Facebook

I have to say that the new Facebook design is killer. It’s a million times better than the previous design, and the previous design was a million times better than their competitors.

I keep saying that companies need to beautify their web sites because UI is going to be one of the big ways to differentiate yourself as all these cool new technologies become commodities.

So what else might be happening around f8 this year? After all, last year Facebook announced their developer platform. Who knows, but I do know that Mark Zuckerberg is giving his keynote right now.

You can watch the live webcast here.

Or you can check out Nick O’neill’s liveblogging here.

Or Justin Smith’s live notes here.

And if you just want to play with the cool new profiles before they’re rolled out everywhere, just navigate to http://www.new.facebook.com.

MarketingVox posted yesterday about the Consumer Internet Barometer survey report that shows more growth and popularity in social networks (so more of the same, I guess).

But what caught my eye about the report is that it surveyed respondents for why they are using social networks like Facebook. Here’s the paragraph, emphasis mine:

The number one reason cited by the vast majority of online consumers — at least four out of five — for visiting social networking sites is to be able to connect with friends. In addition, about half of all users report using sites like MySpace and Facebook to update and maintain their online profile, email, and connect with family. At least one out of five social network users logs on to blog or meet new people. Among the 30 and over working-age population, one out of eight uses social networking sites to conduct business.

That definitely rings true for me. I find that because Facebook is still relatively direct (more consistent and personal than e-mail), it’s a good place to connect and conduct business.

When the Facebook platform first came out, I remember there being a lot of excitement and a big rush for productivity or work-based app development, but most of those apps had poor adoption compared to the whimsical or play-based apps.

I think this was probably not because people aren’t doing business on Facebook, but rather it was because the business that people are doing on Facebook is about connecting with other people, not managing information, to dos, or projects. If you’re going to do that type of thing, there are robust stand alone applications that will do it better than most any Facebook app.

If you’re looking to connect with your team or your clients though, there are few if any stand along applications that can rival Facebook as a platform.

Part of the fallout from the past month’s game between Microsoft and Yahoo! is the guessing game that’s happening in various parts of the blogosphere now, like Kara Swisher’s BoomTown post this morning which entertains (and quickly dismisses) the possibility that Microsoft would look at making a serious bid to buy Facebook.

While owning Facebook might seem like an attractive idea on some levels (getting more than your foot in the door in social media, for example, or having a net property that doesn’t rely on Google for a significant chunk of its traffic), I think it’s a far better deal for Microsoft to leave that one alone.

Google isn’t likely to buy Facebook out anytime soon, and their initial valuation bumped the price tag up so high (~$15 billion) that there are unlikely to be other companies willing to put that much cash on the table for something that, frankly, isn’t showing a lot of revenue yet.

No, I think that a bid for Facebook is firmly off the table at least until Facebook starts actually making money.

Mike Arrington posted the charts to prove it yesterday, but Facebook has apparently caught up to MySpace in terms of worldwide unique visitors.

The interesting statistic, though, is that in the US Market the difference between MySpace and Facebook is huge—MySpace has exactly twice the number of monthly unique US visits as Facebook does. Arrington points out the obvious question these numbers imply:

Facebook added 75 million monthly uniques over the last twelve month, but just 13 million of those visitors are located in the U.S. MySpace added 5 million U.S. uniques during that period - at this rate it will take 4+ years for Facebook to catch up to MySpace in the U.S. market.

There’s a real question about how valuable all these international users are from an advertising standpoint.

I think it’s kind of a false question though. I’m still not convinced that advertising (at least as we know it today) is the killer solution to monetizing social networks. In fact, I’m still kind of surprised that PayPal and Facebook haven’t struck up some sort of partnership to provide e-commerce solutions for app developers…

As Mashable and AllFacebook have already reported, Facebook announced today that they are “open-sourcing” a significant portion of their platform, now called: Facebook Open Platform.

What do you get when you download the open source platform?

This release includes the API infrastructure, the FQL parser, the FBML parser, and FBJS, as well as implementations of many common methods and tags. We’ve included samples and some dummy data to help you get started fast.

Facebook Open Platform also has extensibility points built in so you can add your own functionality, such as your own FBML tags, API methods, etc.

Not too shabby.

Social networks seem poised to take over a significant share of the browser in the way that only search has managed to do so far. The fact that Facebook thrives without letting Google index the majority of its content is FAR more important than in seems at first.

Google holds a lot of power, and it is far from infallible, which can be kind of problematic for any business online.

Facebook wants to own the social networking platform the way Google owns the search platform. And so does Google. And so does MySpace.

Facebook recently announced more details about their upcoming profile changes, which include some massive overhaul to the visual interface as well as some significant changes to infrastructure for app developers.

Teresa wrote earlier about what these changes might mean for developers. Now that we have some more detailed information, I think it’s worth looking at the newsfeed in particular.

When the newsfeed first launched, it was a great channel for spreading viral information. However, very few people grant their applications access to the feed anymore.

I was at the Seattle Facebook Developer’s Garage this past Monday, and when one of the speakers asked how many people let apps put stories in their feed, only about 10 or 15 people in 200 raised their hand.

The redesign introduces some new rules for developers around the feed, and it might be an opportunity to reopen some viral channels that have been disappearing.

When you break down the description on the developers wiki, the changes to the feed are as follows:

• The feed will present one line, short, or “full” stories to the user
• Full stories will have access to a robust set of FBML tags, like wall posts
• Applications can publish one-line stories to mini-feeds without needing user approval
• Users can toggle between each form of story in their feeds

What this means for virality is, I think, subtle but important: Facebook is stressing the importance of being engaging as opposed to just “showing up.”

What mattered most when the newsfeed first started popping up is that you were in it, because then there’s a chance that you might get noticed.

Now what you’re after is interaction within the feed, because that’s where Facebook wants to move a lot of user activity. What’s good is that making app developers focus on this is that it’s going to make for a better user experience, too.

A few days ago Nick O’Neill posted on AllFacebook about some ad numbers that Justin Smith came up with regarding Facebook CPMs.

Basically, the numbers are low and probably going to get lower. This gets at an issue that I’ve been harping on for some time (although, unfortunately, I can’t seem to find the post that best expresses it): the best approach to Facebook applications is not as a business in and of itself (make apps, then sell ads), but as tool to reach a social media audience with your brand.

If social media were a movie theater, Facebook apps would be the previews, not the feature presentation.

The real winners in the Facebook app space are the companies that take a chunk of their ad budget and dedicate it to creating and maintaining an engaging, well-branded application, not those who try to use an application as a vehicle for making money.

I’m increasingly convinced that social media is a “no-buy, no-sell” zone in a lot of people’s minds. What you really want to do is build relationships in social media. You can sell them somewhere else when the time and place are right.

Voter registration efforts typically rely on a great deal of labor and community outreach. Barack Obama’s massive spring and summer registration effort will likely rely primarily on card tables and paper forms.

But the University of Washington students behind the new Facebook application Your Revolution are working a different angle. By comparing a user’s friend list to their state’s voter registration rolls, this application seeks to determine who isn’t registered to vote. It then gives users the opportunity to send an invitation to their friends to register to vote online:

The app features a sophisticated and well-designed interface and encourages users to participate in a voter registration contest.

Unfortunately, this app only works in states that allow online voter registration. But as more states roll out online registration, I think you’ll see applications like this getting real pickup.

I’m still waiting for the day when we can use a social application to actually vote. Imagine ballots spreading like wildfire among people my age the way that viral videos do. Youth turnout would be through the roof.

Silicon Alley Insider tells us that Facebook’s COO went to a Financial Times “interview” event held by the Financial Times (as SAI correctly notes, nobody in America reads it).

OK, so far so good. Here’s where it gets weird: the even was “off the record.”

What?

But the reporters who were there can’t tell you because the event was “off the record,” one of them tells us. Who played along? A lot of people: Folks from Reuters, the NY Post, Portfolio, Paidcontent and the Huffington Post were all in attendance, but chose not to tell their readers.

Does this happen all the time and I’m just not aware of it?

Facebook’s long-anticipated tabbed profile layout will contain room for individual application tabs, says Inside Facebook blogger Justin Smith. Under the new system, users will be able to create a special profile section for their favorite application. This will give application developers an unprecedented amount of real estate on the Facebook profile to display user data.

It’s become common wisdom at this point that display or “showoff” apps don’t do well on Facebook. Users aren’t there to stare at one another’s profiles. Not when there’s so much else going on. MySpace users are more apt to show off.

But with the increased customizability of the profile, this may change somewhat. Users will still be selective about what applications they choose to enable in this way, but I predict that applications that allow users to enhance their personal brand via the profile in dynamic, interesting and highly customizable ways will experience a bump in user engagement and adoption. After all, nothing could be a better endorsement of your application than a user creating a special tab for it on their profile.

Without any hard data about how this phenomenon will play out, the only thing to do is engage in wild speculation — my favorite pastime. Here goes: [click to continue...]

Longtime users of the Facebook platform have seen how applications from popular web services like Twitter can add tremendous value to the News Feed and Mini Feed features. In fact, one could argue that News Feed was the inspiration for lifestreaming tools like Tumblr and FriendFeed.

Now, it appears that the inspiration flows two ways. Facebook announced today that they would begin allowing users to import Mini Feed stories from Flickr, Picasa, Yelp and del.icio.us.

To use the new service, go to your profile and look at the Mini Feed section. Look for the new “import” link at the top, right corner of the Mini Feed profile box. Then, follow the instructions to import your activity into Facebook.  No word on how soon users will be able to import other activity, but other promised services include Digg.

I wonder how fast these updates will become a part of the site, and whether MySpace profile updates and other information will be included in the lifestream.

Also, why is Facebook announcing a feature associated with the Feed when the main feature is clearly broken at the moment? I wonder if this feature addition is the culprit for the massive News Feed slowdown.

Apparently the anti-spam account-disabling features at Facebook are just as inconsistent as their privacy features. This popped up on my screen while I was reading my FB messages this morning:

Anyone else being threatened for reading messages?

For all you developers out there who’ve seen the insides and outsides of the Facebook developers site so many times that you might as well live there, you now have a chance to tell Facebook…everything about you as a developer.

Pete Bratach posted on the developers blog about a half an hour ago asking for feedback about their developers site through this survey. The survey asks such self-critical questions as:

• Are you profitable on the platform?, and
• If yes, how much revenue are you generating per month?

OK, OK, to be fair, they do spend about half the survey asking you to rate, on a scale of 1-3-5, different aspects of their platform. And there’s a field where you can offer yourself for an interview.

So if you’ve got feedback to give, hop on over to the google doc and fill ‘er out.

Thanks to Tim Reha, I had the good fortune last year to attend the excellent Future in Review conference in San Diego and have just now signed up for the 2008 event.

Mark Anderson is the impresario who hosts the conference and is the CEO of the Strategic News Service (SNS).

Unlike other “future” oriented events and newsletters, Mark focuses his attention on the view of the technology industry over the next 3-5 years. This emphasis on the near- and mid-term future applies IMHO better to those looking to make real-world investment decisions. This also may be why his prediction accuracy is considered to be unusually high.

Speaking of investments, Mark posted recently about Social networking sites and monetization at the Industry Standard site and his conclusion is that “…early projections by News Corp., Google, MySpace and Facebook are way too optimistic in online ad revenue estimations.”

While I think the current valuation of Facebook will prove to be on the high side, I don’t think that the advertising model is off the mark.

Anderson says that one lesson to be learned from the Facebook Beacon fiasco is that advertising on privacy-sensitive sites is “inappropriate” and that users will “revolt.”

I certainly agree that further invasive approaches like Beacon could lead to a revolt, but passive approaches have their place. Google users certainly don’t mind (and often value!) related ads appearing next to search results. Beacon was more akin to Google notifying friends about your recent searches.