Archives: September 2008

Facebook has begun launching their operations in India, Hong Kong, Sydney and the U.K. and have begun hiring new employees. The first position they are filling? A Manager of International Business Development. Here is the job posting:

Manager, International Business Development, (Contractor)

Facebook is seeking a Manager of International Business Development (Contractor) who is extremely competent with technology companies, social media and business strategy. Business Development at Facebook is responsible for negotiating partnerships that generate new revenue streams, drive distribution of the Facebook brand online and offline, generate new users for the company, or otherwise add value to the Facebook user experience. The position is a contractor position based in Mumbai, India and reports to the Director of International Business Development.

Responsibilities:

* Negotiate international distribution deals with large consumer online companies to create new entry points around the Web for new and existing Facebook users
* Evaluate and explore strategic opportunities
* Represent Facebook in meetings with senior executives from other companies
* Help source international distribution partners
* Maintain ongoing relationships between Facebook and key partners

Requirements:

* 3-5 years of international business development experience in the consumer Internet space with a heavy emphasis on international distribution deals
* Comfort with a fast-paced, always-on, highly ambiguous start-up environment
* Extensive knowledge of online business models and Internet/consumer technology
* Proven track record with high standards of professionalism
* Exceptional interpersonal skills and ability to develop strong working relationships inside and outside Facebook
* Creative, resourceful, detail-oriented, highly organized
* Excellent verbal and written communication skills
* Ability to meet multiple objectives in an entrepreneurial environment with little supervision
* Extensive negotiation experience, comfortable with legal aspects of negotiations
* Prior experience working in a high-growth or startup technology company preferred

This particular position is for Hong Kong, Mumbai, and the U.K. The Sydney office is looking to fill sales positions. I have been receiving increasing buzz from people in India who claim that Facebook has been looking for office space. With their new job postings it appears that Mumbai is where they will be located. While the exact location of the office space is unknown, it’s clear that they are looking to expand in India.

As the company expands, they continue to seek top talent no matter where they are located. It’s clear that the company has an international focus and given the growth of the site in India, it’s a perfect location to expand operations to. Many speculated that this was taking place when Mark Zuckerberg traveled to India back in May this year.

While it was initially called a “Vision Quest“, it’s clear that there is business taking place in India as well.

Back in November Facebook released a new product called Facebook Pages. What I believed was the most important feature was the ability to add applications to Pages. Since then thousands of pages have been created and everyday I see another friend that has become a fan of a product, person, or service. There are still some serious issues with the Pages product though. I experienced these first hand while launching the inaugural Social Ad Summit.

Can’t Send Messages

This has to be the most significant problem facing pages: you can’t send messages to fans! Rather than using messages Facebook opted to use an alternative messaging system called “updates”. The only problem with notifications? In any given day I get about 20 notifications. The other problem? Most users don’t read them.

If you create an event for your fan page, you can’t send messages to them either! Instead, if you create an event for your fan page you will only be able to send them notifications with event updates. This has to be the most backwards system ever. I understand why Facebook doesn’t want to let fan pages send unlimited messages but they should at least hold the same standard for events whether created by a fan page or a user.

Paid Promotion Only

Facebook encourages owners of Facebook pages to promote their page by purchasing Facebook advertising. This contrasts Facebook groups in which any user (depending on group restrictions) can typically invite their friends to join. This in turn contributes to groups growing virally. Unfortunately for pages, the only viral growth comes in the form of newsfeed notifications.

It is an awkward balance that Facebook has for groups and fan pages. Fan pages appear to receive a higher priority when it comes to news feeds. Why is that exactly? Well Facebook arbitrarily decided it. This model is also somewhat of a conflict of interest. They want to make it easy to spread information but they want companies to pay for some of that promotion.

Ongoing Conflict

While Facebook needs to adjust their Pages product, it’s clear that Facebook still has a lot of changes that need to be made. As I said earlier, Facebook’s model presents somewhat of a conflict of interest. Imagine if Google was in the business of charging for placement of actual search results and not just ad words. Facebook has an unbalanced emphasis on paid promotion and this is something that will have to be resolved as the company works out their monetization model.

Facebook should promote their advertising services equally throughout the site. Whatever model Facebook plans on using for monetization, the most important thing is fully functional products.

For those not aware, this is a satirical post, not actual news

Today, Facebook approved a $150 million application bailout. This comes after news of the impending shift to the new design for all users. The new design has damaged the traffic of hundreds if not thousands of applications which once thrived in the Facebook economy. The result? Many application developers are now back on the street looking for development work.

When asked for a comment Mark Zuckerberg said, “We must act quickly, otherwise the pain being felt by the developers could rapidly spread into the rest of the economy.” When Barack Obama heard the news of the proposed Facebook bailout, he decided that the issue was so important that his campaign was put on hold and he asked Friday’s Presidential debate to be postponed.

When notified of Obama’s decision, Senator John McCain replied with “Deal!” During a press conference today, Obama said, “Millions of young voters may not have access to applications that they once used on a daily basis. These Facebook users are my constituents and all my constituents have the right to bite their friends on the neck as often as they’d like. Even if they are at work!”

When asked whether giving away more than a quarter of the company’s bank account to developers was a good idea or not, Sheryl Sandberg, Chief Operating Officer at Facebook, said “Do you know how many stock options I had at Google?” While we were a bit confused by Sheryl’s response, one thing is clear: developers are ecstatic.

One top developer that preferred to speak anonymously said, “We had to switch our application name from FunWall to FunSpace, tell me who’s hurting!” That developer claimed their daily active users had dropped by more than 30 percent since Facebook started rolling out the new design. While it is unclear how this money will be distributed, we will be sure to keep you up to date with any news related to this bailout.

Tonight Facebook posted an update to the Facebook developer blog which said the new API would be transferred from api.new.facebook.com to api.facebook.com. What does this mean? It means the old API will no longer be accessible. It also means that Facebook is moving over the last users over to the new design. The process has taken longer than expected.

The backlash has been significant but still somewhat limited when keeping everything in perspective. Over 2.5 million people have joined one group protesting the new design. There are over 100 million users though and even while adding up all the users joining protest groups, it still amounts to around 10 percent. So if you are a developer, it’s time to shift over all your APIs to the new design.

If you are a user there’s not much that you need to be prepared for other than not being able to shift back to the old design. The new design is just about final and for those that aren’t happy with it, there isn’t much you can do. Just get used to the new design! As for all those developers that have been punished by the new design? They have to hope that users learn the new design and can find their way back to their favorite applications.

Are you prepared for the final shift? Do you have any concerns regarding the new design?

According to a study published today in the Irish Times, “83 percent of employers have monitored individual’s Facebook statuses to check whether an employee was truly ill with the result that 67 percent of company bosses have disciplined staff for bogus sickness after discovering the real reason for them being absent”. Not only are employees being tracked when away from work but their employers are trying to catch them using Facebook while at work.

According to the study, “74 percent of Irish employees have admitted to being caught out by their boss for using social networking websites during work hours.” That’s not really surprising. Another study that we wrote about stated that the vast majority of younger employees would quit a job if they were prevented from accessing Facebook.

All this news appears to be part of a larger trend which is the clash of professional and personal lives. As our lives become more public the lines have become blurred and there is no longer a distinct difference between the two parts of our lives. Honestly, if you don’t want to get caught for repeatedly skipping work and lying about being sick you may want to make your profile private and not friend your employer.

Have you been burned by Facebook when skipping work? Are you friends with your employers on Facebook?

Earlier this week I had a phone call with a start-up company that was looking to launch a product to the conference industry. It was a service which enabled conference attendees to easily swap contact information. One of the first questions I asked was whether or not you can easily export contacts. I suggested that if I couldn’t export my contacts, the service was not going to succeed.

I found it ironic that I was preaching about contact portability but everyday I interact with Facebook who makes it impossible for me to export my contacts. When I’m writing an email there is no way for me to easily access my contacts’ email addresses and when I make a phone call the only way for me to access my contacts’ phone numbers is through the iPhone Facebook application.

Want to build an application that leverages your Facebook contacts for communication purposes? Unfortunately you can’t unless you are fine with using each individual’s Facebook ID as their unique identifier. What risk does Facebook have from letting users export their contacts? The most obvious risk is the potential for users to take those contacts to a competing service.

In reality though, if a user prefers one social network over another, the ability (or inability) to export from Facebook is not going to be a deal breaker. They are going to register no matter what. So for the love of God Facebook, please let me export my contacts! They are my contacts anyways and I only gave you access to that relationship. You weren’t the person that gave me access to that individual!

LinkedIn continues to grow and they let you export your contacts. Are there any other reasons you can think of that Facebook still locks in our contacts? Why on earth won’t they go ahead and let us export?

On the heels of the MySpace Music launch, MySpace has launched a self-service advertising site which appears to be targeted specifically toward musicians. You can access the service by visiting advertise.myspace.com. The site functions similarly to Facebook’s advertising solution except that advertisers can create custom banners that are either 728à – 90 or 300à – 250.

Read more on Social Times

Just a few hours ago I wrote about one Facebook scam. Within minutes I had details of another Facebook scam arrive in my inbox. Apparently, the following message is floating throughout user inboxes on the site:

Today at 10:55am Reply Facebook becomes recently very over-populated, many members complaining that Facebook is becoming very slow. The report/ratio shows that the reason is that there are too many inactive Facebook members. We send this message around to see whether the Members are active or not, if you are active please send to 15 other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are active Those which do not send this message in 2 weeks, will be removed without hesitation to create more space.v”

Hmm … create more space? I doubt Facebook is running out of server space given that they have a couple hundred million sitting in the bank. This sounds more like a pore attempt at creating a junk chain letter. While I’m unsure of how many people the message has reached, my guess is that a large number of users have seen it.

Fortunately this message does not attempt to hack your computer, steal your computer, or do anything considered invasive. Instead it appears to be a prank and the author of it is obviously trying to see how far they can get the message to spread. My guess is that it won’t get too far before Facebook filters all messages containing the content posted above.

Today the Washington Post covered a new scam which is sweeping through the net. The scam uses a standard method of embedding a trojan horse application to an email an enticing users to click it. Attacks like these have been used since the early days of email and it’s clear that trojan horse models are not getting old. Once you download a trojan horse, attackers can access your computer and control it remotely.

It’s pretty clear how not to get scammed by these attacks. If somehow, this email manages to get through your spam filters you can protect yourself by first: not opening the email. Most emails sent by Facebook do not have an attachment. As such, you should not open any attachments which appear to be from Facebook. Seriously, why would Facebook send you a picture of your friend?

Don’t open zip files that are sent to you by anybody but your friends! Even if they are sent by your friends make sure they tell you that they are sending a zip file. Why on earth would Facebook send you zip files? They wouldn’t! If you have any questions about the legitimacy of an email, it probably isn’t legitimate. Delete the email if you don’t know.

These are simple steps to avoid downloading a trojan virus on to your computer. There are other ways to prevent trojans but my guess is that readers of this blog already know how to do so.

There’s been a lot of discussion about the impact of the new design on Facebook applications over the past month as Facebook has rolled out the new design. Prior to the roll-out taking place many were concerned that the new design would crush application traffic and make it more challenging to obtain new users. Over the past few weeks I have been talking with developers and have received a bunch of feedback.

Today, Vasanth Sridharan concluded that the redesign has substantially damaged many of the applications. That was after taking look at a discussion taking place within the Facebook developer forum. While at first glance, we can assume that traffic is down for most, I don’t think the picture is completely clear.

A Change in Stats Confuses Many

As the new design roll-out approached Facebook decided to switch the standard application metric from daily active users to monthly active users. For many this made sense but for a few it made it difficult to determine what impact the new design was having as it became hard to monitor daily adjustments. Adonomics, the site which had once been the standard site for monitoring application statistics was thrown a curveball by the change.

Suddenly many of the statistics were inaccurate and it was no longer easy to monitor what was going on among the top Facebook applications. It appears that Adonomics has figured out a way to back track stats and fill in missing days but the statistics are still questionable. So how are we to determine what the new design’s net impact is on application developers?

A Drop for Some but Not All

Some application developers I’ve spoken with have experienced a decrease in traffic by 20 to 25 percent. Others have actually experienced an increase in traffic. While the forum discussion that Vasanth referenced is filled with dissenting application developers, that discussion caters to those critical of the new design. The title of the discussion is “Facebook Does it Again, Screws Developers Once More”.

Ad networks that I’ve spoken with have not experienced a decrease in revenue among their top developers. That means results are mixed across the board. One thing that is not mixed is the decrease in application profile views. The “boxes” tab has resulted in a substantial drop in impressions on the profile page. It’s not all bad though.

The new design emphasizes features that add value to the users. While the new design may not emphasize viral channels as much as it used to, times are not critical for most developers. While some may have suffered a decrease in traffic, the majority are not overly critical of the redesign. The largest backlash so far has come from the users, not the developers.

Stats from Developers Who Has Suffered From Redesign