Facebook Blog, Applications and Developers Directory

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?

Developers building on the Facebook Platform are well aware of Facebook’s increasing efforts to enforce its platform policies and reward applications acting in accordance with the platform ideals with benefits.

Today, the MySpace Developer Platform team clarified its process for developers who violate the the MDP Terms or Guidelines.

Specifically,

On first violation:

* In most instances,the application developer will receive a notice giving them 48 hours to fix the issue. If the problem is not fixed within that period of time, the application will be muted (muted applications may not send communication) for 48 hrs. If the application is still not fixed after 48 hours, it will be suspended. Should one company have an application in violation of policy once, and then do something with another application, that will be considered a second violation.

On second violation:

* The application will be muted immediately, then suspended after 48 hours.

On third violation:

* The application will be suspended immediately.

If a company continues to repeatedly violate our TOU/Guidelines, action may be taken against the company and/or all of their applications, which could include banning them from the platform.

Of course, MySpace said it reserves the right to skip steps for “major” violations. For more info, check out the policy section on the MySpace Developer Platform forums.

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.

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.

Social Networks Still Growing: According to web analytics company Compete; It would appear that social networks continued to grow steadily for the past year. This would indicate that the marketplace still has substantial growth legs. It is also worthy to note that there are new social networks such as twitter that experienced serious growth percentages

People continue to discuss why social networks such as facebook, myspace, friendster & bebo are seeing continual growth and engagement. The answer is quite simple; social networks are new communication platforms.
I have stated many times that social networks connect people in way that they could not otherwise connect. Much as text messaging has changed

Google announced today in conjunction with Yahoo! and MySpace, the formation of the OpenSocial Foundation, a non-profit entity, “dedicated to the sustainable and open development of the OpenSocial initiative and related intellectual property.” It’s a shrewd move by the three that leaves Facebook in an even lonelier place inside its walled garden.
In its prospectus,

I will be sitting on a panel tonight in San Diego. Details:
Join AD 2 on March 26 as San Diego’s Web 2.0 SUPER STARS discuss how to manage your online persona and build social capital. This event will answer:
* With so many social networks (Facebook, LinkedIn, Myspace, Yelp, etc.), which ones

By now we’ve had a few examples of bonafide music hits from MySpace (see Lily Allen, for one), but until now the implementation on the site has been somewhat whimsical. With a new partnership between three of the major labels, MySpace Music is set to offer digital downloads, ad-supported music and video streaming. Additionally, a

It’s been 24 hours since News Corp announced an international distribution arrangement with MySpaceTV and ShineReveille that would make shows like “Quarterlife” and “Roommates” available to wider audiences, perhaps producing localized versions for some areas. It’s also been about a week since an even bigger bombshell was dropped with the announcement of MySpace Music

TechCrunch is reporting that MySpace is announcing a broad ranging embrace of data portability standards today, along with data sharing partnerships with Yahoo, Ebay, Twitter and their own Photobucket subsidiary. The new project is being called MySpace “Data Availability” and is an example, MySpace says, of their dedication to playing nice with the rest of

We normally try to offer valuable insights and thoughts with our posts. But I am a bit brain dead this morning since I was up at All Thind D event until 3am. I have decided to give my readers a light hearted animated video around social networking wars. I will have some deeper commentary from

We normally try to offer valuable insights and thoughts with our posts. But I am a bit brain dead this morning since I was up at All Thind D event until 3am. I have decided to give my readers a light hearted animated video around social networking wars. I will have some deeper commentary from

The July Facebook Developer Garage in London is taking place this Wednesday evening.

For those that have never been, Facebook Developer Garages are attended by developers, clients wishing to develop applications, and new media agencies. There are usually relevant presentations and plenty of networking opportunities.

Here are the event details for Wednesday night:

* When: Wed, July 9, 6:30pm - 9:30pm
* Where: Sun Microsystems, 45, King William Street, London

The running list currently looks like this:

* Ashley Ward CEO of European Leadership Forum gives advice for raising money for your Facebook app
* Brad Rees and Jon Hill from Mediacells explore the future of mobile advertising on Facebook apps
* Matthew ‘Chewy’ Trewhella from Google enlightens us a bit on OpenSocial 0.8
* Mat Clayton, CEO of Wakari and developer of Become Rambo, tells us about his new cross platform app for the upcoming film Hancock
* Joshua March from iNetwork is back with part two of Tweaking your App
* Exciting news on a Formula One Application

More info can be found on the Facebook events page. It should be a great evening!

While developers have been waiting on MySpace to turn on additional application communication channels for months, MySpace has just announced that app invites will be going live in 2 weeks. Unfortunately for developers, it’s unlikely that MySpace app invites will lead to the same kind of distribution developers saw on Facebook.

Here are all the details:

* App invites can only be sent to 1 friend at a time (though MySpace says this is only for now)
* There can be “no incentives” to users for sending app invites
* App invites can be viewed in a new “Notifications” folder in the MySpace Mail Center
* The invite will have a 1-click flow to add the app

MySpace hasn’t officially released the APIs yet, but here are screenshots of the app invite flow:

1. Sending a MySpace app invite

2. Receiving a MySpace app invite

3. Installing an app through a MySpace app invite

We’ll have all the details as the MySpace Platform expands its viral channels.

New Inside Facebook Top Jobs for June 30:

* Director of Business Development (MySpace / Los Angeles, CA or San Francisco, CA)

While Facebook has passed MySpace in global visits as of last month, what does it really mean for the company’s ad business?

Making use of Google Trends’ recently updated service for websites in combination with some data on international ad markets shared by Jeremy Liew, Andrew Chen recently came to the conclusion that Facebook has surpassed MySpace in several of the world’s top international ad markets as of Q4 2007.

(Chart by Andrew Chen)

While the US remains the largest ad market by far (in fact, it’s bigger than all others combined), Facebook is demonstrating that social networks can gain ground against an incumbent in meaningful markets after all. Whether Facebook can maintain that lead tomorrow remains to be seen.

In case you’re not tracking the MySpace Developer Platform Release Notes all day long (fun!), we’ll cover all the highlights for you here. Notes from this weekend’s push:

* Edit App Details has been reorganized on the Developer page, and some new fields have been added, so you should take a look and make sure all your info is right
* The Create Album and Upload Photo API XML response has been changed, so you may need to update your apps if you make use of photos on MySpace
* The app install dialogue text has been slightly updated

Although “Facebook” is unfortunately a near-homonym for “doomed to die” in Chinese, the company officially launched a Chinese language version of the site today, taking another step into the complex China market. Facebook faces tough local competition in China - both from entrenched leaders like QQ and massively-funded Xiaonei.

Facebook, with the help of new VP of Communications and Public Policy Elliot Schrage, is reportedly still crafting its formal China strategy, as navigating the various political issues has proven challenging for even the largest of tech companies.

In addition, Facebook announced today that it has added 55 new languages to its crowd-sourced translation efforts. Facebook’s Chad Little says,

Now native speakers can use our Translations application to translate Facebook into additional Asian languages (Malaysian, Vietnamese), African dialects (Zulu, Xhosa), regional varieties (British English, Canadian French) and even rarely spoken languages, such as Latin and Esperanto.

Facebook continues to grow internationally, recently surpassing MySpace in global visitors for May 2008. Facebook’s Translations efforts are definitely accelerating its international growth.