My home town Toronto just held it’s second ever FacebookCamp to another near-soldout crowd. I’d say approaching 250. You really can’t swing a cat in this town without someone tagging the cat on facebook.
Ami Vora form facebook led off, followed by a rather exhaustive series of talks and demos from local facebook app builders and marketers. of note:
At Harvard., Amy Vora maintains 43 friends
This is a just small fraction of 43M active users this week. 3% growth each week
1 in 5 canadians on facebook
Canada is wildly overrepresented on facebook and will be soon a good case study of what happens after you saturate a country (will the book still be as interesting without a constant influx of new faces?).
Canada is bigger than UK. 20% of all Canadians are on facebook (something to do with long winters?).
International and non-english countries are not on the radar. They say internationalization is coming soon though. Yes, some people in the world don’t speak English first. The bastards.
Demographics are different everywhere except the US. US or A is totally college dominated, everywhere else is not. There was a pretty chart.
FB is creating the social graph of how ppl interact (really?). Everyone thinks social graph is a stupid name.
Social graph powers massive more usage of facebook photos/events than flickr, evite
From a scientifically rigorous 3-person sample size of a facebook HQ lunchroom snapshot, I can reveal that everyone that works at facebook is also under the age of 23. This may explain a lot.
If the social graph is so important why are the relationship descriptors so weak? (We hooked up once, it was awesome has been pointed out as a relationship descriptor you may/may-not want to use amongst your professional colleagues. Or after the age of 23. Depending I guess on exactly what your profession is. The word from Amy is that facebook might be working on this.
As a platform Facebooks thinks about providing
1) Gowth (powerful viral distribution)
2) Engagment (all those great feeds and alerts)
3) No business model. Sorry kid, you’re on your own to figure that out.
Facebook is also a little confused about this idea of monetizing apps. They list their granting fund and VC as options. No, these are financing options not business models.
Advice on how to provide engaging content
• Relevant info
• Showcase interaction
• Usability
• Fresh content
• Use integration points well
• Develop and iterate, low investment, quick feedback, lots of control
• Think of intelligent promotion
• Incorporate privacy
And this is just the beginning. Only 4 months in to platfomification of facebook
Here’s how to make money on facebook
How to monetize by Greg Thomson of My Garden and My Aquarium fame:
You need at least 250k installs, 10k users to start making money
$3.00 an active user is worth per year [really? To be safe assume 20% of your users are worth $3]
He’s at 8M installed users
Start with a base of ad-support: Appsaholic pay per click 0.10/click. Adsense 0.07 click
CPM rates of about $2. Depending on page view frequency per user
Most of the popular apps are entertainment
Ads peak after a day or two. Keep them fresh. Constantly need to keep monetization and ads fresh.
A/B testing has huge benefits. [flip side: This isn’t a turn it on and walk away money making machine]
Selling your app. Never happened. $1 install, $8-$10 per active user
Have a base of banners and sell incentiviszable offers. they can earn “coins” to spend on fish for their tank if they click on surveys for which you earn commission. (see your favourite affiliate ad network)
What’s it take to support 8M users in this case? 2 servers. 10 rendering servers uploading flash to jpgs on s3
Don’t spend more than a week(!) on an app, or the risk goes up
How experienced this grizzled veteran of the blue and white book? About 3 months now.
Re: internationalization. Holland uses Hyves.net (ugly and slow loading, modeled after MySpace maybe?) which was developed a few years ago by students at the University of Amsterdam. It’s HUGELY popular, at the level of Facebook in Toronto, and has been for some time.
A few are slowly dribbling into Facebook through people like me who live in a Facebook country, and they always say “Oh, so this is something like Hyves?” It’s not the language (everyone speaks ENglish in Holland anyway) but it’s the fact that there’s already something LIKE Facebook that everyone uses. It’s only useful if your friends are on there too, and all their friends are on Hyves.
Re: internationalization. Holland uses Hyves.net (ugly and slow loading, modeled after MySpace maybe?) which was developed a few years ago by students at the University of Amsterdam. It’s HUGELY popular, at the level of Facebook in Toronto, and has been for some time.
A few are slowly dribbling into Facebook through people like me who live in a Facebook country, and they always say “Oh, so this is something like Hyves?” It’s not the language (everyone speaks ENglish in Holland anyway) but it’s the fact that there’s already something LIKE Facebook that everyone uses. It’s only useful if your friends are on there too, and all their friends are on Hyves.
Everyone is gaga over the development platform but who does it really benefit.
Certainly not the developer. If you actually had an application worth developing you wouldn’t allow Facebook to dictate the terms. Example in the conditions a developer agrees to Facebook reserving the right to charge you (read revenue stream after IPO) and then they say that if you don’t like things you can essentially walk. Also they mention that they could be developing a similar application to yours at the same time. You know that means….
Really a great idea by the Facebook VC’s to increase the speculative worth of Facebook. (Fb fund etc etc) So if you’re a VC or Mark Z great idea. If you’re a developer with a serious application go it alone and build it free of Facebook…
Everyone is gaga over the development platform but who does it really benefit.
Certainly not the developer. If you actually had an application worth developing you wouldn't allow Facebook to dictate the terms. Example in the conditions a developer agrees to Facebook reserving the right to charge you (read revenue stream after IPO) and then they say that if you don't like things you can essentially walk. Also they mention that they could be developing a similar application to yours at the same time. You know that means….
Really a great idea by the Facebook VC's to increase the speculative worth of Facebook. (Fb fund etc etc) So if you're a VC or Mark Z great idea. If you're a developer with a serious application go it alone and build it free of Facebook…