Archives: September 2007

Last night Facebook announced a new stats page for developers. The new statistics are nothing to brag about. The only additional information that is being displayed is the total number of adds, removes, blocks and unblocks from the previous day. Additionally you can view the status returns of each page request. All of these things are statistics that developers should be tracking internally anyways.

While the new statistics are extremely limited, it does show Facebook’s intention to eventually display more detailed statistics. What would be nice to see is some sort of advanced analytics that displays demographic information for each page being viewed. I’ve been hearing that Facebook is going to release an analytics package around the same time that they launch their new advertising platform. Analytics are going to be critical to the success of their advertising platform. Google has been successful with detailed analytics. It is now time for Facebook to show that they can provide more detailed analytics based on detailed demographic information, especially if they are going to be considered a 10 or 15 billion dollar company.

Remember the good ‘ol days when you would launch a widget containing your website content? The new versions of widgets embed personal content generated within Facebook applications. Hungry Machine, a Facebook consulting and development company based in Washington, D.C., has just launched a widget for their extremely popular Visual Bookshelf application. The widget (as featured below) enables users to display the books that they have read, want to read and are currently reading.

Visual Bookshelf is an application exclusive to Facebook. This is in contrast to companies like RockYou who are distributed on multiple social networks as well their own website. While Facebook tries to keep users within their “walled garden,” the Visual Bookshelf widget allows you to take content outside of Facebook. I think this will be a successful model given that 100 percent of our digital lives are not on Facebook (at least not for now). The only downfall of the widget currently, is the inability to resize it. I spoke with Tim O’Shaughnessy, one of the founders of the company, who said that they will be adding that feature soon. If you’d like to get your own widget like the one feature below, go add the Visual Bookshelf application.

Hungry Machine was co-founded by Aaron Batalion, Val Aleksenko, Eddie Frederick and Tim O’Shaughnessy. For more information you can view their website.

According to blognation, a brand new IM client for Facebook is going to be launching for Facebook in the coming weeks. I covered a chat application back in June which plans on leveraging the Facebook social graph. The application which at the time was called “Airwaves” has changed names to “Fuze.” This new application has been hyped up as though it is the official Facebook chat application that also has an open API.

While it may be the first stand alone chat application to launch, it is not going to be the last, nor does it have a robust set of features. This is an extremely simple chat application but it is definitely a great first attempt. Unfortunately there is no way to test out the application currently so you’ll have to wait until it launches.

WidgetBox has just launched a new product called, App Accelerator. The purpose of the application is to provide WidgetBox developers with an easy way to create their own stand alone applications on Facebook from their existing widget library. In the past week over 200 applications have already been launched using the beta service.

Back in June we reviewed WidgetBox’s application which enabled WidgetBox developers to place their widgets within the WidgetBox directory on Facebook. The new service is comparable Clearspring’s Facebook distribution offering which we reviewed earlier this month.

WidgetBox has also provided provided a wall for each widget and has created a system in which developers can earn money through the new program. There are currently two types of advertising: cross merchandising of applications and banner advertising on the canvas page. According to the Widgetbox executives whom I just got off the phone with, these ads are targeted ads. Rather than creating their own advertising system, Widgetbox has partnered with an undisclosed company who currently offers advertising solutions on Facebook (there will be an announcement tomorrow regarding their advertising partner).

Overall, this seems like a pretty great offering for widget developers. As I wrote about last week though, I think there is much more growth in interactive applications rather than stand alone widgets. Michael Dearing, the CEO of Widgetbox, agreed but emphasized that Widgetbox encourages a free market and thinks that there is still plenty of space for the success of widgets on social networks. I will be posting screen shots and sample applications as a follow-up shortly.

As you may already know, Facebook’s messaging system is pretty basic. In comparison to the other social networks out there (yes Facebook is a social network as well), Facebook’s messaging system is nothing to be ashamed of. The only problem is that Facebook has slowly become a utility that people use for general communication. I often substitute email messages with a Facebook message. As a result, my Facebook inbox is almost as overloaded as my email inbox.

While being overloaded with email is a problem, at least there are sorting features within my email client. Facebook on the other hand provides absolutely no sorting mechanism or search feature for my mail. This makes it extremely challenging for me to empty out my messages inbox and often resulting in messages that never get replied to. That’s not the only problem facing Facebook’s messaging system as Mike Ashworth reported to me.

Mike has experienced messages going unread because they don’t show up in his inbox. While I’m guessing this is a unique occurrence, I wouldn’t know if there are messages that I’m not receiving as well. Perhaps this has to do with Facebook’s open access to employees policy. Whatever the reason is, Facebook needs to hurry up and release a new version of their messaging system.

According to Mike Arrington, investors in Parakey (which Facebook acquired in July) may not have gotten the best deal. Apparently, the two founders received significant Facebook stock options while the investors simply got less than $4 million providing a 2x return on their investment. While a 2x return isn’t bad for a 6 month investment, the Facebook stock options may be worth a large amount in the near future.

While Facebook is providing 2x return to companies acquire, they are attempting to get funding at 100 times revenue. I am willing to bet that the VCs in silicon valley are not too happy with Facebook’s strategy. Mike Arrington points out that if VCs in Silicon Valley “don’t see a fair return based on the risk they are bearing, that well oiled machine could come to a grinding halt.” This is something many have been question as one startup after the next gets ridiculous valuations and significant funding for products and services that aren’t generating any cash flow. Enough of the bubble talk though.

The real lesson learned here is that when Google or Microsoft comes to buy out your company, you can expect a nice pay day. When Facebook comes to acquire you, if you have some serious investors in your company, they may not be so happy for you to accept an acquisition offer.

There have been a number of applications on Facebook that enable you to place image grids on your profile that help describe you. I previous reviewed the GridView application which generates a grid of your friends’ profile images. Since then there have been a number of copy cats. This most recent application, generates a grid of your friends, photos, favorite movies, music, books and t.v. shows. While the application is pretty simple, it does generate some pretty cool grids.

Another cool feature is the AJAX overlay that appears when you click on each of the images (as pictured below). The 10×10 application is monetized via the Amazon affiliate program. The Amazon affiliate program has become a standard form of application monetization and has been extremely lucrative for some. If you want to visualize your interests then check out the 10 x 10 application.

Blake Commangere, developer of the Zobies, WereWolves, Vampires and Causes applications has launched a social content discovery application with Lucas Ryan and Yanda Erlich. The application while similar in concept to StumbleUpon, uses Facebook to handle the social connections. The application is relatively simple. All you do is install a browser widget and suggest sites as you are browsing the web.

Rather than sorting information by category, as StumbleUpon does, the Discoveries applcation (which is powered by Mogad), sorts contend based on what your friends suggest. Unfortunately, when I was testing the application, none of my friends had added the application yet so none of my content was very relevant.

When you initially configure the application, you can select sites that you would like to see in your Mogad feed. For some reason I had content from sites that I hadn’t selected yet none of my friends had installed the application. Blake has said that they are still in beta and perfecting the algorithm so there may be some small bugs. For now though, the application seems to work and the concept of social discovery is a powerful one.

One thing that I find interesting about this application is how it leverages Facebook to manage all of the social connections. Leveraging Facebook in such a way can be extremely powerful when launching your own site. Rather than spending time to develop the social component of your application, you can easily tie into Facebook to leverage their social components. If you’d like to try getting content based on what your friends are reading, go grab the Discoveries application.

Discoveries Homepage

Discoveries Content Selection Page

I was sent a link to an unreleased Money Exchange application last night. Happened to be perfect timing given the announcement of Revolution Money. While the application doesn’t seem to do much currently, it is intended to transfer money for free over Facebook.

The concept of transferring money for free on the internet is definitely a revolutionary one. Once they launch the product I am confident that they will be successful as long as they can deliver. It will be interesting to see how soon they launch their product. Once launched, this will be the first (and only) free money transfer product on Facebook. My guess is that Facebook’s future e-commerce system will also tie into this as a back end given the extremely discounted fees for merchants. You can go check out the non-functioning Money Exchange application if you’d really like but it isn’t worth the time given that it doesn’t work. Enjoy!

I have been tipped off that there could be a major lawsuit announced in the coming days regarding security at Facebook. Much of this revolves around Facebook’s lack of privacy controls within their company and that significant data has been leaked. As published on the Jobmatchbox blog, according to a Facebook insider, “privacy controls at Facebook are non-existant.” Any employee within the company has full access to your messages and account information. Technically, they can even login as you and impersonate you. This is not going to bode well for Facebook.

Facebook opened up the platform, but the entire site has been completely open for Facebook employees since the beginning. A comparison of the privacy policies of Facebook, Yahoo, Google and Microsoft proves that Facebook does absolutely nothing to restrict internal employee access of information while each of the competitors restrict employee access to personal information unless it is critical for their job. This could result in a massive security leak at Facebook. I’ve had AOL employees tell me of their lack of access to user data and analytics of anything outside of their department.

I cannot start to explain how bad of a business practice this is. Facebook is going to be in some serious trouble as they rush to build an internal system for restricting access to information. A large portion of the money that Facebook is supposedly raising is going to end up being spent on legal fees. All I can say is wow!

Update
Just to clarify my tip did not come from someone at the Jobmatchbox blog. The information regarding security issues did. Additionally, I have since found out that the lawsuit information was not accurate and should not have been published. Next time there will surely be a verifiable source.