Archives: February 2008

With the usual fever that Facebook causes news of its flash application, via Facebook Pages, is all the buzz on the blogs and tech journals the past couple of days. Most of the blogs are preaching the praise of this move and I have to agree, for the most part.

Facebook has agreed to allow business and band to use and embed flash applications into their profile pages. Allowing business and services to create dynamic web pages is a good move. Typically bands, business, and professionals create well thought out interesting pages.

How long until this migrates to the rest of the Facebook world? We all remember a little website called Myspace right? I have a Myspace page, I think it is still there, but I never visit it because any page I try to look at on Myspace is littered with flash applications that take 2 weeks to open.

Do you remember what it is like to open someones Myspace page? Songs, videos, slide shows and a million other applications open on my laptop in one fail swoop. Again, I am excited Facebook will be allowing certain pages to include flash. My fear, and it probably will happen, is that my Facebook friends accounts will become an barrage of flash applications that cause me never to open them again.

Facebook has a habit of making some pretty good moves. Its business development department is in great hands but please let me be wrong on this. Don’t let Facebook pages fall into the realm of Hamster Dance and Flying Toasters. Is anyone else frightened about flash slowly making its way into Facebook? Let me know.

According to The Guardian, Facebook saw the first monthly drop in traffic since it became the largest social network in the U.K. As Henry Blodget points out, looking at this at a month by month basis is completely misleading. Facebook has grown a whopping 712 percent year over year for the month of January. This is simply a seasonal decrease and I’m sure we will see continued growth from January into February.

When looking at the picture overall though, there may be some slowing in the social network space as I pointed out on the Social Times earlier this month. Even still, Facebook still has plenty of room for growth and there are simply short-term signs in slowing growth. Using the monthly metrics is highly misleading and is like day trading in the stock market and using it as an indicator for long-term growth. It simply won’t work.

I believe that we are going to see continued growth in this space for the next 12- to 24-months and social networks transform into social platforms and OpenSocial attempts to make a significant impact in the industry. If we see growth continue to slow over the next couple months I would begin to get concerned. For now it’s a minor blip.

Update
I’ve received the following statement from Facebook:
“The number of users for Facebook continues to climb in the UK. Our internal monthly active user numbers rose between December and January in the UK and are now at more than 8.3 million. Facebook tracks active monthly users, rather than registered user or unique visitors. Active users reflect those who have used the site in the past 30 days.”

If you thought Facebook was the quick way to million of users overnight, you may want to think again. Yesterday, Facebook implemented a few more changes that will help them battle spam but will also create more restrictions for applications. One new addition has been the permanent application invite block link that had been added to application requests:

Another interesting addition is a checkbox that is displayed both on the application installation page as well as the applications settings pop-up within your “edit applications” page. I have included screenshots of both below:

Facebook is also increasing their fight against forced invites and heavily penalizing those applications that try to gain users by forcing invitations. If you take a look at the statistics of survey applications since Facebook added the new invitation restrictions, daily active users have practically tanked. Ultimately, the only effective applications will be those that generate avid brand evangelists. Those evangelists will invite all of their friends and go tell many of the other users.

We are slowly beginning to see the evolution of Facebook into a platform for valuable and engaging applications as opposed to the first six months which were dominated by spammy applications. I also have to wonder if the difference between social application growth within the platform and social application growth outside of the platform (new web startups) will continue to be significant. In other words, does the application invite system generate substantially more user growth over general websites that use traditional email invites?

In Ontario this week, Jesse Hirsh, a so-called “facebook expert” claimed in court that Facebook is a fantasy world. The case that he was testifying at was regarding a man who had his newborn son taken away by child services. In turn, the man decided to create a group on Facebook that was a petition against the act taken by child services. He also decided to post vulgar status updates and began posting claims that he was going to bomb the C.A.S. in a discussion board.

On his blog, Jesse argues that “The purpose of Facebook is to offer its users a stage upon which to construct a shared narrative, an interactive play, that while based on real life, is in fact fantasy. Unlike a resume or CV, people spin their profiles to reflect the more positive and attractive elements of their personality.” While Facebook profiles may be a touched up version of ourselves, I wonder if the word “fantasy” should be used.

MySpace users have historically created inaccurate profiles of themselves. In contrast, many Facebook users, while they don’t write absolutely everything about themselves, they provide relatively accurate profiles. Do you live in a fantasy world on Facebook or would you consider your life on Facebook an accurate representation of the “real” you?

Yesterday I had lunch with the developers of a top Facebook application. They were commenting on the poor performance of advertising on Facebook applications currently. This is a serious problem for developers, especially those that are making their living off of these applications. Earlier today VideoEgg announced a new advertising model that they would begin using for their general network: pay per view. The new advertisements can be dynamically resized to fit anywhere on a publisher’s website.

The argument behind this new model is that CPM advertising lacks accountability. You pay for eyeballs but there is no way of ensuring who’s viewing it. This is a similar case for application advertising networks. The current models don’t allow for demographically targeted advertising campaigns. Instead advertisers (who are entirely application developers currently) can pay on a cost per install (CPI) basis or a cost per click (CPC) basis. The CPC model isn’t very effective though because it doesn’t accurately measure a user’s intent as Google’s CPC solution, AdWords, currently does.

So what’s the solution? Currently there isn’t one but over the next few months I think we will begin to see more robust advertising services potentially starting with The UADA which will announce the details of their program on February 29th. Mainstream advertising agencies have kept away from application advertising. That may be in part due to the fact that Facebook has built a New York presence and is pressuring advertisers to use their SocialAds solution.

The fact remains that Facebook application advertising companies are going to need to focus on doing more business development activities and go head to head with Facebook SocialAds. So far nobody has developed a robust advertising solution for applications and as such the majority of advertisements are currently advertising other applications. If the Facebook application advertisers want to play with the big boys they are going to have to focus on business development with large advertisers because those relationships are what’s valuable to advertising companies.

So far VideoEgg appears to be the only company doing so but even for them it has been challenging to increase effective CPM rates for application developers. We will see a significant transition in this space over the next six months as more robust solutions become available. Have you had any luck with your advertising on Facebook?

Jay Meattle has a great post which includes the following image of traffic to the privacy settings within Facebook:

Jay suggests that the above chart illustrates that users need to be further educated about privacy on Facebook. For what many in the blogosphere and mainstream media have coined the “Beacon Fiasco” it appears that it may not have actually been as much of a fiasco for Facebook. Approximately half a percent of users visit their privacy settings each week. Following the announcement that Facebook profiles would be accessible to search engines privacy settings traffic doubled. This is in contrast to traffic following the Beacon Fiasco which was ultimately flat.

Do Facebook users care about privacy? According to Jay they definitely do and the spike in traffic following Facebook’s decision to grant search engine access to user profiles should illustrate users’ concern for their privacy. The lack of traffic growth during the Beacon Fiasco implies that users were not thoroughly educated on the issue. Honestly, who’s job is it to educate the user? Should users self-educate or should this be a role that Facebook plays?

My opinion is that the user should educate them self just as they do prior to signing a contract. What do you think?

According to Kara Swisher it appears as though Owen Van Natta, the current Chief Revenue Officer is leaving the company. This is following a summertime change in position that left him with an apparently lower title. It appears that Owen has greater aspirations of being CEO of a “consumer web company.” If he was hoping to become CEO of Facebook it looks like his hopes had been dashed and now he is moving on to hopefully bigger and better things (pretty hard to do considering Facebook is the hottest pre-IPO company in the valley currently).

The exit appears to be a smooth one and best of all Owen Van Natta gets to leave with his Facebook shares in his portfolio. As Vauhini Vara points out, “Mr. Van Natta is the first high-profile executive to leave the company since its rise in popularity last year.” Is this a sign that Van Natta sees Facebook at its growth peak for at least the next few months? Probably not, it simply means that Van Natta is not happy in his current position.

It also appears that the role of the position has been fulfilled given that a Facebook spokeswoman stated that they don’t plan on hiring anybody to fill the position “in the near term.” This is just a small management reshuffle and while it may be a sign of internal conflict, reading any further into the event would not be worth while.

There has been a significant amount of buzz over the past few days about the concept of a “Facebook Fast.” I have heard about people fasting from social networking for Lent and other spiritual holidays and it doesn’t seem like too bad of an idea. I obviously spend way too much time communicating on Facebook and now have an inbox that is overloaded with messages. Occasionally you can find yourself sucked into a game and suddenly waste an hour or too coming up with the most word in a game of Noggin.

As someone who’s job it is to be online practically all the time, I’m thinking that not just a Facebook fast but a computer fast would be a good idea. While social networking can help you expand your personal network, too much of it can become counter-productive. Just for fun, I’ve come up with the top 10 list of reasons you’ve had too much Facebook:

1. Adding friends has suddenly become a game for you and you are constantly competing with your friends and family members to have the most contacts on Facebook.
2. You always have an instance of Facebook running in one of your browser windows in the background. Bonus points if you have more than 5 instances because you are playing a game and browsing through your ex-girlfriend’s profile at the same time.
3. If printed on paper, your application requests could easily wrap around the earth one time.
4. Facebook messaging has become one of your primary tools for communication. If you have so many messages in your inbox that you can’t read them all then you definitely need a break.
5. You are involved in more than 5 poke wars.
6. You’ve added so many games that you don’t even know which ones are your favorites anymore.
7. You are actively engaged in 10 or more Scrabulous games.
8. Petting your friends’ (fluff)Friends has become a source of flirting for you.
9. You find out through your newsfeed that you weren’t invited to an event and decide to hold a grudge against your friends for not inviting you.
10. Your name is Bill Gates and you are forced to quit because you have way too many friend requests to handle.

Have any other Facebook addiction symptoms? Is it time for you to take a break from Facebook?

This morning I saw a lot of buzz happening in the developers forum and on other blogs about Facebook application statistics getting messed up. Adonomics has also stopped tracking statistics due to the numbers being off by an order of magnitude. This isn’t the first time that the numbers have been messed up but it makes you wonder if this is the only numbers Facebook is messing up.

How about for those that are paying for Facebook SocialAds? What would happen if the numbers just went screwy and clicks and impressions were counted incorrectly? That would definitely be a disaster for Facebook. I would assume that Facebook is more cautious with their SocialAds code though. It appears that since writing this post Facebook has updated their statistics and the issue is now resolved. There were simply too many zeros added on to each application.

Analytics are always a point of contention no matter what service you are using. Even Google has problems with their analytics service on a regular basis. Some days it will appear like nobody has visited your site but withing 24 hours the information will be updated. It’s amazing that with all of the technology that has been produced since the launch of the web, analytics services are always one of the primary points of failure for developers.

In the spirit of the Game Developers Conference taking place this week in San Francisco, I figured I would touch on the subject since the biggest buzz at the event revolves around “social gaming.” Ultimately, playing games with your friends is nothing new. People have been playing MMORGs (massively multiplayer online roleplaying games) for a while now and XBOX Live is not exactly the freshest gaming platform out there right now.

While not social gaming may not be a foreign concept for many, playing games on Facebook is becoming an increasingly popular past time. The primary selling factor is that you can easily connect with your friends for a quick game of Scrabble or Texas Hold’em and there is very little time requirements. Best of all it’s primarily our friends that we’re competing with. This is in comparison to sites like Kongregate that provide aspects of social gaming but the users you play against may not necessarily be your friends.

If you take a look at the most popular applications on Facebook you will notice that all the top developers are building either gaming or dating applications and any other top apps are simply an expression of self-identity. So do you think Facebook is going to become the next hot gaming platform or will the users simply go to the next cool thing? Many of these games remind me of a more flashy version of the original Yahoo! Games.