Rumor: AOL, Facebook Talk Ad Alliance – The New York Post reports that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and AOL CEO Tim Armstrong have been discussing a “strategic alliance” that would boost the companies’ respective online ad businesses. Discussions have purportedly been on for months, and a deal might allow Facebook to tap into AOL’s online ad power and AOL to dump much of its content into social media, post-Bebo. AOL could potentially be named a “preferred media partner,” according to the story, but Facebook said it doesn’t comment on “market rumors.”

Facebook, Google Approach Data Centers Differently – An interesting piece in The Dalles Chronicle points out that Facebook and Google have taken radically different approaches to constructing their data centers in Oregon. The article characterized Google as standoffish, secretive and not always smooth with the locals on site whereas Facebook — headed by one of the former leaders of Google’s data center — has sent employees to meet with local leaders and disclosed construction plans early on. In other example, as we wrote previously, Facebook recently co-sponsored a local music event and pie bake-off at its site in Crook County.

Facebook Changes Notes – Facebook has changed its Notes app to allow people to bold, italicize, underline, use bullets, numbered lists or indented quotes without having to use the HTML tags. Users will now also be able to tag Pages in Note. Finally, a new menu on the left side allows for quick perusal of a user’s own Notes, Notes about you or Notes that might interest you.

CloudCrowd raises $5.1 M – CloudCrowd, which networks with workers around the world to bring labor into the cloud, previously raised $5.1 million recently and previously raised $1.5 million, according to TechCrunch. We wrote extensively about CloudCrowd’s business recently, the company bills itself as an on-demand labor-as-a-service crowdsourcing company which uses a Facebook application to assign tasks to workers, more at the link.

Appbistro Raises $550K – Appbistro raised $550,000 in funding recently from a variety of angel investors; the startup is essentially a market of apps for Page developers. Appbistro launched in May, according to TechCrunch, and so far 10,000 apps have been downloaded from the web site.

Rixty: Redeem Coins, Get Facebook Credits – Virtual currency provider Rixty is running a promotion from Aug. 9 through Sept. 7 that combines its Coinstar coin counting kiosks with Facebook Credits. the promotion allows users to redeem vouchers from Coinstar kiosks for Credits, up to 10 free Credits for redeeming their kiosk balance for a Rixty voucher. They can earn up to 105 more free Credits for exchanging these vouchers for Credits at the $0.199/Credit tax, depending on the value of the voucher.

Facebook Seattle Page – Facebook recently opened the Seattle office we wrote about in May and the company consequently published a Page for the office. Thus far the Page has about 530 Likes and Wall content, as well as a note including basic information and a photo of the view from the office.

Facebook Nears Saturation in UK – Hitwise’s numbers in the United Kingdom show that, while Facebook is still very popular, the social network may be nearing saturation. The amount of time people spend on the site decreased slightly and growth has slowed over the past six months. Check out our premium service, Inside Facebook Gold, for more information on growth by country.

eBay Thanks Like Button for Revenue – eBay has reportedly attributed part of its $2.2 billion increase in revenue last quarter to Facebook’s Like button. The Like button has been part of eBay’s Daily Deals or Fashion Vault promotions and company executive say Facebook’s social plugins represent some of the best marketing tools currently available.

Spotify Designer Joins Facebook – Rasmus Andersson, the former chief designer at Spotify, has left to join Facebook as a product designer. At Spotify, Andersson worked on creative and art direction, interaction and graphic design, brand identity and user interaction, among other things. He’ll be moving to San Francisco as part of his new job. On his blog he said that working with basic human needs, such as music and social interaction, has been the focus of his professional life. [Photo via]

Swiss Pharma Censured Over Facebook Info – Swiss drug maker Novartis ran into trouble with the U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) this week over a widget on the company’s web site promoting its leukemia tasigna drug. Under current laws drug companies must present the pros along with the cons of any drug in advertisements, but the widget allowed Facebook users to share information promoting the product without any of the warning information. We wrote about the thin line pharmaceutical companies are currently walking by promoting products on social media spaces; the government is still considering regulations for social media drug promotions.

Book Delta Flights on Facebook – Delta’s new Ticket Window app allows users to book flights directly on Facebook. The app is powered by Alvenda.

Shout Out with Shoutworthy - Facebook Connect integration Shoutworthy is set up to allow people to professionally recommend their Facebook friends by profession and broadcast a short message about this recommendation over Twitter and Facebook.

Hospitals Contend with Facebook – Hospital administrators in California, as well as other places, are having trouble controlling what employees post about their work on Facebook. This is a particular problem due to U.S. medical confidentiality laws, especially in hospitals in Southern California where celebrities often go for treatment. So far, hospitals have responded by firing staffers who break the laws by posting photos or other confidential information on Facebook and by mounting their own social media campaigns.

UK’s Panic Button a Success – The United Kingdom’s experience with the so-called “Panic Button” to allow children to report inappropriate behavior on Facebook has been deemed successful by authorities there. The application has been downloaded more than 55,000 times and the 211 reports generated from it were serious offenses, such as “sexual grooming.” More at the link.

New Jersey Police Post Mug Shots – The Evesham Township police have begun posting the mug shots of local offenders, like drunk drivers, on Facebook. CNET reports that, while this is interesting, it does open up a strange can of worms because the photos can be tagged, which could lead to mischief.

Ronaldo Gets 10 Million Fans – Portuguese footballer Cristiano Ronaldo passed 10 million Likes on Facebook this week, making him the first non-American person to do so.

The Facebook Marketing Bible: 50+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook has enabled thousands of marketers, social application developers, publishers, and entrepreneurs to understand and get the most out of the increasingly sophisticated marketing opportunities on Facebook.

Now, as Facebook continues to roll out exciting changes affecting brands and websites of all sizes, this leading resource and tool is updated and more essential than ever before. The newly revised and expanded May 2010 edition is now available.

The densely-packed Facebook Marketing Bible contains four detailed sections: Tools for Guerilla Marketers, Tools for Advertisers, Tools for Application Developers, and Tools for Webmasters. Each part outlines the best available channels and strategies for reaching your audience inside Facebook. Please see the full table of contents below.

In addition, Inside Facebook is happy to announce that through May 31st all customers who purchase the Facebook Marketing Bible will also receive a free $25 Facebook Ads advertising credit, courtesy of Facebook (see terms). Now that Facebook has crossed the 400 million active user mark, there’s never been a better time to reach your target audience inside Facebook.

The May 2010 edition includes updates on the following topics:

• Detailed updates on Facebook’s recent upgrade to its Insights analytics dashboard for Page administrators and app developers. Ever since Facebook redesign its Pages, brands, celebrities, and small businesses have been showing increased interest in managing their Page and publishing to the Facebook Stream. The upgraded Insights dashboard should equip Page managers to do a much better job.
• Full details on Facebook’s new Open Graph Protocol. At Facebook’s f8 developer conference this past month, Facebook unveiled its Open Graph protocol, a new way of structuring data on the websites, and then connecting the data with the social identity that users build on Facebook. The Open Graph protocol will change the way users interact with Facebook’s social features, and impact how websites, brands and app developers gain visibility in front of the millions of users that log in to the site every day. How could it affect your brand, site, Facebook Page, or marketing campaign? We have all the details on how every brand manager, marketer, and website owner can understand and utilize the Open Graph to increase customer engagement and brand and content distribution within Facebook itself.
• A detailed breakdown of Facebook’s five new social plugins, and what they mean for site owners. Along with its Open Graph protocol, Facebook announced five new social plugins designed to help websites boost virality and user engagement by leveraging Facebook’s existing services. The Like button, the Activity Stream plugin, the Recommendations plugin, the Facebook Login plugin, and the Social Bar plugin each have the potential of changing how your users interact with your website, and how your website gains distribution on Facebook. We take a close look at each of these plugins and how brands and sites can make the most of them.
• Updates on Facebook Connect, and the recent retirement of the Connect brand.The idea behind Facebook Connect is one that’s critical to understanding where Facebook is headed in the future. Now that Facebook has released the Open Graph protocol and social plugins, and retired the Connect brand, what do website owners need to know?
• The latest updates on Facebook’s advertising tools, including the per post insights, conversion tracking, and powerful new targeting features. Facebook’s new Ads Manager is here, and Facebook Ads are becoming more efficient to use than ever before. Facebook recently added several thousand new cities for local ad targeting. And, with Facebook’s new “connection” targeting, “friends of connections” targeting, birthday targeting, and time scheduling tools, advertisers now have the ability to reach their target audiences in more targeted ways – and measure them with Facebook’s improved per post insights. Learn how to use these new tools to get the most out of your performance marketing dollars. Plus, check out ways Facebook is experimenting with virtual currency gifting and branded virtual gifts.
• Full details on Facebook’s Platform API changes and Facebook Credits virtual currency payment service for application developers. Find out the latest on what Facebook’s latest Platform API changes mean for marketers, and what Facebook’s new payment program means for the future of virtual currency payments on Facebook (and Facebook revenues) – including Facebook’s latest international currency efforts.
• New tools for advertisers to target their Facebook Ads better than ever before. With enhanced Facebook targeting tools, advertisers now have the ability to reach their target audiences in much more powerful ways. Learn how to use these new tools to get the most out of your performance marketing dollars. Plus, check out ways Facebook is experimenting with virtual currency gifting and branded virtual gifts.
• Plus, more updates on the removal of application notifications, what that means for marketers, and more.

The Facebook Marketing Bible is also available in French, Spanish, Italian, and print.

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible – Current Edition Buy PDF: $95 USD OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $295 USD

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $95, or $295 with 12 months of free updates emailed directly to your inbox. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic!

Purchase The Guide The Facebook Marketing Bible – Current Edition Download PDF: $95 USD OR Download PDF + Get 1 Year of Monthly Updates: $295 USD

Facebook has hired another advertising sales executive with Google experience to help it expand abroad, the company announced today: Joanna Shields, most recently known in Silicon Valley for helping to lead rival social network to a $850 million sale to AOL. She’d helped launch a London-based media startup called Shine last fall, and will continue on there as non-executive chairman.

Shields will be in charge of sales and business development for Facebook in Europe, the Middle East and Africa, the same area she once managed for Google. Facebook has around 150 million Facebook users in it, according to our Facebook Global Monitor report from last month, with 130 million monthly active users in Europe, another 9 million in the Middle East and nearly 10 million across Africa.

Facebook has many offices across Europe, focused on local sales and customer service support. Locations include London, Dublin, Stockholm, Hamburg, Milan, Madrid and Paris — although they are mostly small, from our understanding. We don’t know of any Facebook offices in Africa or the Middle East, although the company recently cut an ad-sales partnership with a company that serves the latter region, called Connect Ads.

The official statement from Facebook vice president of global sales, Mike Murphy:

Continuing to deepen our global sales capabilities is important for Facebook, and a reflection of the growing demand we are seeing from advertisers around the world. Joanna Shields brings tremendous experience to the company and will help us continue to expand the success we have seen with advertisers and partners in Europe. Blake Chandlee, who has been instrumental in building our efforts in Europe to date, will take on the new role of driving our sales strategy in Asia-Pacific, Latin America and other growth regions, as we look to grow our global support of the marketing community.

The company also tells us that Chandlee will continue to work in the Middle East and Africa.

Boomerang Networks has spent the last year quietly building an advertising offers service designed to take on established players like Offerpal and Super Rewards. Now, it’s taking the covers off.

Every offers company is busy trying to optimize which ads appear to which users. Boomerang’s offer wall includes thumbs-up and thumbs-down buttons so users can vote on which ones they like. That’s the beginning: the company combines this user feedback with user comments, profile data — as Facebook’s and others’ terms of service allow — as well as number of clicks. Then, it analyzes the data to figure out which types of offers make the best fit between the user base (by country, age and sex), the category of application, and the price the users are typically willing to pay for the offers relative to the game. When users interact with the resulting offers, Boomerang gathers more information on their behavior and further optimizes the offers. It also has a customer service team pre-screen for deceptive offers, it says, and won’t repeatedly show offers to users who take them or vote them down.

The company has made internationalization a priority. Chief executive Honor Gunday tells us it has deals with more than 130 advertising networks around the world, so it is able to filter offers to be relevant to users in specific places. He provides a rough breakdown of what this looks like. For medium to high-engagement games in the US, offers can bring in from $1.00 to $1.50 per user; in southeast Asian countries, $0.50 to $0.80; in Latin America, $0.10 to $0.20.

The offer wall includes some other notable features. It has direct payments from more than 60 providers around the world. Although some are available through payment aggregators like PayByCash, Gunday also says that it has brought in some options not available through most rivals, such as Cherry Credits in Southeast Asia. The wall also provides categories of offers by content type and popularity, and shows banner ads. To make the experience easier for users, it also provides a detailed customer feedback form about each offer, and provides a window showing pending payouts and past offer votes.

Users also can click to view a full “customer relationship management” interface showing them the following information about each completed offer: title, date taken, status, earned or expected amount of virtual currency, payout timeframe, and user-generated quality ranking.

Boomerang’s current publicly-named clients include TheBroth and Hitgrab, and is in talks with more. The service is now live for apps on Facebook, MySpace, Hi5 and Bebo. Boomerang has raised a round of funding from angel investors, but the amount has not been disclosed.

Recently, I was selected to be a judge in Bebo’s B.E.S.T. Developer contest.  Over 2,000 applicants participated, and after 2 months, 18 were selected by Bebo to be judged.  Frank Gruber, Dave McClure, and I (Jesse Stay) all had the opportunity of trying out each one and judge, based on various criteria, what we thought of them.  The results were all tallied up by Bebo, and the top 5 were announced at an awards ceremony.  Those included Kickmania, Banana Grams, Robokill Trainer, and Solid Sudoku. The winner, Bowling Buddies, by Playfish, deservedly won Grand Prize due to it being a very engaging and visually appealing app with functional UI.

As a social app developer, and author of O’Reilly’s FBML Essentials, I’ve been through these contests before as a participant, often with a blind eye towards what the judges would look for and how I could get their attention.  After all, in this particular contest, over 2,000 applications were competing for the top prize, but in many Facebook competitions there are 10 times that.  You’re a needle in a haystack to the judges.  I thought, after experiencing this and a few other judging opportunities, that I’d share a little on what catches our, as judges, attention:

1. Functionality – I’m starting with the essentials, and they were very important in the judging process for this particular contest.  Functionality was key.  Believe it or not, even some of the top 18 finalists that we judged still had major flaws, bugs, and issues with functionality. Some apps took several tries to get working after install. Others had bugs within the app itself. I understand you didn’t have much time to write it, but neither did any other developer in the contest, and time is not on the Judges’ side either. That brings me to #2.

2. K.I.S.S. – Keep it Simple, Stupid! There were a few apps that didn’t even have About pages. As a Judge, this is crucial. Remember, some of the judges (those at Bebo, or Facebook, or whatever the host of the contest is) are going through thousands of apps. Others, like me, are going through just 18, but even 18 is a lot to go through on an already very busy schedule. (They don’t call Dave McClure “Master of 500 Hats” because he sits around and judges contests all day.) Your About page is your cover letter – if the Judge never even tries your app, what do you want them to know about it?

Keep your apps very simple, but fun, engaging, and useful. The more you can fit into a small package without being overwhelming, the better. Make it as easy as possible for the judges to get through most of your app, very quickly, and easily.

3. Visual Appeal – Those apps that were a little more appealing visually caught my attention more than those that didn’t. As an app developer myself this doesn’t matter as much to me, but I did find myself sticking around on apps I could “feel good” in a little longer than those that didn’t spend as much time on visual appeal. It made me feel like the developers cared a little more if they invested in a graphic designer to design their application.

4. Engagement – I highly recommend you try out the 5 apps above.  I rated I think every one of them pretty high, and the Grand Prize winner was definitely my favorite.  Bowling Buddies drew me in – in fact, I wrote on Twitter at the time I was playing it, “The good apps in this contest really suck you in.” I liked it so much and was having so much fun playing it I wanted to share it with others and even brought my 6 year old son over to play it with me. I really wanted to tell others about it.  Spend some time having your friends and family play your app – do they share it with their friends (and not because you sent it to them)? How long do they spend playing it?  Think about the types of things your buddies at work send to you and would waste work hours on (seriously). Engagement is very important.

5. Virality – I was very surprised that some of the apps we judged did not make it very easy for me to share with my friends.  Virality is key, and central to the success of any social application. Your application should sell itself.  Your users are your new sales and marketing staff, and best of all, they don’t cost you anything! Make your app engaging enough to make me want to share, and when I want to share, make it as easy as possible, at as many points in the app (without being spammy) for me to share it with my friends. A good judge of social applications will notice this.

6. Get to know the judges – This isn’t an exact science.  The three judges for Bebo’s contest were announced ahead of time.  Our names are all over the place, and we’re all on Twitter, Facebook, and Bebo.  It’s very easy to learn about us, what types of things we like, the quirks we hate in applications, and the types of innovation we’re looking for.  Take advantage of that to get to know the judges ahead of time.  I don’t think a single app developer tried to chat with me and get to know me during this contest. While I probably would not have let it influence me, it could have given them some useful information on what I’m looking for.  This isn’t the case for all contests, so tread lightly (it could backfire), but at the very least, get to know who will be judging your app.

As for me? I was looking for the most useful apps that could be viral and engaging. I like things that change the world, things I haven’t seen before but catch my eye. Surprisingly not many I judged did that, and perhaps that was rightly so since Bebo does target more of an entertainment demographic. With the short timeframe it’s also hard to do that, which I understand. Perhaps yours could have been one of those?

7. Read directions – In this contest, Bebo laid out their instructions clearly.  I don’t know if they turned any apps down due to not following directions, but I bet they did, and you would never have heard of it. Read all the contest rules ahead of time, read them twice, and be sure your application follows them, to a tee, when you submit your application to the contest.  If it does make it through, the judges will notice, and then you’re just wasting the judges’ time at that point.

8. Be original! – Remember that as judges, we’re looking at many applications.  Therefore, those that stand out will be those that haven’t been done before.  I was very impressed, and amused at the Kickmania app, due to the originality of it all, and how at the same time it sucked me in and was very viral. While perhaps not something that would change the world, it was very original in the idea, something I had never seen before, yet wanted to play over and over again. Surprisingly, Bowling Buddies was the same way – while Bowling itself isn’t very original, the way they crafted the Bowling game and the way you play it I thought was very original.

This was a fun contest to judge, and I learned a lot from it. How you craft your application and the amount of time you spend paying attention to these details will make or break your application in these contests.  If you can follow these 8 steps, your chances of being noticed will go up 10-fold.  Congrats again to the winners!

The London Facebook Developer Garage is coming up on Wednesday 8th October at Sun Microsystems, 45 King William Street, London. Sun are generously sponsoring the event again and are also providing free beer and pizza.

As well as the usual networking opportunities there’s a busy line-up of speakers:

• Phil Clandillon and Steve Milbourne from Sony BMG talk about an application based competition they ran across Facebook and Bebo to promote Michael Jackson, lessons they’ve learnt, and what else they’re doing on the platforms.
• Chris Thorpe from MySpace discusses the changover from Open Social 0.7 to 0.8, and why sometimes it still makes sense to use Javascript in normal applications.
• I’ll be talking about Facebook Connect with a technical overview and a practical view of pros and cons.
• Mat from Sun talks about what they’ve been doing with Zembly (a tool to build and host applications across multiple social platforms)
• Toby from Nudge shows us their latest application, Spotted!
• Iskandar from Nudge goes over the latest developments on the Facebook platform.

The event starts at 6:30pm and tickets are available from Eventbrite or at the door.

Friendster, the biggest social network in Asia, will announce later this evening that it is expanding its application developer program by adding support for the Facebook Platform API. With tonight’s launch, Friendster will be the first social network to have implemented support for both the OpenSocial and Facebook Platform application development standards. Friendster launched OpenSocial support just this August, after implementing its own application platform in 2007.

The Friendster launch is a big opportunity for Facebook application developers interested in Asian markets. Facebook developers will be able to easily port (most parts of) their Facebook applications over to Friendster with very little work, gaining access to Friendster’s audience of 57 million users. According to comScore, Friendster’s user base only has a 22% overlap with Facebook’s, so Friendster offers access to an audience largely untapped by most Facebook developers.

In addition, Friendster is less restrictive about which parts of the application can be monetized. Developers can put ads on any real estate they control, including the profile page.

Facebook Platform API categories that will be supported as of launch tonight include: users, friends, notifications, photos, FBML, FQL, authentication, requests, and profile. The news feed API will not be supported, but it will be in the future. Friendster’s Director of Marketing Jeff Roberto says that Friendster intends to keep its Facebook Platform implementation up to date with Facebook’s, but it will just take a little more time to initially get in sync.

“Our vision with the developer program is to build a very open platform and to make it easy for developers who have built on common standards like Facebook and OpenSocial to deploy on Friendster,” Roberto says. “We will maintain our Friendster APIs, Facebook APIs, and OpenSocial APIs.”

Friendster becomes the second major social network to license the Facebook Platform API under the Facebook Open Platform (fbOpen) initiative. Late last year, Bebo launched its platform using Facebook APIs, shortly before being acquired by AOL.

comScore released its June 2008 social networking numbers last week. After taking a little bit of a deeper look at social networking over the past 6 months, I think there are some really interesting trends here:

• Overall, Social Networking total audience grew 64 million (12%) during the last 6 months. (That’s over twice as fast as the total internet audience.)
• Of that, Facebook and hi5 are winning the vast majority of new users coming into the category. hi5 was by far the fastest growing site at nearly 80%, or 25 million uniques, during the period. Facebook grew by the most absolute uniques at 34 million, or 35%. Together, Facebook and hi5 grew by 59 million uniques, accounting for 67% of the growth of the top 6 social networking sites during the first half of 2008 (and 92% of the total category’s net growth during the first half of 2008).
• The next closest in unique terms was MySpace at 10 million, or 10% growth during the period. However, Friendster (7 million uniques/25%), Orkut (9 million uniques/35%), and Bebo (2.7 million uniques/13%) grew at faster rates.
• Facebook is clearly the largest social network in the world by total uniques, at 132 million. MySpace has saturated the US market and is not growing as fast as Facebook and hi5 internationally, where most of the growth is coming from.
• For those that don’t yet know, hi5 is exploding. hi5′s massive 80% growth over the last quarter now firmly entrenches it as the #3 social network in the world. hi5 is the leading social network in 25 countries across Latin America, Europe, Asia and Africa.
• During the first half of 2008, the market became increasingly concentrated amongst the 6 market leaders. Although uniques to the leading 6 social networking sites increased by 88 million, uniques to the other 276 social networking sites in the category actually fell by 24 million from December to June. Despite all the new social networks being launched, it’s proving to be really hard to gain traction at this point.

Update: I think the calculations involving the “Other” bucket are incorrect: the Unique Visitors metric is not additive. Also, the data refers to individual months, not six months at a time.

While Facebook is rumored to be launching Facebook Connect, a new way for third party websites to connect with users’ Facebook profile and friend information without leaving the site, the Bebo Platform team have launched some interesting API’s of their own: today, Bebo announced new external authorization APIs which will allow third party web and desktop applications to access your Bebo account.

Developers interested in the Bebo external auth APIs can find more documentation here.

This is a guest post by Blake Commagere, creator of the “monsters” series of applications on Facebook, Bebo, and other social networks.

How much work is it?

Several Facebook developers have still not ported their apps to Bebo despite the ease with which it can be done. The team at Bebo has gone to great pains to ensure that porting your app from Facebook to Bebo is very, very little work. Given that you can access Bebo’s audience of 80 million users by spending just a little time on it, you should begin your port immediately – my applications (Zombies, Vampires, Werewolves & Slayers) took me about 9 hours total to port over. Here’s a quick guide to help you get started:

Two very important decisions to make:

1. Whether you allow cross-platform functionality.
2. Whether you use the same code base.

Allowing cross-platform functionality

Cross-platform functionality is simply any set of features that allow users on Facebook to interact with users on Bebo. In general, this is not a good decision because it is a non-trivial amount of work and will add value to your application in very, very few instances.

1. While the average Internet user may have accounts on a few social networks, they are only active on one.
   • Keep in mind that engineers are an exception to this rule, but most users are NOT engineers
   • Very few active users on both networks means very few that would need a seamless experience between the two networks.
2. Transferring a user’s settings from one network to another would require authenticating them against both social networks.
   • This would either have to be done by Facebook and Bebo through some sort of collaboration
   • Or, you will have to authenticate the user by prompting for them to log into one social network from an experience in the other – a very confusing user experience.
3. Any tables indexed by user_id will have to be indexed by social_network and user_id to prevent collisions.
4. Friend graphs do not map across the networks – i.e., your Facebook friends do not directly correlate to your Bebo friends.

There are cases where cross platform functionality does make sense and is not much work. If your app creates a synchronous experience with strangers – for example a flash poker game – then the user can be presented with a room that allows them to play poker against members of many different social networks and creates a larger community. However, functionality that allowed you to transfer your poker history and settings from Facebook to Bebo is a feature that would likely get very little use and add a non-trivial amount of work to your porting effort.

Using the same code base

Bebo has gone to great lengths to make using your same code base for both Bebo and Facebook very easy. In general, this is a very good decision for the following reasons:

• Your feature set will always remain in synch
• Bug fixes only have to happen in one place

If you are using MVC architecture, then you should be able to reuse your models and controllers with very little adjustment. As Bebo does not yet have FBJS support, the view portion of your application will require some work if you use FBJS.

If your app is not using an MVC architecture and you extensively use FBJS, then your code will have several places where you have to case out the different social networks and it may be worth branching your code base rather than reusing it.

Recommended Steps

(assumes you want to use the same code base and are not allowing cross-platform functionality)

1. Ensure you are using 64 bit integers for your user ids (e.g. in MySQL bigint rather than int).
2. Create a top level configuration file that determines whether the connection is coming from Facebook or Bebo and sets a parameter or define establishing which network has connected to you.

   * You can do something like this:

* if ($_REQUEST['fb_sig_network'] == 'Bebo')

define('CURRENT_SOCIAL_NETWORK', 'Bebo');else

define('CURRENT_SOCIAL_NETWORK', 'Facebook');

3. Merge the client APIs for Facebook and Bebo. You can start with the Facebook API and add cases that handle connecting to either Facebook servers or Bebo servers based on the parameter you established in Step 1. (Note: I am hoping to open source a merged client API for Facebook and Bebo in the very near future – this will make this step unnecessary!)
4. Handle any cases where you relied upon aspects of the Facebook API that are not yet supported by Bebo. These API calls aren’t supported by Bebo yet:
   • AuthCreate/getsession (but this is coming very soon)
   • Admin.getAppProperties/Set AppProperties
   • Batch:run
   • Users.hasAppPermission
   • Users.getstatus
   • Friends.getlist
   • Datastorage
   • Marketplace
5. If using FBML, handle any cases where you use facebook tags not yet supported by Bebo. Keep in mind: FBML is supported by Bebo – it SNML has the same syntax, but you do NOT have to switch from using to. Bebo allows you to use either! Currently, here are the tags not yet supported by Bebo:
   • mobile
   • require log-in attribute
   • page-edit-admin-header
   • visible to connection
   • attachment preview
   • if is-in network tag
6. If you want to build functionality supported by Bebo but not Facebook, handle those cases properly. Here are the API components on Bebo that do not exist on Facebook:
   • Bands
   • Playlists
   • Songs of Bands
7. Keep in mind that Bebo does not yet support FBJS (SNJS), but that will be coming very very soon! Additionally, pre-load SNQL launches the week of 6/02/08, so use it!
8. Abstract out Facebook specific links or references. For example, anything specified here: http://developers.facebook.com/documentation.php?v=1.0&doc=other will most likely not be as trivial as replacing the word “facebook” with “bebo” in these urls.
9. Release on Bebo and enjoy!

About the Author

Blake was a Founder at Mogad.com, which later became Social.im. Blake is also the creator of the superviral Zombies, Vampires, and Werewolves games on Facebook. Prior, he led the development of the Causes on Facebook application. Blake was also an early engineer on Plaxo’s client team and a founding engineer at BuildForge (acquired by IBM).