Archives: July 2008

Yesterday Facebook formally announced the launch of the new design and there were a significant number of changes. Much of the driving force behind the new profile design was the pollution being created by a practically limitless number of applications on user profiles. Developers were also taking advantage of weaknesses in the platform to help their applications grow. Over the past few weeks, it has become clear that exploiting those weaknesses in any way (constituting a “gray area”) would result in the application being banned.

With the launch of the new profile, a “gray area” remains and Facebook knows it. In a post yesterday, Paul Jeffries stated:

Facebook is about empowering and connecting people through the sharing of information. That’s undermined if users who receive an invitation or other communication suspect it was sent for an ulterior motive, such as gaining points in a game. Similarly, because users represent themselves through their profile, they shouldn’t be goaded into adding a tab or other integration point just to see content they could have seen anyway, or in trade for some unrelated benefit.

There is an implicit social contract you should respect as a facilitator of user-to-user interactions, and in the trusted relationship you have with your user. Therefore, we are introducing new policies to prevent applications from creating artificial or inappropriate incentives to use Facebook features (including, for example, sending requests and adding profile boxes).

The “new policies” that Paul speaks about are outlined in his post but still include a number of “gray” areas. Paul states that developers can have links to the new application integration points “but they should not intrude on the user’s experience by prompting for a permission if doing so isn’t appropriate in the natural flow of events.” I’m sure most developers will be able to tell if it is appropriate. Bending any rules will ultimately lead to the application being banned starting at noon Pacific time on the 28th of July.

One interesting new policy is that developers cannot incentivize requests. This means providing points for inviting more users is now officially against the terms. Additionally, developers may only make “appropriate calls to action in notifications and Feed stories.” This statement is somewhat unclear but developers have until noon Pacific time on the 11th of August to abide to these new policies for existing features. This means we could soon see a whole new wave of applications being removed from the platform in the coming weeks. These new policies combined with the profile redesign will most definitely reduce the virality of many applications.

As announced, Facebook will be releasing the updated version of the Facebook profile by tomorrow. It has taken the Facebook team over five months of development and iterations based on user and developer feedback. It has been a challenging time for developers as well as the Facebook team and many are eagerly anticipating the launch to see what the end result is. There could be backlash from the users as well as developers depending on how things pan out. Regardless of what happens, the profile will eventually change permanently so we figured this would be a great opportunity to give a thorough overview of the changes.

General Facebook Profile Overview

The new profile has been substantially modified from the original for the purpose of making it more visually compelling and reducing the clutter created by multiple applications being installed. Rather than a single profile page, there is a new four-tabbed system by default. The default tabs included are “Wall”, “Info”, “Photos”, and “Boxes”. I go into more detail about each of these tabs below. There is one additional tab which enables users to add an infinite number of their “favorite” Facebook applications, two of which will receive visible profile tabs.

The Wall

Previously, user profiles had a Wall and a mini-feed. The mini-feed displayed recent activities of the users and the wall was a place where friends of that user could post content including notes, photos, videos and any content that user-installed applications would enable the user to post. All of that has now been condensed into one feed. Within that feed, users can select whether or not they would like to view all posts, posts only by the profile owner and posts by others. Below are screenshots of each of the features and a description of the features’ visibility.

Status Update

Just like before Facebook enables users to update their status from within the profile. In addition to updating your status by clicking on the text of your status, a text box has been added to the wall to enable users to update their status from a second location within the profile. That change in status is directly reflected both at the top of the user’s profile as well as within the user’s feed. The status update box is only visible to the profile owner and is not visible when viewing another user’s profile.

Post New Note

Previously, creating a note on Facebook required visiting the “Notes” application. If you aren’t aware of the notes application, it is functions just the way it sounds. You can create notes which includes text and a photo. You can also tag your friends in notes and they will be notified via their feed that they were tagged, driving them to visit and read the note you published. Currently it doesn’t appear as though you can manage the visibility of a note from within your wall. Typically you can limit the visibility of a note to “Everyone”, “Your Networks and Friends”, “Friends of Friends”, specific friends or specific networks you are a member of. I’m guessing that Facebook will soon add this functionality and as they do we will update this guide.

Post Photos

There are a number of ways that Facebook has now enabled users to post photos from within a user’s profile. Currently you can create albums, post photos and take photos from within your own profile. When you visit another person’s profile you can only post a profile and take a photo but not create an album.

Create Album
Rather than visiting the photos application to create an album, Facebook has made it so that you can create an album directly from within your profile. This makes navigating to numerous pages just to upload photos unnecessary.

Post Photo
Once you’ve created an album you can now directly upload your photos to them. Currently there is not a mass upload feature though. Instead you can upload pictures individually. This appears to make more sense for posting photos on your friends’ walls rather than on your own. One thing I don’t know about is if you upload a picture to your friend’s wall, whether or not it will display in your personal albums.

Take Photo
This is a pretty sweet new feature. Now you can take a picture directly from within the wall. This makes a lot of sense for posting on your friends’ walls. It makes the photos about instant communication and communication is what Facebook is all about. I’d imagine that this feature will be used much more heavily.

Post Videos

In addition to photographs, users can now publish videos directly from within the profile publisher tool. Currently you can record live video and upload a video from within your own profile. The video feature increases the communication models for users and also expand the types of media that can be published.

Record Video
This feature is practically identical to the take a photo feature except that you can actually record live video that is then posted to your wall or the wall of the person you decide to post to. This is also a new feature that I expect to see highly used. It’s an easy way to leave a media-rich message with your friends’.

Upload Video
If you don’t want to record a live video and have another type of video that you would like to share, you can use the video upload tool directly in the publisher. This feature is only available to users directly from their own profile. You cannot upload videos while visiting a friend’s profile.

Links

Links are another way to communicate with other users. Rather than publishing entire notes, sometimes it is significantly easier just to publish the link of another article. Currently links will display an image from the article you reference as well as the article title and a sampling of the content within the article.

Post Link
Posting a link is just as it has always been. You can post a link of an article on your wall as well as your friends’ walls. When you enter the link you first click “Preview” to see how the link will be displayed. I can envision some users making taking advantage of this to spam other users.

Gifting

Gifting is one of Facebook’s unique features. Typically users send gifts to each other for birthdays and special occasions. In this regard, the profile is not much different from before. There doesn’t appear to be a way to view all of a user’s received gifts but when a gift is sent it will show up directly on their wall.

Send Gift
This feature will not display on your own profile page as there is no purpose of sending yourself a gift (although I like to purchase gifts for myself on occasion). This functions similarly to the send gift feature that was previously on profile walls.

Info Tab

Previously Facebook included all user information on one page. They have now expanded the various profile information into multiple tabs, the second of which is the “Info” tab. On this tab all person user information is displayed including their basic information, personal information, contact information, education and work, groups and pages. This is practically the same to the right hand column of the old profile minus the wall and any applications.

Photos Tab

Previously users would need to click on a link under a user’s picture within their profile to see that individual’s photos. Facebook has now integrated the photos into one tab which displays both albums and photos of that user. This makes it easier to navigate through the user’s photos and it also emphasizes Facebook’s emphasize on leveraging multimedia to help a user express themselves. Previously there was much more text but with the redesign we now see the increased usage of photographs and videos.

Boxes Tab

Remember all the applications that were cluttering user profiles? That’s now a thing of the past. Facebook now has a separate tab for users to display all of their applications. This increases the emphasis on a user’s feed and decreases the emphasis on applications. Rather than calling the tab “Applications” or “Apps”, Facebook decided to go with the term “Boxes”. I’m not sure what the benefit is of using that phrase is. Regardless, all of the applications that you once displayed on your profile page have now been placed within the boxes tab.

Alternatively, applications can place themselves within the narrow left-hand column of the profile, but they must have a limited height. Facebook wants to ensure that the main page of user profiles is extremely clean. This change will most definitely reduce the number of click-thrus to applications, something many developers have complained about. We will have to wait a few days to see how significantly this change impacts application growth.

Application Tabs

Not all is ruined for applications by the “boxes” tab. Facebook has enabled users to also create custom tabs for applications. Currently, the profile is limited to visibly displaying up to two new tabs, all additional tabs will be visible via an arrow tab within your profile. While I haven’t seen any exceptional uses of this new tab, I think that we could start seeing some innovative new applications that take advantage of the tab. The best will help users extend the utility of the profile as well as help users express themselves.

Conclusion

The new Facebook profile redesign is one of the most significant changes since the launch of the platform last year. The design emphasizes simplicity and cleanliness. Additionally, there is now room for Facebook to display larger advertisements along side of the profile. Over the coming weeks, Facebook will be rolling out the updated version of the profile to all users, eventually making it the default profile for everyone. If there are any changes made in that time, we will be sure to update this guide.

Yesterday I suggested that the Social Ads have apparently disappeared. It appears that they just weren’t displaying immediately. Facebook reached out to me with details on how the new advertisements will be displayed. All advertisements have moved from the left hand side of the site to the right hand side of the site. From a user interface perspective, I would imagine right hand side placement will result in a lower click-thru rate. Just a hunch though!

New Homepage Advertisements

One interesting change is that it appears that advertisements displayed on the homepage will no longer be directly from Social Ads flyer campaigns. In stead the advertisements on the right hand side of the page will be “Facebook Ads sold through the direct sales team.” This is a significant change. Currently the only advertisements showing in this location are ads for Facebook features. I’m guessing that we will see this change over the coming weeks.

Newsfeed SocialAds Become Exclusive

Facebook will no longer have newsfeed advertisements automatically display via user-created Social Ads campaigns. Instead, all newsfeed advertisements will be available exclusively to advertisers through the direct sales team. This means that Facebook now controls the price of newsfeed advertisements, not their Social Ads system. Additionally, it means one less advertisement location for those that integrate Social Ads campaigns with branded pages.

Facebook Advertises on Applications

Previously Facebook was displaying Social Ads flyers on the left hand side of applications but there wasn’t a significant advertising presence. With the new redesign, Facebook has made a much more significant statement by placing advertisements practically front and center. In addition to flyers, Facebook will now be able to advertise 300 x 250 advertisements as well as 300 x 600 ads, which also happen to be the best performing ad unit on the web.

This new form of advertising is a direct shot at internal Facebook ad networks which currently cannot place large advertisements on applications due to canvas page size restrictions. Facebook’s new sales pitch? “Why go with those other Facebook application ad networks when we can give you 300 x 250 and 300 x 600 advertisements?”

Three Types of Advertisements on Right-Hand Side

There will now be three types of advertisements that Facebook displays on the right-hand side. One style will be to display two Facebook Social Ads running together. The second method is the display of one Facebook Ad and one industry-standard banner ad. Finally, in some instances Facebook will just run banner ads on the right-hand side and no Facebook Social Ads flyers.

Conclusion

Facebook’s new redesign has a new found emphasis on applications and profiles: advertisements. Facebook needs a way to boost their revenue and this redesign will surely help significantly. The most significant change is on applications where Facebook will now compete head-to-head with existing social advertising networks. As of now, there are no signs that Facebook plans on sharing application ad revenue with developers. Facebook has clearly been working to optimize make the site design cleaner while increasing their space for advertisements.

Update
I have spoken with Facebook and there will be no changes in the size of ads placed on the site for now. It will be the same banners that were previously served by Microsoft. Speculation about the new banner sizes are completely inaccurate according to Facebook.

In speaking with Peter Corbett with iStrategyLabs the other day over dinner, we realized that there was one missing opportunity on Facebook which could be used to help brands and their pages get promoted more effectively. If users could tag brand instances the same way that you can currently tag users, there would be a large promotional opportunity. For instance, imagine if you take a picture of yourself next to your car and would like to tag it as “MINI Cooper”.

If you were actually a fan of the MINI Cooper on Facebook, you would be able to tag the photo and that photo would be displayed on the brand’s page. This way you don’t need to individually navigate to and upload photos on the actual brand’s page. It’s a great opportunity for brands and a great way to extend the existing platform. Facebook videos can currently be tagged as well so that would be yet another opportunity for Facebook.

There are a number of competitive services that are working to develop brand tagging in media some of which are completely automated. While I can see this technology being useful, enabling users to tag images and videos with brands themselves would be sufficient in my own opinion. Do you think tagging images and videos with brands would be smart? Why hasn’t Facebook done this yet?

Facebook released their new design tonight and it threw the platform into somewhat of a chaotic state for a period of time. The update went live at around 10:15 PM eastern and it appears that the errors continue to be taking place right now. Many users have been complaining that the site has been inaccessible. Some pages are clearly not displaying properly if at all. For instance click on the “Account” link in the navigation has been displaying the following screen in my Firefox browser:

Applications Get Randomly Punished

One of the most significant concerns voiced by developers when the platform launched was that the new design was going to hurt the virality of their applications. Right off the bat I noticed that some applications were no longer displaying in my links. Considering that some of these were my most frequently used applications it seemed strange that the link no longer appeared. I needed to search for and bookmark the application in order to get the link back. This appears to be a small issue but it could have a significant impact on some applications.

Not Completely Accessible

I’ve had multiple people contact me now to complain that the new site is not accessible. I’m guessing that these problems will be resolved over the coming hours as Facebook works to make all the last minute changes which went unnoticed or popped up when pushed to the live platform. Have you found any other bugs with the new release?

Facebook has been testing out the new profile design for the past five months but for the first time ever, they have released the new full site design (pictured below). You can access the new site by visiting www.new.facebook.com.

New Homepage

The first noticeable change is a complete removal of the left-hand sidebar. Instead all of the links have been moved to a wider sidebar on the right hand side which appears to be double the size of the original. The applications have been moved to two different locations in the header and to the right hand sidebar.

New Applications Dropdown

There is a new drop-down menu in which users can view all of their applications. It’s not that great though if you have hundreds of applications installed as it takes a fair amount of time to browse through the applications (see the video below).

New Publisher Links

The top of the newsfeed now displays links to the publisher box on the new profile. This enables quick access for posting new notes, new photos, new videos and sharing links with your friends.

Bookmarks in Sidebar

As mentioned above, Facebook has moved the application links to two places: the navigation bar and the sidebar. The sidebar version shows only 8 applications but by clicking “See All” expands to show other applications. For some reason not all my applications are displayed in these links. For instance my “Mouse Hunt” link is no longer present. Additionally, it doesn’t appear that these links show up as the default links you initially had under the old design.

Removal of Social Ads?

Facebook used to display SocialAds flyers but apparently those are no longer displayed. I’m not sure if this is a fluke or a strategic decision by Facebook. Facebook will be announcing new initiatives on Wednesday and perhaps some of these initiatives are expected to remove this one. My guess is that this is a temporary removal as it doesn’t make much sense to completely remove SocialAds flyers. That also means that all ad campaigns that were running will not currently display on the new homepage or new profile.

Honestly this doesn’t make much sense and I’m guessing that Facebook may have instead chosen to redesign SocialAds. I have reached out to Facebook and am waiting for them to respond at this point.

New Friends Page

There is now a new friends page. While it is not substantially different the friend lists have been moved from the right hand side to the left hand side. The width has also been expanded to accommodate the new site design.

Design Feedback Form

Facebook has also included a form for users to provide feedback about each page’s new design. They have also emphasized that this feedback is expected to be positive and courteous as I’m sure they expect some negative feedback about the new design. On every page you can simply click “Send Feedback about this Page” directly above the navigation bar. Over the coming month, Facebook will be making updates to make sure that the new design provides a good user experience.

Conclusion

The new site design is much cleaner and simplified a lot of the features on the site. The fact that one of my applications didn’t display on the homepage leads me to believe that there are still bugs on the new design. Facebook is expected to announce the new design to users over the coming days at which point applications will begin noticing new users interfacing in new ways. The true test will be whether or not applications experience a reduction in growth rate. We will have to wait and see!

Over the weekend, the Financial Times reported that Facebook had “filed an intellectual property lawsuit against a German company that it has accused of running a ‘knock-off’ of the social networking website.” The suit claims that StudiVZ copied “the look, feel, features and services”. StudiVZ is one of the most popular social networks currently in Germany, Switzerland and Austria and definitely looks strikingly similar to the Facebook design.

The filing of the suit resulted in a prompt response from the StudiVZ team:

Because we have not been served with the complaint, studiVZ cannot comment in detail about the content of the claims. However, based on what Facebook has apparently told the media, the claims are without merit.

Claims made by lawyers acting on behalf of Facebook prior to Facebook’s filing of this lawsuit prompted studiVZ to file for a declaratory judgment at the District Court in Stuttgart, Germany, on Friday, July 18. The purpose of the filing is to have the responsible German court declare that the claims made by Facebook are without merit.

This is not the first company to copy Facebook’s design. In China, Facebook has much more powerful competitor: Xiaonei. Xiaonei reportedly received a whopping $430 million investment earlier this year. This looks like it could become a long, drawn out battle between the two companies. Given the worldwide copycat presence, it may not be the last suit filed by Facebook.

Last week I asked where the new profiles were. Facebook had provided developers with a notice that the new profiles would finally be launching by Wednesday evening. Wednesday rolled around, then Thursday, then Friday and developers began wondering what was going on. Last night Facebook wrote that developers should have their applications ready by tonight so that the first users that opt-in to the new profile can start interacting with the updated version of applications.

It appears that Facebook still had some last minute changes and simply wasn’t ready for launch. Could they actually be ready for launch this time around? Hopefully! If all goes well, users will begin having access to the new profile design in the next 24 hours. At this point I had figured that Facebook would simply wait until f8 to officially launch the new profile but apparently they are simply moving ahead with the launch.

According to one person I spoke with, the profile will not be switching over to all users as the default until a couple weeks into August. For the time being, everything will be completely opt-in. For now, let’s hope second time’s the charm.

The SocialCash team and I are camped out in SFO for a bit, so we wanted to give everyone a quick debrief from the SWAT Summit yesterday. Here’s the quick and dirty:

About: SWAT is a conference focused on how social networks are transforming advertising (and vice versa). Speakers included David Smith (Mediasmith), Sonya Chawla (Slide), Chris Cunningham (Appssavvy), and Ian Swanson (Sometrics). It was a good time.

What we thought about: This was a speaker/panel conference, but much of what went on was focused on identifying the right questions to think through. Here’s what was on everyone’s minds:

1. Which metrics are important for engagement in different social application settings? Advertisers want tangible metrics, and there is a bit of tension in environments like Facebook that have myriad methods of interaction. It seems as though more and more advertisers are starting to involve tangible actions (giving email, fan page additions, etc.) to help them quantify engagement.

2. Social networks and apps are melding communication and entertainment. How can brands become part of the conversation w/o interrupting it? The brands desperately want to get in, but they are concerned about maintaining control. The thing is that to really get in the middle of the user experience, they have to cede a fair amount of controlWe talked through case studies of the Acura TSX, Nielsen, and the Ethanol Information Council. Everyone seemed to agree that adding either a discovery experience or way for users to express themselves in a different way was highly effective. The Ethanol Council hosted a “Fuel the Change” video contest, but then gave users myriad ways to express interests or opinions.

3. How can we give advertisers better information about the users on social networks? It’s a bit of a problem, but with emerging platforms like Sometrics, we’re slowly figuring out better ways to summarize user data and couple it with engagement data to give advertisers a full picture. All of us are excited to see what tools develop over the coming months.

After the panels were done, we went for drinks and mingled with the people. Alright — back to DC for us. See you all at F8.

Gordon Peters is the General Manager of SocialCash, a leading monetization engine for social networks.

There is ongoing speculation about what will be announced at next week’s f8 event in San Francisco. The event will be attended by the top social networking thought leaders, executives and developers all looking to take advantage of all the new services being announced next week. Justin Smith suggested that contrary to popular belief, Facebook will not be announcing their highly anticipated payment platform at next week’s event.

Currently it is well known that Facebook will be launching their Connect service. Facebook may also be delaying their profile redesign launch until next week. Finally, there may be an announcement about the extension of their open source platform. Aside from that it’s anybody’s guess at this point. Perhaps Facebook will announce the fPhone to compete with Apple’s recently launched iPhone.

One thing that would be nice to see included in this upgraded is a more robust messaging system for Facebook. I had previously suggested that Facebook could leverage information about the strength of your connections to automatically filter messages. There is also the possibility that Facebook will announce a mobile offering that works with the Blackberry application as well as the iPhone application, giving developers yet another distribution channel.

Could location based information be added soon? Perhaps Facebook will integrate directly with the CIA (as one person on Friendfeed suggeted to Techcrunch). Do you have any guesses as to other things Facebook will be announcing?