Inside Facebook

It’s not just for photos anymore. Facebook wants to become your platform for sharing anything online with your friends.

When I woke up this morning I found a major new Facebook feature: “Share”.

Share is basically a link sharing tool for Facebook. When you come across a cool web page, YouTube video, MySpace profile, or Flickr photo that you’d like to share, just use the “Share on Facebook” bookmarklet, choose who you’d like to share it with, and the item will appear in your friends’ “Share Inbox”. The bookmarklet automatically extracts an excerpt and thumbnail image.

You also have the option to “post” your share to your Mini Feed on your profile page, meaning it will also appear in your friends’ News Feeds. The bookmarklet automatically recognizes when you share YouTube videos and MP3’s, embedding players right in the page. This is the first time Facebook has ever enabled video — and, notably, the first time they’ve embedded third party widgets on Facebook.com as well. You can also share items that have been shared with you, or any Facebook profile, by clicking the new “Share” button.

Since launching photo sharing features last year, Facebook claims to have become “the largest photo-sharing site in the world“. Now, they may become the largest link sharing site in the world. One could imagine that a “most popular shares” page is coming soon - basically Digg for college students. Notably, Facebook has not enabled pure bookmarking features - you cannot save a link without posting or sharing it.

Share is currently only available to Stanford and Berkeley students until the kinks get worked out. No doubt Mark and the team also want to do a better job of gathering feedback from the community than they did with the infamous Feeds launch. Expect to see a full public launch soon.

I’m in St. Louis today for Webster University’s 2nd annual PR Institute. The focus of this year’s event, attended by corporate communications professionals in the St. Louis area, was understanding current trends in social networking.

David Lowey, SVP and Senior Partner at Fleishman-Hillard, started the morning off by giving a historical overview of social trends over the last few years. Then, I zoomed in on the current state of affairs, detailing products and cultures within Facebook, MySpace, and a dozen other social services. In addition, I summarized new experimental communications programs taking place in these environments, detailing both how they must be different from traditional campaigns to work and the challenges of measuring their effectiveness.

I enjoyed meeting everyone who attended this morning. Thanks to Nancy Higgins, Gary Ford, and Debra Carpenter for organizing today’s successful event!

When Facebook launched News Feeds and Mini Feeds over a month ago without giving users any advance notice, the user community pitched a fit over privacy concerns. Lost in the noise perhaps, some analysts applauded the move at the time because they believed the changes actually made the site better for users. Despite the possibility that feeds would cause page views to suffer in the short term, Mark Zuckerberg and the team firmly believed that the new features would “increase information flow” (as always) and ultimately increase page views.

Well, it appears they were right. According to Alexa, Facebook’s page view numbers, which have been flat all of 2006, have dramatically increased by over 40% in the last month alone.

Those are big numbers (despite Facebook’s inherently seasonal use patterns) (ironically total uniques were actually down from Aug to Sept). Facebook’s strategy of bringing more information to users via social feeds is working. Not only have the revolts subsided–but feature use has increased.

This shot in the arm couldn’t come at a better time for Facebook’s business. In particular, these new numbers should strengthen its negotiating position with potential acquirers, like Yahoo. In fact, just this morning Kevin Delaney and Rebecca Buckman at the Wall Street Journal wrote,

Facebook’s business picked up over the past month after the introduction of some new features on its site, making the company more confident about its prospects, say some of the people familiar with the matter. Google’s deal for YouTube also indicates a robust mergers-and-acquisition climate for Internet companies that could broaden Facebook’s options, these people say.

These factors reduce the incentives for Facebook’s management, which includes founder and Chief Executive Officer Mark Zuckerberg, 22 years old, to sell the company now.

Despite the bungled release, the Feeds features, which were in development for over a year, appear to be very successful. While Feeds definitely raised new privacy concerns within the user community, they are now enjoying widespread acceptance and use, and are indeed changing the way students get information on and share information with friends.

Karel Baloun, a former senior engineer at Facebook from 2005-06, has written a short book on his experience at the company. You can check it out here.

Ad publication MediaWeek recently ran an article proclaiming that Facebook users’ ad clicking behavior would soon show up in their News feed for all of their friends to see. Quoting the article,

The new placement, dubbed Sponsored Stories, appears within Facebook’s News Feed platform. News Feed, which Facebook launched earlier this month to a storm of controversy, provides users with a constantly updating list of “news items” on their personal profile pages. Those news items appear whenever members of individual Facebook users’ network make changes to their own profiles, such as uploading pictures or posting comments.

The new Sponsored Stories ad unit will initially be placed in the third position within each user’s News Feed - as either a small banner-like placements or potentially a video clip. When users elect to click on these ads and then join that advertiser’s ‘group,’ their entire network of friends will be automatically alerted and then given the chance to interact with that particular marketer’s group.

Facebook’s marketing director has hence stated that the article got it wrong. Instead she told TechCrunch,

Only users who have elected to join a sponsored group will be notified when friends in that group click one of the group’s ads…

No one will ever be notified of your ad clicks and the ads will either be for sponsored groups or link directly to an advertiser’s page.

So, it sounds like MediaWeek got some important details wrong. But the fact remains that Facebook is taking small steps toward new forms of social advertising–notifying friends of interaction with a sponsored group is ultimately not that different from notifying friends of interaction with an ad.

Fred Stutzman has posted a nice summary of social networking revenue models. See the full article here.

In summary, Fred says there are five ways social networks can make money:

1. Advertising
2. Product affiliation groups
3. Partnership opportunities
4. Micropayments
5. Subscriptions/premium features

He also explores some other ideas, like the creation of alternative markets (like Second Life) and the brokering of trust.

The blog Mashable recently did a profile of Facebook’s features and history.