Inside Facebook

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!

When the Facebook Platform launched in May 2007, it included access to a number of Facebook’s powerful communication channels right from the start (unlike some other platforms that have launched since). Access to these channels - profile boxes, invitations, notifications, and feed items - allowed applications to spread quite quickly. However, due to user experience complaints, Facebook has been putting in place limits on how much apps can use these viral channels throughout much of 2008.

While Facebook has not been explicitly clear in explaining what that feedback is, we thought we’d try to gain some at least anecdotal quantitative evidence on what users are complaining about. So we ran a Facebook Poll (which was really easy, by the way) to ask them. While the sample size was very small (only 200 responses, and disclaimer: this is not a proper way to do real user experience testing, etc etc), the results may offer some clues on upcoming Platform changes.

First, the question:

What do you hate most about Facebook apps?

• Too many invitations
• Too many notifications
• Too much clutter on my profile
• Too much clutter in my mini feed

We ran the same poll in 2 geographical regions to compare results between technophiles in Silicon Valley and folks in more “normal” places - in this case (lovely) Topeka, Kansas. The results, however, were quite similar (guess there’s not a red state/blue state bias either), so we’ve included only the Silicon Valley data below.

The results:

• Invitations are still the most annoying thing about apps (especially for women).
• Mini Feed stories are clearly the least annoying thing about apps.
• Profile clutter is still a big problem (especially for older folks).

So, assuming Facebook is seeing roughly the same data in its user experience testing, what are some possible conclusions for the Platform?

• Facebook will likely update the rules on invitations again. Per-user limits or stricter per-app limits are possible changes.
• Given that the new profile page is about to become dominated by the Feed/Wall, expect apps to be given more room to run here.
• Facebook is also solving the profile clutter problem with the new profile page design. Only 3 apps will have a box on the default tab. The rest will be, um, migrated.

Thoughts?

Poll data:

A few weeks ago, there was some speculation that Facebook is planning a “Preferred Developer Program” to reward popular applications that play by the rules. The thinking went that just as Facebook punishes bad developers, it would reward good developers with preferential treatment - perhaps with softer limits on viral channel restrictions or more News Feed visibility.

However, I received confirmation from Facebook today that the company is indeed NOT working on a Preferred Developer Program. “We aren’t doing a ‘preferred developer program,’ but are experimenting with new ways to better communicate with our developers,” a Facebook representative said.

Facebook’s efforts include its recent Developer Roundtable events, the Profile Preview Page, continuing to answer questions in the Developers Forum, and Developer Garage events.

Although some remain skeptical of Facebook’s even-handedness, Facebook is making major strides to open up its developer communication channels much more broadly. How do you think Facebook could improve communication with the developer community?

In another small tweak to the site, Facebook has added support to quickly jump to individual Groups by using the auto-complete feature of Facebook search. Initially, auto-complete only displayed friends. Later, it was expanded to include applications and Facebook Pages, and now it supports Groups. Links to other core features, such as individual events or photo albums, are not supported.

Currently, auto-complete only supports recognition of characters in the beginning of a word. For example, to search for a group called “Facebook Developers,” the box would recognize the input “dev” and display the proper result. However, substrings of a word like “velop” or “acebook” do not return the desired group.

In the same way that the upcoming Firefox 3 supports a more intelligent location bar, perhaps Facebook could use some basic relevance algorithms, like Firefox’s “frecency,” to learn who or what you are searching for. The current method organizes results not by relevance but by alphabetical order.

Facebook’s long-awaited Chat service, originally launched last Sunday to a select group of users (primarily in some of Facebook’s earliest college networks), has slowly been rolling out to additional networks and users.

Within the last 48 hours, Facebook Chat has been launched for users in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Philadelphia. However, most other users still don’t have access yet. While Facebook refuses to announce stats on the service until after the rollout is complete, most users have found Chat very stable so far.

As for Facebook Chat’s impact on Facebook Platform chat applications? That remains to be seen - none have shown very strong numbers so far.

Update: As of this morning, Facebook Chat is live in New York as well.

Social Gaming Network, one of the largest network of games on Facebook, has just announced the acquisition of Esgut, Free Gifts, Nicknames, Oregon Trail and Friend Block. With these acquisitions, the SGN family of games now has more than 50 million Facebook application installs and almost 1 million daily active users.

The acquisitions have actually happened gradually over recent weeks as SGN has built out its founding team and moved the staff to downtown Palo Alto. The following developers have joined SGN as co-founders:

• Suleman Ali and Jamal Ashraf of Esgut
• Zach Allia of Free Gifts
• Adam Gries and Wayne Mak of Nicknames

In addition, SGN purchased the Oregon Trail and FriendBlock applications directly.

“We are building a brain-trust of leading app talent. These are very highly regarded developers and SGN is blessed to have them join to help build a great company that brings innovation, creativity and joy to our users,” said Shervin Pishevar, CEO of SGN. “We are all passionate and believe in our vision of putting the key pieces together to be a creative force in building EA 2.0 with strength in new social games and virtual goods.”

SGN is shaping up to be a dominant force in the social gaming space. The company also announced that its game network has now grown to over 70 games, and it has also recently launched an innovative new Game Feed feature. More to come as SGN and Zynga battle it out to become the biggest social gaming platform!

Last week, I interviewed Bret Taylor, the co-founder of FriendFeed, a new website which aggregates content you’re sharing around the web and shares it with your friends.

Today, Facebook launched a feature specifically designed to make it easier to share content from around the web, called Feed Importing. Like FriendFeed, just enter your credentials for your accounts at supported partner sites and your content will appear in your Mini Feed (and your friends’ News Feeds).

According to Facebook’s Harry Wang,

The option to import stories from other sites can be found via the small “Import” link at the top of your Mini-Feed. Only a few sites—Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us—are available for importing at the moment, but we’ll be adding Digg and other sites in the near future. These stories will look just like any other Mini-Feed stories, and will hopefully increase your ability to share information with the people you care about.

This will certainly make Facebook a more powerful way to share content - currently, users have to actively “Post” items to their profiles or for certain friends. FriendFeed’s Taylor said the service was already the #2 referrer for some bloggers - if Facebook expands the feature to allow users to import any feed, will the same be true of Facebook?

However, Facebook feed importing is not quite FriendFeed–yet. Unlike FriendFeed, Facebook doesn’t allow conversations to take place in the feed itself. However, with an upcoming update to the Profile page, Facebook has alluded to a new kind of in-line “publishing flow” in the Mini Feed.

One further obvious difference with FriendFeed: while you can import RSS into Facebook, you can’t syndicate your Mini Feed or News Feed via RSS.

As Facebook users syndicate more content from external sources, selecting which of those feed items for News Feed distribution could become complicated. Facebook will need to continue developering effective News Feed selection algorithms to keep the News Feed from becoming too spammy.

Brad Stone over at the NYT reports today that Facebook is intending to settle the suit brought against it by ConnectU and that an agreement could be reached within a matter of weeks.

ConnectU, founded by twins Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss along with Harvard classmate Divya Narendra, originally filed suit against Facebook in 2004, claiming that Mark Zuckerberg and his fellow Facebook co-founders (also Harvard classmates) essentially stole the idea and initial code from ConnectU, then called HarvardConnection, and instead launched their own site, at the time called TheFacebook.

However, the suit was eventually dismissed on a technicality, and nothing much more came of it. Over the next two years, the ConnectU team apparently discontinued working on their product, while Facebook grew like gangbusters

ConnectU then resuscitated the case last year, and Facebook counter-sued in response. Now that Facebook is apparently going to settle the case, one wonders if it has ever contained any merit, or if it is merely an untimely thorn in Facebook’s side that the company is willing to pay to make go away before future financial events. Either way, the lawyers are getting paid.

One of the big challenges of building any social service on the web is, has, and always will be spam (and, likewise, trolls). At any given point, some percentage of “users” generating content are actually marketers attempting to drive traffic to their own site or otherwise not helpfully contributing to the community.

Facebook, for its part, has invested massive amounts of people hours and technical resources into making Facebook a fairly spam-free experience. Some ungodly high percentage of Facebook’s employees are devoted to spam detection and customer service. It’s a huge problem that takes a lot of effort to fight.

For developers, spammers and trolls can be just as much a problem as they are for Facebook itself. However, most developers lack the resources to implement effective spam detection/user reputation systems. Rather than leaving every app developer to build their own, Facebook should share access to its internal user reputation scores with developers AND allow developers to contribute their own user reputation “votes” back to the system based on how users behave within their apps.

This may be a little ways off, but it would be a win-win for developers, users, and Facebook. Developers wouldn’t have to reinvent the wheel, users would have better app experiences, and Facebook would get more comprehensive user integrity data.

After much speculation, Facebook is about to start closed beta testing its payment system for application developers.

This is big news for developers seeking to monetize their apps through transactions. Transaction-based applications that use virtual currencies or kick users out to Paypal could soon start accepting payments from users directly in their apps.

A Platform payment system could also be a significant revenue generator for Facebook. While Facebook is not making money directly from application use (developers keep 100% of ad sales), developers would be happy to pay a commission for the service.

Developers who are interested in participating in the beta test can go to the Developer Forums and email the Facebook Platform team. You will be required to sign an NDA to participate.