Inside Facebook

We’ve heard a lot of people say the iPhone’s built-in support for YouTube video uploading is going to make a huge impact on the number of people posting videos online. That number could grow even more now that Facebook’s upcoming Facebook for iPhone 3.0 app is going to include video uploads - especially amongst people who want to easily post their videos online for friends and family to see, but not the general public.

Joe Hewitt, the lead engineer on Facebook’s iPhone app, says, “3GS video uploading for the Facebook iPhone app is a go — didn’t plan to include it in the 3.0 update, but it was really easy to code.”

Developers and marketers should prepare for many more user-generated videos shuffling around the Facebook ecosystem in the coming months.

In addition to including video uploads for iPhone 3GS users, Facebook for iPhone 3.0 will include the “new” News Feed, Events Likes, Notes, Pages, a new home page, and a variety of other features. However, Push Notifications, which are in high demand, will be included in Version 3.1 later this summer, Hewitt says. A release date has not been announced.

While Facebook has over 230 million active users and has been rapidly growing around the world in the last 24 months, Orkut, the social network run by Google, has remained dominant in Brazil and India. Although Facebook has grown slowly in those two countries, it’s never been able to turn the corner - until now.

Starting about 60 days ago, Facebook’s growth began accelerating rapidly in both Brazil and India, growing several times faster in May and June than it did in March and April.

In fact, Facebook nearly doubled in Brazil during May alone. Its growth has continued in June, and today Facebook has just crossed the 1 million active user mark in Brazil for the first time ever - up 100% in the last 45 days.

Granted, Orkut still claims well over 20 million monthly visitors in Brazil, but we’ve seen this kind of pattern before. Facebook has the potential to double in new countries every 2-3 months several times over as it spreads through new populations, but it is probably still too early to claim that this is the canary in the coal mine for Orkut.

Curiously, however, just as Facebook started exploding in Brazil, the same thing was happening in India, the other major country where Orkut is the leading social network with 13 million monthly active users.

While Facebook has been growing slowly and steadily in India for the last couple of years, Facebook exploded in May and June, doubling from 1.6 million to 3.2 million monthly active users in the country in the last 60 days.

Do these trends correlate? Time will tell, but it certainly looks like Facebook is gaining significant steam in Orkut’s biggest strongholds.

Brazil and India are far from the only countries where Facebook is fighting to claw its way to the top spot. Nevertheless, Facebook continues to grow in almost every country we’re tracking the company in - and in most countries, by double digit percentages in total reach every month. Facebook is clearly a global phenomenon - it will be very interesting to see where things stand in another year.

Note: All data from Facebook’s advertiser tools.

The Facebook Platform payments and monetization ecosystem continues to grow rapidly this year, and recently, Facebook has been getting more involved. A few weeks ago, Facebook started testing integration of its own virtual currency with Platform applications, and last week Facebook enabled payment support in 14 new currencies.

Now, we’ve learned that Facebook recently hired Prashant Fuloria, formerly a Director of Product Management at Google where he worked on Google Checkout amongst various other projects during his six year stint, as the new Director of Product Management responsible for Facebook payments. Highly regarded by colleagues, Fuloria left Google and started at Facebook last month.

With Fuloria’s hiring, the march of former Googlers two exits up the 101 to Facebook continues. At one point, nearly 10% of Facebook employees came from Google. Just a couple of weeks ago, Greg Badros, who headed up the AdSense engineering team for several years at Google, joined Facebook as a Director of Engineering.

Fuloria has his work cut out for him as he oversees the development, testing, and wider launch of Facebook payments services over the next several months. While Facebook only accepts credit card payments today, it is likely to expand its payments tests in the future, as the company seeks to monetize users across geographies and demographic profiles. Managing the integration of payments methods and systems into the Facebook experience is an increasingly important challenge for the company as it seeks to create a new, substantial direct-to-consumer revenue stream in a market that is known for its high operational costs, major fraud challenges, and international complexity.

Several companies have already launched major efforts to help developers accept payments from Facebook users - including mobile payment providers Zong and Boku, integrated credit card payment enabler Social Gold, and a variety of others - not to mention Paypal, Amazon, and Google Checkout. Even large developers like Slide are now building their own payment platforms. The Facebook Platform payments ecosystem has gotten crowded in the two years since the Platform launched - a good sign of its overall health.

Facebook opted for Platform growth over monetization in 2008, but it appears to be increasingly focused on building out its payment platform in 2009. We’ll let you know as Facebook’s monetization efforts continue to develop - though we somehow doubt they’ll include Google Checkout any time soon.

This morning I gave the opening presentation at the Social Gaming Summit, discussing an overview of the major platforms, players, and monetization stats in the social gaming industry. For those interested in checking out the slides, they are embedded below.

Topics covered: Facebook, Facebook Connect, iPhone, MySpace, Hi5, Twitter, Monetization, ARPUs on Facebook and MySpace, IP, copycats.

Add another former Googler to the Facebook ranks. Just recently, Facebook hired Greg Badros, formerly a senior director of engineering at Google, as a new director of engineering.

While at Google, Badros was responsible for AdSense, Gmail, Calendar, Reader, and Orkut (Google’s social network that’s most popular in Brazil and India) at various points over the last six years. Prior to Google, Badros was the Chief Architect at InfoSpace. He will report to Facebook’s VP of Engineering Mike Scroepfer, who joined the company from Mozilla (at the time as a director of engineering) last summer.

Badros’s deep experience managing the AdSense engineering team over a period of three years could come in handy as Facebook starts to monetize Facebook Connect. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told us recently that the idea has always been that most of the action on the Facebook Platform would happen off of Facebook.com proper, and Badros has experience building systems flexible and scalable enough to serve a wide variety of publisher partners.

Badros’s experience managing Google’s Gmail engineering efforts over the last two years could also come in handy as Facebook continues to build out its messaging infrastructure. Just last week, Facebook announced some updates to the Facebook Inbox to decrease clutter, but with the launch of Facebook usernames we could see new kinds of messaging emerging in Facebook in the coming years that would require different architectures to work well over time than Facebook’s existing channels do.

It’s another significant engineering hire for Facebook. The company is still searching for someone to head their payments efforts as well.

As we continue our discussions with this year’s 2009 fbFund REV winners, we now turn to Navify, an online collaborative encyclopedia that complements Wikipedia articles with images, videos, and comments. We recently spoke with Alan Rutledge, Founder of Navify, on his vision of creating an online encyclopedia that the world can illustrate together.

Inside Facebook: Alan, what’s the problem that Navify addresses?

Alan Rutledge: Wikipedia is a vibrant community. What would Wikipedia look like with complementary media forms? I was fed up with going to a movie article on Wikipedia and not being able to watch the trailer. I’m a very visual person, and so whenever I went on Wikipedia to read up on a topic, there would be no pictures; and I had no idea how to visualize the concept. Basically, we’re adding a rich multimedia layer on top of Wikipedia so you don’t have to go to YouTube, for example, in addition to Wikipedia to get related videos.

You seem to have a lot of entrepreneurial experiences under your belt already. What were you doing before Navify?

I was raised in an entrepreneurial environment. My dad used to run the engineering school at Caltech. I began working at startups in high school. At Idealab, I worked on projects related to alternative energy, sterling engines, getting rid of Internet cables, robots, etc. Before doing consulting at BCG, I worked at Microsoft and a mobile photo sharing startup that was bought out by iLike.

Who’s on the Navify team?

I work with two other buddies. We’re a very tiny overworked team right now.

So, what’s your relationship with Wikipedia?

You can use Wikipedia with attribution. Answers.com is a $30 million company that builds content around specific questions. For each answer, it pulls content from Wikipedia. Similarly, with Navify, our platform is possible with YouTube and Flickr’s APIs. At the same time, we’re not trying to substitute Wikipedia; in fact, we drive traffic back to Wikipedia.

How do users interact with Navify right now?

Navify is currently divided into two partitions. The first partition is human edited and is pretty empty right now because we launched only several days ago. The second partition is algorithmic and will always be populated with content. Users can move content, videos for example, back and forth between the human-edited and algorithmic partitions. There’s more noise with the algorithmic one, but with the human-edited one, users are picking and organizing content in meaningful ways.

Notice the Images and Videos tabs next to the Wikipedia article, as well as Comments to the right.

Richer media forms are a must in today’s Internet culture. Why hasn’t Wikipedia integrated them into its platform yet?

Wikipedia has a strict stance of neutrality. It’s hesitant to integrate with other sites because its community wants to remain neutral. But, in the last two years, most sites have opened their APIs, and the concept of the web as a platform has only begun to capture the public’s mind. Unlike Wikipedia, we plan to operate as a for-profit business. The key will be to find forms of monetization that are useful for end users – like how Google’s sponsored links are providing actual utility to users.

And, how are you leveraging the Facebook Platform on your own platform?

We already have Facebook Connect. In addition to images and videos, we’re building a vibrant reader community around topics of discussion by allowing Navify users to leave comments on articles (via Disqus), which Wikipedia doesn’t do. A Facebook integration comes in handy because your real identity is tied to your comments, which gives you incentive to leave higher quality comments; there are higher social costs to leaving meaningless comments. Contrast this to YouTube: its comment trail is like a bathroom wall. We also support OpenID and Twitter.

Now that you’re in public beta, what trends have you noticed in user behavior?

People like the Related Articles box. They sit and click on articles. It becomes addictive.

Are there any other players in your space?

The closest analogy to what we’re doing is FriendFeed, which provides a search and browse experience to let their users share more easily online. None of the content on FriendFeed is original, but users can build discussions around them.

What are your expectations for this summer’s fbFund REV incubator program?

I’m keeping my mind open.

Thanks Alan! Any final thoughts?

One thing I’ll leave you with is that we’re working on a collaborative encyclopedia for the world to illustrate and make more useful for each other. Navify isn’t just a product, it’s a belief. We’re illustrating the world’s knowledge.

Although Facebook and Google are rivals on multiple fronts, YouTube announced today that it has just launched Facebook Connect integration, making it easy to autoshare uploaded videos with Facebook friends.

Now, after you authenticate with Facebook on YouTube, YouTube will automatically post a link to videos you upload on Facebook. The integration should boost traffic sent back to YouTube from Facebook as well - in the case of other Facebook Connect implementations, each shared item has generated up to 30 clicks back to the Connect-enabled site.

This actually isn’t the first time Facebook Connect has been integrated on YouTube. Two months ago, Coca Cola Europe’s Green Eyed World campaign manged to launch with a custom Facebook Connect integration on YouTube. That effort went very well.

The YouTube integration marks another major partner launch for Facebook Connect in June. Last week, Microsoft announced the integration of Facebook Connect on Xbox Live and Nintendo announced integration on its DSi handheld at E3 in Los Angeles.

A new Facebook gadget for iGoogle is available that lets you directly access the News Feed and update your status from your iGoogle home page. The stream is updated without having to refresh the page. However, you can’t comment or Like stories from the gadget just yet. (You can view a subset of comments for now.)

Here’s what the process of adding Facebook to iGoogle looks like:

1. Click here to add the Facebook Connect gadget to your iGoogle home page.

2. Once the gadget is added to iGoogle, you’ll be asked a series of requests for special permissions to allow iGoogle to a) update your status, b) remember you for constant reauthorization, and c) access the News Feed and Wall.

3. Now you can view live updates from your friends and the Pages you’re fans of, as well as update your status from iGoogle.

Notice that back on Facebook, my status has been updated via “iGoogle Gadget.”

This is not the first Facebook Connect widget that has taken advantage of Facebook’s “open stream” API. Desktop applications from Seesmic and TweetDeck allow users to monitor and update the stream from desktop applications. Now, gadgets like this one for iGoogle show that Facebook’s stream API is bringing more social context to portals as well - and driving more content sharing inside Facebook.

Update: A previous version of this story said that the gadget was developed by Facebook. It appears that this app was designed by Facebook but developed by Google, however. Thanks to Facebook and Michael Bauser for the correction.

Google dominated the business and technology press yesterday after it revealed the existence of Wave, a web-based application built upon email that enables users to share notes, pictures, blogs, videos and other bits of dynamic content in real-time. If successful, Wave would make Google’s core products and the web in general inherently more social, which begs the question: What does that mean for Facebook?

Overall, it might be too early to tell, but Facebook should keep an eye on where the technology is headed for a few reasons.

One is the design similarities. As an application, Wave embraces the “stream” design that Facebook has already implemented for its 200 million users. Apps focused on streams of shared content are based on the idea that information should flow to you. The Facebook News Feed and home page have been restructured to work in this format, representing a departure from past iterations of the site’s design that relied more heavily on users visiting their friends’ profiles. Under Facebook’s stream design, the content your friends share on Facebook flows to your fingertips.

Wave will do this, too. But it won’t just be your Facebook friends — it can be everyone in your address book, making it potentially very powerful.

But since Wave won’t be available until later this year, Facebook will enjoy even more time to have their users adjust to this way of consuming content on its platform. One of Facebook’s most powerful assets is that users have already uploaded years of pictures, notes and videos. This trove of content has made Facebook not only their primary communications mechanism, but their digital scrapbook as well. It’s unlikely that, overnight, they would move to their Gmail (or Wave) account to control all that information.

But Facebook shouldn’t dismiss Wave as hype, either. It appears to have immediate upsides for both developers and consumers. For developers, Wave is very open. They can add functionality to it, integrating it with other websites and applications. For consumers, Wave seems to marry social features (like an event invitation) with the robust messaging capabilities that you’d see in Gmail or instant messaging clients.

It also doesn’t require that users be loyal to one particular web tool or service for their content creation; they could use many of them. This, of course, could make Facebook look more “closed off,” since many of Facebook’s core applications (i.e. photos, notes, videos) are proprietary.

Conclusion

Rather than be adversarial, Facebook might examine how its site could work alongside Wave rather than compete with it. To date, Facebook’s large user-base remains loyal. They might conclude that Facebook and Google serve different purposes in their daily Web diets, as they currently do today.

Last month, Facebook announced that users would soon be able to login to the site via OpenID. Today, Facebook has officially become an OpenID relying party: users can now register for Facebook using their Gmail accounts and any OpenID provider that supports automatic login. As such, Facebook has become the largest OpenID relying party on the web.

Now, once users link their Facebook account to a Gmail address (or OpenID URL), they’ll be automatically logged in when they go to Facebook after having logged into that service. Facebook says that in its user testing so far, users who register through OpenID actually get engaged with Facebook more quickly than others.

“In tests we’ve run, we’ve noticed that first-time users who register on the site with OpenID are more likely to become active Facebook users. They get up and running after registering even faster than before, find their friends easily, and quickly engage on the site. We’ll continue to integrate more OpenID providers into our registration and account linking flows as they support automatic login,” Facebook says.

To link an existing account with a Google or OpenID account, users can go to their Account Settings page and choose an account in the Linked Accounts section. Yahoo and MySpace are also listed here, but a Facebook prompt says “Note that your accounts from Myspace and Yahoo do not allow for automatic login.”

We recently spoke with Facebook engineer Luke Shepard, who represents Facebook on the OpenID Foundation board, to get his perspective on Facebook’s OpenID integration.

Inside Facebook: Luke, why is Facebook integrating OpenID support?

Luke Shepard: The primary motivation for us is to accept OpenID for new users registering for Facebook. For now, that means through Gmail, though more providers will be coming soon. Google released their address book API a few months ago through OpenID, and we’re using that. The response has been pretty positive so far in our user testing.

In addition, for existing users, we’re offering a feature for you to login automatically if you have an account with an OpenID provider. For example, I have a Gmail account. Every day, I open up my browser and go to Gmail and Facebook, and now you can be automatically logged into Facebook after logging into Gmail.

Which other companies have support coming soon?

Yahoo has been an OpenID provider for over a year and is on the verge of supporting automatic login. Microsoft hasn’t launched as a provider yet, but will sometime. The big three will be covered pretty soon.

What steps did Facebook take to overcome some of the user experience challenges that have hindered OpenID?

One thing we did was we skipped some of the hard part. Probably the most difficult open question in the OpenID community is how do you get a user to register with an OpenID for the first time. We’re skipping that for existing users right now to make sure we get the underlying system working. We’re working on a lot of ideas for how we can present that to the user after we launch - like how to do OpenID login in a popup and keeping users on the page versus sending them off to another site.

We’re a major identity provider with the Facebook Platform and Facebook Connect. We’ve been trying to do a good job on this for apps, and this is a good chance for us to eat our own dogfood with identity and learn what we can do better for apps in the future.

There are very few sites that support the background automatic login in OpenID, but this is a core part of the Facebook Connect experience. Others haven’t done this yet because it’s pretty difficult technically. When designing our OpenID implementation, I was drawing on several Facebook engineers here to learn from how we did various things with Connect. It’s also still rapidly evolving.

Other relying parties will get the cookies, but they’ll usually redirect you to the provider and then you’ll be directed back, but there are a lot of risks with that approach because when you’re a site like us where we’re bigger than almost all the providers were going to be using, it’s important for us not to send them off to a site and have a bad experience.

What other designs have you seen that have worked well?

Currently the best approach out there is what Chris Messina has caleld the “NASCAR” approach (putting a bunch of buttons up for the user to choose). Currently we’re trying to avoid that approach with a couple sidesteps:

1. For new users who we know have a Gmail account, we can show them one big Gmail button, and we’d like to expand that to other providers.
2. We’re also letting existing accounts link.

Can users login to sites with Facebook Connect through Gmail and OpenID as well, or just Facebook.com?

Only facebook.com. Right now, we’re trying to get something out to users and figure out what is the smallest set of functionality that we can roll out, because it involves laying a lot of the groundwork from a security perspective. Now that we’ve laid the groundwork there’s a bunch of iterations we can do.

Why have you been such a big internal advocate of OpenID at Facebook?

The company is really big into open standards and open source already from the highest level - Mike Schroepfer came from Mozilla. Basically everything here is open source, like Thrift. It’s not like I’m fighting a battle, I’ve just found that my role is to learn what’s going on in the community and educate what’s going on inside the company.

In the long run, i think we’ll see that open standards are ultimately what win. Part of what we’re trying to figure out is how do we get there and how does our product work with open standards.  Using the popup and doing the background approach aren’t things that the OpenID commuinity hasn’t really pushed yet, but they’re core to the Facebook Connect product. We want to try to help incorporate these back into the OpenID community.

Is the OpenID movement good for Facebook?

I think it’s good for Facebook in two ways. First, registration rates: OpenID clearly makes registration easier for users, which is good for growth. Our growth team tries everything, so I think this will increase our growth rate.

Second, if we participate in open standards and help define them and work to have our innovations contributed, it’s ultimately going to lead to a better product than trying to fight them.

What’s your relationship with Google been like working on this?

We’ve been talking with them to make sure it works well, but we were able to get it working with the public API documentation.

Thanks Luke - any final thoughts?

This is still an early version, and not yet a finished product. There should be more iterations soon.