Inside Facebook

This year, winners of Facebook’s fbFund competition are spending the summer in Palo Alto as part of the REV summer incubator program. Organized by Facebook and Founders Fund investor Dave McClure, participants have gotten the chance to hear from experienced startup and Facebook Platform entrepreneurs, like Jia Shen from RockYou, Keith Rabois from Slide, and Eric Ries, formerly of IMVU.

We recently visited the fbFund REV incubator in Facebook’s old offices in downtown Palo Alto and sat down with a couple more of this year’s winners to hear about their ideas and what they’re working on this summer. The 20 or so teams (including some of the previous year’s winners) are scattered across a few floors, with collaborative space for brainstorming, guest talks, and meetings. Eric Ries shared his thoughts on “The Lean Startup” before we spoke with fbFund entrepreneurs Suzanne Xie and Rich Tong of Weardrobe and Waleed Abdulla of Networked Blogs.

Weardrobe

Weardrobe is a fashion community for people to share what they wear. Users post photos of themselves modeling how they’ve chosen to mix and match different articles of clothing and most importantly tag them. The sum of all these tagged photos is a searchable online closet that users can tap into for fashion inspiration.

“It’s not about what people wear, but how they wear it,” Xie says.

The Weardrobe project started about a year ago, and the site has been up for about six months. In college, lack of closet space prompted Suzanne to create an Excel spreadsheet of her clothing items. Organized by style, brand, color, etc., the tool was intended to be able to sort items and, thus, help her not waste clothing. She showed the tool to Rich, and the two realized that there was a better way to efficiently map one’s closet.

This summer the Weardrobe team will be working on a Facebook Connect integration, which will allow users to login to the site using their Facebook accounts, see which Facebook friends are also Weardrobe users, and be able to publish content back to the News Feed.

Another next step for the team will be involving fashion brands, many of which are discovering that TV or magazine advertising isn’t as effective anymore. Weardrobe has already partnered with Urban Outfitters in a Netflix-style initiative: Urban Outfitters donated clothing to Weardrobe, and Weardrobe sent them to its users who styled them up, posted photos on the site, and mailed them back.

Networked Blogs

We also spoke with Waleed Abdulla at Networked Blogs. Within the Networked Blogs Facebook application, users can search for blogs they read and follow them via Networked Blogs. Features include a News Feed of recent posts from the blogs you follow, a Most Voted tab where users can vote for blogs they like, as well as tabs that showcase what your Facebook friends are reading and posting. The idea was born out of a hackathon event in February 2008 called Weekend Apps and has since then taken off.

Networked Blogs’s Facebook Connect implementation is compelling and different than most we’ve seen so far. Bloggers can add a Networked Blogs widget on their blogs, which links back to its Facebook app. On the Networked Blogs website, which is less interactive than the app and more like a directory of blogs (currently 190,000 blogs) Waleed notes, Connect is also used for authentication and sharing.

Another feature that is useful for blogs that own their own Facebook Page is that you can manually or automatically import posts to the page’s Wall via Networked Blogs. Comments made through the app and the Wall are synced.

As the fbFund continues throughout the summer, we’ll be bringing you more looks at fbFund companies that are using Facebook and Facebook Connect to make the web more social.

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible - Current Edition Buy PDF: $49 USD OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $149 USD

The newly revised, expanded, and hot-off-the-press Facebook Marketing Bible: 40+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook - July 2009 Edition is now available!

The Facebook Marketing Bible has been purchased by thousands of agencies, marketers, social application developers, entrepreneurs, and educators, and is the leading resource on Facebook marketing today. It is also available in French, Spanish, and Italian. (A special edition for agencies and big brands is also 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 July 31st all customers who purchase the Facebook Marketing Bible will also receive a free $25 Facebook Ads advertising credit, courtesy of Facebook (see terms).

The July 2009 edition includes updates on the following topics:

• The latest updates on Facebook Pages (public profiles), including the vanity URL landrush and rule changes for generic Facebook Pages. We’ve broken down all the new elements piece by piece and offered detailed and specific advice for marketers hoping to reach more users inside Facebook than ever before - including details on why marketers should choose Facebook Pages over Facebook Groups, new updates to Facebook’s new Insights dashboard, and new rules for administrators of generic Facebook Pages. See the table of contents below for more details.
• The latest details on Facebook’s new “Pay with Facebook” virtual currency payment program for application developers. Find out the latest on 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.
• The latest details on Facebook’s new “Open Stream” API and what it means for marketers, publishers, and developers. With the new Open Stream API, Facebook has released the power of the Facebook stream to live anywhere developers can put it - including publisher websites, desktop applications, and mobile phones. Find out exactly what you can do with the new Open Stream, and what it means for the future of the Facebook Platform.
• The latest tools for webmasters to drive more traffic to their site and build more social context through Facebook Connect and Facebook Share. With Facebook Connect and Facebook Share, publishers have new opportunities for both enriching their sites with deeply social features and leveraging Facebook’s powerful feed system for driving traffic to their site. Get new details on metrics early Facebook Connect partners are seeing, and learn how to optimize your Facebook Share integration.
• 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 Facebook’s “Live Stream” widget for live events on your website or Facebook Page, recent rule changes for Facebook Platform ad networks, and more.

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible - Current Edition Buy PDF: $49 USD OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $149 USD

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $49, or $149 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!

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. Tools for Guerilla Marketers

1. Profile Page

2. Pages / Public Profiles

• “Facebook Pages 2.0″
  • The New Wall Tab - Making Pages More Dynamic and Viral
  • Status Updates - Now for Pages, Too
  • Application Boxes - Changing Places
  • Tab Management - Choosing a Landing Page
  • Conclusion - Facebook Learning from Twitter, Pages Getting Better
• The Future of Sharing on Facebook: A Hybrid Public/Private Model
• Branded Virtual Gifts on Facebook Pages Opening New Doors for Viral Advertising
  
• Adding Custom Modules to Your Page
• Strategy: 4 Reasons Why Marketers Should Choose Facebook Pages Over Facebook Groups
• Strategy: I’ve just created a Page. How do I promote it?
• Group to Page Migration
• Guidelines for Promoting Pages Outside Facebook
• Official vs Unofficial Pages
• Pages and SEO
• Vanity URLs for Facebook Pages
• Which Celebrities are the Most Engaging on Facebook?
  
• Ways Page Owners Can Restrict Content for Underage Users
• How to Import Your Blog into Your Public Profile
• Page Invitations
• SMS Subscription Service for Pages
• Updating Facebook Page Status Via Text
• Getting Page Status Updates Via Text
  
• More Features Coming Soon
• Interesting Conversion Rate Metrics from Adobe Students Facebook Campaign
• Marketers Actively Bidding for Generic Facebook Pages
• Facebook Upgrades “Insights” Metrics Dashboard for Page Managers
• Facebook Disabling Stream Publishing for Generic Pages

3. Groups

• Strategy: What about spamming existing groups?
• SEO
  

4. Events

• Events API
• Events SEO
  

5. Notes and Photos

• Events API
• Events SEO
  

6. Messages

7. Status Updates

• Public Timeline Search

8. Share / Posted Items

9. Mini Feed and News Feed

10. Feed Importing

> Data: Latest US Facebook Age and Gender Demographics

> Recommended Strategies for Guerilla Marketers

II. Tools for Advertisers

11. Social Ads

• How Specialty Brands are Driving Sales on Facebook
  

12. Engagement Ads

• Summary of ad units available to Facebook advertisers
  1. Sponsorship Units on the New Facebook Home Page
     • Social Video Ads
     • Sponsored Virtual Gifts
     • Events Ads
     • Pages Ads
     • Polling Ads

  2. Advertising in the New Facebook News Feed
  3. Advertising on the Profile Page (and other pages)
     

13. Virtual Gifts

• The Future of Virtual Gifts on Facebook
• Scheduled & Holiday Virtual Gifts
• Facebook Testing Virtual Currency Gifting Program with Branded Virtual Gifts
  

14. Performance Ads

• Radius and Language Targeting
• Multiple Currency Support

15. Localization Opportunities

16. Integrated Opportunities

17. Facebook Platform Ad Networks

• List of Leading Facebook Platform Ad Networks
• What eCPMs do apps charge? Data from Facebook application developers
• Facebook Bans Platform Ad Networks for Deceptive Ads

18. Facebook Platform Application Sponsorships

• List of Leading Facebook Platform Sponsorship Resellers/Rep Firms
• Strategy: Why sponsor applications when I can sponsor Facebook itself?

19. Specialized Facebook Platform Advertising Service Providers

> Recommended Strategies for Advertisers

III. Tools for Application Developers

• Strategy: What is the Right Way to Market Through Facebook Applications?
• Strategy: Where do most new application users come from?

20. Profile Box

• 5 Things Developers May Not Know About the Facebook Redesign
• Profile Integration: Tour of New Facebook App Settings

21. Application Tabs

22. Application Info Sections

23. Designing Feed Stories

• Strategy: Designing High Performance Feed Items
• News Feed Optimization: Strategies and Techniques

24. Feeds 2.0

• Feed Forms
• Feed Clustering
• Action Links
• Policy Update: All Feed Story Calls to Action Must Now be Action Links
  

25. Feed Publisher

• Publishing in the Feed with Feed Comments

26. Requests / Invitations

• Policy Updates: Requiring Invites to Access Hidden Features, Offering Incentives for Invites, Ads on Profile Page Prohibited
• Strategy: Facebook’s Evolving Approach to Platform Governance
• Sending Application Invitations to Non-Facebook-Members

27. Chat Invitations

28. Facebook Notifications

• Chat Integration: Facebook Wants More Synchronous Notifications
• Policy Update: Bulk Pre-Selection Prohibited
• Facebook Turns On Instant Notifcation Popup Alerts
  
• Spammy Affiliate Marketers Sure to be Shut Down
  

29. Email Notifications

• Updates: Email’s Status as Core Application Marketing Channel in Doubt

30. Application Bookmarks

31. Application Directory & About Pages

• The Publisher Comes to Application About Pages
  

32. Status Updates & Donations

33. Demographic Restrictions

34. Verification and Certification

• Great Apps Program
• Application Verification

35. Translations

• Data: Stats on Facebook Apps Built for International Markets
• Tutorial: Translating Your Applications Using Facebook’s Crowd-sourced Translation Service

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36. Analytics Tools

• List of Leading Third-Party Facebook Platform Analytics Providers
• New Metrics for Developers with Facebook Profile Redesign

37. Search Engine Optimization

38. Mobile

• Facebook for iPhone and Connect for iPhone

39. Customer Service

40. Custom Tags

41. Open Stream

• What Does Facebook’s “Open Stream” Mean for Marketers?
  

42. Pay with Facebook

> Poll: Which viral channels do Facebook users hate most about apps?

> Recommended Strategies for Application Developers

IV. Tools for Webmasters

43. Facebook Connect

• Overview: Integrating Facebook Connect with Your Website
• Related: Google Friend Connect
• Examples: 40 Sites Live with Facebook Connect Today
• Variety of Facebook Connect Plugins Now Available for Blogs and Wikis
• Citysearch: Each Item Shared Through Facebook Connect Generates 30 Clicks
  

44. Comments Box Widget

45. Live Feed Widget

46. Facebook Share

Conclusion

Recommended Partners

Although Facebook is testing a redesigned publisher that makes it easy to share public status updates, it’s important to remember that some comments left inside Facebook are always public - most notably, Wall posts or comments on Facebook Pages.

For example, when you leave a comment on a Facebook Page like that of New York Times’s Modern Love column, they are visible to anyone who visits  - Facebook friend or not, Facebook user or not.

Similarly, Internet users who check out www.facebook.com/threadless and click on the Video box can see the comments left by Threadless’s Facebook fans.

For Facebook, making user-generated content on Facebook Pages public and searchable is desirable from an SEO perspective. But the important thing for users to remember is that it’s possible for people outside of your Facebook friends to see what Facebook Pages you’re a part of (via your public search listing) and to learn more about you through the comments you leave.

Related Resources:

• The Inside Facebook Guide to Protecting Your Privacy on Facebook

In a bid to make it easier for people who have gotten married or who have names in multiple languages to clearly express their identity, Facebook has just turned on a new feature enabling users to display an “alternate name” on their profiles.

Users had previously been able to specify an alternative name so that they could be more easily found in search results. However, now the alternate name is displayed in parentheses next to their full name wherever it appears on their profile, in search results, and in friend requests. For example, here’s how Sophia Huang’s profile looks now that she’s specified an alternate name in Chinese:

This feature should be very handy for people who have names in multiple languages, have a maiden name, or otherwise changed their name. To enter an alternate name, go to the Account Settings page here.

Right now, the Facebook Inbox is a catch-all for many different types of messages: personal messages from individual friends, message blasts sent to Groups, Events, and Friend Lists, and Facebook public profile “updates.” Because all of that can get unwieldy, Facebook is about to release new filters to make it easier to manage messages sent yo your Facebook Inbox. Here’s how it will look:

As you can see, Inbox filters have now been moved to the left side of the page to match the Facebook home page. Other notes:

• Notifications, currently a tab within the Facebook Inbox, have been removed.
• Updates from public profiles remain in a separate view from personal messages. Facebook engineer Scott Marlette, who’s been working on the new features, says blasts from Groups and Events will be moved into the “Updates” folder over time as well.
• Public profile update subscriptions will be able to be managed directly from the inbox.
• Entering any keywords into the search box will return all messages containing those keywords in real time.

Facebook hasn’t announced whether or not users will be able to send messages to each other using their Facebook username. For now, Facebook will be using the same UI for choosing friends to send messages to.

The new inbox is currently in testing, and will be rolled out to more users in the “coming weeks,” Facebook says.

Tonight, Facebook has started testing a major revamp to Facebook search that promises to bring what many users and marketers have been clamoring for for a long time: live search of the News Feed and the public timeline.

Unlike the current Facebook search, which is pretty clunky in the way it organizes results, the new Facebook search is all about searching recently posted updates and content. Now, when you search on Facebook, you’ll get two sets of results:

1. Most recent posts by your friends
2. Most recent posts by all users who have made their profile open to everyone (including public profiles)

For example, here’s what a search on “Iran” would look like tonight:

If that looks very similar to Twitter Search, that’s because it is. However, the new Facebook search differs from Twitter in 2 important ways:

1. Updates from your friends come before updates from everyone.
2. All updates contain rich content in-line, from videos to music to thumbnails of shared links.

It’s important to note that updates from friends are usually private, and not on the public timeline. Although Facebook is making public timeline search available for the first time ever, it is still prioritizing communicating with friends above searching the public timeline in this iteration of Facebook search. Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg told Inside Facebook earlier this year that the future of Facebook lies in a hybrid public/private sharing model.

Nevertheless, this marks a major step forward in the evolution of Facebook’s search services. Now, marketers and analysts will have another tool to monitor conversations on Facebook in addition to Facebook’s Lexicon tool, which only shows trends at a very high level. Facebook started allowing users to open up their profiles to everyone in March, in an attempt to better serve users who want to share their updates more openly as opposed to using Facebook’s robust privacy controls.

Facebook also has a search partnership with Microsoft, who also owns a 1.6% stake in Facebook, but we’re still awaiting word on whether Microsoft is contributing any search technology to the new Facebook search.

Facebook says the new version of search is open to only a “fraction of a percent of the people on Facebook” as it tests out the new features. We’ll keep tabs on how testing goes and let you know as Facebook rolls out its new search service more broadly.

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.

Back when Facebook expanded from a college-only network to being open to anyone in 2006, it introduced the concept of “regional networks” to let users share more information about other people in the city or country they live in. Some default privacy settings for profile page content were set to a user’s regional network (like San Francisco or China), and Facebook created network pages for people in the same areas to connect.

However, regional networks never really worked out. Because there was no way to verify users’ physical location, regional networks never became a useful privacy filter. And since regional networks often contained hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of people, the network hub pages were some of the most heavily spammed areas on Facebook.

So over a year ago, Facebook removed the network pages and network tab from the top of Facebook. And today, Facebook says they’ll be eliminating the concept of regional networks from the site altogether soon.

This change will have the following impact:

• Regional network filters will no longer be available in the home page stream (Facebook says few people were using them anyway).
• Regional networks will no longer appear in privacy settings (though you can still share content with everyone or a school or work network).
• Groups or events that are only open to members of regional networks will now be open to everyone.
• If your current regional network is a city, that information will be moved to the “Current City” field of your profile.
• If your current regional network is a region, a new “Current Region” field will be listed on your profile.

This change will actually make a lot of information shared on Facebook more private, as many users left their profile privacy settings open to regional networks that probably allowed more people than they intended to access their profile and photos. Now, the concept of regional networks will be gone altogether, leaving school and work networks - both of which must be verified through a company or school email address - in tact.

There’s a lot happening at Facebook these days. From advertising to payments, search to mobile, platform to privacy, Facebook has teams working on a spectrum of products to serve the company’s 200 million active users - 100 million of which log in every day - in the years ahead.

Since Facebook was founded in 2004, it has repeatedly evolved to make it easier for people to share and consume information in trusted and more efficient ways. Facebook has always focused on establishing real identity and user profiles, and that identity continues to be foundational for all of the company’s products and monetization plans today.

In late 2006, Facebook created the now-famous News Feed, making it easier than ever for users to keep track of friends’ activity on the site. Facebook then launched the Facebook Platform in 2007, enabling thousands of developers to leverage Facebook’s data to create a new wave of web applications with deeper social context than had been possible before. Facebook extended that context to the rest of the web, desktop, and mobile through Facebook Connect late last year.

Around that same time the company also flirted with acquiring Twitter, the hot “micro-blogging” service, but a deal was never reached. And just a few months ago, Facebook replaced the algorithmic News Feed with a stream of real-time updates on the home page.

With all of these changes in the core product alone - not to mention advertising, mobile, and many changes to Platform - where is Facebook going next? We spoke with Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg yesterday at the company’s new Palo Alto headquarters about how he sees communication, commerce, advertising, and the Platform continuing to evolve in Facebook’s future.

Justin Smith: We’ve seen Facebook evolve in several phases over the years, most recently with the home page stream. How do you see communication evolving going forward?

Mark Zuckerberg: There are a bunch of aspects about how communication is evolving that are big trends in the world - some of which we’re touching, and some of which are just broad that we’re not affecting but that we adopt.

The biggest one that we are pushing is Facebook has people’s real identity. You are yourself on Facebook. You connect to your real friends, they’re real relationships. You put in real information, it’s really you. That’s really the basis of what we’ve been calling the “social graph” since the Platform launched in 2007. It’s the idea that you are the people and the things that you’re connected to. The social graph is this concept that exists in the world that we try to map out as much as we can on the site.

Now on top of that, you can build different applications. And some of them - whether they’re status updates or messages or wall posts - are simple communication tools that are built on top of real identity. The reason why a lot of people use the Inbox on Facebook instead of email, for a lot of cases, is you don’t need to know someone’s email address - you can just send it to their identity directly.

Status updates are really cool because you can see what’s going on with this real person. Wall posts are cool because I can go to someone’s profile, and even if I don’t know the person writing on it, I know that here’s someone you’re connected to and here’s what they’re saying, and I can click on them and get that context. Real identity really helps people communicate a lot and is really powerful.

Another trend is just that content production is getting simpler. Over time, content production has gone into smaller and smaller bits, and therefore more and more of it happens - there’s this elastic function in there. For example, few people wrote books, more people write blogs, even more people write status updates, and who knows what the next thing will be. There were few professional photographers doing really intense photography, but then a lot of people got digital cameras and uploaded photo albums, and even more take mobile photos just one picture at a time. That’s another big trend.

With the increase in the amount of content being shared, many people have privacy and security concerns. Facebook has been good at establishing robust privacy controls for users to choose who has access to their information. However, there have still been many worms and phishing attacks within Facebook. How will Facebook handle these broader security challenges in the long run?

I think those challenges aren’t specific to Facebook. Facebook is really way better equipped to handle worms and phishing attacks than almost anyone else because of the real identity and how hard it is to spoof that.

You can start a blog saying you’re someone you’re not, you can start an account on some other service really easily saying you’re someone you’re not. One thing that’s really interesting about Facebook is, for example, I had a friend who decided that he wanted to create fake identities for himself on Facebook using a bunch of different accounts just for fun - but he couldn’t do it. He could get a few fake people to add him as friends, but ultimately people looked at the people that he knew and asked, ‘Why don’t you have friends?’ or ‘Why don’t you have pictures of you with other people?’ They thought, ‘Something just doesn’t add up here.’

It was really hard to create a fake account, and because of that understanding of realness within the system, it’s really easy to weed out different behavior when someone’s trying to be a worm or trying to phish.

It is an ongoing problem that we’ll continue to have to work on. We have a team that focuses on this just because it’s so important, but I really think that we’re better equipped to handle these things than almost any other company.

Recently Facebook launched a couple of alpha tests for its payments service with application developers. How important is payments to the future of Facebook’s monetization goals? My (and others’) estimates show that a payments service might add just a few percent to Facebook’s revenues today.

I think it has the potential to be really important. Its potential correlates with how valuable it is to developers and users. There’s a bunch of things that we test as a company, and we basically choose what to invest in based on what people are doing. I don’t really have anything new to add to the information that you already have on this.

But based on how our tests go, we may choose to do a lot more. We’re pretty optimistic [about the potential performance of the payments service], but we don’t really have a sense of how big it will be yet either. I do think it is one interesting area.

Do you think that the majority of those transactions will happen within Facebook.com, or on other websites through Facebook Connect?

Well, I think the whole system is decentralizing. The idea of Facebook Connect is really that it’s the evolution of the Platform.

The idea was never that we would have these boxes inside the site. That was a good way to get started, but the idea is that eventually there should be thousands and thousands of applications built on the web, desktop, and mobile. Those will be the ones that handle most of what people are doing.

One of the messages I’ve heard from [Facebook COO] Sheryl Sandberg is that Facebook feels like there is some misconception of its advertising sales success. Why do you think there is a potential misconception there about how things are going?

I think that’s partially because there’s been data in the market about companies not doing that well with advertising. We decided earlier this year to issue three new stats: five quarters of EBITDA profitability, 70% growth in revenue year over year, and that we’ll be cash flow positive in 2010 based on our current estimates.

The reason that we did that was because we felt like the general perception around things was that we weren’t anywhere near those levels. You know, thoughts like ‘the economy isn’t doing well, so Facebook isn’t doing well or is losing money,’ when in reality we’re on track to be cash flow positive really soon.

I don’t know how those perceptions got there, but that was why we issued those numbers - to try to clear that up. I think that since then, people’s perception around things seems to mirror reality more. It’s a tough balance as a private company, because the easiest thing would be for us to just go out and tell people what our revenue numbers are, but we don’t want to do that.

How are things going with Microsoft?

Good - you know, people tend to focus on the advertising relationship with Microsoft, but that is just a part of what we do, and we’ve built out our own revenue systems and advertising systems that are a much bigger part of our revenue.

We work with Microsoft on ads, but we’re also working with them on a few things around search that hopefully we’ll be ready to roll out at some time in the near future. We have also done integrations with them around different communications products.

In general, I would just say it’s a good relationship. The original deal was around ads, and then we added search in, but the Xbox Live integration and the other integrations that we’ve done are completely separate. We just do that because the teams are talking.

Which Platform verticals would you say add the most value to the Facebook ecosystem in the long run?

It’s tough to say. The beauty of Platform is that we don’t know the answer to that question, but I can tell you what we’re surprised by.

As soon as we launched the Platform, we saw a few areas of information that are clearly important to people that we just hadn’t touched before, like music. We didn’t touch that because of a lot of the legal issues surrounding music online, but there were immediately a ton of applications around it. It was pretty neat to see that those got built out so quickly.

We expected music, location based services, and travel - but the biggest surprise so far has been games.

Why?

We just hadn’t thought about that at all. It makes a lot of sense, and people love it and just do it so much. I think Apple was surprised by this too. I’ve gotten the sense that since they launched their platform, they have also been developing a lot more to enable games than they were thinking about originally.

It’s interesting to see that that’s an area that’s so far from the core social value of the site but it so important to people. You’re doing it with your friends in a lot of cases, and it’s the perfect candidate for an application, but we just kind of laugh about it because we completely overlooked it.  The DNA of a company that produces games is just fundamentally different from the DNA of a company that produces tools for mapping out the social graph.

A lot of Facebook’s traffic, including games, is international today. Which country’s social networking behavior have you been particularly intrigued by?

The most interesting thing is actually how uniform it is. There are some differences in the stats from country to country or demographic to demographic, but it’s way more similar than different. Sharing and connecting are core human needs. Everyone has an identity, and from a very young age people start building out their identity and figuring out how they want to express themselves and what things they want to associate with. It’s just a really core part of being human.

Early on, we made what was at the time was a pretty controversial decision about going from being just a college site to a site that would support everyone. That whole decision was based on the idea that what we’re doing here is applicable to everyone. There have been platform applications built in local languages that have been primarily used in one region, but besides that, I think you’d be surprised if you saw all the data how uniform it is. There are some interesting cases in some countries where it’s so ubiquitous the governments are starting to take more involvement.

Going back to the Platform, how’s the fbFund going, and what do you think of the new structure?

I think it’s just cool that we’re doing it. The apps that got the grants are doing some pretty cool stuff. But I’m just glad that we were able to pull that together.

I remember when I was a kid in high school, some of the first things that I built were add-ons to AOL. All of my friends were on AOL, and I built tools for IM or servers to run chat rooms, and I just had so much fun and that’s how I learned how to program. I just think it’s really interesting to see the new generation of college students that are growing up and building on top of this platform, and anything that we can do to encourage that is awesome.

A couple of personal questions for you. Who are your biggest mentors right now?

I think it’s a bunch of the folks who we added to the board. We wanted to add Marc Andreessen and Don Graham to the board because first they’re universally respected business people, but also because I’ve known them for years and they’ve been advisers to me. I’ve looked up to both of them as people who in some way I think have had similar parts of the experience.

For Don Graham, I just respect how he has such a long term focus on running things - he has a willingness to have a company be cash flow negative for 20 years before becoming positive. Now obviously we’re not trying to do that, but I think the Valley tends to be really short-term oriented. When I got out here, this is one of the things that really shocked me - how much people are looking to IPO quickly or sell their company. So that has always really resonated with me about him.

And Marc has built a bunch of really great companies and I think he has such a good perspective on how to build a good engineering company, and I just really respect that.

So how long do you want to run Facebook? What are your goals for the company?

The end is not in sight. I think that one of the most important trends over the next 10 or 20 years is how the world opens up. I think it’s almost a given that people will be sharing more and more information, but there’s this question of what the world will look like when we get there. Will it be done in such a way that people have complete control of their information, or will it be done in a way where they don’t and that information is just out there?

Facebook is really invested in making sure that it’s the former one, where people can always control what their identity is and what information of theirs is being shared with different people, and I just think that matters a lot. I think that’s one of the key questions for our generation.

Finally Mark, what website do you use most beside Facebook?

Probably Wikipedia - it’s so good.

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The newly revised, expanded, and hot-off-the-press Facebook Marketing Bible: 40+ Ways to Market Your Brand, Company, Product, or Service Inside Facebook - June 2009 Edition is now available!

The Facebook Marketing Bible has been purchased by thousands of agencies, marketers, social application developers, entrepreneurs, and educators, and is the leading resource on Facebook marketing today. It is also available in French, Spanish, and Italian. (A special edition for agencies and big brands is now also 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 June 30th all customers who purchase the Facebook Marketing Bible will also receive a free $25 Facebook Ads advertising credit, courtesy of Facebook (see terms).

The June 2009 edition includes updates on the following topics:

• The latest updates on Facebook Pages (public profiles), including new ways marketers are actively bidding for generic Facebook Pages. We’ve broken down all the new elements piece by piece and offered detailed and specific advice for marketers hoping to reach more users inside Facebook than ever before - including details on Facebook’s new Insights dashboard, who the most engaging celebrities on Facebook are, and quiet transactions happening on the Facebook Page market. See the table of contents below for more details.
• The latest details on Facebook’s new “Pay with Facebook” virtual currency payment program for application developers. Find out the latest on what Facebook’s new payment program means for the future of virtual currency payments on Facebook (and Facebook revenues).
  
• The latest details on Facebook’s new “Open Stream” API and what it means for marketers, publishers, and developers. With the new Open Stream API, Facebook has released the power of the Facebook stream to live anywhere developers can put it - including publisher websites, desktop applications, and mobile phones. Find out exactly what you can do with the new Open Stream, and what it means for the future of the Facebook Platform.
• The latest tools for webmasters to drive more traffic to their site and build more social context through Facebook Connect and Facebook Share. With Facebook Connect and Facebook Share, publishers have new opportunities for both enriching their sites with deeply social features and leveraging Facebook’s powerful feed system for driving traffic to their site. Get new details on metrics early Facebook Connect partners are seeing, and learn how to optimize your Facebook Share integration.
• 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 “Instant Notification” alerts, the new application director and application about pages, and more.

Purchase this report The Facebook Marketing Bible - Current Edition Buy PDF: $49 USD OR Buy PDF + 1 Year of Free Monthly Updates: $149 USD

For those interested in learning more, click the purchase link above. The price is $49, or $149 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!

Table of Contents

Introduction

I. Tools for Guerilla Marketers

1. Profile Page

2. Pages / Public Profiles

• “Facebook Pages 2.0″
  • The New Wall Tab - Making Pages More Dynamic and Viral
  • Status Updates - Now for Pages, Too
  • Application Boxes - Changing Places
  • Tab Management - Choosing a Landing Page
  • Conclusion - Facebook Learning from Twitter, Pages Getting Better
• The Future of Sharing on Facebook: A Hybrid Public/Private Model
• Branded Virtual Gifts on Facebook Pages Opening New Doors for Viral Advertising
  
• Adding Custom Modules to Your Page
• Strategy: Groups and Pages have some similarities. Which makes more sense?
• Strategy: I’ve just created a Page. How do I promote it?
• Group to Page Migration
• Guidelines for Promoting Pages Outside Facebook
• Official vs Unofficial Pages
• Pages and SEO
• Who Get a Vanity URL on Facebook?
• Which Celebrities are the Most Engaging on Facebook?
  
• Ways Page Owners Can Restrict Content for Underage Users
• How to Import Your Blog into Your Public Profile
• Page Invitations
• SMS Subscription Service for Pages
• Updating Facebook Page Status Via Text
• Getting Page Status Updates Via Text
  
• More Features Coming Soon
• Interesting Conversion Rate Metrics from Adobe Students Facebook Campaign
• Marketers Actively Bidding for Generic Facebook Pages
• Facebook Upgrades “Insights” Metrics Dashboard for Page Managers
  

3. Groups

• Strategy: What about spamming existing groups?
• SEO
  

4. Events

• Events API
• Events SEO
  

5. Notes and Photos

• Events API
• Events SEO
  

6. Messages

7. Status Updates

8. Share / Posted Items

9. Mini Feed and News Feed

10. Feed Importing

> Data: Latest US Facebook Age and Gender Demographics

> Recommended Strategies for Guerilla Marketers

II. Tools for Advertisers

11. Social Ads

• How Specialty Brands are Driving Sales on Facebook
  

12. Engagement Ads

• Summary of ad units available to Facebook advertisers
  1. Sponsorship Units on the New Facebook Home Page
     • Social Video Ads
     • Sponsored Virtual Gifts
     • Events Ads
     • Pages Ads
     • Polling Ads

  2. Advertising in the New Facebook News Feed
  3. Advertising on the Profile Page (and other pages)
     

13. Virtual Gifts

• The Future of Virtual Gifts on Facebook
• Scheduled & Holiday Virtual Gifts
• Facebook Testing Virtual Currency Gifting Program with Branded Virtual Gifts
  

14. Performance Ads

• Radius and Language Targeting
  

15. Localization Opportunities

16. Integrated Opportunities

17. Facebook Platform Ad Networks

• List of Leading Facebook Platform Ad Networks
• What eCPMs do apps charge? Data from Facebook application developers

18. Facebook Platform Application Sponsorships

• List of Leading Facebook Platform Sponsorship Resellers/Rep Firms
• Strategy: Why sponsor applications when I can sponsor Facebook itself?

19. Specialized Facebook Platform Advertising Service Providers

> Recommended Strategies for Advertisers

III. Tools for Application Developers

• Strategy: What is the Right Way to Market Through Facebook Applications?
• Strategy: Where do most new application users come from?

20. Profile Box

• 5 Things Developers May Not Know About the Facebook Redesign
• Profile Integration: Tour of New Facebook App Settings

21. Application Tabs

22. Application Info Sections

23. Designing Feed Stories

• Strategy: Designing High Performance Feed Items
• News Feed Optimization: Strategies and Techniques

24. Feeds 2.0

• Feed Forms
• Feed Clustering
• Action Links
• Policy Update: All Feed Story Calls to Action Must Now be Action Links
  

25. Feed Publisher

• Publishing in the Feed with Feed Comments

26. Requests / Invitations

• Policy Updates: Requiring Invites to Access Hidden Features, Offering Incentives for Invites, Ads on Profile Page Prohibited
• Strategy: Facebook’s Evolving Approach to Platform Governance
• Sending Application Invitations to Non-Facebook-Members

27. Chat Invitations

28. Facebook Notifications

• Chat Integration: Facebook Wants More Synchronous Notifications
• Policy Update: Bulk Pre-Selection Prohibited
• Facebook Turns On Instant Notifcation Popup Alerts
  
• Spammy Affiliate Marketers Sure to be Shut Down
  

29. Email Notifications

• Updates: Email’s Status as Core Application Marketing Channel in Doubt

30. Application Bookmarks

31. Application Directory & About Pages

• The Publisher Comes to Application About Pages
  

32. Status Updates & Donations

33. Demographic Restrictions

34. Verification and Certification

• Great Apps Program
• Application Verification

35. Translations

• Data: Stats on Facebook Apps Built for International Markets
• Tutorial: Translating Your Applications Using Facebook’s Crowd-sourced Translation Service

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36. Analytics Tools

• List of Leading Third-Party Facebook Platform Analytics Providers
• New Metrics for Developers with Facebook Profile Redesign

37. Search Engine Optimization

38. Mobile

• Facebook for iPhone and Connect for iPhone

39. Customer Service

40. Custom Tags

41. Open Stream

• What Does Facebook’s “Open Stream” Mean for Marketers?
  

42. Pay with Facebook

> Poll: Which viral channels do Facebook users hate most about apps?

> Recommended Strategies for Application Developers

IV. Tools for Webmasters

43. Facebook Connect

• Overview: Integrating Facebook Connect with Your Website
• Related: Google Friend Connect
• Examples: 40 Sites Live with Facebook Connect Today
• Variety of Facebook Connect Plugins Now Available for Blogs and Wikis
• Citysearch: Each Item Shared Through Facebook Connect Generates 30 Clicks
  

44. Comments Box Widget

45. Live Feed Widget

46. Facebook Share

Conclusion

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