Inside Facebook

We knew it would happen, we just didn’t know it might happen this soon.

I just received a tip from top application developer Trey Philips that Facebook has added two new undocumented functions to its API Test Console this evening that appear to reference an as-yet-unreleased feature called “Friend Lists.”

The two new API methods are:

• friends.getLists
• friends.getListsMembers

Based on these method names, “Friend Lists” could be buddy lists that you might use to organize your friends. For example, “Work Friends” or, say… “Top Friends”.

If these are indeed upcoming features of the Facebook Platform, I think this has two major implications:

1. This could dramatically simplify privacy controls. Right now, users manage privacy settings per-feature or by managing their Limited Profile list. The addition of Friend Lists means one can now much more flexibly and powerfully manage privacy settings per List. Work friends see one portion of your profile, personal friends see another, best friends see yet another.

This will be a welcome change for everyone whose LinkedIn networks have migrated to Facebook. Consequently, this could mean accelerated LinkedIn attrition: per-Friend-List privacy settings could substantially decrease the need of many to actively maintain their LinkedIn accounts as well.

2. More significant, this would mark the first time Facebook has moved to directly compete with a top Platform application. The dynamics here are more complex: Slide, maker of Top Friends, the #1 application on Facebook with over 13 million users, is now the owner of a social graph one third the size of the entire Facebook population, and arguably poses some threat to Facebook.

Is Friend Lists functionally similar to Top Friends? If so, how will Facebook promote Friend Lists within the core user experience? Does this mean that Facebook wants to compete with its most successful Platform applications?

As more information comes to light on Friend Lists, more clarity will be gained on both the privacy control and platform owner/developer dynamic questions. For now, these potential new API features should certainly raise some developer eyebrows.

Technorati Tags: facebook, platform, friendlists, competition

Last night, Dave Morin, who manages the platform at Facebook, announced a number of changes to the Facebook Platform. Most are aimed at reducing application spam and making the Facebook experience better for users. The updates include:

• deprecating code that allowed developers to show different UI to profile owners and visitors, as previously reported
• a consolidated application invite process–no more misleading ’spam your friends’ screens
• eliminating external email through the Facebook API, for now
• new metrics for the Facebook Application directory that focus on engagement

The change to the Application Directory to focus on engagement metrics is the most interesting. Just this morning, Facebook changed the way it counts an application’s user base from total installations to daily active users, where “active” is defined as:

• Going to the canvas page
• Clicking an FBML link
• Mock-Ajax Form Submission
• Click-to-Play Flash

Currently, the “most active” apps (defined by highest percentage of total users that are active) are:

• WarBook - 18,073 daily active users (42%)
• Scrabulous - 157,197 daily active users (37%)
• Hatching Eggs - 106,975 daily active users (35%)
• Are You Interested? - 92,534 daily active users (33%)
• Premier League Picks - 26,631 daily active users (27%)

It’s interesting that the two most active apps on Facebook are games. Most applications, by contrast, have an 8-10% active user rate. More to come.

Technorati Tags: facebook, application, metrics, engagement

Today marks the 3-month anniversary of the Facebook Platform since it launched May 24 at F8 in San Francisco. Suffice it to say, the pace of innovation surrounding the Facebook Platform so far is faster than that for any platform ever before.

I thought this would be a good opportunity to step back and take a look at some basic Platform stats and guideposts. In the first 90 days of the Facebook Platform:

• 3,261 applications have been created and vetted by Facebook (many more remain below the radar). Developers from around the world and every level of sophistication are building diverse categories of Facebook applications. It is extremely cheap to develop and deploy Facebook apps.
• 46 applications have garnered over 1 million net installations. Around 100 more have garnered over 100,000 users. Top Friends, the #1 Facebook app, has over 13 million users. Facebook is the most viral software distribution platform ever.
• Several dedicated ad networks (and dozens of ad-hoc ones) have been built to connect advertisers with Facebook developers. Advertisers and publishers are eagerly experimenting with performance-based and brand marketing programs…developers are making money (and a few are making a LOT of money). The arbitrage market is volatile but stabilizing.
• Investors are taking Facebook platform opportunities very seriously. Multiple venture capitalists have started programs specifically to fund and/or incubate Facebook application developers. Dozens of applications have been acquired by other application developers, Web 1.0 companies, media companies, and investors (…though few have been publicly announced).
• Facebook is dedicating significant resources to serve and support the developer community. Developer Garage events are occurring around North America. Over 70,000 people have joined the Facebook Developers group.
• Facebook has experienced no known major security breaches, despite opening the platform to anyone in the world.

Facebook has truly taken the social networking world by the <<>>, and the game is theirs to lose.

However, not everything is hunky-dory…

• Developers are dying for decent Feed metrics. Right now, app developers have no idea how often their feed items are being seen or clicked on, so it’s impossible to A/B test or iterate. Facebook says they’re working on this, and hopefully better metrics in general will be available soon. Until then, everyone suffers from poorly designed feed items.
• Investors are still figuring out how to value applications. What are the new kinds of special sauce? How do you measure engagement? User numbers are only a very basic start. The average app is getting somewhere under 1 canvas page view per user per day, and the strongest apps are seeing over 10 or even 20. There is a lot of risk in the market right now, but shrewd investors will be rewarded handsomely.
• The APIs are still changing seemingly by the week. Just 2 weeks ago, Facebook made a major change to the FBML spec that impacted hundreds of developers with very brief lead time.
• The TOS are still very bad for developers. The rug could be pulled out at any moment, and some very smart people are staying out of the game altogether.
• Facebook ops have been sloppier than normal recently. An outage a few weeks ago made the site inaccessible during several prime daytime hours, and two weeks ago Facebook accidentally served up its source code…

Overall, there’s never been a more enjoyable time to be an entrepreneur. So much is happening so quickly that’s accessible to so many developers and consumers. I hope the next quarter is just as fun as the first was!

Technorati Tags: facebook, platform, applications, awesome

There’s been a lot of shuffling at the front offices of Facebook in recent weeks. Chamath Palihapitiya left Mayfield to run Product Marketing and Operations at Facebook. Owen Van Natta “shifted” roles from COO to Chief Revenue Officer. Former YouTube CFO Gideon Yu ditched an opportunity at Sequoia to become Facebook’s CFO a few weeks after the un-discussed departure of Mike Sheridan.

So amidst all these changes, InsideFacebook has compiled a comprehensive list of Facebook executives, past and present, for those interested in learning more about the company’s front office.

Current Facebook Executives

• Mark Zuckerberg, Founder and CEO (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Matt Cohler, VP of Strategy and Business Operations (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Adam D’Angelo, VP and CTO (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Dustin Moskovitz, Co-founder and VP of Engineering (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Chamath Palihapitiya, VP of Product Marketing and Operations (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Owen Van Natta, VP and Chief Revenue Officer (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Gideon Yu, VP and CFO (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Chris Kelly, VP of Corporate Development, Chief Privacy Officer, General Counsel (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Dan Rose, VP of Business Development (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Rudy Gadre, VP and General Counsel (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Mike Murphy, VP of Media Sales (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Jeff Rothschild, VP of Technology (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)

Current Facebook Board of Directors

• Peter Thiel, Managing Partner at The Founders Fund (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Jim Breyer, Partner at Accel Partners (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• David Sze, Partner at Greylock Partners (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Paul Madera, Managing Director at Meritech Capital Partners (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)

Additional Facebook Co-founders

• Andrew McCollum (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Eduardo Saverin (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Chris Hughes (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)

Former Facebook Executives

• Sean Parker (Facebook profile / LinkedIn profile)
• Mike Sheridan (Facebook profile)

Omissions or corrections? Please let us know. Thanks!

Long-time software entrepreneur Lee Lorenzen had an epiphany when he heard about the first company being built on the back of Facebook.

“When I heard about iLike, it dawned on me,” Lorenzen said. “This is a complete greenfield opportunity.”

Although his VC/incubator Altura Ventures was not a Facebook F8 launch partner, Lorenzen immediately shifted the focus of the Altura 1 VC fund and its portfolio companies squarely on Facebook.

The new vision for Altura, Lorenzen says, is to provide funding, technical assistance, product guidance, and monetization tools for application developers not keen to sell out early like some have.

Lorenzen believes developers will realize much greater value by developing their products and monetizing through ad networks than selling out at low per-user prices now.

As such, Altura Ventures recently acquired Appaholic, the application tracking service built by Jesse Farmer (former contributing author to InsideFacebook) (not to be confused with SocialMedia’s Appsaholic), and brought Farmer in house to further develop the service. It’s an important part of a bigger effort by Altura called Adonomics, which will provide a suite of monetization and measurement tools for application developers.

Adonomics promises not only a simpler way for developers to buy installs (it will negotiate deals with ad networks and publishers on a CPM, CPC, or CPI basis and simply charge developers CPI), but also an integrated dashboard to measure user engagement post-installation.

After generating new user installations, Adonomics will tell developers how many of those users subsequently uninstall their application, and how many times they are coming back to the canvas page. The goal is to provide better measurement of the value of generated leads so as to allow developers to make more informed buying decisions.

“You can think of Adonomics like a meta ad network,” Lorenzen said.

Time will tell whether Altura/Adonomics can deliver better advertising ROI metrics to developers. The service is currently in alpha and will be expanded to more developers in the coming weeks.

One thing’s for sure - it’s exciting to see new tools for developers and entrepreneurs as the Facebook arbitrage market forms.

Technorati Tags: facebook, altura, adonomics, appaholic

A core principle of Facebook’s profile page design philosophy is consistency between what you see when you are viewing your own profile and what a visitor to your profile page sees. This creates an important sense of security that you know how you look within the system.

With the advent of the Facebook platform, thousands of profile page widgets have been developed. As part of the original FBML spec, Facebook enabled application developers to detect whether the person loading a profile page was the owner or a visitor. They did this to allow apps the flexibility to show certain features and UI elements, such as widget management functions, to the profile owner directly within the profile box instead of requiring the owner to go to the canvas page.

However, some developers have exploited this functionality to effectively spam a user’s profile page box with ads that are only visible to profile visitors and not visible to the profile owner. For example, some apps are adding messages like “See photos Jenny doesn’t want you to see!” or otherwise big, obtrusive links that the profile owner would likely want to remove were they aware of their existence.

Thus, Facebook has announced significant changes to the FBML profile page spec with version 1.1 with hopes of reducing application profile page spam:

One of the key parts of the success of the design of the Facebook profile is that the user is always aware of exactly what their profile looks like to their friends who stop by to view their profile. This enables users to understand exactly how they are expressing themselves to others by simply deciding whether or not they like an application’s profile box and the content that the developer has decided to put into the box.

Right now, we have made a few FBML tags available that are causing users to not trust the content in the profile box. Tags such as: fb:if-user-has-added-app, and other fb-if tags. These tags are currently being used to deliver content to profile boxes which users are unaware of. Content such as big yellow boxes which say “ADD THIS APPLICATION!” or “ADD SOME OTHER APPLICATION!”.

Starting today, these tags will no longer be available for use in profile boxes. We will be migrating FBML to version 1.1, and adding a new set of tags called fb:visible-to-. They are:

fb:visible-to-owner
fb:visible-to-friends
fb:visiible-to-user
fb:visible-to-added-app-users
fb:visible-to-app-users

Facebook is adapting the Platform development specs rapidly and without substantial lead time. Developers are obviously incurring headaches every time changes are made, and hoping that core functionality like profile page FBML will stabilize more soon.

Technorati Tags: facebook, platform, fbml, spam

Update: TripAdvisor’s Brian Payea has responded: “This is untrue. Beyond that, we do not have any comment.” Payea would not specifically comment on whether acquisition hasn’t happened or simply that the reported price was inaccurate. Take it for what you will…but for now, though this is not a ridiculous price given the canvas page views and CPMs I would expect Where I’ve Been to be generating, it seems like the first big Facebook app acquisition is still yet to happen.

Just two months after asking, “I Have 250,000 Users, Now What?”, Craig Ulliott has an answer.

In what is by far the largest Facebook application acquisition to date, travel company TripAdvisor has reportedly acquired Where I’ve Been from Craig Ulliott for $3 million.

The acquisition marks the first major successful exit of a Facebook application since the Platform launched just under three months ago.

With 2.3 million users, Where I’ve Been established itself as by far the biggest travel application on Facebook, leading #2 Cities I’ve Visited (also TripAdvisor owned) by over 1 million users.

The $3 million price tag values Where I’ve Been users at about $1.30, or almost 30 times the 4.6 cents per user Slide paid for Favorite Peeps two months ago.

If confirmed, this acquisition marks a major step toward validating the value rapidly being created by Facebook platform developers. Many have questioned the liquidity of the Facebook application market beyond the $60k range that Slide paid to acquire Favorite Peeps.

“This means Facebook is a real platform,” said Naval Ravikant, founder of Hitforge, an investor in the Facebook platform.

“I do think he sold too early, but $3M is a great return for the amount of time he invested.”

Certainly! For a developer once unable to afford a server to handle his bustling app traffic, a $3M sale is sure to inspire additional development and investment in the Platform. Congratulations to Craig for hanging on and leading Where I’ve Been to a successful exit!

Technorati Tags: facebook, app, acquisition, whereivebeen, tripadvisor

I’m here at AppDevCon in San Francisco, a gathering of Facebook developers, entrepreneurs, and investors hosted by SocialMedia’s Seth Goldstein at the offices of Fenwick & West.

Today’s agenda:

12:30 - 1p: What is Engagement and why is it so important?
– Dave McClure (500 Hats)
– Seth Goldstein (SocialMedia)

1p: Creating, Spreading and Scaling Multi Million User Facebook Apps
– R. Tyler Ballance, (Slide)
– Blake Commagere (Vampires / Zombies)
– Dave Genztel, (SocialMedia)
– Jia Shen, (RockYou)
– Joe Winterhalter (Quizzes)
– James Hong (Hot or Not)

2p: Facebook Advertising Models
– Aryeh Goldsmith (Mybucks)
– Sourabh Niyogi (Appsaholic)
– Scott Rafer (Lookery)
– Narendra Rocherolle (fbExchange)
– Matt Sanchez (VideoEgg)
– Sundeep Ahuja (Appfuel)

3p: How to Value Facebook Apps?
– Eve Phillips, (Greylock)
– Keith Rabois, (Slide)
– Naval Ravikant, (Hitforge)
– Angela Strange, (AppFactory)
– Susan Wu, (CRV)

What is Engagement and why is it so important?

12:46pm: Dave McClure: Bake in a metrics system from day 1. Hypothesize the customer lifecycle and refine. Identify 5-10 conversion steps and put somebody on measuring it.

12:52pm: Dave McClure: Let’s not screw up this new ecosystem and fail to provide advertisers with effective metrics. We need some other usage metric than just users - like page views.

Creating, Spreading and Scaling Multi Million User Facebook Apps

1:04pm: Tyler Ballance (creator of Slide’s Top Friends, now with 12 million users): We’ve got a little social network inside your social network. Your top friends are the users you interact with the most. It’s really difficult to scale something after building it in your dorm room. Very difficult to keep persistent database connections open, very difficult to memcache very large amounts of data. Slide and RockYou have been able to do cool things because we’ve got caching servers. If you can afford an iframe, do it. If not, you’ve got FBML, but we all know that it breaks. They had the image caching collision issue where I had friends asking me why they showed up as furniture.

1:09pm: Jia Shen: We have to change things all the time. We’ve pretty much stayed away from all the caching stuff that Facebook offers. What we’ve done instead is build an infrastructure that allows us to regenerate all the profiles pretty quickly. They’re pushing FBML changes today and I’m just reading the post now.

1:19pm: Blake Commagere: Causes is an app with a lot of depth that I’m proud of. I also did Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves, but they’re more like games. We think people want to compare themselves to others. That type of application is inherently more interesting. Collecting points for trivial activities within games - people love to get rewarded and compare. Let people show off what they’ve done. As you’re figuring out what you’re going to do with your apps, your database server is always going to be your constraint. We leverage memcache, we leverage Facebook’s caching. We chose Ruby on Rails because we could build our apps much faster with limited resources. Focus on your database and make sure it’s solid. We use MySQL on a machine with 32GB of RAM. Our app servers are cheap, but they do great. You don’t need 100 app servers to serve millions of users.

1:25pm: Joe Winterhalter: My inspiration came from what’s been successful on MySpace. Quizzes is about self expression. Create an incentive for you to have your friends involved. Most of our growth still comes from invites.

1:31pm: James Hong: We started out trying to create a bunch of different apps, now we’re focused on engagement. HotOrNot, HotLists, Pets, and Moods. Pets is driving millions of canvas page views a day. In our experience, database servers are not the bottleneck, Facebook’s proxying is. We’ve been using a lot of ajax. This does create issues if you want to refresh ads with ajax.

1:35pm: Dave Gentzel: Every single web page that I have made in the last 10 years that has taken less than 2 days to make has worked. Anything that has taken weeks or months has bombed. If your app doesn’t work well enough to succeed after a week, adding more complexity is not going to help. The massively successful apps will be simple, sticky apps that just work better. Apps that don’t involve others won’t work. Vampires was brilliant. Instead of inviting your friends, you’re “biting” them. Within Happy Hour, we do type-in invites instead of checkboxes because the people you type in are the people that are much more likely to pay attention to your request.

1:38pm: Jia Shen: News Feeds convert the best. It’s a black box, but if you can get there, you’ll convert. Do whatever you can do to get in the news feed. Requests and notifications are also good, but they convert less.

1:45pm: James Hong: Three things came to my attention this morning that make me think we’re on to something huge. 1) One of our applications that we spent a week building and haven’t touched since is making $1,000 a day with AdSense. You don’t need to have a big company to build an app to make a living. 2) Roelof Botha is in the room (from Sequoia, who invested in YouTube), and he’s here looking for the next big thing. 3) Bill Gates has rated 16 people on HotOrNot’s Facebook app (this is real). It feels like the early days of the Internet.

1:55pm: Advertising on Facebook - Making money with ads vs Protecting the user experience:

Blake Commagere: These kids don’t need to refinance their mortgage. If I’m just going to break even, I’m not that interested in it.

Dave Gentzel: Browsing MySpace is like browsing an ad-fucked website, so don’t go that far.

Jia Shen: Advertising on Facebook is ultimately not that different than advertising on the rest of the web, or MySpace. But your app is your baby, so it’s your choice. VideoEgg has some high CPM stuff. Do a bunch of A/B testing. I have heard rumors that Facebook is going to tax FQL queries.

James Hong: When you add ads there is some user leakage, but they’ll come back if you have a good product. If you leave for Dr. Pepper you’ll come back if you get messaged by a hot girl. I expect CPMs to go up 2x in the next year or so.

Tyler Ballance: We’re using our smaller apps as testbeds for advertising without sacrificing users on our big apps. You can do much more targeted advertising on Facebook because you know their network, etc. If ad networks can do it properly, it works much better.

Facebook Advertising Models

2:25pm: Scott Rafer: most correlations that ad networks could theoretically draw require tens of thousands of rules. The bulk of the Facebook crowd won’t be monetized all that much to begin with because they don’t spend that much. Most of the early monetization will be helping people do something like learn how to buy their first car, like Ford is doing now. Less profile inference and more not screwing up privacy concerns.

2:27pm: Matt Sanchez: We’re focused on bringing brands into social environments like the Facebook platform. We’re selling at $10 and sharing 60% with the developers. Early and need more advertisers. Selling in the UK, Canada, Australia, and the US.

2:30pm: Narendra Rocherolle: fbExchange is a hybrid between a text link network and a link exchange. The first step for new apps to get some exposure. Completely inventory constrained.

2:35pm: Aryeh Goldsmith: We started Matches and other successful apps and were about to start an ad network, when my partner said we shouldn’t because Facebook might do it. We have built a link exchange however. Now we’ve built AceBucks, a virtual currency. If you integrate a currency or points system within your app, your users now have more reason to come back and be involved. It also changes how people use your apps - whereas people wouldn’t pay $1 to do something in your app, they may pay $10 AceBucks which they can get for free by doing something else in your application.

2:39pm: Seth Goldstein: We launched “Monetize Your Apps” within Appsaholic last week. You can pick your app and ad format. We’re doing social advertising. We also have Promote Your Apps, and just this week started showing live bids. We are experimenting to create a quality score. You can buy clicks from us with PayPal.

2:44pm Seth Goldstein: Facebook says they want third party ad networks to exist, but that they may launch an advertising marketplace at some point themselves. There’s still a lot of ambiguity. Facebook understands that they could enable better behavioral networks than anyone else.

2:45pm Matt Sanchez: Media buyers want more simplicity. Age, gender, location.

2:48pm Sundeep Ahuja: We have to be careful around which data is private and what’s not.

2:52pm David Henderson: The young media buyers know about Facebook. But it’s still new. We have to give the value proposition clearly to buyers. People in agencies don’t understand what the Facebook Platform is. A major beer brand had a problem with the fact that we couldn’t guarantee that 70.1% of the audience was over 21 (can’t guarantee that in the feeds).

2:58pm Keith Rabois: People say they like transparency, but ultimately they really don’t.

3:04pm Lee Lorenzen: With Adonomics we’re hoping to measure all the way from installation to canvas page views. We encourage developers not to sell their apps for less than $1 per user. We think users are worth $500 to Facebook. If Facebook grows to 200 million users, I think they’re worth $100 billion. The social operating system is a big curveball that has been thrown at Google. It could be a chance for Microsoft to get back in the game.

3:10pm Roelof Botha: Brand marketers don’t innovate very quickly. Early search marketers on Google were not the Fortune 500. I encourage developers to create more measurable performance-based ad products because performance-based advertisers innovate more quickly.

How do Investors/Acquirers Value Facebook Applications?

3:22pm Angela: Web sites have spent more energy attracting user than a Facebook app has. Therefore, you could say that a website user is more valuable. At the same time, with a Facebook user comes their relationships on Facebook, so you could say that a Facebook user is more valuable. At Bay Partners, we value apps according to growth, category leadership, engagement (which is currently subjective, hopefully Facebook will help), team, and business model possibilities.

3:23pm Naval: I think Facebook users are worth more than website users. Most websites inflate their user numbers. The value of a Facebook user is going up - at first users were being sold for $0.10, now it’s $0.60-$0.70. TripAdvisor just bought Where I’ve Been for $1.50/user.

3:24pm Keith: Whoever is more upstream has more valuable users. App users are derivative of Facebook users. It just can’t be the case that Facebook users are more valuable than destination site users.

3:26pm Susan: It’s still so nascent, there’s still divergent opinions, it remains to be seen. I think it completely depends on the application. I’m a big investor in online games and virtual worlds, or synchronous social media. The type of engagement you get with synchronous social media is much different than asynchronous social media.

3:28pm Eve: The classic destination site is starting to disappear.

What business options do developers of successful apps have?

3:30pm Eve: Entrepreneurship is fundamentally about the entrepreneur. Some want to build a lifestyle business and others want to be more aggressive.

3:35pm Keith: There hasn’t been a technology company to go public without venture capital in the last 20 years. For owners of other destination sites Facebook is a tactical play. But I’ve looked at thousands of apps and I wouldn’t invest in any of them (in the VC sense).

3:40pm Susan: Resoundingly we prefer to invest in apps that could exist outside the Facebook user. It’s up to the CEO to determine the ROI of users in every channel - it completely depends on the relationship you have with your users. There are very few apps on Facebook today that would be good standalone businesses. There are inklings of micro-transaction or virtual currency platforms. There are more sophisticated business plans that are trying to create more persistent or new types of relationships with users.

3:43pm Naval: The apps that win aren’t necessarily going to feel more complex, they will feel more right. Also, I will take a contrarian view and actually bet on apps that will only live in Facebook. I think about it like an OS - would I invest in applications that only exist in Windows? Yes. Facebook however doesn’t want to let apps have out of band relationships with users.

3:46pm Roelof Botha: There is opportunity to take the torrent of users and built a sizeable business off the platform, but only a small number of firms will be successful in doing that.

What about other social networks?

3:49pm Angela: LinkedIn announced that they were opening their platform a week after Facebook did…in 9 months. Maybe they should make their API compatible with Facebook’s.

3:50pm Naval: I think it will be difficult for others to emulate the Facebook API, there are just different features. MySpace will take a more controlled approach. LinkedIn has a different demographic. This is Facebook’s game to lose.

Is there a market for liquidity for apps not at venture scale?

3:58pm Keith: We only buy developers. We hire them, not just apps.

3:59pm Angela: Users is just a baseline, we look at a lot of engagement factors.

4:00pm Naval: For those who said that Paypal didn’t get a good valuation because they were too dependent on eBay, we would all be happy with that outcome. It may not be enough for a half billion dollar VC fund, but for someone smaller there’s a lot of value to be created.

4:02pm Keith: Maybe in certain verticals, like travel or movies, you could sell those, but not What’s Your Stripper Name.

4:04pm Susan: There are segments where there are attractive exits for small development teams.

4:04pm Eve: Although there may be an arbitrage opportunity for individuals, it doesn’t make sense on the venture side, we have to look at value creation. We are willing to make seed level investments though.

4:05pm Naval: $15m exits can apply here.

Facebook today released a version of the site specifically for the iPhone, and it’s one of the most functional and beautiful iPhone web apps I’ve seen yet.

Accessible via iphone.facebook.com, Facebook’s iPhone app offers views of all vital Facebook pages - including great versions of the News Feed, Pending Requests, Profile, Wall, Friends’ Status Updates, Friends’ Photos, and Inbox Reading and Composing.

Page transitions, the friends list, and several other features emulate the iPhone UI wonderfully.

Check out more screenshots from Chris Messina. Great job, Facebook!

Technorati Tags: facebook, iphone

Dave Winer and Michael Arrington are making a big deal today about Facebook RSS feeds for friends’ status updates and posted items. While it’s true that these features are a step in the open direction, let’s all remember Facebook is really not very open.

For example Facebook does NOT provide feeds for many core features, including:

1. My News Feed
2. Friends’ Mini Feeds
3. Friends’ Profile Updates
4. Friends’ Updated Photos
5. Groups Updates
6. Events Updates

Additionally, Facebook does NOT provide export functions for data I have stored there:

1. Friends/Contact List
2. Photo Albums

So yes, while there are some open functions (particularly the Twitter-esque friends’ status updates feed), most data is still stuck in Facebook.

Update: Facebook’s Ari Steinberg points out in the comments that 1) a friends’ notes feed is also published, and 2) events are actually exportable. Thanks for the corrections, Ari!

So, a summary of Facebook’s “open” features:

1. Friends’ Status Updates RSS
2. Friends’ Notes RSS
3. Friends’ Shared Items RSS
4. Events Calendar Exporting
5. My Notifications

Technorati Tags: facebook, rss, feeds, twitter, walledgarden