site many things that we simply couldn’t offer to our users ourselves. After photos, apps are the most popular thing on the site.

Dan: Last fall we announced our platform Force.com. It is the first platform as a service for business. It is a system of tools and application services that allow both developers and corporate IT departments to developer applications and have them run on the Salesforce infrastructure. It is a very powerful environment not only to developer your applications but also to run your applications. The difference between our business platform and the social platforms is the level of security requirements that enterprises really depend on. We created the eco-system with all of the security functionality built in so that developers can put their applications on our platform and have access to an entire universe of users for free.

Oren: It sounds like the monetizing element is baked into the force.com environment. For Bebo and Friendster, are people building businesses on your platform?

David: We are many seeing many developers generating healthy revenue through CPA.

Jessica: Yes, there are a lot of developers making money. Our approach is how can “we” make money, we including both the developers and Bebo itself. We are looking at our rich data and how can we help use the data we have to help developers monetize. We want to offer increased ad relevance for the entire ecosystem. We think that there needs to be some way to share the data we have so that the CPMs developers are seeing are much higher than the .05 or .10 cent range.

Oren: In terms of access to profile info, what are the trends in regards of the balance between privacy and personal data and allowing the developer to take advantage of the rich data that is being collected?

Dan: Salesforce and Force.com is a little different in that regard. We do not see nor collect data. On Salesforce you can buy directly from the developer, so we are really outside of that ad based model. We should all be watching a lot on the public policy side that may alter the behavioral ad targeting environment.

Jessica: This probably is the most delicate balance we have to deal with given the huge opportunity and huge risk. It is a constant conversation that we have internally in the company. We think there are ways to achieve a balance that doesn’t compromise users.

David: First off, there are tons of granular privacy settings on Friendster. In terms of the APIs and the developer program, a developer can only access certain private information once the user actively consents. We’ve put in place controls to keep a tight handle on this issue so that users know whats going on while developers can still build worthwhile applications on the platform.

Jessica: The question we’ve found when talking about lending this information to developers or any third party is do users understand what they’re doing when they give access to their data? The hardest part is educating the users to understand the significance of their actions.

Oren: People definitely don’t know. Inevitably, the bad news is going to happen and policy will quickly enter into the equation. What do you see as the next big thing over the next six months as the era of throwing sheep passes?

David: Friendster is a founding member of Opensocial and we will be deploying the spec in coming months. We are looking for new, compelling, innovative apps. We haven’t seen as many as we would have expected. We are looking forward to some truly next generation apps to make life easier for our users.

Jessica: I’m for the kind of apps that my users are going to use. To me, thats about engagement. What I think is quality is not what my average 21 year old user thinks is quality. We want things that will be really engaging. In the next few weeks we will be coming out with some new engagement metrics and rewarding based on those. We definitely hope to innovate on the monetization side as well.

Dan: We think this is a terribly exciting time considering all of these new platforms. This is the era of “let a thousands flowers bloom.” We really think that what we’re moving towards is the end of software, and you’ve seen that with applications and you’re seeing platforms take that to the next level. The consumer web is setting the pace that the business web tries to interpret and implement in the business environment. The dynamic combination of these two worlds will lend a tremendous amount of excitement to both the business and consumer side.

Q: For salesforce, for developers how much help do you offer to meet the security requirements?

Dan: Not only do you as a developer code in salesforce, but we do also have a security audit. Our team works with developers to make sure that they are following proper security procedures. All of those security issues are automatically handled by the run time environment.