Category: Other

US visitors to Facebook tailed off slightly in January, with 33.9 million unique visitors , down 2 percent from 34.7 million in December 2007. Looking at the graph it’s too early to tell if it’s a blip or a trend.

This story about a headset that will allow you to control computer games is fairly interesting, but I do hope that whoever’s writing the games has a better imagination than the spokesperson for the company: “If you laughed or felt happy after killing a character in a game then your virtual buddy could admonish you for being callous.” Just what you want: a computer character telling you off based on facial expression.

BBC NEWS | Technology | Brain control headset for gamers

Bebo today opened their platform to the general development community. It’s based on Facebook’s own FBML and API documentation which is supposed to make porting apps very easy… I’m expecting a land grab of app clones over the next few days, but it’s fun times at least! I think it’s time to hang around on Bebo for a while and see how it works.

Bebo developers

The Facebook API may be great in many ways, but for stability there’s still a lot to be desired. There seems to be a slightly “gung ho” attitude to code deployment at Facebook which, although I feel some empathy with, isn’t particularly suited to a site with 50 million users. Take this recent developer update as an example:

Requests inadvertantly deleted
Dec 11, 2007 10:27am

It looks like all outstanding requests/invites from platform applications may have been inadvertently deleted last night. We are exploring various recovery options and will post here when we have more information.

So the last few days weren’t a great time to release an application, it seems, and that explains why growth (and ad revenues) have been down on my half a dozen or so.

It looks like LinkedIn has been looking at which Facebook features it can steal. LinkedIn’s newsfeed does appear to actually be news rather than friend activities, however, and tries to work out what the user might be interested in. It’s only in beta at the moment but it’ll be interesting to see if it does work. Personally: I’m not convinced, because I read all kinds of disparate rubbish and I don’t see how any newsbot can work that out.

Alongside that it seems that the API is starting to make an appearance too, at least to some partners. How OpenSocial it will be is hard to tell at the moment.

LinkedIn newsfeeds in Beta

LinkedIn ‘s new homepage and API

“It’s okay to spam your friends” may not be the company’s official strapline, but it certainly seems to be a key part of Facebook that spamming your friends with everything you’re doing is the way to stay “in touch”.

It’s a fine line to tread, however, and the recent additions to the newsfeed seem to be taking the site into a dangerous zone. On the one hand, the newsfeed does allow people to see what their friends are doing without having to put much effort in, and allows for all kinds of serendipitous discoveries. (“What an interesting group, I think I’ll join!” and “I didn’t realise you were interested in…”)

On the other hand, it can easily turn people off if the relevancy drops off and the volume becomes overwhelming. “5 of your friends received Funwall posts” is of no interest to me and although I can “vote down” the relevancy, I’m sure there’ll be some new fad next month that five of my friends will all happen to do at the same time and I’ll have to vote it down again.

The encouragement to spam is no more active than with application design. In fact: the viral nature of application growth, almost by definition, encourages spamming of friends as a way of surviving and spreading. “Invite 10 friends to unlock new gifts” and the like are usually enough encouragement, and somehow the “ethos” of Facebook means most of us have little compunction in at least spamming those closer friends. After all: they can always click on the “ignore” button.

We’ve experimented with the principle ourslves. Applications such as Which Dessert Are You? give the user a very basic reward for inviting their friends and that, in itself, seems to be enough to spread the application. The content, and usefulness, are both close to non-existent, yet the app is spreading at the rate of thousands per day.

It’s a simple equation: if each person manages to spread your application to more than one person it will grow. If it’s less than one, it won’t. On the plus side (from a commercial point of view) it’s a great environment to spread brand awareness by capitalising on the currently acceptable face of spam, but on the other it’s a challenge for Facebook to keep these invites and newsfeed messages enough on the side of useful (compared to annoying) for us to put up with it.

Self-proclaimed Facebook development specialists Facebookster have been spamming blogs with a huge number of comments, including this one.

It really isn’t a good sign for a company to be reduced to barely ethical means of marketing, especially when the Facebookster spam messages aren’t even relevant to the posts. It’s just blatant commercial spam.

We need a stop Facebookster spamming us button on Blogger.

Facebook wants to make the data its members enter into the social network’s profiles portable, so that they can move that data to other online services if they want, the company’s CEO said Wednesday.

It’s already possible to take some data out of Facebook for use in third party applications (but not store it), but extracting data and data objects (such as photos) would be a big step, and a bold one given the current dominance of Facebook, at least in the UK and in terms of speed of growth.

How they implement it is going to be very interesting, given the privacy concerns about the API. But if it does happen, and there are other sites that make use of it the way that application development within Facebook has taken off, it could be another huge leap forward in terms of making Facebook almost an integral part of the internet.

Facebook wants to make members’ data portable

This article from O’Reilly on the long tail of Facebook applications ties in with some of the comments I made on the Exponetic blog a few weeks ago comparing Web 1.0’s history with Facebook’s own progress.

The key points are:

• Some applications are getting huge traffic
• The majority of applications aren’t
• Only 45 applications have more than 100,000 active users

100,000 users is still a lot of people (bearing in mind an active user is one who visits at least once per day).

As I originally said, I believe the best prospect is not in creating one killer viral application but in working towards a suite of applications. That’s the way to make the long tail work.

The long tail of Facebook applications

The Facebook platform: Web 2.0 or Web 1.0 a second time around?

This article in the New York Times actually has a fairly level-headed view of the Facebook application market and how much money can be made from it. It’s quite a rare thing to find a level-headed opinion about an over-hyped subject in mainstream journalism, so quite refreshing. It also makes quite a few good points the sustainability of current advertising models.

In Facebook, Investing in a Theory