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.
