Archives: July 2007

According to VentureBeat, Facebook has killed the Audio application. I had a chance to interview the application creator, Numair Faraz, earlier this month. I have inquired with him about a follow-up discussion to get his input on what has happened. I am hoping to have a response later tonight. The Audio application had over 750,000 users and was growing rapidly. The only problem was that entire tracks were being uploaded which was a clear violation of United States copyright laws. When I spoke with Numair previously I asked him about this:

Nick O’Neill: If you take a look at the songs being uploaded via the Audio application, the majority of the songs are copyrighted. How is it that your application is not in violation of music copyright laws?

Numair: Well, we have very stringent copyright takedown policies that follow the terms of the DMCA. I can’t say much about this issue at the moment other than that we are in discussions with all of the major record labels, and several of the independents.

While they had stringent copyright takedown policies, not many songs were being taken down. There is no indication as to whether or not this is a final decision. Hopefully Numair can shed some light on the issue later today. I’m guessing he may be preoccupied. When I asked him about additional features earlier this month, Numair responded, “Well, artists and record label executives keep badgering me to get those features done, and I really want to get them done, but beautiful girls and warm sunny beaches are one hell of a distraction.” If you get too distracted though it looks like Facebook will shut you down. So remember: if you plan on launching an illegal application on Facebook, it will not be staying up indefinitely.

Want an easy way to browse through brand name clothing, put together cool outfits and show them off on your profile? Brand me provides a fun and easy way to create your own custom outfits that you can show off to your friends. I spent hours playing dress up this afternoon. Well, not really, but I’m sure that would have been a lot of fun. As of now you can select from men and women’s clothing and can choose from H&M, Land’s End and Levi Strauss brands. This application will definitely be better once a wider selection of brands is provided. I had commented on this type of application previously when I was discussing possible ways of leveraging the Facebook platform. Why could this application have such a powerful impact? From the advertising standpoint it helps you and your friends to share a brand experience on Facebook. From a sales perspective, individuals could create theoretical outfits with their exact sizes and then friends and family can come through and purchase those outfits via an affiliate program. While this is a first shot at allowing users to show off their favorite brands, I think this is headed in the right direction. If you want to play dress up on Facebook, go check out the Brand Me application.

Productivity across the country has soared 100% in the past half hour. That’s because nobody can currently use Facebook. I actually have to do real work now! Facebook is performing some upgrades. My guess is that these are nothing spectacular just the addition of servers and such. It’s kind of ridiculous that in this day in age Facebook needs to take down their entire site in order to perform upgrades. Maybe Facebook is preparing to release a new platform which protects all users from STDs and cancer. That would be pretty revolutionary. Unfortunately, I doubt that this is the case. Honestly I doubt there is anything major taking place except from the fact that they have had to take down the servers. That’s definitely one downside of having your business built on someone else’s platform. When they decide to go down, your business goes down. For now, it’s time for me to go try out some work related activities like reading email and other things that I have been avoiding.

Update
Given that even the Facebook page that says they are getting an upgrade is loading slowly suggest that there may be another issue at hand. I read a blog post this morning stating that Facebook was being hacked. Anybody know anything about this? Sounds like a denial of service attack. Although maybe I’m reading into this too much and you would expect that they have protection against DOS attacks.

Update 2
According to another blog, Facebook was down at 1:50 AM PST this morning and the Facebook wikipedia entry read the following:
“IT WAS RECENTLY HACKED BY CHRIS DOHERTY ON TUESDAY 31ST JULY. MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN AFFECTED, ESPECIALLY THOSE IN THE UK. CHRIS DOHERTY PROCLAIMED, ‘NOW PEOPLE MAY SEE THAT I AM THE TRUE CREATOR!’”

Update 3 – 2:30 PM EST
The site is back up. Not sure if we’ll ever know what happened!

Final Update
Facebook released the following statement:

This morning, we temporarily took down the Facebook site to fix a bug we identified earlier today. This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them. The site has now been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Yesterday, a new application called WatZatSong launched. WatZatSong is a website where people that don’t know what a specific song is can either post a recording or hum the tune that they can’t find the name for. Music savvy community members then respond to each user’s posting with the correct song name. The Facebook application picks random sets of 10 songs samples and you need to guess each one. Some of the samples include people humming out the tunes. So is this an iLike competitor? Definitely not. The application seems to be missing the viral component. I have to admit though that I was thoroughly entertained by a French girl screwing up the lyrics to the song “Cotton Eye Joe.” In comparison, the iLike application was smart in that you could compare your song naming skills with your friends. This application fails to leverage the social component of Facebook. I think this is a good start but definitely an unfinished product. If you want to go guess the songs that random people hum to you, check out the WatZatSong application.

Some entrepreneurial individual is apparently working on an application to allow Facebook developers to sell their application. He or she claims that they are launching a Facebook application that will list other applications for sale. Will this succeed? No idea but I don’t see this becoming a marketplace for popular applications. Any top tier Facebook developer has been acquired or is in the process of being acquired by venture capitalists and angel investors. The remaining applications are either solely for the purpose of marketing a brand or have quickly resulted in failure. Mike Arrington commented a couple days ago about each Facebook user being worth $0.30. So for all those developers who’s application peaked at around 1,000, you can go sell it for around $300. Not much of an offer if you’ve spent a couple days pumping out an application. My conclusion? I doubt any valuable applications will end up on the open market, they will be bought out way before they are in a position where they need to come up with an exit strategy. Do you think I’m wrong here?

I have to be honest, I had never used Voki until they launched their Facebook application yesterday. I had seen Voki on Fred Wilson’s blog previously but didn’t get any further than the surface. Then last night I was reading Charlie’s blog and was thoroughly entertained by his Voki widget. The Voki widget is the most robust flash application to date on Facebook. So how does it work? After adding the Voki application you can either log in with your existing account to load your existing Voki avatars or start from scratch. I started from scratch since I don’t already have an account. Next you select one of seemingly hundreds of avatars ranging from the devil (pictured left) to anime characters to animals and a whole lot more. After customizing your avatar you can record your own message and the avatar’s mouth moves with your voice. It’s pretty slick! This application also has a viral component to it. In order to leave a message on the person’s profile you need to create your own Voki account (for free of course). The application creators definitely built in all the Facebook promotional features possible including a link which allows you to broadcast your Voki to your newsfeed. Congrats to the Voki team on launching this application! If you want your own talking avatar on your Facebook profile, go grab the Voki application.

The “non-existent” Facebook rate card has been released from an insider. I found the following rate card to be particularly revealing:

For $15 CPM you can target users within Facebook based on gender, geography, major, interests, activities and movies. Earlier this month I commented on how Facebook can fix their ads. Apparently their ads have been fixed but only for those that are willing to spend $50,000 or more on a marketing campaign. While I still think Facebook would benefit from an adwords like system, this at least reveals that as of now they provide highly targeted advertising opportunities. These rates are from February but I would imagine they are still in the same range. Alternatively, you can spend $150,000 for a 3 month sponsored group on Facebook. Given that there are already over 150 of these sponsored groups, this would suggest Facebook is making over $20 million alone from sponsored groups. Add in their news feed ads at $50K a pop and you are talking about some serious money. For all of you that wanted to know how Facebook makes money, this is how they do it. In my own opinion, if Facebook opened up these targeted ads to the masses, they would be providing a higher value to small businesses and would revolutionize the advertising industry. For now though, you better have big bucks if you want to play. Smaller businesses will have to stick to building applications on the Facebook platform.

[Via]

Last week, Facebook posted the following news announcement:

Developers – Now is the time to build education applications on Facebook Platform! Facebook will be phasing out its Courses feature in early August, and we wanted to make sure you were the first to know.

Collaboration services and applications are a big part of the world of Education. Especially on college campuses, where we first found our roots. Many of you have probably used some kind of collaboration software as a part of your courses. Our courses application was a great way to connect with new friends, and find your classmates. But, we think Facebook Developers can create even more robust ways to create, connect, and collaborate around teaching and learning in the classroom.

This is a great business opportunity, with vast distribution potential, and a great way to fundamentally affect an important part of the lives of students worldwide.

Rather than trying to drive creativity within their company, Facebook has decided to look elsewhere for creative input. Additionally, they would like someone else to build some of their applications. Here’s my translation of Facebook’s announcement: “Hi developers! Let us let you in on a secret: we are removing the courses feature on our site. First, go develop the same application if you want to grab a few thousand users that miss the feature. Second, go and build us an application similar to Blackboard. We have enough to currently worry about, so do us a favor and go build us the app. Oh … one other thing … we have told all the other developers about this opportunity so you might want to hurry up if you are going to seize the moment!”

I understand Facebook wanting to increase their feature set, but do you find it a little odd that they are now trying to guide what applications developers build? Perhaps this is their way of saying that they will purchase any company that builds a robust enough educational application. I think this means something completely different: Facebook has their hands tied. While I won’t hypothesize about what exactly Facebook is building, they are definitely up to something big. There has been the opportunity to improve upon Facebook’s educational features since the platform launched, so why have they decided to announce this now? Maybe I’m reading into this too much. Any ideas?

That shouldn’t really come as a surprise. It’s a good thing that much of my job already revolves around Facebook otherwise I would be in trouble. According to the Telegraph, over 70 percent of businesses in the U.K. have blocked Facebook from within their company. You know you are going to become a powerful brand when companies start banning you from the workplace. Could you imagine if they banned Google from work? That wouldn’t happen though since Google is where I find all my answers. Conversely, banning Facebook could become a problem if Facebook becomes my primary center of communication. A large percentage of my interactions already take place on Facebook now and I have a feeling that this will increase over the coming months. Om Malik suggests that all this Facebook interaction which has resulted in Facebook fatigue can be prevented. By simply accepting friend requests from people that are in your cell phone, you can limit the amount of interaction on Facebook. I have to agree with Om but at this point my Facebook account has almost become as tainted as my email account. Perhaps it is time to heed Om’s advice and become more selective. How open are you in accepting friend requests?

This one is sure to be a hit with Mac fanatics. The Mac Lover application is extremely simple and is also one of the first completely flash based applications that I have seen. You can select from a large variety of Apple products including classic Macs. I’m not quite sure that I agree with their selection of classics though. I would have liked to see the Apple IIe or the Lisa. Aside from that, this application is pretty slick. It is also cool that when you select all of the products that you have and wish for, you click “update profile” and the flash application automatically updates your profile. This one is definitely well made and I think we will see an increase in the number of flash based applications that are launched on the Facebook platform. If you are a serious Mac fan then go grab the Mac lover application.