Inside Facebook

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While it’s widely known that Facebook and Microsoft are collaborating on implementing Live Search in Facebook sometime “by the end of the year,” there is another Facebook group at Microsoft that you may not have heard of.

Sebastian Gard, Viral Marketing Manager in the Digital Experiences team at Live Search Consumer Marketing, is heading up an experimental effort at Microsoft to drive use of Live Search through the viral spread of - you guessed it - Facebook applications.

The first of Microsoft’s applications, Knocked Up, went live last night. It makes use of Live Search’s image search capabilities, along with advanced photo morphing software from Microsoft Research, to let Facebook users see what it might look like if their friends mated with popular celebrities. The often hilarious results can then be tagged with friends’ names and placed in their Facebook photo albums.

Inside Facebook spoke with Gard about his team’s efforts to use the Facebook Platform as a marketing channel for Live Search, and how his efforts related to Microsoft’s collaboration with Facebook overall.

Sebastian, what is Microsoft doing building Facebook apps like “Knocked Up”?

We’re really just trying to drive use of the Live Search platform. We’re taking this powerful platform and building a few narrow, entertaining applications on top of it. This is the first of those.

We really went into this with a sense of fun. At the same time, we’re Microsoft, and we have access to Microsoft research that makes our apps a little bit more solid and mature than what else you might see out there. We have access to some great code.

How is this achieving your goals at Live Search Consumer Marketing?

Search is very broadly horizontal.  As we compete with Google, if we can come in with a very narrowly focused message, Facebook applications offer us the opportunitity (though a somewhat limited one) to get our message across. We can build on top of Live Search capabilities like image search and pulling in celebrity photos based on search popularity. We could see this applying to QnA and Maps as well.

How does Knocked Up take advantage of the Facebook Platform?

Well, we’re dealing with very photographic content, which seems to do well on Facebook. We also create an album for you and automatically save all the pictures you create there. If you tag friends in the photo, that’s a huge attractor. You can use Knocked Up as a “weapon” with your friends, and get huge threads going.

We’re trusting word of mouth to spread the app, as there’s no way currently to click through to the application from a photo album. We’re going very light on the use of Facebook invitations and requests.

How does your group interact with those integrating Live Search with Facebook?

Live Search is being integrated into the Facebook platform, which is very exciting, through we’re not specifically a part of that effort. Facebook is taking a very thorough approach to how they’re putting Live Search in, however - they’re not just plugging web search in like we’ve seen other social networks do.

Thanks Sebastian. Any final thoughts?

The challenge for us is really how can we keep up a steady stream of ideas like Knocked Up? Can we get the community involved? It will be really interesting to see.

Facebook tonight launched version 2.0 of its Facebook for iPhone application, bringing many features that were before only available on the site to a mobile device for the first time.

With version 2.0:

• The home page now features a full News Feed, along with access to filtered views of the News Feed, like Status Updates, Posted Items, Live Feed, and Events.
• Full photo tagging and posting is now supported.
• Notifications are now accessible for the first time.
• Profiles now have tabs, like the Facebook website redesign.
• Feed comments are accessible both here and on the News Feed.

Overall, Facebook for iPhone now looks and feels like a fully featured Facebook - it’s a remarkably well designed product.

Facebook’s Joe Hewitt, the lead developer of the iPhone application, said shortly after the release tonight, “I’ve been hearing some bug reports in 2.0, so I will probably wind up doing a 2.1 release in the short term to address many of these problems. Please tell me if you find anything wrong (in the comments here, or you can message me), and I will try to fix it.”

Facebook for iPhone can be downloaded by heading to the App Store on your iPhone.

Every Facebook application developer faces a major architectural decision when starting a new app: whether to build canvas pages in FBML - Facebook’s subset of HTML with some elements removed and other proprietary elements added - or iframes. Over the course of the last year, many developers have chosen to build in FBML because new platform features have usually been released for FBML-based applications before iframe-based applications.

While there have always been advantages and disadvantages to each, Facebook itself has usually recommended FBML to developers, but has always ultimately left the question open.

However, tonight, Charlie Cheever, a lead engineer on the Facebook Platform, has written a lengthy essay on the differences and tradeoffs between FBML and iframes. His conclusion? “I think I’d use iframes.”

All developers interested in learning about the details of the differences between FBML and iframe Facebook application development should definitely read the entire essay. It’s a clear and articulate explanation of the way that each works. For those interested in the Cliff’s Notes version of Charlie’s post, here are the key points on “Why We’ve Been Recommending FBML Up Until Now and What’s Changed”:

1. Speed

• What’s Changed: Facebook Chat and XFBML. While Facebook Chat makes FBML canvas pages slower, XFBML can make IFrame canvas pages faster.  The big disadvantage for IFrame canvas pages in terms of speed was having to make an API call to Facebook before sending back content to the user’s browser.  XFBML lets you avoid that… We developed XFBML as part of Facebook Connect as a way to quickly get social content onto any webpage, and since IFrames are just webpages, XFBML can speed those up as well.

2. Convenience

• FBML is really nice when its important to batch your data access
• FBML is nice for Facebook-provided widgets and dialogs
• What’s Changed: XFBML gives you access to all this within Iframes

3. Looks

• What’s Changed: Now, there’s an easy way to get your IFrame to resize automatically

4. Preload FQL and the List of Friends for Free

• What’s Changed: Now, there is a way to do something similar in IFrames

Cheever then goes on to discuss some of the URL and authentication issues for which good solutions haven’t completely been found yet. Ultimately, he concludes,

• I think using IFrames for canvas pages is probably a better choice…  In particular, if you are doing a lot of AJAX in your application, it will be snappier in IFrames since the requests don’t need to go through Facebook proxy…
• That said, there are a number of things we’re likely to release in the future that will bring FBML and IFrames even closer to converging on a point of parity….
• In brief, if you use the new features we recently released, using IFrames for canvas pages is probably a little bit better choice than using FBML for canvas pages.

Developers should definitely check out the full article for details on the ways Facebook is planning on continuing to develop support for both IFrame and HTML-based applications in the future.

FBML Canvas Page (by Charlie Cheever)

IFrame Canvas Page (by Charlie Cheever)

Facebook tonight launched an updated version of their home page design. The visuals have been revamped, but user search has been removed. Public search is still available at this page, but it’s not clear if that page will still live once the redesign is complete.

Facebook said last week that the full redesign would be complete by this week and users would go back to “facebook.com” instead of the current “new.facebook.com” where the new version of the site currently lives. However, that final switch has not yet occurred.

From what I hear, the greeting card business is a great one: hire freelance artists in small towns across America on contract, get as much distribution as you can, and sell them for $3-$6 a pop. The folks at Blue Mountain Arts figured out that this was an interesting space early on in history of the web, creating a free online greeting card business and selling it to Excite in 1999 for a cool $1 billion (granted, those ended up being play dollars, but it was a big deal at the time).

Now that the social web is upon us, who is winning the greeting card business? If my personal experience is any indication, it looks like a large share is going to Facebook and the social networking platforms and applications. Yesterday was my birthday, and here are the birthday greetings messages I received, by type, as anecdotal data:

Why would Facebook wall posts be such a popular way (52% of all messages, if you include the public Facebook Gift) to wish friend happy birthday?

As Jeremy Liew suggests, the public nature of the Facebook wall post provides additional value to both the sender and receiver of the message than if the message had been sent privately (email, snail mail, phone call, text message, Facebook message, online greeting card). Because the message is public, the sender is seen as someone “who sends happy birthday messages,” and the receiver is seen as someone “who gets happy birthday messages.”  Short of tacking things to your drywall at home or cubicle at work, it’s pretty hard for those same dynamics to emerge with a Hallmark card.

So who’s playing in this market in the Facebook Platform? Even though I didn’t receive any personal messages from gifting or birthday-related Facebook applications, there are 3 large players on the Facebook Platform in the birthday greetings market alone:

• Birthday Calendar by BigDates Solutions (3.35 million monthly active users)
• Birthday Greeting Cards by My Birthday Alarm (2.25 million monthly active users)
• Birthday Cards by RockYou (2.03 million monthly active users)
• Free Gifts by SGN (1.25 million monthly active users)

Given that Facebook’s doing $35 million a year in virtual gifts, these apps have the potential to do quite well for themselves. Who’s going to take one of these independent players out?

Facebook is beefing up its corporate legal team with the addition of Ted Ullyot, most recently of Kirkland & Ellis where he was recruited by former US special prosecutor Kenneth Starr, Jessica Guynn at the LA Times reports.

Ullyot has very strong ties to the Republican Party, having previously worked as a White House lawyer “who helped coordinate the response to the investigation into the leak of CIA operative Valerie Plame’s identity and serving as chief of staff to former U.S. Atty. General Alberto Gonzales.”  Earlier in his career, Ullyoy was a clerk for US Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia.

Ullyot also has strong private sector experience, previously serving as VP and General Counsel of AOL Time Warner Europe, where he worked for Paul Cappuccio, executive vice president and general counsel of AOL Time Warner.

Ullyot will help Facebook navigate new legal waters, especially as emerging fields like online privacy become bigger political issues. Recently, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly testified before a US Senate committee hearing about Facebook’s approach to user privacy.

“We view Ted’s joining us as just another reaffirmation of the fact that we are working at the cutting edge of lots of incredible innovation,” said Elliot Schrage, Facebook’s vice president of communications and public policy (and himself a lawyer). “He has an extraordinary combination of private legal practice and public sector experience. So many of the legal issues we face touch on both of those arenas. He is equally comfortable helping us expand internationally as he is in helping us navigate complicated legal issues we may face in Washington. Ted’s arrival really demonstrates we’re a little more grown-up.”

So why is he heading to Facebook?

“It was extremely attractive to me from the outset,” Ullyot said. “It’s an innovative company and a growing company in size and presence and profile. From a lawyer’s perspective, the legal issues are novel and interesting.” Among the draws: “Operating in a fast-moving environment where the legal framework is less-developed… [and] I doubt you will see me in a tie very often.”

The Harvard alum and San Francisco native joins a Facebook front office with increasingly senior government experience. Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s CEO, was formerly the chief of staff at the Treasury Department under President Clinton.

This week Facebook is expected to migrate all users to the redesigned version of the site, almost six months since the initial profile redesign announcement. Today, we look back on the three major stories that have arisen during this process: user backlash, app declines, and application bookmarking.

User complaints

Much like the introduction of the News Feed, the profile redesign has spurred significant user feedback and criticism. Some Facebook groups critical of the new design now have millions of members, and the backlash has even extended to the Facebook developers forum and comments on this very blog. Blogs and major news outfits alike have extensively covered both of the redesign, and the subsequent negative reactions.

Given that Facebook now claims over 100 million active users, the backlash has been relatively minimal. By gradually migrating to the new design, Facebook has successfully placated most users, though the slow roll-out has made development difficult for some app developers.

Anecdotal evidence of app declines

Along with the site redesign came the monthly active user metric, which has made comparative analysis of applications’ performance pre and post redesign challenging. Further complicating this analysis is the inclusion of tabbed views in the MAU metric, as before profile box views were not included in the reported DAUs. For the purposes of analysis, daily unique canvas page views is the best metric available for retroactive comparison.

With that being said, some developers have shared graphs (shown below) in the Facebook developer forums that suggest a downward trend for overall platform usage.

But in one developer forum thread, a Facebook representative posted the following in response to developers’ feedback:

Since the cut over began, aggregate Platform usage has continued to increase. The apps that have made the greatest effort to take advantage of the new integration opportunities are starting to see the positive results… Developers should continue to try out innovative ways to include the new integration channels and features in their applications. We acknowledge that applications that depended on traffic from certain features that are no longer available or prominent may see decreases if developers have not modified their applications to focus on the new ways of sharing and integrating into profiles.

It is too early to tell how the platform will ultimately be impacted by the site’s changes. The increased focus on feeds and the reduction of app clutter should benefit developers in the future, but in the near term the impact of these changes is still an unknown. While the general sentiment is that the changes have hurt applications, the fact that aggregate Platform usage continues to increase is an exceedingly positive sign.

Bookmarking and the application menu

The biggest change made to the new Facebook design in recent weeks was the application menu bar, which was introduced as a means of improving apps’ visibility, particularly after the removal of the left side-bar links. The introduction of the menu bar has significantly increased the importance of app bookmarking, which has become the platform’s primary means of app re-discovery. However, some have questioned the current implementation, especially the absence of a recently used section.

Conclusion

The profile redesign has been a delicate balancing act for Facebook, as even the slightest change can materially impact developers’ statistics and users’ contentedness. It remains to be seen if these changes ultimately will have a positive impact on the Platform, and if developers will be able to quickly adapt in the near future.

The social gaming charts were in this week for both Facebook and MySpace over at Inside Social Games. Also, ISG reviews pay to play service Casual Cafe, new social gaming site Muzui, and the fourth title from leading Facebook game developer Playfish, Geo Challenge. Check out the latest details in this week’s highlights from Inside Social Games!

• Top 25 MySpace Games for September 24, 2008
• Top 25 Facebook Games for September 24, 2008
• Casual Café - Will You Pay to Play?
• Geo Challenge - How Worldly Are You?
• Muzui Launches New Social Gaming Site
• Mediannex Cannon Can’t Pay Users to Play
• Pillow Fight - Light, Fluffy, and a Brief Distraction

Last week, we wrote about CBS launching the first significant Facebook Connect implementation on the web at TheInsder.com. While we’re still in the very early days of the Connect-ization of the web, two more sites have quietly launched Facebook Connect implementations in the wild today - MoveOn and Red Bull - that show the potential power of Facebook Connect to 1) spread political campaigns and 2) allow brands to engage their customers more virally.

1) MoveOn.org - Spreading a cause through Facebook Connect

MoveOn has implemented Facebook Connect to spread the word about its Obama/Biden sticker campaign. When you sign up for free stickers, you can tick a checkbox to publish the story to your Wall. When friends see the story, they can go directly to the MoveOn page and get more stickers.

2) Red Bull - Engaging customers through Facebook Connect

Red Bull is using Facebook Connect in their blog comments, allowing users to login using their Facebook account and then share their comments with their friends on their Wall. Friends will then see Red Bull on your profile page and can easily click out to the article on the Red Bull blog to further engage with the brand.

Red Bull has also created a Facebook Connect portal - it’s the first Flash app to integrate with Facebook Connect on the web. Here, users are able to read content from other Red Bull sites, comment on the postings (which will also display on the other sites), and view comments left by their Facebook friends.

We’re still very early in the game, but these examples show the ways that Connect can enhance the rest of the web by making it more social and allowing anyone to leverage the power of Facebook’s social graph to share information - right on their own site.