Inside Facebook

New Inside Facebook Top Jobs for May 1:

• Senior Front End Developer (Sometrics / Los Angeles, CA)

New Inside Facebook Top Jobs for April 30:

• Product Manager - Mobile (hi5 Networks / San Franicsco, CA)
• Social Application Developer (Clipmarks / New York, NY)

Recently, I spoke with Jeremy Liew of Lightspeed Venture Partners about the future of gaming on social networks. Jeremy has been writing frequently about social games on his blog and recently moderated a panel on the topic at Web 2.0 Expo.

During our conversation, Jeremy brought up some important points regarding the way the core mechanics of social games are designed, specifically regarding the different ways that some game developers are integrating “viral channels” on social networks into their games:

It’s not an accident that the biggest games on Facebook are not owned by SGN or Zynga: Scrabulous and Friends For Sale have been growing independently.  They’ve been baking virality directly into the game mechanic, not layering it on top. They’re developing game mechanics that are native to social networking environment - not just using social networks as a distribution channel. This has only been going on for a few months, and so it’s clear to me that there’s still a lot more opportunity to optimize that.

Read the full interview at Inside Social Games

This is a guest post by Nick Gonzalez of SocialMedia Networks, an advertising network for social media platforms like Facebook and OpenSocial.

Last week I covered a strategy for dreaming up your next Facebook application. This week leads me into the second round of considerations when making an application. What language should you code in, and what provider should your host your app with?

Would an app programed in any other language be as trite?

The short answer is use the language you’re most comfortable with, and a hosting provider you already know. But chances are, if you’re reading this, you don’t have a strongly preferred language or provider.

When choosing a language, you’re looking for one that can generate programs quickly and scale effectively. Programming on Facebook’s platform brings in a third concern: platform support. Facebook has several libraries prepped for developers on 17 different languages (ASP.NET | ASP (VBScript) | Cocoa | ColdFusion | C++ | C# | D | Emacs Lisp | Java | JavaScript | Lisp | Perl | PHP | Python | Ruby on Rails | VB.NET | Windows Mobile).

From a support perspective, PHP makes the most sense for development. Facebook maintains an official PHP library, meaning that PHP gets all the new features first. But there are a growing number of developers drawn to Ruby on Rails (ROR). Some of the largest applications and development houses on Facebook run on ROR (iLike, Friends for Sale, CLZ Concepts). This means, even though it’s not officially supported by Facebook, there are a lot of developers with a vested interest in keeping the Ruby libraries up to date.

Here’s a little test the provides a bit more insight by looking at most recent library updates on the Developer Wiki:

ASP.NET - 7 January 2008
ASP (VBScript) - 19 December 2007
Cocoa - 25 January 2008
ColdFusion - 22 September 2007
C++ - 29 July 2007
C# - 14 February 2008
D - 17 November 2007
Emacs Lisp - 18 October 2007
Java - 10 April 2008
JavaScript - 3 April 2008
Lisp - 27 July 2007
Perl - 22 March 2008
PHP - 12 April 2008
Python - 26 April 2008
Ruby on Rails - 18 April 2008
VB.NET - 17 February 2008
Windows Mobile - 27 November 2007

PHP, Python, and ROR get the most love. Anecdotally these are also the languages I hear about the most on the platform.

My kingdom for a scalable hosting provider!

So, now where to put your application. With the traffic patterns for most Facebook applications looking something like the NASDAQ circa 1999, your application can get some serious attention - but you don’t want to be stuck with the bill when the party’s over should users abandon your application. There are essentially three types of hosts: elastic, dedicated, and a new category I call a web IDE.

Word of caution: how your app is architected has a large impact on your server costs. Use a lot of processor or make too many DB requests and it’s the programmer’s fault, not the hosting provider’s.

Facebook’s endorsed hosting solution has been pimping out two “elastic” hosting services: Amazon Web Services and Joyent. They’re called elastic because you can just buy incrementally more computing resources as you need them; perfect for a quickly growing Facebook app.

However, Joyent and AWS differ significantly. Joyent will give you free service for up to a year granted your application stays under their processing cap (1/32 processor, 512 MB RAM, 10 GB disk space, unlimited bandwidth; see this tech comparison). Beyond the basic account, they scale your application as you need more resources and move into a new pricing bracket (see Joyent’s price list). AWS charges you incrementally for the resources your use (bandwidth and processor). They charge $0.1 to $0.8 per hour for small to large instances (see AWS’s cost calculator). Joyent claims to be significantly more cost efficient than Amazon.

Both services have heavy hitters batting for them. Joyent currently hosts Blake Commagere’s laundry list of applications amongst other large developers. Amazon has some testimonials from the likes of iLike.

Other options to consider are Softlayer and MediaTemple. I have personal experience with MediaTemple, which hosts TechCrunch on a dedicated server. For that account, they’ve been impeccable. However, they’ve taken some criticism in the forums for their Grid servers. Their Grid Server starts at $20/month (100GB disk, 1 TB bandwidth, 1000 GPUs {1 GPU = 7.24% of 1 CPU for 1 hour}).

Softlayer, on the other hand, hosted SocialMedia’s Food Fight app and was paying about $1,500 a month for an application that had about 500,000 daily active users at the time. CLZ Concepts, a large app dev house, also uses Softlayer to host their applications. They normally start off at about $159/month, so you better have an application that’s going somewhere.

The final category, web IDE, is an interesting one. These services allow you to code in an online editor and deploy instantly. They also handle the scaling for you. AppJet and Heroku are the two I’m familiar with. AppJet is an all JavaScript environment, which makes getting started easy. Heroku is a Ruby environment that does the same. These two are very early on, so it’s hard to judge how well they’ll scale or what pricing will be because they haven’t released rate cards yet.

Anyone have specific experiences to add?

With the full launch of Facebook Chat last week, Facebook users were introduced to a new interface for receiving notifications. While notifications used to be presented in a kind of restricted “inbox,” now notifications are accessible via a red flag in the chat bar which pops open a notification “bubble.”

To shine more light on Facebook’s thinking behind this change, Facebook’s Pete Bratach wrote in a recent blog post,

Whether it’s to announce the giving of a gift, the challenging to a game, or the joining of a cause, your applications’ notifications will make a more instant impact. We encourage you to think about new ways to integrate with Facebook when you send notifications…

Because we’ve added a new interface, this also means there are more integration points that your applications can hook into. We welcome your thoughts on what new integration points you’d like to see (for instance, since notifications appear right next to Facebook Chat, maybe you’d want a link in a notification to initiate a chat session).

Facebook’s intent with Chat, and Notifications going forward, is to encourage a more synchronous communication experience for users. Why? I would wager that Facebook’s average session length is very short (lots of “Log in - Check News Feed - Check messages - Leave” types of paths in their server logs), and synchronous communication sessions (i.e. games) are much longer than asynchronous ones. Facebook needs apps to help make sessions longer.

If you want to become Facebook’s favorite new developer, start taking advantage of real-time notifications. Have ideas for how the Facebook Platform could better support your efforts? Send them to developer-feedback@facebook.com with “[real-time notifications]” in the subject line.

As many developers have noticed over the last week, the Hi5 Platform has been suffering repeated downtime. As the Hi5 team shared in a blog post last night, the source of the problem was a technical issue related to the way Hi5 was processing notifications. As a result, Hi5 for a brief period turned off all platform notifications. As Paul Lindner, architect of the Hi5 Platform, wrote:

We underestimated the amount of notifications sent, and the popularity of their use on the site.  At first glance this just meant that posting and browsing notifications were slow.  We didn’t expect that other requests would suffer collateral damage.

However, Hi5 has since restored platform notification service to developers by making some changes to the way notifications work. Specifically, notifications are now processed asynchronously.  In addition, Hi5 instituted the following changes:

• A new notification retention policy removes the oldest notifications from the system (14 day max)
• Only notification REST calls with a token generated in the preceding 4 hours are allowed

Hi5 will be continuing conversations with developers that are using notifications the most.

Social Gaming Summit, one of the first conferences focused on social games, is happening Friday, June 13 at the UCSF Mission Bay Conference Center in San Francisco.  A top-flight roster of speakers has already been lined up by organizer Charles Hudson.

Inside Social Games and Inside Facebook readers can get a 10% discount on general admission tickets by using the code “INSIDEFACEBOOK” at checkout. Early bird ticket sales (which aren’t discounted but are $100 cheaper than general admission tickets) are on sale through May 1st.

For more information, check out all the details at Inside Social Games.

With over 670,000 Daily Active Users, Scrabulous has become a case study for Facebook application and social game developers around the world. Despite increasing constraints on communication channels inside Facebook, Scrabulous’ user base has slowly risen around the world for the past 9 months. And, surprisingly, without much methodical analytics - the game’s improvements have almost all been driven by user feedback.

The creators of Scrabulous, brothers Jayant and Rajat Agarwalla of Kolkata, India, have faced some legal questions from Hasbro and Mattel - but that’s the subject of another article. Jayant was nice enough to take time away from his finals this week to speak with Inside Facebook about how they’ve been able to built Facebook’s most popular game.

Inside Facebook: Scrabulous has become the most popular game on Facebook. What are the elements of Scrabulous that you think have made it successful?

Jayant Agarwalla: One of the reasons for Scrabulous being quite popular is that it is such a cool way to stay in touch with your friends / family members. You play a word, and you stay in touch, because when you are placing the tiles you are thinking of your opponent subconsciously. It’s way more exciting than repeatedly poking someone or throwing sheep. That’s cool for new users but I think it gets boring after some time.

The other reasons for the popularity are the simple interface and quick loading time. Users love the clean look and we have always listened to their requests. Most of the application has been in a way built by the Scrabulous community rather than us.

Inside Facebook: So which of your metrics do you give the most weight when deciding how to improve Scrabulous?

Jayant Agarwalla: We improve Scrabulous based on user requests alone. For instance, we shall be launching the tournaments shortly and are also working on a Scrabulous robot.

Inside Facebook: Scrabulous does not publish very many feed items, while most other developers do. Why?

Jayant Agarwalla: We did post a lot of feed items but discovered that the other apps were probably doing the same thing. Keeping in mind that our users hate spam, we decided to keep away from sending too many news feeds. Our users are truly happy with our conservative nature when it comes to promoting Scrabulous. The community grows by word of mouth and our solid reputation. We hate when we get too many useless notifications, so we don’t do it to others!

Inside Facebook: Many users email or IM their friends to take their turn. Why?

Jayant Agarwalla: It’s because we don’t send a message or notification when a turn is played. It would make the application very ’spammy’. We do have an auto-refresh feature which refreshes the board every two minutes. Thousands of users use that and are very satisfied.

Inside Facebook: Do more users play with friends or strangers?

Jayant Agarwalla: Hmm, it’s hard to comment on this but I would guess it’s more with friends. There was a show on ABC Nightline in which most of the players interviewed were playing with their friends.

Inside Facebook: It appears that many public games of Scrabulous end up including adult themes. How do you handle this?

Jayant Agarwalla: We got many complaints regarding this and immediately took measures to curb it. Now, you can host an ‘adult’ game and users are shown adult requests only if they choose to see them. Over 20 complaints per day were reduced to 0 as soon as we did this.

Inside Facebook: Finally Jayant, why do you think Chess Pro hasn’t grown as much as Scrabulous has?

Jayant Agarwalla: Chess Pro will be the number one chess application on Facebook within the next week. 3 days ago, in terms of daily active users, it was just 1000 shy of Chess which is number one right now. Total registered users are around 100,000.

While Chess is based on the technology of Scrabulous, it is not intended for a mass audience and not every asynchronous game can attain the same levels as Scrabulous. Also, Chess is a game which requires a lot more thinking than Scrabulous, so it takes more time to get through your moves.

It’s been many weeks in the making, but we at Inside Facebook have some exciting news to share today - we are launching a new, experimental second blog called Inside Social Games! Inside Social Games is going to be entirely devoted to tracking the convergence of games and social network platforms.

So what are social games anyway - and why Inside Social Games now? Just as I was surprised two years ago by the way my “non-geeky” friends were using Facebook, I’m finding myself repeatedly being surprised by the way those same people are playing new kinds of “social games” inside Facebook (and MySpace, Bebo, Friendster, Hi5, and Orkut) now. Games that, despite their apparent simplicity or complexity, are being adopted in large numbers by people outside traditional console, PC, and online gaming demographics. Games on social networks are bringing together family and friends like games never before have - and we think that’s pretty darn cool.

Like Inside Facebook two years ago, I’m starting Inside Social Games as an experiment. An experiment into what “social gaming” really means and how social games may or may not be changing the way large numbers of people play and communicate. What the results will be, I’m not yet sure, but I’m excited to see what conversations emerge over the coming weeks and months, especially between the game design and SNAP communities.

I’m proud to announce that I’ve been able to land Chris Holt (also of PC Gamer) to review current and new releases. Chris would love to receive tips on new games, so feel free to contact him at submit AT insidesocialgames DOT com to let him know what you’re up to.

We’re looking forward to tracking not only the games but also the people and companies behind them that are leading the charge into this new and exciting space. We believe some interesting new companies will be created as the worlds of gaming and social networks collide. It should be a fun ride. Please drop us a line any time!

Two weeks after it removed per-story (thumbs up/thumbs down) preferences from the News Feed, Facebook today further simplified the News Feed interface by removing (update) moving the Preferences link to the bottom of the page. News Feed Preferences allow users to indicate types of stories and people that they want to see more or less news about.

Apparently, while powerful ideas in theory, when taken in conjunction with other factors in Facebook’s News Feed algorithm both general and per-story News Feed preferences must not affect user satisfaction significantly enough to merit their presence. Facebook is apparently able to do a better job of choosing the right feed stories for you based on your behavior rather than the preferences you express - a significant technical accomplishment.