Archives: January 2008

I love a good video game. I love a good social game. When I came across Street Race, nay was hit by Street Race, I was pretty excited. My mind began to fill with simplistic thoughts of social vehicular racing.

Much to my dismay there is no street race in Street Race. In fact, there really isn’t much of a game. After installing the application I was greeted with multiple error messages and instantly informed I had loss two races.

Two races? I had only inputed my name, how odd. Fighting on, that’s what I do, I tried to purchase and ‘supe’ up my vehicle. After plowing through more error messages like some blind driver in downtown DC, I was told I could only buy more parts for my tractor (named Jonny Dear) by inviting my friends.

Was that it? Was that the social aspect of this game? I could peddle my friends and subject them to this error ridden game for more parts for my tractor? I mean give me a global score, show me tracks I have won, give me something to boast to my friends about and show them that I am a better driver.

I really wanted this game to be cool. I wanted something I could enjoy playing and prove that I am better than my friends. The problem is that the ‘game section’ of this game is nothing more than randomly clicking buttons to train my tractor and the ‘social’ part is just me pimping out my friends for more parts.

My biggest complaint is the ‘gas’ situation in this game. I would have said the game was playable if I could just purchase gas and keep playing, but I can’t. I either have to wait 2 hours or invite some of my friends to play. I have never been one to invite people to games because I dislike being invited to games. I know my friends are pimping me out for some token prize in a game.

I normally don’t say a game was a failure, but I can’t see how this game hit its intended targets. I could be wrong. If you are a big fan of Street Race let me know, perhaps I jumped the gun on this one. The game did have interesting screens to watch while random things were happening.

It appears that over the course of the past week, many of the fbFund applicants have been receiving their rejection letters from the Facebook team. Ami Vora sent out letters to the rejected applicants:

Hi XXX,

Thanks much for coming to present to the fbFund advisory board two weeks ago. We really appreciated your flexibility and dedication. Unfortunately, your application wasn’t deemed an immediate fit with the focus for fbFund at the moment.

I want to stress that this doesn’t mean that we don’t believe in your application nor that it can’t be successful. As your application evolves, we encourage you to reapply for a grant — there is no limit on how many times you can apply for a grant, and each funding cycle represents a new opportunity to receive a grant.

The advisory committee had some feedback on your application which you might find helpful, some of which we covered during the presentation itself. They suggested that:

• XXXXXX
• XXXXXX

I hope this feedback is useful to you as you continue to build your application. Of course (as our lawyers asked us to make clear), all feedback is provided on an “as is” basis, and your incorporation of feedback doesn’t in any way guarantee that your application will receive a grant from fbFund in the future.

We’re planning on posting more information on fbFund and the funding process shortly, and I’ll let you know when those resources are posted.

I wish you the best of luck as you build your business, and hope to hear from you again in the future.

Cheers, and thanks again,

Ami Vora

One developer in the Facebook forum ranted about the process stating, “While I do believe that many applications could have had stronger business plan than us, I think that the way they handled the entire grant offer reflects poorly on Facebook and how they treat dev community. It is also a meaningful coincidence that FB decided to revamp their fbGrant program a week after myspace announced that they will be offering grant to developers.”

One developer that emailed me said that they had previous experience with raising money and were not treated fairly. “Now, I’ve pitched a lot before and raised 2.5MM for my last company in 2000. In my experience, VC’s usually say ‘Hello, we invest in ____ and we like you because ____.’ at the beginning and ‘Thank you’ at the end. We got ‘Ok, go.’ and ‘Next.’

Many of the developers had similar tone to those that receive rejection letters to their college applications. I’m sure after investing a significant amount of time in pitching a venture capitalist about your application and receiving the first round approval letter and a surge of excitement, the follow-up rejection notification can be painful. One person’s idea that I heard was actually a really great idea and I think it’s funny that Facebook decided not to go with their company.

I have no idea what the decisions were based on but it appears that we will soon begin to see those applications that received funding! Have you had a similar experience?

Take some time browsing through the Facebook developers forum and you’ll notice that the biggest complaint from developers is that the forced invite applications are killing it for the rest of them. They are probably right but then again a great application will usually get the exposure that it deserves even if it doesn’t use aggressive techniques that I’ve been repeating over the past few days.

One of my readers sent me a useful bookmarklet that avoids all Facebook applications that use the forced invite model. At the time I couldn’t go test it out because I couldn’t find any forced any invite applications off hand. Instead, I took a look at the code to see what it was and it appears as a logical solution. I tried adding it to Internet Explorer 7 but was unsuccessful. It worked well in Firefox.

Even if forced invites have not been banned, this bookmarklet is a great temporary solution. In the long-run, Facbeook is going to be forced to penalize any application that leverage spammy measures for promoting their application. Using bookmarklets such as the one that mass rejects all application invites reported by numerous other blogs over the weekend are simply short-term solutions.

In a large scale environment, even small changes can have big impacts. That may be why Facebook has been slow to make minor changes. Instead they have been focusing heavily on rolling out new products and services. Not a bad strategy by any means considering the impressive set of new services that they plan on rolling out in the first quarter alone. Do you think forced invites have ruined Facebook applications?

Ten years ago the web was an ugly place, cluttered with a vast array of crappy websites and littered with porn. Today, it is still littered with porn and the crappy websites haven’t gone anywhere. Instead they are piling up at a furious pace. This would all be a disaster if it weren’t for one company: Google. Thanks to Google (and others that are attempting to compete), we now have effective filtering methods to sift through all the junk.

The same thing is now taking place on Facebook and it is now extremely challening to filter through them. There are almost 15,000 applications and the list continues to grow at a rapid pace. You would imagine that Facebook would take some time to make their application directory more effective but so far they have not. It has been almost seven months and when I search for an application from the general search box I get completely different results then when I search through the app directory.

Facebook should also quickly add the ability to sort applications by the rating as well as fix the multiple errors within the directory. When Facebook reaches over 100,000 applications they will have significantly reduced the spamminess but more important is that we can search through the applications effectively. How do you find your Facebook applications? Do you spend time browsing through the directory?

A lot of discussion has been going on in the Facebook developer forum about the possibility of Facebook applications hitting their peak. Much of this was in response to a blog post written up by Alec Saunders. Alec argues that thanks to the spammy tactics used by many application developers, users have become resistent to forced invites and application requests. One Facebook group, “No, I will NOT invite 20 friends just to add your application,” has attracted over 63,000 users.

Many applications, including Flixster, have been using extremely aggressive tactics to obtain users by spamming user newsfeeds. This has ruined it for many applications that have chosen not to resort to such measures. To argue that Facebook applications have peaked though would be foolish. If developers design useful and creative aplications users will engage with them and there is the potential for building a long-term user base.

Facebook does have a spam issue on their hands though and they are working to resolve the issue rapidly. In the past few months Facebook has made significant changes to the newsfeed, requests, notifications and all other aspects that support spamming on the platform. Over the next few months I would predict a reduction in the number of spammy applications on the site.

At the same time, developers will continue to release a large number of poorly designed applications. This is nothing new though. The web is filled with tons of junk and we are simply witnessing the same thing take place within the confines of Facebook.

I love video games. It is true, I am fast approaching the age where I should be concerned with a family and my future, but I spend way too much time on my PS3 trying to show the world how great I am at Call of Duty 4.

Due to my unnatural love of video games I have found that video game emulators are a wonderful thing. While I was in the Navy I had a laptop with 4 different system emulators that kept me amused for months while at sea.

I currently have an NES emulator running on my Motorola Q that kills countless hours while I am on the subway. I say all of this so you can truly understand the joy I felt when I came across The NES Emulator on Facebook.

The emulator is basically an online version of the Nintendo Entertainment System you can play through your Facebook page. The application also has a scoring system that tells the world how great of an NES player you really are. Recognize!

The emulator system isn’t a great way to play Final Fantasy or any game that you have to save, but it is an awesome time suck (is there such a thing?) when playing Mario or Excite Bike. My current Nintendo rank is Goomba and I am certain I will be some sort of Mushroom King by the end of the day.

Let us hope that someone makes a Genesis Facebook application so I can get my Sonic on.

In the first five months of advertising on Facebook applications, Videoegg has paid out over $1.5 million to application developers. If every application on Facebook served up Videoegg ads, that would average out to around $125 per application. Videoegg has just over 100 Facebook applications that it advertises on which results in an average close to $15,000 per application. Not exactly enough to cover a yearly salary.

Videoegg is currently one of the leading Facebook ad networks along with SocialMedia, RockYou, Cubics and a number of others. There are a number of other solutions for application developers but according to many developers that I’ve spoken with, none of them have perfected the system. If you browse through applications you will see ads that say that you have messages in your inbox or that someone thinks you are cute and to click on the ad to find out who.

Videoegg has been able to maintain a high standard for the ads that they serve. Early on, many developers were complaining that VideoEgg was not able to fill all the invetory that applications had though. I have not been hearing the same complaints recently. The total amount being paid by Videoegg alone helps to provide us with estimates of how much is being generated in total by the Facebook economy through advertising.

While thousands of developers are jumping at the opportunity to get a piece of the pie (which in my estimate is less than $20 million in the first 6 months), only a few are succeeding. For those that do succeed, the payout can be substantial. A few of the companies I have spoken with are generating over $1 million a year, enough to maintain a small development firm. It has yet to be proven if advertising will be able to support the rapid growth of social platforms though.

Yesterday’s big news was that Facebook has expanded their platform to the general web. According to developers, this service was already accessible via backend methods but there is now a client facing version. Regardless of the technical aspect of Facebook’s new JavaScript service, their intentions are clear: Facebook wants to own the social graph. At the Graphing Social Patterns conference last October, Chamath Palihapitiya, Vice President of Product Marketing & Operations at Facebook, clearly stated that Facebook’s goal is to most acccurately store the “social graph.”

I would argue that Facebook has already accomplished that goal by reaching more users than LinkedIn who has the second most accurate version of the “social graph.” Facebook continues to grow at a quick pace and has expanded their reach far beyond college students. The question that remains unanswered is: can Facebook continue at this pace and avoid a mass exodus of users as a result of some unforseen privacy (or other) debacle?

Currently, Facebook has only been leveraged for relatively simple applications for the most part and much of its power has not yet been harnessed. Imagine if the majority of your social interaction on the web passed through Facebook including blog comments, forum posts, web queries, etc. Imagine if all of your family member could walk through your home security system thanks to them being placed in your “Family” group on Facebook.

Imagine when soldiers in the field can look at someone and have their Facebook profile immediately show up in their eye piece and learn everything about them and who they are connected to. Perhaps police will pull up your Facebook profile when they pull you over for a routine traffic violation. At a certain point, it begins to almost sound like science fiction but there would be an immense amount of value from having one completely accurate image of my social graph. This value is not only to myself but to other organizations as well.

Once you start to think of the creative ways that Facebook could be implemented for both good and bad, you have to begin to wonder if the world will let this exist. There are almost 70 million people now using Facebook and they are growing at a rate of over 250,000 users daily. So far there is no end in sight and people appear to be fine with putting their personal information as well as relationship information into the database. I’ve done it myself.

While I cannot tell you what will happen in the long-term, something significant is happening. Facebook will either pull of one of the greatest feats of our time or will crash and burn. The story so far has been impressive and in the next 12 to 24 months, much more will begin to unfold. Facebook’s initial steps may appear trivial but in the long-run the implications of a world-wide social graph transmuted into its virtual equivalent is substantial.

Do you think Facebook can pull it off? Do we want this to happen?

I surely did not see this coming anytime soon but Facebook just released their JavaScript client library than enables developers to extend their applications to their own websites. Rather than building your applications strictly within Facebook you can now extend the full functionality of the platform to your own website and leverage Facebook as the tool for managing members and their relationships. Somehow nobody has seemed to take note of this significant step.

Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own website but leverages the power of users’ Facebook relationships? Now you can! There had previously been applications that could leverage the Facebook API prior to the launch of the platform but there are some significant differences now versus before. The first significant difference is the broader access to Facebook’s core features that the platform provides.

The second difference is that Facebook has now implemented the ability to leverage cookies to access a user’s data even when they are not at your application. Since this just launched last night, I have yet to see any applications (or websites) take advantage of this new feature. This is a huge step in Facebook extending their platform beyond the Facebook.com domain and letting people leverage the power of the “social graph” (I hate to use that phrase in this context but oh well).

Update
Debate has surfaced as to whether or not new functionality is being offered. In essence this is just the client facing version of what you could already accomplish via an iFrame on the platform. I would argue that what’s significant here is that Facebook has publicly released something that is intended to extend the platform to the outside. See Dan Farber’s post for more. The public is now aware of the possibilities to leverage Facebook outside of the main site and that is big news.

Over the past few months I have been thinking about the distinction between social networks, the social graph and social platforms. While preparing for a presentation the other day I decided that it was time to actually define what social platforms are. In the process of defining “social platforms” I had to first define what social networks are and what the social graph is. There has already been much discussion as to whether or not there should be any distinction between the social graph and social networks.

Read the rest of “Defining Social Platforms” at The Social Times.