BradPace.com

Presented by BJ Fogg. Sharing some secrets that have never been shared before. At stanford they had a class where teams built facebooks. They had 5 apps that got over 1 million users and had 10 apps get over 100k users. This was a big success. They started the class and did not know what they where doing. They expected 20-40 users and ended up with over 120 the first day. Ended up with 7 teachers and 80 students. They got some great press coverage. Students started meeting outside of class and still get together. $500k-$1Million in revenue at least 3 companies where formed. At least 2 companies where acquired.

Learnings from the class. #1. It is never to late to create a winning app. #2 the simple apps won. Apps need to be simple and easy. #3 speed and flexibility in launch and iterations. #4 community cooperation leads to success. Students helped others #5 individual opinions about apps are worthless. dont be swayed by one persons opinion. #6 Copying success is a cheap fast way to succeed. Novelty inst the best approach to apps. $7 metrics do matter, but todays tools are too weak. Instrument your apps to track success #10 mass interpersonal persuasion is finally here. Persuasion, social network, observable impact, fast cycle, easy to do, automated.

I was a bit disappointed by this presentation. I was already familiar with what they did there. They did not talk about the psychology behind the apps much. They went over their learnings very quickly. We built out app at this same time and achieved 2 million users in 10 weeks for our we’re related app. But our app is a real app and not a toy like these students created. And our app continues to grow.

Presented by Benjamin Link from Facebook. They are trying to create the frictionless platform.

User objective: help users communicate ad share information more efficiently, generating more meaningful activity, providing valuable information to users, increasing value to the users. Value to users means value to developers of facebook apps. This creates a more seamless level of activity.

Enhanced site experience. Expanded and interactive wall where users can generate their own content, friends can write posts. Additional tabs on the profile where users can add their favorite apps. This will be a great ui enhancement.

Seeing an increase in app usage. 99% of all users have used at least one app. Most have 6 or more apps installed. Long term value to developers and businesses.

Sharing proven technology, tools and architecture. Licensing their technology to partners like beebo. They claim that this makes their platform open. I don’t think this makes it open. They have launched the platform developers marketplace. Match developers to major brands. They are working on mass distribution via localization. They used their users to translate the site and then got feedback from users. Now you can get facebook in spanish. This will greatly expand their market. They say these same language translation tools will be available to facebook app devlopers. This will launch “very very shortly”.

Providing core infrastructure and resources. Applications should use the social graph and then leverage the social graph. Timing is less important when interacting online. Interact when you can. Timing of communication is very important and helps the communication be more efficient. Facebook photos is the largest online photos app in the world because it is plugged into the social graph. Facebook wants world class apps that leverage the social graph. Some of the top apps now are entertainment. New apps are more about productivity and more useful applications. They are building commerce functionality into the system. Build native support for accepting credit cards into the developer apis. That will be awesome! He says this will launch very soon (later this year).

Enabling viral distribution to over 66 million active users. Create the best user experience available. Jacking users around has been a big problem on facebook. Like forced invites. Facebook is putting control of these types of poorly designed apps in the hands of the users. Users can report poor experience. Facebook wants apps with a long term view of the world and that put the user first. Facebook now monitors activities like invites and accepted invites. Apps that create good content and functionality get more privlages on the system. Personally I think this is the only way that they can keep a good user experience on Facebook. Our app can now send more invites per user because we have a good conversion rate.

At the snap chat last week 2 guys (I didn’t catch their names) from WidgetBox.com spoke.  I have never built a web widget before and am simply not that familiar with them so this was a great opportunity for me to understand them better. Widgetbox distributes apps, has 18k developers, 25 Million page views per month and has 30k apps/widgets.

The most common use of widgets is to install them on your blog.  Most are built for WordPress or Movable type.  Also lets not forget Google Gadgets and Yahoo widgets (confabulator).  Then there is the desktop widget. There is a huge audience here and possibility to get your app distributed to thousands of sites.  Widgets tend not to be quite as “Social” as a social network because they don’t have the data that the social networks do.  But I think that hooking a widget into an app in Facebook or an OpenSocial site will be big soon.  Many people on the social networks also have a blog.  There is opportunity in this space and will be for a long time.

Tips for building a widget:

1. Match your audience.  This means take into account who will use the widget and what they want to do.  The Beebo audience is much different than the Eons audience.
2. Focus.  There are many ways to get your widget installed like widgetbox, yourminis, spring widgets and clearspring.
3. Operations.  This is the APIs, the networks, hosting and all the rest of the details.  Make sure you do it right and have a plan that scales well.  If your widget takes off you want to be ready.
4. Marketing. There are several ways to do this.  The above sites all have galleries where users can find apps.  There are also many widget directories.  But don’t forget good old virality.  Have your users invite their friends, make the install easy, and keep it going.  There are many widgets out there but the good ones grow on their own. Use an installer that launches right from the widget and also provide a “Get code” feature so it is easy to embed in a website.

For a good example of a widget check out the Netvibes widget.  Use your widget to push data out and bring users in.

Last Tuesday I was able to fly to San Francisco to attend the Snap Chat at Hi5 Labs.  Patrick Chanezon who is the Google API evangelist spoke.  He did a great job and it was easy to tell he is a major player in planning and implementing OpenSocial.  He spoke on high level non-technical issues all the way down to coding and specifics on the spec.  Google currently has 40 APIs available with their suite of products.  The 2 major APIs Google is focused on right now are Android (for cell phones) and OpenSocial.

In any new product there is a cycle that it goes through.  First there is a peak of inflated expectations then a trough of disillusionment.  After that there is a slope of enlightenment and finally a plateau of productivity.  Patrick was very clear that OpenSocial had a high peak of inflated expectations at the beginning and then hit a trough of disillusionment.  He hopes that now they are on the uphill slope of enlightenment.  But still have a long way to go before it is ready for real customers and business.

OpenSocial is not intended to make it so you can write your app once and have it work everywhere.  OpenSocial allows us to LEARN ONCE (one system) and write everywhere.  Each app will need to be re-written for each social network.  Each network has a different audience and different features and different data that will be available.  But the point of OpenSocial is that it will be very easy to deploy the same app (with some customization) to many networks in a short amount of time.

The .5 version of the OpenSocial spec had no security at all (or user authentication).  The .6 spec came out at the end of December and had many enhancements and included security and user controls.  The OpenSocial spec is really just an extension of the google gadget API.  They have agreed to use Atom as a standard format for files.  The .7 version of the spec will come out by the end of January and should be ready for actual end users to test.  There will be a .8 version in February that will be ready for production or beta use.

The API can be broken down into 3 main parts:

1)      Access to friends

2)      Activities stream (feeds and invites for virality)

3)      A simple hash map (creates a persistence layer for the apps)

If you want to play with OpenSocial the best way to get started is to use a sandbox to run your code on.  Plaxo, Ning, Hi5, and Orkut all have sandboxes.

Ning and Google have created an Apache open source project called Shindig.  There has been some confusion as to what Shindig is.  Simply put Shindig is a container and back end server components for hosting Open Social apps.  Think of it as plumbing to expose your data.  Google is working on the Java version and Ning is working on the PHP version.  They hope that other companies will do other versions like .net (MySpace?) and ruby(Zing?).

Patrick’s prediction was that MySpace would make a big impact this year.  They did not do much in 2007. They are going to be launching a developer outreach program and will be providing some very cool tools for their system.  MySpace is not done yet and we should see some exciting stuff from them over the next few months.

He also hinted that there will be some OpenSocial development tools coming soon.  Maybe even from Google.  He keeps track of all the cool OpenSocial links at http://del.icio.us/chanezon.

The overall take away from the meeting is that OpenSocial is progressing well and will be ready for some serious development and possibly betas in a month or so.  Plus you have to have the networks implement the most recent version of the spec to actually use it. But he acted like the 4-5 major OpenSocial networks are implementing the versions quickly. But it should be ready for production in March.  Start filling those sandboxes now because OpenSocial will be here sooner than we think.

Now days to us at World Vital Records we often consider social media to be just Facebook.  Just because we are developing apps for facebook.  Did I mention we have an app with 1.8 MILLION installs? Anyway social media can include anything from social bookmarking to blogging.  Each speaker at this session of Pubcon spoke about a different topic.  So here are the random highlights:

• Page views don’t matter (unless you can sell CPM ads).  So in social media especially it is the action that is important.
• The types of products that work best in social media are products (not services), consumer goods (not B2B), impulse purchases, and low cost door buster prices.
• Manage your expectations with social media.  Users are not there to buy so you have to understand that conversion rates are going to be low.
• In social media you need to make sure to let your visitors choose their delivery method of your content or service.  This means they may be getting your content via RSS for example.  So do everything you can to make your monetization method work with all types of delivery.
• Twitter – push sales and offers to customers.  This will work great both our World Vital Records users who use twitter!
• Tips on getting Digg traffic. First understand the Digg demographic but also know that more diverse types of people are starting to use Digg.  You need about 100 diggs in 24 hours to get to the home page.  If you cant do that then you can forget it.  Timing is everything on Digg. And make sure your site can handle the traffic if you do get to the home page!  One great suggestion is to post your content early and get it crawled by Google.  Then point the Digg traffic to the Google cache version of your page. Google can handle it! Hard core Digg users hate ads so remove the ads on day 1 and 2.  Then add them back in on day 3-5.  This is when the buyers come anyway.  One tactic is to use Digg to just get RSS subscribers or email addresses instead of sales. Great way to get branding.
• Ads are ailing. You need to find a different way to monetize social media.
• Negative comments are increasingly normal in social media.  So a company must actively participate.  Timely responses quell the storm.  But don’t get into public debates.  Try to take problems out of the social arena and work them out one on one.  There is an increased demand for transparency in social media.  So don’t pretend to be something you aren’t.  Be honest!

Sorry that is all so disjointed.  But there are some good thoughts and ideas in there.

I am proud to say I finally reached over 100 connections in LinkedIN (111 actually).  This is not many compared to some, but it is a major milestone for me.  I started using LinkedIn several years ago but did not really start trying to grow my network until a year or so ago. I can honestly say that I do know everyone in my network.  I do not accept or invite anyone in LinkedIN, Facebook, or any other social network that I would not feel comfortable sending an email. You can see my profile at http://www.linkedin.com/pub/1/213/a74.

My goal is to get much better at networking and meeting new people.  So my goal is to double my network in the next 6 months.

Yesterday I attended the Snap Summit conference in San Francisco. This was a conference on the Facebook developer platform and covered many different topics related to Facebook app development and marketing. Here are a few of my notes and thoughts on application monetization from the conference. You can check out our new Facebook ap at www.wererelated.com.
Notes from the facebook platform manager Ami Vora:
There are currently 5,400 apps with over 100 daily unique visitors. Facebook has issued over 88,000 developer keys. 85% of all facebook users have installed at least one app. So the users are liking the apps and there are many to choose from. Currently they have 49 Million active users. The new users are 25+ years old or in high school or are international. More non-collage users than collage users. 1/2 of all facebook users are out of US with many in Canada and UK. They have 60 Billion page views per month and average 50 page views per visitor per day.

Facebook loves to talk about the “social graph”. This is how everyone is connected in facebook. They define the Social Graph as network connections in the real world through which people communicate. Any app that understands and uses the social graph will do well. The reason that facebook has more photos than all the photo services out there is because those photos are tied to the social graph and have meaning to people.

Their advice is to provide content and focus on social interaction. This is what they build facebook around. They also said to pay attention to usability. Fresh content creation is also key.

Notes from the advertising panel:
All consumer software will soon be free (within 5-10 years). There was some debate on this but all agreed that most consumer software is moving in this direction and will be ad supported. Currently facebook apps are seeing a very low $.01-$.50 CPM. Google ads are not working because click through rates are very low. People do not want to click off when they are working in facebook. So this is a huge issue. Currently other developers are buying ads and this is about the extent of the current ad model.

They through out several examples. One of someone with 600M monthly page views making $20k per month. Another of someone with 100K daily active users making about the same. These are exceptions (most don’t make any). They stated that most facebook apps do not have a business plan and are just grabbing users in hopes of either selling their app or hoping something comes along to help them make ad dollars. But everyone on the panel was optimistic that facebook or a partner would figure out how to monitize facebook. The Microsoft investment gave everyone hope that they would help facebook figure it out.

They did speculate about the November announcement. And one panelist thought that facebook would be announcing that they will take the information they have on facebook users and use it to serve targeted ads outside of facebook. When the facebook users are visiting other sites. This seems very strange to me.

The president of Flixter was very sharp and really got it. His point was that they don’t need to sell ads but rather they are selling social interaction with their users to major movie studios. So they report back all the interactions their users have with the movie like page views, movie reviews, discussion boards, trailer views, ect. I thought this was a great approach and a new way to think about getting branding in facebook (for a fee!).

Additional thoughts:
I was very disapointed in the ad networks that were there. They all seemed about 8 years behind the times and are focused on banners and CPMs. It just seemed like they are trying to start over and have not learned from what Google has done in the ad space. I think facebook would be dumb not to add the ability to serve up tarted text ads to their users based on content on their pages or in their profiles. I think this will happen. Whether they provide a way for developers to take part in this or not is unclear. It was clear that most of the apps out here have no business plan and no real business behind it like ours. This will give us a huge advantage over others.

I was not impressed with the other developers at the conference. I think many have moved over from experience with myspace widgets. And most don’t think big. They are looking for the easy $. Even though there are thousands of apps most of them will die off. Ours is one of the first next generation of apps that really provide value. I think there is an amazing amount of opportunity here still for real businesses and real apps. Someone brought up the point that all the apps developed so far have taken less than 5 months to develop. So the real apps are yet to come.

I also think that the other social networks will have to follow facebooks open platform lead. This model will not be going away anytime soon. So we have to make sure we are ready to jump on the other platforms as they come along.

Keep coming back because I will be blogging more and more on Facebook development and application marketing.

Here is my outline of a short presentation I did at the last Rocky Mountain Affiliate Marketing Association last week.

First you have to get yourself in an “Outsourced Mindset”. (Don’t outsource your mind!) Effectively using outsourced resources can change everything from profitability to how much you can pay for a customer.

50s, 60s, and 70s was all about building large all-in-one corporations. The 80s and 90s was about cutting costs using outsourcing. The 2000s will be about partnering with the companies that have the best specialties and the fastest growing knowledge and skill sets.

The books “The world is flat”, “the Only Sustainable Edge”, and “The 4 hour work week” are great books on outsourcing.

What can be outsourced. 2 rules + 1

1) Tasks can be clearly defined and easily communicated

2) Tasks that are time consuming and can be easily broken up

3) Also, have fun with it!

Things to think about

· Do you have short term, unrelated tasks or do you want a trained team with long term projects?

· Do you have someone to manage the tasks and provide direction? You must have good management. This is where most companies fail.

· What form of communication do you need from them (email, phone, written docs)?

· There will be frustrations!

Outsourcing- don’t forget US opportunities

• Part time specialized help (genealogists in specific area), bloggers, PR, IT, content creation, SEO, affiliate recruiting.
• Setup an “advisory panel”.
• Use customers, LinkedIn, social networks, affiliates, etc.
• Find people who are excited about what you do.
• Just ask!

Finding a company to work with

• Ask the right questions and lots of them.
• Types of skilled workers they already have. Specialties?
• Office setup and work environment. Internet connection, utilities, public transit, even health conditions can make a big difference in productivity. Ask for photos.
• Team organization and communication channels
• How are workers compensated? Understand their benefit package. Employee retention rate.
• Times outsources employees will work.
• Who will you interface with? A US manager, overseas manager, or direct with employees?
• Can you interview your workers? Is there a trial period you can use?
• Have them help you understand the differences between overseas workers and US workers.

Outsourcing tools

• Google docs – Best tools ever!
• VOIP and IM
• Source control for developers – cvs, source vault, source safe
• Bug/Task tracking systems. Used bugzilla in the past. Use OnTime now (awesome!)
• 37signals.com products (basecamp and backpack) and many open source solutions
• Amazon’s Mechanical Turk system to outsource tasks to thousands of independent workers.

Bill Lancer from Hitwise gave a great presentation on some important changes in search. They have a blog at www.ilovedata.com and track traffic from over 1600 search engines. First of all Google is BIG and only getting bigger! They currently make up 4.8% of ALL internet usage. This is an amazing number if you think about it. They have a breakdown of Google’s traffic by their various sites. Search is #1 and makes up 70% of their traffic. But YouTube is now their #2 traffic generator at 10% of all Google traffic. After that is Google Images. A few months ago Google implemented the “Universal Search” results in which they mix in maps, videos, images, news and other sources into their global search results. This has greatly impacted their traffic mix. Google maps is seeing 20% more traffic over the last 30 days due to this.

Human search has been a hot topic as of late. But the first human search shows up at spot 400 in the search engine list. That is ChaCha.com. So in other words “nothing”! The top 4 search engines (Google, Yahoo, MSN/Live, Ask) make up 98% of all searches. So the others are hardly worth the effort.

Social networks now make up a large amount of traffic. The interesting thing is that the increase in social networking traffic has not effected the search engines at all. Social networking are unique in that they do not rely on search engines. They now have numbers that show that many people participate in multiple social networks. The increase in facebook traffic has not effected myspace traffic for example.

Facebook is touted as the next Google. There has been a ton written about this and there is lots of hype around facebook right now. My boss Paul Allen has a great facebook post. Facebook has had 2 major turning points in their traffic. The first is when they opened their site up to corporate networks. The second was when they opened their site to all users. Facebook now accounts for almost 2% of all web traffic! It is amazing to think about.

It is also interesting to think about how users start their web experience each day. In the beginning there where large portals like yahoo and netscape. This is what people used as their start page. Then people moved to using a search engine as their starting point. Now users are moving to social networks as their starting point. This is one reason they are growing so quickly.

There are some major differences in the demographics of each of the major search engines. Google has more males and they tend to be technical. One interesting stat is that extreme liberal and extreme conservatives tend to use Google more (people with political views in the middle don’t use Google as much). MSN and Ask have more women searchers. Also seniors use MSN/Live and Ask way more than they do Google.

There are 60 billion searches per month worldwide and only 13 billion of them happen in the US.

Today I read a great article on webpronews at http://www.webpronews.com/insiderreports/2007/06/25/all-the-good-kids-are-on-facebook entitled “All the good kids are on facebook”. I have been a long believer that we have not even started tapping into the demographic and sociological information that is available on the web. I find it interesting that there is such a large difference in the types of users on myspace and facebook. I have a profile on both systems. (for market research reasons when we where building familylink.com). From my experience in both systems, I do find their analysis in the article to be correct.

I think much of the difference is due to the difference in features between myspace and facebook. Myspace is built around expressing yourself and customizing the system. While facebook is for users who actually want to “DO” stuff.

So I decided to look at the quatcast.com charts for both. Quantcast is awesome and I have found it to be much more accurate than alexa. And I think alexa is getting worse. But here are some differences I see when I compare the reports.

1) Obviously myspace has 3-4 times the daily visitors. But it is interesting that facebook is growing more quickly.
2) Facebook is almost exactly 50/50 male to female visitors. Myspace has more females than males (probably from all those fake female profiles promoting their porno sites).
3) Both systems are 3x the internet average for the age group 18-24. Face book is weak in the 25-44 range but much stronger in the 45-54 age demographic. A few months ago this was not true. I think facebook will quickly become more popular for all age groups. I wish quantcast had a 13-18 age range. Maybe they don’t want to know.
4) Household income is almost opposite between the 2 systems. Myspace has more in the 0-30k income range. Where facebook has the most in the 100k+ range! This is very interesting and is a good sign for facebook.
5)Ethnicity is also interesting. Both show more than average in the African American range and below average in the Caucasian and Asian groups. But Myspace is also way above average in the Hispanic and other categories. What is other anyway? Native american and other nationalities? This stat could show that myspace has more international users.
6) both have mostly Regular and Addicts as their visitors. Are social networks addictive? I know my friend Jon feels he is addicted to facebook and has limited his self to only logging in on even days
7) myspace has many more users with no college education. This could be in large part to the history of facebook being a college site.