Facebook Blog, Applications and Developers Directory

Facebook launched a new kind of ad unit today that has the potential to drive much more engagement than any ad product on the site ever before has: embedded multimedia with comments visible to users’ entire friend list.

Facebook has created new home page advertising inventory with its upcoming redesign. However, this is the first time we’ve seen Facebook fill the sponsored home page slot with this kind of unit. The behavior:

1. Clicking on the ad image opens a video player in-line
2. Comments on the video are visible to your entire friend list.

The comments around the ad dramatically increase engagement with the unit, as the highly visible comments provide an opportunity for users to simultaneously draw attention to the ad by drawing attention to themselves. While this could backfire if comments degrading the advertiser are abundant (I saw a few “LAME!” comments about Tropic Thunder today), the ad comments powerfully take advantage of Facebook’s social dynamics to draw attention to an ad in a way that is impossible without the social graph. When is the last time you heard 9 friends talk about an online ad in the same day?

Ad comments are an interesting step forward in the evolution of “Social Ads.” While this kind of ad may not work as well outside of a few advertiser verticals, I expect that early advertisers will be pleased with its performance.

While Facebook simplified the News Feed interface a few months ago by removing the “thumbs up/thumbs down” ratings system, in-line News Feed preferences are now back in the Facebook redesign.

While before users gave feedback on a story, now users can give feedback on a story type or a particular friend: for example, “show me more feed stories about my friend John,” or “show me less photo stories.”

Facebook reportedly removed the first iteration of preferences from the News Feed because the factors did not have a significant impact on user satisfaction when compared to other elements of the News Feed algorithm. We’ll see how long this iteration lasts.

Yesterday Facebook announced the launch of Facebook Connect and with it the opportunity for sites around the web to easily integrate into the largest “social graph” on the web. The pre-f8 hype along with MySpace’s Data Availability initiative and Google’s Friend Connect program ended up muting much of the buzz that was intended for Facebook Connect. Whether or not it was buzzed about, Facebook Connect could have a substantial impact on the future of the web as Om Malik points out.

I agree with Om and I think that Facebook Connect could truly be game changing. As many industry thought leaders were saying last night at f8, Facebook Connect is the alternative to OpenID.

In the past month, many major application developers have been on the receiving end of policy enforcement measures handed down by Facebook. Here’s an update the current status of each application, including a look at the traffic repercussions of the measures taken.

Top Friends (Slide)

On June 26th, Top Friends was the first major app to disappear completely from the Facebook platform. The application was allegedly punished for violating the TOS by allowing access to non-friends’ personal information.

On July 5th, Top Friends resurfaced on the platform. Before the punishment, Top Friends users could use their profile box as a means to quickly access their friends’ profiles that they visited often. To bring the application in compliance with the TOS, this functionality was eliminated - now, clicking a “top friend” directs to that user’s Top Friends profile within the application.

Despite this loss of functionality and the long outage, Top Friends traffic has rebounded impressively.

Social Me and Compare Hotness (SocialHi.com)

July 1st, Social Me, a top 25 Facebook app, also disappeared from the platform. Compare Hotness, another SocialHi app, was also temporarily disabled.

An outpouring of support was seen for the Social Me app, even in the comments on this blog. On July 15th Social Me made its triumphant return to the platform, only to disappear again temporarily.

The app has now been available since the 16th, but has yet to recover its pre-July traffic levels.

Super Wall (RockYou!)

On July 6th, Super Wall’s traffic decreased rapidly. RockYou’s CTO and co-founder Jia Shen confirmed in an email that the app’s viral channels had been turned off for what he considered “slightly debatable” policy reasons.

Yesterday, Nick O’Neill interviewed Shen, who confirmed that Super Wall’s access to viral channels was back. It remains to be seen whether or not Super Wall can return to its position as the largest Facebook 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.

On the same day that Bebo agreed to be acquired by AOL for $850 million (congrats everyone!), it also announced an important update to the Bebo Platform (not celebrating too hard, I guess!). As of today, a new “To do” list design on the home page of every Bebo user more prominently displays application invitations and notifications. Previously, they were behind a second tab.

Jessica Alter, Bebo’s head of business development for the platform, said, “We’ve released changes to the users homepage that moved the alerts for app notifications and requests to the top right of the users homepage. The redesign provides apps a top-level placement, bringing additional awareness to your apps.” In addition, Bebo is now showing icons of all apps a user has installed on the profile page.

Alter also said that several additional features are in the works to be released soon:

* A new API call to add tags to photos
* New JavaScript capabilities
* Pre-loading SQL

All of these changes will enhance the platform and be welcome news for developers!

Facebook is in the process of launching the redesigned version of user profiles. They are also focused on a number of other initiatives including Facebook Connect which is one of the sources of the data portability discussion over the past few days. One thing I’ve been wondering about a lot more frequently is why doesn’t Facebook take features from other sites that are finding success? One example would be integrating Twitter functionality into Facebook statuses.

On a regular basis I have people post replies to my statuses on my Facebook wall. While the reply occasionally ends up in other peoples’ newsfeeds, it doesn’t allow for a continuing dialogue that can be tracked. If Facebook statuses had Twitter functionality, Twitter would have an overnight competitor that could instantly crush their growth. As of now, Facebook has simply enabled Twitter to update statuses via the Twitter application but honestly, Facebook should update it.

Another thing missing is FriendFeed style communication in the newsfeed. Justin Smith suggests that there should be FriendFeed style dialog in the profile mini-feed. I would argue that it should also be added to the newsfeed in general. Enabling discussion around various newsfeed items would also help guage the popularity of each item.

While Facebook is focused on building a valuable platform for developers and a simple to user interface that can be understood internationally, I don’t think Facebook is innovating in areas that they could easily improve. The Facebook messaging system is always a source of criticism since it is impossible to sort or search through. While there have been rumors circulating that Facebook is testing out search within their messaging, I have yet to find any screenshots of it in action.

As Fred Wilson pointed out this weekend, “Social web services need not fear data portability. They need to fear others providing a better experience.” There are better experiences happening elsewhere on the web. Facebook needs to hurry up an integrate some of those experiences back into their site.

I’ve said it a million times: the best way to make money with Facebook applications is through branded partnerships. Jeremiah Owyang has posted a case study about Sony using the Vampires application for generating buzz about their movie 30 days and 30 nights. The statistics are impressive yet not surprising considering the Vampires application is one of the top 30 applications on the platform.

Sony pictures was looking to have at least 10,000 users register for their sweepstakes in which a 4 wheel ATV was given out and $1500. The application ended up registering almost 60,000 users. This was way more than they expected to register and as a result the client was happy. So what are the suggestions that Jeremiah came up with after speaking with Rock You? Jeremiah came up with the following three things that worked:

1. Fishing where the fish are: Sony figured out where the already existing community was (remember to fish where the fish are) and rather than trying to rebuild something completely by scratch, they leveraged an existing successful application.
2. Rely on specialists for new arenas: In my many briefings with vendors and clients, specialized firms often provide something a general interactive firm or corporate web marketing team can’t. They have experience, know their area, and in this case, they knew to rely on someone that already knew Facebook (such as Social Interactive.
3. Compliment the existing user experience: Sony didn’t beat the 3 million existing users with heavy advertising (and I’m sure RockYou wouldn’t have let them) over the head, instead offered value by giving away prizes, and tied in a movie that already existed.

The main conclusion of Jeremiah’s post was that this individual campaign was highly successful and leveraging social applications for branding can be extremely effective. For Facebook application developers, you should be specifically targeting brands and looking for opportunities to forge new relationships. Do you have any examples of other applications that have used this tactic?