Inside Facebook

About six weeks ago, Facebook launched Feed Importing for the first time, allowing users to connect their Facebook accounts to Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, Delicious, and Digg and automatically syndicate their activity on those sites within their Facebook Mini Feed.

Today, Facebook announced Feed Importing compatibility with several new sites, including Google Reader, Hulu, YouTube, Last.fm, StumpleUpon, and Pandora. Thus, whenever you upload a YouTube video, rate a Hulu episode, or share a story in Google Reader, your activity stream will be automatically syndicated to your Facebook Mini Feed (and thus to your friends’ News Feeds).

In addition, and potentially more interesting, Facebook also today enabled general importing of any RSS feed into your Facebook Mini Feed. While Facebook users have previously been able to import their blog RSS into Notes for a long time, the new Feed Importer makes it easy to syndicate multiple feeds directly to your Mini Feed.

Like FriendFeed, Facebook is hoping to be able to become an important channel for content discovery and thus a major referrer of traffic on the web. While Facebook’s Posted Items/Share feature seems to have never achieved widespread adoption, Feed Importing is much more likely to succeed. By integrating with popular sites and automatically publishing activity, much more content should enter Facebook for distribution and discovery via the Mini & News Feeds.

Graphing Social Patterns East is quickly approaching June 9-11 in Washington, DC! O’Reilly and Dave McClure have pulled together a fantastic lineup as usual, with full days devoted to each the business and technical aspects of building on social platforms, with a workshop day to kick it off.

I’ll be moderating the Social Games for Social Platforms panel on Tuesday, discussing ways that new companies are creating viral and engaging social games on social networks. I’m excited to be joined by Shervin Pishevar, CEO of SGN, Siqi Chen, Co-Founder of Serious Business, Andrew Trader, VP of Business Development at Zynga, and Robert Balahura, Co-Founder of J2Play. (In case you haven’t heard, social games are hot!)

Inside Facebook readers can register with a 15% discount by entering discount code “gspe08ifb“. In addition, Inside Facebook has 2 passes to give away to GSP East! The best 2 answers to the following question will win the passes:

If you had $100,000 to invest in any company building Facebook applications, who would it be, and why?

Please respond in the comments (or if your thoughts are super secret you can email mail AT insidefacebook.com with “GSP East Tickets” in the subject line).

And now for a word from O’Reilly’s lawyers:

• Only one attendee per pass (two people cannot share the same pass to attend the conference on separate days).
• The prize is nontransferable and non-endorsable; no cash or other substitutions will be offered. Winner cannot sell his/her pass.
• The winner consents to the use of his/her name and/or likeness for publicity, advertising, and commercial purposes, in perpetuity, without further compensation unless prohibited by law. O’Reilly Media and its agents are not responsible for lost entries for whatever reason. Entries will be disqualified if O’Reilly Media determines, at its sole discretion, that entrants have attempted to circumvent the terms and conditions of these rules. All decisions by O’Reilly Media are final.

On the eve of the Facebook Platform’s 1 year anniversary, Facebook has just passed its 1,000,000,000th application installed.

Even if most apps created during the first year of the Platform turn out to be flashes in the pan, it’s clear Facebook has created one of the most powerful channels for software distribution ever. How long did it take other major software platforms to reach their 1 billionth application installation?

Three days ago, MySpace added several new restrictions to its Platform guidelines that prohibit applications from offering incentives to users for sending messages to friends. The new guidelines apply to both offering game-like rewards and restricting access to application features. The development community is reacting as you would expect, and game developers here at the InterPlay social games conference are particularly feeling the pain.

Today, perhaps in response to the MySpace policy update, Facebook announced an update to its Platform guidelines prohibiting applications from requiring users to send messages in order to gain access application features. While Facebook has officially not allowed forced invites for a long time, this update makes the rule more broadly applicable. The new policy says,

[Applications cannot] Require that users invite, notify, or otherwise communicate with one or more friends to gain access to any feature, information, or portion of the application, unless (a) it would be logically impossible to deliver that content without the user’s friend(s) also using the application, and (b) the fact of this requirement, and the reason(s) for it, are explicitly and prominently explained inside the application before the first element of the flow path users would reasonably expect to lead to that content.

However, Facebook did not add the same guidelines on incentives - that would have a big impact on many social game developers.

As the Facebook Platform nears its one year anniversary - making it the “elder” amongst social networking platforms - the OpenSocial initiative continues to move forward. While the OpenSocial spec is still in version 0.7 and key containers like MySpace are rolling out full OpenSocial support very slowly, OpenSocial has come a long way since it was announced six months ago.

I sat down with Google’s Patrick Chanezon, OpenSocial Evangelist to social networks, developers, and advertisers, to get his perspective on the state of OpenSocial six months in.

Patrick, what new trends stand out to you at this juncture for OpenSocial?

We’re still very early. Now that OpenSocial is reaching 200 million users, we’re starting to see a lot more people ask how they can be involved.

We’ve seen a lot of big social networks adopt the OpenSocial standard. Now, we’re starting to see some enterprises experiment with OpenSocial internally. For example, SocialSite by Sun is helping any site become a container out of the box.

We’re also seeing the beginning of some new things on professional networks (as opposed to “social” networks). For example, when the LinkedIn sandbox opens soon, I think we’ll see different types of applications - more productivity oriented - with different types of business models - perhaps subscription models.

What business models do you think are working well for developers on the big social network containers?

There’s great opportunity to work with the brand advertisers. They’re ready to start experimenting with application campaigns. There’s definitely market opportunity now.

However, there hasn’t been as much done in the way of e-commerce yet. Buy.com’s Garage Sale application is one example, but most commerce apps are just doing referrals. I’m curious to see what eBay is going to do in this space.

In the bigger picture, how do you think social platforms are changing the web right now?

The standardization and acceptance of APIs is really accelerating the distribution of the web. Currently, most social web sites contain content that is generated 70% internally and 30% externally. I expect this trend to reverse over the next 5 years.

We may see new developments if certain applications are able to socialize a majority of one type of vertical content across multiple social networking platforms (like music, movies, etc), becoming meta-networks themselves. In that case, they will probably create their own APIs for developers to use. Vertical-specific OpenSocial APIs could be necessary at that point.

Finally Patrick, how would you characterize Google’s interest in the Friend Connect “dispute” with Facebook lately?

We are actively talking with Facebook about different ways to make Friend Connect work with the Facebook Platform.

Ultimately, we’re genuinely interested in making the open web grow faster, because Google is good at monetizing the web. We want to make building on the web as easy as possible, and we’ve been doing open source projects for a long time to support that. For AJAX development, we created the Google Web Toolkit. For offline development, we created Google Gears. Anyone can use these. Now, for social applications, we’ve created OpenSocial. The web is becoming increasingly social, and we want to make it easier to build and grow the social web.

We’re here at Facebook this morning for a briefing on the new profile redesign. We’ll be live blogging throughout this morning’s session.

Chamath Palihapitiya, VP Product Marketing: We’re seeing some trends emerging around the news feed and mini feed. As we’ve introduced more active and passive ways to share information, the aggregate amount of information that is being created has increased. And as frequency of sharing has increased, the average size of each piece of content has decreased.The profile redesign aims to make the profile cleaner and simpler, give users more control over their profile, and emphasize recent and relevant information first. For developers, we want to make the most engaging and relevant applications more prominent.

Mark Slee, Product Manager. We’ve moved from a single flat profile page to a tabbed design. The goal is to split up different types of information according to the different ways user communicate. The core tabs are Feed, Info, Phoots, and Boxes, and there will be custom application tabs as well.

The Feed tab is the heart of the new profile - what we really want to do is pull everything together into one stream. This makes it easy for viewers see what the profile owner has been up to lately. The new Publisher lets users interact directly with the feed, and putting it close to the feed really contributes to the feeling of control we want users to have. Facebook and developer applications can publish to the feed. Also, story re-sizing will be introduced, allowing users to make stories bigger or smaller depending on what they feel is the most relevant.

The Info tab you may recognize as containing the core information Facebook originally contained. The reason we split it apart from the Feed is that the Feed is dynamic and relevant for a given time frame, but Info is more static and relevant for a longer period of time. We will also make this tab extensible for developers to add information to this tab.

Photos is one of the richest and most engaging parts of Facebook, and is an example of how applications can integrate with the profile via its own tab.

The fourth core tab is the profile box tab that makes application profile boxes easier to consume. We’re maintaining a lot of the features that exist today - this is backwards compatible, and users can continue to arrange the boxes on this tab as they have been able to on their profile page so far.

Finally, custom application tabs allow users who are really engaged with certain applications to make them a very prominent part of their profile. This is also a big new opportunity for developers, we’ll talk more about that later.

Ruchi Sanghvi, Product Manager. We want to enable developers to create experiences that engage users in more meaningful ways. The main integration points are the Publisher box on the Feed tab, application info sections, the boxes tab, and custom application tabs.

The Feed tab is the focus of the new profile. It contains information like interactions and status updates. We’ve found that Feeds have increased engagement and interaction, and we wanted to expand that more on the profile. Users can publish feed stories from the Publisher on the Feed itself, or on application Canvas pages. Developers will have the choice of 3 different types of stories - full, short, or 1 line stories. Developers will choose which to use based on the nature of the content, and users can resize stories in their feed. We think this will lead to a lot of application traffic and distribution.

Users can use the application Info sections to describe themselves. There are two types of templates - text only and thumbnails with descriptive text. Some interesting cases could be listing top friends, relatives, favorite music or movies. We encourage developers to think about all the different ways users can express themselves.

On the Boxes tab, we’ve created a tab and migrated all application boxes here. There are still the narrow and wide profile box.

Custom application tabs give users a way to give more prominence to their favorite applications, which in turn should give developers more real estate and drive new app traffic.

Question: Where will the wall go?

Mark Slee: We’re still in a dialogue about whether or not to keep a dedicated wall tab. There’s also the possibility that we completely integrate it into the Feed tab. If we do that, we’ll give users a way to filter out wall posts.

Question: How will the migration process work?

Mark Slee: We’re going to give developers a sandbox to test this this week. In the coming weeks we’ll give users a chance to opt in and try out the new profile. A few weeks after that we’ll migrate everyone over.

Question: How will this change page views users generate?

Ruchi Sanghvi: The new profile is a simpler and cleaner version of the old profile. Over time, users will view more profiles over time, which should lead to more page views.

Chamath: This isn’t about generating more page views, it’s about a better user experience. We’re ajaxing a lot of our features. We focus on engagement, time spent, not page views. People are telling a narrative constantly, and we want to make that easier and more clutter free.

My Question: Are there any changes to advertising products that will be available on the profile page?

Chamath: No, it’s just a layout change.

Question: What’s the upshot for developers?

Ben Ling: We think that there will be increased distribution opportunities for developers of applications that users find meaningful. Some developers may not be as ecstatic about it, but we think the community at large understands that this change is good for users.

Question: Will users still be able to import information into their Facebook profile?

Mark Slee: Yes, and we’re going to make more powerful tools available for doing that. That will happen through the Publisher.

Chamath: We think we’re building pipes that carry information. We’re introducing more ways for users to bring data in and take data out, like Facebook Connect. We expect the Feed-driven nature of publishing and consuming information to increase.

While hi5 already has tremendous reach in South America, Europe, and Asia, apparently 23 languages are not enough. Starting today, hi5 is announcing the launch of its crowd-sourced translation service that will allow users to translate hi5 into any local language. In addition, hi5 will soon be making this service available to developers who want to translate their applications as well.

Since its launch earlier this year, Facebook Translations has spurred on significant international growth for the primarily English-speaking social network. While hi5 has been translating its site for a long time, the company hopes to push further down the long tail of languages around the world.

I sat down with Mukund Bhagavan, hi5’s Director of Strategy & Operations, and Greg Holmes, hi5’s Localization Manager, to discuss the details of the Hi5 translation program.

Mukund and Greg, With hi5 already professionally translated in so many languages, what is your vision for crowd-sourcing more translations of hi5?

Mukund: Our goal is to make hi5 accessible in all languages. Today, hi5 is available in 23 languages, but there is a long tail of languages we haven’t yet started to reach in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and the Indian subcontinent.  We also want to expand our offering in Spanish speaking countries - today, we just have Castilian and Argentinian. We really want users to see hi5 as part of their local community.

Greg: For us, it’s all about speed and quality of translations.   As far as quality goes, authenticity and natural voice is important.  For example, addressing all of the regional Spanishes is very important to us.  There’s a lot of pent up demand - we want to remove language as a barrier to hi5 usage.

So will you use a purely crowd-sourced model?

Greg: We’ve been incorporating feedback from our translation partner, Lionbridge, with whom we’ve been working for a long time.  We’ll keep working with them - they handle key parts of the translation, and create the glossary for volunteers.

As far as the volunteer experience goes, we’re using an in-context translation model.  Users can vote on others’ translations, and once translations get enough votes, it goes to the editor for approval.

The hi5 user base is very international, but most developers can’t afford to translate their apps into many languages. How will it work for developers who want to translate their apps on Hi5?

Greg: For developers, there’s a similar in-context interaction model.  The highest quality translations come in context.  We want to make it as seamless as possible.  We’re working with the OpenSocial standards group to develop these particular standards further.  Developers just have to meet the OpenSocial [i18n] spec for internationalizing their apps, and they will then be able to leverage the Hi5 translation community.

Thanks guys. Any last thoughts?

Mukund: The rollout is starting today, and will be live in the next several days.  Our goal is to add 30 more languages this year.  And tools will be available to the developer community soon.

While every platform must always try to strike a delicate balance between developer and user interests, MySpace today updated its application guidelines around the use of key viral channels. The changes, announced on the MySpace Developer Platform blog by Kyle Brinkman, limit applications from creating incentives around use of MySpace communication channels. Specifically,

• No incentives may be given to a member for sending a message, bulletin, comment, or any other form of communication. This includes “points,” “bucks,” increased standing, or even features within the app.
• It must be very clear to a member what they are sending, when they are sending communication. “Share with friends” is not sufficient messaging, the link must state “send comment,” “send bulletin,” and so on.
• The “no popups” rule we have had in place since day one applies to messaging windows. This means no more popping up a messaging window the first time someone tries to use an app. No popping up messaging windows without a user clicking on a very clearly marked link.

The new guidelines will be enforced via an editorial review process by the MySpace platform team. These new rules are in effect immediately for new applications, and existing applications have 2 weeks - until 5pm PT on June 3 - to comply before MySpace conducts a full review of the app directory.

In a long post today on the MySpace Developer Platform blog, MySpace co-founder Tom Anderson wrote about MySpace’s platform philosophy and the reasoning behind the changes:

To be clear, the purpose of these changes is to emphasize to developers that their focus should be on creating great apps that users will want to tell each other about. The best viral software is software you can’t live without. Unfortunately, for some developers, the focus has been on how to come up with the best methods of viral distribution.

Clearly, MySpace is taking steps to protect users from spammy apps. What do you think of this approach?

Developers can find the full MySpace Developer Platform Application Guidelines here.

The Facebook Profile Preview team just released a screenshot of the new Facebook UI that will be rolled out in the upcoming weeks as part of the Facebook profile redesign. In addition to redesigning the profile page, Facebook is making some pretty major changes to core navigation on the site as well: the left navigation menu is gone.

• The Applications menu now sits at the top of the page, instead of on the left side. Within the new Applications menu, there will be “Bookmarks” and “Recent Applications” sections.  You will be able to add apps to your “Bookmarks” section.
• The Search box now sits in the top menu as well.
• The “Profile” link has been replaced by your first name and last initial - e.g. “Rebekah C”.
• Facebook ads will now appear on the right side of the page, instead of on the left. This will make the left side seem relatively bare.

What do you think of the new design?

This is not a final spec - you can email feedback to the Profile Preview team at profilespreview@facebook.com.

This Thursday, InterPlay: The Business of Games on the Social Web is happening at the Kabuki Theatre in San Francisco. I’m moderating the opening panel, Social Games Everywhere: Methods for Distribution and Development.

A fantastic group is lined up, including:

• Martin Green, VP of Biz Dev, Meebo
• Jim Greer, CEO and Co-founder, Kongregate
• Mark Pincus, CEO and Founder, Zynga
• Shervin Pishevar, CEO and Co-founder, SGN

The panel will focus on key questions surrounding distribution and monetization for game developers on social networking platforms like Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, and Orkut.

For more, check out Inside Social Games. Look forward to seeing you there!