The primary change is that a majority of the page is now taken up with the “wall”, which consists of status updates and comments by fans. This is obviously a direct response to Twitter and the success it has given brands in engaging their followers in direct communication.

The biggest drawback is that pages now have the exact same layout as user profiles. Previously, many brands were able to highly customize the content and look of their pages using the large area available for images and multiple large application boxes. Now, there is only a small image on the upper left corner and a few small application boxes down the left column. As on a profile, the rest of the applications have been relegated to a boxes tab that many fans probably won’t take the time to explore. While it is possible to change settings to have new users start on this tab, once someone becomes a fan of a page, they will always start on the main wall.

The consequences are clear. Brands will not be able to rely on rich graphics or flashy widgets to create engagement and reinforce identity; the focus in now on the conversation. Brands that update their status will have it appear just like friends’ updates on their fans home pages where they will be able to “like” and comment on it. With the imminent redesign of the home page, this conversation will only gain prominence and become the primary way for brands to engage fans and grow virally through the social graph.

The challenge will be for brands to use these new touch points for communication effectively. People will not accept passively receiving broadcast information like an RSS feed of blog posts; they require real engagement and two-way conversation. Brands will need to find real people to convey their voices and identity. There have already been successful examples of this on Twitter such as Zappos and Comcast.

It will only become more complex maintaining and managing a brand’s conversation as it moves away from a brand’s own site to the distributed web. As more sites and services open APIs, new tools and meta-services will be created to facilitate this for brands as FriendFeed and TweetDeck have only begun to demonstrate for consumers.

The videophone was a revolutionary product that was featured prominently in the 1964 World’s Fair. Huge amounts of time and money were spent creating it and just because it was technically possible, it was predicted that there would be an enormous demand for it. But it turned out that no one actually wanted a videophone. In fact, that the parties cannot see what each other looks like is viewed by most people as a major benefit to voice-only communication not a limitation.

When I worked in Interactive Television, every year there would be two or three companies that invested a large amount of effort in developing systems to allow users to click on a person on the screen. The envisioned killer app for this was inevitably buying what the person was wearing, the example being whatever happed to be the hit show of the moment such as Sex and the City. Even ignoring the difficulties of coordinating the business cycles of television and fashion to have products on shelves when a show airs, it was always a cumbersome user experience. TV shows are edited (such as cutting between two people having a conversation) so timing a click to be on the intended person is difficult. It would be much easier to simply select that actor from a menu. The hubris of these technologists is such that one company even blatant stated that TV shows would no longer need to be edited as if it were a flaw that would finally be corrected with their product.

Now with location based services, the holy grail is evidently walking down the street and getting beamed a coupon when passing by a certain vendor, usually Starbucks. Apparently the technologists’ vision of the future is being bombarded with offers as we stroll down a city street, even though everyone at the conference admittedly had no desire for this much less the average person. But these efforts perpetuate because it makes a good trade show demo and an even better pitch to a client or venture capitalist. Unfortunately, as we’ve seen in a previous post, selling the client on the presentation rather than the result usually leads to something that no one actually uses.

Modern humans evolved about 200,000 years ago and we all have the essentially the same brains as our ancient ancestors. It’s amazing that something like a film can deeply emotionally engage us, but it somehow taps into the way our minds work. Social interaction whether around a campfire or on Facebook hasn’t changed much; people still want essentially the same things whether it’s to flirt or boast or establish social hierarchies. Technology and media that address human needs or solve human problems can be very successful. Some companies like Apple are amazingly adept at this. Products that simply demonstrate their technical capabilities are doomed to fail.

JCPenney recently launched an app on Facebook called Dorm Life. It’s targeted to college freshmen, and although this is a major portion of Facebook’s demographic and the app is well executed, it doesn’t seem to be doing well. It allows users to put pictures of JCPenney products on their profiles and suffers from what can be called the “free ad” mentality. Unfortunately, people will not flock to put something on their profiles just because YOU care about it. People will put something on their profile because it provides value to THEM.

Flirting is definitely something of value to the Facebook demographic, and an app for Calvin Klein call In2U would seem have tapped this perfectly in allowing users to anonymously flirt with each other. However, a basic premise alone is not enough; the details of the execution always matter and this app is clumsily made. Despite all the communication channels available through the Facebook API, there is an awkward requirement to know a friend’s external email in order to flirt with them and for them to notice a strange generic email received amongst all the other spam as something intriguing to act upon. Thus, any viral growth from friend to friend is severly hindered.

At least these apps tried to create something specifically tailored to the social networking environment. More often than not, the expedient course is to take the “round peg in square hole” approach and repackage pre-existing content from something completely unrelated into something vaguely resembling an application. This is what ABC did by taking widgets for its popular shows like Ugly Betty and allowing people to put them on their profiles. They are just pushed content and contain nothing in them that makes social media powerful. No personalization, no communication with friends, no user generated content, no interaction between people at all.

One can only imagine all the conference calls and PowerPoint presentations that went into creating these apps. It’s a shame that so much money and the time of so many otherwise talented and intelligent people could be spent on creating products so boring and useless. Unfortunately, this seems to be the norm in corporate America. Occasionally, however, a gem manages to make its way through the maze of cubicles and quarterly reports.

This is the case with an application called Parking Wars, which was created for an A&E show of the same name. Rather than taking the obvious route of aggregating clips and news from the show into something that no one would care about, they instead produced a thematically related game in which people park cars on each others’ profiles. It utilizes many of the hooks provided by Facebook to create an engaging social activity that allows people to have fun with their friends. Oh, and the show probably got a lot of promotion from it too.

Facebook has an array of privacy settings. In fact, they may be too complicated, and most users probably don’t pay attention to them. An application only has the permissions of the person using it, so if you install an application, by default, it can generally access all the information on your friends that you can. However, users can set the information available to applications their friends are using to be essentially nothing.

On MySpace, applications’ access to information is even more restrictive; only the name and image of a user’s friends who haven’t added the application are available through the API, although for some reason age, gender, and location are listed in the settings which also allows users to completely block apps from accessing their information. A developer could actually get more information on users just by scraping publicly viewable pages than through the API.

The real area for concern is that when using a Facebook application, it can access everything about yourself that you can, which is almost everything. On MySpace, an application can get most of the profile information on users who have added it, but this information is usually already on a public page. Unscrupulous developers could then store this against the sites’ policies and do what they want with it.

The bottom line is, if you don’t want something to be known by the whole world, don’t put it on a social networking site regardless of your settings. The only information required to register for Facebook is a name, email, and birthdate. On MySpace, it’s this plus country and zip code. Everything else is voluntarily, as is using the sites themselves.

Social networks are amazing tools to communicate with friends and make new connections. They just have to be used with common sense and intelligence, things that seem to be missing in journalism.

However, the incessant spam and constant barrage of useless applications quickly led to a backlash among users. More importantly, it led to apathy from developers who became disincentivized to create anything worthwhile as study by Jesse Farmer points out. Social networks quickly realized that to keep their platforms a viable ecosystem, they had to provide value for all participants from developers to end users. Recently, the most stringent ant-spam measures to date have been announced by MySpace and Facebook.

Introduced in a post by Tom of MySpace himself, the new terms state:

No incentives may be given to a member for sending a message, bulletin, comment, or any other form of communication. This includes “points,” “bucks,” increased standing, or even features within the app.

Facebook’s guidelines have been changed to explicitly include:

[Applications cannot] require that users invite, notify, or otherwise communicate with one or more friends to gain access to any feature, information, or portion of the application.

While these new policies will inhibit the growth of spammy apps and improve the environment on various platforms, it’s unlikely that it will help with another complaint about social apps, that so-called “useful” applications aren’t successful. People will still want games and social interaction not office productivity apps.

But usefulness is in the eye of the beholder. Who’s to say that entertaining someone for 20 minutes or facilitating hook-ups are not useful in their own way? After all, procreation is one of the most important functions that any organism can perform, or as Nick O’Neill more eloquently puts it, “Social Apps Should Get You Laid.”

This drowsy state of affairs in what has come to be called Data Portability has suddenly been woken up in a flurry of recent announcements. First MySpace announced an initiative called Data Availability along with Yahoo!, eBay, Photobucket, and Twitter. It allows partners to use MySpace users’ logins, profile info, photo, videos, and friends list on their own sites. The next day Facebook announced an almost identical service called Facebook Connect. Then Google announced a service called Friend Connect which includes Facebook, Hi5, Orkut, Plaxo, and other sites. It seems to be more of MyBlogLog-like widgets, while the MySpace and Facebook initiatives seem to be more robust APIs, but all are nothing but announcements at this point.

Taken together, they represent the next phase of social media APIs. The first phase was providing platforms for developers to integrate their applications within popular social networks. These new services turn this inside-out and allow other websites to incorporate user information from MySpace, Facebook, etc. There are only so many profiles the average person will maintain, so this has generally led to consolidation of a few large social networks. If people can easily use their logins, profiles, and friends lists across smaller niche sites, it will likely make it easier for these to grow.

While all the players in these announcements are part of an industry organization called The DataPortability Project, none of the platforms were actually developed within it. And while they use some open standards like oAuth, they will likely be incompatible and something of a platform war is inevitable. If social networks extend beyond individual sites, whoever maintains the crucial foundation of managing users’ social identities will reap huge rewards. The stakes are high and the first moves have been made. Let’s hope the result includes better, richer, and more varied social experiences for users.

The phenomenal growth of Facebook after launching its application platform in May 2007 sent shockwaves to all other social networks. Where sites like MySpace had previously been actively attempting to block external widgets, they all began scrambling to implement their own APIs and embrace third party developers.

Now, a year later, the primary competitor to Facebook is clearly the Google developed open source OpenSocial which is finally launching on a consortium of sites including MySpace, Hi5, and Orkut. In addition to its own site, Facebook has also licensed its proprietary platform to Bebo (recently purchased by AOL.) Is this the beginning of the platform wars?

While it’s still early to see how it will all play out, a few observations can be made:

• Spam and other abuse of the system can be a huge problem. Facebook initially had very little restrictions in its messaging which allowed a few early apps to gain a huge advantage by massively spamming their way to the top. This also created a backlash among users who quickly grew tired of spammy tactics and all apps in general.
• Hi5, with fewer users than other networks, has proven to be amazingly viral. Perhaps this is due to the demographics of the users and the low number of apps in the directory (leaving a bigger slice of the pie for each one.) It also has unlimited messaging from applications, but so far, not too much spam.
• MySpace has demonstrated disappointing growth for applications. This may be partly due to the fact that after seeing how spam almost ruined Facebook, there are only a few APIs for sending messages which have only recently rolled out and have many restrictions such are requiring an active confirmation before sending. The application directory is not heavily promoted and has recently become flooded with hundreds of quiz apps and two or three apps for every single TV show or sports team, making it difficult for users to find other interesting apps.
• MySpace friends may have weaker connections than Facebook friends. This may be another reason for the much higher viral growth on Facebook, where applications provide an entertaining way for users to interact with their friends, with whom they already have a high level of involvement. MySpace users, in contrast, seem to be less involved with their friends, many of whom are probably just a collection of images for their profiles, and thus much less likely to participate in shared activities.
• OpenSocial provides limited functionality and is already fragmenting. The promise of OpenSocial is that is establishes a standard for the same code to run on multiple sites. While this mostly holds, the capabilities it offers when adhering strictly to the specification are rather limited. Each site has also implemented it in a slightly different manner and extended it through a variety of other APIs which allow more comprehensive and site-specific integration. In fact, it is entirely possible to create an application for MySpace that does not use anything related to OpenSocial.

Finally, from a developer’s or brand’s standpoint, these platforms are all still amazing opportunities to leverage the existing membership and services of popular networks to develop a large user base with relatively less effort and shorter time than other methods.

¹ Visitors in millions for March and annual growth from Nielsen Online as reported by Mashable.

² From April 22, by viewing sites’ app directories.

While mapping and geographic tools have been successfully utilized in many areas such as driving directions and event locations, some of the more interesting applications are in what might be called “location-based social media.” All social networks generally incorporate members’ location as a piece of information, but these sites and services offer very specific geographic functions and often incorporate related technologies such as GPS and mobile.

Frappr, Platial, and Socialight are sites that allow users to collaboratively mark locations on a shared map and post notes or comments about them. The uses are fairly open-ended and range from favorites places around town to fan clubs showing where everyone lives. Socialight also allows users to send a location to a mobile phone, but all that’s send is a link to a web page.

A service more oriented towards mobile is Dodgeball. It allows users to SMS their current location which is then broadcast to their friends, sort of like a geographic twitter. It gets a little complicated for places with multiple locations such as Starbucks and suffers from the limitation of only being about the immediate moment. Instead of saying to a friend, “let’s have a drink at Ace Bar tomorrow after work,” users have to sit around and wait for an alert, then drop everything to rush out to meet someone who serendipitously happens to be in their vicinity.

For planning, Dopplr provides services focused on travelers. Users can see friends who will be in the same city at the same time and make plans based on this. It obviously has some value to people who travel frequently, but doesn’t provide any other travel related features such as lodging or local information, so its use is very limited and “who will be in the same place as me” is a simple function that is likely to be incorporated into all travel sites. In fact, travel-oriented communities such as Travelpod or RealTravel provide this and much more.

For photos from around the world, the capability to add geotagging metadata to indicate location has led to many creative applications. Flickr was one of the first services to offer this and its map is an engaging way to explore and organize photos in addition to things like text tags. Flickr also provides a comprehensive API which has allowed developers to build their own interesting applications such as Trippermap and loc.alize.us. Locr is another photo service with a very specific geographic presentation.

One of the most robust geographically-oriented communities is at Geocaching, sort of a global hide-and-seek game where people use GPS devices to find caches hidden by other users. Geocachers are a passionate bunch and generally love outdoor adventures. At best the goal is to share personal favorite locations such as a beautiful view or secret hide-away, with the cache more an excuse for the journey.

These examples are quite varied. Some are simple and fall short, while others have very intriguing aspects. All hint at the amazing potential for the social application of geographic information, which is still in its early stages. As technologies advance and people become more accustomed to interacting with spatial data, it will be exciting to see increasingly sophisticated and compelling implementations of location-based social media.

This can be seen in My Starbucks on Facebook. It is a very well done gifting application, so well done in fact, that most people probably think it is an official Starbucks application. The Starbucks logo and numerous graphical assets of Starbucks products have been incorporated into it. This association with Starbucks, which has many avid followers, is a major factor in its popularity. It has over half a million installs. If it were just “my coffee”, it would likely have gotten nowhere near that many users.

The two college students who created it are not trying to hide the fact that they did this without Starbucks’ permission and include a disclaimer on the app’s about page. They are making money from advertising incorporated into the app, none of which goes to Starbucks, but they probably feel they are actually doing Starbucks a huge favor by promoting their brand. Maybe they are. It is certainly the view shared by many as represented by Nick O’Neill of AllFacebook who wrote, “If I was a brand I would be extremely happy about this.”

Perhaps nothing serves as a better example of the issues involved than the saga of Scrabulous, an online version of the game Scrabble which has become a huge hit and makes $25,000 a month for its creators, two brothers in India. Hasbro, the owner of the brand which has licensed the online rights to two other companies, has threatened to sue to have it removed from Facebook. Needless to say, the fans of Scrabulous are upset and many bloggers seem to hold the opinion that Hasbro should buy out Scrabulous as exemplified by Josh Quittner of Fortune:

If I were an evil genius running a board games company whose product line spanned everything from Monopoly to Clue, I might do this: Wait until someone comes up with an excellent implementation of my games and does the hard work of coding and debugging the thing and signing up the masses. Then, once it got to scale, I’d sweep in and take it over. Let the best pirate site win!

Is this the new business model for aspiring entrepreneurs? Don’t bother to negotiate pricey licensing deals; just find a hugely popular brand and leverage that popularity to create successful unofficial products, and then wait for the big pay day from the brand that is either grateful for all the hard work or fearful of the backlash from fans.

It certainly puts brands like Hasbro in an awkward position. Who would bother to license rights anymore if the people who simply steal intellectual property are being rewarded? On the other hand, these unofficial products are helping to promote brands and fighting against them would result in negative publicity. But isn’t this “pay me off or face harmful consequences” attitude a little like extortion?

It will be interesting to see how it all plays out. In the long run, technological changes and evolving cultural attitudes will certainly transform business models and intellectual property laws.

This is very good news for application developers as a whole, but individual developers are primarily interested in their own applications. A critical factor that Compete neglected is the exponential increase in the number of applications from less than 100 at the platform’s launch to almost 17,000 now. The exact historical number of apps over time is difficult to determine, but simply assuming a linear growth rate to 15,000 in January, it’s possible to do a “back of the envelope” calculation of the engagement of the average application.

The average app now receives about 1,000 visits and 100,000 views. While visits/app have declined, there has been a steady increase in views/visit which has offset some of the decline in visits/app and actually slightly increased it in the last few months.

It is intuitive that as the space becomes more crowded, every new application is fighting over an increasingly smaller portion of the pie. The distribution is also likely very skewed with a few huge successes and many apps that hardly anyone uses.

However, the Facebook platform still represents an amazing opportunity to engage a high number of users with relatively low effort (as opposed to developing other interactive media such as web sites.) It just now requires a thorough understanding of the characteristics of the platform and its users.