Facebook Developers

As you have been probably reading, Google has launched their API for their new Open Social developer's platform for social networks.  MySpace, Hi5, LinkedIn, Orkut, Ning and a raft of other social networks are already on board and ready to "gang up" on facebook.  Well, they are trying to but will it work?  Don Dodge has a good article up for the facebook camp.  Bloggers around the net have been saying that it is a game changer for members of social networks.  We think it is a game changer, but not for the users of social networks, for the app developers.  

App developers will now probably focus their energies on BOTH facebook and Open Social.   The 50 million users of facebook are considered to be "real people" and one of the most accurate networks.  This is not to be ignored and these people that have invested time and energy to build their networks on facebook are not about to jump ship and do it all over again on Orkut, Hi5 or any other network.  They are there to stay.  So, the only thing that has changed is for application developers who will get access to multiple social networks with one code base (through Open Social).  

Furthermore, the Open Social API is in early beta and there seems to be some issues.  Also, it is not even live yet, developers can only play in the "Orkut sandbox" to build and test their apps.  There is a great article here that details Open Social vs. the facebook f8 platform .  If you are a developer, you should read it for sure. 

With the exceptional success of the facebook f8 development platform rumours have been abound that other social networking sites will follow their lead and build their own platforms. The rumours included hi5, myspace, linkedin and google. Three of those now look like they are about to become reality, and soon.

Myspace and hi5 are the two that seem to be imminent. FT broke the myspace rumour in June and another again today by TechCrunch. They claim that third party developers have been contacted for input on the system and they also claim that they have info that the platform will be launched next week at the web 2.0 conference in San Francisco.

Hi5 already has a portion of its API posted and they have a small group of developers already making widgets and application for the network. So far they have said that facebook star developers Rock You and Slide are involved.

Also it has been supposedly leaked by a secret industry meeting (and then reported here by TechCrunch) that google will open up a platform for developers starting with their social networking site orkut and igoogle. They may also have plans to open it up for their other apps later on too. This is supposed to start on November 5, 2007!

And Linkedin? There have been indications from their CEO that they are going to do something but it doesn't sound like it is clear what or when. They are much more business focused so most of the fun apps and ideas will not likely work there. New business-like apps and innovation is going to have to be developed for linkedin.

What does all this mean? For one, we still have social networking 'silos'. A handful of closed networks are ruling the roost and the dream of an open social graph is not yet apparent. One where the Internet itself is the platform and all networks can integrate so it won't matter which network any friend or colleague is on. A social graph without walled gardens where everyone can connect with anyone they have a relationship with. It looks like a pipe dream for now and the top networks are going to have to fight it out for some time yet.

As for the third party platforms, right now facebook is the only game in town for third parties to access the social graph. Once the other networks launch their platforms however, the game is going to change. There is going to be flurry of innovation for the developers to access hundreds of millions of new users for their applications. It won't be easy though as they are going to have to maintain multiple sets of code and adhere to standards and rules (these networks do have a lot of rules and have ultimate control of course). Also how will the networks treat their developers? Will they compete with them and just develop the best ideas and functionality themselves? Or will they support and nurture them and prosper alongside them?

Fasten your seatbelts, it is going to be a fun ride!

This just in from Center Networks, they report that all developers that have submitted ideas to be funded by the fbfund, need to re-submit them. Here is the note that the developers got from fbfund:

"Thank you for your inquiry about the fbFund grant program, and for your support of the Facebook Platform. Our goal for this program is to encourage as many developers as possible to write innovative and engaging new applications on top of Facebook Platform. Additionally, we hope to enable an even broader class of developers to become entrepreneurs by giving you the financial resources necessary to pursue a new venture that relies on Facebook Platform.

It has become clear that we will receive proposals which contain similar or even identical ideas. As a result, and in order to protect other developers and us from claims that we or anyone else copied material without the creator's permission, unless we agree otherwise in writing, we can't promise that any materials or information you submit here will be kept confidential, or specifically that we or others might not develop similar or identical products or services.

To make sure that everyone understands the conditions of submitting a grant application, we will not review any materials you have sent via email, and any materials you may have sent have been deleted. If you would like to submit an application for an fbFund grant or require more information, please see our website and grant application submission form at http://www.facebook.com/developers/fbfund.php. We apologize for the inconvenience, and hope the online information and submission form will help you develop and structure your proposal. We are accepting applications from around the world.

Again, we are very excited to be offering this program and wish you the best of luck whether or not you are an fbFund grant recipient. We can only give a limited number of grants and not getting one does not mean that we don’t believe in your application nor that it can’t be successful - it simply means that we have a limited amount of resources and weren’t able to give money during this cycle to you. You are welcome to apply as many times as you like as each funding cycle represents a new opportunity to receive a grant.

More information is available at
http://www.facebook.com/developers/fbfund.php.

Thank you for your patience - we apologize for the delay in this response. We've seen a tremendous response to fbFund, and look forward to reviewing great proposals.

Cheers,
the fbFund team"

Oreilly.com has posted an article about facebook applications and the long tail. They put together some research that is very interesting which states that 87% of all application usage in facebook is by 84 applications. There are about 5000 applications now on facebook so that is roughly 1.7% of the applications. He goes on to tell that only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users.

Now these are great insights to the statistics of facebook application usage but then he goes on to explain how this is the long tail. Well actually this is incorrect as the long tail is supposed to be fat and deep and catering to a market that was unreachable before. He acknowledges the mistake in an update and says it should be called "the short head rules" . This more accurately describes the phenomenon.

What does this mean? Is it not worthwhile to develop applications for facebook because only the first entrant have all the traffic. No way! The facebook f8 platform is still in its infancy and there are going to be plenty of apps that breakthrough and get massive usage. Also, the growth rate of facebook should be taken into account. There are now 30 million users on facebook. What is going to happen when the user numbers hit 50 million? 100 million? Will the dynamics change then? We think there is plenty of opportunity for the apps in the long tail still.

Another factor is advertising. Many application developers have spent time on building their apps and trying to make them viral on their own. Some will succeed in this manor but a viral application PLUS advertising will always come out on top.
Don't get discouraged by this report if you are an application developer, facebook is still a baby and there is going to be more massive growth to come!

Flyers Exchange (now known as Flyers Ex) came on the facebook ad scene a couple of weeks ago with with an "in-facebook" application and interface to advertise on facebook. Henrick Shyu was the creator of the network and started off with the developers on the wrong foot. He devised a workaround so that the Ads from his network sat outside the application canvas. What is the harm in that you ask? It violates the facebook Terms of Service and interferes with facebook inc.'s own advertising placement. Everyone complained that it was not allowed and trust wasn't high among the developers. Mr. Shyu then told the developer forum that this practice has been stopped. The editors (of this article) checked and it was still being offered. He was lying to the developers in the forum. A start on the wrong foot I guess you could say.

The network started to go along a little better and ad impressions and clicks were being delivered. Mr. Shyu was on the developer forum constantly slagging the Cubics ad network and pumping his own Flyers Exchange network. People started to tire of constantly hearing his promotional posts on the developer forum but, the network seemed to be growing a little and impressions and clicks were still being delivered.

Then IT happened. It was exposed that Mr. Shyu has code in his Flyer Exchange Ads that hit the cubics server 5 times for every time a Flyer Exchange ad is hit, effectively bringing down and overloading the Cubics server. In the forums there were many complaints of Cubics slowing and even crashing a couple of times. Next, the eCPM started to drop and application developers delivering Cubics ads started to complain about low payouts and loss of revenue.

There are developers boycotting left right and center. He has been reported to facebook. In our view this is corporate sabotage. Trying to overload a competitors servers so his customers get mad and leave is dirty business. Or maybe he was somehow faking to deliver Cubics ads and getting paid, which is stealing. What should happen now? We don't know but there are sure some strong feelings and discussions on the developers forums about it.

Here is a picture of the code..

Update: Henrick Shyu posts a reply to the accusations and the developers are not buying it. Also, no apology. Here is what Mr. Shyu had to say:

"Dear devs,

There's been some bad rumours in the past few hours and we feel like we owe you an explanation. I apologize for not responding earlier. It is a national holiday in Japan.

We here at Flyers Ex take pride in our business, and as amusing as it would be for us to be running our competitors' ads, the profit if any would be marginal compared to the lengthy load times. If you'll remember, Cubics was slow and crashed often long before Flyers Ex launched last week, and we do not like being blamed for our competitor's problems. Also, as flattered as we are for some to think that a 1-week old site has enough users to DOS attack Cubics, the number of users on all of Flyers Ex combined would equate to no more than 10 large apps. For "Facebook's official ad network", that should be no problem.

We are always trying to improve our services, and note Cubics as our primary competitor using a CPM system. The reason we use CPC as opposed to CPM is because of the likelyhood of view-fraud. We noted that they allow no more than 1 of their ads to be shown per page. The Cubics ads you saw on Flyers Ex this afternoon were done in short 6 hour intervals during 2 days in a study to learn more about Cubic's CPM and view-fraud protection system. Obviously our quality rating and CPM on Cubics dropped to near $0.00 but we were more curious than concerned about making a few pennies. We also noted that Cubic's downtimes had NO relation with the times we ran this experiment.

Also, Flyers Ex has never scammed anybody. You've not heard a single post on this board about a publisher not being paid, or an advertiser not receiving points he/she paid for. The conversion rate for points is not "randomly set" as some have speculated, but adjusted weekly on Fridays at 4pm (PST) as stated on the site. The conversion rate depends on the number of publishers/advertisers, and as we just launched, we need the flexibility to adjust it to attract more publishers if there are too many advertisers. Also, using a point system instead of money allows Flyers Ex to serve out its primary purpose of allowing developers to exchange clicks with each other without having to pay a commission on the transaction.

I hope your trust in us is not damaged by such speculation, and we hope to continue serving you in the future as the ad network for developers, by developers. If you have any further questions, please let me know.

Yours truly."

and here are what some of the developers had to say so far:

"So you decided to "test" Cubic's fraud detection system…
Riiiiggghhtt "

"You're doing shady business and this post lacking any kind of apology regarding this "test" shows that you clearly aren't someone to be trusted."

"Its just like you try to rob a bank and say that you were only testing the bank's security arrangements."

"ouch. That's fraud, pure and simple. You are not only defrauding people publishing on your network, but also Cubics. Your ethics are beyond the pale."

"Thats the most bullshit excuse I've ever heard.

I've reported you to Facebook and Dwayne, I hope others do the same. "

Update II - A further response from Mr. Shyu was posted on the facebook developer forums:
"Perhaps I'm missing something, but we promise you a certain rate for placing an ad on your site, and we pay you for it. You get to preview the ad, and when you place it on your site, it loads instantaneously and looks exactly like you expect it to.

What does it matter if there's other information hidden in the ad? For example, all good ad networks track ad views/clicks and referring URLs, and must embed such tracking code in the ad. If we're researching our competitor by placing their ads to track their statistics, that has absolutely no affect on you as the publisher. And as I already mentioned, Cubics was laggy and crashy before we came along. In fact, that was one of the main reasons we wanted to build a new ad network.

We do apologize for the confusion and will be careful to notify publishers of such changes in the future.

Regards."

Update III - After this response Mr. Shyu took a pounding in the forums (some of the responses to follow). Also, he then backtracked and deleted his posts and they are no longer in the thread. Good thing we saved it, one of them anyway! There were three more posts from Mr. Shyu that were deleted, you can see where they have been deleted in the picture below. In one of the posts, he went on to bash appsaholic and accused them of being the crooks because he thought their pay scale was unfair and then went on to basically say that he had done nothing wrong. Have a look at the next dialog and see what you think. (names and faces are blurred to preserve the identity of the other forum posters.)

It is safe to say that the facebook f8 platform for 3rd party developers to launch applications on the facebook infrastructure, is a massive hit. Over 5000 applications have now been developed and more are flooding facebook everyday.

This has led to a call by developers and investors to be able to get more detailed stats on how their applications are doing. Facebook responded by introducing stats that tells you how many users are active on each application in any given day. This was a step in the right direction but left people wondering how many installs they had.

Facebook has moved quickly to rectify the problem and are now doing even better to improve the application statistics. Here is an overview of the changes from the facebook developers blog:

"Tonight we launched a stats page for applications in our effort to give you guys more information about how your apps are doing. Currently, the page displays some basic information about the number of adds, removes, blocks, and total users, as well as a summary of sampled HTTP requests for your app. You can check out the application stats by following the "More Stats" link underneath your application name on the right-hand column of this page. We’ll continue to add relevant and interesting data to the page as we can. In the meanwhile, if you have any suggestions for improvement or other stats that you'd like to see, please let us know on the wiki ."

Third party developers for the facebook f8 platform have been asking for test accounts for some time, and now the facebook team have finally listened to the users and created them. This may not seem such a big deal to many but there have been cases where developers have set up accounts in fake names for testing or development purposes (rightly needed to develop their applications) and then have been banned by facebook for breaking the terms of service. Sometimes developers have even lost control of their application that they have developed because their account was shut down.

This is great for the developers but also for the facebook community as it says that facebook is listening to their developers and users. It took them a few months but better late than never!

If you are a developer, here are some details to get you started (from the facebook developer forums:

"You can now make officially sanctioned test accounts

Full details are posted on the wiki here:
http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php?title=Test_Accounts&action 
but here is the short version of the important parts:

To make a test account, register on Facebook as you normally would. Then, when logged in to the test account, go to this URL:
http://www.facebook.com/developers/become_test_account.php

A few important things to note:

• Test accounts won't be able to see real Facebook users and vice versa. You can make an existing account a test account, but if that account is friends with a real account, each user will disappear from the other’s list of friends.

• Our customer support team won't disable test accounts for being fake, but test accounts may be disabled for violating any other reason that a real account would be disabled.

• Only real accounts may be listed as application owners. In other words, you may not list a test account as the developer of an app."