Gatherings

The hottest goal in technology right now is to build the next successful Facebook app. Everyone wants a piece of the Facebook platform action.

But what does success mean on Facebook? What are the metrics for success and what do they really mean? How do you make the most of the Facebook API when it won’t let you do everything you’d like to? And how do the best Facebook applications operate?

We’ll be tackling these questions and more in a session at Web Community Forum 2007 called “Defining Success: Which Apps and Why?”. Our buddy and newly announced speaker Rodney Rumford will moderate a panel of expert application developers and reviewers as we talk about the ins and outs of the Facebook platform.

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Facebook is great, to be sure. But there are a lot of drawbacks:

• The limitations of the API.
• The constantly shifting rules.
• The rapid uglification of the profiles.
• The spammy application requests.

And those are just the tip of the iceberg. For every rave review about Facebook, there’s at least one complaint. So let’s get together and talk about what could be better.

At the Web Community Forum 2007, we’ll discuss this issue in depth and come back with our top recommendations for improvement for the gang at Facebook.

We’ve been talking over in the Facebook group about the personal/professional boundary. The need for more granular permissions has come up again and again.

Tinu Abayomi-Paul suggested that we organize an official petition to Facebook asking for more granular permissions, and I thought that this might be an excellent additional goal for the event this December.

What do you think? In addition to some proposed best practices, should we as a group try to generate some recommendations for improving Facebook?

According to Merriam-Webster online, the word “curmudgeon” means “a crusty, ill-tempered, and usually old man.”

So I guess what we’re really looking for her is a few good, crusty old men. Or perhaps what we’re really after are Facebook skeptics.

Facebook is a great platform, but we all know that it’s not the be-all end-all. There are drawbacks, flaws and features that just don’t make sense. (A great conversation on this topic can be found here.) We want to give all of those gripes a full airing at the conference.

That’s why we’re putting together a Facebook curmudgeons panel for our get-together this December. And even though the definition of “curmudgeon” indicates maleness, we’re really going out of our way to look for women.

Women are notoriously underrepresented from the podium and in the audience at tech conferences and we really want to combat that. That’s not to say that recommendations for male panelists are unwelcome, but if you know of a great female Facebook curmudgeon, now is the time to post her name and a way to get hold of her in the comments.

Keynote speech by Jeremiah Owyang

Facebook is a media, community and application platform that offers an existing thriving ecosystem, scalable growth, and word-of-mouth marketing. The ability to understand users, their preferences, and networks, helps web applications to quickly segment and rapidly grow. Of course, no system is perfect, as we will understand the challenges with data, privacy and the growing conflict as work and personal lives collide online.

By analyzing users, their profiles, networks and affiliations there’s a tremendous amount of rich data that we’ve not seen displayed so readily. The ability to create a targeted web strategy to meet specific needs of the ‘long tail’ is more accessible than ever before.

Facebook provides targeted advertising unlike we’ve ever seen before, the ability to provide messages segmented by location, gender, and or preference gives the ability to accurately market effectively

The recently launched Application Platform gives the small agile web team the ability to quickly deploy a widget, scale and monetize. We’ll explore what’s worked as these mini-applications are launched on top of an existing community.

We’ll learn:

• Demographics and Trend Data of Facebook
• Word of mouth and viral growth using the Newsfeed and Widgets
• Groups, Sponsored groups and other community features
• Harness Personal and Network information
• Contextual and targeted Advertising opportunities
• Monetizing your efforts
• Case studies of success and failure
• Understanding costs, and strategies to measure ROI