Archives: October 2007

Back in September I suggested that someone should develop an application similar to Blackboard for Facebook. When attending the Graphing Social Patterns conference a few weeks ago, one of my readers, Jayson Ahlstrom approached me and told me that his company would soon be releasing a version of Blackboard on the Facebook platform.

Yesterday afternoon I had the opportunity to demo the product and it is amazing! ClassTop, an official partner of Blackboard®, has developed an application that literally takes 95% of Blackboard’s functionality and ports it into Facebook. If you have been out of school for more than a few years chances are you didn’t get to interact with Blackboard. Currently, Blackboard is a relatively ubiquitous product within universities across the country.

The new CourseFeed application provides users with a newsfeed of everything that is going on in their courses. Additionally, CourseFeed is not limited to the invite limits of the Facebook platform since CourseFeed is directly tied into the Blackboard platform and can directly email users. I think this application has serious potential and when I speak of Facebook’s golden application, this could very well be it. This application literally imports all of your Blackboard content directly into the platform.

Students already login to Blackboard daily but they don’t have a significant interaction with it. If you add it to the Facebook platform, I have a feeling things will change. The developers of CourseFeed agree. The real test now is to see if their beta tests go well. Currently, Blackboard functionality is only at a few test schools but they are preparing to opening it up to all schools in the near future. If you want to see what functionality is currently provided at your school, go check out the CourseFeed application.

CourseFeed Homepage

CourseFeed Course Home

CourseFeed Course Announcements

CourseFeed Course Content

CourseFeed Course Roster

Facebook has announced that they will soon remove the messaging limit on Facebook groups larger than 1,000 members. If you are the admin of a group that is larger than 1,000 members you know the pain caused when you can no longer contact your group members. Worry no more! Facebook will soon remove this limit so that you can message all your members once again.

Facebook representatives had been suggesting that there will be big changes coming to groups on Facebook at the Washington D.C. Facebook political summit and at the D.C. Facebook developers’ garage. It appears now that those changes will be coming soon. So why did Facebook decide to limit group messaging in the first place? Rumor has it that due to a clever marketing plan executed by individuals at Ruckus networks (Washington Post article), Facebook decided to limit messaging after a series of popular groups were used to spam their members. Another group designed around a false character called Brody Ruckus reached 430,000 members prior to the admin account being banned. Unfortunately Brody was never able to contact his fan base.

Ruckus on the other hand was successful at mass messaging people up until the restriction was placed on group messages. Ruckus Network used the messages to promote their website which provides free music downloads for college students. Luckily, I know the mastermind behind Brody Ruckus so I reached out to him for a comment. He simply responded “Game On.”

According to the Wall Street Journal, Microsoft has just closed a deal with Facebook. Microsoft will invest up to $250 million in Facebook at up to a $15 billion valuation. This move has beat out Google winning Microsoft an extremely valuable advertising deal with Facbeook for the international market.

Rumors have been circulating about who would win in the deal but it now looks like the deal has closed. Many were speculating up to a $750 million investment by either Google or Facebook. Microsoft has missed out on most of the growth in online advertising and it looks like they may have just inked their first deal that provides them with a larger play in the space

Many of these numbers are lower than expected. Microsoft has ultimately paid $250 million for rights to Facebook’s international ad market.

According to VentureBeat, Facebook has announced a new feature that enables third-party developers to build web applicaitons that work on mobile devices. While Facebook mobile is nothing new, the ability to build applications for mobile is. Facebook has also announced that they will be launching a new Blackberry optimized site in conjunction with RIM.

This comes the day after news was released about Facebook’s new ad platform. All the startups that were based around building social networks for mobile devices have just taken a serious blow. The iPhone compatible Facebook site is one of the slickest designed sites that I have seen for mobile devices in a while.

Given that Facebook mobile is not highly optimized on my Blackberry, I look forward to the new update. While there is no mention of when this is launching, this is huge news. Web developers worldwide now have the ability to create personalized mobile applications all built on top of the Facebook platform. Want personally targeted applications on your phone? Looks like you are going to need Facebook! How big is mobile? There are more mobile devices that are in use worldwide than computers. That’s big!

Update
I have downloaded the Facebook application for Blackberry. It is an amazing application. If you have a Blackberry, go get Facebook for Blackberry® Smartphones application. All you do is enter your email address and it will send you a download link that you can open from your Blackberry. It then installs the application directly on your phone. I hope to be able to provide screenshots soon!

Based on the classic game of HiLo, Smart Or Not is an extremely simple but highly addictive game. For each card that comes up you bet on whether the next one will be higher, lower or the same. While I don’t think this game is really an accurate test of your intelligence, it is pretty darn fun. Perhaps I don’t think it is an accurate measure of intelligence based on the fact that my score isn’t on the leaderboard!

Smart or not is really well made and really addictive. The only downside to the application is that there seems to be a bug. When a King card shows up and you select “lower” if the next card is a Queen, it says you are wrong. Not really sure what’s up with that but I’m sure it will mess up any professional card counter. Honestly, I’m not sure that card counting is useful for this application given that the game could theoretically be played indefinitely if you have amazing luck.

I’m am proud to say that currently I rank first among all of my friends. While that may be a result of none of my friends adding the application, I prefer to think that the real reason is that I am just highly skilled at cards. Whatever the case may be, if you are into playing cards and want to test your luck, I highly suggest checking out the Smart or Not application.

Your out having a good time one night with your friends … a really good time. You wake up the next morning and have some emails in your inbox and a few missed calls. Apparently one of your friends just tagged you in some photos and you look like crap! First message: “Hey Nick, just wanted to say that I saw your pictures from last night. Looks like you had fun! Call me later.” Second message: “Nick, dude … you seriously had way too much fun last night. Have you seen the pictures on Facebook?”

Not that I’ve experienced this or anything but for those that have, I’m sure it can be pretty bad. The first step is to not act like a fool in front of your friends who all have digital cameras. If you are in college and end up acting like an idiot one night though it would be nice if there was some way to know that you have been tagged in photos and they are about to be published to your friends’ newsfeeds.

Worry no more thanks to the Photo Tag Alert application. As soon as this application spots a new photo that you’ve been tagged in, you will immediately receive a text message to your phone. You can then logon and untag yourself from any of the compromising photos that you may not want all your Facebook friends to see. While Facebook already sends you email alerts, not everybody gets email on their phone. For those unfortunate few, you can now use the Photo Tag Alert application. Enjoy!

Are you going to be in the Sanfrancisco Bay Area on Friday? If so, I have 3 free tickets to the Snap Summit. Snap is a one-day, single-track conference that focuses in-depth on the Facebook platform and beyond. It is relevant to developers, entrepreneurs, marketers and visionaries. I will also be speaking on a panel at the event so if you would like to come I will see you there! If you are interested in receiving the tickets either post a comment, send me an email or give me a call. The first three people will receive free tickets.

Some of the speakers at the event include:

• Ami Vora – Facebook
• Robert Scoble
• Keith Schacht – Developer of Grow-a-gift
• Dave McClure
• Rodney Rumford
• Justin Smith
• Susan Wu – Charles River Ventures
• Jia Shen – Rock You
• Matt Marshall – Venture Beat
• Michael Lazerow – Buddy Media
• Tim O’Shaughnessy – Hungry Machine LLC
• and more!

This should be a great event and a great start to the weekend. If you are interested in coming and don’t happen to get one of the free tickets you can still get discount tickets (10% off). Let me know if you have any questions or comments!

Rumor has it that there was an all hands meeting at Facebook yesterday. To discuss what? Nobody has the details but early the morning the New York Post says that the announcement of an investment in Facebook by Google or Microsoft is likely to be announced in the next 24 to 48 hours. According to the article, Microsoft is prepared to pay any price to keep Google out of the magical land of Facebook.

This apparently could result in a $15 billion valuation of the extremely hyped social network. As Peter Lauria states in the article, this would result in a $1.5 billion investment for a 10 percent stake or $750 million for a 5 percent stake. Not a bad of financing for Facebook! Given that the current employees all have stock options and the executive team surely doesn’t want to piss anybody off, my guess is that employees were given notice of the impending news and also given the option to sell some shares at the current valuation.

That would be a fun meeting to be sitting in on. While all I can do is speculate about what took place in the meetings yesterday, the amount of chatter going around in the industry means something is surely about to happen in the coming days. What it is, I can’t tell you but according to the New York Post, it is going to be a serious investment by Microsoft or Google.

I’m a little behind in posting videos from the events over the past couple weeks but I will continue to post them even if the timeliness is a little off! The following video was of a panel at the Graphing Social Patterns conference a couple weeks ago. The panel included Tantek Celik (moderator), David Recordon of SixApart, Chamath Palihapitiya of Facebook, Joseph Smarr of Plaxo and Ted Grubb from Satisfaction Unlimited. The panel was a great overview on portable identities among social networks.

This panel provided a great overview. Chamath of Facebook had some memorable quotes including the concept that there is “One social graph” as well as his final statement which was that “we want as much information as humanly possible to flow across the graph and we are going to continue to build whatever it takes to get to that goal.” Not a bad goal for Facebook! If you want to know more about the panel, check out the video below:

Whether or not it was strategically planned to be the day after Google’s big announcement, Mark Zuckerberg will be announcing the launch of Facebook’s new advertising system on November 6th. I have spoken with at least one individual who’s company was invited to the event. According to advertising industry insiders, information about users’ relationships can be used to target them on the site and off of the site.

I have been hearing for months that the ad system would be unveiled at the Ad Tech event in New York early next month. The rumor appears to have been true given that the announcement falls right in the middle of the event. This news comes days after Facebook released an unannounced upgrade to their Flyers system, enabling users to view demographic data within the site. Interestingly, Facebook recently filed a trademark for “SocialAds” just last month. This ad network is one of a number of features that has been rumored over the past few months.

It appears as though this is finally taking place next month. Also rumored to be launching in the coming months is an advanced analytics package and e-commerce features for the Facebook platform. There are a number of other features that Facebook plans on launching but it looks as though they are beginning to ramp up to become more than just a social network. It also looks like the dream of psychographic and/or behavioral ad targeting may finally become a reality.

Update
Adage is reporting the same thing. It is definitely going to be interesting to hear the details once the new ad system launches.