Archives: June 2008

Today at the OMMA Social in New York City, Seth Goldstein, founder of social media advertising network SocialMedia, announced a new service for advertisers called “Friendship Ranks.” The new service combines data related to peoples’ interactions on Facebook applications to generate more effectively targeted ads. Seth also formally announced “social banners”, a service the company has been experimenting with over the past few months.

The “social banners” are an opt-out advertising service which resides within Facebook applications. Sound familiar? The whole Facebook beacon “fiasco” (as it was coined by the press), was due to it being an opt-out service. SocialMedia has been able to figure out a way to display your friends within advertisements that are present on applications. Technically, they’ve also figured out a way to display a fair amount of this information outside of Facebook.

Two weeks ago while attending the Graphing Social Patterns East conference, one of the attendees approached me to show a page on SocialMedia.com’s website that was able to display targeted ads to me based on information they had collected. I have included a screenshot below. Initially, I chose not to write a post on the issue because I wanted to make sure I got all the facts right.

Read more on the Social Times.

If you are looking for a fun way to waste a few minutes each day, I highly recommend checking out Mouse Trap. Mouse Trap is a game of strategy which requires players to figure out ways to trap the most number of mice as possible. You accomplish this by choosing the right combination of cheese and mouse traps. As you progress through the game you obtain new mouse traps and begin acquiring new types of cheese.

I have been playing the game for days and I keep checking back a few times each day. It’s pretty addictive and the illustrations are of amazing quality. Personally, I think that this game is a perfect example of a high quality Facebook game. It is extremely simple but it drives you to return. While the game isn’t extremely social, there is a forum where users discuss various strategies about how to obtain the most amount of gold and maximize game scores.

So far I haven’t been able to generate a substantial amount of gold but I also haven’t been playing it for long. I think the creative illustrations help to make the game more engaging. Even though there isn’t much motion taking place I am working to unlock other locations to travel to and unlock more advanced mouse traps. If you’ve come up with any highly effective strategies, please post about them in the comments. Otherwise, if you haven’t had the opportunity to check out Mouse Hunt, I highly recommend doing so.

Will Electronic Arts (EA) lumber to a bargain basement valuation behind the record labels?

Will EA’s Pogo.com raise the company to a Facebook style valuation? (using social network community metrics and Facebook as a comparable).

Gabe Zichermann made a strong case at the LA Games Conference that Facebook is going to Napsterize the games industry. Incumbent majors are taking a wait and see approach to Fabook, while the people, “the little guys”, now have the tools to create a whole new gaming paradigm.

Gabe cites developers who are not traditional game developers are using Facebook’s platform to create highly successful games: Blake Commagere created Vampire, Zombies and WereWolves, some of the most successful apps ever. Scrabulous took an established game and leveraged Facebook as a social utility to achieve a new level of success for the game Scrabble (at least its hard to believe that the board game would have over 600 concurrent users 6.22.08). Zynga Game Network raised 10 million dollars and SGN raise 15 million on the promise of building games on top of the social graph.

Gabe has the perspective to make such assertions. As founder of Trymedia, Gabe was the first to make a business of putting legitimate music content on Napster. Trymedia received applause from only the youngest employees at the labels, and open disbelief and hostility from the labels’ executive ranks. Gabe is a bear on the prospects of the video game majors if they put their head in the sand like the record labels did in the late 90’s.

Gabe is CEO of rmbr.com, and clearly understands the power of Facebook. rmbrME is Social Networking for Real Life. It’s an easy way to share your socially-networked contact information with someone using text messaging. It works with every phone, carrier and social network (Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, etc.). There are no downloads or subscriptions–it’s an easy, fun, cool and green way to keep in touch with new friends you meet in real life. Check out Gabe’s profile for his contact information and read more at http://rmbrme.com/.

The McCain campaign decided to enter the world of Facebook yesterday with the launch of the Straight Talk Express application. So what does the application do? Not much to be honest. All it does is embed the video which I’ve included below. That’s it! It also enables users to invite their friends and provides links to John McCain sites as well but nothing else.

I’m not quite sure why the McCain team decided to launch this application rather than embed the video on a fan page but that’s their decision, not mine! The McCain team is way behind the Obama team on Facebook given that the Barack Obama fan page has now crossed 1 million supporters. The John McCain straight talk express application has added less than 1,000 users so far but then again it just launched yesterday.

The video created by the McCain team is a really well done MTV Cribs style overview of one of the Straight Talk Express buses. I’m not sure how this tells me anything about McCain as a candidate but I definitely learned a little something about his bus driver. Check out the video below and feel free to install the Straight Talk Express application.

Yesterday, Facebook launched the simplified Chinese, traditional Chinese and Russian versions of their site. This is a huge move for Facebook who has been rapidly launching in new languages thanks to their translation tool which crowd sources the job of translating the site. The site has already been translated in to German, Spanish, French, Italian, Norwegian, Polish and Japanese.

Facebook is rapidly on their way to expanding their global dominance as the largest social network in the world. It also appears that Facebook has launched in Portuguese, Suomi, Russian, Cestina and Catala. I’m not aware of what many of these languages even are to be honest but my guess is they are now entering uncharted territory! Facebook must now prove that they have developed the best multi-lingual communications platform.

As Facebook rapidly rolls out new languages, they are clearly becoming one of the most dominant international player in the global battle for social network domination.

Mike Arrington has done an interview with Matt Cohler and Bill Gurley of Benchmark Capital. Mike discusses Matt’s decision to leave Facebook as well as the history of Benchmark Capital. Matt Cohler has been interested in the venture capital business for years according to people I have spoken with.

Based on the interview, it sounds as though Matt Cohler has become an equal partner in Benchmark Capital which sounds like an amazing opportunity for him. Best of luck to Matt at the new position. Check out the video below.

It’s official. This is some really big news and it is much anticipated news as well. Facebook is preparing to launch search for the inbox in the coming month. According to Prashant Malik:

This month, we’re rolling out Inbox search, a tool which allows you to search through all of your messages either by name of the person who sent it, or by a keyword that shows up in the text. Ever had a friend send you a Facebook message suggesting a good restaurant? Or maybe you were sent an address or phone number of an old friend. Then time passes and your Inbox fills up, and by the time you’re ready to go out to eat with your old friend you have to page through hundreds of Facebook messages to find the one you need. Inbox Search aims to fix this problem.

Search will be available this week to a few select networks (mostly Ivy leagues if they roll it out the same as before). There are no screen shots of what the search will look like but this will be a highly welcomed feature by most users. I for one am extremely thankful that this feature is finally being rolled out. I’m curious as to what types of sorting features Facebook will add. No matter what the sorting features are, I am extremely excited to see this finally rolled out!

Update
According to other reports there are no sorting features currently! This is some bad news but at least the search is being added. I hope they add search soon after!

Facebook had previously limited group messages to groups with no more than 1,500 members. As of last week that limit was raised to 5,000 according to an article published today in the New York Times. Facebook had previously stated that they would be completely removing group messaging limits but for now it appears that they won’t go all the way.

This definitely doesn’t help much for those groups that have hundreds of thousands of users. Facebook is making slow adjustments though due to previous abuses by a select group of users that were using groups for spamming purposes. While there remains to be discrete ways to spam users, Facebook has been extremely effective at combating spam, a problem that severely impacted MySpace. Recently, MySpace has been on a streak against spammers winning two law suits, including a $234 million judgment back in May.

This little update by Facebook went unnoticed by most users since most groups are far below 5,000 users. The number 5,000 is an important one for Facebook. Currently users are limited to 5,000 friends. It’s an issue that a small number of users have been complaining about and Facebook has claimed has been a technical limitation. There is no word on if this number will be removed anytime soon aside from unsubstantiated rumors.

A bar named after Facebook has been launched in Beirut, Lebanon. The bar, which has no affiliation with the site, aims to provide visitors with a place to meet people and catch up with their friends. If this sounds anything like a normal pub, it is. The only difference is that the bars has a “uniquely Facebook ambiance” according to an article in the Lebanon Daily Star. According to the article:

The bar is unique in its quest to provide a physical space that mirrors the wildly popular social networking site. The menus are laminated screen shots of a Facebook Web page. Under the tab “Drinks” there is a list of all the shots and beers available, the blue backlighting and white furniture upstairs give the dancing and DJ area a uniquely Facebook ambiance, and the styrofoam letters on the wall that spell out the word Facebook are in exactly the same font as the now infamous Web site logo.

Also of interest is a guest book in the pub which is supposed to mimic the functionality of the Facebook wall. It is filled with comments of previous entrants to the pub that enjoyed chatting with “cool” people. The bar highlights the magnitude of the Facebook brand whether or not it accurately portrays the real life version of the social networking site. Aside from looking like Facebook, the bar is nothing more than exactly that: a bar.

People enter regularly and do the same thing they do at any other bar or pub: socialize and drink. No word yet on if any drunken photos taken at the pub have ended up on Facebook but the irony of posting photos taken in the Facebook bar on Facebook for your friends to see is too much for me to handle.

I just received word that Matt Cohler, VP of Product Management at Facebook, will be leaving Facebook to join Benchmark Capital. Details coming shortly. There is now a lot of speculation about why Cohler would be leaving at such an important time for the company. With new products expected to be rolled out at the upcoming F8 event, it doesn’t make much sense. Kara Swisher thinks that it could be part of Sheryl Sandberg’s house cleaning effort.

Unfortunately there is not much else that can be assumed at this point. Leaving one of the hottest startups in Silicon Valley is bound to spark controversy but then again it appears that the venture capital firm that Matt Cohler is joining is rapidly becoming one of the hotter VC firms in the valley. The company has made investments in eBay, FriendFeed, Friendster, MySQL, Yelp and a number of others.

My guess is that we’ll never know what exactly happened but this is definitely an interesting move by Mr. Cohler. Mark Zuckerberg commented on the issue:

Matt is a valuable member of our team and one of our earliest executives. He has been an important contributor to Facebook’s growth and success and we are pleased he will continue working in a formal role as a special advisor to me and the Facebook management team.

While I’m note sure what a “special advisor does”, I’m sure that it will be a great position.