There was a lot of hoopla in the blogosphere today about the New York Times launching a Facebook application. What they didn’t tell you is that few people on Facebook care: despite all the cool ways that the app lets you interact with New York Times content, only 16 people used the app today.

Even if that number if off by an order of magnitude, it’s clear that while the New York Times is making efforts to connect to Facebook users, they’re not resonating with very many so far.

But the Times is not alone. Similar applications from NBC Sports and CBS News have been around for much longer but are only engaging 32 and 29 Facebook users per day, respectively.

Heck, even Internet tech media company CNET is having trouble: its CNET TV app is only garnering 20 users a day.

What’s the point? Essentially that most media companies have not figured out how to package or distribute content in compelling ways inside Facebook.

Some would argue (with good cause) that this is simply because the Facebook audience is not interested in consuming content like “CBS Breaking News Headlines.” However, before stopping there, here is one last example that may shed more light on this question:

Yahoo!, clearly a company that understands how to distribute many forms of media on the web, built an app that distributes its music video collection called Yahoo! Music Videos. As you can see, it achieved minimal success. Then, Yahoo! called up powerhouse app developer RockYou to help them redesign their application, and voila:

The reincarnated Music Videos application has achieved 1 million installs and sports 30,000 active daily users – 50 times more than before.

All this to say, Facebook is different. It’s a new medium and different than the rest of the web. There is some expertise involved in building Facebook applications that users will actually use to shuffle your content around their social network. While building an interface or RSS feed for your content is an easy project (and easy money for contract Facebook application developers), web sites and media companies who try this will fail to achieve any significant business objectives.

[tags]facebook,new york times,cbs,nbc,rockyou,application design[/tags]

Facebook is experiencing major Platform downtime tonight and all applications are down for most if not all users.

We’ve been seeing intermittent availability issues all week, but today’s/tonight’s outage is the most severe yet. According to a hot thread in the developer forums, some have not been able to ping apps.facebook.com for over 3 hours.

Obviously Platform downtime issues affect all application developers, big and small. The team is scrambling and we’ll pass along updates as they become available.

[tags]platform,availability[/tags]

Since the Facebook Platform launched just over three months ago, entrepreneurs and developers have been gathering at groks and developer garages all around North America (we covered AppDevCon and FacebookCampToronto last month). However, until now, many of the top Facebook developers and entrepreneurs haven’t gathered in one place.

So we’re excited to announce two events coming in early October solely focused on building applications and companies on the Facebook Platform!

Graphing Social Patterns: The Business & Technology of Facebook

Graphing Social Patterns is a new conference devoted to building and distributing apps on the Facebook Platform, coming October 7-9 in San Jose, CA. The conference will be a great way for both business executives and developers to learn more about the Platform and will feature speakers from top application developers, ad networks, venture capitalists, and Facebook.

So far, confirmed speakers include Dave Morin, Director of the Facebook Platform, Tim O’Reilly of O’Reilly Media, Charlene Li of Forrester Research, Susan Wu of Charles River Ventures, and executives and top application developers from SocialMedia, Slide, and RockYou, with more presenters confirmed daily.

Day 1 (Sunday) will be a (business & technical) workshop day that concludes with the start of an “Appathon” hackathon, while Day 2 (Monday) will be devoted to business and marketing topics and Day 3 (Tuesday) will be focused on development and apps. Check out the schedule for more details.

InsideFacebook a proud partner of Graphing Social Patterns. Passes are available on a per-day or all-access basis. It should be a fantastic conference for Facebook Platform entrepreneurs, marketers, and developers.

CommunityNext: Platform

CommunityNext: Platform is the latest from the CommunityNext conference series, coming October 5-6 in Sunnyvale, CA. CommunityNext: Platform will focus on building applications for the Facebook Platform and other social networking platforms and APIs, and will feature developers of many top 100 Facebook applications and venture capitalists active in the platforms space.

So far, confirmed presenters include David Gentzel of Social Media (Happy Hour, Food Fight, etc.), Zachary Allia of Free Gifts, Craig Ulliott of Where I’ve Been, Keith Rabois of Slide, and Naval Ravikant of Hit Forge. Check out the speakers page for a complete list.

CommunityNext: Platform will be packing everything into just two days: Day 1 (Friday) will be a developer day concluding with the kickoff of an “Iron Coder” contest while Day 2 (Saturday) will examine key topics on platform development.

The conference should be a fantastic place for social network application developers and entrepreneurs to learn best practices and connect. InsideFacebook readers receive a 10% discount by registering with discount code “insidefacebook” for the next 3 days!

[tags]facebook,conference[/tags]

Facebook announced this morning that it is now publishing the names and profile photos of all members with search privacy settings set to “Everyone” to the public.

This has two implications: non-members can now search for Facebook members and see all members’ names and photos, and web crawlers (like Google) will now more readily index the Facebook member rolls.

While public access isn’t entirely new (public profiles have been around for a long time), Facebook is clearly pushing the marketing/privacy boundaries a little further by allowing for personal profile photos to be so readily accessible to the general public and archivable by open web crawlers. While this change won’t be a major scare for most members, it does open new scenarios for privacy violations.

[tags]facebook,public,people,search[/tags]

While the Facebook platform has taken off over the last three months, few personal finance apps have emerged with much early adoption. While a few big brands have gotten into the game with basic portfolio tracking tools, most of the attention has been paid to lending, bill splitting, and games. Here, we’re going to take a quick glance at Facebook personal finance apps.

For those with a stock portfolio to keep track of, you can now get quick updates on your investments without ever leaving Facebook. Both Forbes and Yahoo Finance have applications that display stock prices and charts. The Forbes app has functional charts and social functions like tracking your friends’ stock picks. Unfortunately, the Yahoo Finance app doesn’t display images of stock charts – you have to click on each and wait for it to load. We think the Forbes application is a smoother yet basic experience.

For those without large portfolios to track, virtual stock market games offer a way to gain some experience researching companies and making some mistakes without going broke. The biggest and best virtual stock market game on Facebook is FSX (the Fantasy Stock Exchange) by HedgeStop.com. You start off with $10M in virtual dollars (and can earn another $10M for each friend you invite into the FSX). You can select stocks and build up a portfolio very quickly and compare yourself to the best stock pickers on Facebook or your friends. Comparisons are generally based on net dollar gains so getting additional money from friend invites should give you an advantage, though detracts from the game overall.

Several app developers have created payment apps. However, after testing several and finding most to have very few users, it would be hard to recommend any of these systems except Paypal. The Paypal Facebook Application lets you easily send or receive money inside Facebook. The Paypal application automatically creates Facebook Messages with the payment link included. Hopefully someday Paypal will have competition and we’ll see lower fees, but for now Paypal is still the best solution.

If you need some extra cash, the Lending Club Application can help connect you with others with some to lend, or if you’ve got cash on hand you can extend personal loans for a decent rate of return. Lending Club claims to have loaned over $800,000 through Facebook so far. Unfortunately, the application doesn’t contain much functionality inside Facebook, and links to LendingClub.com for transactions.

On the purely tracking side, splitting bills with roommates can cause a lot of arguments and several Facebook apps aim to make this process easier. The best applications are Bill Monk by BillMonk.com and SPLIT IT by TD Canada Trust. Both let you add roommates, add bills, and quickly figure out who owes who how much. Bill Monk has better support for roommates not on Facebook (who doesn’t?) but SPLIT IT is slightly easier to use. (And if you need to track your personal bills in Facebook, try Bill Track Reminder.)

Compared to most types of Facebook applications, these finance apps showed the best overall quality and performance. We didn’t experience any problems with applications not loading or generating errors.

Of course, the pink elephant in the room for money on Facebook is Facebook itself. Will they build payment system in house? Payments on Facebook are currently handled on outside websites, which creates a number of challenges for merchants and a poor user experience. Many developers have been clamoring for Facebook to launch a payment system fully integrated with the Platform soon.

[tags]facebook,money,finance,stocks,bills,lending[/tags]