Archives: December 2007

Facebook’s surprise announcement that they will encourage adoption of their Platform standard by other social networks has of course been interpreted as a challenge to OpenSocial. Just as Google announced their free and open standard from a position of weakness, Facebook have plainly decided to share their Platform from a position of potential weakness – the fear that a standard shared by every other network would be irresistible to developers and users.

At first glance, we imagine a world filled with Platform clones would signify victory for Facebook. But compare that scenario to a world where OpenSocial has been adopted by all social networks including Facebook. Pride aside, how is Facebook’s competitiveness enhanced by the ubiquity of their platform over the ubiquity of Google’s standard across all networks? Either way, all social networks would share the same mechanism for hosting third-party applications. The only difference is who invented it. But who cares?

Recall the unnecessary debate between Blu-ray and HD DVD. Two separate camps flexed their muscles claiming that theirs was the superior of two largely indistinguishable standards. It’s a fight to the death – that kills consumers in the cross-fire as much as it is likely to kill the competition.

Surely Facebook isn’t stupid enough to start the same type of war?

Facebook is not offering an indistinguishable standard to OpenSocial. Facebook believes correctly that Platform offers a far more robust – and moreover existent - standard than Google’s rush-job. At least for social networks on Facebook or Bebo’s scale, the server-based might of Platform is the correct answer. In the long tail of smaller “Web 2.0″ communities, perhaps Javascript widgets will find their place.

Google’s alternative to Facebook’s innovative Platform was announced without so much as a hat-tip to Facebook’s ingenuity. And worse, it was drafted in ignorance of the Platform’s tried and tested design.

Sure, Facebook might prefer if no other social networks get around to incorporating third-party apps. Its next best offer would be for each competitor to build its own inferior mechanism – although even Facebook would be tempted by the thought that a unified standard could enhance the whole social networking sector. Anyway, Google has already blown the whistle on separate standards, and large enough groups of rivals are likely to stick together that Facebook should be scared to stand alone.

What Facebook seems to have announced today is what Google should have tried to negotiate in the first place, instead of hiding from Facebook while cooking up OpenSocial. Except Facebook would have been unlikely to throw their jewels to the opposition without the threat of OpenSocial. At the end of all this, if the only thing that the OpenSocial announcement has done is draw Facebook into sharing their platform for the benefit of the entire social networking sector, perhaps the consumer is the winner after all.

[Dan Lester is a cross-platform specialist, on Wednesdays anyway.]

Ami Vora has just posted about Facebook opening up their platform. This is huge! Here’s the release:

At Facebook, we’ve always recognized that social context is an essential part of providing a great experience for our users, and we’ve wanted our users to have the best social experience whether they were on our site or off. That’s why, back in August 2006, we released the Facebook Platform API — with that release, developers could incorporate the data users chose to share into their own sites or applications to give users a more social experience no matter where they were. With the launch of the most recent version of Facebook Platform in May 2007, we also opened up the Facebook website itself.

We’ve seen a great response from both our developers and our users, and we’ve certainly learned a lot as we’ve worked on our platform over the past year and a half.

Now we also want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms. Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve, but by enabling other social sites to use what we’ve learned, everyone wins — users get a better experience around the web, developers get access to new audiences, and social sites get more applications.

This is just another step toward the vision of easy, open sharing of information. We look forward to supporting other social sites as they release their own platforms, and look forward most of all to the added benefit for developers and users.

You can find more information at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/PlatformArchitecture and additional technical details at http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/FBMLspec.

There had been a lot of of speculation about Facebook joining OpenSocial once the platform had stabilized. It looks like other social networks are going to be able to leverage the power of the Facebook platform. There is no word on whether or not the other social networks will be able to leverage the power of the Facebook social graph but if Facebook opens up the social graph, this will be the biggest thing ever and Facebook will indeed become the dominant player in social networking.

The main point of this move by Facebook is to standardize the social networking platforms across the web so that there will be simple future integration among the platforms. This step is not an opening of the social graph …. yet. Will Facebook be able to convince other social networks to use tags like “” and other FBML tags. I’m a bit skeptical that Facebook will be able to pull this off. If other social networks adopt the Facebook platform it will be a massive blow to Google. So who will the competition decide to partner with: Google or Facebook?

Yesterday I highlighted a platform “bug” that was the result of a poorly designed script. Last night, Facebook posted an update to the platform status feed:

The current update on the requests/invites is that it looks like the requests that were sent out over the course of the day on Monday are lost. We are working on recovering requests that were sent out up until Sunday, those should hopefully be recovered after tonight’s push.

Well guys, it looks like we’ve slipped up a little and have lost millions of application requests. Sorry! As if the errors weren’t enough, the platform went down last night from about 12 AM until about 2 AM Pacific Standard Time causing trouble for thousands of Facebook developers and their applications. While it’s understandable that most changes are pushed at night during the lowest traffic time, Facebook should have a better testing environment to have developers that can test changes during peak hours. If Facebook already has a good testing environment, they should use it!

Last night I had a number of developers contact me to get across how significant a snafoo this was. Most of these people have their entire businesses built on the Facebook platform and generate their revenue from traffic coming to their applications. For applications that have millions of users, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of requests could have been deleted. That has a significant impact on those applications’ traffic. Was you application affected by this mishap?

It has been almost 7 months since the Facebook platform launched and almost 11,000 applications have been developed for the platform. If you browse through the Facebook application directory you will quickly realize that Facebook is a place that is used to spend your free time (or at least procrastinate when you should be doing something else). It is one of the most addictive sites on the web currently and it continues to grow at a phenomenal pace.

Back in July I suggested that there would eventually be a golden application on Facebook. Since then, there have been a few that have come close but nothing has been ground breaking. I’m starting to think that we shouldn’t hold our breath while waiting for the golden app. I’m not quite sure what would make an application golden but I do know that we haven’t seen it yet.

So what is the productive social netwrok? I’m beginning to think that LinkedIn may be it. Salesforce has partnered with LinkedIn to be a launch partner on their new platform. While Facebook provides highly useful personal data that can be used for sales, LinkedIn shows how you are connected to other professional and that is also a great tool for closing a sale. If LinkedIn allowed you to optionally place other personal information such as interests, hobbies, etc, it would be the ultimate sales tool.

Do you think Facebook will replace LinkedIn or is there still hope for LinkedIn to continue as the market leader in profesional social networking?

My friend Andrew Cafourek picked up a pretty cool feature within the Facebook mobile application: a phonebook. I’m not quite sure how long the phonebook has been available but it is pretty darn useful. Remember the good ol’ days when we used to converse with each other rather than twitter each other? Now you can call up your friends thanks to the easily accessible Facebook phonebook!

Don’t be surprised if you get a phone call me sometime soon. This concept of speaking with people verbally is a fascinating one! Given that this is on the mobile application, I’m assuming it is easily accesible from your phone. Forget adding all of your contacts to your phone, just add them to Facebook! Actually, that would be ok if Facebook enabled you to export your contacts but unfortunately they don’t. I’m not quite sure why they are so concerned about export functionality considering LinkedIn enables you to.

Will you be using the phonebook application?

Late last night a number of developers began complaining about a significant decrease in the growth of their applications. After much discussion the developers realized that their application requests that had been sent out to users had been deleted. So what happened? Ari Steinberg, lead platform developer, responded to a bug on Facebook’s bugzilla:

hey, there appears to have been some data loss last night. it seems (ironically) that a script that was supposed to be backing things up and cleaning out old platform requests that were already acted on actually went haywire and instead deleted new requests that were not supposed to have been deleted.

we are investigating the possibility of data recovery but it’s not yet clear if that will be possible. it’s possible that we may be able to do a partial recovery that would be missing for example all the requests sent yesterday but recovers everything before then. will post updates as i find out. my sincere apologies.

Whoops! Sorry guys, I just made a quick script that went through and deleted all of your application requests! There is no telling how many requests were deleted but it is definitely a significant amount. It takes time for applications to build up their momentum and deleting all of an application’s requests is a huge loss. This was echoed by one of the developers that replied to Ari’s apology:

This has a significant impact on our business. In addition to impacting growth, I am very concerned that the user of experience for people that have our application installed will be negatively impacted by Facebook’s bug.

While I’m sure that this was an accident, late night slipups should be protected from happening. Imagine if Google accidentally deleted their index of websites overnight. While that would never happen to Google, it goes to show how young Facebook truly is. Thanks to Matthew Eustice for pointing out this bug to me!

A couple of Wisconsin University graduate students decided to create a Starbucks branded application. The funny thing is that they don’t event work for Starbucks. So far approximately 50,000 people have added this application and it is growing steadily. You can send an receive Starbucks drinks from your friends and that’s all there is to it. Starbucks has a cult following though and as such there are a ton of users using this application.

If you want to sell an application to a brand, this is definitely one way to do it. Imagine if this application was modified so that user information could be collected. The developers of this application have been staying true to the Starbucks brand by giving out free Starbucks gift cards. If I was Starbucks, I would buy up this application ASAP. The amount they would have to spend on building a similar application that has the same number of users is probably more than they could pay these two developers.

There are already 50,000 Starbucks fans using this application. If I was a brand I would be extremely happy about this. Have you seen any other successful branded applications? If you are into drinking Starbucks coffee, go check out the My Starbucks application.

Betsy Schiffman, writer for the Wired Epicenter blog, has revealed a possible law that was violated by Blockbuster’s participation in Facebook Beacon. According to James Grimmelmann of the Laboratorium blog, Blockbuster may be in violation of the Video Privacy Protection Act of 1988. According to the VPAA:

A video tape service provider who knowingly discloses, to any person, personally identifiable information concerning any consumer of such provider shall be liable…

Facebook’s new opt-out policy may protect them from future lawsuits but for now it sounds like they may have violated the law. This may have also been some of the reasoning behind Zuckerberg’s decision to enable users to completely opt-out of the program. All of the chatter in the blogosphere and mainstream media may not have been the only driving force.

I thought we may have heard the last of Beacon for at least a little while but it appears that occasional issues continue to sprout up. I wonder if Beacon has been doomed from the beginning or if it will survive and become a key component of Facebook. Do you think Beacon is doomed for failure?

I just came across this funny video on YouTube related to Facebook. It’s pretty entertaining.

Mediaweek has published an article describing Facebook as being forgiven by advertisers. This is definitely good for Facebook even though some people are up in arms over privacy policies being blatently violated. According to the article, “Buyers say they are generally satisfied with the way Facebook has responded to the recent storm of controversy generated by Beacon.” Apparently it wasn’t as big of a PR disaster as many bloggers made it out to be.

Not only was it not a disaster but “many buyers credit Facebook for its willingness to be daring in this still-nascent space, where the rules of advertising are still being written.” Mike Shields, author of the Mediaweek article, spoke with a number of advertisers and it appears that the backlash against Facebook may have been overblown. This is why this morning I suggested that Facebook’s decision to let users completely opt-out of the service may have been a poor business decision.

Regardless, Facebook has a ton of momentum and is still only at the early phase of their growth. Facebook would be in the tornado phase as described by Geoffrey Moore in the book, “Chrossing the Chasm.” As such, advertisers are going to want to get a piece of the action and a little slip up by Facebook is not going to stop them. Brands will definitely be hesitant though when joining the new Beacon program. Do you think the drama surrounding Beacon is over or is will it soon flare up again?