Inside Facebook

It’s been a very interesting week in the world of social platforms and data sharing: after years of talk in the data portability community, industry behemoths Facebook, MySpace, and Google all announced major data, identity, and privacy portability initiatives within the span of 3 business days.

• Thur May 8: MySpace announces its “Data Availability” initiative, whereby it will share public user profile data with partner sites like Yahoo, eBay, and Twitter.
• Fri May 9: Facebook announces its “Facebook Connect” initiative, which will let third party developers access Facebook user profile and friend data.
• Mon May 12: Google announces its “Friend Connect” initiative, which will let users do much of the same thing through an OAuth/OpenID/OpenSocial system administered by Google.

None of these press events, however, included any actual product announcements. It’s something Marc Andreessen called a case of “strategitis” - making big strategy announcements before developers or users have any products to test out.

Today, Facebook upped the ante significantly by announcing that it is banning Google Friend Connect from the Facebook Platform for violating the Platform terms of service. Facebook’s Charlie Cheever writes,

All Facebook Platform developers agree to the Developer Terms of Service, which strictly limit the collection, use, and redistribution of user information. We have technology and a team to ensure applications abide by those policies.

We’re excited that our industry partners are taking greater steps toward openness and enabling users to share their information around the web. We hope, though, that we can collectively find a model that allows users to share data while protecting the privacy of our users’ data and ensuring that the user is always in control.

In the past, when we found applications passing user data to another party (for instance, to ad networks for the purpose of targeting), we suspended those applications and worked with those developers to ensure they respect user privacy. Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service. Just as we’ve been forced to do for other applications that redistribute data in a way users might not expect or understand, we’ve had to suspend Friend Connect’s access to Facebook user information until it comes into compliance. We’ve reached out to Google several times about this issue, and hope to work with them to enable users to share their data exactly when and where they choose.

We think MySpace’s Data Availability, Google Friend Connect, and Facebook Connect can be part of a great movement in the industry to give users a better and safer experience online, while respecting user privacy. We look forward to working with our developer community and everyone else in the industry to help all of our users take their information, and their privacy, with them wherever they go.

The amount of innovation in this space right now is good for everyone, but ultimately, Facebook, Google, MySpace, and other social networking platforms have major challenges ahead to provide the kind of portability users want without violating user privacy or cutting platforms out of the loop. We’ll stay on top of this story as it unfolds.

Google hosted the OpenSocial Summit today at its home offices in Mountain View to discuss the state of the OpenSocial API and the roadmap for version 0.8.  Amongst the many presentations by containers and app developers, Hi5 shared some very interesting stats on the Hi5 Platform.

These are some of the first detailed stats on the Hi5 Platform to be released - Hi5 doesn’t publish installs in the app gallery.

Hi5 Platform Totals

• 617 applications
• 1 million total daily installs
• 14 apps have been installed on more than 1 million profiles
• 6.5 million total daily canvas page views
• 9 apps with more than 10 million total canvas page views so far

Amongst Active Users

• 3.7 apps on average
• 52% have at least one app
• Max apps installed by any one user is 23

Shindig Stats

• >15 billion requests served
• 10k requests/second
• 35 servers total

New Inside Facebook Top Jobs for May 15:

• Director/Senior Product Manager, Top Friends (Slide / San Francisco, CA)

• Director of Product (Wallop / San Francisco, CA)

So you’ve decided what kind of application you want, and you’ve programmed it up already. Now the problem is “How do you grow and maintain it?” These two issues (growing and maintaining) are managed through two separate processes every application (or website for that matter) should keep in mind.

I like to call these two processes the invite and re-engagement loops. The invite loop refers to how you get new users, while the re-engagement loop refers to how you connect with old ones.

The Invite Loop

Invite loops are all about intelligently inviting new users. Forced invites are out of the question. However, the most effective invites we’ve found are the ones that provide a social context. Social context means that a people’s ego and relationships are leveraged as an incentive to add and application.

This happens to a degree when one user pokes another. Depending on who pokes me, I’m either more or less likely to add an application and poke back. When you tie ego into it, it becomes even more persuasive. If my friend bought me on “Friends for Sale”, it assaults my ego in a way that makes me more likely to add the application and buy them instead. If I’m told that my friend needs only $5 more virtual dollars for their cause, I’m more likely to add the application to help them out.

Tie invites or notifications to these actions in order to get new users interested in your application and test on a variety of messages.

The Re-Engagement Loop

When Facebook first started, applications were all about installs. The more you had, the better your application was, or so we thought. A lot of users install applications, only to not use them again, or only infrequently. The reasons for re-engagement are obvious. More users returning to your application provides more opportunity to sell to them.

Aside from creating an engrossing application experience, there are a couple things you can do to encourage re-engagement. Similar to the invite loop, you can use notifications to inform a user when their friends are active on the application, making the case for re-engagement more persuasive (i.e. John wants to play a game of Scrabulous with you). Don’t forget you can send email notifications to your users.

Another frequently used method is to tie virtual currency into your applications. You can give more money to users who re-engage more frequently or carry out specific actions. This can also be an opportunity for you to earn real money when users complete CPA offers.

Also, applications are driven by changing content. You need to have something new for the user every time they log in or their frequency of returning will go down. It’s the same deal in the blogging business. One suggestion is to let users subscribe to more or fewer notifications when content changes.

Wrapping Up

In closing, you should think of how to engineer these two loops into your application. What actions trigger a socially relevant event to let new users know about your application? What incentives can you create for users to return (new content, more currency, social relevance)?

Finally, don’t be spammy to your existing users. I’ve essentially turned off Fun Wall because I’d get an email nearly every day telling me about how someone else I barely knew forwarded a photo to me. I’m not interested in simple friend spam, and I’m sure your returning users aren’t either.

This is a guest post by Nick Gonzalez of SocialMedia Networks, an advertising network for social media platforms like Facebook and OpenSocial.

Six months ago, Facebook launched Pages as a way for “businesses, brands, and celebrities to represent themselves on Facebook.” Now that Pages have been out for six months, we thought we’d see who’s got the most fans on Facebook.

So here’s the list of the 25 Most Popular Pages on Facebook. The results?

• Amy Winehouse has more fans than John McCain. And so does Nutella.
• There’s no stopping Barack. He has twice as many fans as anyone or anything else.
• Pages are all about the music. 40% of the top 25 are bands.
• Some brands have made a big splash.

What does this say about marketing on Facebook?

1. Barack Obama - 834,550 supporters

When it comes to promoting applications in the application directory, Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and other social networks face a challenging dilemma balancing user, developer, and their own interests.

• Users want to be able to find the most relevant applications quickly and easily.
• Platforms also want users to be able to find the most relevant applications quickly and easily.
• Developers want as much free promotion for their applications as possible.
• Platforms want to motivate developers in the right direction by providing free promotion to those that perform well on goal metrics.
• Platforms also want to sell developers as much promotion as they are willing to pay for.

How have Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and Hi5 balanced these interests so far?

• Facebook’s application directory can be sorted purely by global activity (though with multiple filters – recently popular, most active users, and highest active ratio). However, Facebook doesn’t filter by relevance to your profile, your applications, or your friends’ applications. You’re only able to browse applications by category, which are very loosely self-assigned. And there are no “sponsored listings” in the directory – developers who want to purchase promotion must do so through Facebook’s Social Ads system.
• MySpace’s application directory is also sorted by overall popularity. Users can also sort by most recent or alphabetically, but not by relevance. In contrast to Facebook’s lack of advertising in the directory, MySpace has launched aggressive advertising opportunities for developers right from the start. Developers can pay on either a CPM or CPC basis on either the main gallery or category listings pages. Finally, an Editor’s Picks section (chosen by the MySpace Platform team) rotates in the directory as well.
• Bebo’s application directory is sorted by user ratings. It’s hard to tell how Bebo protects against app rating spam - Facebook’s app ratings are notoriously spammy. You can also sort by recency or alphabetically. And developers wishing to purchase app promotion can do so in a variety of placements, though not in the application directory itself.
• Hi5, meanwhile, has chosen to completely randomize its application directory until the platform is more mature.

While each approach has its tradeoffs, I think Facebook’s application directory could be improved to provide more value to users, developers, and Facebook itself.

• First, Facebook should organize applications based on their relevance to individual users. By looking at my info, my apps, and my friends’ apps, Facebook should be able to recommend more personally relevant applications and generate more app installs from the directory.
• Second, Facebook should develop engagement metrics more directly aligned with platform goals. For example, time spent per active user per day might be a good metric if Facebook wants to increase its session lengths in general.
• Third, Facebook should consider adopting MySpace’s approach of reserving some real estate for Editor’s Picks. Though it would be challenging to administer without bias, reserving some room for editorial selection would give Facebook another way to motivate developers in a way more aligned with Facebook’s goals for the platform. (And CPC/CPI ads, if targeted well and able to perform over a base CTR, may not be a terrible idea.)

I’ve received word from Facebook that the company is indeed about to launch a redesigned application directory in the coming weeks that will incorporate some of these ideas. With the upcoming profile redesign likely to have a significant impact on application discoverability, Facebook will really need to provide better ways for users to find new and interesting applications.

One of the major updates in Facebook’s upcoming profile page redesign is the “Publisher” - a much-upgraded approach to what has previously been called “Wall attachments.”

With the new Publisher, users can create and attach content using any application on any profile page. Facebook hopes the redesigned profile page will increase content rich communication on the site. As Facebook writes,

Currently, if you want to add a photo album, you go to your Photos page. If you want to write a note, you go to your Notes page. Uploading videos requires you to go to the Video page, and so on. Basically content from any application, whether a Facebook application or a third party application, gets created and added from those specific pages. With the new publisher box, whenever you want to add or create content, you will be able to do so directly from your profile. From there you will be able to add content as well as restrict privacy settings for that content. We think this will make Facebook much simpler to use and navigate, and will also help you control the content on your own profile.

Check out the screenshot here:

Since Facebook Chat launched a few weeks ago, chat application developers have been clamoring for the ability to integrate Facebook Chat into their apps via Jabber/XMPP. Tonight, Facebook will announce upcoming support for a Jabber interface to Facebook Chat that will allow users of third parties to:

• Chat with your friends inside Facebook from the client of your choosing
• See which of your friends are online and view their profile pictures
• Set your status

Jabber support marks a major step forward in the evolution of Facebook Chat. Some applications, like Adium and Digsby, have already launched Facebook integration even though the company has not officially launched Jabber support.

However, Facebook hopes that application developers will take chat in new and creative directions given their ability to plug into Facebook’s already vibrant platform. New kinds of real-time applications are now possible given access to Facebook’s social graph. For example, Facebook chat client Social.im could help Facebook app developers reach users when they’re not on Facebook with new kinds of “system tray” notifications. Xfire, an IM client for gamers, could do the same. Where do you want to see Facebook chat integration?

Leading Facebook game developer and game network SGN announced its Series A financing this morning. The company has closed a $15 million round from Greylock Partners, Founders Fund, Columbia Capital and Novak Biddle Venture Partners. This huge round comes as the company is fiercely battling also-well-funded Zynga and recently-funded Serious Business for early leadership in the “social gaming” market.

The funding gives SGN some very close connections to Facebook. David Sze, the partner at Greylock who made the SGN investment, also invested in Facebook and is a Facebook board observer. Founders Fund’s Peter Thiel was an early investor in Facebook and also currently occupies one of three board seats along with Accel’s Jim Breyer and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg.

The move also marks Founders Fund’s second bet in the social gaming space (and Peter Thiel’s third). Founders Fund has also reportedly invested in Facebook game developer Alamofire, makers of the popular game PackRat. Thiel is also an investor in Zynga.

Those interested in tracking the social gaming space more closely can check out our sister blog, Inside Social Games.

Since the Facebook Platform’s launch one year ago, Blake Commagere has come to be loved and hated by millions of Facebook users. As the creator of Zombies, one of the earliest social games on Facebook, as well as the entire suite of “Monsters” apps (Vampires, WereWolves, and Slayers), Commagere has pioneered merging concepts of social network virality and traditional game design. I sat down with him to learn more about his process of building the Monsters franchise and his future plans for building the business.

> Read the entire interview at Inside Social Games