Facebook developer garage tomorrow night

The July Facebook developer garage for London is on Wednesday evening. More details can be found on theFacebook event page

• Ashley Ward CEO of European Leadership Forum gives essential advice for raising money for your Facebook App.
  
• Brad Rees and Jon Hill from Mediacells explore the future of mobile advertising on facebook apps
  
• Matthew ‘Chewy’ Trewhella from Google enlightens us a bit on OpenSocial 0.8
  
• Mat Clayton CEO of Wakari, developer of Become Rambo tells us about his new cross platform app for the upcoming film Hancock
  
• Exciting news on a Formula One Application
  

And to top it off, I'll be talking on application design. The event is hosted by Sun Microsystems at 45, King William Street, London.

Social Media Business School - this Friday in London!

I've been asked to be on the panel for a conference this Friday in London, the SocialMedia Business School, organised by SocialMedia Networks. They have a line up of very good speakers, with panelists from Developer Analytics, WE7, Fidelity Ventures, Partygaming and BuzzTone, among others - as well as of course their own guys (and me). 

The blurb:

The purpose of the SocialMedia Business School session is to bring together industry experts to help guide you in building out your applications’ revenue model and preparing your business plan for financing and general planning. SocialMedia Networks, the social advertising network will bring together advertisers, leading developers and analytics gurus to help you build your business. You will learn about the resources available to you to make the most money from your applications, and using supporting materials provided by SocialMedia you’ll apply what you learn into an actual business plan that turns your apps into a sustainable business.

I'll be on the marketing panel, discussing seeding and marketing of applications. Hope to see you there!

Facebook 'Phonebook', One click calling from Palm and Treo, and SMS features...

I was just flicking through my newsfeed and saw that a friend had changed their mobile number. So far, not that interesting... until I noticed that Facebook went on to say 'and it's been added to your Phonebook'. I took a look, and sure enough there were all my friends in alphabetical order, with their different numbers, all searchable. This was interesting, as earlier on I'd just read about the Palm/Treo Facebook application which, according to FaceReviews, allows you to ' Open your Contacts and dial your friends with just one touch.' Sounds a lot like Facebook are moving more and more to integrate your mobile addressbook with your Facebook friend list - similar to what Yahoo! are doing with One Connect, and a few other services people are working on. 

I already use the Facebook application for Blackberry, and occasionally m.facebook.com off my phone browser, both of which are useful for different things, but I decided to delve a bit deeper into Facebook.com/mobile and see what else was on offer. It turns out that there's a lot of functionality just on pure SMS - including not just status updates and private messages, poking etc, but also adding friends, writing notes, and - my favourite - getting the mobile number of one of your friends. You just text in 'cell john smith' and you get a text back immediately with all their contact details.

Quite interesting is the ability to choose certain friends' status updates to follow - and Facebook will text you whenever they change. 

At the moment there aren't any links to the mobile section from the homepage until you've actively gone to the mobile section and authorised your phone, but they're obviously working hard on integrating the mobile Facebook experience in different ways. With all the buzz around mobile social networks going on, and some bloggers proclaiming that the major online social networks will be swept away by these, it will be interesting to watch as Facebook moves more heavily into this space.

Facebook adding in new metrics - weekly active users, more relevant than daily.

Facebook have just announced that they're adding in new metrics for developers, including weekly active users - as opposed to just daily. Although it was of course possible to build this in manually, many developers haven't. Although a small change, this is actually a very important one for the growth of the platform - when I speak to many brand owners thinking of launching applications on Facebook, and even when I speak to ones who actually HAVE applications on Facebook, about 75% of them don't realise that the active user stat that Facebook give out is daily only. This can be very misleading, as for most applications what's important is how many of your users are coming back week on week, not just day to day. When these people go in and see that they only have 2-5% (daily) active user rate they think this is terrible, when in fact if people are only visiting the app once a week, this is actually a 14-35% (weekly) active user rate. 

For more information on retention rate and cohort analysis, see my post on jumping the shark from a talk I did at the April Facebook Developer Garage London.

MySpace UK advertising on Google - smacks of desperation?

Twitter's down, so what would of been a small observation has ended up as a proper post. I was reading Andrew Chen's blog this morning when I noticed that MySpace UK was being advertised in the Google pay-per-click ads below the post. 

This smacks of desperation - a viral social network having to advertise itself on a search engine?

MySpace has been performing poorly in the UK for a while, lagging behind Bebo and Facebook, but if it wants to catch up it needs to see what these are doing better for users, not pay for advertising. Users join social networks either because a) they offer more suitable functionality b) all their friends are on it. Very, very few join because c) they saw a Google advert.

Just think, if MySpace cancelled all the adverts they were paying for, and used those cost savings to reduce the adverts on their site, then it might provide a better user experience, leading to more engagement, retention, and users. 

Facebook Developer Garage London: 7th April 2008

It's been a really hectic few weeks for me, for a reason that will be unveiled soon - hence the big slow down in blogging. I'm at the Facebook Developer Garage London tonight (which I help organise). I usually try to take notes and write them up into a blog post later, however because I'm so pressed for time at the moment I'm writing this 'live' at the garage. 

A bit different this time, as we've got Laura Kidd along to video the presentations, which will be up and on YouTube within a couple of days, so I'll embed them here when they're live. 

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Karl Bunyan from Exponetic is talking at the moment on apps to watch, looking at how the company behind Friends for Sale has just got huge investment, and how Slide's been expanding Funwall. 

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We're now listening to Jon Mitchell from Spotify, a new music (desktop) app from the people behind Skype. It's a free, legal, on demand music streaming service that's ad-funded (both audio and online). 

They're determinedly not a social network, but have many social features to share playlists, recommend music, etc, and have very sophisticated ad targeting. They do some similar stuff to last.fm (e.g. a radio player that recommends music) - but you can listen to full tracks indefinitely, compared to Last.fm's 3 times. They also have the ability to purchase songs through them (via retailers at the moment), although they say this isn't a focus at the moment, as they're more about exploration than ownership. 

They're showing a demo of the app on Mac. It's similar to iTunes, a good idea considering the huge number of users of iTunes familiar with the layout, and it seems pretty slick. It has a playlist feature so you can put together favourite artists and songs etc. They asked someone to shout out a band and straight away got to Devo and started playing, which is pretty impressive - it showed all of their albums and artwork and he dragged an album into a playlist. 

The main speakers are Andrew Mills and Daniel Denning from Sports Anorak, an application project from Andrew and Dan alongside ITN. They create unique Facebook applications for different football teams. They have about 700,000 installs, and support eight leagues. They have 1293 discussion topics just on Arsenal Supporters, and are getting 3-5m page-views per month (2-5% Daily Active Users). They've recently branched out into Bebo (currently have 80k users there). 

Andrew and Dan started the app themselves and then went to ITN once it had some traction to get together to distribute content from ITN to the app (a number of different sports shows). They spoke to Facebook directly to get video feed approval, which means that if one of their users share any of the videos, their friends can play it directly from the feed - a huge viral benefit. 

They had some issues with user racism, and have had to stamp down on this pretty hard - creating an automatic mechanism to delete racist posts and block those users, as well as a moderation scheme - they track down users who are really active in the forums, and give them admin control to delete and block, which they've found to be an amazingly effective strategy (as well as a great way to reward heavy users). 

They had some copyright issues with club logos and fixture details but have managed to overcome these - for example, instead of logos they now use 'club shirts'. 

It's coming up to the end of the season now, so they're looking to improve and expand the app, by moving into other social networks like Friendster and MySpace, possibly expanding the sports they cover, and building mobile apps. 

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Next up is Kristian Segerstrale from Playfish, a social games company. He's speaking on how to create successful HTML businesses, and lessons learnt from the games industry. Kristian is a multiple games entrepreneur - co-founder and MD Europe of NASDAQ listed mobile games company Glu Mobile, and has been behind over 50 games (multiple platforms), including over 10 top-ten titles. He set up Playfish with $3m seed finance, and they're getting over 5m  game plays (CORRECTION: 1.5m - still very impressive) a day through their gaming applications. Their main game so far is "Who has the biggest Brain", and they've just released "Word Challenge".

Kristian's five learnings:

1. Think like a CFO (with picture of Darth Vader in the background)

- develop a financially led operating model

- manage risk in hits business

- clear product strategy (e.g. some low risk cash cows, high risk experiments). Choose them by forecasted contribution, not just what would be fun.

- enterprise value

- choose a clear financing model (work for hire or venture capital)

- look for operating leverage

2. Create great product

- only create the No. 1's or 2's in any category - the rest don't matter and don't make satisfactory ROI

- attract the most talented team

- specialise in types of games

- love your product and polish, polish, polish

- names, trademarks, logos, characters, sequels - get it right from the start

3. Kill Product

- learn to stop projects when it no longer goes in the right direction, even if you love it

- This avoids resource drain, and bad products

- implement 'green light' time periods on projects, get big formal reviews after a certain time

- ensure that a kill is not seen as a failure, and no-one has loss of face (otherwise developers etc will be against the kill)

4. Build Platform

- develop and document tools, tech and processes to constantly improve efficiency

- better leverage over time

- easier to scale development

- enterprise value

- automate and document everything that can be

5. Budgets Increase

- be ready to compete with the kind of product that you expect to be possible within 1- 3 years

- production values always increase over time

- early investors into new platforms reap the largest rewards (allow to learn, build market share and products)

- build/recruit right skill set for 1-3 year horizon

- focus on continuous learning

Interestingly, he thinks that the Facebook app platform is around the same level at the moment as old MUDS - a far cry from World of Warcraft. He expects production values of Facebook app games to increase hugely, so that we have console-equivalent games on social nets. 

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Just watched a great talk on Ideomag, a really impressive 'personalised daily music magazine'. It gets over 6000 articles a month from over 500 content partners, as well as pulling in feeds for artists from Flickr, YouTube etc. They take your profile info and friends profile info to create recommendations and then look at your behaviour, artists you look at and say you like etc, and personalise all the content they feed to you.

Unfortunately I was having an in-depth discussion with the person next to me during the presentation so couldn't get all the info down - have to wait for the video. 

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We're just finishing up looking at what's new on the platform, will be over soon but loads of great conversations waiting to happen in the pub after (the best bit!).

Thanks to Toby and the rest of the committee, as well as all the speakers, and of course Laura for being our 'Video Girl'!

02's Unlimited Orgy of Fun on Facebook - they're back again

After a successful Facebook campaign a few months ago with the "Battle for the UK's Favourite University", involving a sponsored group that got over 100,000 students taking part and an online points based competition between universities to win a big party, O2 have launched a fresh campaign targeting university students on Facebook - "O2 Unlimited Orgy of Fun". Although using the page system, O2 have got some bespoke modifications from Facebook (for example the integration of a banner/app under the fan box), which shows Facebook's willingness to bend over for big brands with big money - just as they did for the March Madness application (which allowed 100 invites to be sent at a time). 

It will be interesting to see if Facebook commoditise this service more, in the same way as MySpace do - MySpace have a number of packages depending on the Ad spend you are willing to promise, each one offering more and more bespoke features for your MySpace pages over and above what can be created externally. 

In the current campaign, O2 are taking a big step forward - rather than having all the interaction online and very simple, they are setting challenges for teams of friends from universities to compete in, with quite big prizes for teams along the way, and the top four Unis all going to the O2 'Orgy of Fun' day. As companies become more confident with their social media activities,  expect to see more integration of offline and bigger prizes offered - O2 are really leading the way here. 

Making Facebook invite requests emotionally appealing - a great example

I logged on to Facebook this morning, saw that I had some new requests (as well as a load of old ones up there), and decided to have a flick through to see if there was anything interesting, when I saw this:

I just couldn't resist clicking. A mix of playing to my vanity (I'm one of her coolest friends!) and that possibility that I would be letting her down if I didn't accept created a strong desire to click, mostly in order to 'reward' my friend.

This highlights the huge value of the Facebook platform for viral growth, when done properly. It allows you to utilise the emotional connections between people in order to spread applications very fast. Although this is possible outside of the Facebook platform, it's access to the social graph and ability to control and personalise messages automatically means that it (and other social network application platforms) are vastly superior compared to platforms which don't utilise the social graph in the same way.

Unfortunately, the application inside required me to send invites out to see what ranking I am, with no choice to skip (which is now forbidden by the Facebook ToS, but there we go), and because I didn't want to spam my friends I didn't go any further.

So, what drove my response? I would suggest there were three main reasons - a fixed-action response, desire to reciprocate, and liking.

Fixed-Action Response

Many studies have shown that when you give a reason with a request, compliance goes up dramatically - from 60% to 94% when asking people waiting in a queue to use a photocopier to skip ahead of them (Langer, Blank, & Chanowitz, 1978). The remarkable thing is that this is still true even when there is no real reason - when the reason was 'because I have to make some copies', compliance still went up to 93%.

Robert Cialdini calls this a 'fixed-action response' - we have an automatic tendency to comply with requests when a reason is given, regardless of the validity of that reason. This is a really simple way of increasing compliance and great for viral requests like this.

Desire to Reciprocate

It is a common compliance/persuasion technique to give a gift, free sample or favour to someone in the knowledge that this will create a feeling of obligation to reciprocate. This can be very powerful - James and Bolstein (1992) found that mailing a $5 'gift' cheque with an insurance survey was twice as effective at getting people to return surveys as offering $50 as a reward for completing it. 

In this instance, the invite request makes clear that my friend has nominated me as one of her coolest friends - quite a compliment. It then connects this compliment to a request to do her a favour in return by accepting her request. This is a clever way of linking the invite action to the request to install the application. 

Liking

It is this factor which makes the Facebook viral system so powerful. Facebook, and other social networks, facilitate the linking up of 'weak-ties' (see my longer post on why weak-ties are so useful for marketing here) - people who you have some connection to (e.g. work mate, similar interest, mutual friends) which creates a much more trusting relationship than if they were pure strangers. The viral channels on Facebook then make it very easy to spread applications and other actions/notes/UGC etc across these weak-ties.

The most powerful offline use of the liking rule are Tupperware parties (and more recently Ann Summers parties), which uses the power of liking to directly sell products.

As an advanced method, research shows that the more similar we are to another person, the more we like them (Byrne, 1971). When utilising the weak-ties in a social network, then, you are going to get the highest conversion rate when you use the social graph data to encourage invites to be sent to people similar to the inviter. An obvious way of doing this was used by the Addicted to Scrubs app, which found the friends of users who had Scrubs mentioned as a favourite show but didn't have the app, and suggested to users that they should send invites to them. However a more subtle way could be to find the friends of users with similar age/gender/location/interests and simply put these at the top of the friend invite box.

Price and Value - Why Virtual Items Work

"I got a phone call one day from a friend who had recently opened an Indian jewelry store in Arizona. She was giddy with a curious piece of news. Something fascinating had just happened, and she thought that, as a psychologist, I might be able to explain it to her. The story involved a certain allotment of turquoise jewelry she had been having trouble selling. It was the peak of the tourist season, the store was unusually full of customers, the turquoise pieces were of good quality for the prices she was asking; yet they had not sold. My friend had attempted a couple of standard sales tricks to get them moving. She tried calling attention to them by shifting their location to a more central display area; no luck. She even told her sales staff to "push" the items hard - again without success.

Finally, the night before leaving on an out-of-town buying trip, she scribbled as exasperated note to her head saleswoman, "Everything in this display case, price x 1/2", hoping just to be rid of the offending pieces, even if at a loss. When she returned a few days later, she was not surprised to find that every article had been old. She was shocked, though, to discover that, because the employee had read the "1/2" in her scrawled message as a "2", the entire allotment had sold at twice the original price!"

This is an extract from Influence, Science and Practice, by Robert B. Cialdini, showing how people equate value with price. Over the past couple of years a 'virtual item' economy has been cropping up - from Facebook's digital gifts, Habbo Hotel's virtual items, and Second Life's user-created economy. However, when I've mentioned some of the estimated figures and real money being spent on these to clients, many of them are incredulous - why would people spend money on a 'fake' gift??

The truth is, as human beings we equate price and cost with value. We have the general assumption that if something costs more, then it is worth more, and although this may seem shortsighted, it's actually an extremely valuable tool. If I wanted to buy a diamond, how would I know the different values? I have the choice of a) learning everything about diamonds so that I am able to personally value them b) paying an independent expert to accompany me shopping or c) going by price. 

Now, diamonds are pretty, but I know I haven't got the time or inclination to learn everything about them, and paying an expert to accompany me shopping just seems a bit... over the top. Of course diamonds are only one product, but the same applies across the board. We have trained ourselves to use these kind of short cuts in many areas of life - rules of thumb. They help us operate in an extraordinarily complex world. 

The same thing applies to virtual items and gifts - as soon as you put a price on them, that effectively becomes their value. As long as a buyer can't get the same gift for free next door, then the item has that real world value. This can carry over into gifts as well - if I receive a gift that I know is worth £1, then the value of that gift is £1, plus the value of having someone who cares about me enough to actually buy the gift and give it to me. 

Although they don't release any figures, the recent move by Facebook to remove the 'gift of the day' from the homepage suggests that this is become a less meaningful revenue source - not a surprise when you consider that it's so easy to send free gifts to each other on Facebook with different applications. This is a problem for any business strategy revolved around selling virtual items - you need to ensure that someone else can't come in and undercut you with the same features. This has been a problem for Facebook because their gifts were essentially extremely simple 2d graphics. It hasn't been so much of an issue in the Second Life economy because building new items is complicated and requires significant knowledge, and isn't an issue at all in Habbo Hotel where they hold a monopoly over creating and selling items. 

So, selling virtual items can work - but only if a virtual scarcity is created. If you can create this, either through the complicated nature of the virtual item or by holding a virtual monopoly, it can be a very effective business strategy.

Dealing With Stress - a problem for all entrepreneurs

A few days ago, the New York Times ran a piece about how two bloggers had died, and how another two were having health problems. They put this down to the non-stop stress of trying to build up a blog network, working 24-hours, and the associated lack of sleep and unhealthy lifestyle. I'd flicked through it at the time, noting with sadness that people had died trying to build their businesses, and hoping that Michael Arrington over at Techcrunch manages to sort himself out and get a proper work/life balance. 

Yesterday Jason Calacanis wrote a post discussing the New York Times story - and pointing out that the fact that they were all building a blog network wasn't the trend, it was that they were all entrepreneurs, trying to build their own businesses and dealing with the stress of that. It's a great post by an experienced entrepreneur on how to build a business whilst maintaining your work/life balance and look after your stress levels, and really hit home for me - a couple of years ago I thought that the only way to be a successful businessman was to power work and never rest. I was working til 1am and getting up at 5am every day. After 6 months of this I came down with a bad case of appendicitis - bit of a blow to go from working non-stop all hours of the day to suddenly being bed-ridden,  hospitalised  and then recovering from surgery. 

Since then I've kept more of a balanced load - I'm still working pretty much non-stop, but always ensure I take a bit of time for myself each day, get out early to train/go for a run in the morning, and get a reasonable nights sleep. If you're a fairly new or first time entrepreneur then this is something you need to start thinking about now -it's easy to think we're invincible, but unfortunately it's not true; it's not maintainable, and in the long run it's not good for the business, or you.  

Jumping the Shark

On Wednesday night I spoke at the Facebook Developer Garage in London on 'Jumping the Shark', based on mathematical analysis by Andrew Chen. See my presentation at the bottom of the post - I have written up the essentials of my talk below.

Slide 2: this is the 'shark fin', a graph showing the exponential growth and then equally fast fall in active users over time - this could be daily active users of a Facebook application, but could also refer to other time periods such as a week or month, and could apply to web sites or other viral applications. 

Slide 4: Network saturation causes a slow down in new user growth, and eventual plateau. With Facebook applications, this can be seen easily by considering the following: if in each time period your current users send out 10 new invites, and you have a 10% conversion rate, then at 0% saturation all ten of the invites will be sent to new users, and you will acquire 1 new user for each current user in each time period. However, as the network becomes more saturated this conversion rate will lower - at 50% saturation, 5 of every 10 invites will go to users who either already have the application, or who have already rejected it. Thus, your 10% conversion rate will only apply to the 5 new users, so you'll get 0.5 new users for each current user in each time period.

Slide 5: You may think that, with 60m users, it would be almost impossible for any one Facebook application to hit its 'carrying capacity', i.e. full network saturation. However, the average user on Facebook does not have a social graph equally spread across the whole Facebook ecosystem. Instead, they will exist within 1-3 closely knit networks. The picture in the slide is a visual representation of my own social graph on Facebook, using an application called nexus. The large radial curve shows my former university, Durham, where you can see very heavy connections between all users. Likewise, the small curve shows my hometown, Malvern, which is equally interconnected. 

If a developer seeds an application to their own social graph, it is likely to only gain traction in the networks he is heavily connected to. So, for example, the Durham University network has 24,000 users - if only 10% of users are likely to install your application, this leaves a total carrying capacity of any application only seeded to Durham University of 2,400. Of course, you could be lucky, and the application may spread to other networks, but the chance of this is much lower.

Slide 6: Once new user growth has slowed or plateaued, it is left to the retention rate to ensure that any application maintains a high active user base. The graph shows how at 99% retention rate the active user base steadily falls off once new user growth has stopped.

Slide 7: Although 50% retention rate may sound high, once your new user acquisition has slowed or stopped, this will create a dramatic fall in active users, down to almost nothing in the same time period it took for your userbase to grow to its peak - creating the shark fin.

Slide 9: There are a number of ways to prevent the 'shark fin'. The first is to ensure that you have the maximum carrying capacity possible - this means that an application must be seeded early into as many different and diverse networks as it can. For some applications you may be able to do this by seeding to fan pages - even if these only have a few thousand fans, they are likely to be from diverse networks, and are more likely than other users to install a relevant application. If you don't have access to a fan page, then advertising, either with banner ads or social ads around Facebook, or by using application advertising networks, is the only way to ensure that your application is widely seeded (you could also use traditional advertising or other channels to reach your current customers). 

Once you've ensured a high carrying capacity, you then need to ensure that your application has a clear retention loop. The Facebook application platform is great for viral loops, with applications able to build in newsfeed stories and invite requests into the fabric of the application. However, although this is fine for growing the installed user base, to maintain a high active user base you must have a clear retention loop that keeps users coming back. This is a serious pitfall that many applications on Facebook have fallen into - and without a continuing active user base, there's no-one to market to or to click on adverts. 

It's extremely important that you measure your retention rates from day 1, and test the effect of changes to the application on retention rate. Although the drop off is disguised by exponential growth during the initial phase, the drop off is still happening, and if you wait until active users have dropped off the other side of the shark fin then even if you fix the retention loop you will have less active users than otherwise. Thus, you need to ensure the retention loop is working as early as possible to ensure that you hit the maximum number of active users you can, and keep them. 

If you're interested in the maths I'd advise you to check out Andrew Chen's post on this, especially his notes about cohort analysis for testing retention rate over time.

Read this doc on Scribd: Jumping the Shark

Bebo + AOL +Time Warner + AIM = Watch films with your friends online

I was reading through the interview of Ron Grant, AOL's COO, on Giga Om, where he mentioned potential synergies with Time Warner and Bebo with regards to media and entertainment, and have been thinking about what this could mean in the future. With the addition of the AIM and ICQ instant messaging (IM) systems to the equation (they are owned by AOL), they could be the first company to actually get going with interactive online film viewing with your friends. 

People have been speculating for a long time about the possibilities for combining IM with online media viewing to allow people to watch films or shows 'with' their friends, by being able to chat with integrated IM as they watch. Bebo has been one of the most forward thinking of the social networks when it comes to media, producing shows like KateModern which have interactive elements, and could well be about to take another leap forward. With all the elements above they are in a unique position which should allow them to take the lead in this area - stay tuned. 

I've heard of a couple of tools and platforms which at least have this possibility, for example Apple TV, but none which also link in to the social graph (either with social networks or instant messaging), and none which are currently available - do you know of any?

IM and Facebook - a prediction I made in January (kind of)

Was reading back on the article I posted in January, Some Thoughts on the Pew Internet Report, and realised I'd said this at the time:

"A big drop in chat room popularity

The study found a drop of chatroom use to just 18%, from 55% in 2000. As social networks are allowing people to reach others, including interest groups, and form weak ties with them by becoming friends or joining similar groups, with instant messaging allowing these users to have direct chat, and even to form their own private chat groups via the IM clients, I expect that these conversations are still going on, just in a different format. Watch this area - instant chat in Facebook groups, possibly?"

Okay, so not exactly the same - but my recent research on Fubar and their use of exactly this leads me to predict again that this isn't far off. 

Facebook: Friend List Privacy Controls

In an update this evening, Facebook has added completely granular privacy controls using friendlists, and also added the option to show more information to 'friends of friends'. It is now possible to control what elements of your profile can be seen by different friend lists, and the lists themselves have been updated so that it's very easy to move users to new lists or between lists.

As part of this change, the 'limited profile' has now got its own friend list. In addition, the Facebook blog reports that when uploading new photos or albums, they can be specified for a particular friend list - so you could share an album just with your family, for example, or just with your girlfriend. 

It isn't clear what the priority of the lists are - i.e. if someone is in two lists, one of which has access to photos and one of which doesn't, which one trumps? I'm assuming that being in more friend lists always give more access, apart from the limited profile list which has special status and restricts access regardless of other lists. This seems to be the case although I cannot find it stated anywhere.

This is a great move for Facebook and will be really useful for users expanding their social graph to a wider range of people. For example, I may wish to share my photos with my family, but not my wall, which is more likely to contain offensive banter from friends, or visa versa. 

Clay Shirkey at the RSA

I went to listen to Clay Shirkey speak on his new book, Here Comes Everybody, at the RSA this afternoon. It was very interesting, opened my eyes to some different uses and potential for social media tools, and great to see an organisation like the RSA pro-actively embracing social media (they're working on turning their fellows into an online network). 

I won't write a full run-down of the talk (just buy the book - which, by the way, I have but haven't read yet. It's in the big pile by my bed, so I'll reach it sometime soon, hopefully), but I'll just mention a few key points:

Twitter made it more fun

I tweeted about the event this morning, and because of that quite a few people who follow me decided to come along, spurred by other people in the network saying how good he is as a speaker. We were all live-tweeting comments and picks from the talk, discussing style (e.g. the choice to group questions was very annoying. It just increased the time spent answering, as Clay had to think back to all three questions he'd just heard, sometimes getting clarification again - this wasn't his fault, some of the questions were long and complicated), and getting feedback from each other and others in our network who weren't at the event. 

Social Media gives individuals the tools to co-ordinate action

Clay talked a lot about the imbalance of power that formerly existed between co-ordinated organisations and un-co-ordinated individuals. He used the Facebook/HSBC example as a prime example - a couple of years ago, HSBC could easily of cancelled the interested free overdrafts of graduates, as the graduates had left their close university networks, and would just be angry individuals. However, because of Facebook these individual angry graduates could group together and co-ordinate their anger - regardless of geographic distance. This forced HSBC to reconsider. 

Techniques like Flash Mobbing are also being used to great effect for political action, with people being able to make stands against dictatorships (he used Belarus as an example) by creating real-time protest events which are impossible for the state to prevent happening.

This re-balance of power to individuals essentially takes away the monopoly that organisations have had on many parts of life, and could have big implications for the future - at the moment, the state organises many parts of life that are very difficult for separate individuals to handle, but which could be handled potentially far more efficiently by co-ordinated individuals.

Before we start dreaming of a libertarian utopia, he did emphasise that in all of these things, the governance question does always spring up eventually, usually when a tool becomes successful - the more success, the more spam and crap, and someone's got to decide where to draw the line to ensure the tool remains useful. And someone's got to decide who gets to decide where the line is, and what their constraints are, etc. 

The next big thing............... Email!

I stepped up to ask what tool he thought could create the next step change in social behaviour, pointing out my use of Twitter throughout the event. He started by saying it's the use of a tool, not the tool itself, which can create revolutionary change - wikis being a perfect example. They were created in '95, but it wasn't until 2003 and Wikipedia that they suddenly started making a big difference. 

Clay thinks that the big thing for the next year is email - because it's completely ubiquitous, and could be used to organise a much greater range of activity and communications. He thinks that Twitter is great but a few years off making a difference to mainstream behaviour. 

What do you think?

IM, Social Networks, and the Death of the SMS

This week has seen some big news for Instant Messaging (IM): first, the huge Bebo acquisition by AOL, and their subsequent announcement of integration with their AIM and ICQ IM clients (the NYT called it "Bebo: Randy Falco’s $850 Million Rescue Plan for AIM"); and second the announcement that Facebook is planning to launch its own IM service. 

This could mark quite a step change in the IM and social net spheres. IM is a great tool for having multiple one-on-one in-depth conversations. For myself, I used it a lot as a teenager, as did all my friends, spending hours chatting away to friends at home as well as friends all over the world. However, as I grew up, went to university, left home, I made new friends, and gradually my 'friend' list on MSN became more and more outdated. Now, it has almost no relation to my social graph, other than the few old friends I've stayed in touch with. I do use it still - but apart from those few friends it's now mainly for work purposes. 

For myself, my social graph on Facebook is pretty accurate and up to date. If I was going to chat to anyone on IM, it would be the people I'm friends with on Facebook.

I'm betting that this move could create a boost for IM among adult users of social networks out of the work sphere as it becomes an easy means of communicating with friends, without the need to keep your IM contact list up to date with your social graph. 

Fubar, and Live Chat Groups

I was involved recently in research on the social network Fubar, which gained some coverage when Compete reported that it had grown 3,272,217% in the last year. One of the most stand-out features of this site is its heavy use of IM and live chat between users. All users have a 'shoutbox', which allows any other user on the site to start up a private IM chat with them when they're both online, and their groups (or 'lounges') use live chat, rather than the discussion forum / bulletin board system of most other social networks. 

This is interesting, as normal 'chat rooms' have declined in popularity considerably since the rise of social networks has allowed users to interact more readily with their friends online, and with 'real people', which the anonymity of the original chat rooms made difficult. By combining social networks with live chat and IM, however, users know who they're talking to, and the chat will often be more constructive and less brazen or offensive - if users have spent a long time building up a social network profile and friend list, they don't want to have their account removed for acting like idiots in a chat room. What's most interesting about this is that the lounges in Fubar are far more lively, interactive and engaging than the groups on Facebook, which most of the time can seem pretty dead. 

With the speed that Fubar has grown in the last year, it would be silly of the big social networks not to be looking at what they're offering, and it will be interesting to see if they start offering live chat in groups as well. 

Mobile Integration and the Death of the SMS

With more and more social networks integrating in the mobile sphere, and services like Yahoo's OneConnect looking to integrate these further, this could be a great opportunity to have easy phone based IM with all of your contacts. A similar service is already available with the Blackberry Messenger, but this is only for BB users, and requires knowing an additional 'pin', so has quite high barriers to entry. However, it is great to use - and between friends who are BB users, it makes it really easy to chat and stay constantly in touch, without having to worry about the limitations (or cost) of SMS. If I had my whole social graph on Blackberry messenger, and they were all connected regardless of their phone, I would use it as my primary communication tool. 

The Monetisation Issue

This is the one problem with all the above - how is anyone going to make any money (apart from the mobile service providers who can charge a data tariff)? IM has traditionally been very hard to monetise - ads, like on social networks, are pretty ineffective, and for the same reasons - users are looking to engage with each other, not to click away somewhere else. 

It looks as though Facebook will be keeping the IM on site for the time being - which they're betting will increase time spent on the site, and hopefully ad clicks. However, this isn't how users like to use IM, and I expect clients will become available, either from FB itself or through an API. 

There are lots of possibilities - e.g. integrating IM with applications (as MSN has done with some games), paid virtual gifts with the emoticons (or branded emoticons), direct branding or sponsorship opportunities (e.g. the Chat Box at DontStayIn is sponsored by O2). 

It will be interesting to look at the different strategies used by Facebook and Bebo, and of course to keep an eye on the activities of the other social networks in this area.

Facebook Developer Garage - slides now up

For those of you interested in my write up of the Facebook Developer Garage, I've now got links to the top apps/cavemen emotions slides, the copyright talk slides, and also the Facebook poll results. Enjoy!

Facebook Developer Garage, 5th March - "Growing Up"

Last night I went along to the London Facebook Developer Garage, hosted by Sun Microsystems. I help to organise these through the garage committee. Last night was about "apps Growing Up, how we use them in business, how applications compete against each other and how they're coping with the real world of copyright".

The event was pretty packed, as normal, and amazing almost everyone managed to turn up at exactly the same time, so there was a huge queue to register. After everyone had arrived we cracked open the beers, and the pizzas (loads and loads of them) were delivered from Dominos).

Once we'd all had our fill we settled down. Had a quick introduction from Toby Beresford, who is the primary organiser of the garages here. He played us the "Facebook Anthem", a UK made song about being bored of Facebook and annoyed especially with applications. We then had to turn to the person next to us to ask what they thought about the future of applications (this discussion was continued into the pub after). 

Alexey Gabsatarov took a look at some of the top applications, stating that 90% of the top 200 apps have no utility or rational appeal, and appeal to our emotional make up, or as he described it: "apps a caveman would like". He suggested that our basic emotions are hardwired and have remained the same since caveman times, and so groups applications in this fashion:

The Self (personality tests etc)

The Family (kissing/hugging/personal relationships)

The Tribe (Friend lists, top friends etc)

The Chief (Compare/Compete with friends)

It was an interesting talk, although it does mainly apply to the 'emotional' applications with little rational utility, which I believe will decrease in predominance as more engaging and useful applications grow, boosted by the crack down on spammy applications which have fueled the growth of many of these simple apps. 

Next up, Andy McLoughlin from Huddle.net and Tom Woolway from Techlightenment took the stage to discuss the Huddle Workspaces application, which allows you to have secure spaces to store files and work notes, whether for personal or work. Huddle have a 'freemium' business model, allowing full functionality to free users, with additional storage for payment, and large scale serviced enterprise clients. They admitted that they designed the application mainly as a marketing tool to get users to sign up to the main service, and so didn't include complete functionality, although stressed that users within Facebook still had more than enough functionality to make use of the application without ever leaving, and the PHP facebook application works off the primary (ASP.NET) application using a mixture of APIs with SOAP, so that Facebook users could work alongside users from the main website, and could interchange between using Facebook and the main site with the same account (although to use the main site with the extra features you have to register, with your email address). 

I asked why they couldn't of given full functionality within the application, and why they thought that users were more valuable on their main site. They responded honestly that they wanted users email addresses to be able to try and upsell, rather than doing that through the application itself which may put off users. This is valid, although it is possible to send emails directly to users of apps through Facebook. It would also of been possible to ask users to register with their email inside the app to get access to more functions. What do you think?

David Parfect, from the new Facebook London office, came up to show us the polling system on Facebook. Relevant to our initial discussion, he asked "Apps on Facebook are useful for...", and bought 500 responses at $1 each, which is the fastest way (the votes started coming in real time). I jotted down the responses, but don't have the screen shots, so the wording of the answers may be slightly inaccurate:

1. Interacting with friends: 9%

2. Showing your emotions: 2%

3. Making your day go quicker: 15%

4. Irritating friends: 20%

5. Nothing: 54%

The responders were roughly split between male/female, with most from the 18-24 age range. Hmm... not a great response for application developers! Nevertheless, I believe this reflects the general fatigue of all the crappy, spammy apps that have pervaded Facebook for too long, and which I believe will die out over the course of the next six months, to be replaced by engaging, relevant applications. 

We had a great talk on copyright issues, with a particular look at Scrabulous, from Vanessa Barnett, BLP Law. This was really fun, and had a long digression into the legality of showing photos of Banksy work (it's still artwork, and thus copyright, even though many of it is also illegal graffiti). 

Matt Clayton, from Wakari, gave another excellent talk. He was hired by Sony to build an application to promote the new Rambo movie here in the UK, however at the same time another company was briefed to do almost exactly the same application to promote it in the US (duh). The US version was called Get Rambo, the UK one Become Rambo. In summary, Get Rambo tanked, whilst Become Rambo did amazingly well. Why? Well, that made up most of the talk!

There were a couple of key reasons. First, here in the UK they'd been promoting a Rambo facebook page, and by the time the app launched they had a few thousand fans who all installed the app and provided the first boost. This meant that when they started advertising the app (ad spend unknown) people saw activity and usage, a big difference. Also, instead of a simple attacking option which Get Rambo used, Become Rambo included a 'gameplay' element, with points and rankings, and different weapons which unlocked as you got more ranking points, as well as options to defend or retaliate. When you got to 100 points you 'became Rambo', and they had a secret status at 300 points. Matt said that there were users with over 2000 points still battling it out. Over 5 weeks, the length of the campaign, they got over 50,000 users with 6-7k daily active users.

They worked really hard on the page flow to keep users coming back, and added loads of viral functionality, with a really high conversion rate. The application itself is beatifully designed, combining the Rambo style with Facebook design features. Matt also talked about the huge importance of constant testing, saying that tiny tweaks made huge differences to invites and conversion levels. 

After the event, I went to the pub round the corner with Toby, Matt and Mike Butcher from TechcrunchUK. Around a few drinks we had some great discussions on the future of applications. Anyone following my tweets through the event would of heard that during his talk, Matt said that being reported in Techcrunch had no effect on user levels and was a waste of time for application developers trying to get users - not realising Mike was standing in the door. Of course, Techcrunch is primarily a business publication, so it was unlikely to make a difference - and Mike and Matt were getting on just fine in the pub after, so no hard feelings!

Facebook, the Friendfeed Killer.

Last month, Friendfeed launched publicly with the announcement that they had $5m of funding. They're a social aggregator, feeding in stories from your different social tools, e.g. Twitter, Flickr, Delicious etc. However, they have the added ability for comments and discussions to be started about any of the individual posts. 

It had a lot of fanfare and created dedicated fans among the blogosphere because of the value of some of the conversations taking place. 

However, as Techrunch reported a couple of weeks ago, Facebook are opening up their newsfeed to allow external sites (such as Twitter, Flickr and Delicious) access, essentially making it the same service as Friendfeed, with the added value that not only are all your friends already on Facebook, but also that Facebook have developed an advanced algorithm for picking and choosing stories to ensure they're relevant to you, rather than delivering everything in the newsfeed - and you can still get everything from a person in their mini-feed if you want.

Of course, Facebook hasn't announced that they're adding comments into this... but, wait a minute - they have announced a new profile layout, with a single big page which combines the wall and the mini-feed into one, big feed: put them together and you're going to be able to comment directly after stories coming in on your friends mini-feed. Of course, this isn't quite as advanced as Friendfeed, but then the new profile page isn't fully confirmed yet, and they could well go the whole hog.

If they do, this would certainly make the existence of friend feed almost entirely pointless for most Facebook users. What do you think?

8 Random Things About Me

I've just been tagged by Thayer Driver to share 8 random things about myself. Hmmm, I better choose wisely...

1. I've played guitar since I was 12, initially electric lead guitar, then acoustic for the last 7 years or so. I sing, and write my own songs, and have performed in bands and solo, but I do it for myself more than anything else.

2. I've been training in Baguazhang, a Chinese internal martial art, for almost 9 years. I get up early to train, usually for about an hour a day.

3. I was a PC user for years, but switched to Mac a year and a half ago and haven't looked back.

4. I'm half Spanish, but although I've stayed in Spain with family many times my grasp of the language is very basic.

5. I had originally planned to be a barrister, and have a law degree from Durham University, before I realised I was far more interested in business, running my own companies, and generally doing my own thing.

6. I'm one of those people who are interested in everything, and have to work really hard to limit what I do. Things I've been interested in (some pretty seriously) include card magic, kayaking, surfing, break dancing and hiking, to name just a few, and I'm a prolific reader.

7. I was in Scouts when I was a teenager, got all the way to the Queen Scout Award, which is a step up from Gold Duke of Edinburgh.

8. I have family who live in Kenya, I've been out there many times. Luckily they were out of the country when the troubles hit. The election problems were really saddening, Kenya had so much promise - I just hope it manages to fix itself and get back on track.

Well, that's my eight - what are yours?

I tag Kelly Rusk, Scott Gavin, Dan Light, and Jeremy Gould.

Added tags: Laura Whitehead