As Google prepares to ready its own open social networking platform while at the same time trying to negotiate a partnership with Facebook, the Google News team has finally released Google’s first official foray onto the Facebook Platform. The Google News app allows you to – you guessed it – read Google News within Facebook (and share news items with your friends).

I don’t expect this app to become very popular (Facebook already has a share platform, and news reading has not been made popular by anyone else so far), but it’s nice to see that Google is experimenting.

[tags]facebook, google[/tags]

A few weeks ago, Facebook announced that they would be standardizing the invitation sending UI and eliminating the notifications.sendRequest method for developers. However, they did not give a specific timeline until last Thursday, when Facebook announced that the change would happen in 7 days, giving developers a week to change the invitation code within their apps. The change went live a couple days ago, and now all Facebook invitations look the same.

Since the beginning of the Platform, Facebook has had to tweak the invitation rules a few times to limit the impact spammers could have at large. At first, Facebook had no limits on invitations – apps could spam all your friends every day, and many apps had little behind their full page of checkboxes with no skip button, yet were able to grow to millions of users in a matter of a couple of weeks. After that, Facebook limited the number of invitations a user of an application could send to 10 per day – and later to 20 per day, though only 10 at once.

Nevertheless, that didn’t stop developers from still using borderline tactics. Because invitations are such a vital part of the user application experience, Facebook ultimately decided to bring more of the UI in house to prevent poor experiences from becoming common amongst Facebook applications.

Unfortunately, this change does cost developers some power to design compelling invitation experiences. For example, Facebook only allows developers to filter which friends show up by default in the UI widget by network (and to hide friends who already have the app). Previously, developers were able to much more powerfully choose which 10 friends showed up at the top of an invite page list. However, developers no longer have to build or maintain invitation UI – it’s now all handled by Facebook.

Ultimately, Facebook made a decision to protect the long term integrity of the Platform and a core viral channel – requests. This is a good move for everyone in the Platform community, though it is sad that the spammers out there cost the good developers some powerful tools.

[tags]facebook, invitations, requests, notifications, UI, spam[/tags]

Two weeks ago I moderated a discussion panel on Viral Strategy at the Graphing Social conference in San Jose. I was joined by Blake Commagere, Jason Beckerman, Jia Shen, and Tim O’Shaughnessy. Here’s the full video of the session:

Dave McClure has posted full video of several conference sessions at GraphingSocial.com. Check it out!

[tags]graphing social, viral strategy, invitations, notifications, news feed optimization[/tags]

Amit Agarwal points out a little Facebook easter egg: a “Grid View” for your friends.

Simply go to your Friends page, and choose the “—” option from the “Show” dropdown. The resulting page is a tile view of your friends, much like the “Friend Grid” apps.

[tags]facebook, friends, grid, view[/tags]

Facebook this week made the blog press when it added “Networking” to “Looking for” on your profile. This move makes sense, as Facebook accommodates its increasingly older, more professional user base.

However, what got less coverage is that for some older users not in college networks, “Random Play” and “Whatever I Can Get” have been removed from “Looking For”. Several older bloggers have commented how the existence of those options makes them uncomfortable with Facebook – looks like Facebook thought it a good idea to clean things up a little.

[tags]facebook,dating,relationships,networking[/tags]

The Netly News reports tonight that Google Director of Product Management (eCommerce) and Stanford CS PhD Benjamin Ling is leaving Google to “head up the Facebook Platform”.

Ling is among at least several senior engineers known to have departed Google for Facebook in recent months. In July, former Google Product Manager Justin Rosenstein was outspoken about the prospects of making the move to Facebook.

Facebook is known to offer generous options packages to lure top engineering talent. With Google’s strong share price recently, it wouldn’t be surprising to see more make the jump in the coming months.

[tags]facebook,google[/tags]

The Weekend Of Facebook Conferences was great. But you can only talk about viral exponents and monetization for so long…now it’s back to work :)

Here are some brief notes I presented to start the Viral Strategy discussion panel at Graphing Social Patterns on Tuesday. (If you’d like a PDF, just email me.) It was great meeting many of you there!

The Facebook conference season is in full force! Today, Graphing Social Patterns: The Business & Technology of Facebook kicks off in San Jose. The fantastic speaker and panel lineup includes:

• Keynotes by Reid Hoffman, CEO of Linkedin, and Tim O’Reilly, CEO of O’Reilly Media
• Top executives from Slide, RockYou, and SocialMedia
• Executives from ad networks Lookery, RockYou, AdBrite, and fbExchange
• Dave Morin, Mike Arrington, Danny Sullivan, and more

In addition, I will be moderating a discussion Tuesday afternoon on “Viral Strategy: Invitations, Notifications, and News Feed Optimization.” I will be joined by an awesome expert panel including:

• Blake Commagere of Causes, Zombies, Vampires, and Mogad
• Jia Shen of RockYou
• Jason Beckerman of TeachThePeople
• Tim O’Shaughnessy of Hungry Machine

We will be discussing the in’s, out’s, do’s and dont’s of using the Facebook Platform’s “viral” features. I’m sure it will be a fantastic conversation. Look forward to seeing you there!

Shortly after Facebook launched the Platform in May of this year, LinkedIn announced that it would be offering its own platform in “9 to 12 months”. Since then, expectations have grown that many of the major social networking services will build their own platforms as well. In fact, just yesterday, Hi5, the third largest social network, said that it is building an application platform that will launch in about a year.

As more and more social networks announce Platform plans, it becomes harder and harder to attract and sustain a critical mass of application developers. As new platforms emerge, widget and SNAP companies have to port their apps to run on the new platform.

Today, I got word from a credible source that fast growing Tagged, which has well over 40 million members, is building a platform that will exactly mimic the Facebook Platform API. In other words, if successfully implemented, Facebook apps will be able to run on Tagged without any significant code changes (developers will have to manage the different user communities, of course).

If true, Tagged would be the first to take the path of choosing to emulate the dominant platform’s API. While this will lead to many more apps entering the Tagged ecosystem, Tagged will have the task of keeping up to date with Facebook’s changes, even if they build their own custom extensions.

We’ll keep following general platform news as other social networks enter the fray over the coming months.

[tags]facebook, tagged, platform[/tags]

Tim O’Reilly released a new research report on the Facebook Platform this week. The $149 report includes 2 free updates as things are so rapidly changing, and includes selections by Dave McClure and Niall Kennedy. According to O’Reilly:

Find out what it takes to launch a successful Facebook application, understand the new rules of the application development game in a Web 2.0 world, and get the scoop on the most popular Facebook apps in this new report from Tim O’Reilly and the O’Reilly Radar team.

The report:

* Sizes up the Facebook opportunity–who’s making money, and how?
* Lays out best practices of marketing with Facebook Applications, aka Social Media Optimization (SMO)
* Identifies the top 200 Facebook applications and plots their growth rates
* Goes beyond Facebook, and scopes out the emerging widget economy

Tim will be debuting his report this week during his keynote at the Graphing Social Facebook conference in San Jose.

Additionally, Compete.com released data on how users spend time on Facebook recently. According to Compete:

* 14 million people interacted with Facebook Applications in August.
* Applications capture more time per session than any other activity on the site.
* Over 16 Million people browsed photos in August. 

[tags]facebook,research,reports,data,usage[/tags]