Inside Facebook

When people think Open Source and social networking, usually the first thing that comes to mind is Google and OpenSocial. What most don’t know however is that Facebook is almost as much, if not more Open Source focused as Google is.

One unknown fact about the Facebook Platform is that most of the technologies used to create the platform were used in-house before they were released to the public, and because of that they have been able to release many of those projects through OpenSource licenses to the public. Facebook has an entire page on their developers site that features the Open Source projects they are working on. On that page are 12 projects that I’ll describe here:

Facebook Open Platform

As one of the most significant contributions by Facebook, Facebook has made almost its entire developer platform, from FBML to the API, open source for other sites to enable developers to port apps from Facebook. It was recently made famous through its implementation by Friendster. Bebo has also implemented the code from this platform enabling developers to easily make the transition of their apps from Facebook to Bebo. Any developer can download the code, written in PHP, install it, and implement a Facebook-compatible API on their own site.

Thrift

Thrift, according to Facebook, “combines a powerful software stack with a code generation engine to build services that work efficiently and seamlessly between C++, Java, Python, PHP, and Ruby”. The idea here is that with Thrift, you can easily generate an intermediate layer that will talk between languages. Facebook uses this in their search, mobile, posts, notes, feed, and platform products currently, but the code is free and open for all to download.

MemcacheD

According to Facebook, they are the largest user of MemcacheD. MemcacheD is a memory-based caching technology that enables multiple servers to share a common pool of cache, all stored in memory, enabling very fast, scalable response times for web services. Facebook has made significant contributions to the source code of MemcacheD increasing response times by 20%. Twitter is also a significant user of MemcacheD among many other services.

Cassandra

Cassandra appears to be a distributed storage system enabling storage across many servers with no single point of failure. It’s unclear what Facebook services are using this currently.

phpsh

Written in Python (ironically), phpsh is a shell intended to make PHP development easier. Facebook says it was developed internally, but gives access to documentation, tab-completion, and more. Facebook has coined the term, “interactive scripting”, with this new shell. Could we be seeing the first “social” development environment?

Facebook Animation

Facebook is creating an entire library to enable javascript animation methods in the Facebook Javascript client library. Going head-to-head with the likes of YUI, the Animation libraries Facebook provides give shortcuts, keeping the Facebook look and feel in Facebook javascript development.

Facebook Firefox Toolbar

Completely open source, the Facebook Firefox Toolbar is an extension for Firefox that enables the user to track their Facebook friends, check messages, and more from the Firefox browser. It was written as an example of the Facebook Platform desktop client libraries, and Facebook is even allowing developers to submit patches to keep it going.

Facebook Exporter for iPhoto

If you have uploaded photos to Facebook from iPhoto the chances are you’ve used this plugin. The exporter takes the photos on your Mac and sends them to Facebook, all integrated into the iPhoto experience. All code is open source and available to the public, so you can get in as a developer and see how they did it, extend it, and more.

flvtool++

flvtool++ is a set of libraries used by Facebook to find and extract data from FLV files (used to generate Flash videos). Based on the Ruby FLVTool2 libraries, it was rewritten in C++ for performance. Facebook uses this actively in its Video app.

PHPEmbed

PHPEmbed enables developers writing applications in C++ and other languages to easily embed PHP in their code, making development times faster as developers don’t have to abandon existing development patterns to get the job done. Facebook wrote this to speed up their development processes and has released the code to the public.

Public Patches Library

Facebook has released a series of patches to various projects in the public. Of the patches listed, perhaps the most significant is a change to the PHP MySQL libraries.

Facebook Mirror

Facebook has offered a hosted mirror to the public where projects such as Apache, Linux, and other Open Source projects can mirror their code and others can download. Facebook is doing the community a service in this case by reducing the load from some of the most used Open Source projects available. Facebook also uses this mirror to host some of its own Open Source projects.

Conclusion

Facebook may have a bad reputation in the public eye when it comes to open source. However, I think that reputation may be quite misunderstood. Facebook is relatively new in comparison to Google, and they appear to be well on their way to being a leader in the Open Source community.

For those interested in a primer on the state of the social gaming market, the news this week at Inside Social Games reflects a smattering of trends happening in the space.

As platforms and services are becoming social:

• Microsoft Giving the Xbox 360 a Social Overhaul
• Challenge Games is a New Developer of Casual Social MMOs

We’re seeing new types of game development strategies on social networks:

• RockYou Going After Social Games Market
• My House - A Facebook RPG for Women?
• Elven Blood - An Old World RPG on Facebook

And new types of utility services:

• MyGameMug - Matchmaking for Online Gamers

Check out the latest at Inside Social Games.

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.

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.

For Facebook application developers looking for a way to monetize unsold inventory, Sydney, Australia-based social ad network Triana Global is guaranteeing floor CPM and CPC rates for new developers willing to try its networks. App developers can choose between two offers:

• $0.15 USD CPMs on standard banner sizes
• $0.08 USD CPCs on standard banner sizes

Current apps on the Triana network include Friends Finance, Private Photo Gallery, and Friend Wheel, so you can check them out to see what kind of ads Triana Global is running.

“For publishers that take the CPC option of $0.08, they normally end up getting eCPM’s of around $0.50, with some of our publishers over $3.00 eCPM. The $0.15 CPM is great for publishers whose CTR is less than 0.2%, but is still looking for some good payouts,” says Triana’s Nabil Naghdy.

The offer is good on all global traffic, and is similar in price to guarantees from other ad networks we’ve seen in the past, like Lookery and Platform-A, but with fewer restrictions. However, like all ad networks, developers should see what works best for their particular application.

Triana also works with app developers on MySpace, Bebo, Hi5, Friendster, and Orkut.

iLike, the maker of the largest social music application on the Facebook Platform (and recently named one of the two inaugural “Great Apps” on Facebook), is launching a new music syndication platform tonight that enables all developers to add music features to their Facebook app or website.

The iLike music platform enables developers to add any of three music features to their apps for free:

• A song player - allowing users to play back a preset song
• A song chooser - allowing users to select a song (for message attachment or playback)
• A playlist editor - allowing users to add songs to a playlist, edit the list, and play it

The iLike service makes it very easy for developers to include music in their apps and websites. Four of the top 10 developers on the Facebook Platform - SGN, Flixster, Watercooler, and Slide - are integrating elements of the iLike platform in different parts of their applications for launch. Google’s Blogger, TypePad, and Evite are also announcing integrations at launch.

“iLike has always embraced syndication. Today, we’re taking that strategy one step further by giving anybody with a website or blog a powerful way to offer music legally using just a snippet of code,” said Hadi Partovi, President of iLike. “Already the leading music provider on the Facebook Platform and OpenSocial, we have enormous room to grow by empowering other apps to provide music to their users. This also continues our tradition of working with the music industry and empowering artists – because labels and publishers receive royalties every time music is streamed via iLike.”

iLike continues to build out its footprint as a distributed provider of music services across the social and consumer web. The iLike music syndication platform is likely to extend the company’s footprint both inside and Facebook and other major social networks and across other media sites as well.

Note: I work with Watercooler, one of the companies mentioned in this article.

Offerpal Media is one of the leading “managed offer platforms” that social app and game developers are using to monetize their applications on Facebook, MySpace, Bebo, and hi5. While much has been made about the returns some app developers are seeing on the Facebook Platform, not much has been said publicly about business on the MySpace platform. Earlier today, Offerpal launched a new onboarding application for MySpace application developers, and shared some stats on its growing MySpace business with Inside Facebook.

“Roughly half of our overall business is now on MySpace,” said Matt McAllister, Director of Marketing at Offerpal. “The real story here is how MySpace is beginning to rival Facebook in terms of developer activity.”

“We’re seeing most of our MySpace developer partners earning on average $75 per day for every 1,000 daily active users, with high-engagement apps raking in more than $200 per day per 1,000 DAUs. These numbers are pretty equivalent to what we’ve been paying out to Facebook developers,” said McAllister.

To see how Offerpal is integrating with MySpace apps, check out some of the top MySpace apps in the Offerpal network: Own Your Friends!, Mobsters, Super Pets, Heroes, and Speed Racing. Developers can integrate offerpal i-frame offers, reg-path offers, prestitial offers, or a more general shopping i-frame. Developers can also use Offerpal to purchase installs or do an “install exchange” with other apps.

McAllister says Offerpal is now doing about 50,000 CPA transactions per day overall across all platforms. With half of those taking place inside MySpace apps, the MySpace platform economy is clearly quite healthy.

Developers building on the Facebook Platform are well aware of Facebook’s increasing efforts to enforce its platform policies and reward applications acting in accordance with the platform ideals with benefits.

Today, the MySpace Developer Platform team clarified its process for developers who violate the the MDP Terms or Guidelines.

Specifically,

On first violation:

• In most instances,the application developer will receive a notice giving them 48 hours to fix the issue. If the problem is not fixed within that period of time, the application will be muted (muted applications may not send communication) for 48 hrs. If the application is still not fixed after 48 hours, it will be suspended. Should one company have an application in violation of policy once, and then do something with another application, that will be considered a second violation.

On second violation:

• The application will be muted immediately, then suspended after 48 hours.
  

On third violation:

• The application will be suspended immediately.

If a company continues to repeatedly violate our TOU/Guidelines, action may be taken against the company and/or all of their applications, which could include banning them from the platform.

Of course, MySpace said it reserves the right to skip steps for “major” violations. For more info, check out the policy section on the MySpace Developer Platform forums.

Two weeks after hi5 announced support for OpenSocial 0.8 in its developer sandbox, the MySpace Developer Platform team today announced in its platform Release Notes that support for OpenSocial 0.8 apps on the MySpace platform is “coming soon.” What that means exactly date-wise remain to be seen, as MySpace has generally taken the “take things slow and release later” approach on most things platform related so far.

OpenSocial 0.8 is important for developers because it’s the first time OpenSocial has included a spec for building apps using REST APIs, decreasing the need for developers to use and maintain complex JavaScript.

Friendster, which has risen to become the largest social network in Asia after its precipitous fall in North America years ago, is today announcing  support for OpenSocial 0.7 as part of the Friendster Developer Program.

The Friendster app platform actually launched in late 2007 - it was the second social network to launch a platform after Facebook. Since then, thousands of developers have joined the Friendster Developer Program and about 500 apps have been released on the Friendster platform. Friendster told us today that 10 million unique users have installed at least 1 application so far, and half a million apps are installed every day. Of those who have installed applications, the average is between 2-3 apps installed per person.

Friendster’s Jeff Roberto says that the company will continue to support existing APIs as it adds OpenSocial support. “We plan to support both. This is really an extension of the Friendster Developer Program to developers of OpenSocial applications, who should now be able to run their apps on Friendster out of the box. We’re the only place that app developers can reach 55 million unique users in Asia on a single social network. And we have very low overlap with other social networks.”

Friendster’s platform as an open revenue model, meaning developers are free to monetize their apps however they like. One unique aspect to monetizing on the Friendster platform is that ads on the profile page are permitted - unlike other social networks.

“Friendster’s launch is another major milestone in the adoption and deployment of OpenSocial throughout the social web and around the world. We’re particularly excited that OpenSocial is helping Friendster bring new social applications to users in Asia, and we look forward to seeing users embrace these apps,” said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google.

Roberto says that while the company is not ready to announce specific dates yet, Friendster does plan on supporting the OpenSocial 0.8 spec. OpenSocial 0.8 adds REST API support - like the Facebook Platform does - something OpenSocial developers have been clamoring for for months.