Facebook made three announcements today…more coming soon:

Facebook Unveils Facebook Ads

Today, Facebook Ads launched with three parts: a way for businesses to build pages on Facebook to connect with their audiences; an ad system that facilitates the spread of brand messages virally through Facebook Social Ads; and an interface to gather insights into people’s activity on Facebook that marketers care about.

Leading Websites Offer Facebook Beacon for Social Distribution

Users Gain Ability to Share their Actions from 44 Participating Sites with their Friends on Facebook…The websites participating in Beacon can determine the most relevant and appropriate set of actions from their sites that users can distribute on Facebook. These actions can include posting an item for sale, completing a purchase, scoring a high score in an online game or viewing of video. When users who are logged into Facebook visit a participating site, they receive a prompt asking whether to they want to share those activities with their friends on Facebook. If they do, those friends can now view those actions through News Feed or Mini-Feed stories.

Facebook Ads Launches with 12 Landmark Partners

Facebook today announced that 12 of the world’s largest brands and companies have immediately committed to using Facebook Ads…Partners joining the stage at a launch event in New York for Facebook Ads included senior executives from Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, The Coca-Cola Company, Sony Pictures and Verizon. Other brands and companies launching with Facebook Ads include CondéNet (Epicurious.com and flip.com), Crest Whitestrips, Dove Cream Oils®, Herbal Essences, The New York Times Co., and Saturn.

[tags]facebook,socialads,beacon[/tags]

The landscape for social network application developers has changed drastically with the anouncement of OpenSocial this week.

Google’s Orkut and a cadre of partners including behemoth MySpace, LinkedIn, Hi5, Bebo, Friendster, Six Apart, Ning, and Plaxo, have announced common support for what has already become in the eyes in developers the second major “platform.”

I spoke with Peter Chane, the Group Product Manager at Google who is helping to lead the OpenSocial effort, about OpenSocial and how it compares to the Facebook Platform.

IF: At a high level, how do the real estate and functionality that OpenSocial affords developers compare to the Facebook Platform?

PC: With OpenSocial, there are many “container” sites that can host developers’ social applications. Together, these sites have over 200 million users.

There will be a lot of commonality between container sites in terms of the profile page and canvas page real estate developers have to work with. However, some sites will offer additional features that they’d like developers to plug into; many are extending the API.

One example is the Flixster app on MySpace. When the Flixster app is added, it reads in a user’s favorite movies into the app. MySpace added the “movies” field to the API…there’s not a fixed list of profile fields that will be available to developers on every container.

IF: Facebook offers features that help applications spread “virally” to their friends. Will OpenSocial support features like Facebook’s invitations, notifications, and feed items?

PC: There isn’t a feature like invitations in the OpenSocial API at this point. It’s something we’re considering — a lot of sites and developers have expressed interest in this, and we’ll be having conversations with them.

OpenSocial container sites will have activity streams that show activity from the user and their friends. Just like on Facebook, applications can publish stories to it. This is one channel that will really help applications spread.

IF: Facebook has fairly strict limitations on what profile data applications can retain. What about OpenSocial?

PC: We haven’t included any rules about this in the API yet. OpenSocial is still very much a work in progress, and we’ll have more to say soon.

This will be addressed between now and when the first site goes live that allows apps to be used by consumers. But our general philosophy on this is to allow these sites to make decisions for themselves.

IF: Unlike Facebook, OpenSocial doesn’t require apps to be marked up in a proprietary language. Will developers be able to reuse substantial amount of code from their Facebook apps in their OpenSocial apps?

PC: I’ve heard both models from developers. Some say, “I have already built some infrastructure, and it’s great that OpenSocial can take advantage of it.” Other developers say that they want to write client side JavaScript. The API allows for both types of apps to exist–those in IFrames, and those in AJAX.

IF: OpenSocial is being touted as write-once, run-anywhere. Do you think that the same applications will work on different container sites, given the different types of users and behaviors on each one?

PC: I think some might and some might not. Some applications, like iLike, will run untouched in a number of containers. In other cases, developers will need to change their applications according to the features of the new container and the usage patterns that happen in that container.

Some applications are more focused on communication, others more on personal expression. Some are domestically focused, some are international. Even if a given application needs to be changed, there should be an enormous amount of code reuse possible.

IF: When the Facebook Platform launched, several “launch partners” were briefed ahead of time, and arguably gained a leg up on other developers. Will the same thing happen with OpenSocial sites?

PC: None of the container partners have launched consumer apps yet. All developers have access to the same information.

As for Orkut, signups to gain access to the Orkut Sandbox are now open. We will be very quick in approving developer access–we want to add people to the sandbox at a fast rate. I don’t know of other containers that are accepting developer applications as early and quickly as Orkut is right now.

Developers: check out the OpenSocial API at http://code.google.com/apis/opensocial/.

[tags]facebook,opensocial,platform,api[/tags]

Last week, after Facebook announced Microsoft’s $240 million investment at a $15 billion valuation, some reported that Facebook had also taken an additional $500 million from two unnamed New York hedge funds at the same lofty valuation.

Today, we have word from a credible source that this is not the case — Facebook in fact did not close an additional $500 million in funding at the time of the Microsoft investment.

Instead, Facebook’s current financing round is still open. The company is seeking to raise $500 million in this round (or $260 million in addition to Microsoft’s $240), which will be their last.

While there are a lot of offers on the table, possibly including some hedge funds, no deal is done yet.

[tags]facebook, investment, microsoft, hedgefunds[/tags]

As everyone knows, Google tomorrow is announcing its “OpenSocial” social network platform APIs with participating social networks LinkedIn, Friendster, Hi5, Orkut, Ning, and more. You can find interesting perspectives on the announcement from Mark Andreessen (screenshots here) and the rest of Techmeme.

In talking to people around the valley today, most people are very intrigued by the notion of OpenSocial platforms across the web, but many questions remain:

• Google is announcing this tomorrow, but how long will it be before OpenSocial applications and social networks are in public production?
• Will OpenSocial APIs actually lead to any significantly new compelling applications? 
• What about performance? OpenSocial is a JavaScript API, so many widgets on a page may want to make many HTTP requests.

Obviously OpenSocial has the potential to become a major “platform” for SNAPs. Dave Winer says, “Standards devised by one tech company whose main purpose is to undermine another tech company, usually don’t work.” We’ll see how this one goes starting tomorrow…

[tags]facebook,google,opensocial[/tags]

Earlier this week, we wrote that our #1 request for improving News Feed functionality was the need to publish application stories to friends who don’t have the given application installed. It appears that this is going to happen, at least in some scenarios, soon!

According to James Wang at Facebook,

For story templates that you register, you are given the option to expand the audience of the News Feed stories to users who have not yet added your application. (By default, an application’s stories can only show up in the News Feed of users who have added it.) The stories won’t start showing up in non-added users’ News Feed yet, but as soon as we roll out the new changes, the stories for templates that you have registered and designated for display to all users will be immediately eligible.

Facebook also says that by registering your template,

You will enable us to monitor how much users engage with your stories — this is data that we will soon be passing along to you in order to help you determine any changes you would like to make to improve your story quality. 

This is good news for application developers and users. For developers of highly engaging applications, the News Feed could now become a much more powerful channel for your application to reach new users. Great job, Facebook!
In addition, Facebook is taking the posture of providing increasing amounts of data to developers. This will help them design better, more useful applications.

[tags]newsfeed,template,viral[/tags]

In an effort to reduce Mini Feed spam, Facebook today added new functionality to the Mini Feed item deletion process that allows users to tell Facebook “I didn’t do this” and to remove the application.

First, when you delete a feed item, you’ll get the following options:

Then, if you select “I didn’t do this,” you’ll get another set of options:

While this will cut down on aggressive (i.e. spammy) News Feed marketing, this is good for the long term health and integrity of Platform applications.

[tags]minifeed, spam[/tags]