Inside Facebook

A few weeks ago we wrote about the upcoming Graphing Social Patterns: The Business & Technology of Facebook and Community Next: Platform conferences on building for the Facebook Platform — they’re now coming up soon! I look forward to seeing everyone there in a couple weeks!

But wait, there’s more — the Facebook conference calendar is really heating up. Over the course of the next couple months 3 more events are being held in the Bay Area and Seattle to grok the Facebook Platform. Here’s the scoop:

SNAP Summit

October 26, San Francisco

SNAP Summit is a one-day, single-track conference that focuses in-depth on the Facebook platform, while looking ahead at new and emerging platforms, such as Yahoo! Mash.

Our conference is designed especially for developers, and is also relevant to entrepreneurs, marketers, visionaries, and anyone interested in the web’s next big revolution.

InsideFacebook readers can save 10% on their registration by entering discount code “insidefacebook“!

App-Camp

October 20, San Francisco

App-Camp 2007 is a Saturday gathering focused on the development of applications within open API environments.

This will be an opportunity to discuss everything from user behavior and best practices to technical solutions. There will also be plenty of food during the day plus an after party with even more food - and entertainment to boot!

Web Community Forum: Facebook

December 5-6, Seattle

The goal of Web Community Forum Seattle 2007 is to discuss and propose some tentative best practices for community building for business, political campaigns, marketing, and other professional efforts using Facebook and the Facebook platform.

Technorati Tags: facebook, conference, snap, appcamp, community, forum

WYSIWYG widget publishing platforms Widgetbox and Dapper both announced new tools for turning widgets into Facebook applications today.

Widgetbox released App Accelerator, a new service that lets you publish your Widgetbox widgets as Facebook apps. In addition to bringing your Widgetbox widget into Facebook, App Accelerator also packages viral Facebook features like news feeds and friend invites around it, helping it grow. Over 200 Facebook apps have already been created during private beta.

Widgetbox simultaneously announced a revenue service for App Accelerator developers whereby RockYou will sell inventory and will split a 50% commission with Widgetbox. This is a nice perk for publishers in monetizable spaces.

Separately, Dapper today announced AppMaker, a tool that lets you turn any”Dapp” into its own Facebook app. The service launched with apps created by partners Answers.com and MTV. Dapper is focusing more on content syndication and allows for more powerful look and feel customization.

Cranking out a simple Facebook app with Dapper is dead simple. (The Inside Facebook app below was made in 5 minutes!)

Automated Facebook application creation gives the “long tail” of communities and content a better Facebook experience. We’ll keep an eye on this space as it grows.

Technorati Tags: dapper, widgetbox, automated

Facebook released some new statistics today on overall growth, user demographics and engagement, international growth, and the Facebook Platform. Some notable numbers:

• Facebook now has more than 42 million active users (double the number one year ago when it opened up registration and growing at more than 200,000 per day since January)
• More than half of Facebook users are outside of college (85 percent of US college students still use Facebook)
• More than half of active users return daily (users spend an average of 20 minutes on the site per day)
  
• Facebook is the top photo sharing application on the Web
• There are more than 6 million active user groups on the site
• More than 80% of Facebook members have used at least one application built on the Facebook Platform

It’s quite impressive that 80%, or over 33 million, of Facebook members have installed a third-party Platform application.

By turning to Appsaholic and doing a little extrapolation (see below), we see that the top 44 apps alone have racked up nearly 200 million total installations. That means that the average user who has added at least one app has added an average of six apps. That may be even more impressive.

Technorati Tags: facebook, platform, growth, statistics

The WSJ is reporting today that Microsoft is in talks to acquire 3-5% of Facebook for US $500 million, giving Facebook up to a $10 billion valuation.

While rumors have swirled of a possible impending Facebook IPO in recent weeks, Facebook founders have indicated that they’re much more apt to take strategic investments than raise public money.

Microsoft is already in bed with Facebook and best positioned to strike a deal, having signed an agreement last year to be the company’s exclusive advertising partner through 2011.

And though Google has been rumored to be opening up its social graph in a few weeks to compete with Facebook, the Journal says Google and Facebook have also been in talks about a potential investment and future advertising partnerships. It’s clear that the guys over in Mountain View have been thinking long and hard about their strategy in the space.

Update: Facebook’s Brandee Barker declined to comment on the rumors this afternoon.

Technorati Tags: facebook, microsoft, google, investment

Facebook shook up the social networking world in May when it announced the financial terms of doing business on the Facebook Platform: not only did Facebook give third parties unprecedented APIs and opportunities for viral growth, but it also agreed to let developers sell advertising and conduct transactions for free, keeping 100% of the revenues generated by their applications.

This laissez-faire approach to the Platform economy stood in stark contrast to the command-and-control philosophy of MySpace (and others), and consequently spurred massive entrepreneur and developer interest.

But will free last forever?

Platform developers and others who are familiar with the Facebook TOS know that Facebook protects its “social graph” dearly: Facebook disallows developers from retaining member profile or relationship data in their databases. Facebook wants to always own the fundamental human grid on which the myriad of social applications are developed; without exclusive ownership of that grid, applications would have much less reason to exist within Facebook.

However, while developers agree not to retain Facebook profile and friend data, they still have temporary access to it during application use, and are finding ways to use that information to serve better targeted ads. (It’s what one VC I spoke to recently called “profile-enhanced” targeting.) By combining profile-enhanced targeting with more traditional contextual and behavioral targeting approaches, Facebook developers (and ad networks) may be able to deliver new significant value to advertisers.

Based on how protective Facebook has been of the social graph, many are beginning to doubt that Facebook will continue to allow developers free use of profile data for long. It’s a potentially significant value leak that Facebook could plug in a number of ways:

1. Prevent developers from passing along supplementary profile data to advertisers. However, this could be quite difficult to manage.
2. Require all developers to use a yet-to-be-created Facebook advertising marketplace for any profile targeted ads. This would keep Facebook in the middle of advertisers and all premium Facebook inventory.
3. Tax developer queries on profile data. While sure to scare away some developers, Facebook could charge for queries that access certain profile fields, thereby capturing some of the margins of third parties selling profile-targeted ads.

As the initial bonanza matures, how long do you think Facebook will be able to maintain its hands-off approach to the Platform economy?

Technorati Tags: facebook, platform, taxes

Shortly after the Facebook Platform opened in May, Renkoo, a web service focused on improving the way friends arrange social events, created a Facebook application called “Booze Mail” that lets users give virtual drinks to each other. Like many other companies, Renkoo (founded by Adam Rifkin and Joyce Park in 2005) wanted to test the Facebook waters with an app related to its core off-Facebook service.

However, unlike most experimental apps, Booze Mail took off: it’s currently the 15th most actively used application on Facebook, with over 300,000 daily users and 3,000,000 total installations.

Like other creators of early successful apps, Renkoo is now unsure where exactly it will go with its newfound hit.

“The success of Booze Mail took us by surprise, and we’re still figuring out where the company and its products should go from here,” said Adam Rifkin, Renkoo CEO.

The question facing Rifkin is one facing several startups who now find themselves with multiple applications across different platforms.

• Should the company focus on one platform/application over the other?
• Can applications on different platforms be integrated without messing up both?
• Should Facebook be used primarily as lead generation to a destination site, or is it worthy of more strategic focus?
• What about other platforms, like MySpace and Bebo?

“Booze Mail on Facebook sends tens of thousands of people a day to Renkoo.com, despite the fact that we’ve made no effort to connect the Booze Mail experience to the Renkoo application. That said, we are in the process of building the booze-mail.com website so people can send Booze Mail without being on Facebook,” said Rifkin.

“But maybe Booze Mail shouldn’t be driving additional Renkoo usage since there’s very little overlap in the people each application appeals to.”

Like many social networking application startups, Renkoo must weigh the risks and benefits of different platform strategies. It’s a new dilemma not often faced by social services before the Facebook Platform.

“We’re likely to try everything, and see what the users show us they like through their behaviors,” Rifkin said.

What are your thoughts on what Renkoo should do?

Technorati Tags: facebook, renkoo, boozemail

This week’s push had at least one Facebook engineer a little nervous, and while several developers experienced a brief period of Platform downtime yesterday, overall things appear to have gone smoothly.

One new feature that went live this week is a simple auto-complete widget for Facebook sidebar search. Currently, the feature only displays shortcuts to your friends. Selecting a friend takes you directly to their page, skipping the search results page.

Additionally, earlier this week, Facebook Javascript (FBJS) moved out of beta and into 1.0. FBJS only launched six weeks ago after developer clamor for better “rich” Facebook application capabilities than were available in Facebook’s original “Mock AJAX” spec. (FBJS functions very similarly to JavaScript; the Developers Wiki explains the differences.)

Technorati Tags: facebook, search, fbjs

Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg just announced at TechCrunch40 today that Facebook is launching fbFund, a $10 million venture fund to invest specifically in Facebook Platform developers. fbFund will be backed and managed by Jim Breyer of Accel Partners and Peter Thiel of Founders Fund; Facebook itself will not invest in the fund, but will apparently play an active role in managing it.

fbFund will grant between $25,000 and $250,000 per startup, putting it somewhere between a traditional seed fund and ultra-early-stage fund like Y Combinator. According to Facebook:

• The grants will not come with any conditions except that the grantee use the funds to build their company on Facebook Platform.
• Any individual or company is eligible, anywhere in the world can apply as long as they have not raised any formal venture funding.
• The Founders Fund and Accel Partners will have the right to fund these companies first, but beyond this, no equity or debt will be associated with any grant made.
• Anyone will be able to apply for an fbFund grant from the Facebook website. All proposals will be reviewed by the advisory council and then approved by the investment committee. The goal is to get decisions to potential grantees within the month that they apply.
• Initially, you can mail your business plan to platform@facebook.com. In coming weeks, we will set up an online submission process. Submissions are being accepted immediately.
• We want to see the most innovative and ambitious proposals for building a business on Facebook Platform.

fbFund’s charter board of directors includes Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, Reid Hoffman, CEO of LinkedIn (often called a competitor to Facebook these days), Josh Kopelman of First Round Capital, and Rajeev Motwani of Google/Stanford. Zuckerberg has certainly allied with some very smart investors to direct fbFund.

fbFund marks a major development in the growth of the Facebook economy. The financial options available to developers building great applications and creating serious value on Facebook are increasing, and more investors are sure to follow. (Early stage Facebook-focused funds have also recently been set up by Bay Partners and Altura Ventures.) However, with the advent of fbFund, Facebook will of course now more than ever have to do a great job maintaining its credibility as an equal-opportunity-platform.

This week, Facebook launched a very interesting new advertising product called Flyers Pro. Flyers Pro sports two major differences from the previous Flyers (now Flyers Basic) ad product:

1) Targeting options are now more rich.

Advertisers can now not only filter by A/S/L, but also:

• Profile Keywords - such as “PS3,” “Gucci,” or more niche interests
• Workplace - such as “Google”, or anywhere else recruiters might want to hire away top talent
• Relationship Status - those in a relationship, single, engaged, or married
• Political Views - people who call themselves liberal, moderate, or conservative
• Current Education Status - those in high school, college or alumni

2) Pricing is now CPC as opposed to CPM.

This is a big deal, because click-through rates are so low in social networks - some as low as 0.1% or even 0.01%. Facebook recently quadrupled its Flyers CPM pricing from $0.50 CPM to $2.00 CPM - at a 0.1% CTR that’s $2.00 per click, which is not affordable for most advertisers.

Thus, Flyers Pro looks like it could offer significantly lower prices to Facebook advertisers than ever before. It will be interesting to see how much traffic early advertisers can get at cheap prices as the Flyers Pro marketplace develops!

(Of course, it should be noted that several Facebook Platform ad networks have offered CPC and CPA/CPI pricing for quite a while now. Purchasing traffic from specific applications will still probably be a better bargain than profile-targeted Flyers Pro traffic for some advertisers.)

Technorati Tags: facebook, advertising, cpc, flyers

Stanford students will find a new addition to the Computer Science department’s course offerings this fall:

CS 377W
“Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook”
3-5 units
Tues & Thurs: 2:15 - 5:05

Although the Facebook Platform only launched three and a half months ago, Facebook marketing guru Dave McClure and BJ Fogg, Director of Stanford’s Persuasive Technology Lab, have teamed up to lead an experimental new course in Facebook application design.

The course will actually not focus on the technical aspects of Platform development, but rather it will bear the thumbprints of McClure’s passion for startup metrics and Fogg’s focus on designing persuasive and engaging user experiences.

Fogg and McClure hope to attract students from various departments (including the business school), and students will work on small teams to create three projects throughout the quarter.

Here’s the Facebook group for the class, which has over 280 members.

Kudos to BJ and Dave for setting up such an innovative course so quickly. If I were still a Stanford student, I would rearrange my schedule to take this class. I bet they’ll probably have to find a bigger lecture hall after the first class meeting to accommodate the interest!

Technorati Tags: facebook, stanford, application, design