I’m going to be leading the charge to further monetize that portfolio as well as develop new products and services related to the portfolio. Translation: I’m going to be performing Domain Name Karate as a full-time job!
When presented with the opportunity to turn my long-held passion for domain names into a full-time gig, I leaped at the chance. This was truly one of those ‘once-in-a-lifetime opportunities’ and I knew I’d regret turning it down. Plus, I get to work again with Ken Schafer and a great team of people who are equally passionate about the domain name space.
It’s good to have you on the team, Bill. Welcome to the herd!
My friend Miss Fipi Lele sent me a scan from The Usborne Guide to Computer and Video Games, a children’s book published in 1982:
Image courtesy of Miss Fipi Lele.
I was quite impressed with how many predictions the book got right. Here are some excerpts from the “Videogames in the future” section of the book, followed by examples of the predictions coming true.
Here’s what the Guide had to say about “TV games” in which you can take part in battles. Remember, this was published when the Atari 2600 (which was still called the Atari VCS — short for “Video Computer System”) and the Mattel Intellivision were established consoles and the Colecovision had just been released:
A TV game with a very large memory will be able to reconstruct detailed pictures of say, the Battle of Waterloo or a space battle, and the players will be able to control far more of the details in the picture than they can today.
Score one point for the Guide. Although the game History Channel: Civil War got poor ratings, it fulfills the prediction. Here’s a screenshot:
Here’s the Guide on sports games:
In TV sports games you will probably be able to control each of your team members individually. These games will also have electronically synthesized voices and the referee will tell you when you are offside or given a free kick.
The Guide has this to say about multiplayer games:
At present, most computer games are for only one or two players. More powerful computers though, will be able to cope with instructions from a number of people playing at the same time, either as teams against each other, or against the computer.
Another point for the guide! Case in point: a video of gameplay from the Halo 3 multiplayer beta…
Video duration: 9 minutes, 48 seconds.
And finally, here’s what the Guide predicts for handheld games:
Hand-held electronic games will still have liquid-crystal displays, but they will probably be in full colour and will be as detailed and realistic as pictures for a TV programme today.
Yet another point for the Guide: here’s Burnout Dominator for the PSP…
It seems strange that such a simple thing could give away your source, but as anyone who’s set up PHP on a server a number of times will tell you, it can happen.
When you visit a static HTML page — that’s a plain old HTML page that wasn’t generated by some server-side script written in PHP or any number of programming languages — the web server simply hands over the contents of the page (the HTML) over to your browser. Your browser renders the HTML as a web page:
The opposite of a static page is a dynamic one, in which the content is generated on the fly — the server isn’t just handing over the contents of a file. Instead, it calls on some program to cull data from one or more sources and then use that data to assemble some HTML which is then sent to your computer:
What happens when the server is configured incorrectly in such a way that the code for a dynamic page never gets sent through the code interpreter? One common result is that the code gets sent directly to the user. Instead of seeing the result of running the code, the user ends up seeing the code itself. That’s what seems to have happened with Facebook.
Its look is reminiscent of my beloved first Apple laptop, the original “clamshell” iBook, or perhaps of Fisher-Price toys designed in the age of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Its appearance seems to announce that it’s both durable and fun:
The OLPC, side-by-side with my accordion. The OLPC is considerably more compact and easier to carry, which explains why the “One Accordion Per Child” idea never caught on.
It’s designed for kids from the get-go. The integral handle is best suited to a child’s hands, and beside the handle are a couple of holes so that kids can loop a shoulder strap, belt, sash or rope for over-the-shoulder carrying. The keyboard is the sealed, rubberized type, which should make it spill- and dust-resistant.
The network screen on the XO. There wasn’t another one in the room, so there’s not much on this screen.
The keys are clearly designed for kids’ hands. I wonder if Mike plugs in a USB keyboard to code on it:
Adult hands contrasted with the XO’s keyboard.
I saw some of the applications in its built-in suite, including the browser, word processor, drawing app and a music making app. I’m told that there’s a programming environment for kids to make their own application, although I didn’t get a look at that.
The screen can also be rotated 180 degrees and then pressed shut so that the OLPC becomes a handy ebook reader. It’s a helluva lot nicer (and cheaper) than many other ebook readers I’ve seen:
The calm before the storm: the MaRS centre auditorum before people arrived.
Last night’s FacebookCamp was a success, packing the main auditorium of Toronto’s MaRS Centre (which was ready to seat 420 people) as well as spilling over into an extra room with simulcast video. It’s estimated that about 450 people attended, which makes this event the largest “Camp” style developer event ever held in Toronto.
15 minutes before the opening presentation.
Rather than comment on the event right now, let me jump into the notes! I’ll talk about the event in a later post.
Introduction (Andrew Cherwenka of Trapeze.com and Roy Pereira of Refresh Partners)
Thanks to Facebook for flying up here to a “cooooold” Canadian summer
Thanks to MaRS for letting us use their space
The number of people attending grew so much that we had to keep changing venues to accomodate them — MaRS is our fourth venue!
Some facts about Facebook:
54+ million users
15 billion pageviews/month
Toronto is the 2nd largest Facebook community in the world, with 724,000 members
Canada: home to 10% of all active Facebook developers
Toronto is in top 10 largest Facebook developer communities, beating out San Francisco and San Jose for apps with more than 5 users
3.3 million active users in Canada (by “active”, we mean users who log in more than once a month)
61% of the active users are out of college
68% of the active users log in daily
Facebook gets 8.5 billion pageviews a month from Canada
In total, there are 33 million active users
We get 150,000 new users every day
There are 90,000 Facebook developers
There are 1700 apps with more than 100 users
It’s been only a couple of months since the Facebook platform was launched (at f8, in the Bay Area)
A number of popular apps have spring up since then: Zombies, Pirates, Scrabulous, Crackbook (credit to Amber Mac for that name) and Appsaholic
Facebook Platform:
What is Facebook Platform?
Google Maps, OS X dashboard widgets — noth are examples of platforms
Facebook’s platform is built on the Facebook Social Graph, which is made up of the connections between Facebook users
Facebook cares about:
Identity
Information
Social Context
Ninja Tricks
Popular apps make use of deep integration with Facebook
We’ve studied the apps that did best, and here’s a breakdown of how users found them:
About 1/4 discovered an app through the News Feed
About 1/6 discovered an app through the Profile
About 1/6 discovered an app through the Product Directory
About 1/3 discovered an app through some other means
Profile integration
A lot of Facebook’s built-in features are actually apps that are built on the platform
The Mini Feed is a good way to promote your app — write to it!
Profile Box
Users want to see recent interactions and be notified of them — who did what?
If users don’t see updates from your app, they’ll remove it
Timestamps are important too — users want to know when things happened and about recently added content — notify them!
Make your notices socially relevant: mention the user’s friends! Users want to know “Who of my friends did something?”
People use Facebook content for self-expression and as a means social promotion — think about what people want to share
The Profile is how people share info about themselves
People post pictures, video and notes — content that is “precious to them”
Canvas Pages
The Canvas Page is where users are taken when they click on an app
The idea is for your app to use the Canvas Page to keep a captive audience
Use “Call to Action” buttons — big buttons that encourage people to initiate some kind of action
Track the important actions in the feed, e.g. “Alice wrote on Bob’s wall
Rather than bombard the Feed with lots of tiny actions, aggregate actions together into a single notification for the Feed
Use social comparisons based on actions, e.g. In a quiz, compare the user’s score with his/her friends’ scores: “Alice is smarter than 20 of her friends”
More Integration Points
There are other less-used integration points in Facebook that you may wish to consider using:
Message
Message attachments — e.g., when a user installs a song app like iLike, you can offer to send a friend a song as a message attachment
Profile actions
Wall
Share buttons — call on the user to share the app — no biz deals with Facebook are needed to make use of these
Mass Distribution and Getting Users:
>75% of active users have at least one Facebook app installed
The largest app has 10 million users
The best way to grow your app is to feed the Mini Feed
Track interactions and push them to the user via feeds, but not so much that you spam the user
Use the Mini Feed to “show off” — show the user’s friends that they’re missing out by not using your app
Apps are free, so it’s a low-risk
The temporal element is important: Note the time someone did something
News Feed Optimization:
Increase the relevancy of your News Feed items — make sure that those items are things users care about — if 10 of my friends and I are doing the same thing, I want to know about it!
Build apps to promote your core business:
Example: Boozemail. Seems trivial, but its creators are using it to promote their toolbar to Facilitate meetings
Cross-promote: Make deals with other developers to promote their apps within your app — Flickster and Top Friends are cross-promoting each other
New Opportunities: Virtual Currencies
Think of virtual currencies, such as the one in (fluff)friends
It makes use of a currency called “Munny”
Users of this app have virtual pets that live on their Profile page
If you pet my virtual pet or take care of it, you get munny, which can be converted to “food” (virtual food for virtual pets), virtual gifts to send to other (fluff)friends users, and so on
These are “incentive-based actions” that lead to “interaction capital”
You also get recognition for your actions: “Meagan has petted pet xxx”
Use this recognition to let your users build “street cred” or karma
Red Bull’s Rock-Paper-Scissors game is another good example
New Opportunities: Ad Networks
You can run ads on your app’s Canvas Page, but not in the Profile
Impressive CPM: $15/20 CPM for top apps
Some app developers are showing really good numbers from advertising:
Some are quitting their day jobs
VCs in the Bay area looking for Facebook app developers
Some applications are self-sufficient without an existing base anywhere else on the Web — they’re solely on the Facebook platform
New Opportunities: APIs on APIs (“So meta!”):
e.g. the Super Wall API, which is an API for their application, which in turn is built on the Facebook API
Super Wall was created in 3 days and drew in 2 million users in 2 weeks
Metrics to consider: The Facebook Effect
If you have an external site, you won’t be cannibalizing it by drawing people to your Facebook app
If anything, Facebook brings traffic to your site
HotOrNot and RockYou can trace growth back to traffic driven to them from their Facebook apps
It’s a virtuous cycle, supporting growth both directions
Metrics to consider: Vitality Metrics
Installed base
Growth of new users
Outgoing impressions — note that impressions are not notifications
Conversion rate
Your app will get lower numbers if it’s not content-oriented or if it doesn’t have some kind of meaning to your users
Metrics to consider: Engagement Metrics
Canvas page visits
Canvas page duration
Installed users * Impressions/Installed user * Acquisitions/Impressions = New users acquired
It’s all about connections and network effects
If you’re keeping your users engaged, that sends out more impressions and attracts more users
Focus on interactions on the Canvas page rather than outgoing impressions
Think about engaging your existing users rather than obsessing over growing your user base — “New users is not the be-all and end-all”
Watch the feed on the developer app! It’ll keep you up to date on changes to Facebook that might affect your app
We’ve removed the “Courses” feature, which dates back to when we were just for colleges: we think the development community can do it better, so we decided to open up that opportunity to the dev community
We’ve seen apps get traction that wouldn’t have gotten it without Facebook
Q & A
Question: What’s the uninstall rate for Facebook apps?
Answer:
I have the data on my laptop, but haven’t memorized it; see me afterwards
Uninstall numbers are low and declining
Certain apps have rapid uninstalls — most of time because they’re spammy
Apps that are “spammy” — those that send messages that are misleading, damage trust or abuse the relationship with the user — will get their notifications throttled back or disabled by us
Question: What are the top 3 and bottom 3 apps?
Answer:
Don’t have the numbers memorized
I believe Top Friends is the number 1 app, with about 10 million users
You can see for yourself — look at the “Browse Apps” leaderboards for app stats
Question: Do sites that integrate with Facebook have to pay?
Answer: No, it’s free! You have to have your own servers and engineers, though.
Question: Is the “Action” menu being removed?
Answer: If the user doesn’t have an app installed, s/he shouldn’t see it in the profile.
Question: Can you give us any insights into the Facebook roadmap?
Answer: I can only talk about “the state of the world as it is today”.
Question: What’s your stance on “policing” Facebook?
Answer:
We prefer a “hands-off approach”
You can’t distribute copyrighted material, as per the terms of service
Read the terms of service and don’t violate them
Please settle disputes between you and other app develoeprs (say, “copycat” apps) yourselves
In the Next Installment…
Next time, I’ll post my notes and photos from the other presentations.
Since I work at Tucows, I get asked this question a lot: What does Tucows do?
Here’s the short answer, which should do for the purposes of this article: Tucows is in the business of providing wholesale services to ISPs and hosting services, such as domain name registration and email. The ISPs and hosting services then provide these services to their customers. By buying our wholesale services rather than implementing and maintaining these services themselves, they can concentrate on customer service.
How’s this for a radical idea: Charge less for each domain, then add more services and features and then fully explain where every penny of each transaction goes. It sounds crazy, but that’s exactly what we’re doing starting today.
For example, our price of a .com domain used to be US$10.05, and now it’s dropped to US$9.20. Here’s how it breaks down:
Item
Cost
.com registration (charged by the registry)
US$6.00
ICANN fee
US$0.20
Tucows management fee
US$3.00
In pie chart form, the cost breakdown looks like this:
Here’s what the Tucows management fee covers:
Free Name Suggestion Tool powered by DomainsBot
50% of net domain parking revenue
The ability to sell any of hundreds of thousands of premium domain names
Access to a library of APIs and web-based tools for provisioning and management of domains
Technical support
And come September, these will also become available with every domain name:
I’ve known Bill Sweetman since the mid-nineties, back when I worked at Mackerel Interactive Multimedia, so I was very pleased to find out that Tucows — the company where I hold the title of Technical Evangelist — has hired him as General Manager of our domain name portfolio.
By now, you’ve probably heard that for a brief period, 
