Archives: February 2009

Trazzler is a personalized travel-planning tool that was one of the most recent recipients of the fbFund. What started out as a Facebook application has since expanded to a standalone site. With new Facebook Connect features launching today, and Trazzler’s standalone site growing as a result of leveraging its Facebook app, there are a few lessons to be learned in taking advantage of Facebook’s Platform. Below is an excerpt of an interview with Trazzler founder Adam Rugel:
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Over the past few days Facebook has been giving developers a look inside of Facebook’s development thought process. Chris Piro posted an article on the engineering blog about the high-level development challenges that the developers faced when scaling the Facebook chat system. While I’m not a high-level developer, there are plenty of developers that will benefit from the information shared by Chris Piro.
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Tonight Facebook has announced that the launch of their “first social widget” for Facebook Connect. It’s a comment box which enables blogs, photo galleries, or other sites, to add comments to their site quickly. This is surprisingly the first public widget we’ve seen Facebook release. Contrast that with Google Friend Connect which immediately launched a community widget for user’s sidebars.
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Writing about large consumer brands is something that we typically don’t do on this site but recently we decided to reach out to a few brands to see what their experience has been with Facebook Pages. While Facebook presents a huge opportunity for businesses, each business needs to use a different strategy. We thought it would be a good idea to find out how other people are using the pages product and what would improve their experience.

The first person we spoke to was Bob Kraut, Pizza Hut’s Vice President of Marketing Communications. Pizza Hut now has over 790,000 fans according to our Facebook page statistics tool, which ranks them among the 200 most popular pages on the site. Below is a copy of our interview with Bob. If your company has an interesting story about Facebook Pages, please get in touch with us as we’d love to hear from you.
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Posterous launched as a simplified blogging process for users that want to stream a wide array of media to the web. Simplicity is key to its design as well as its submission process, lowering the barriers to entry by enabling users to update their Posterous blog by emailing text or media to the Posterous service.

The blogging platform is extending this simplistic view of sharing content by integrating with Facebook Connect. You can now update your Facebook wall by emailing content to Posterous. You can also post Facebook photos directly from Posterous, which will appear on both your Posterous blog as well as your Facebook Photo Galleries. Posting more than 5 photos will create a separate album with the email subject being the album title. Video support for a similar feature is currently being developed by Posterous.
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Tonight we had the opportunity to check out some of the applications that Facebook is actively testing advertisements on. We’ve also included a screenshot of some of those advertisements below. So far Facebook is advertising on three Zynga applications (Heroes vs Villains, Special Forces, and Word Twist), the We’re Related application by FamilyLink, and one other unnamed developer who’s ads are in beta.

Currently the advertisements are similar to the ones you’d see on the sidebar except that the layout is a bit more horizontal. The key value addition is of course that these ads will be targeted just like their existing ads. Many ad networks that I’ve spoken to have been exploring developing their own targeting systems but in many cases doing so appears to be pointless now that Facebook has entered the game.
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In a new twist of events Facebook has decided to begin running test ads with Facebook applications. An announcement is expected on the Facebook developer blog in the next 20 minutes. David Swain of Facebook says that its running only a few small tests, but as an ad network running on Facebook this would certainly draw my attention.

Currently there are few details on the types of ads being displayed but I can only assume that they are similar to Facebook’s existing ads. In the halls of industry conferences, the idea of Facebook filling application ad inventory is something that has always been discussed.
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Turn based multi-player games have been a huge hit on Facebook but there are few that have a real-time multiplayer environment. Sacred Seasons can’t see any reason why there shouldn’t be more multiplayer games, especially massively multiplayer games. So the team behind this virtual game environment has ‘created a Facebook application that combines the Sacred Seasons world with the Facebook community.
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If you want to gain an edge on the competition and learn how to dominate the Facebook platform for promoting your company, personal business, or self, you should read this. In the next week or two we will be releasing the first issue of the AllFacebook newsletter. It’s a once a week newsletter that highlights the top articles of the past week and will also include some tips for optimizing your presence on Facebook.
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This is a guest post by Mike Volpe, VP of Inbound Marketing at HubSpot.
I have been advertising on Facebook for a while, and have done a number of other forms of online advertising over the years. Currently, the big advantage Facebook has is the cost per click rates are still very low so you can get traffic at a lower cost than Google AdWords or many other sources. I have found that if you target the people and ads appropriately, you can get Facebook traffic to convert at about 2/3 the rate of AdWords, which given the much lower (5-7 times lower) cost per click, means the leads are still cheaper.
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