Inside Facebook

New Inside Facebook Top Jobs for March 25:

• Senior Server Engineer (Mesoft / Sunnyvale, CA)

Facebook hosted its first Developer Roundtable event in Palo Alto today, bringing dozens of Facebook developers together for a more personal discussion surrounding Facebook’s upcoming redesign of the profile page and new application reputation system. The developers ranged from the largest on Facebook to those just beginning. I got permission from the Facebook Platform team to share my notes from today’s meeting with you here.

Representing Facebook were several members of the Platform team, on both the product marketing and engineering sides. First, Tom Whitnah presented on the application reputation system. Then, Sasha Rush discussed the upcoming profile page redesign. Finally, Sandra Liu Huang and Ruchi Sanghvi took general Q&A. Several other Platform team members met with developers during small group breakout sessions.

Here’s what was discussed - the emphasis is mine:

Application Reputation System - Tom Whitnah, Facebook Software Engineer

• We’re trying to establish a reputation system for applications that is a proxy for user affinity and user experience. Are users happy with the profile box, the notification, the request you just sent, or was it misleading?
• When calculating application viral channel allocation limits, recent data is weighted more. This means if you change behavior, your limits can improve. However, your historical performance still has an impact.
• We’re still trying to make the system more mature. For instance, if you accept a request to view a message but actually get something else, that’s a bad experience and we need to capture that.
• We want to expose more data without giving away more tools to game the system. But we do plan on giving more granular (i.e. per-notification and per-invitation) statistics.

 Profile Redesign - Sasha Rush, Facebook Software Engineer

• The main goals of the redesign are to help users communicate and share information more efficiently, generate more meaningful activity, and increase user trust. We want the Feed to be really good, and users to be really happy - the Feed is not an ad channel.
• The 4 major components of the update are: 1) The Wall-Feed combination - we’re merging the most important communication channels on the profile page into one, 2) The About tab - think of it as an extension to the static information you currently have on your profile, 3) The introduction of Tabs in general - there will be 3 by default (Wall, About, and Photos), and apps can add more, and 4) The left column - the same left column will appear on both the Wall and About tabs, and apps can add boxes here.
• With the new profile, it will become increasingly important for applications to create meaningful feed stories. The main purpose of the feed is changing from what you’ve done to content you’ve created.
• Users will be able to create content in-line on their and others’ feed stories. There will be a publishing flow. Any app that emulates our wall will fit in here.
• Users will approve “big” feed items you create using Feed Forms. “Small” feed items can still be automatically published.
• Tabs are really interesting - they allow you to put everything that users have done in your app right in their profile page. We will be following a limited canvas page model - we will pull FBML directly from your server, but some interactions will not be allowed. For instance, we won’t be allowing auto-play Flash on the profile.
• Users may be able to add some app content to the right side of the About tab. We will give applications templates to work within here. The templates will contain images and can link back to the canvas page, but think about the content as a generalized comma separated list.

Q&A - Sandra Liu Huang, Facebook Platform Product Marketing, Ruchi Sanghvi, Facebook Platform Product Manager, and Sasha Rush

• On the launch date - we are targeting late spring at this point. The sandbox will be open to developers well in advance.
• On adding tabs - the exact flow is still under internal debate, but it will be a very explicit choice - not automatic or on by default.
• On About tab limitations - can’t auto-play Flash, won’t give the viewer’s ID due to privacy, willing to take suggestions for how to handle it differently if the viewer already has the app.
• On application about page reviews - they’re too spammy to take into account for the application reputation system right now - it wasn’t built by the Platform team so it has some issues (snickers from colleagues).
• On the left column - the same left column will appear on the Wall and About tabs. There will be a height restriction, but we’re still deciding what it will be. There will be a limit to the number of application boxes users can have on their profile page, but that is also still up in the air. We were just talking this morning about whether to allow users to choose their own maximum number of boxes or not.
• On the migration user experience - we’re not sure exactly how we’re going to allow users to choose which profile boxes to keep above the “extended profile” fold, and which to hide.

Overall, the mood of developers was appreciative but concerned. Very appreciative for the Facebook Platform team inviting developers in to have a conversation and solicit feedback and input regarding upcoming changes, but nevertheless concerned about the potential overall impact of the profile box redesign.

It was clear in today’s meeting that many details regarding the profile changes are still not finalized and will potentially be impacted by feedback from the developer community. Developers are encouraged to send feedback to the Facebook Platform team at developer-feedback AT facebook DOT com.

Facebook just announced new, more robust privacy controls and an upcoming ground-breaking site-wide chat service, this morning in Palo Alto. Here are our notes from this morning’s conversation with Facebook’s Matt Cohler, VP of Product Management, Naomi Gleit, Product Manager for Privacy, and Peter Deng, Product Manager for Chat.

Matt Cohler, VP Product Management

• We want to develop more personalized ways for people to communicate.
• Really important to give people right tools to enable people to communicate as much as possible. This means giving users control over their information, what they’re sharing, when sharing, and with whom.
• As far as the product goes, this means 1) providing powerful, granular privacy tools, and 2) making them very easy to use. Keeping those two principles together is a classic dilemma, and is very important to us at Facebook.
• Originally, Facebook was only used by US college students - then, it was much easier to introduce product principles to solve that problem (organizing around college networks).
• Today, we have many more users, types of users, relationships, and types of relationships. We have 67M active users, 2/3 are outside the US - 18 months ago, it was 90% US. The vast majority of users are not US college students now; there’s a great diversity in types of relationships.
• People put their cell phone on their profile because they understand that they have control over who sees that information.
• Facebook chat is coming soon…

Naomi Gleit, Product Manager, Privacy

• Tonight we’re launching an updated privacy interface and new privacy options.
• We’ve redesigned the privacy dashboard - it’s simpler and there’s a standardized blue interface when editing privacy.
• Facebook privacy is based on social proximity - you can now choose to share information with friends of friends, all friends, some friends, only me, specific networks, everyone on Facebook - and you can exclude friends or friend lists (new).
• Friend lists are “private groups” of your friends. No one can see the friend lists you make.
• Today we’re integrating friend lists and privacy - you can now include or exclude friend lists.
• We’re also launching new ways to create friend lists. When you share photos with specific friends, you’ll be prompted to save those people as a list list, and when you send or confirm a friend request, you can in-line add friends to one or more friend lists. Social map details like “we hooked up” are now secondary.
• We’re migrating people you’ve added to your “limited profile” list to a “limited profile” friend list.

Peter Deng, Product Manager, Facebook Chat

• Facebook chat launching in the coming weeks. We’re opening up a new communication channel and enable real time conversation on the site.
• Chat UI at the bottom of the browser - present whenever you’re on the site. Shows open chat windows, number of friends online.
• Can pop out entire chat interface into a separate window. It shows online friend lists and current conversations.
• If don’t want to be bothered by chats, you can toggle your online/offline status easily.
• Considering whether or not we will support Jabber. We’re starting with on-site messaging.
• You can clear your own chat history if you like.
• Your “online” status icons when you appear throughout the site.
  
  
  (video captured by Mark Hendrickson)

Matt Cohler

• We’re thinking about/working on chat APIs. We want to make Facebook useful across the web, and are still figuring APIs out on a context by context basis. There’s a lot of infrastructural challenges just getting a scalable chat service up and running.
• Beacon is part of our platform group. We made a mistake by launching it as an “advertising” product instead of a “user” product. It took us too long to make the changes.
• We think about chat differently than we think about applications - it’s a simple, core way to communicate with your friends.

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New Inside Facebook Top Jobs for March 18:

• Product Manager - Television (Watercooler / Mountain View, CA)

While Facebook is a multi-faceted service that could grow in any number of directions, Facebook’s recent cues indicate that first and foremost on its mind right now is establishing itself as a communication platform. Facebook doesn’t want to become a content distribution system or an entertainment console as much as it wants to wants to become the dominant way you communicate with your friends.

This is not a short term goal that will instantly reap financial benefits. As some have recently pointed out, communication tools like email and IM have historically been difficult to monetize. Rather, it’s a long term plan that has the potential to significantly change how the world shares information.

I think Facebook and other social networks can create the most enterprise value by continuing to create new communication channels that provide better user experiences than what’s existed before - channels that are only possible because they own a large chunk of the social graph. On Facebook, this has been happening in a number of ways:

1. News Feed

In my opinion, the News Feed is Facebook’s greatest innovation to date. It has organized and filtered a large class of one-to-many messages like never before. Many types of messages that today are broadcast via Mini Feed and consumed via News Feed have historically (less efficiently) been broadcast and consumed via email: status updates, content sharing (links, photos), service referrals (applications, Pages, Beacon). However, Facebook’s ability to organize and filter these messages according to your personal preferences has made consuming them in great volume much more palpable and valuable than any email client or feed reader ever did. I really continue to believe that the News Feed has the potential to deliver greater value to the consumer than any broadcast channel ever built.

2. Messaging

Many people in tech circles can’t talk about Facebook’s messaging system without complaining about it, but even though it “sucks,” Facebook Messaging is replacing (or has already replaced) email with friends for many users (especially those under 21). Even though it lacks a feature set comparable to most email clients, the context for large classes of one-to-one messages is simply more important. As Facebook enhances the context around messaging, and builds more utility into the service, I think a greater portion of conversations currently conducted over email will move to Facebook.

3. Wall

Much of the same could be said for Wall. Its semi-public context has made it a more valuable channel than email for both the senders and receivers of messages that appear one-to-one but are often really one-to-many. (Facebook has tried to make the Wall into a media sharing platform as well, but apparently without much success.)

4. Chat

With the exception of Google Talk, it’s been years since most people have experienced an improvement in synchronous communication. While Facebook hasn’t announced any chat products yet, I wouldn’t be surprised if it did soon. Chat is just a better experience around your social network - most of the time, people want to talk with their friends. Just as Google Talk has probably significantly increased the number of people using IM, so could Facebook…downloading a client and exchanging odd handles is an experience that’s just too complicated for some people.

In the end, if Facebook wants to own the most valuable channels for communication with your friends, this could have significant implications for the Platform. It’s clear in announcements Facebook has made regarding upcoming changes to the profile page that Facebook is expanding the role and concept of the Mini Feed and Wall, while simultaneously dealing a blow to applications that may depend on significant profile page real estate to provide valuable communication experiences to users. If Facebook does indeed build a chat application, that could obviously hurt applications building chat around the Facebook experience. At the same time, however, Facebook has been promising to reward applications that enable valuable and meaningful interactions with greater visibility within the new Wall and News Feed.

While I hope Facebook can co-exist with and reward developers of communication-oriented Platform applications, I think Facebook is smart to want to own the most important channels used to communicate with your friends. While it may take a while to figure out how to monetize these new communication channels most effectively, people will always stay most engaged with services that provide the most value, and core communication tools are some of the services that can be most enhanced by ownership of the social graph.

MySpace apps went live for the first time today. Which apps have users added most after Day 1?

	1. Playlist.com Music Playlists 6387 Installs “The Social Music Experiment - discover new music and broadcast it on your MySpace profile!”
	2. Ace Texas Hold’em Poker 1929 Installs “Compete in the biggest free Texas Hold’Em Poker game on the net with over 7 million players.”
	3. DrinkingSocial 1578 Installs “Organize your own personal drinking history and send beers to your friends!”
	4. Honesty Box 460 Installs “Honesty Box lets your friends send you anonymous messages. Find out the truth!”
	5. Metachat 354 Installs “Chat live with your friends, throw snowballs, and even watch movies together. Come join the party!”
	6. Pokey! 317 Installs “Meet Pokey, the cute, interactive 3D puppy who fetches frisbees and loves belly rubs!”
	7. Picnik 311 Installs “Make your photos fabulous with Picnik’s easy to use and powerful editing tools. It’s fun!”
	8. PhotoFX 295 Installs “Make your pics stand out with glitter and more”
	9. Movies 247 Installs “Flixster Movies lets you see what your friends say about movies.”
	10. Shelfari Books 239 Installs “Find out what your friends are reading, and show off your books on a cool shelf.”

After months of anticipation, the MySpace Platform launched today, bringing applications to MySpace users for the first time.

In an intentional “soft launch” of the MySpace Platform using the OpenSocial 0.6 standard, the top 10 applications reached about 12,000 total installations in their first day. About 200 applications have already been approved and appear in the MySpace Application Directory.

In addition to canvas page and profile box real estate, MySpace apps also get real estate on the home page: both an app list under the welcome module and app boxes further down the left rail. However, notification and request channels will not be live for at least a couple of weeks.

A big congratulations is in order for the entire MySpace Developer Team!

Hi5 CEO Ramu Yalamanchi announced today that the Hi5 Platform, built using OpenSocial standards, is set to go live on March 31. Since the first Hi5 Platform apps launched in December, Hi5 has been preparing its Platform to launch with full OpenSocial 0.7 support.

While Facebook and MySpace largely dominant the American and English speaking markets, Hi5 prides itself on the fact that it’s the most trafficked site in over 10 countries in Latin America, Europe, and Asia, and under one third of its userbase are also active on other leading social networks.

In order to help developers reach its predominantly international user base, Hi5 is offering free translation services (into either English or Spanish) and free hosting for the first 100 apps that are approved for the Hi5 Platform.

On a related note, though it has just recently launched translation versions of its own site, Facebook has announced that it will make its crowd-sourced translation tools freely available to developers on the Facebook Platform.

Hi5 is coordinating a “bi-national” hackathon this Saturday at the Google campus in Mountain View, CA, and the Campus Estado de Mexico of the Instituto Tecnológico y de Estudios Superiores de Monterrey (ITESM) in Mexico. Developers interested in learning more can check out the Hi5 Platform here.

On the same day that Bebo agreed to be acquired by AOL for $850 million (congrats everyone!), it also announced an important update to the Bebo Platform (not celebrating too hard, I guess!). As of today, a new “To do” list design on the home page of every Bebo user more prominently displays application invitations and notifications. Previously, they were behind a second tab.

Jessica Alter, Bebo’s head of business development for the platform, said, “We’ve released changes to the users homepage that moved the alerts for app notifications and requests to the top right of the users homepage. The redesign provides apps a top-level placement, bringing additional awareness to your apps.” In addition, Bebo is now showing icons of all apps a user has installed on the profile page.

Alter also said that several additional features are in the works to be released soon:

• A new API call to add tags to photos
• New JavaScript capabilities
• Pre-loading SQL

All of these changes will enhance the platform and be welcome news for developers!

In most stories about Facebook Platform development, there’s a depressing footnote - sure, applications are popular, but very few of them make significant profits. The New York Times famously compared Facebook’s economy to the San Francisco Gold Rush, describing a long line of developers searching for a short supply of gold. Apps on the Facebook Platform may get traffic, but the perception is that developers don’t make money.

That perception may be incorrect.

“Developers want to monetize their applications,” says Chris Cunningham, founder of Appssavvy, a new ad firm representing Facebook application developers to major brands. “Brands do as well.”

If the desire is there, why haven’t big companies jumped on the opportunity while prices are at a premium? Fortunately, the traffic gold rush analogy is flawed. Developers have already figured out how to get huge volumes of traffic, and are just looking for a way to ship it to Madison Avenue.

To some degree, they’ve already succeeded in getting paid without Madison Avenue’s help - vibrant app exchange networks are flourishing on Facebook, and many developers have deployed affiliate and cost-per-action offers with great success. It takes a lot of clicks, but with hundreds of millions of pages served every month, those clicks can amount to real cash.

Most observers, however, are more interested in the investments big brands make. But big brands need a railroad to get to all that gold. That process is just beginning on the Facebook Platform. Countless app developers have traffic, but they don’t have the connections or talent to sell that traffic to advertisers.

According to former ad salesperson Ashkan Karbasfrooshan, ignorance about the ad sales world is a problem on the web at large. There are also issues specific to Facebook - while a search engine thrives on monetizing a user’s intent, it’s been widely circulated that Facebook continues to struggle to monetize its own traffic. “It tries to bypass content creation,” Karbasfrooshan says, “and instead passes off UGC as premium content advertisers want, which is even more foolish.”

Ironically, applications may have a better path to monetization than Facebook itself. Facebook can sell against all the app traffic too, but apps give the social graph more meaning and value to users. That’s when brands get interested.

Already, some companies and applications have taken the leap into partnerships. Many brands have launched their own applications, and others have worked closely with existing ones. Free Gifts, Zombies, and other top apps have all launched campaigns with major brands.

The space is monetizing rapidly - traffic gains experienced by many Facebook app developers have merely outpaced construction of the railroad to Madison Avenue. Ad sales companies will continue to dive into the space and aggregate traffic, focus content, and help brands access traffic gold. John Battelle’s Federated Media has already partnered with Graffiti and Watercooler. Even companies like Videoegg, which sell ads across a vast network, have focused on better serving Facebook application developers specifically.

The future for developers, however, is in young companies like Appssavvy. Founder Chris Cunningham has a background in ad sales as well as widgets, and his relationships with a number of major brands and developers help him sell for individual Facebook apps. “We are selling the applications through a direct sales team. Sharp developers have no way of connecting with big brands at a high level - we want to change that.”

The larger ramifications of brands embracing Facebook? Less “useless” and more meaningful apps. A relatively useless but pageview-maximizing application makes sense when developers are selling on a CPM or CPC basis, but as Cunningham notes, “Brands get excited if they feel like they’re reaching the right audience - they are interested in a relationship.” That relationship means richer applications and, eventually, richer developers.

The Facebook application gold rush is already a success: developers have found traffic in massive amounts, while other websites spend years panning for as many visitors. Now, the railroads are being built to get the traffic to the brands that can use it.

Admittedly, that process moves more slowly than fast-forward Platform watchers are accustomed to. However, these new relationships will endure for a long time - as the arduous process of ad sales begins, the Facebook Platform seems less like a rush and more like an economy.

Phil Edwards is Director of Business Development at Lonely CEO Media