I don’t understand how Facebook’s new Friend Connect is substantively different from their pre-platform API functionality. External Web sites already have the ability to allow users to sign in to Facebook and retrieve their friends and profile from an external site. Friend connect just appears to be some better UI controls for doing this withouth having to jump off to Facebook and approve the 3rd party app. What am I missing?

Image via Wikipedia

This is interesting, and certainly makes sense in the Facebook application world. Seems to me the Long Tail is already a prevalent concept in music though.

Prof. Elberse describes research showing that even in our cultural consumption we tend to be intensely social folks. We like experiencing the same things that other people are experiencing — and the mere fact that other people are experiencing and liking something makes us like it even more. Far from being cultural rugged individualists, most of us are only too happy to have others suggest to us what we’d like.

Portals – WSJ.com

Earlier this week I read about Zembly, a Sun “social” development project. One of the critiques against Zembly, is that it targets obscure app developers. I don’t see that as a problem for a development tool. Outfitters want to sell as many pick-axes as possible to gold searchers as possible?

Image via Wikipedia

The race between OpenSocial and the Facebook Platform is hard to call. Facebook has better technology, and a growing user base – but OpenSocial has the support of MySpace and LinkedIn.

A few weeks back, Google announced Friend Connect, and I don’t think it got the coverage it deserved. Maybe I was just on vacation. I think Friend Connect more than anything else gives OpenSocial a leg up. Friend Connect will let you turn any Web site into an OpenSocial Web site by adding some javascript. Facebook’s relase of fbOpen serves the same purpose, but will never be adopted as widely.

I was a big fan of MyBlogLog (the idea and virality at least, if not the implementation). I think Friend Connect is going to be what puts OpenSocial over the top. As if Google hadn’t taken over my life enough already.

Video: Adam Loving – Instrumenting the Viral Loop

It’s Thursday and the team has just one day remaining to complete their project for “A Startup A Week”. The concept of the show is to bring together a few rockstar developers and designers, pitch them an idea for a startup, and give them just one week to take the idea from concept to reality.

For the initial project of this series, our team is building out a Facebook application that can use the viral power of the social graph to raise money for a computer lab in Cambodia via the non-profit Room to Read. On this episode, our developer Adam Loving shows how he used LINQ and SQL Server to keep track of donations, our designer Jay Dokken of Design Commission gives us a very quick sneak preview of his awesome design, and Kyle Cressman sits down with our special guest Dominic Canterbury from D/C Strategic.

With less than 48 hours remaining, can our team come together and create a startup in a week? Stay tuned for the finale tomorrow, and be sure to check out the first three days of A Startup A Week – Episode One.

We never captured on camera the “revolutionary change” I was asking for. Basically, the idea I came up with was to switch from asking for direct donations to going to an ad based model. Making that switch was too risky. We would have to come up with something that was so entertaining it would reach millions of people virally. We had thrown around some ideas on day one like “donate your favorite books.” However, facing the fact that it was Tuesday, I didn’t fight for a revolutionary change. I thought it would be enough to leverage Jay’s great design skills to create something that was beautiful to look at – and thus compel visitors to donate.

A couple weeks back I did a fun project for Microsoft. The goal was to show Microsoft products being used to complete a real-life project in a week. “A Startup A Week” is the brain child of Kevin Leneway, and he picked me for the pilot episode. The video of the first day is now live on VisitMix.com.

Bringing teams together for short technology projects (whether they go on to become companies or not) is popular here in Seattle. Recently there was a Startup Weekend, and another group meets once a week at Saturday House. It is a great time to be a developer because of the growing availability of Web APIs and excellent tools – you can get a lot done in a short period of time.

I didn’t know the details of this project until the first day (other than that we would use the Facebook platform and Microsoft tools). The project description was simply to raise money for the Room to Read charity on Facebook. From that starting point, we brainstormed the “Lab Builder” Facebook application. This application lets you help build a computer lab in Cambodia.
Check out Lab Builder – if you don’t have a Facebook account, let me know if you’d like me to donate on your behalf. I’m excited to make a difference for a worthy cause. Let me know what you think of the video, and how I can help your company design a Facebook or Open Social application!

This filter comes at a price – you and your friends have to keep consuming and forwarding to keep it interesting. More importantly, you are now the gate keeper that everyone with information (or an App) to push through this filter will lean on as hard as they can to get their ideas to spread.

You can bet they are going lean, grovel, and trick you. I was spurred to write this by Hillel Cooperman’s post “How to Piss off your Users” last night:

“The real offensive aspect of many of these apps is their up front and never-ending demands for more users in order to reveal their functionality. I won’t contribute to the debate on what all those users are worth as it doesn’t really matter for the purposes of this post. After all, the key thing is that the app creators think that having tons of users is important to the value of their business. And for many of them they will stop at no end to crank up those numbers.”

Of course having tons of users is critical to the value of their business. Slide, the company that makes Super Wall, builds parasitic apps on top of larger Web sites in order to siphon off users to show ads to. Their cheapest path to new viewers is through those viewer’s friends. For small application developers (or those not buying advertising) your friends are the only path.

The effect of forced invites on the number of daily active users for
the Toy Chest application. The application was live 4 months before the
window shown here, so the flat line extends 4 months to the right.

I don’t want to excuse this practice, I just want to emphasize how hard it is to build an app (or compose information) that is both interesting, and inherently spreadable. A Good Facebook App is one that has magic mix of quality, collaboration, and either fun or usefulness*. I think these are two good examples:

• Growing Gifts (177,387 daily active users)
• Fluff Friends (167,548 daily active users)

These apps succeed in spreading because they demonstrate a high level of quality, fun, and inherent virality (Fluff Friends is mostly just quality and fun). Jackson Fish Market’s They’re Beautiful would make a fantastic Facebook App. 99% of apps that don’t reach this bar will languish in obscurity no matter how large the brand behind it. Some examples:

• New York Times News Quiz (1,627 daily active users)
• Nordstrom Fashion Status (65 daily active users)
  
• Google News (46 daily active users)
  
• Microsoft Partner Point (16 daily active users)

I highly doubt the New York times covers its expenses with the News Quiz App. The point is, when you don’t have the magic – iterative re-invention is required, but very difficult. So difficult, that most app developers resort to pissing off their users. I am optimistic that in the long term Facebook’s user and app filtering will muffle the amount of spam you get from your friends. I think most apps monetized by advertising will continue to force you to forward where ever possible.

*PS: I would like to add some note about understanding the demographic here. Send Hotness was clearly a hit. It was low quality, and not really fun, but optimized the “virality” by understanding what would fly with the target audience.