Facebook Developer Garage October 2008 - tickets now available

TICKETS NOW AVAILABLE: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/183235061

Join us this month as:

* Phil Clandillon and Steve Milbourne from Sony BMG talk about an application based competition they ran across Facebook and Bebo to promote Michael Jackson, lessons they've learnt and what else they're doing on the platforms

* Chris Thorpe from MySpace discusses the changover from Open Social 0.7 to 0.8, and why sometimes it still makes sense to use Javascript in normal applications. 

* Karl from Social Cash talks about using Facebook Connect

* Mat from Sun talks about what they've been doing with Zembly (a tool to build and host applications across multiple social platforms)

* Toby from Nudge shows us their latest application, Spotted!

* Iskandar from Nudge goes over the latest developments on the Facebook platform. 

This month thanks to Gold Sponsor Sun (http://uk.sun.com/startupessentials/) we're back at Sun Microsystems Customer Briefing Centre and they'll be laying on the pizzas, wifi and beer 

Our Event Sponsors: Nudge (www.nudgelondon.com/blog), Logicode (www.logicode.com) and Social Cash (www.socialcash.com)

Media partners: Newspepper.com

You're not anyone if you're not on Twitter

What a great video, by Ben Walker - apparently composed one morning at the Tuttle Club in Soho:

Facebook are NOT launching a music service

I am getting really annoyed with the constant posts all over the blogosphere about how Facebook should 'take control' and launch their own music service, up against the hugely successful music community/application iLike (over 5m monthly active users on Facebook).

We already know that Facebook is developing a payments system. This will allow any application to sell ANYTHING (a real shopping mall, with unlimited shops) and Facebook will get a cut. This includes music, digital items, real items. This will make them a lot of money. And they won't have to disrupt their core focus (being a social platform), or seriously piss off one of their biggest application partners. They also avoid scaring off the prospect of any serious VC money going to social app developers (instead, by placing their trust in developers to create and sell the content, whilst providing an easy monetisation route, they'll encourage investment; creating more successful applications selling things through their platform; creating more money).

Facebook is a business, with a clear focus; to be the social platform of choice. They clearly differentiate themselves in this way from Bebo and MySpace, which have more of a content focus. Their strategy has been working, and they recently overtook MySpace as the biggest social network in the west. I'm really dismayed to see well-respected blogs in the social media space write articles saying Facebook should do this, without even mentioning the upcoming payment system (which Facebook first started talking about almost 10 months ago). So much so they won't even get my links. 

Netlog: localised applications for the European market

Netlog is one of the most significant European social networks, with over 33m users, and 25 language versions. It's easy to forget about some of the great sites that mainly exist in other languages than English, but if you want to hit the European market then this is an important area to be aware of.

One of the difficulties in building applications for the European market (Netlog supports Open Social) is the language barrier; building out 25 separate language applications is timely and costly. However, Techcrunch UK recently reported that Netlog are opening up their translation and localisation capabilities to third party developers. This will hugely lower the barrier to creating multiple-language applications. How it will compare to Facebook's own translation APIs (allowing users to translate applications for developers), which hasn't had a lot of publicity, is yet to be seen - the actual tools don't seem to be available yet from the Netlog developer site. 

CrunchBase Information

Netlog

Information provided by CrunchBase

Bebo ups the game against Facebook's core market

Arguably the biggest factor in Facebook's huge success has been their ability to have a near monopoly over the student market. This causes new students to switch over from their previous social networks (often Bebo and MySpace), and for it to spread into the workplace as the students graduate. 

When Facebook first hit the student dorms, social networking was relatively immature. Most young people knew what they were, and had heard of MySpace, but a majority weren't actively using them, and the ones that were used them to meet new people or share interests. Facebook turned this round by being specifically for organising and keeping track of your REAL life contacts, and their 'exclusive' focus made them spread very quickly, especially among the Ivy League and Red Brick universities. I had first hand experience of this, being at Durham University when Facebook first came over to the UK. I was speaking to a senior exec at MySpace earlier in the year about this, and he said that it came as a real surprise to them - they "just hadn't thought about it being used in that way". 

Bebo's main differentiator from Facebook for a while has been it's focus on original content, both through partnerships and their own shows. They've had some huge successes, notably KateModern. The Social Times reported recently about a new show that Bebo are launching, Meet the Freshers:

Bebo will be launching yet another new original program tomorrow about first year university students in the United Kingdom. They are going all over the country to see what these students do with their lives. Based on the trailer below it sounds like they drink, party and have sex and not much else. It also doesn’t appear that this show has much of a production budget.

This is obviously a low-budget, experimental production. However, I think it could be successful; freshers are generally nervous, experiencing new things, and doing their best to meet new friends and fit in. In this situation, they'll be looking for social proof that they're acting the way they should be. If Bebo can offer to this to new students, they may be able to maintain their grasp on all those 18/19 year olds who would otherwise be setting up their Facebook accounts. Will this trump Facebook's purer focus on being a social connector? It will be interesting to see. 

Social Network Apps; the Agency Perspective

When will social network applications become a mainstream marketing tool? When there is enough consistent evidence of ROI that large agencies feel comfortable to recommend and sell them to their most conservative clients. This will take a while to get to, but the faster it gets there the better - for brands, who if they approach this correctly can engage with users in a way like no other, whilst learning more about their customers than anywhere else on the web; for all of us working in the social media industry; and for users, who will benefit from the increased competition and experience in producing great applications that they choose to use and enjoy. 

To get to this stage quicker, people working in the social media space need to understand how agencies think and what evidence they need to see in order to feel comfortable recommending it to clients. It was great to have Duncan Arbour from LBi talking at the Facebook Developer Garage last week. After getting burned trying to make apps for some clients, he recommends sponsorship or advertising within already successful applications where this is possible, rather than building something completely new. In an interview recently with Inside Facebook, Camilo La Cruz from Rapp Collins again said that the failure of many applications to be successful has caused them to be wary. 

A big issue that I've had direct experience of is brands and agencies assuming that they can just build an application, chuck it out there, and it will get millions of users. To a very small extent this was possible with some applications back in the early days of the platform, when competition was minimal and viral channels were plentiful. Even then it only happened in a very small number of cases. Now, it is even more difficult - and a proper plan has to be in place to seed and grow the application. Although there are still many viral channels still available through the social networks, by their very nature they require people to be using the application first - and for an application to spread far, they require a number of people across different areas and networks. There is more information on this in my post Jumping the Shark - see slide 5. Seeding effectively is a science in itself, and agencies will be just as annoyed if they end up spend too much on blanket advertising across a social network with very high effective CPAs. An agency wouldn't expect to launch a website with no promotion, and social network applications are just the same. 

More and more brands and agencies are realising this; and realising that to really get out there and get an effective ROI they have to put some reasonably significant investment into it, rather than a tiny test budget. The more evidence provided, the more money they'll put into it, and the greater the effectiveness and ROI (as long as it's done properly!). 

If you work for a brand of agency, what are your thoughts on social network applications? And if you develop applications, what has been your experience of working with brands and agencies?

What is the iPlatform?

Early this year I began working on the concept of the iPlatform, a tool to allow any website to integrate fully with multiple social networks, using their application platforms. I teamed up with Dan Lester, who had built Open Socket, a tool allowing Open Social applications to plug into the Facebook API, and we've spent all summer working on the concept, discussing it with customers, and building the actual technology behind it. Last week I sat down with Michelle Acton-Bond, who we're working with on our go-to-market strategy, to create a simple video which will help to explain the use case behind the iPlatform. We're currently working with launch partners, and will be keeping you up-to-date on the progress of the iPlatform on theiplatform.com 

The iPlatform Demo from Joshua March on Vimeo.

Facebook developer garage London, September '08

Last night I was at the Facebook developer garage we run every month in London. We had some great speakers but didn't have our usual videos, so I made a few notes over the night.

One of the first speakers was Chris Thorpe, who has recently taken on the role of evangelist for the Myspace developer platform in the UK. I've known Chris for a while, he's a great guy with a lot of experience developing on all of the social network platforms. His talk was really just to say hello, but he also talked about how the strict TOS on Myspace restricts applications from being spammy, yet many apps on the platform are still growing fast. They're really looking for 

great apps that add long term value, are social, relevant, and increase self-expression. Because of their stricter TOS app approval can take a while - but Chris gave out his email, he's happy to look and advise on apps being developed, and he has direct access to the platform developer team in the US. Contact him at cthorpeATmyspace.com. They've also set up Twitter/ukmdp to track what they're upto and other developer focused events they'll be running.

Next up were Duncan Arbour and Jon Marks from LBi, a large agency. They gave a very funny and candid talk on what brands are looking for in this space, and also how the agencies have been approaching it with clients. One of their main lines of thought, after being burned attempting to make their own apps for clients, is that it's actually better to find successful applications and to advertise or sponsor these directly rather than to compete with them.

Jon Cole, the MD of AdKnowledge then came up. Adknowledge are the leading social ad network worldwide, serving around 10billion paid impressions every month. They have a very impressive automatic targeting system which tracks not only all the demographic information 

from users but also all of their interests, and use these to automatically find which combination of applications, demographics has the highest CTR and eCPM.

Jon also talked about the position of adverts within applications, and the importance of ensuring that they are within the natural mouse/eye movement that are made when using the application (as opposed to just sticking ads at the top or bottom). Interestingly he thinks this is the reason Facebook shifted their ads to the right- so that people go through them on the way to the scroll bar.

Reto Laemmler, an entrepreneur and developer from silicon valley, showed us his new Facebook app (apps.Facebook.com/doodlepolls), allowing users to set up quick an easy polls between their friends, e.g to plan a date for a meetup, choose a film to see etc. The app integrates well with their main site (polls exist both within the app and the site when you set them up, allowing users to take part even if they're not on Facebook), which has over 2m monthly users.

And last but certainly not least Max Nierderhoffer from Atlas Ventures gave us some insight into the VC world when it comes to investing in ventures related to social network applications, with his main advice being to build something and show it works before you go for investment.

We had our AGM beforehand, where I'm very happy to announce that I was elected host and chairman for the coming year. A big thanks to Toby Beresford, who set up the garage a year ago and has done an excellet job on getting us to where we are now, and of course Sun start-up essentials, who have provided us with venue, pizza and beer!

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Sent from my iPhone

SEO & Brand Monitoring Alert: Facebook groups are getting indexed

There's been growing awareness in the past few days that 'public' Facebook groups (groups available to all users within Facebook) and their discussion forums are now showing up in search results, alongside public brand pages. Facebook has a huge number of groups on all subjects, and the fact that they are now fully public and being indexed means that they've just become much more important from an SEO and brand monitoring perspective. On the other side of the coin, they've also just become much easier to track through site monitoring tools and Google alerts. 

As Inside Facebook points out, the group forum text is not even searchable within Facebook yet, so this could be a bit of a surprise for users. As every comment will link back to its user's profile, this is another reason to be careful what you say within the groups. 

d.Construct 2008

On Friday I headed down to Brighton for the d.Construct 'designing the social web' conference, courtesy of the Guardian (they gave away a few free tickets as sponsors, I was lucky enough to get one after the main conference had sold out). 

It was a really interesting day, with some great speakers (see the line up on the official site), I met up with some good friends and met some familiar faces from Twitter. It was especially great to meet and hang out with Mel Kirk, Michael Smith, Alex Tew and Ryan Carson. 

During the conference, the definite highlight for me was the talk by Aleks Krotoski on 'Playing the web: how gaming makes the internet (and the world) a better place'. She's a brilliant performer on stage (despite professing her nervousness), with an awesome depth of experience that goes across gaming, social media and tech. Partly her speech was a rally call to get the gaming industry to talk more to the web industry as she described the huge parallels between them, and the areas where they could both help each other out. In short, games engage people, internet connects people, do both together and make lots of money. 

A few bits I took away from her talk:

1. Graphics don't really matter, it's all about the gameplay

2. Story is the last thing though about in a game, again it's all about the PLAY - fun, enjoyment and stickiness. 

3. Some games still employ 'controlled systems', simple gameplay with linear progression. However more and more users are looking for 'open systems' where users can explore and do what they want within the game world to progress in their own way (e.g. the GTA games). These are great but can be made too big.

4. The next step again are 'enabling systems' where the social value in the game is created by users themselves; e.g species in Spore, the stories created in World of Warcraft, items and buildings in Second Life. 

If you were thinking about heading down this year but didn't get the chance, I definitely recommend going down next time - you'll see me there. 

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UPDATE: Aleks has done a full write up of her talk on the Guardian blog, go check it out. 

Content ID: a paradigm shift in copyright and content monetisation

YouTube recently announced Content ID, a system which automatically works out the original copyright ownership of user-uploaded content, allowing the owners to then take it down - or monetise it. They are reporting that content owners are choosing to monetise 90% of this content. 

For YouTube, this could prove transformational; for a long time they've only been able to monetise 'official' content, a tiny part of their video library. With content ID, there's potential to monetise almost 100% of their content. 

Even more exciting for me is the prospect of this extending in the future to become a complete web copyright management and revenue sharing system, reaching across all of the major websites. Potentially this could allow content creators to freely distribute their works, whether text, music or video, and allow users to share, distribute and mash-up, safe in the knowledge that they'll get a revenue share from all the sites the content is being accessed. If a user uploads a music video to YouTube, they'll automatically get a revenue share of the YouTube video. If someone then posts this to Facebook, they'll continue to revenue share from the Facebook monetisation, and so on. 

This has the potential to completely revolutionise both the spread and monetisation of all content on the web. That the beginnings of the system are being developed by Google mean it will be able to spread across multiple properties and link up to thousands of content creators far quicker than otherwise; however, it is highly unlikely that major non-Google properties will hand control over their content monetisation to Google. Ideally, a non-profit organisation needs to be running the system. Less ideally (but more likely) it could turn into a joint venture between a number of major sites, like Visa for card payments, eventually becoming an independent entity (Visa recently IPO'd). 

We're at an early stage, but this is a big step forward - and could herald some serious changes in the coming years. 

Royal Air Force launch simple Facebook app

One of the sponsored links on the Facebook homepage this morning led me to a new application, Best Crew By Far, from the RAF. It's a simple application that allows you to select your 'best crew' for different RAF roles. I've opted to be a lone ranger fighter pilot:

It shows you the roles you've been offered by friends and the stats to which position suits you best. This is pretty much it; they're not going for any long-term retentive elements, just a bit of fun to show off the different roles within the RAF organisation (personally, I don't know why anyone would choose anything other than Fighter Pilot. Presumably this is why they need the app). Each of the role names links in to the relevant RAF careers page, where instead of a simple job specs they have real stories from people who actually do the job: 

It's good to see an organisation like the RAF start to experiment with social networks; the simple mechanism to ask actual users to recommend their friends for different posts could prove to be an innovative way of getting more people to realise the range of jobs available. The app has a few thousand users at the moment; it will be interesting to see how they evolve the application, and if this spreads out to other military recruitment efforts. 

Authonomy: the future of niche social networks

Authonomy was launched this week by HarperCollins. The Financial Times reports:

HarperCollins is the latest publisher to make the foray into social networking sites by encouraging would-be authors to upload sample chapters to Authonomy.com, a website that launches to the public on Wednesday.Readers – taking the traditional role of editors – will then sift potential J.K. Rowlings from those fated to remain unpublished. While HarperCollins is not promising book deals, it has committed to read the 10 top-rated submissions to Authonomy every month and hopes other publishers will also join the site.

This is a brilliant initiative. There is currently a boom in niche social networks, however most are formed very loosely around a niche concept, without offering any differentiating features to mainstream social networks like Facebook. Where people are highly passionate about something this can work; for example sport club fan sites. Even here though, our own research on UK premiership football clubs shows much higher levels of engagement in (usually unofficial) club groups/communities within main social networks than the club's own sites.  

HarperCollins have taken a very different approach; rather than just forming a community of aspiring authors (of which I'm sure there are already thousands, mostly unused) they've really thought through what would actually add value to the target users. Possibly the best thing about this is that it's a great example of using social media to fill a real business need; as the FT article goes on to report: 

HarperCollins “conservatively” estimates it receives 50 submissions a week from unpublished authors, forming what is known in the trade as the “slush pile”. By enabling readers and other would-be authors to read unsolicited manuscripts, rather than just a few “overstretched” editors, the publisher hopes to make the search for new talent more manageable.

“We as a company can’t possibly read everything,” said Charlie Redmayne, HarperCollins’ director of digital development. “So why not build a community of people that are going to engage in this content and get them to read and vote on it? By getting the wisdom of the masses, we can get them to do the work for us.”

By crowdsourcing the initial search for promising new authors, HarperCollins will be able to save significant resources in their search for new books, whilst exposing potential books to a wider audience, allowing them to gauge popularity more accurately. 

With people spending more and more of their time on major sites like Facebook, MySpace and Bebo, because of the network effect (as more people use these sites, they more accurately reflect real life social graphs and users' average number of friend connections increase. As people use these sites to interact with their friends, the more friends, the more time spent interacting), they are less and less likely to want to use separate community based sites. New services allowing people to use their social graph on external sites (like Facebook friend connect) will make this easier, although it still won't change the trend for users to spend more and more of their community based time through their main social network. 

For a niche community site to exist completely independently of major social networks, their has to be clear value to the user over and above simply interacting with like-minded people; this is something that corporations should keep in mind when they're looking at using community features, both externally and internally (even with corporate social networks, if all they do is although employees to connect then they're more likely to use Facebook or LinkedIn). 

If you have any other good examples of niche social networks offering bespoke features that add real value to users whilst differentiating them from major sites let me know. 

Bedcrunch.com review a table

See the original review here

Next Facebook Garage London: September 10th

TICKETS FOR SALE NOW:
http://septembergarage.eventbrite.com/

Join us this month at Sun Microsystems, King William St as:

* We listen to Steve Ford from Channel Four as he gives us his Client perspective

* Max Niederhofer from Atlas ventures informs us on Financing and finding those Facebook apps that "If you build it, they will come" 

* Martine Parry from Apply Group gives us some lessons from the games industry.

* John Cole from Adknowlege, the UK's leading Advertising Social Network explores marketing and monetising your app.

*Duncan Arbour from Lbi talks about Digital Marketing

*And Iskandar Najmuddin from Nudge tells us What's new on the platform.

Plus all the regulars- Apps to Watch and this months App Awards

This month thanks to Gold Sponsor Sun (http://uk.sun.com/startupessentials/) we're back at Sun Microsystems Customer Briefing Centre and they'll be laying on the pizzas, wifi and beer 

Our Video Sponsor: Logicode, And our Event Sponsors: Nudge (www.nudgelondon.com/blog) 

Media partners: www.intruders.tv 

This is a ticket only event. Tickets are £7. 

Student ticket available for £4 with a valid Student ID card. 

NB: Tickets can be bought on the door however, please buy online to avoid disapointment 

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Be sure to join the Facebook group to be kept up to date and get notified of the next event too: 

http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=5282952746 

Bebo's Open Media Platform vs. Applications

Last November, Bebo launched the 'OpenMedia Platform', allowing content producers to apply to distribute and monetise their video content through the Bebo platform. If approved, producers get a channel to distribute their content, in the same format as a normal Bebo profile, controlling the skins and layout, and also getting control over advertising on the page. Bebo don't host the video's themselves, although offer a number of different hosting partners, including blip.tv, revver and ooyala. 

Bebo have had a number of notable successes with their media productions, including of course KateModern, and a number of large producers utilise the platform (including the BBC and recently ITN). They take a different approach than MySpace Video, which is more of a YouTube-esque offering, allowing any user to upload videos; the OpenMedia Platform is targeted more at professional content, and producers must be approved first. Facebook allows individuals to upload videos but has no video 'destination' site or channels to distribute professional content (although they can of course do this through Facebook's open application platform, as they can on Bebo and MySpace). 

When I first looked into the OpenMedia platform, my initial impression was 'why not just use an application, and then REALLY have full control over everything'; partly this still holds, although I'm going to explore a bit more in this post the pros and cons of both. The beauty of using the application platform is that you really do have complete control over the whole canvas page. This means 100% control of hosting partner, functionality, and 100% of advertising revenue. You get to control the ways in which the site integrates with user profiles, and more flexibility in adding advanced functionality. 

The OpenMedia platform, although not as flexible (you're limited to the Bebo profile format, and a revenue share), is obviously sufficient for pure media channels as shown by the success of its different shows. You can also use the normal Bebo features (profiles, chat etc) to create profiles for characters to interact with users, as KateModern did. The single biggest advantage however, is the traffic - Bebo promote their channels on the homepage and around the site, and sources using the platform have informed me that this gives a significant boost. If you haven't got a large media spend to promote your show, having it done for you on the Bebo homepage is a big upside. Add to that the lower up-front cost of using the OpenMedia platform as opposed to building a bespoke application, and it starts to become an attractive proposition for pure media plays. 

I would say that as traditional media begins to make the shift to new, this provides a good in-between platform. However, more and more media is becoming about the interactive and the engaging, and the combination of different methods of entertainment. There are ways that Bebo could introduce this, for example using more interactive video players, although they will never be able to offer the full range of features which could be used on their open application platforms (which would allow you, for example, to combine games and multiple media formats). The application platforms also allow media to become part of the user communication experience (for example, the Bob Dylan application on Facebook by Sony/Techlightenment, allowing users to send messages to each other which are read out by an in-video Bob Dylan) in a way which the OpenMedia platform doesn't. 

What do you think?