There was a strange moment this afternoon at the Snap Summit 2.0 in San Francisco. Dave Morin, Facebook's Senior Platform Manager was fielding some audience questions after spending the better part of an hour giving a very broad overview of Facebook's development efforts to a room full of mostly developers. For many, the event was the highlight of the day in a conference whose very promotional materials were made to emulate the look of a Facebook profile page.
An audience member in the back called Morin out on preaching openness despite the fact Facebook is one of the largest social networks not a part of OpenSocial, an initiative that was designed to compete with Facebook's system by letting user data cross-pollinate between sites and services using a single API.
Morin shrugged the question off saying simply "It's pretty interesting. We've made some pretty interesting commitments to openness as well." Not to cut off the chances of Facebook joining the project in the future, Morin followed by saying that Facebook would continue to "evaluate OpenSocial and Facebook's potential place in it." Audience members let out a few sighs and Morin ended the Q&A session immediately.
As it stands Morin and company seem to be quite happy with Facebook's open yet closed platform that's has more than 300,000 applications. Morin nostalgically noted that when he was first brainstorming the platform project with others on the Facebook team, he had hoped they'd get 5,000 applications in the first year, and had no idea it would grow to be what it is today.
So what's next for the platform? Commerce. More specifically, integrating a payment system into the developer tools so application developers would be able to get cash from users instead of just advertisers. Morin says the tools will be in the hands of developers within the next two quarters. Facebook users have already been christened into the idea of giving Facebook money with its first-party gifts service, which lets users spend real world money on virtual gifts friends can display on their walls. The service represents a very early play on what developers would be able to do with their applications using upcoming commerce tools.
Also in the works is application localization for different countries. Facebook's grand scheme is to use specialized markup tags to let users localize applications by language without having to do any of the translation themselves. The result would be making one application work in every country Facebook can be found. The company has already been using a similar system on its own international sites by having users do the heavy lifting when it comes to translation. Morin didn't give a time frame on this feature, but noted that it would come later on.
Coming back to what Morin said about OpenSocial, I honestly don't expect Facebook to join the newly created OpenSocial Foundation or movement anytime soon. The company has a very powerful upcoming strategy of letting people spend money quickly and easily with micropayments (a la iTunes), and spreading the Facebook's presence internationally with the help of users who are willing to do the work for them when it comes to translation.
Opening up Facebook user to data, or giving up the system that's clearly been working very well isn't in the company's interest at the moment. In the meantime it's worth watching developers of both platforms closely, as they've got two big platforms to launch applications, and the opportunity to attract users and make money is only getting bigger.
Facebook's Senior Platform Manager Ami Vora took the stage at this morning's SNAP Summit in San Francisco to talk about "the state of the platform" from Facebook's perspective. Besides a rehash of the social graph spiel from the launch of the applications platform earlier this year, several interesting numbers were thrown around, including one that noted that 1 in 4 people in Toronto are on Facebook, and that each Facebook user turns about 50 pages a day. The most impressive, however, is that 85 percent of users on Facebook have added at least one application to their profiles since the launch of Facebook applications in late May.
Since the SNAP Summit is aimed mainly at Facebook developers, Vora went on to discuss some of the things that they've seen "work" for app creators from Facebook's point of view. "Every time you touch the user, think about how you're adding value to them," Vora said. She also noted that giving users interaction with buddies, integrating your app with Facebook's tools, and adding privacy controls will make an app stickier even to cautious users. In the previous panel consisting of the heads of several successful Facebook app creators from RockYou, Grow-a-Gift, and Graffiti, the big buzzword was "virility," and Vora noted that a big part of developers' successes thus far have been utilizing the tools that Facebook had provided to help share an app with their friends.
Following her presentation, Vora fielded several questions from the audience, ranging from Facebook's internal party plans following this week's Microsoft investment announcement, to adding a system for developers to integrate micropayments into their apps--something that, according to Vora, Facebook is "thinking about," but not implementing anytime soon.
An audience member also asked about what Facebook views to be its biggest competitors. Vora nixed mentioning any other social networks (most notably MySpace) in place of saying that other forms of media are Facebook's biggest foes, including TV, radio, and "petting your dog." Surprisingly, she answered more questions than Zuckerberg, who just last week at the Web 2.0 Summit managed to spend nearly half an hour talking to Federated Media's John Battelle without divulging anything that hadn't been said in the past five months.
Facebook's Senior Platform Manager Ami Vora took to the stage at the SNAP Summit to talk about all things Facebook for the crowd of developers and entrepreneurs.
(Credit: CNET Networks / Andrew Mager)
A few weeks ago, I moderated a panel at the Graphing Social Patterns conference, about business models on Facebook. The panelists couldn't agree on which models will actually work long-term. So I'm modifying the question and asking it another conference, the SNAP (Social Network Application Platform) confab, this Friday.
I'll be talking with Lee Lorenzen of Altura Ventures, Darryl Eaton of SocialMedia, Murtaza Hussain of PeanutLabs, and Todd Sawicki of Lookery. My panel starts at 1:30 pm Pacific time.We'll dive into business model topic again, focusing on advertising on social networks. If you're in town and would like to see and hear the discussion, go to this Eventbrite page to get a 10% discount on admission.
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