The first Facebook Developer Garage of 2009 is taking place in London on Wednesday evening at 45 King William Street, London. The doors open at 6pm and there’s free beer and pizza provided by Sun. Tickets cost £7 (£4 for students) and are available from EventBrite or at the door.

There’s a busy line up of speakers and networking sessions as usual, including:

• Cat Burton from Moshi Monsters will talk about their experience with Facebook applications
• The latest on the MySpace platform from Chris Thorpe
• Huddle will discuss their experience on the LinkedIn platform, and how this compares to Facebook
• Victoria McEvedy will discuss ‘The law and social networking: third party applications’
• Mark Baker from Sun / MySQL tells us about meeting Facebook’s scalability challenges, and scaling MySQL apps.
• Dan Lester, CTO of The iPlatform will discuss frameworks for launching applications on multiple social networks
• Santosh from TwitBlogs talking about their experience building an Open Social container

The events usually attract a mix of application developers, new media agencies and internet entrepreneurs. You can find out more and check out who’s attending on the Facebook event page.

Hundreds of agencies, marketers, social application developers, entrepreneurs, and educators from around the world have purchased Inside Facebook’s Facebook Marketing Bible: The Guide to Marketing Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook – the leading resource on Facebook Marketing. Last month, Inside Facebook and French social media agency Sociabliz announced the launch of the Facebook Marketing Bible in French. Today, we’re proud to announce a new partnership with Latin American social marketing agency eSocial Marketing and the simultaneous launch of the Facebook Marketing Bible fully translated into Latin American Spanish!

La Biblia del Mercadeo en Facebook: La guía para mercadear su marca, compañía, producto o servicio en Facebook is the definitive resource for advertisers, social media marketers, application developers, and entrepreneurs throughout the Spanish speaking world. Inside, you’ll find all the comprehensive strategies and insights of Inside Facebook’s Facebook Marketing Bible adapted to Latin American culture and context.

“Facebook has lead a revolution in Latin America. We are witnessing the transformation of the way people surf the web, communicate with each other, and share information. And although Facebook is among the top 5 web destinations in every country in Latin America – and Colombia and Chile are 2 of the fastest growing Facebook countries in the world – many Latin brands, marketing firms, and digital agencies are not yet aware of Facebook’s growth or the opportunities Facebook presents,” said Luis Alberto del Castillo, founder of eSocial Marketing.

“Inside Facebook and the Facebook Marketing Bible are leading the evangelization and education about this revolution. eSocial Marketing wanted to partner with Inside Facebook in translating this book because we want to be a leader in the evangelization and education of the Hispanic market. eSocial Marketing is committed to being updated with the latest information regarding Facebook and social networks,” Castillo says.

Based in Bogotá, Colombia, eSocial Marketing specializes in all aspects of Facebook and social network marketing strategy and execution. The company works with many traditional and digital agencies like Leo Burnett and DDB, and has served clients like Nestlé, Nokia, and Telmex across multiple South American and Central American markets.

For those interested in learning more about La Biblia del Mercadeo en Facebook, click here. The price is $39 USD, and the full table of contents (or contenido) is below. As always, please make suggestions if you’d like to see more attention paid to any topic!

Contenido

I.    Herramientas para el Mercadeo de Guerrilla

1.    Página de Perfil

2.    Grupos

• Estrategia:  Sobre los grupos que generan Spam  o contenido indeseado
• SEO (Optimización para los Motores de Búsqueda: Search Engine Optimization)

3.    Páginas (Pages)

• Estrategia: Las Páginas y los grupos son muy similares. ¿Cuál de estas herramientas brinda mayor utilidad?
• Estrategia: Acabo de crear una Página. ¿Cómo la promociono?
• Migración de un  Grupo a una Página
• Guía para promocionar Páginas por fuera de Facebook
• Páginas Oficiales vs Páginas No Oficiales
• Optimización de las páginas para los Motores de Búsqueda
• Maneras de restringir el contenido de las Páginas  a usuarios menores de edad
• Más características por llegar pronto

4.    Eventos

• API de Eventos
• SEO de Eventos

5.    Notas y Fotos

6.    Mensajes

7.    Mercado

8.    Elementos publicados/compartidos

9.    Noticias y MiniNoticias

10.    Importación de Noticias

> Data: Monitoreando el crecimiento Internacional de Facebook por País

> Data: Los últimos datos sobre la edad y el género de los usuarios norteamericanos de Facebook

> Estrategias recomendadas para el Marketing de Guerrilla

II.  Herramientas para Anunciantes

11.    Anuncios sociales (Social Ads)

12.    Anuncios de Enganche

• Resumen de las piezas de publicidad disponibles para los anunciantes de Facebook
  1. Piezas de Patrocinio en la nueva Página de Inicio de Facebook
     • Anuncios Sociales de Video
     • Regalos Virtuales Patrocinados
     • Anuncios de Eventos
     • Anuncios de Páginas
  2. Anunciando en el News Feed del nuevo Facebook
  3. Anunciando en la página de perfil (y otras páginas)

13.    Regalos Virtuales

• El Futuro de los Regalos Virtuales en Facebook

14.    Anuncios de Rendimiento

15.    Oportunidades de Localización

16.    Oportunidades de Integración

17.    Red de Anuncios en la Plataforma de Facebook

• Listados de Redes Líderes de Anuncios en la Plataforma de Facebook
• Cuál es el CPM que las aplicaciones están cobrando? Información de los Desarrolladores de Aplicaciones de Facebook

18.    Patrocinio de Aplicaciones en la Plataforma de Facebook

• Listado de las Agencias y Firmas de Representación de Aplicaciones para Patrocinio
• Estrategia: ¿Porqué patrocinar una aplicación cuando puedo patrocinar a Facebook directamente?

19.    Grupos de Facebook Patrocinados

• Estrategias recomendadas para Anunciantes

III.    Herramientas para desarrolladores de Aplicaciones

• Estrategia: De dónde vienen la mayoría de los usuarios de las aplicaciones
• Estrategia: ¿Cuál es la mejor manera de hacer mercadeo usando las aplicaciones de Facebook?

20.    Caja de Perfil

• 5 cosas que los desarrolladores deben saber sobre el rediseño de Facebook
• Integración con el perfil: Tour de las características del nuevo Facebook

21.    Pestañas de Aplicaciones

22.    Secciones de Información de las aplicaciones

23.    Diseñando historias para el alimentador de Noticias (News Feed)

• Estrategia: Diseñando ítems de Noticias de alto rendimiento
• Optimización del alimentador de Noticias: Estrategias y técnicas

24.    Noticias 2.0

• Formularios de Noticias (Feed Forms)
• Agrupación de Noticias (Feed Clustering)

25.    Editor de Noticias

• Publicando en el Historial de noticias con comentarios sobre las Noticias

26.    Invitaciones y Solicitudes

• Actualización de las políticas: Exigir invitaciones para acceder a servicios, ofrecer incentivos por Invitaciones y Publicidad en las páginas de perfil: PROHIBIDO
• Estrategia:  Aproximación evolutiva al gobierno de la plataforma de Facebook
• Enviándole invitación de aplicaciones a personas que no son usuarias de Facebook

27.    Notificaciones de Facebook

• Integración con el Chat: Facebook quiere más Notificaciones sincronizadas
• Actualización de las políticas: Preselección de Notificaciones masivas prohibida
• Notificaciones “ Aplicación a Usuario”
• Extinción segura  de los profesionales o técnicos del mercadeo que usen técnicas de Spam en las Notificaciones

28.    Notificaciones vía E-Mail

• Actualización: El E-mail como el principal canal de comunicación de las aplicaciones en duda.

29.    Marcadores de Aplicaciones

30.    Directorio de Aplicaciones

31.    Fuentes alternas de actualización de estado

32.    Restricciones demográficas

33.    Verificación y Certificación

• Programa de Excelencia en Aplicaciones (Great Apps Program)
• Aplicación al programa de Verificación

34.    Traducciones

• Tip: Estadísticas en las aplicaciones de Facebook hechas para profesionales del mercadeo a nivel internacional.
• Tutorial: Traduciendo su aplicación usando el servicio de traducción basado en fuentes masivas de traducción (Crowd-sourced Translation Service)

35.    Facebook Connect

• Descripción general: Integrando Facebook Connect con su sitio Web
• Asuntos relacionados: Google Friend Connect
• Ejemplos: 40 sitios con Facebook Connect
• Gran variedad de Plugins de Facebook Connect disponibles para Wikis y Blogs:

36.    Herramientas de análisis

• Listado de los proveedores líderes de análisis de la plataforma de Facebook
• Nuevas métricas para los desarrolladores con el rediseño del perfil en Facebook

37.    Optimización de los motores de búsqueda (SEO)

38.    Móvil

• Facebook para Iphone y Facebook Connect para iPhone

39.    Servicio al cliente

• Encuesta: ¿Cuáles son los canales virales que los usuarios de Facebook toleran menos de las aplicaciones?
• Estrategias recomendadas para Desarrolladores

CONCLUSIÓN

This week has been quite the week for both Facebook and Google, as both have released their “Connect” products more broadly to developers and webmasters over the last couple of days.  Facebook’s Facebook Connect and Google’s Friend Connect products are engaged in a game of virtual Tug-o-War with developers and webmasters as they race to get more sites to integrate their Connect products.  Developers and website owners must choose which to go with, though the two are quite different.

Google Friend Connect – Social Context Through Gadgets

Google’s Friend Connect allows webmasters to authenticate their users from multiple social networks at once. However, while Facebook Connect links users to their Facebook profile and friends, profiles and friends are still very lightly developed in Friend Connect. Most of the early deployments (example here) are basically community lists and comment walls.

Given that Friend Connect is based on OpenSocial, developers should theoretically be able to link users of their websites to their profiles and friends on multiple social networks.  However, currently, users are only able to link to their profile to Plaxo, Orkut, or Google itself.  There is still no support for larger OpenSocial participants like MySpace and Yahoo.

However, website owners don’t have to do much to get set up with a Friend Connect gadget on their site.  In theory, once set up, any existing OpenSocial gadget could be easily imported into the Friend Connect-enabled website.  Almost no coding is needed to be set up with Google Friend Connect.

Facebook Connect – Social Context Through Integration

Facebook Connect, on the other hand, is more deeply integrated with the Facebook social graph and viral channels. (We’ve covered Facebook Connect extensively in previous coverage here, here, here, and here.)

With Facebook Connect integration, websites are able to easily publish to Facebook feeds and send Facebook invitations. Because Facebook controls the whole interaction, the user experience is in general much more smooth.

However, in order to integrate Facebook Connect, website owners must know a little bit of software development.  Facebook Connect is more than just a series of widgets; webmasters can optimize every aspect of their site for integration with the Facebook Platform if they wish. Facebook is working on a WordPress plugin to make it easier for bloggers to integrate Facebook Connect, and other plugins should be coming soon.

Conclusion

Who will win this race to wire up the social web is hard to tell.  Ideally, we’d love to see Facebook and Google play nice and interoperate with one another, but at this point that looks unlikely. We’ve only gotten started – it will be interesting to see how it all evolves.

Who do you think will win this race?  Share your own thoughts below!

The Widget Summit is happening in San Francisco this week and all the major social networking platforms are here. While much of the conversation has focused on widget and application distribution fundamentals, a large portion of the crowd is from larger media companies trying to figure out how they should do content distribution throughout the web.

Sandra Liu Huang from Facebook, Paul Lindner from hi5, Max Engel from MySpace, and David Jones from Friendster are addressing the different opportunities each social platform has for content creators to gain distribution and eyeballs on their respective platforms. Of course, both the technical and market opportunities are quite different on each.

Later today, Joseph Smarr from Plaxo will talk about how companies can “design their web presence as an agnostic data hub, connected to many different widget platforms over time.” These questions should be important to any media company hoping to distribute content across the web.

October 28 must have looked good on the PR calendar. A year and a half after the Facebook Platform launched to hundreds of indie developers and entrepreneurs in San Francisco, Yahoo and LinkedIn each made major platform announcements today. In short:

• Yahoo announced the launch of the Yahoo Social Platform and Yahoo Application Platform, major components of the Yahoo Open Strategy. As of today, the sandbox for developers to begin building OpenSocial applications on Yahoo is now open. While specific integration points and launch dates for Yahoo apps have not been announced, Yahoo says, “We will keep you updated on the rollout schedule for embedding third-party applications within the pages of Yahoo!’s properties.” The platform is fully internationalized from the start for 31 countries.
• LinkedIn announced the launch of the LinkedIn application platform, also built on OpenSocial, that will allow application developers to integrate apps on the LinkedIn home page and profile pages. 9 applications are part of the initial app directory, including apps by SixApart, WordPress, TripIt, Amazon, Box.net, Slideshare, Huddle, and Google. LinkedIn is taking a more controlled approach to app development, focusing on productivity and communication above entertainment. Here’s the launch commercial:

As more Platforms launch, application developers focused on different markets will begin to focus their energies on different platforms. We’ll be tracking which Facebook developers build for Yahoo and LinkedIn, and whether any nimble developers clone Facebook apps as they did on MySpace. Which Facebook apps do you think would do well if ported and adapted for Yahoo or LinkedIn?

As the Facebook Platform matures, an increasing number of social media agencies are bringing brands into the Facebook world by way of Facebook applications. Not just application developers, these agencies are increasingly working with clients directly to set strategy and design the rules of the campaign — and then manage the promotional spend inside Facebook once the application is launched.

Votigo is one such agency based in Emeryville, CA. The company has been doing social media campaigns since 2006, and since the Facebook Platform launched last year, has been building a big part of its business bringing brands into Facebook. (Note: Votigo is also an advertiser on this blog.) We sat down with Jim Risner, Votigo’s President and CMO, to learn more about the company and the trends he is seeing in the marketplace.

Thanks for your time Jim. Can you give us a little background on Votigo?

Sure – I started the company in 2006 with Mike La Rotonda. I was previously VP of Interactive Design at United Online (Juno, NetZero, Bluelight, etc.), and Mike was a PM at Yahoo (worked on 360 and other social products). The initial premise for Votigo was a video-focused UGC community site, but we quickly got interest from big brands and agencies wanting to take what we had and skin it for their own brands. So for example, we did a video contest with Victoria’s Secret PINK and received hundreds of entries and 100,000′s of visitors. From there, things snowballed, and we went from a B2C company to more of a B2B social media agency.

We have our own community platform for user generated photo and video contests that can be deployed anywhere. They’re all completely branded and centered on the campaign.  We do Facebook apps, OpenSocial apps, and branded community sites as well. Now, our focus is really on social applications and UGC campaigns.

What kind of campaigns are you doing on Facebook now?

When Facebook opened the Platform, we immediately started building there. We’re releasing a new version of our contest application this week actually, that we’re using to sell branded photo and video contests. For example, we recently did one for Kohl’s department stores with Appssavvy and Universal McCann. We did all the development and design, based on our contest platform.

We’re also building deeper custom applications. Just last Monday we launched an application for a political organization called Who wants to be president? Inside the app you earn points by sending faxes to Congress and inviting friends. The application uses components from our contest platform, which we try to leverage them as much as we can.

When promoting applications we’ve built inside Facebook, we always keep users inside Facebook – either on the application itself or on Pages – not to an external website. Pages are a great option too, and we’re doing more of that.

What parts of your business are you the most bullish on?

The parts of our business that we’re really most bullish on at the moment are Facebook applications (and soon Facebook Connect) and the video contests. Unlike some others, we don’t see applications as being short lived (except for contests) – we see them as being a part of your business. When we do them, we think long term.

We’re also seeing some traction internationally on OpenSocial. We built an app on Orkut called Rate People that has had 33 million visits from 15 million uniques since July – so we’re doing well in Brazil. So we’re also selling some sponsorships directly ourselves.

Thanks Jim. Any final thoughts?

It’s fair to call us a social media agency, but we also have a strong technology platform. For some clients, we do everything in house, but we also work with agencies who manage the design and are able to then leverage our technology and our platform.

For Facebook application developers also building for other social platforms, Hi5 announced today that is has officially launched OpenSocial 0.8 on the Hi5 developer platform. This marks the first major launch of OpenSocial 0.8, which has been in the making for many months.

The most interesting part of 0.8 is the addition of a RESTful API, which will make it easier to write OpenSocial apps (this is also more similar to the way Facebook apps are built). Developers can find the full release notes here.

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.