Archives: September 2007

On the Facebook platform there is a battle waging. The battle is between advertising networks, all scrambling to get a piece of the highly lucrative ad market. Today, Om Malik highlights the Appfuel network which is one of close to 10 ad networks currently on Facebook. They are by no means the last company to join the race. Many have questioned whether or not Google will decide to hop in as well. Chances are they will join via their new platform which they are announcing at the beginning of Novemeber.

Currently, RockYou and Social Media are the dominant players in the Facebook ad market. Once Facebook decides to join, all that may change. Regardless, the one thing that is slowly becoming apparent is how important targeting is. If you send 100 untargeted users to your application, there is no measure of value (aside from the number of users that joined). Being able to determine a user’s intentions and desires is going to be a critical point of success for many of these companies. Any company that provides untargeted ads is only in the market for the short-run.

Last night I had the opportunity to speak with one person who plans on hopping into the ad market in the coming weeks. He discussed the importance of intentions and I couldn’t agree more. Previously, I had stressed the value in being able to target ads based on gender and age in addition to location. The reality is that all those things are pretty much worthless if you don’t know what the person’s intentions are.

In the coming months we are going to witness a significant shift in advertising as ad networks become more advanced in their ability to target based on our intentions. The race is on to be the first to market and the race isn’t ending anytime soon. It is well known that both Google and Facebook are entering this market, but the real question is when. For all the smaller players in the market, now is the time to grab up as much market share before the big companies join in. It will be interesting to see how this all pans out.

Want to post comments on content anywhere on the web that your friends can see? I new startup called CommentAnywhere enables users to post text, photos and videos directly to any website and share that content with their friends. When you browse to a page, you can view which of your friends have commented on that content. The only downside of the application is that currently you need to register by entering your Facebook email and password but there is nothing on the page specifying that they have integrated with Facebook.

From the perspective of an average visitor, I would be highly skeptical of a registration like this. The cool part though is that the software utilizes Facebook for the social connections. Ultimately, I think individuals are going to use one site to manage all of their social connections and then there will be websites and/or applications that leverage those connections. I would assume that this is what Google is aiming for with their new platform. If you want to check out their application which is in the alpha phase, go check out their website.

While many of us like to avoid it, politics is a heated topic. There are significant divisions within our country and around the world and with the coming elections politics is going to heat up. A couple weeks ago, Robert Scoble had the opportunity to interview Randi Zuckerberg. In the interview Randi discussed her desire to increase the political activity on Facebook. It appears that Randi is holding true to her promise as a Facebook Political Summit has been scheduled for October 9th in Washington, D.C.

There are also an increasing number of applications looking to tap into the political fever. These applications include the:

• Causes application;
• Jena 6 application;
• Election ’08 application;
• End Poverty application;
• and hundreds more.

While many of us don’t discuss it, politics is something many of us are passionate about. Do you think the younger generation is politically active? How do you think Facebook and politics mesh? Or do they not mesh at all?

According to Fortune, Mark Zuckerberg was spotted walking through Seattle on the way to a meeting with Microsoft executives today. Perhaps he’ll walk out of there with a check for $500 million! That’s a check that I’d like to walk out of any meeting with. With a lofty valuation of $10 billion, one has to wonder if we are in the middle of a Facebook bubble. My thoughts? Yes we are.

Social platforms are indeed the wave of the future. Social platforms will also be limited to larger social networks for the next 12 months due to the development cost. Additionally, developers and advertisers aren’t going to want to develop for a ton of platforms, they will only want to develop for social platforms that provide the greatest impact. While Facebook may currently be the only social platform and will continue to be the leading social platform, it doesn’t mean there isn’t room for competitors.

The real question at hand is what is the actual value of social platforms or the social operating system? Nobody knows and that’s why Facebook is able to pull is some lofty valuations. Perhaps years down the road Facebook will become the next Microsoft. For the time being though, Facebook has yet to release any monetization tools that warrant their sky high valuation. Do you think Facebook will be worth 10 or even 15 billion dollars?

Yes, I know it’s not “the Facebook” but I liked the title! It’s kind of like “The Google.” Anyways, tomorrow LinkedIn will be launching a new feature: user photos. This is a whopping four years after to launching. Did LinkedIn get a case of the Facebook envy? Definitely. In a number of months, LinkedIn is supposed to be launching their own platform (alongside MySpace, Bebo and Friendster) which is also a response to Facebook’s platform. A quick look at the Linked in versus Facebook Alexa graph shows why LinkedIn should be copying Facebook in any way possible:

While the chart shows stagnant growth, LinkedIn claims they are getting around 240,000 new users a week. That’s not close to the 200,000 users a day that Facebook is getting but it’s nothing to sneeze at. It will be interesting to see if Facebook decides to cater more to the active professional networkers by differentiating between professional and social contacts. For the time being it doesn’t appear to be one of their focuses but it is still something they should do.

Every day I talk with clients and prospective clients about developing Facebook applications and the best way to go about it. The reality of the matter is that unless you have some insanely catchy idea that naturally goes viral, chances are you are going to need some help. That help comes in the form of marketing. All the larger applications have been launching new apps which they the cross promote. For all the remaining applications (who now make up the majority), it is frequently close to impossible to gain significant traction.

While minimal traffic on Facebook still amounts to more than most websites drive in the first day, there is nothing that can be done to increase traffic except for the following:

• Build in viral features (invites, news feed postings, catchy profile boxes … see top 5 viral techniques)
• Invite all of your friends on a daily basis
• Share the about page of your application so that it ends up in your news feed
• Pay for advertising

Aside from that there is not much else you can do. This contrasts to websites which once picked up by search engines can immediately start getting traffic and as content is added can grow in size. On this blog for instance, over 50 percent of my traffic comes from search engines. This is not the case for Facebook applications since they can’t be crawled. The result?

As the application market becomes saturated it is going to become increasingly challenging to make your application go viral. Not that it wasn’t already challenging to make things go viral (see the book “Made to Stick“), but without search engines, driving traffic suddenly became a lot more expensive. In contrast to a website, your only hope of success is having your application go viral. While your odds of going viral are significantly increased on Facebook, I question the long-term sustainability. The number of applications that go viral without the assistance of marketing are going to decrease significantly in a short period of time. What do you think?

Last night I got to speak with Dave McClure who will be teaching the “Create Engaging Web Applications Using Metrics and Learning on Facebook” class with Professor BJ Fogg at Stanford University starting Thursday. Below are a few of the questions that I had the opportunity to ask Dave.

What is the new class about?
Really about building engaging web applications and using user engagement metrics to figure out what makes the right set of features and right set of marketing and promotional channels to use. Using Facebook as a lab environment. We are going to use a 5-step model for user engagement:

1. Acquisition – where are users coming from?
2. Activation
3. Retension – email and other things to get them to return
4. Referral
5. Revenue/Monetization

Are you going to be focusing primarily on Google analytics or will it also involve specific user demographics?
I think so. Right now one of the biggest issues for us to explore as the class, and really kind of interesting when involving both Google and Facebook in figuring this out is how do we get those two schools to work together and also what other tools we might use to figure out the metrics that we are trying to collect. Charlie Sheever was the developer at Facebook who implemented the fb:google-analytics code and I’ve been trying to connect with him and folks at Google analytics to see how they are progressing with that and trying to develop it further. In addition to that we are working with a couple other companies; probably Social Media and Adonomics to see what they are doing.

Those are quantitative solutions. There are also ways to collect qualitative data that are based on user surveys and sample data; maybe even doing just user monitoring and testing. It is not exclusively about quantitative data, although that is one of the more significant goals, but really more about building that model and thinking about your product development and product marketing process using that framework.

Facebook is going to have to launch some sort of analytics software if they are going to launch an ad network.
They probably are looking to roll out more in the metrics area. We are looking forward to working with them to get a better sense of where they are headed on that. It is possible that we will work with Facebook, Google or a third party company that is developing and building off of whatever Facebook offers, that we can put that stuff together. Definitely we don’t have all the answers right now. The platform itself is still maturing, developing, it’s a moving target. Even outside of Facebook, I think a lot of the concepts that I’m presenting, are ones that people are still experimenting with.

I know a lot of people who are doing general website development that don’t really have these models in place very well yet. I do think it’s really important for startups to have a simple set of metrics that they watch and actually do a lot of A-B testing around those metrics when they are building features and trying to measure deeper down the conversion funnel before marketing channels. Understand what’s working and what’s not working at bringing visitors to the site or getting users to install the app and use it on a regular basis.

You said Facebook will be involved. How involved?
I’m still talking with those folks. I’m hopeful they will speak at one or two classes. We also have some folks from Google who are going to be speaking at one or two classes. Part of the structure of the course is really that Prof. B.J. Fogg and myself will be presenting on a topic. The class is a 3 hour class on Thursdays that is more presentation then team oriented and then a lab on Tuesdays that is more self-paced development. In terms of Thursday classes we will try to bring in outside speakers in addition to our own talks and someone who is actually doing project management, doing project marketing, building a facebook app or potentially Facebook bloggers and VCs that are interacting with startups.

The goal is to give them a set of real world experiences with people who are doing those functions in startup companies in the valley. Internally with the students in the class we are trying to structure them in 3 person teams: either 2 developers and one business marketing person or one developer and one product manager/product marketing person. This is so that they really get the full experience of building a startup team and working together to put together their app and do the marketing.

What do you consider a successful application to be?
Our goals are to have each of the teams build two different types of apps during the course of the semester:

1. One will be measuring based on acquisition metrics. The goal will be a broad use case app, applicable to a lot of people, lite-weight like a Zombies or profile badge type of application.
2. The other type of app is going to be more depth of engagement metric. Very narrow use case probably around education topics but the goal is to see more depth of user engagement: repeat visits and retention time being the key metrics there.

We’re trying to contrast those two different styles of app development and in fact will probably be using the first set of apps to market the second ones. Also, having the class cross-market each other apps as well. That’s one of the benefits of working in an environment where we have 10 or 20 teams working together. They can use each of their apps to cross-market to each other. At the end of the semester we might be able to build an application network within Stanford. One benefit is that some of the students in the class have already built Facebook apps.

Mashable said the concept of grading based on number of users seems somewhat flawed. Do you see any issues with this method of grading?
I think they misinterpreted the grading. Perhaps a very small percentage of the grade will be based on active users but I think we will be looking for a good split between breadth of use and depth of use. In one sense we might look at active users and number of referrals as a measure of success but in others we might look at time spent or pageviews or repeat visit behavior as success.

The apps themselves are not the only measure of success. We will be looking at class participation, what they are doing or how they are interacting with their teams. There will also be an expo at the end of the year where we will bring in a panel of judges. Hopefully we get folks like Arrington and other VCs. We might actually see some applications that come out of this and get funded.

When does the class start?
Thursday. We are hoping to put together a set of course materials to place on the web at the end of the semester. We will also try to videocast some of the sessions.

I just found out a new project that Dave Cohen of San Francisco is working on that is pretty sweet! Earlier this month I posted about a content management system on Facebook. Within weeks it looks Dave has successfully ported over Drupal into Facebook. While Dave is not complete with the project (view screen shots below), he is coming along nicely. He has successfully ported the website, “Drupal for Facebook” into the Drupal for Facebook application.

When this is complete, it is going to suddenly become much easier to develop robust communities on the Facebook platform. I have sent a message to Dave to find out if this is an open project or if it is just his and is friends. While I haven’t heard back yet, I will be sure to post a follow-up for any developers that want to participate in the project. Alternatively, you can simply post a comment below if you would like to contribute. It will be interesting so see how far along this goes in the coming weeks. Being a developer myself, I can speak from experience when I say this is surely a challenging task. Best of luck to Dave in completing the project! We will be excited to see the final app.

Drupal for Facebook About Page

Drupal for Facebook Forum

In transcribing an interview that I had yesterday with Dave McClure (I will be publishing that interview later today), I began wondering about Google’s involvement with social networks. Google already has a highly successful social network, Orkut. Orkut is hugely popular in Brazil and is still continuing to grow, although not at the same pace as Facebook. Many have been speculating about Orkut’s involvement in the new social graph that Google is launching.

Rather than focusing on trying to compete directly with Facebook, Google should provide Facebook with tools that will help social networks as they transition into social platforms. One focus of this is analytics. As I wrote about this morning, Facebook has launched some extremely basic analytics for developers but this is a far cry from the details that Google Analytics currently provides. Not even Google built their own analytics system. Instead, they acquired Urchin and built upon it. So what is the next step for analytics?

Websites are going to want information about the users that are visiting their sites beyond city and state. Previously, this information was unavailable to visitors but thanks to social platforms, that information is slowly becoming available. So why doesn’t Google simply add those features into their adwords system as well as analytics? Rumor is that Google is already working on building these features. Currently, Google can already predict, with a relatively low margin of error, the gender and age of a website visitor.

Integration with social platforms will provide Google with even more detailed demographics. So while Google is preparing to announce their own social platform, they should be feverishly working to develop the system to integrate the more detailed demographic information into their ads and analytics. I’m pretty confident that they are. Once they do, it will make life a lot easier for Facebook who is either going to have to acquire another analytics company or build their own from scratch.

_{(via searchengineland)}

For those of you that don’t know, Twitter is a microblogging site. This means that it allows users to write very short text posts, alerting their friends to what they’re doing. Users can update their status from cell phones, or they can write a short blurb on Twitter’s web site.

This sounds very similar, in ways, to Facebook’s status updates. It’s a way for friends to show what they’re doing to other friends. The only difference, of course, if that Facebook prefaces every message with a “[username] is” title, making posting less flexible than on Twitter.

Is this a direct competitor to Twitter? No. (Although, however, Twitter does have a Facebook application of its own.) I started using a service similar to Twitter a week ago, and I love just how interactive a stream of notes can be, and how addictive it is. Facebook’s status messages have never made me interested in posting my status.

Changing this would be easy for Facebook: there isn’t much stopping them from removing the “user is” in front of a message and creating an interface that really lets people use status to interact. (For good measure, they could also throw in a status RSS feed, which has currently been sorely lacking.)

However: would it be a smart move for Facebook? They emphasize interaction through using their built-in applications. Why bother using status when you can write a wall? Why built interactive back-and-forth miniblogs when you’re able to just write on walls?

The answer: it’s much easier to do that way. But Facebook isn’t about making it easy to chat quickly back-and-forth. They’re focused on making their web site into a social utility, where it’s possible to work efficiently without any spam and nonsense showing up. Twitter-like statuses would be nice. But it is far from being essential, or even useful.