Facebook

The two most common pieces of advice you’ll hear about developing a Facebook app are probably:

1. Viral ideas are like half-cooked spaghetti; some of the stick to the wall, but you have to throw a bunch of noodles to find out which
2. Launch you app before it’s “finished,” and develop it over time as new features occur to you

I call this strategy of developing apps over time “baby step development,” because it relies significantly on incrementalism, or taking baby steps with your product.

Why is this important in social media?

Because what you’re looking for is engagement. Facebook highlighted this when they introduced the idea of “daily active users” for an app, instead of just counting the number of people who have installed an app.

And what better way to keep people coming back to your app than to keep adding new features and responding to user requests?

From that standpoint, it’s important that you look at any Facebook or OpenSocial app spec as something to provide a trajectory, not just a product.

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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.

When we build Facebook applications we always start with a spec.

A spec is a document that details the complete application user flow and provides the technical details necessary to put together a functional back end and stay with Facebook’s ever-morphing application terms of service. Basically it’s like a blueprint for your house.

We’ve talked with some clients who want to work from another Facebook application instead of first doing a spec.

I get the logic: “Here is a complete application that is already on Facebook. We know it conforms to the terms of service (or is not yet shut down) and we know how popular it already is. Why do I need to pay money to have someone write out the functionality when they can just look at it in action?”

Aside from the obvious possible pitfalls of simply cloning someone else’s application, ranging from possible copyright issues to opening yourself up to getting bashed the reviews, you’re only looking at half the picture when you’re using an application.

While the user flow is important to every application, it’s equally (if not more) important to have a complete framework for what the app requires technically. The plumbing, if you’ll allow me to continue the construction metaphor, needs to be planned out before you start nailing planks of wood together.

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.

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?

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about platforms and services as platforms. The recent strategy trend in start up companies seems to be: become a platform.

That’s what Twitter is doing, that’s what Facebook and every other social network is doing. You build an infrastructure and an API and you invite people to play on your system.

But the one thing to remember is that the web is the ultimate platform.

I keep seeing the exodus of Facebook features, one by one, to the native web. Twitter is enhanced, open, archive-able “status updates.” FriendFeed is trying to co-opt the News Feed (what I give credit for popularizing the idea of the lifestream) and bring it out onto the open web. In many ways it is succeeding.

I think it’s inevitable that online community is going to end up as a disparate set of open services that work together instead of a closed system (Facebook) that offers all services.

The future of social networking is that everyone has:

• a blog (profile + notes)
• FriendFeed (news feed)
• Twitter (status)
• flickR (photos)
• del.icio.us or Google (shared items)
• etc., etc.

The smart way to go about “building a platform” is not to build something on top the web that traps users and developers, but to build something within the web so that it connects with everything that’s already available.

What’s the difference?

Facebook sits on top of the web, and it relies on its users and its developers to be content with only a base level of interaction with the greater web. When you build a Facebook application, you’re building a Facebook application, not a web application.

It’s the difference between wearing a Starship Troopers exoskeleton and working out. The exoskeleton is really cool looking, polished, and lets you plug in all kinds of gears and gizmos. But you’re not actually any stronger than you were. And your muscles aren’t really connected to it, even though it’s responding to your push.

A lot of the recent buzz in the tech sector has been about unsuccessful efforts to monetize online social tools via advertising. Google is losing money on their advertising deal with MySpace. User sentiment suggests that demographic targeting doesn’t raise the relevance of advertising, and clickthrough rates are low across the board.

It’s not that social networks aren’t playing a role in business transactions. Blogger Charles Hudson wrote that he routinely makes transactions whose impetus has been a recommendation from friends through an online social network:

Judging by the activity I see within my own network, there are a lot of my friends using social networks as social Q&A systems to get input, advice, and recommendations in addition to just letting folks know what they’re up to at the moment.

But that activity doesn’t translate into revenue for the networks, and advertisers aren’t seeing the conversions like they do with Google’s AdWords service. So what’s a marketer to do?

A few suggestions:

1. If you’re doing targeted, self-serve advertising on Facebook, get as specific as you can. Avoid stereotyping your potential customers, all women are not interested in weight loss. Many men are not interested in having sex thrown at them all day long.
2. Think about ways of rounding out your campaign to encourage echo chamber behavior. Everyone is after conversions these days rather than brand awareness, so be sure to link your ad to a landing page that drives conversions and also enables social sharing of product recommendations. Even if the user who clicks through to your site doesn’t wind up becoming a customer, you want to enable him to encourage his friends to visit via social mechanisms such as embedding a video in his MySpace page or sharing your landing page on Facebook because it contains interesting content.
3. Consider building something useful — like an embeddable widget or a Facebook application that lets your customers connect with their friends in a way that involves your brand.

We got an RFP and a Facebook Application Spec in the inbox this morning that highlights one of typical pitfalls we find that people run into when they’re developing a concept and a spec for their app: they’re missing a social metaphor.

We find that one of they key factors in how much pickup a Facebook Application gets is how well it taps into the social connections that people have created. The “social metaphor” I’m talking about is this: how can some action in your application be equated to a real social interaction between friends?

If people can use your application to connect with others, they will do so. If they feel that their interaction with other people through your application is meaningless, they will probably abandon it.

Basically, setting up invites and plunking something into the feed is not enough to make it work.

Scrabulous for example allows you to “nudge” players that aren’t making their moves quickly enough for your taste. It’s a very simple feature, but it’s one that instantly conjures up the image of sitting around a scrabble board and going “hey, Jimmy, it’s your turn.”

I know that’s not a feature that has a lot to do with gaining users, but you bet your underoos it keeps their daily active users count nice and high.

Facebook, like the desktop and the web, is a platform. But it has a different set of features and rules, and if you take something designed for the desktop or the web, and just plug it into Facebook without taking advantage of the rich relationship information available there, it’s far less likely to work.

Not sure about your idea? We’re happy to build you a spec that works.

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.

Check out this post over on Face Reviews. Also read this article in the New York Times.

Despite agreeing not to shut down or mess with Scrabulous, Mattel has apparently launched their own version of Scrabble on Facebook. It’s bug ridden, poorly executed, and apparently nobody likes Mattel.

Here are the lessons:

1. Board games can make excellent Facebook applications
2. Adopting a community built by someone else around your product is far better than trying to shut it down
3. Adopting a community built by someone else around your product is far better than trying to mimic it and build it again yourself

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?

It’s pretty hard to screw up in social media if you’re being honest. As long as you’re upfront about what you’re trying to accomplish, ask permission to engage with people, and generally act like you would act in person, you’re going to be OK.

Which is why I’m always surprised at the number of people who decide that bad ideas are good ideas.

All Facebook wrote about fake application reviews yesterday, and how they’re effectively screwing up the system:

Duncan Riley wrote a post earlier today about Slide posting fake positive reviews on their own application. This has become a standard practice nowadays by companies. This problem happens time and time again when you set up any sort of review system. Even on this blog, I have application reviews. It’s pretty obvious who’s voting when immediately after I post an application review and there are suddenly 5 perfect reviews within minutes.

Here’s the thing about fake reviews: they’re deceitful.

We (noisy, blogging) consumers don’t want to be deceived.* And it makes us angry when we see companies trying to pull a fast one on us.

Every time this happens, a little bit of trust in the medium goes away. Right now, social media has this great, wonderful, high level of trust and personal contact because as a whole people are being very genuine. Let’s not waste it.

——
* Outside of, say, a magic show.

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.

I logged into Facebook this morning to the usual flurry of messages, notifications, pokes and friend requests. As I was responding to each point of contact, I noticed a couple of distinctly weird new behaviors.

First, in my notifications, I was told that someone by the name of Derek had joined Facebook and that I should friend him.

I have no idea who this Derek character is, so it came as a surprise to me that Facebook would want me to friend him. I assume this is part of Facebook’s new friend recommendation feature.

The feature is cool in theory, but it needs to be dialed down in its intrusiveness in practice. I really don’t want to get pinged with new potential friends. I want to go through the list of recommended friends at my leisure and decide who I might want to connect with the way Linkedin does it.

If this is indeed part of the new feature, then it’s really news to me. Facebook shouldn’t just unilaterally launch features that fundamentally change user interactions with the site, say by notifying them about something they’re not used to getting notified by, without discussing it with the user base first.

Obviously, this isn’t as big a deal as the News Feed or Beacon being unilaterally thrust upon users, but at this point — given all the information that comes flying at my head every time I log into FB — it’s just as annoying.

After screen-shotting the offending friend notification, I went about dealing with the rest of my inputs. When I got to the pokes, I noticed that a strange man — someone I do not know and am not friends with on the site — had poked me. This is odd because, as you can clearly see below, I have disabled the function that lets non-friends poke me.

I don’t know how this fool was able to poke me, but I don’t like it. It doesn’t matter how young and hip you are, a random uninvited poke from a guy you don’t know is just plain creepy.

Update: Apparently, despite having my privacy settings tuned to disallow poking in search results, the poke option is still showing up in my search listing. My friend and colleague Ellen Petry Leanse was kind enough to send me these screenshots of how my search listing looks:

and how it should look: