At 200 million users, Facebook is:

• Twice as big as the largest number of people who have ever watched a Superbowl game


• Twice as big as YouTube


• Twice as big as Skype


• Bigger than the number of people who own gaming consoles in their homes (190m)


• Bigger than the population of all but 4 countries in the world. (Just passed Brazil, next in line is Indonesia and then the US.)


• Twice as big as eBay.


• Four times as big as the number of people in the US who run on treadmills.


• It's twice as big as the number of malnourished people in India. Another way to look at that is to imagine that half of the people on Facebook were malnourished and living in one place.

These numbers can't be directly compared with any real meaning, but we think it's interesting for context. It's still cooler to live in France than it is to have a Facebook account, even if it is only 30% as popular.

A new Facebook group has surged in popularity over the past few days as it claims to provide instructions on how to revert your Facebook to the old design. The group titled “I WILL SHOW YOU HOW TO GET THE OLD FACEBOOK BACK!” gives step by step instructions on how do just that. While I haven’t tried out the process, it sounds logical.

Numerous users that have joined the group claim that it doesn’t work. Regardless of the tutorial’s accuracy, users are joining at a rapid pace. Just in the last hour I’ve counted over 300 new users. What has accounted for the group’s rapid growth? The primary growth is due to the group administrator’s decision to post step by step instructions for promoting the group prior to listing out the instructions for reverting back to the previous design.

Everything listed in the instructions makes sense but I don’t have any desire to go back to the old design. My guess is that Facebook will disable this functionality in the near future. Theoretically Facebook could store copies of the “old design” and “new design” at all times, in order to make it easier to roll-back in case of substantial errors or backlash from users.

While I haven’t heard substantial feedback from users about frustration with the new design, many users have expressed frustration with Facebook regularly changing the layout of the site. Some users claim that Facebook switches the design just as they get the previous iteration functioning properly. Have you found the new design easy to use? Have you tested out the steps described in this group? If so, did it work? We’d love to know!

Tonight Facebook has announced that the launch of their “first social widget” for Facebook Connect. It’s a comment box which enables blogs, photo galleries, or other sites, to add comments to their site quickly. This is surprisingly the first public widget we’ve seen Facebook release. Contrast that with Google Friend Connect which immediately launched a community widget for user’s sidebars.

This comment widget theoretically competes with numerous blog widgets that are already out there. Unlike traditional Facebook comments, this widget enables developers to customize the background color, text color, and other attributes via CSS. Developers can theoretically integrate this service directly into their own system by using the comments.get API call.

Those that choose to enable the comments widget also have access privacy settings for each widget on an individual or global basis. The company has also stated that this is “just one of many social widgets” that will integrate with Connect. Does that mean we should expect the company to release more widgets in the coming weeks and months?

Not necessarily as they were referring to existing widget services but I would bet that we’ll see more regardless of what third-parties (or as Facebook calls “fourth parties”) have to offer. If you want more details, go check out Facebook’s post from tonight about the new service.

Update
One huge feature of this widget is that comments posted on your profile in reference to a given comment thread will also show up on your site. This is a huge advantage, mimicking much of the functionality provided by a couple FriendFeed and Twitter plugins that are scattered around the web. On this site in particular, I’ll receive comments here as well as comments on my profile. It would be great if that information was made accessible on my site.

There are some inherent privacy issues with this feature though. I’ll be exploring that in another post but this is definitely a much welcomed feature.

Tonight we had the opportunity to check out some of the applications that Facebook is actively testing advertisements on. We’ve also included a screenshot of some of those advertisements below. So far Facebook is advertising on three Zynga applications (Heroes vs Villains, Special Forces, and Word Twist), the We’re Related application by FamilyLink, and one other unnamed developer who’s ads are in beta.

Currently the advertisements are similar to the ones you’d see on the sidebar except that the layout is a bit more horizontal. The key value addition is of course that these ads will be targeted just like their existing ads. Many ad networks that I’ve spoken to have been exploring developing their own targeting systems but in many cases doing so appears to be pointless now that Facebook has entered the game.

Granted, the ads are currently only tests but it’s an extremely strong statement from Facebook who at one point suggested that the existing advertising networks were sufficient at filling developer inventory. Facebook has gone ahead and created a wiki page with a list of third party advertisers that can help monetize applications which is clearly a smart political move on Facebook’s part but there are a few networks that should definitely be concerned.

Is it game over for all of the Facebook ad networks? Most definitely not. There are plenty of ad networks that are not competing directly with Facebook. “Affiliate marketing” ad networks like Offerpal and SuperRewards (both sponsors of this blog) will continue to thrive for the time being because they provide extremely high CPMs for developers and Facebook is not competing. There are also gifting ad networks and payment platforms that are doing very well and will continue to.

For many other ad networks that are in the general Facebook advertising space Facebook has now become a direct competitor. The only remaining business that Facebook hasn’t publicly stated that they are getting into is the cost-per-install space but theoretically developers can always bid on Facebook ads. Additionally, Facebook has extremely strict advertising policies compared to application ad networks and ads like “You have (3) unread messages in your inbox” aren’t going to fly.

For any developer ad network on Facebook, things just got a bit more complicated. At this point it has become a CPM battle and I’m sure Facebook wouldn’t be getting into this space if they didn’t think they could compete. It will most definitely be interesting to see how this pans out.

Facebook is doing around $35m in digital goods sales. In November anonymous insiders suggested that it was closer to $50-60m in digital goods sales. That’s a healthy run rate, but I think Facebook could make a few product changes to do even better.

I’ll split my suggestions into three categories: Opportunity, Means, and Motive.

I. Opportunity

Facebook has made some smart changes to its digital goods/gifts product recently, highlighting upcoming friends birthdays on the home page,prompting gifts on birthdays and allowing users to buy birthday gifts in advance. As birthday gifting is the most common usecase for Facebook digital goods, these are changes that increase a users opportunity to buy virtual goods.

Facebook could increase gifting opportunities by prompting gift giving on other calendar events as well. Some are natural gift giving holidays, such as Christmas, Chinese New Year, Valentines day etc. It already provides a selection of holiday specific gifts for each of these occasions. Facebook could generalize the “birthday” section on the homepage into a “calendar” and note upcoming events that are gift worthy, and perhaps even suggest recipients. For example, if you are “in a relationship” with someone on Facebook, then they would be a natural person to prompt for a Valentines day gift.

Chinese New Year themed virtual gifts

Facebook could also prompt gift giving on certain notifications in the feed that might be “gift worthy”. Especially notable are changes in relationship status (e.g. moving from “in a relationship” to “married” or to “single” for example), but others might include changing address (housewarming gift?), changing educational or job status (graduation gift, or new job gift etc).

Finally, Facebook could prompt for gifting more generally through more, and more direct, calls to action. “Give a gift” is the fourth option for writing on someone’s wall, and moving it to first would likely increase gifting immediately. So would prompting for gift giving (not just comments) on Status Updates on a profile and in the news feed. Simply putting a link to “gifts” as the default first application in the application box in the right rail would help.

I suspect that increasing opportunity could increase gift giving by 50-100%.

II. Means

Last year Facebook switched from denominating gifts in dollars to gift credits. This was a good first step as users tend to be more willing to spend virtual currencies than real money, even when they are readily interchangeable.

Currently there is only one way to buy Facebook gift credits, and that is via a credit card. But a lot of Facebook users don’t have or don’t use credit cards. They may want to be able to buy and give gifts, but they can’t do so. This is a common problem for a lot of game developers, including many game developers on Facebook. The techniques that worked for them can work for Facebook too.

As a start, Facebook could enable additional payment mechanisms, including Paypal, cell phone billing (including premium SMS) and direct debit from checking accounts. With such an international audience, additional payments mechanisms would allow many of Facebook’s international users to more easily buy gift credits.

Some Facebook users, especially those younger than 18, may not have access to any payment mechanisms other than cash. Accepting cash in envelopes for Facebook points would not scale very well. However, many game companies have been successful in getting their branded prepaid cards distributed at retail. This is one way of turning user’s cash into a payment mechanism that can be used online. Facebook has the brand awareness to do the same thing by striking deals directly with the two biggest distributors of prepaid cards, Incomm and Blackhawk. Alternatively, if they did not want to deal with retailers directly, a company like GMG Entertainment could handle it for them.

However, some users don’t have any money at all to spend on gift credits. Super Rewards and Offerpal have found one way to reach this market, through incentive offers. These companies allow users to trade their attention (through filling out market research surveys, applying for credit cards, getting a free trial of a service, signing up for email newsletters or other activities) for virtual currency. They take the bounty paid by the company acquiring the user, and use some of that to buy the user their virtual currency. Facebook could enable users to buy gift credits with incentive offers.

The combination of these tactics to increase Means to buy digital goods could provide an additional lift of 50-100% in digital gifts revenue.

III. Motive

Let us start by understanding the motives of gift givers. Gifting serves the same purposes on Facebook as it does in the real world. Firstly, it serves to strengthen social ties. Secondly, it serves to draw the receivers attention to the gift giver. Facebook can increase motivation for gift giving by playing into these two familiar behaviors, looking to the real world for conventions that can easily be borrowed.

Strengthening Social Ties

One of the strongest conventions of gift giving is reciprocity. It is awkward to receive a holiday card from someone that you did not send a card to. So too with virtual gifts. But right now it is difficult to know who has given you a Facebook gift. Since virtual gifts are given with the context of the wall, the wall is the best place to highlight gift giving. If each time I visited a friends wall I could prominently see what gifts that friend had given me, that would increase the pressure for me to buy a virtual gift for my friend to accompany my wall posting, especially so if it was a gift giving occassion (such as a birthday, holiday etc). Of course the opposite is also true - if a friend had not given me any virtual gifts you would not want to highlight that at the point at which I was considering whether to give a gift myself.

Gift giving is strongly influenced by immediate social norms. If I were to show up a dinner party empty handed when all the other guest had brought a bottle of wine, I would also feel awkward. People look to the behavior of others to see what is appropriate for their own behavior. Once again, the wall is the right place to highlight this. Right now the wall displays all postings in reverse chronological order. Since a new wall posting appears on the top of the wall, you will only see the most recent postings on your friends wall, many of which may not have digital gifts attached. What if the top postings on the wall were those with virtual gifts attached, and then reverse chronological order after that? (Perhaps with some time limitation, so that top posts would be virtual gifts received say in the last week). This would create a sense of social pressure to a visitor to the wall who would see virtual gift giving as a social norm. This will be especially effective around traditional gifting occasions as before. By highlighting desired behavior, you can influence social norms in the direction that you want.

Drawing Attention to the Gift Giver

Facebook can be a noisy environment. On your birthday you can receive 10s and even 100s of birthday well wishes. That is a lot of messages to sort through, and often these wishes are not responded to individually due to the volume. How can I make my well wishes stand out from the rest? How can I show how good a friend I am or how much I care? One way is to attach a virtual gift. Because the gift is not free, the very act of attaching a gift serves to differentiate my message from the rest. This is visible not just to the recipient, but also to all other visitors to the profile. Facebook could makes product changes to make this differentiation more prominent. One way would be to “pin” gifts to the top of the wall for some period, as noted in the preceding paragraph. Another would be to similarly “pin” gifts received to the top of the News Feed page for some period, ensuring that the gift is noticed and emphasized to the recipient. Finally, having a small profile picture accompany the gift, instead of just the name of the giver on the News Feed would serve to further draw attention to the gift giver.

Building from this approach, gift giving draws attention but it currently cannot draw gradations of attention. The absence or presence of a gift is the only distinction because all gifts currently cost the same (with the exception of free sponsored gifts). If Facebook were to provide gifts of different prices and levels, this would enable a gift giver to express their interest in a more nuanced way. One problem with implementing this approach on Facebook is the sheer volume of available gifts. There are over 300 Facebook gifts available today. It will be hard, if not impossible, for a gift recipient to tell what is a more valuable gift versus a less valuable gift just by looking at the gift. HotOrNot’s Meet Me solved this problem by starting with a small range of gifts with value tied to a conventional scale; flowers, ranging from the least valuable daisies to the most valuable red roses. Given the profusion of gifts available on Facebook today, Facebook would need to find some other way of demonstrating value to a recipient than relying on the image itself. Perhaps it could show the point value of each gift when the gift displays. But that is a bit crass - it is like leaving the price tag on a gift. It may need more creativity to make this obvious. Facebook could change the background color of the gifts according to a scale of value that is well enough understood: perhaps white - bronze - silver - gold? This would allow for the current large range of gifts but make it easy to tell at a glance the gradations of value.

Obviously, allowing gifts to have a range of prices will increase the average sales price of gifts, hence increasing revenue from digital gifts sales.

Motivation for Gift Receivers

Looking at gift givers motivations is only half the story. The other half of the story is the gift recipient. What are their motivations?

One simple dynamic to increase gift recipients’ motivation to receive gifts is to make gift getting competitive. Keep track of how many gifts have been received and display this prominently. This could be done on the profile page; in the same way that number of friends is tracked and thumbnails of friends shown, number of gifts receieved and thumbnails of gifts received could also be shown. Or it could be made even more explicit with leaderboards for the people who have received the most gifts. The power of displaying metrics to drive behavior is well documented by game designers. (If you haven’t read Amy Jo Kim’s work on game design for social environments, you should). Once people want to receive more gifts, they will start acting in ways that encourage gift giving, whatever that might be.

Game design provides a second possible mechanic to induce gift recipients to want more gifts; collecting. Gifts are all treated the same right now. If Facebook were to offer awards and achievements for getting “sets” of gifts, you would most likely see some users work very hard to collect gifts to complete those sets. PackRat has shown just how powerful and addictive collecting behavior can be on Facebook. Facebook could for example offer a free [birthday cupcake] to give to someone else if you were given five [birthday cupcakes], or put a custom Christmas skin on your wall if you received 10 Christmas themed gifts.

I believe that through increasing the motivations of gift givers and gift receivers, Facebook could see a more than doubling of their virtual gifts revenue.

Forget Tweetups. A Facebook flash mob in a London train station became overwhelmingly popular last Friday when a user identifying himself only as Crazzy Eve posted an event on the social network, reports CNN. Modeled after a successful T-Mobile commercial showing hundreds of people dancing to music at the Liverpool Street Station, the sudden outburst at the strike of 11:00 am took commuters and bystanders by surprise. T-Mobile’s motto at the end of the commercial? “Life is for sharing.”

The message from the mobile service provider was so inspiring that Crazzy Eve took it upon himself to create an event on Facebook, where the dancing crowd was so large that many commuters couldn’t even get to their trains. The event was only scheduled for 15 minutes, and organizer Crazzy Eve left after then, for fear that the crowd was in fact too large and he would get in trouble by the police. But it appears that the even remained non-violent and good-humored until the end, with no need for police interjection.

The police have not released an estimate for the number of people that actually participated in the Facebook flash mob, but there are over 14,000 users that have joined the Facebookgroup. Crazzy Eve has since removed his name from the Facebook group and event, but more of these dancing flash mobs have been scheduled for the next two Fridays at Trafalgar Square in central London and again at Liverpool Street Station. It appears that Crazzy Eve has gotten away with it once, but how many times can this commercial-inspired flashmob take place before things get out of hand?

Typically when we learn of parties that were spread across Facebook, we also hear of the police force that was called out to squelch the rowdy get together. But that’s not the case with this train station flash mob, and let’s hope that things stay that way. A rowdy, dancing crowd in a heavily populated train station could be bad news for Crazzy Eve, the city of London, T-Mobile and even Facebook. Even though Crazzy Eve didn’t expect his event to become as popular as it did, the 22-year-old may also be pressing his luck.

There’s not too much Facebook can do about it, but it’s difficult to ignore the sheer magnitude of a network that’s become so widespread in our global culture that an event can gain 14,000 fans in less than two weeks. And who knows what will happen with the flash mob mentality now that Facebook has opened its platform further to include status updates, taking Twitter (and maybe now the concept of the Tweetup) head on. Being able to combine Facebook events with status updates could enable even further spreading of flash mob information, making it even easier for someone like Crazzy Eve to end up in hot water after a string of highly successful events in public London spaces.

And while this seems like great press for T-Mobile right now, any legal issues that may arise from a flash mob crowd getting out of hand could ultimately reflect poorly on T-Mobile as a brand. For the time being, however, I imagine T-Mobile is basking in the ongoing success that social networking has provided for some user-driven marketing.

I spend a fair amount of time browsing through our Facebook application leaderboard to find what applications are growing on the platform. Every day it’s a different picture. Sometimes you find applications that are spamming the platform and other days you’ll find a really interesting application that you haven’t seen before. Regardless of type, there is still a huge potential to build successful applications on the Facebook platform.

While we’ve previously published buzz about the platform being dead, it’s currently far from it. The platform continues to thrive despite its occasional hiccups. Yes, there is controversy about honest versus dishonest developers but the fact remains that you can still build a popular application even with the new hurdles. Below are 13 strategies that you can use to immediately attract attention to your applications. Don’t be surprised if you use these strategies and your server gets overloaded with a massive onslaught of new users!

1. Copy Another Application

They say imitation is the biggest form of flattery. It’s also often times a really good business plan. In the world of Facebook applications, duplicating another Facebook application is frequently a fast track to success. I don’t recommend creating an exact duplicate though since at that point you could run into some legal issues. For those that are not very creative, duplicating applications is frequently the most efficient model for attracting a lot of users.

The highly viral applications, like snowball wars, tend to immediately attract numerous copycats which also often times attract tens if not hundreds of thousands of users. Even the top application developers use this strategy. For example, there is now an entire suite of Mob Wars applications created by Zynga and SGN which are essentially copycats of the original Mob Wars application.

I remember a saying in the movie hackers which was “Mess with the best, die like rest!!” If you modify that phrase a little you can come up with “Copy the best, soar beyond the rest.” Perhaps my derived version is a bit corny but you get the idea. Copy the top applications and there’s a good chance that you will attract a large number of users.

2. Put a New Twist On A Popular App

This is extremely similar to the first strategy that I outlined. If there is a popular application that appears to have an active user base but still doesn’t rank among the top 50 applications, you may want to explore ways to improve it. For example, Zynga’s version of Mob Wars is now one of the most popular applications on Facebook.

In this example Zynga simply provided more development and design resources to improve the application. I would guess that they also invested heavily in promotion in addition to thorough A/B testing. O.k., so perhaps that’s not the best example since Zynga clearly invested heavily in building out Mafia Wars. There are plenty of other applications that need improvements and you can be the one to do so.

This strategy clearly takes more investment then some of the other strategies I outline below. You can’t quickly duplicate larger applications since more development time went into creating them. If you are looking to build lasting value though, you are going to need to invest more significant development resources. So remember, if you can’t come up with an original idea, improve upon an existing one.

As Lupe Fiasco says in the song Superstar, “Did you improve on a design, did you do something new?” Improving upon existing applications can bring you great success.

3. Launch Holiday Oriented Applications

For the past two years, holiday applications have thrived on the Facebook platform. Every time another holiday comes around, I see a temporary spike in application traffic to those apps catering to the specific holiday. With Valentine’s Day right around the corner, love is spreading around Facebook through a number of applications.

One application, “Send Valentine Chocolate“, has attracted over 150,000 users in under two weeks. My guess is that they’ll be launching more holiday applications since they’ve called their company “Holiday Apps“.

There are numerous other applications growing due to Valentine’s day. Browse through our directory of the fastest growing Facebook applications and you’ll quickly find tons of applications for sending valentines, chocolate, love letters, and more. We’re almost two years into the Facebook application and there is still a market for holiday applications.

As always, niche holidays are always an easy grab but it appears that more popular applications are still ripe for the taking.

4. Niche Gifts

The most popular applications tend to have avid fan bases. For example, the YoVille virtual world application, created by Zynga, has an extremely active user base. There are also a number of fan pages that have popped up related to Yoville, a few of which have even become extremely popular. One application that is growing quickly is called “Pet Society Gifts“.

This application has taken advantage of the popularity of Playfish’s extremely popular Pet Society game and has made a gifting application targeted to it. Should you completely rip off another company’s brand? Definitely not. There are some great opportunities to build niche gift giving applications though.

Rochester Gifts is another application that picks an unfulfilled niche and provides them with a gift giving application. The application selects gifts that only locals would know about and then encourages them to donate the gift to friends. One problem with the application? It violates Facebook’s terms of service by unlocking more gifts as a user gives out more.

Regardless of their violation, the application clearly satisfies and unfulfilled niche and on Facebook there is still limitless niche possibilities.

5. Translate Existing Applications Into A Foreign Language

This is a huge opportunity for just about any developer. Take one of the more popular applications (not the most popular since the are probably translated already) and convert it into different languages. Also, a good strategy for choosing which language to translate into is to use our demographic statistics tool to find the fastest growing countries and then translate applications into each country’s native language.

There are now numerous fast growing applications written in Arabic, Chinese, Turkish, Russian, and many other languages. The point is clear: create similar applications in other languages and you’re sure to experience similar success.

6. Post Outrageous News Feed Stories

Last week in my Facebook privacy guide, I highlighted how news feed items published by applications can often times be invasive if not offensive. Regardless of how aggressive some application developers are willing to go for new users, the bottom line is that such tactics are successful at acquiring new users. Personally, I’d avoid trying to launch a similar application but so far “Have Sex!” has proven to be extremely successful.

While I believe the developers in this example may have pushed the limits too far (in that they publish a news feed story every time you visit the application), the model is clearly effective. By publishing news feed stories regularly with outlandish statements you rapidly increase the likelihood of friends of your users clicking through and adding the application.

By itself, this strategy is not extremely useful, but combined with an engaging application, this strategy can attract a ton of new users.

7. Integrate a Way to Rate Friends

This strategy continues to be successful. Jugement, a French application which let’s you rate friends based on various characteristics has experienced tremendous growth over the past week. The application has also followed one of our previous suggestions, “Translate Existing Applications Into A Foreign Language”, by essentially translating the “Compare People” application into French.

Friends for Sale is probably the most classic example of integrate a rating system into their application. While Friends for Sale isn’t simply “rate your friends on these factors”, the bidding on friends creates a natural ranking system among friends, creating a highly competitive environment. I think there is a clear distinction between rating and ranking though, which is why I separated this strategy from the 11th strategy below.

The act of rating friends to determine who’s the most popular, who’s the most friendly, who is the best looking, and others, caters to our inner high school yearbook ranking system. Any time you can list out friends into ranked lists, you are guaranteed to attract the attention of users. Unfortunately though ranked lists only attract temporary attention which is why you need to come up with other creative models for engaging users once you have their attention.

Begin with a friend rating system and you are on the path to Facebook application success.

8. Turn A Popular Fan Page Into an Application

This is something that I think many developers have failed to act on. Fan pages are a great indicator for what’s popular among users of the Facebook platform. That’s why we released out Facebook page statistics tool. For example Kinder Surprise, a popular chocolate egg which comes with a toy inside (and has been banned from the United States), is one of the most popular pages on Facebook.

That’s why it’s not surprising that the Kinder Surprise application is one of the fastest growing Facebook applications. I would argue that this is probably the single most effective strategy for figuring out a good application to build. Whether it’s celebrities, products, politicians, or just general topics, fan pages provide developers with a countless number of good topics to focus on.

Watercooler Inc. is probably the best example of an application developer that has build a large network of applications based around popular topics. While they inspiration probably wasn’t Facebook pages since they didn’t exist when the company launched, the concept is similar: go find the most popular topics and brands and build applications around them.

9. Create the Online Version of a Television Game Show

Yesterday while browsing through our application directory, I noticed that the Deal or No Deal application was spiking in traffic. It’s not surprising considering that it’s still a popular television game show. Similar to the last strategy I mentioned, which is to take advantage of popular brands, this one takes that a little bit further and suggests duplicating television game shows.

There are clearly risks involved. For example, the Scrabulous application went through a number of lawsuits and was forced to rename their application after creating the first version of Scrabble for Facebook. While it’s not a game show, it still had trademarks and copyrights related to the game and the same thing goes for television applications.

One good model is to recreate a television game show but call it something else. For example, I have yet to find a Facebook version of the “Price is Right” but I’m sure tons of people would end up playing it. While you may want to call the application something besides the actual name of the game show, this strategy is pretty much guaranteed to work.

The only problem with this strategy? Well, it takes a bit more programming to recreate a television game show on Facebook. Aside from the hurdles though, this is still a great model.

10. Create Culturally Oriented Applications

Facebook is all about expression of self-identity and part of our self-identity is our affiliation groups. One affiliation group that people tend to be strongly attached to is their cultural groups. Whether it’s religion or geographically related cultural activities, targeting sub-groups of users is always a great way to achieve rapid adoption. Many of the culturally related applications are in other languages so it’s hard for me to come up with a lot of examples, but I would say that theShabbat Shalom application is one example.

There are a number of other applications that are culturally related but many of them have fairly uncreative application titles though. For example, the “Italian Stuff” application is growing quickly, yet it has a horrible name in my own opinion. There are a number of ways to brainstorm effective cultural applications.

The easiest way is to think of the most memorable places or activities when going on a vacation to any country. Applications based around native food dishes are also a great thing to consider. I’ll leave the brainstorming up to you though.

11. Create a Ranking System

I’ve already mentioned a rating system for friends, but ranking is much different. One of the better ranking systems I can think of is done through Grader.com. The site has a number of ranking systems including the Facebook grader which ranks the top Facebook users and top Facebook pages on the site. Many social gaming applications also have their own internal ranking systems.

These systems are great for incentivizing users to compete against their friends and other users on Facebook. The result is higher engagement and often times you see repeat usage as users try to work their way up the leaderboard. One interesting strategy to get users to return is to provide them with a higher ranking in the leaderboard. For example, users tend to rank higher among their friends then among all Facebook users.

By posting the leaderboard within their friends, it gives the impression that users aren’t really that far from the top spot. This indirectly encourages the user to return to try and gain the top spot.

12. Make People Feel Like They’re Part of an Inside Joke

This rule is a combination of making people feel like their part of an exclusive group as well as stroking their ego by emphasizing their intelligence. The Dunder Mifflin Nifty Gifties application is a good example of this. You can compare it to the “Watercooler effect”, which was when employees felt left out of the loop for not watching a certain television show the night before.

By catering to this sort of behavior, you can easily attract a large number of users by making them feel good for being in on the joke. Like many other strategies, this only generates temporary engagement. You will still need to create something which generates additional value for the user. Inside jokes alone don’t provide much lasting value.

The inside joke strategy will most definitely get you moving in the right direction for attracting a few new users.

13. Generate Creative Quizzes

I hate mentioning this one because there are already way too many quiz applications on Facebook. The funny thing is that this always works though. Browse through a Cosmopolitan magazine, and you’ll see it filled with tons of quizzes that are almost identical to ones they put in previous editions. Quizzes are as enticing as top 10 lists. They never fail to capture the user’s attention.

Encouraging the user to actually click the application is another story, but they’ll most definitely notice the quiz invitation. Quiz applications always rank among the fastest growing applications with our Facebook application leaderboard. Whether it’s “What character in Sex in the City are you?” or “What rock song best describes your life?”, people continuously add these applications.

Quiz applications have extremely short life spans for the most part though so you may want to quickly figure out somewhere to redirect users once they’ve completed the application. One way is aggregating all the quizzes into a single application. That’s what the developer ofQuizzes application did. They now have over 35,000 daily active users.

Quizzes are a great step for first attracting users, but as I said, make sure you quickly find out another way to engage the users once they’ve completed the quiz. Also, please do me a favor and don’t create junk applications. Try to come up with something a little more creative!

Yesterday tons of people wrote that my description of Facebook’s new status API as a “Twitter killer” was absolutely ludicrous. They claim that I don’t understand the difference between Facebook and Twitter and how Twitter is much more than just status updates. Trust me, I fully understand the difference between the two services. I would argue that the ability to “follow” people you aren’t connected to and the ability to @ reply (”at reply”) to other users is just a feature.

Since the majority of people think that Nick’s smoking crack for calling Facebook’s new API a “Twitter Killer”, I’ve decided to outline the blueprint of a product that duplicates Twitter’s features yet uses Facebook as a backbone for each of these status updates. I’m going to call this product “FB Tweet” but you can call it whatever you want. I began programming it but decided that I was only putting my existing projects aside and ultimately it’s not worth the time for me personally.

Whoever decided to take the day or two to make this product will be rewarded for taking the time as it will surely generate a ton of buzz.

Is There A Need for “FB Tweet”?

Any good product must satisfy the needs of the user and the first question to ask is if there is a need for a Twitter replacement. I’ve made some fundamental assumptions that suggests there is a need but feel free to argue otherwise. The average user probably wouldn’t switch products because they are fine using products that they’ve spent the time to learn how to use.

I don’t think Twitter users are average though. I think Twitter is still used by mostly early adopters. If Twitter has in fact become mainstream then the odds of a “Twitter Killer” is much less likely. The need for a “twitter-like” product is clear but ultimately I would argue that much of what is provided by Twitter is simply a set of core features that can be easily replicated:

FB Tweet Features

• Public status updates - As one commenter put it yesterday, “FB = inner circle; Twitter = public party”. That’s no longer the case because status updates are now accessible to those outside your inner circle.
• Ability to reply via user aliases - Twitter’s identification system is one of user aliases. This is easy to duplicate in that you simply assign each Facebook user an alias through the FB Tweet product. I would force Facebook users to use their Twitter username (via basic Twitter authentication) or pick a username that hasn’t already been selected on Twitter.
• Open protocol for status update access - One of the most powerful components of Twitter is their open API. Developing an API isn’t very complicated if you are using a good development framework. For example RESTful APIs are native to Ruby on Rails, the development framework which Twitter was built on. Django, a powerful Python framework, also has a great module for building a RESTful APIs. If you want to develop a RESTful API in PHP (which is the language most Facebook developers use) then I recommend checking out this article.
• Unidirectional follow capabilities - This is was sets Twitter apart from Facebook. It’s the ability to follow somebody’s status updates without them confirming. FB Tweet resolves this issue by letting people use their existing Twitter user names but when the status is published in Facebook it will say “@Full Name, text of status update”.
• SMS Functionality - This is where FB Tweet will have some issues initially. While Facebook currently has SMS functionality within their API it’s not documented well and doesn’t work with all mobile phone carriers. If Facebook truly wanted a “Twitter Killer” to exist, they would have to improve their SMS API significantly.

Conclusion

While Facebook’s new status API will bring in a wave of new applications, the death of Twitter still requires the rapid development of a new product that is distributed through Facebook. Not all Facebook users understand why Twitter is so powerful, yet provided with a public timeline of their friends’ statuses, I believe they would rapidly begin to see the value.

Will Twitter disappear tomorrow? Probably not, but there’s a huge opportunity to duplicate the majority of the functionality provided to Twitter users directly to Facebook users. I would argue that this product would make it easier for Facebook users to understand what the power of a twitter-like product provides and help bring such a service to the mainstream.

Twitter clearly has an opportunity here though. They already have many of the features I’ve outlined but they don’t yet have the full Facebook integration that I described. At this point though, I still fervently believe that the status wars are not yet over and a new company could come into power.

Different tracking services show different numbers when it comes to measuring which social network is most popular, but at least one now places Facebook with a significant lead in the US. Compete has updated its data for January, and the service now shows Facebook seeing a full 10 million more visitors each month than MySpace.

With Facebook growing another 14.9% from December to January, the site now reaches 68.5 million people each month, versus 58.5 million for MySpace. Granted, Compete is the only service we track showing such a disparity, though the gap is narrowing on other tracking services as well. Nielsen Online’s year-end numbers put Facebook’s domestic traffic within 3 million of MySpace, while comScore still has MySpace with a significant but shrinking lead.

Meanwhile, Twitter’s growth continued to accelerate in January. The microblogging tool grew 34.7% from the previous month, and a whopping 812.7% year-over-year. It’s still tiny compared to the two leaders though, reaching a total of 5.9 million people in January. Of course, that doesn’t account for all of the people that access Twitter solely through a third-party app.

Pete Bratach stated that “We now count tab views toward your applications’ active users. The count occurs on the initial page load of the profile, in addition to a user explicitly clicking the tab.” It was a minor change but one that could potentially inflate application metrics substantially.

Previously active users were not counted until the user actually interacted with the application. That could include clicking on a profile box but now it just represents a user viewing the “Boxes” tab. For those few individuals that actually visit the “Boxes” tab, I’d guess that they aren’t viewing every box on the page. Ultimately this ends up inflating the active users as far as I can tell.

Then again, I don’t even navigate to the “Boxes” tab on friends’ profiles but I do know that in order to view all the boxes on my page you would have to navigate well below the fold. So why has Facebook decided to switch to this new metric? Honestly I have no idea. The only rationale I can think of is to artificially boost the active user metrics for applications.

Does Facebook really have an incentive to boost active users within applications? Well it makes sense in terms of Facebook wanting applications to look more popular than they are in order to drive new developers to the platform. I doubt this is the rationale though. Facebook already has plenty of popular applications and it doesn’t make sense to inflate the numbers any more.

Meebo is back in business with Facebook. After adding Facebook support for its multi-client chat tool late last year, Facebook requested that Meebo remove the service due to issues with the way in which Meebo was connecting to Facebook’s network. But the standing issues between Meebo and Facebook have since been resolved, and Meebo is able to add Facebook chat support by leveraging Facebook Connect.

The details surrounding the technical issues that Facebook cited when requesting that Meebo remove Facebook chat support from its service are still cloudy, and when we firstlearned of Facebook’s request we were also baffled.

As a third party developer working with Facebook’s Platform (or most other platforms for that matter) there’s always the risk of doing something that directly conflicts with the owner of that platform. And with Facebook being at the forefront of open platforms for social networking purposes, there are many times when its terms are unclear or take weeks for Facebook to completely verify them at all.

However, when Meebo announced that Facebook had requested that the chat service remove Facebook support, the company also hinted that it was working with Facebook on a way to reinstate support for Facebook chat. Facebook itself mentioned that it was looking to offer additional chat options for developers by leveraging Facebook Connect, and it looks like that’s exactly what it’s done, given Meebo’s new implementation of Facebook chat support.

This makes Meebo the first official launch partner of the alpha version of the Facebook Connect + Chat integration program, which is designed to protect users, their login info and authenticated sessions. When it’s all said and done, developer and user frustrations aside, it’s important to remember that user safety in regards to such open platforms is still very important, especially considering the many phishing scams that are currently plauging Facebook.

We’re glad to see that Meebo and Facebook have found a way to team up in such a relatively short amount of time, and there will surely be more applications arise from Facebook’s new Connect + Chat integration program in the coming months.

Earlier today I was contacted by Jason Wilk from TinyCombwho claimed that all stores had Facebook disabled, including three that he tested. I proceeded to call a number of stores here in the Washington, D.C. area and one out of three couldn’t access Facebook. One Apple store representative that I spoke to said that MySpace has been banned for a long time but Facebook has not.

Why the discrimination against MySpace? I have no idea but Facebook and Apple are known to have a fairly strong relationship so it makes sense. Does banning Facebook in stores make a lot of sense? Not really considering Apple’s sales continue to break records each quarter. The company is rapidly capturing large portions of the personal computer marketplace.

Conversely, avoiding having customers come in to the store to use it as a free internet cafe makes a lot of sense. Want to save money? Just show up to the Apple store when they open each day and turn their top of the line computer into your personal office! Apparently some customers were spending too much time on Facebook but part of this argument just doesn’t seem rational.

Personally, I’ve witnessed numerous individuals sitting in Apple stores and browsing social networks. I’m sure Apple prefers customers don’t spend hours on end using the computers but then again, isn’t this how they can sell more computers? Apple is known for constantly having customers in the store. There may be a down economy but every time I walk into an Apple store it’s always busy (perhaps it’s the part of the country I live in though).

So has Apple banned Facebook in your stores? We haven’t been able to get an absolute confirmation that it’s unavailable in all stores but there is sufficient evidence to indicate the start of a possible trend. While I doubt it will have a substantial impact on Facebook’s traffic, it could impact the relationship between the two companies.

Today, Facebook announced that they have joined the OpenID Foundation. Facebook has long been criticized by those working to build out the “open stack” for not supporting open standards, instead opting to develop their own authorization protocols. Facebook Connect is the current public authentication model that the company is promoting although the Facebook API has provided methods for authentication for a while now.

OpenID and other open stack protocols have become secondary to Facebook Connect within the mainstream media due to the massive buzz the company experienced as the Facebook platform grew. Being a participant in the OpenID Foundation is an important step toward the success of OpenID and the open stack. Without Facebook’s support, I would argue that many of the open stack standards (OpenID, XRDS-Simple, OAuth, OpenSocial, etc) will not succeed.

While Google has been heavily promoting Friend Connect, the standard doesn’t appear to be gaining as much traction, especially not in the media. Facebook has also kept themselves at arms length from the open identity evangelists for a long time although more recently they’ve become more active with Julie Zhuo’s participation in the UX Summit, and Dave Morin’s occasional appearance at meetups related to the topic.

While Facebook has not yet committed to support many of the open standards, joining the board is a sign of commitment. While Facebook may choose to duplicate and recreate their own version of many of the standards, it’s always important to be part of the conversation. Personally, I’m interested to see what other steps Facebook will make to support these new standards.

Finding out your marriage is over via Facebook may be one of the worst experiences you could have. Yet that’s exactly what happened to Emma Brady, 39, when her husband of 12 years changed his relationship status on Facebook, according to theDaily Mail. To Neil Brady’s friends, the message on their news feeds read “Neil Brady has ended his marriage to Emma Brady.”

The worst part about this situation is the fact that Emma says she had no idea her marriage was in such dire straights until a friend saw Neil’s updated relationship status and called her at work to see if she was all right. It’s painful enough to go through marital problems and even a divorce. It can be just as painful to have to deal with the social consequences of divorcing, so Neil’s public denouncement of his marriage via Facebook has turned into a very humiliating situation for Emma.

Neil, however, insists that his Facebook profile changes are not the first Emma had known of their separation. After a scuff between Neil and Emma, the husband grabbed his wife by the wrist and threw her out of the house wearing nothing but her robe after hearing of Emma’s purported affair. The case went to court, where the Facebook status situation also came up. Neil’s attorney insists that Neil had suggested a separation several times, rejecting Emma’s claim that the Facebook status update was the first she’d heard of Neil’s desire to end their marriage.

While this does all seem to boil down to a nasty case of he-says, she-says, the situation merely reiterates the power of Facebook as a heavily influential social utility. Just last weekPrince Harry faced a similarly humiliating situation when his girlfriend of 5 years officially ended their relationship by changing her status on Facebook as well. No matter which way you look at it, changing your relationship status on Facebook is an official and public declaration of what’s going on in your real life.

And with delivery tools like the Facebook news feed, our immediate social graph is only enabled to watch the successes and the train wrecks of our lives go by. As Facebook is a social network, these successes and train wrecks also become interactive occurrences in our lives’ timelines, often incurring reactions from friends and acquaintances we’re just not ready for.

Which begs the question; is this something that will change on Facebook’s end, or an individual’s end (by changing things like privacy settings or merely avoiding online social networks all together) or will we come to accept the fact that our lives get played out and essentially archived on sites like Facebook, for all to see?

Facebook turns five years old tomorrow. That’s practically middle-aged in Silicon Valley. To celebrate, Facebook has put up this slideshow that highlights Facebook’s evolving Web design over that time period. We’ve reproduced the slides below. (Yeah, we wish they were bigger too).

Founder Mark Zuckerberg also hints at a surprise virtual gift that will that will appear tomorrow in the the Facebook Gift Shop Oh, what could it be?