Global Nerdy

Last night was the second FacebookCamp Toronto, and I took notes. Here’s the first part, with more to follow later today…

Introductory Presentation

The introductory presentation was made by the FacebookCamp Toronto organizers: Roy Pereira, Colin Smillie and Andrew Cherwenka.

They thanks the event sponsors:

• Facebook
• Segal
• Refresh Partners
• Trapeze
• MaRS

Some updates on things that have happened since the last FacebookCamp Toronto:

• There are now more than 43 million active users
• fbFund has been established:
  • $10M in capital (may grow over time)
  • Accepting applications for grants from US$25K – US$250K
• FBML 1.1 and FB JavaScript have been released

Here’s what the Facebook application scene looks like right now:

• About 5,500 approved applications:
  • 84 of these apps account for 90% of the usage
  • At this point, “It’s anyone’s game”
• The primary measure of an application is no longer installs, but now daily active users
• Having good functionality is now up there with being first (e.g. Consider the number of “wishlist”-type apps — there are about 18)
• 9 of the top 20 apps come from from the same development shop

They showed a chart of the top 30 Facebook cities (in terms of membership), 9 of which are Canadian. The top five Facebook cities are:

1. London, UK
2. Toronto, Ontario, Canada
3. Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada
4. New York, New York, USA
5. Chicago, Illinois, USA

In August 2007, Canada beat the UK for monthly visits to Facebook.

There are a number of upcoming FacebookCamps:

• Vancouver: October 23rd
• Montreal: November 7
• Toronto: Early December 2007

There are also plans for a Toronto “FacebookWeekend”, a full-weekend developer workshop — perhaps in early December 2007.

Facebook Application Best Practices (Ami Vora, Facebook)

Who am I?

• The lead of Platform Product Marketing for Facebook
• Her job: make sure the developers out there are successful and that the developer community is healthy and growing

Facebook, as a whole, is…

• A tech company intent on building a social utility
• 45 million active users (that’s up from 34 million, which was the figure at the last FacebookCamp Toronto)
• 250,000 new users sign on every day, which means there’s a 3% week-on-week growth

Who are the new users?

• They’re typically age 25 and older
• Everywhere outside the U.S. — that is, in places where Facebook didn’t get its start in universities — there’s even distribution of ages for Facebook users

Stats

• U.S.: 18 million users
• Canada: 6 million (“That one in every 5 Canadians!”)
• U.K. 5 million
• 60 billion pages served a month
• More than 50% of our users visit at least once daily

The Social Graph

• What makes people come back to the site?
• For them, it’s all about the social graph: the network of connections in the real world through which people communicate and share info
• In Facebook, they’re trying to create an accurate online analog of people’s real-world social graphs
• Value of the social graph to photos:
  • Facebook’s “Photos” app is relatively simple compared to other photo-sharing sites — you can only upload and share
  • In spite of its lack of features, it still has more activity than other photo sites
  • Why? Facebook’s social graph
  • There’s a social context attached to the photos — you can tag the photo, specifying with who’s in it, and the tagged people are told that they’ve been tagged
  • Photos become social content
  • Photos are shared with exactly the people who are interested in them
• Value of the social graph to events
  • Facebook’s “Events” app is relatively simple compared to other event-announcing sites
  • Once again, in spite of a lack of features, they see more event traffic than competitors (for example, they get 3 times eVite’s pageviews)

The Facebook platform provides 3 things:

1. Mass distribution
2. Deep integration
3. New opportunities

• They’ve tried to open every integration point available to their own developers to all outside developers
• When developing a Facebook app, think about the value you’re adding to the user experience

Best practices for Facebook features:

• Mini-Feed:
  • Good for “temporal information”
  • Used by people looking for the latest info about me
  • If your app posts items to the Mini-feed, include a friend of the user’s where possible (e.g. “Pete Forde tagged Joey in 2 photos.”)
• Profile Box:
  • Not really for content
  • It’s a representation of the user
• Canvas Page:
  • Use for heavy information
  • Use it for interaction to build connections
• News Feed:
  • Shows connections
  • Great driver for future engagement — shows a preview of what you’ll see if you dive in

Opportunities — Building a business online, you’re concerned with

• Growth
  • Access to millions of potential users
  • Viral distribution through the social graph
• Engagement
  • 50% daily return rate
  • Social context provides opportunity for engaging content
• Monetization
  • Freedom
  • Several monetization paths:
    • Relationship with an ad network
    • Partnership with a brand advertiser
    • Cross-promotion
    • Institutional investment
    • fbFund

fbFund

• Meant to lower the barrier to entry
• Small no-equity grants
• Not Facebook’s money, but the money of early funders of Facebook
• Right of first refusal to fbFund companies

Advice

• Provide engaging content / focus on the social
• Provide relevant info
• Showcase interactions between users (“Everyone loves a little voyeurism”)
• Focus on usability
• Keep providing your users with fresh content
• One good idea for fresh content: turn-based games
• Use the integration points into Facebook well
• Iterate often
• Think about intelligent promotion
• Incorporate privacy:
  • Think of privacy as an asset, not as something that weighs you down
  • Users are more willing to interact if they feel their privacy is being protected/respected

Platform growth

• 4000+ applications
• 100 new applications added per day
• 80,000 developer keys
• 80% of users have added at least one application (which means that users think of apps as a key part of their Facebook experience)

This is just the beginning!

• “We’re only 4 months in, and we have a long way to go.”
• We’ve all got the same users — we’re all trying to build the same user experience — our success is contingent upon each other.

The Q&A Session

Ami, on the relationships represented in Facebook: “‘We hooked up’ is not the best relationship descriptor.”

On limiting the clutter presented by all the apps:

• A hard problem — considered it when they first decided to open Facebook to third-party apps
• Try to keep the profile clean
• You have free rein on the Canvas page
• Note that if you collapse an app on your own profile, it’s collapsed on all the other profiles you see

Q: Any other incentives other than fbFund?

• The goal is really to create an open market where incentives come to exist
• Don’t really want to be in the incentive business themselves

The second FacebookCamp Toronto — a gathering for local techies interested in developing Facebook applications — takes place next Tuesday, October 9th, at the MaRS Centre (101 College Street, a stone’s throw from Queen’s park subway station). I was at the first FaceBookCamp Toronto, and if you’d like to see my notes, they’re here.

Speakers will include:

• Ami Vora (Corporate Communications, Developer PR) from Facebook Inc., flying in from Palo Alto
• Janice Diner (Creative Director) and Michael Scissons (Director of National Sales) from Segal Communications
• Geoffrey B. Roche (President) from Lowe Roche

The last FacebookCamp was quite tech-heavy — the one, while still aimed at developing applications, will be more focused on the business, marketing, branding and promotional aspects. Here’s the schedule:

• 6:00 – Social/Mingling
• 6:30 – Intro – update from last FBCT (Roy Pereira / Colin Smillie /Andrew Cherwenka)
• 6:35 – High level presentation on platform and best-practices (Ami Vora – Facebook Inc.)
• 6:55 – Building an Application for a Brand (Michael Scissons & Janice Diner – Segal Communications)
• 7:15 – How Many ways can you Market your Application Inside Facebook? (Roy Pereira)
• 7:30 – Top Applications and Why They Work (Jesse Hirsh)
• 7:45 – Monetizing your Facebook Application (Greg Thomson)
• 8:00 – Secrets of PayPal interface used by Gift Cards Facebook Application (Steve Pritchard)
• 8:15 – Demos: 5 minutes each ( 3 Slots )
  • Demo #1 – Dogbook / Catbook (Geoffrey B. Roche)
  • Demo #2 – WishList (Bogdan Arsenie)
  • Demo #3 – DreamBook (Phil Tucker)

For more information, consult the event’s Facebook page or its wiki page. See you there!