Archives: July 2007

Jason Calacanis is at it again. I knew he was self-absorbed when he wrote his linkbait rules back in April, but this just confirms it. Jason has been inundated with friend requests, friend detail requests and a number of application requests. Poor guy! Boo hoo, I’m so popular that I have 150 friend requests. I’m sure he cries himself to sleep at night with all of the pain that he experiences from so many friend requests that he doesn’t have the 2 seconds to click “Confirm Friend Request.” I agree with him that the neck-biting, movie tagging, skype calling and all the other application invitations are getting a bit absurd but deal with it! Seriously, does Facebook really decrease your ability to enjoy life? The solution to Facebook overload? Walk away from the computer. As soon as I finish up this post I’m going to try it myself … at least for a few hours. Although I guess I can browse Facebook from my blackberry but I’m going to avoid that for the time being. Jason: get your head out of your bum! The time it took to write that post could have been spent doing something more productive, such as watching one of those Netflix movies that you have sitting around or eating some Chinese food so you can get a real fortune cookie!

I previously covered two other advertising networks for Facebook (one and two). According to VentureBeat, RockYou, a leader in Facebook applications, has just launched their own ad network. Their applications are being used by between 6 and 12 million users and they are leveraging that widespread adoption to provide advertisers with a new platform to spread their message. So far, this has been the most effective method for monetizing an application that I have seen. VentureBeat is reporting that the application installation page is bringing in $20 per 1000 installations which is extremly high. Given that most of the applications are growing at around one percent per day this would result in close to $2,000 worth of revenue per day for RockYou. If you can come up with an insanely effective method of driving people to your application, it looks like you can make around $100,000 per year. Not bad! It will be interesting to see how this pans out in the rapidly changing environment of Facebook advertising.

Top Friends, one of the staples of a successful application, crossed 10 million users within the past couple hours. The application, which was produced by Slide Inc., is growing at around 1% per day. There are a number of people that have contacted me asking me “How can we launch an application that’s as popular as iLike or Top Friends.” My response? Chances are you can’t! I think this is more of a realist’s perspective. Over 50% of applications currently have less than 750 users. That’s a pretty large figure when people are expecting hundreds of thousands or millions of users. I also have a feeling that the number of applications with less than 1000 users will grow drastically over the coming months. I’ve already mentioned that effective marketing techniques need to be used in order to have a successful application. The viral impact of Facebook only comes into play once you have reached a critical base and have a valuable application. I don’t want to suggest that the viral nature of Facebook applications does’t exist, I simply am suggesting that there needs to be an effective seeding strategy if you are going to have any hope of success. Congratulations to the Slide Inc. team though! They are truly the envy of many in the internet industry.

Will Chu, Mike Weber, Paul Kowssari and Erik Ober just launched a new application that lets you keep track of the local scene. Simply type in your city and browse through the various late night attractions. Additionally, it shows you all of the users that have added each location to their favorites. As soon as I signed up it immediately reminded me of LateNightShots, an invite-only social-network dedicated to DC nightlife. As of now there was only one venue for Washington, D.C. but New York city and Los Angeles has a ton of venues. As of now there are around 350 users on the application but I can see this one taking off. One feature that I would like to see is photos from each location. Additionally, it would be great to see a list of upcoming events that users can post. Aside from that, this application is well made and is easy to navigate. If you are a regular to nights out on the town, then go grab the Bar|Book application. It’s a great way to find other people that like to attend the same places as you do. Maybe you’ll even find some new places to attend!

After reading an interesting post the other day about how to use Facebook professionally, I thought I would have a little fun and put a twist on the professional aspect of Facebook. Given that your social and professional lives can end up on Facebook, I figured why not show what you probably shouldn’t be doing on Facebook. If you are using Facebook you may have seen or experienced some of the items that I cover in this post. Trust me, these are things that you shouldn’t be doing.

Message Contacts When You Don’t Know Them
So you have now come to realize that there are some great contacts on Facebook. Why not start leveraging these contacts whenever you have the opportunity, right? If you want to use Facebook unprofessionally, get out there and start messaging people that you have never even met. That’s always a great way to form lasting relationships. The world is yours for the taking so get out there and leverage all those relationships that you’ve never created.

Post Photos of those “Good Times” You Had
So you had a little to much fun one night. If you don’t have memories of it I’m sure one of your great friends will be there to capture it on camera. Call up your friends and tell them to post all those pictures from when you and your friends went out and had a blast. Make sure that they tag you in the photo so all of your contacts can see the evidence. This is a great way for you to get hired. When your potential employer sees the photos, no worries! Everyone has a wild side, right?

Randomly add friends
Go browse for attractive people and send them messages like “Nice butt baby!” Then proceed to add them as a friend. Next find people with similar interests and send them a friend request without ever having spoken to them or sending them a message. Some say that, “The quality of your Facebook experience will be based on the quality of the people in your network.” Boy are they wrong. Get out there, browse through people at random and start adding them as friends. This is a competition to see who is the most popular. So get to it!

Put 100 Applications on Your Profile
Consider this: your friends load up your profile with the intention of writing on your wall. Instead of just scrolling down real quick, they spend the next hour scrolling through all of the applications you have placed on your profile. With each application you think to yourself about how this will force your friends to spend more time on your profile. Don’t be selective in your application selection, just start adding. There are over 2000 applications so there has to be at least 100 that you can add to your profile. Don’t think about it, just do it. It will make your profile look more pretty and user friendly.

Set Your Security Settings to a Minimum
You are an amazing person, so let the whole world know about it. Rather than allowing only your friends to view your profile, let everyone see in. While you’re at it, also make sure to place your home address, phone number and any other personally identifiable information that you can come up with. This will make it easier for others to get in contact with you. Isn’t it great when a random person knocks on your door and says “Surpise, I saw you on Facebook so I thought I’d stop by!”

If you follow the 5 steps that I have outlined above, you will be on your way to using Facebook unprofessionally. Seriously, there is nothing wrong with letting the whole world know that you’re amazing and want to be their friend! Be wild, be popular, be transparent. This is the place to let your personal life out into the open! Party time!

Stickam, the webcam based social network (who is also apparently run by pornographers), has just launched their official Facebook application. While not as flexible as UStream.tv, the concept of putting your webcam on your Facebook profile seems pretty interesting. While it may stream 24/7 it won’t have the capacity to follow you around. This is definitely a great opportunity for Stickam to increase their user base by building a webcam network on Facebook. It’ll be interesting to see if this application is adopted by many users. One thing that is interesting to note is that the UStream application which was launched 4 days ago still has less than 100 users. I realized that UStream may not have the mass appeal that it soon will but under 100 users is pretty pathetic. It makes me wonder if many of these applications have come up with their application marketing strategy. It doesn’t seem like it. Oh well! If you want to show off on your profile in real-time, go check out the Stickam application.

My friend Joe Suh launched a new application yesterday which allows you to automatically import your LinkedIn resume directly into your profile. While it is a basic application, it is one of the components that could help drive users away from LinkedIn and toward Facebook. The real killer application will enable the differentiation of professional from social profiles (as I mentioned two days ago). While this application doesn’t go all the way it is a great step in the right direction. You are able to either upload your resume or have your work history captured from your LinkedIn profile. Additionally, recommendations are transferred into your profile as well. This is a simple application that combined with a larger application would contribute to the demise of LinkedIn. If you want to transfer over your LinkedIn profile and recommendations go grab the Resume application.

So what is this killer application that I speak of (and perhaps the golden app that I spoke of yesterday)? It is an application the allows you to store all of your social relationships, photos, and personal details. As my professional and social networks collide I need to be reserved in what is displayed on my existing profile. With the development of an application where I can select users that can view my personal profile (in this hypothetical application), I could transition 100% over to Facebook. I will be able to maintain stronger bonds with professional contacts and my social contacts can still see the unfiltered version of me. What do you think?

The dynamic of Facebook application marketing is rapidly changing. What once was an environment in which your application was practically guaranteed to go viral has shifted to one in which you need to come up with creative ways of marketing your application. The MyBucks application is a perfect example of this. After Aryeh Goldsmith (the creator of the MyBucks application) added the “Top Referrers” feature, the application immediately turned viral. After seeing all the applications go viral I have decided to do a brief overview of a few key features that help your application go viral. While this is not an exhaustive list, it covers the majority of tricks of the trade that are currently being used.

• Forced Invite – The first instance that I saw this implemented was by David Gentzel when he launched the Happy Hour application. Within a matter of weeks the application has already become the 13th most popular application on Facebook, which is no easy feat. This method was duplicated by other applications with varying success within a matter of hours. What exactly is this method you ask? As soon as someone decides to add the application they are forced to invite 10 friends. This is a risky tactic but David Gentzel was able to leverage his other highly popular applications to drive traffic to this application. Personally, I don’t recommend this tactic. It is a brute force method that can be used by those with popular applications that don’t have rich feature sets. I have a feeling that most happy hour users don’t return to the app on a daily basis, but then again I don’t have statistics to back that up.
• Invite after action – When the Facebook platform first launched there were no restrictions as to how many people an application user could invite per day. As a result many of the initial applications that took advantage of the checkbox invite forms grew rapidly. Since the launch, there is now a limit of 10 friends per day by each application user. While it has been significantly limited by Facebook, it is still a useful form of marketing. When building your application you should definitely come up with an effective way of allowing users to invite other people.
• News feed – The news feed is the most powerful component of Facebook. Period. There are two ways that applications can leverage the news feed. The first is naturally built in. Most of the time, when a user adds an application it is displayed in their friends’ news feeds. While it is not a guarantee that it will show up in other people’s news feeds (due to a number of factors pertaining to news feed optimization), this is the primary thing that helps applications spread virally. When I launched my Bush Countdown clock I added no viral components and relied completely on people’s news feeds. This has spread the application to close to 8,500 users. While not spectacular, it is hardly something to sneeze at. The second way of using a news feed is by leveraging the news feed API calls that Facebook has provided. Within reason, you can regularly post news items to a user’s mini-feed within their profile. A small percentage of the time that item will end up on their friends’ news feeds. While this is severely limited, at least you can get it on to your users’ mini-feeds. Every form of exposure you can get (within reason) for your application, you should strive for.
• Referrals/Giveaways – This is the most recent form of viral marketing on Facebook. I am seeing a number of applications adopting this technique. The referrals tactic is to come up with an effective way of encouraging your applications users to market your application for you. They can market your application on blogs, websites, forums, Facebook walls, messages to friends and more. The bottom line is that you end up with your application users being the ones that get scrappy with the marketing, not you. Giveaways are usually combined with this to provide an incentive for users to promote your application. There is a risk though in making your application look cheap, but for now I think this is a great technique.
• One-on-One – Used alone, this technique may not result in viral growth of your application but combining this technique with one of the others I have listed can result in exceptional results. The concept is straight forward. Reach out to people that you think will find your application useful. This technique is more for targeted applications, not for generic applications such as poke wars or zombie biting or any of the other generic applications out there. Reach out to those individuals that you think will benefit from your application and then follow-up with them once they’ve added it. The result is passionate users that become your own brand evangelists. This technique has been used by countless communities to help generate passionate users. If you nurture your application users you will see positive results in the long-term.

While each of these techniques can provide varying results, all of them are targeted at creating the viral effect. Ultimately that is what makes the Facebook platform so appealing currently. You can rapidly reach thousands to millions of individuals in a short span of time at minimal cost. The problem with these viral techniques are that many of them will become practically useless soon after I release this post. That is the nature of viral marketing. Viral marketing techniques lose their appeal after they become adopted by the masses. While the techniques that have been used until now are far from revolutionary, I have a feeling that we will begin to see truly creative techniques in the coming months.

I have now reviewed hundreds of applications and looked at each one of the thousands of applications on Facebook. After speaking with my friend Justin Thorp last night we concluded that there has yet to be the true golden application. So what is a golden application?

A golden application is one that leverages Facebook’s social component to provide true value to the users that interact with it. At this point I am speaking of something that is not easy to create. It is ultimately the concept of building the next revolutionary product (like Facebook) within the Facebook platform. What are the chances that someone is working on this golden application? Extremely high.

In contrast to many of the existing applications that were built overnight by a college student in their dorm room, the revolutionary applications will require large development teams and take months to build. I know of a few that are in the works but the bottom line is that we have yet to cross the point at which robust applications are being featured on the Facebook platform.

I am currently working on one of those feature rich applications with a team and I can speak from experience, it takes a significant amount of time to build high quality, viral and sticky applications. While there are a number of applications that have stood out to me as exceptional none of them are quite revolutionary. Are there any applications that you have seen that you would qualify as revolutionary? If not, what applications come close?

Remember poke wars? A similar application called “Social Climber” has just launched. The app is a simple one. Once you add the application you simply invite your friends and then try to be the first to “climb on” them. Once you have climbed on someone, they cannot climb on you for a 24 hour period. After the 24 hour period, the restrictions are gone and it’s back to a free for all. This is extremely similar to the poke wars application but instead of having to check the application on an extremely frequent basis, you only need to check every 24 hours. The about page of the application describes the app as “a true measurement of your popularity.” Instead this shows how much time you have sitting at your computer. If you spend as much time as I do then chances are you will quickly rise to the top. Thus this is not the most accurate portrayal of your popularity. This is another one of those “social games” on Facebook. If you want a way to get your friends involved in another form of poking go grab the Social Climber application.