Some Ideas from the Facebook Engineers…
Biz Productivity
Facebook Context on other websites
Location Based Services
More Utility & Sharing
Shared Profiles
Facebook Connect

This year’s f8 event will also feature an 8-hour Hackathon for all f8 attendees. During this year’s Hackathon, you will have the chance focus on hacking the new platform interfaces like the Profile Publisher, App Tabs, and Feed Stories. If you have any questions or need assistance, facebook will have dozens of engineers at your disposal to help you. Because they want you to follow a more normal sleep schedule than the Facebook engineers swear by, the Hackathon won’t last all night long, and instead will be held from 3pm till 11pm.

They will be giving away prizes as well. I will be there filming the festivities and reporting what we see. The event is sold out and looks like it will be an amazing event.

Technorati Tags: facebook, f8, hackathon

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About a year ago facebook launched the Facebook iPhone website, and it has over 1.5 million people using it regularly. Today, Apple has opened the doors to its App Store which features a new application we’ve created: Facebook for iPhone.

You’re probably wondering what makes the iPhone application different from the facebook for iPhone website. The bottom line is that applications built for the iPhone have access to more technology than websites. For example, with the native application you can take photos with the iPhone’s camera and upload them instantly to your Mobile Uploads album on Facebook. You’ll also find the native application is much faster than the website, giving you more reliable access to your Friends, Photos, and Inbox.

Facebook for iPhone also brings one important new feature to the iPhone - Facebook Chat. Wherever you are, you’ll be able to see which of your Facebook friends are online and chat with them for free.

The first version of Facebook for iPhone is just a glimpse of the future. For instance, the iPhone has the ability to find where you are located, and we are looking for ways to let you opt-in to share your location and discover nearby friends. We’re developing this and several other exciting new features that we’ll release in the coming months.

Facebook for iPhone works with the original iPhone, iPod Touch, and iPhone 3G. You can download the application for free from Apple’s App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at www.itunes.com/appstore/

iPhone junkies like myself can rejoice; this app from facebook is a thing of beauty.

Technorati Tags: facebook, iphone facebook

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These boys got blogosphere coverage bigger than anything in recent memory (other than facebook perhaps). The exact number of mentions of the twitter brand in the blogosphere in the last 30 days is 138, 225. Not all of these mentions are negative. Many are very positive and just voicing frustration with the down time of the service.

Except now the jig is up, the failure novelty is wearing thin on many millions of users. They are now in serious danger of not being able to shake the unreliable wrap and might just do irreparable damage to their brand.

We will see how it all plays out in the coming months. My bet is twitter will get it right since they have Amazon’s Jeff Bezos investing in this latest round. Amazon knows a thing or 2 about creating scalable websites.

A Twitter fan created a 3D sculpture of the twitter fail whale. The fail whale is what you see when twitter is over capacity and broken. Millions of people know this image.

When people create art around your ongoing failure it means 1 of 3 things.
1. They are too familiar with your failure mode.
2. They care enough about your brand to go create artistic sculptures. (they love you)
3. You might end up a joke on the footnote of web 2.0 start-ups that blew it.

Technorati Tags: twitter, fail whale

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Per Facebook: “These newsletters will keep you updated about what we’re doing to improve your advertising experience including news, product iterations and improvements, best practices and lots more to help you make the most of your Facebook Ads.”

The newsletter shows a few tips from a featured advertiser. It also has a few links that users can follow to become more educated about the product advertsising and marketing offerings from facebook and how you can give facebook money.

To get the newsletter you have to have set up an advertising account we believe (awaiting confirmation on this).

The thing that I like about this is that it is a proactive move by facebook to educate their advertisers. It has a link to their help page. Below is a screen shot of the Facebook Ads Newsletter.

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook news, facebook advertising

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Seriously, do i need to go through this exercise of setting up all my services in yet another life-streaming website. It is enough to make me cry. That being said, I thought I should give it a try and on the surface it is not very interesting.

There are none of the feedback loops and ways to comment or interact that I really like on services like friendfeed and plurk. Spock feels very flat an 1 dimensional. Beam me up Scotty.

So check Spock out if you are so inclined to see yet anothernot so social life-streaming service.

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Twitter has investors that have put over 15 million dollars in the bank for them to use. VC’s do not invest in companies that do not have a plan for a business model; contrary to what some people might tell you.

The only issue that matters at this time is reliability of the twitter service. Millions of users have come to depend upon the service as a new and improved way to communicate, build audience and interact. Intermittent outages frustrate users and their patience is wearing thinner by the outage (myself included). It has almost be come a running joke about the outages. As a point of reference twitter has ~4-5 million users.

I still say that the average twitter users first instinct when twitter is down is to twitter that twitter is down. This sounds funny and every twitter user will agree with you and laugh. The reason that it is people’s first instinct is because twitter has changed the way people choose to instantly and quickly share news & information with their network of friends.

Twitter is limited to 140 characters: that is it’s beauty. “Brevity in 140″. It forces you to think before you type and to be succinct. The uninitiated might question the value of this service andwhy they would use it. But once you have some friends in the service and jump in the pool you will find multiple uses for twitter for both personal and business. As the audience grows twitter has several ways to monetize. More on that in the future…

Here is a quick video interview from Always On with Robert Scoble talking about the twitter business model (or more accurately: why it does not matter). If they are not reliable they lose their audience to other similar services like plurk, jaiku, friendfeed, pownce, etc.

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Facebook has operated through this phenomenal growth curve with virtually no loss or interruption of service. Not like our dear friends at twitter who continue to struggle with delivering their service on a daily basis. Delivering a reliable technology offering is much harder than meets the eye.

My friend Dan Farber at CNET news did an interview with Jonathan Heiliger, vice president of technical operations about how facebook is managing this growth and keeping the service humming along. Very interesting read for those that are interested.

The thing about facebook is that you just assume that it is going to work; just like you check Google to make sure you are connected and online. Facebook really has performed at that rock solid level. This means they have the right team in place and are executing quite well.

The growth for facebook continues to move onward. This means that facebook is continuing to gain an audience that marketers will want to reach in an engaging way in the coming years (if not right now).

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In the past, you’ve been able to comment on photos, notes and posted items, but if there was something else on your friend’s profile, an interesting status, or a cool new friendship, or a quiz result (as I show in the screen shot below) you’d need to send a message or write a Wall post to talk about it.

A little balloon shows on the right side for the mini-feed actions that you can comment on. As more comments appear on that item the balloon displays a number of comments. Click on the balloon and the item expands. This is nice, simple and easy. I like the ability to comment son something in this area. This will be more important in the new page layouts that are coming very soon.

Also worthy of note here is that when people comment on an item (say a video or a note) those comments ROLL UP to the minifeed. See this example in a video mini-feed comment. Note the date of the comments was from june 10. That was way before this feature was turned on. cool!

This is yet another interaction point for users. This is similar to the way FriendFeed.com works in the way that you can comment right back into the activity reporting. Kind of cool and very meta.

Facebook just keeps removing the points of friction for communication and expanding the points & places that people can converse and converge data. I like that a lot.

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Something is up for sure and more details will follow soon enough I am sure. Top friends was one of the worst offenders of the “spammy” type of behavior that facebook was trying to control. Possibly they stepped over the line one too many times?

Facebook shuts down apps all the time so that is not really newsworthy. What is newsworthy is that top friends has over 32 million installs (that is almost half of all facebook users). It has (I mean had) over 1.6 million daily users. It is the third most popular app on facebook. This app is a money printing press for Slide.

The thing about top friends that I did not like was the way that the application continually increased its real estate by promoting other apps at the bottom of the app on the profile page. It just kept getting longer and longer.

Recent stats on top friends:

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Visa is teaming up with Facebook and investing $2 million in advertising and introducing a social networking application for small business owners. Visa plans to announce today that it is launching an application on Facebook for small business owners to connect with one another and to use Facebook to find new customers.

Visa is one of the world’s best-known brands; to have them engage/partner with facebook shows some of the vast potential that lies in social networks. This could be the app that gives facebook some penetration into the small biz advertising space.

To promote the campaign, Visa is offering a $100 Facebook advertising credit to the first 20,000 small business owners that sign up for the network

You can sign up for the Facebook Visa Business application here. You will receive $100.00 dollars in advertising credits on facebook for joining the network. Go for it, free money is a good thing (while it lasts).
UPDATE: facebook will immediately email you a advertising coupon code for redemption that must be used by 9/22.

Connect with other small business owners, learn ways to manage your business more efficiently, and grow by reaching the millions of potential customers on Facebook.

It’s free to join and easy to use. Sign up now to redeem your $100 in targeted Facebook advertising, and start connecting. They also have quite a bit of content that will be of value to small business owners (podcasts, ask the experts, etc.).

This is a nice application that is really well thought out and executed. We have been saying for a very long time that useful apps that leverage the power of the social graph were coming to the facebook platform. You can hold this app up as a great example of what is possible with facebook apps that is of business value.

Here is a sample of our parent company (Gravitational Media) listing in the Facebook Visa Business Network.

Use the Facebook Visa Business Network to:

GROW: With over 80 million users, Facebook is a great place to build your business. When you join the network, you get $100 to create targeted advertising and reach potential customers on Facebook.

CONNECT: The Visa Business Network connects you with other small businesses. Share ideas, information, opinions, and knowledge with people going through the same things you are.

MANAGE: The Resource Center features exclusive content that gives you great ways to help you manage your business. Take advantage of articles, videos, and tips from top small business sources.

Watch this quick video to get a quick overview of how it all works.

Technorati Tags: facebook, business

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