Facebook Blog, Applications and Developers Directory

Caroline McCarthy got the scoop on a Facebook movie which is in the works. The only reference to the movie is a group which was created by Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing and A Few Good Men, and Sorkin’s assistant. Is the group real? It seems pretty real considering Aaron’s claim to have no understanding of how Facebook works at all.

Aaron Sorkin prompts users to test to see if he is real in the group’s description. The only problem with accomplishing what would otherwise be an elementary task is that there is no way to friend or send a message to Sorkin. Not sure how he got to have that setting but my guess is it’s via the privacy settings. The only other person that I know of that doesn’t have a friend request in the directory is Mark Zuckerberg.

I wonder if this movie will be created in a similar way to The Pirates of Silicon Valley which highlighted the start of Microsoft and Apple. The only difference between that movie and the apparent Facebook movie? The Pirates of Silicon Valley had two companies that actually went public. Facebook has yet to do that. However the movie is written, this definitely sounds like an interesting beginning!

If you are more interested in what your friends are up to then what photos they are uploading and what their relationship status, you may be pleased to hear that Facebook has upgraded your friends’ statuses. Now rather than just showing recent friend activities, the most recent status updates of your friends are now displayed at the top of the news feed.

It’s clear that statuses have become one of the most important components of Facebook and many have called it a Twitter killer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an increasing emphasis on statuses as Facebook moves forward. One interesting component about this new layout is how the statuses are updated instantaneously whereas the main news feed content is only updated periodically.

This contrasts FriendFeed where every load of the page presents new data among your friends as the site is updated in real-time. Facebook has tried to automatically filter information for users to try to select the most relevant information. It will be interesting to see if Facebook ever shifts this strategy to display more information.

This is a simple change but it most definitely highlights the importance of statuses in Facebook.

A blog post today to Facebook developers highlighted that they have yet to remove infinite sessions and also that all users are slated to have access to the new profile in “mid-September”, a little behind schedule for Facebook. The new Facebook profile roll-out has taken significantly longer for Facebook but it’s clear that they are trying to optimize the site and improve the user experience.

So far Facebook has had a pretty smooth transition but everyday I read about a few people who don’t like the new Facebook layout. One group I previously wrote about this month has grown to over 50,000 users. This is a really small number though when you compare it to the more than 20 million people that now have access to the new Facebook design.

Whether or not you like the new design, it won’t be a choice as to whether or not you make the shift. What “mid-September” qualifies as is left for interpretation but it’s clear that Facebook is taking their time when it comes to making the shift over. Are you in favor of the new design or do you not like the changes? Do think this is much ado about nothing?

Yes, I love calling Facebook the Twitter and FriendFeed killer but I seriously think they may have one-upped the competition on their latest release: the Live Feed. You can sit and watch in real-time what is taking place with your friends across their profiles in an unfiltered manner. This is similar to the functionality the Twitter Search (previously Summize) provided.

Rather than the AP Newswire going across your screen, you now have a live activity feed of all of your friends actions. Soon enough I’d imagine that we will begin to see the activities of friends that are taking place outside of Facebook show up in this feed more frequently, making it much more of a competitor to FriendFeed. Just as with FriendFeed though, the majority of posts remain to be comments.

I’ve included a one-minute screencast below of my live stream newsfeed and I have to say that it is really impressive. Congratulations to the Facebook team on this one. One of the most enjoyable experiences with this new feature was watching the stream of feedback people were providing to the Obama speech last night. It will most definitely be interesting to watch this feed during any significant national event.

Honestly, I have a feeling that the demand for this feature of the news feed is going to grow exponentially as users get used to the new design. The only challenge will be that users that have less friends won’t have as active of a stream. Then again, this same phenomenon takes place on any social media site: the more friends you have, the more content you have to consume. Take a look at the feature in action below.

Today more details were released about the Facebook movie which is in the works by Aaron Sorkin, creator of the West Wing. The movie is supposedly going to be based on a book created by Ben Mezrich who is also the author of Bringing Down the House. According to 02138, Mezrich also recently sold a book called Face Off, “a book on the origins of Facebook”, for $1.9 million to Doubleday.

The book has been criticized by a number of people about how it exaggerates a number of components of the story, including that he is a koala-eating jet-setter as Caroline McCarthy pointed out back in May. There has been a ton of buzz about this and based on the rumors about this book it sounds like the buzz is only going to get louder. It sounds like Mark Zuckerberg isn’t covered in a favorable light, especially if he is eating Koalas (nobody likes a koala-eater).

Just earlier this week news about the movie became widespread and it looks like this will only continue as roles are cast and production gets under way. No matter how Facebook is portrayed in this movie, it sounds like this is going to be a juicy story … the anticipation is killing me! The movie will also discuss how the movie was created and try to tackle the age old question of: who did Mark Zuckerberg steal the Facebook idea from?

While I doubt this movie will come up with the accurate answer to the story, I’m sure it will be an interesting version! For those looking to purchase your tickets to the Facebook Movie (which may be title Face Off), you may be waiting a while as most movies take months if not years to produce. Our projected date of release? June 2009! This is based on nothing but gut instinct.

A few sources have alerted me to a project that Facebook has been working on: integrating Facebook Connect directly with Wordpress. For all you developers that also thought that building a Facebook Connect plugin would be brilliant idea, you might want to stop development. While the timetable for releasing this plugin isn’t clear, there’s a good chance that it will be released in the coming weeks.
Facebook Blog Comments

Facebook Connect is still in beta mode and can only be accessed by developers but there is actual code from this plugin floating around (we actually have a copy of it). This means that rather than having to register for every site that you visit, you will simply be able to login with your Facebook account. Soon enough, it will also mean that you will have access to all of your friends that are on Facebook on any other site you visit.

For the time being, the plugin functionality is limited to comments. How does this work exactly? If you were at f8 then you saw David Recordon of Six Apart, demo the functionality of Facebook Connect comments in Moveable Type. In similar form, you will go to a comment form, click on a link which logs you into the blog’s application on Facebook and then your comments to that blog will start showing up in your Facebook profile feed.

The difference with the Facebook Wordpress plugin is that the Wordpress plugin is an internal Facebook project. This also means that Facebook wants to be able to own the comments on your site. Anytime you enable users to login via Facebook, you won’t have access to their email address, unlike Disqus and native Wordpress comments. That would probably be my greatest complaint.
Blogs as An Extension of Facebook

In the not too distant future, Wordpress will be unveiling a much anticipated social network service for Wordpress blogs: BuddyPress. The new service enables site owners to integrate social networking features directly into their blogs. If you thought remembering all of your logins was hard before, imagine what it will be like when every site you visit has its own social network.

Find a new friend on a remote social network? You can easily add them as a Facebook friend rather than having multiple locations for all of your connections. So how soon can you expect to launch Facebook functionality into your own site? No timeframe is available yet based on publicly available information.

The launch of social networking features into blogs that integrate with Facebook Connect will directly compete with Google’s Friend Connect service (which already has a service in beta).
Conclusion

While you can’t test out this plugin without being a developer, this is definitely a great first step. It also makes me wonder why Facebook put internal resources to this project when there are countless other developers working on their own Wordpress Facebook plugins. My guess is that this plugin was being developed to further the Facebook Connect documentation.

My only complaint remains to be that I don’t get access to a user’s email when they “register” to comment on my site. Leveraging this plugin provides blogs with a great opportunity to gain exposure through the Facebook news feed. Please note that if you’ve tried out the plugin but it doesn’t work, it was developed using the “Kubric” default theme on Facebook. That’s according to documentation provided by Adam Hupp, the Facebook developer behind this project.

Update
We’ve been contacted by Facebook and asked to remove the plugin since it isn’t licensed for distribution. I’ve gone ahead and done so Also, they’ve said this wasn’t technically an “official” internal project as he was working on it in his free time. Not sure what to say about that.

It’s no secret that virtual goods are a big business but how big exactly, nobody has really been totally clear. Yesterday Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners released an analysis done by the company which suggested that Facebook could generate up to $43 million this year alone from virtual goods. How does Facebook generate so much money from their virtual goods?

Well as Eric Eldon points out Facebook generates a lot of demand for their goods through scarcity. Apparently this model works because Facebook is selling a lot of gifts. If Jeremy’s high-end estimates are accurate, they are selling close to 43 million gifts. Gifting is a straight forward model and when the platform launched last year, Free Gifts became one of the most popular applications.

When Facebook temporarily removed gifts a few months back, I expected the Free Gifts application to get a significant boost. Instead, the application had a decrease in gifting activity because there was no longer a competing product which charged for gifts. Since the gifts came back, Free Gifts has continued to succeed. Virtual goods are a massive economy especially in Asia where virtual goods generate the majority of social network revenue.

That’s because advertising dollars in Asia are pretty low. So what’s the prime reason for gift growth on Facebook? The company’s rapid growth in their user base. The company has more than doubled since Jeremy Liew published the company’s findings back in January. This means that the rate of gifting appears to be staying pretty consistent.

The real question I have is: can the virtual gift economy could become a billion dollar economy on its own? If Facebook can reach $100 million eventually the global gift economy will be able to push $1 billion. What do you think?

Tonight Facebook announced that they made a few changes to application iframe canvas pages which “provide them with more of the functionality previously available only to FBML-based applications.” This means that applications will now be able to use XFBML, an extension of FBML which works on iFrame pages. These features also give application developers access to cached friend lists and preload FQL data.

There are a few other changes as well:

In addition to the JavaScript client library changes, iframe applications that want to preload FQL queries will receive the data along with other parameters via POST with the prefix ‘fb_post_sig’. We’re using a different prefix from the original ‘fb_sig’ prefix so we can avoid namespace collisions with the GET parameters, which will continue to use ‘fb_sig’ for compatibility with current applications which may be expecting the data. These parameters can be accessed and validated in the same method as the old parameters (for the PHP client, use get_valid_fb_params with the new fb_post_sig prefix).

Facebook continued tweaking the News Feed in the redesigned Facebook this morning with 2 interesting changes:

* Status Updates now always occupy the top three story spots
* “All Stories” has been renamed to the more exciting “Live Feed”

The first three status updates also do not have the “show me more/less about this person” feedback options. It appears that Facebook is simply taking the three most recent updates without trying to prioritise

Many users have missed the Status Updates panel on the right side of the old profile, and will be glad to see it being given more prominence in the new design. Whether this is a permanent change or just an experiment remains to be seen.

Last week I wrote about Michael Phelps’ rapidly increasing popularity on Facebook as the company decided to by promoting his fan page on the top of Facebook. The end result is that Michael Phelps’ fan page has become the most popular page on Facebook, overtaking Obama now attracting over 1.425 million fans versus Barack who has over 1.389 million fans.

What does this mean for Michael Phelps? Well, first of all it means that a run as a Presidential candidate is now warranted. It also means that Phelps is sure to attract millions of dollars in sponsorships when he returns home from the Olympics. I contacted Barack Obama for comment but have yet to receive a response as he is busy preparing for his speech at the Democratic National Convention in Colorado this week.

Hey Barack, we’re not mad at you for not replying to our emails, we know you are busy trying to become the next President. Michael Phelps was at least kind enough to update with the following wall post on his profile:

Hey guys. Thanks so much for all the support - you guys are awesome! I know I haven’t been around lately (been a little busy), but I should be able to post some cool stuff now. Just to give you an update, I got to hang out in Beijing for a couple days once I finished up and met Kobe and Chris Paul. They’re definitely bringing home the gold. Now I’m on my way to London for the hand-off between Beijing and London. After that, well…just stay tuned.

Unfortunately the wall post was on his own wall, but we’ll accept that as though Phelps had contacted us directly! Congratulations to Phelps on becoming the most popular person on Facebook. We know that this is easily a bigger achievement then winning the most gold medals in a single Olympics ever.

Over the weekend we wrote about a secret among application developers which is that at least one developer is currently generating over $1 million a month. Today, Charles Young of Developer Analytics released data which suggests that this rumor is false. The information does suggest that Mob Wars is the top revenue generator though. This is also what many have speculated and confirms some of our own findings.

The only problem with this information? It doesn’t seem completely accurate. It does make a lot of sense though but this also suggests that Slide is currently generating close to $6 million a year from their top two applications. That definitely doesn’t justify a $500 million valuation though. Can you really plug all these numbers into a single equation which can tell you a company’s revenue?

Definitely not! You can definitely come close though and Developer Analytics appears to be a more realistic estimate than Adonomics (which calculated an app’s estimated valuation) was is estimating valuations. There are some intersting findings that the company has generated and a number of suggestions that have been created for most of applications based on the numbers the company has.

So what is Developer Analytics trying to create? The company is looking to generate what appear to be automated numbers based on equations they’ve created which is similar to a Compete.com or Alexa for social applications. It’s an unfulfilled niche but are companies willing to invest $200 - $800 a month after an initial fee of $500 - $8000 for company data?

I’m sure there a lot of companies already registered but the only problem with this strategy is that the data is still automatically generated. There’s definitely valuable information though. Check out Developer Analytics recent post for the latest stats.

Over the weekend, international users of the popular Scrabulous game were shocked to find that their favorite applications was no longer accessible. By Monday word has spread around the world via traditionl media outlets which were all reporting the source of the shut down was surprisingly not the Agarwalla brothers (who developed the applications), but instead Facebook who was responding to pressure from Mattel.

The one place where Scrabulous is still available is India but that may not be for long. In response to a law suit filed against Scrabulous, the brothers who developed the application decided to shut it down and relaunch a modified version of the game called Wordscraper. So far, the application has attracted over 262,000 monthly users so far. That’s a far cry from the more than 500,000 active daily users that Scrabulous used to have.

Electronic Arts and Hasbro also released an official version of Scrabble which has now attracts over 382,000 monthly active users. It appears that the Agarwalla brothers will have to suffice with only a few hundred thousand active users rather than the millions they previously had. This should still be sufficient for the brothers to make a living but the battles with Mattel have most definitely stunted the company’s growth.

Facebook’s decision was guided by the risk of facing “liability for copyright and trademark infringement” according to AP News. Tough luck for the Agarwalla brothers and it’s unfortunate that they couldn’t take advantage of the remaining hours to direct Scrabulous uses to their updated Wordscraper game. I have a feeling that this story isn’t over until Scrabulous is shut down everywhere, including India.

Caroline McCarthy got the scoop on a Facebook movie which is in the works. The only reference to the movie is a group which was created by Aaron Sorkin, the creator of The West Wing and A Few Good Men, and Sorkin’s assistant. Is the group real? It seems pretty real considering Aaron’s claim to have no understanding of how Facebook works at all.

Aaron Sorkin prompts users to test to see if he is real in the group’s description. The only problem with accomplishing what would otherwise be an elementary task is that there is no way to friend or send a message to Sorkin. Not sure how he got to have that setting but my guess is it’s via the privacy settings. The only other person that I know of that doesn’t have a friend request in the directory is Mark Zuckerberg.

I wonder if this movie will be created in a similar way to The Pirates of Silicon Valley which highlighted the start of Microsoft and Apple. The only difference between that movie and the apparent Facebook movie? The Pirates of Silicon Valley had two companies that actually went public. Facebook has yet to do that. However the movie is written, this definitely sounds like an interesting beginning!

If you are more interested in what your friends are up to then what photos they are uploading and what their relationship status, you may be pleased to hear that Facebook has upgraded your friends’ statuses. Now rather than just showing recent friend activities, the most recent status updates of your friends are now displayed at the top of the news feed.

It’s clear that statuses have become one of the most important components of Facebook and many have called it a Twitter killer. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an increasing emphasis on statuses as Facebook moves forward. One interesting component about this new layout is how the statuses are updated instantaneously whereas the main news feed content is only updated periodically.

This contrasts FriendFeed where every load of the page presents new data among your friends as the site is updated in real-time. Facebook has tried to automatically filter information for users to try to select the most relevant information. It will be interesting to see if Facebook ever shifts this strategy to display more information.

This is a simple change but it most definitely highlights the importance of statuses in Facebook.

A blog post today to Facebook developers highlighted that they have yet to remove infinite sessions and also that all users are slated to have access to the new profile in “mid-September”, a little behind schedule for Facebook. The new Facebook profile roll-out has taken significantly longer for Facebook but it’s clear that they are trying to optimize the site and improve the user experience.

So far Facebook has had a pretty smooth transition but everyday I read about a few people who don’t like the new Facebook layout. One group I previously wrote about this month has grown to over 50,000 users. This is a really small number though when you compare it to the more than 20 million people that now have access to the new Facebook design.

Whether or not you like the new design, it won’t be a choice as to whether or not you make the shift. What “mid-September” qualifies as is left for interpretation but it’s clear that Facebook is taking their time when it comes to making the shift over. Are you in favor of the new design or do you not like the changes? Do think this is much ado about nothing?

Yes, I love calling Facebook the Twitter and FriendFeed killer but I seriously think they may have one-upped the competition on their latest release: the Live Feed. You can sit and watch in real-time what is taking place with your friends across their profiles in an unfiltered manner. This is similar to the functionality the Twitter Search (previously Summize) provided.

Rather than the AP Newswire going across your screen, you now have a live activity feed of all of your friends actions. Soon enough I’d imagine that we will begin to see the activities of friends that are taking place outside of Facebook show up in this feed more frequently, making it much more of a competitor to FriendFeed. Just as with FriendFeed though, the majority of posts remain to be comments.

I’ve included a one-minute screencast below of my live stream newsfeed and I have to say that it is really impressive. Congratulations to the Facebook team on this one. One of the most enjoyable experiences with this new feature was watching the stream of feedback people were providing to the Obama speech last night. It will most definitely be interesting to watch this feed during any significant national event.

Honestly, I have a feeling that the demand for this feature of the news feed is going to grow exponentially as users get used to the new design. The only challenge will be that users that have less friends won’t have as active of a stream. Then again, this same phenomenon takes place on any social media site: the more friends you have, the more content you have to consume. Take a look at the feature in action below.

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?

Facebook made some minor changes to the homepage last night with one substantial change which is the removal of quick links to Facebook created applications (notes, videos and photos). Now, the status has been promoted to be the primary item within the homepage. This new update clearly marks a shift toward a more Twitter-like environment.

Additionally, statuses are no longer in the sidebar only in the news feed. The majority of the changes are extremely small but the promotion of statuses definitely emphasizes the importance of statuses. Soon enough we will see statuses as the default tab within the news feed. That would actually make a lot of sense considering Facebook’s less than efficient auto-filtering system in the feed.

I’ve noticed that viewing the unfiltered feed provides me with much more valuable information. I’ve spoken with a number of other people who have been dissatisfied with the quality of stories being displayed in the news feed. Have you had any issues with news feed content?

This evening, Facebook announced a new set of demographic targeting features that will enable developers to limit users that view specific content. Developers may limit viewership based on age and location. With these restrictions comes a policy update which enables alcoholic beverages to be promoted. As the blog post today states:

We plan to modify this policy to permit promotion of content around the sale of alcohol, provided that you specifically use the Demographic Restrictions feature to restrict your application or content to users of appropriate legal age.

There have already been a number of applications shut down for the promotion of alcohol and it is no secret that alcohol companies are desperate to get on to Facebook. Most likely because one of the largest demographics for the site is college students. Does that mean that Facebook is going to start alcohol promotions in the near future? I don’t see why not.

Alcohol companies spend billions on advertising, so I’d guess that we’ll see many more beer and liquor ads in the near future. Perhaps Facebook will start to feel like spring break! If you’d like more details on the demographic restrictions check out the wiki page.

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.

Facebook pushed a couple changes to the redesigned home page tonight that may be of interest to application developers:

1) Publisher shortcuts for Facebook-developed applications have been removed, and publishing status updates has been promoted.

The new design is reminiscent of the Twitter home page:

Previously, links to your own profile page with the Publisher selected for posting photos, videos, notes, and links were located here.

2) Status updates have been removed from the right rail, and application bookmarks have been promoted. Now, status updates are only accessible within the Top Stories feed or filtered Status Updates feed.

Old:

3) And finally, some UI elements have been cleaned up, which may satisfy picky designers.

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.

Facebook today released a preview of version 2.0 of Facebook iPhone application. The upshot? Both the home page and profile page in Facebook for iPhone will look and feel a lot more similar to the redesigned Facebook home page and profile page.

Still not included in any of the Facebook for iPhone mocks are ads. With iPhone rapidly gaining share in the mobile web market, we wouldn’t be surprised to see Facebook include ads in its mobile products in the next year - particularly to take advantage of the iPhone’s GPS data. Mobile ad network AdMob is giving away $1 million to iPhone developers, so it’s clear that the market is developing quickly.

Home - The home page will have a full News Feed, along with access to filtered views of the News Feed, like Status Updates, Posted Items, and Events.