Inside Facebook

Travel search company SideStep is furthering its foray into the Facebook Platform tonight with the launch of CouchSwap, a new application that allows users to offer up their couches to travelers as a cheap form of lodging and to find and rate couches offered up by users in other cities. CouchSwap is the first SideStep product to emerge from the acquired TripUp, a travel social network founded by Sam Rogoway and acquired by SideStep earlier this month.

SideStep, already known for its Trips application (the 4th most popular Facebook travel application) and for acquiring Facebook application Extended Info and developer Trey Philips, continues its exploration into Facebook with CouchSwap, the company’s third application.

We caught up with Brian Stolte, Director of Product Management of SideStep, this afternoon about SideStep’s growing Facebook efforts.

“Historically, SideStep has focused on travel vertical search. Now, we’re expanding a bit. We want to provide ways for Facebook users to share their travel experiences and get travel ideas. Our strategy is to build a network of applications that help you leverage your social network to make travel decisions,” Stolte said.

As for plans to integrate SideStep web properties and Facebook applications, Stolte said the company will be bringing current web functionality into Facebook and current Facebook functionality out onto their web properties gradually. The company is placing a higher priority on stability and scalability now after experiencing some user attrition during slowdowns after the F8 launch.

SideStep’s applications show that the firm is one of the fastest travel companies to innovate on the new opportunities offered by the Facebook platform. We’ll keep a close eye as new types of travel applications like CouchSwap continue to emerge.

Technorati Tags: facebook, couchswap, sidestep, tripup, travel

Last night, Facebook completely kicked the Audio application off the Facebook Platform, a first in Platform history for an application of this size. The reasons cited were IP violations. Audio was an application that let Facebook users upload MP3 files, share them with friends, and listen to them on the site. One of the fastest growing apps after launch, Audio had about 750,000 users before Facebook pulled out the rug.

The Audio case is a first in what is sure to be a developing IP law landscape as Facebook looks to define its legal role and responsibilities with respect to application developers and copyright holders. Is Facebook liable for copyright violations that occur within third party Platform applications?

I’m not an expert in IP law (that’s why I pay them God awful sums) but I am sure that Facebook does not want to be in the middle every time an application developer is served a complaint. What a nightmare.

At the same time, application developers need some assurance that their apps are going to be deleted just because a high powered lawyer sent a letter to Facebook. While this case is certainly one that did not develop overnight (Facebook had reportedly repeatedly asked the developer of Audio to modify his application before it was removed), Facebook has set the precedent with Audio that it will delete applications that it feels are in violations of copyright law and its terms of service.

As the Platform emerges, new scenarios and questions around user-generated content, application developer liability, and platform provider liability will emerge. Ultimately, however, I predict Facebook will have to go to court to defend its position as merely an application gateway and thus not a liable party for third-party developer behavior. I hope the court finds in their favor, else I doubt the Platform concept can survive.

Technorati Tags: facebook, platform, audio, ip, law, copyright, infringement, applications

I’ve had no access for the last hour and, “We’re upgrading. We’ll be back soon.” is all that’s on the landing page. Two thoughts:

1) As a Facebook app developer dependent on Facebook reliability, this really sucks, and

2) Facebook should build a more informative and transparent “server down” page.

Update: The outage continues at 11:16am PT, putting this one in the “major” category. (We received our first report that the site was down at 8:58am PT this morning.)

Update: Facebook is back up at 11:30am PT.

Update: We’ve heard several reports of security issues at Facebook overnight. If true, I’m guessing it was more likely a botched push then malicious attack. Since the site has come back online this morning all Facebook links have a tracking code that wasn’t there yesterday, making me think something went awry when Facebook was pushing changes last night.

Welcome to the second installment of Inside Facebook’s “Hottest Facebook Apps.” Here’s the list for July 28, 2007:

1. Comic strip [growth]
   Comic strip does what it says: places any number of comic strips in your profile from a list of a few hundred, well-known strips. At one point the review board was abuzz with complaints of the application placing ads in its profile box, but I saw none when I installed it. The app is straightforward and simple, so hopefully it continues to see the growth it has over the past week.
2. The Simpsons Photos, Quotes, and Trivia [growth]
   This app, a sort of “über quote app,” lets you place all sorts of Simpsons bling in your profile. The interface is a little bulky but it gets the job done. This app is refreshing because it shows someone is trying to move beyond the already-cliche “quote app” idea.
3. SpotDJ [growth]
   SpotDJ lets you create a custom playlist to put on your profile or share with your friends. There are multiple ways to get music into the system, including uploading your own MP3 or recording something on the spot. We’ll see how they fare with respect to copyright violations, but the app itself is fairly decent. My only wish is that it were more social: I want to be able to see my friends’ mixes.
4. Grow-a-Gift [growth]
   Grow-a-gift is a play on the “free gifts” idea. Rather than sending a static gift, you send a gift which, over time, blooms into something more impressive. Unfortunately the app wasn’t working when I tried to test it so I can’t say whether it does it well or not. I’m guessing, however, that it’s breaking because so many users are adding it — they went from 100 users per hour to 1000 users per hour in less than a day.
5. What’s your pimp name? [growth]
   This app randomly generates a random “pimp” name for you to put in your profile, like “Wiggy Bling” or “Professor Shmoove.” You can also send pimp-themed gifts to your friends. The app is simple to use and marginally amusing, so congrats to them on getting 30,000 users in a week. We’ll see if the growth continues.
6. Crushes [growth]
   Crushes is essentially identical to Matches. You can flag other people anonymously as crushes. If they reciprocate then you’re both informed of the other person’s identity. I still think it’s a clever idea and the growth of Crushes seems to reinforce that. It’s unfortunate that Matches was hit by a bug which rendered it useless for a week. Hopefully Crushes can resume where Matches left off.
7. Superlatives [growth]
   I wrote about this app last week and it’s still doing well, but noticed that there is in fact a second app with the same name and an order of magnitude more users. Both apps allow you to nominate your friends for “Most likely to…”-style awards. Beyond that there’s very little difference. You can compare Superlatives v. Superlatives yourself and see which one wins out.
8. Daily Dragon [growth]
   Every day a new dragon, in your profile. That’s what you get with this app. It’s cute, it’s simple, lots of people are installing it, and that’s enough to make it a hot application. If the developers wanted to make it a more compelling they could add an adopt-a-dragon style functionality and let people trade amongst themselves. I have a feeling that people who are into dragons are also into RPG gameplay.
9. Love Quotes [growth]
   Love Quotes is YAQA, Yet Another Quotes Applications. It’s cute, simple, and part of the “quotes app” trend (or fad, depending on who you ask), so its success isn’t so surprising. Like most quotes apps there’s very little that’s social about it. I’d like to see the quotes my friends have selected for their profiles, for example, and also be able to see quotes that people share with me without having to install the application.
10. Mwah (kiss) You! [growth]
    Mwah (kiss) You! is a purely viral app, like Zombies or Vampires. When you add the app you’re presented with a very simple interface: a single textbox. Enter a friend’s name and they’ll be sent a kiss.

Technorati Tags: facebook, hottest, applications

(Many of these ideas came out of a conversation I had with Patrick Koppula, one of the founders of iLike. So, thanks to him and his current team at Vadver, who will quite probably do something amazing.)

There’s a lot of buzz around the internet about whether Facebook is going to start an ad network to monetize its application platform. Lookery, SocialMedia, and a few others are certainly betting that there’s a market for such a network. In the view of many, the holy grail is of course an in-Facebook network which uses Facebook’s demographic data to target users. An advertiser could then say, “I want to serve my ads to 18-24 year-olds who like sports,” for example.

However, even that kind of ad network may not be the most valuable thing that can be accomplished with a universally available copy of the social graph. Offline, one of the most common ways we use the social graph is recommendations - we learn about new movies, music, and restaurants from our friends all the time, and we trust those recommendations all the more because they’ve come from people we know.

Plenty of companies, e.g., iLike and StumbleUpon, have already built their business around such “social discovery” mechanisms. Search works well if you know to some degree what you want, but that isn’t always the case — that’s why people channel flip, why there are shuffle buttons on iPods, and why you see people casually flipping through magazine pages on the bus. People don’t know what they want beforehand, but they’ll know it when they see it. The Facebook Platform presents an opportunity for third-party services to make many kinds of new social recommendations.

And many of these new discovery features will be integrated outside Facebook. Services like “What are my friends watching?” or “What are my friends listening to?” already exist, but almost always require you to build out a social network within their external site.

The Facebook Platform means my corner of the social graph is now available to anyone I want. Who will capitalize on what is possible with new kinds of social recommendations?

Technorati Tags: facebook, search, discovery

Caroline McCarthy is on the ground at US District Court in Boston and just reported that the decision on Facebook’s motion to dismiss the infringement lawsuit brought about by ConnectU has been postponed by two weeks. The judge in the case, Douglas Woodlock, cited insufficient facts supporting ConnectU’s laundry list of claims and allegations in its complaint.

“You’re really going to have to do this with particularity,” Woodlock said to ConnectU’s counsel, “because this is a most evanescent of explanations.”

I reached ConnectU co-founder Tyler Winklevoss shortly after the ruling a few minutes ago, but he is not commenting on the ruling at this time.

Technorati Tags: facebook, connectu, lawsuit

What at first glance seemed like a minor thorn in Facebook’s legal side comes to a major turning point tomorrow in Boston, where a judge will decide whether to allow ConnectU’s copyright infringement suit against Facebook and its founders to proceed, or instead to accept Facebook’s motion to dismiss the suit outright.

ConnectU, founded by twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss along with Harvard classmate Divya Narendra, originally filed suit in 2004, alleging that Mark Zuckerberg and his Harvard Facebook cohort more or less stole the idea and initial code from ConnectU, then called HarvardConnection, and instead launched their own site, at the time called TheFacebook. However, the suit was eventually dismissed on a technicality, and nothing much more came of it.

Since that time, it doesn’t appear that the ConnectU team continued working on their product. The ConnectU site doesn’t appear to have been updated much since 2005, and the ConnectU founders have apparently moved on to, of all things, a try for the Olympics as American rowers. Meanwhile, Facebook has grown like gangbusters, completed two rounds of venture financing, now has over 300 employees, and after posting a job listing for a stock plan administrator has been the subject of rumors of a possible future IPO or multi-billion dollar sale.

After nearly three years of apparent inactivity, ConnectU refiled its infringement case in March of this year in a Massachusetts court. Facebook, armed with an array of legal counsel, has filed to have this new suit dismissed. In tomorrow’s hearing a judge will decide whether to send the ConnectU lawyers packing or let the case proceed.

While no one except Zuckerberg and the early Facebook guys know what actually happened, I often tend to believe that the simplest explanation is usually the right one, and in this case ConnectU’s timing smells a little funny. As I mentioned to Caroline McCarthy at News.com this morning, things can get messy when informal projects by young entrepreneurs turn into real business success. In the absence of a paper trail from conception, the entrepreneurs involved are subject to a he-said-she-said where the cheapest option may be to settle. This is why getting corporate lawyers from the very beginning is generally a good rule of thumb

It’s clear that the Winklevosses and Narendra are A) pissed, and B) willing and able to bet some cash to give this lawsuit another go. We’ll find out if there’s any more to this story tomorrow.

Technorati Tags: facebook, connectu, legal, suit

New social music services have made it easier than ever to see your friends’ favorite music and get updates as they discover new tunes. Since the launch of Facebook’s Platform, over 100 Music applications already developed for you to choose from. Now, your Facebook profile can quickly be transformed from Facebook’s standard (and boring) list of favorite bands into the life of the party. We’ve thoroughly examined all the current Facebook music apps and selected the best for you to check out.

The poster-boy in the Facebook Music category so farhas been the extremely popular iLike music app. A Facebook Platform launch partner, iLike delivers a great experience - almost entirely inside Facebook - by combining several functions into one great package. The iLike install process is seemless and you start by selecting artists that you like. iLike provides each artist with its own landing page where users can listen to music, see recently released albums and even buy directly from iTunes.

Depending on the artist, either full tracks or song clips are available for free - similar artists are shown and MP3’s from newer artists are available for download. Once you’ve built your list of artists, you can quickly see concerts - as well as your friends’ concerts. iLike also offers a music quiz to see how well you really know your favourite artists. With great functionality and a slick interface, it’s easy to see why iLike is so popular.

One disappointment in the iLike application, however, is your inability to share playlists. Last.fm has made a name for itself as being one of the best tools to share your playlists and see what your friends have been listening to. During installation the Last.fm application presents a spam-your-friends page but then quickly gets to work. The Last.fm app automatically captures your favorite music and creates a playlist based off this list.

Click play and you’re rocking–Last.fm is one of the easiest music applications to get started with. Last.fm automatically includes similar artists it thinks you’ll like, and if you don’t you can quickly skip the track. However, some features don’t seem to be working, like the “purchase album” link and the Last.fm player — they intermittently disappeared from our profile page during testing.

To add your own MP3s to your playlist, though, you’ll need to look beyond the major music apps. One of the fastest ways to upload your own music is through the Music application by Steven Lu and Russell Frank. You can upload just about any music file ( under 8MB ) and it will appear as playable link on your profile. The whole process of uploading and linking the file is nicely abstracted away behind simple user interactions. The Music app looks great for independent artists but it does seem ripe for abuse and will probably watched closely by music industry lawyers.

Concert goes will love the BandTracker application by Oodle.com. The app starts with 2 simple questions, “Who?” and “Where?” From there, you can see where over 200,000 concerts are happening, or you can search just your area and see which artists are coming to town. You can also see your friends’ concerts or invite them to a show that you’er dying to see. The one disappointment with BandTracker, however, is that the profile page is very basic–it would be nice to include some artist photos or album art.

For fans of Album art, the Visual CD Rack by Edward Frederick lets you display your CD album art. The process to add CDs is very painful, though, and it’s not clear if the visual effect is worth the effort.

While not strictly a music application, it would be hard to talk about the music category without mentioning the Yahoo Music Video application. The application is one of the slickest we’ve seen. After you install Yahoo Music Video, you can quickly select videos that you like and post them to your profile page. You can also see your friends’ videos.

One of the most innovative features of Yahoo Music Video is the “Dedicate Video” feature. You can send a dedicated video to someone special by selecting them from your friends list. This is a really great way to hide the “Invite your Friends” feature - not only good marketing but also a little romantic

The growth in the Facebook music application space has been enormous. Just last week there were 60 music applications, and this week there are over 100. Many of the major music sites are still MIA from Facebook, or struggling to create a unique experience inside the Facebook environment. We’re expecting to see many more music apps coming soon…things can only get better for music lovers!

Technorati Tags: facebook, music, applications, videos

Welcome to the first edition of Hottest Apps - our weekly look at the fastest growing Facebook applications over the last week. Our hope is to look at what’s working both for large and small-but-quickly-growing apps. If you feel like we’ve left something out, please let us know in the comments!

1. Pirates vs. Ninjas [growth] Pirates vs. Ninjas is a simple viral game where you pick a team (Pirates or Ninjas) and recruit friends to your cause. Like Zombies, it’s not hard to see why this app is growing so fast: the “gameplay” is simple, there are multiple elements of competition, and, well, who doesn’t have an opinion about pirates and ninjas? It’s unlikely, however, that people will play more than one or two of these games. We’ll see if they can create features to keep people interested.
2. Superlatives [growth] Superlatives is one of three similar apps, but clearly has the model down. You can nominate up to three friends for each superlative, which are hard-coded into the app. These include things like “Best Personality” and “Most likely to end up on MTV cribs.” You can then see who in your networks or on the Facebook as a whole is winning in what categories. The app is fun, but I’d like to see who among my friends is winning in which category and also be able to nominate people for superlatives that aren’t hard-coded into the app.
3. Apples ‘n’ Oranges [growth] As you might guess from the name, Apples ‘n’ Oranges lets you compare people, not to fruit, but to each other. Who is more brave? Who is more loyal? You’re presented with two pictures — either of two friends or a friend and a celebrity — and you are asked to pick. Binary choice games like this are fun since they require so little effort. You can also send a complimentary basket of apples or oranges to people to invite people to the app.
4. The Sorting Hat [growth] Does this really need explaining? “The Sorting Hat” is an anthropomorphic hat from the Harry Potter books. When placed on a student’s head it decides which house they should be placed in. No psychic powers here, though. Rather, the app asks a handful of questions and then places the coat of arms from the appropriate house in your profile. If you’re a Harry Potter fan, cool, if not, meh. It is, however, a well-designed and well-timed application.
5. Talk To Me! [growth] This app lets you send pre-recorded, uploaded, or text-to-speech voice messages. It’s gotten over 10k users in its first week, but I’m not sure the growth is genuine — it automatically prompts you to invite ten friends when you join, skipping the usual “select friends to invite” screen. Frankly, the app is not well built - it is ugly, slow, and confusing. Good on them for growing so quickly, but I’d be surprised if the growth continued.
6. Big Profile Picture [growth] No, Big Profile Picture doesn’t replace your profile picture — that area is off-limits to apps. Rather, you upload a picture and it gets placed into a box on your profile at a larger resolution than your profile picture. Simple apps that augment existing Facebook features can grow quite quickly, and this app is another example. Edit: This is similar to the Big Photo application which does the same thing, functionally, but markets itself as being for any photo. It also has about 100k users.
7. Awareness Ribbons [growth] Awareness Ribbons is also simple (noticing a pattern for fast-growing apps?). Pick your causes and the corresponding ribbons will display in your profile. You can sort by ribbon color or cause, and you can also see what ribbons your friends are displaying. Simple, straight-forward, and social.
8. FB Styles [growth] FB Styles lets you add a bit of color to you Facebook profile. Well, sort of. A “style” is nothing more than a skyscraper-sized image placed in the left-hand column of your Facebook profile.The idea is neat, but there are a two big problems in the execution. First, there’s nothing social about the app. Let me see my friends’ styles! Second, and more annoying, I have to go to their external site to use the application. Browsing and adding styles else requires you to go to their website.
9. Friends Quotes [growth] No, this isn’t quotes from your friends, it’s quotes from the TV show Friends. You can submit quotes, get statistics about quotes, and choose quotes to put in your profile. It’s one of many “quotes” applications. But the model is successful right now, so who can blame them for making another?
10. Scrubs Quotes [growth] $previous_post =~ s/Friends/Scrubs/g.
    Like he said, there are a lot of successful quotes apps out there It’s impressive that Friends is so popular given it’s been off the air for a while, unlike Scrubs. — Ed.

Technorati Tags: facebook, hottest, applications, top

Just received word from Facebook that the company has made its first acquisition: Parakey, a startup founded by Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt, co-founders of Mozilla Firefox. Ross and Hewitt will join Facebook immediately to work on the Facebook Platform. From Facebook’s Brandee Barker:

“Blake and Joe built the Firefox web browser and then turned to the developer community to build on top of the foundation they’d established, not unlike what we’ve done with Facebook Platform,” said Mark Zuckerberg, founder and CEO of Facebook. “The work they’ve done with Firefox and Parakey and their approach to building products fit right in at Facebook.”

Ross and Hewitt are best known as the co-founders of Firefox, which has been downloaded more than 300 million times by people worldwide. Hewitt went on to build popular web development tools such as Firebug. In early 2006, Ross and Hewitt founded Parakey to build a platform bridging the gap between information on the web and the desktop.

“Facebook Platform is finally making it easy to share experiences with friends and family over the web, a goal Joe and I have worked toward for years,” said Ross. “We are thrilled to join the most innovative technology company in the industry.”

For the last two years Parakey has been developing a platform that will synchronize your documents and files across web and desktop applications. Ross spoke to IEEE Spectrum last November describing the service as a “Web operating system.”

Parakey is intended to be a platform for tools that can manipulate just about anything on your hard drive—e-mail, photos, videos, recipes, calendars. In fact, it looks like a fairly ordinary Web site, which you can edit. You can go online, click through your files and view the contents, even tweak them. You can also check off the stuff you want the rest of the world to be able to see. Others can do so by visiting your Parakey site, just as they would surf anywhere else on the Web. Best of all, the part of Parakey that’s online communicates with the part of Parakey running on your home computer, synchronizing the contents of your Parakey pages with their latest versions on your computer. That means you can do the work of updating your site off-line, too. Friends and relatives—and hackers—do not have direct access to your computer; they’re just visiting a site that reflects only the portion of your stuff that you want them to be able to see.

Parakey is Facebook’s first publicly announced acquisition. The company reportedly received seed funding from Doug Leone at Sequoia Capital in early 2005 and later O’Reilly AlphaTech Ventures, but Facebook is not releasing financial terms of the transaction.

Technorati Tags: facebook, parakey, acquisition