Seth Goldstein

At the end of July, roughly two months following the opening of Facebook’s social media platform, I wrote that “Closed is the New Open.” I anticipated that Facebook would enable tremendous innovation by virtue of how few options it provided for expression as opposed to how many. In the roughly two months since, developers have harvested the Facebook social graph to create a veritable rain forest of myriad applications.

The original sin of social media may be remembered by future generations as the moment when poke and wall exposed themselves at the Facebook Platform F8 event in SF on May 24, 2007.  Against the backdrop of an open social graph API, these core functions suddently enabled 3rd parties to create entirely new forms of social interaction: “Who do you want to XXX now?,” “Wanna send a XXX to your friend?,” “Who is XXXer?,” “What do you want to draw on your friend’s XXX?”

Platforms

A platform’s success is based on its generosity: how many sustainable applications have been built on said platform?

For an embodiment of a successful platform, cf Dave Morin, the authentic leader of Facebook’s technical platform. When you sit down with him, you are struck by his commitment to openness and providing all applications with a level playing field. He combines the intellect of an economist with the empathy of a sociologist. Any fear a developer may be wrestling with in terms of whether to base their business on Facebook, melts melts away in Morin’s disarming presence. You think to yourself, “Geez, sounds like these guys at Facebook are genuine- the platform is open.”

Applications take what the platform gives.

Applications

The success of an application is based on its ability to consume, to take, information from a platform and interpret it specifically for a user’s benefit. In media futures speak, the Facebook platform exposes an API which creative developers use to infuse their apps with a certain alchemical magic, otherwise known as engagement.

Perhaps the best personification of a successful application is Max Levchin, the intense, “nothing will stand between our engineers and N consumers” CEO of Slide. Slide is the biggest application suite on the Facebook platform. Max wastes little time at conferences educating others, as he seems to prefer notating on a whiteboard about optimizing viral growth paths. If Morin is like Jeff Sachs the world economist– working hard to reassure countries that he will promote free trade– then Levchin is like Dmitri Balyasny, the hedge fund trader who stays under the radar while managing vast money flows.

Advertising takes what the applications give.

Advertising

While apps take from the platform, they give to advertising. The 10-year procession of online advertising models from when banners first appeared in 1995 to today’s behavioral targeting, can be seen simply as an emerging ability for web sites to share more about what they know about their users with the advertisers that want to reach those same users. This is the apogee of what I shall describe as personal advertising, which is all forms of advertising that try to market to you based on who you are, what you have done, and what your commercial intentions may be. All advertising today, more or less, falls under this umbrella.

Recently, I have been working on a different kind of advertising, social advertising. This is when the ads you see aren’t simply influnced by your behavior, but in fact are driven by the behavior of those in your “friend group.” This was never possible before a social network such as Facebook enabled new kinds of applications that could carry social graph information up into the advertising layer of the online media stack. These kinds of ads take the value of rich data about social influence (which is extracted from the applications) and pays this value back to the underlying platform, which benefits in the form of increased CPM. I will have much more to show and tell about social advertising next week at the Web 2.0 conference. One thing that should be self evident is that the only forms of advertising that work inside of social media are social advertisements.

The most desperate attempts that personal advertising continues to make in order to capture my attention not withstanding:

* For a powerpoint-icized description of Social Advertising, see the brief presentation I gave at Dave McClure’s excellent Graphing Social conference this week

Check out Justin Smith’s live blogging at InsideFacebook

I am still not sure exactly how Facebook relates to the Attention Economy. But that has not stopped us from embracing the challenge to develop innovative social applications on top of this new platform. As you can see from the graphic above, we have created enough Facebook applications in the past few weeks to fill the profile above the fold. Our first application for Facebook was Trakzor, which we ported from MySpace, where it has millions of users who use the service to see who is checking them out. Within days, Trakzor for Facebook went from nothing, to thousands, to hundreds of thousands of users. It was such an adrenaline rush to see social media growing at scale; at its peak growth spurt two weeks ago, more than 7,000 people were adding the application per hour.

On the heels of this growth, we decided relax the focus on Attention with a capital A and start developing fun, interactive software that leveraged the implicit social graph of Facebook. And so FoodFight was born.

As “cooked up” by one of my co-founders Dave Gentzel, FoodFight reimagines the archetypal mess hall brawl as a distributed social media game: every day you get $5 for lunch money and can choose from a list of foods to throw at your friends. In perfect social media fashion, users have been (1) asking how to increase their lunch money (read: microtransactions) and (2) coming up with new food ideas to throw at their friends. By the time you read this there will be more than 1,000,000 FoodFight users (in less than two weeks).

Earlier today we launched Tag, which brings Web 2.0 tagging to tag the game we used to play as 2nd graders. In order to find out what you have been tagged as, you need to tag a few of your friends. We are learning to embed the viral coefficient directly into the user experience. It’s not longer just software as a service, it’s now software as a sequence. I bet you will see more and more Facebook applications that do not deliver their money shots until you first agree to share them with your friends. This is the socialization of the Free ipod concept which proved so successful as a cash cow in the online lead gen world.
Whether you think that the Facebook platform represents the reincarnation of Netscape in terms of its impact on the Web, or whether you think that this is just so much twiddling, the fact is that nobody really knows how this will play out. Which is all the more reason to get out there early, learn the language, and start having conversations while other people are still wondering whether they should or shouldn’t jump in. All of us would likely agree that if we had it to do all over again, we would have bought up short vanity domain names before they became trophies, or loaded up on Adwords and SEO early to maximize our Pagerank on Google. I believe that many of us will look back in a few years with similar regrets wrt Facebook if we do not start taking risks now.

As a treat, I wanted to share some tips from Dave Gentzel, founder of Trakzor and part of our AttentionSoft posse that includes Sourabh, Roj, David, Jonas and Ted. He is 24 years old and is quickly becoming the “Tom” of Facebook, friending everbody who downloads one of our apps.

SG: What is the secret to developing a killer Facebook application?

DG: There isn’t a formula at this point. It seems that the most popular applications are the ones that are simplest, already exist in the real world, and live almost exclusively in one’s profile. It goes to show that a good idea, a two minute brainstorming session, and a quick development turnaround is all it takes. Oh, and “integrated social distribution mechanisms.” Lots, and lots of those.

What do kids really want versus what grown-ups think kids want?

DG: Kids want simple applications that their friends will find cool. Profile bling is only worth something if other people see it. There’s always something to be said for being an early adopter and influencing friends, even if it’s with a pet rock application.

What was your key to getting Trakzor to scale on Facebook?

DG: Trakzor is a product that works well if no one else has it, and really well if tons of people have it. This gives people a real incentive to invite their friends and encourage them to get Trakzor, and even if they don’t, their experience is still solid. Lots of consumer demand didn’t hurt either.

What was your key for succeeding with Trakzor on Facebook?

DG: Tens of millions of people know Trakzor from MySpace. Even though the migration to Facebook required that the Trakzor service operate somewhat differently, people were enticed by the prospect of knowing who was paying attention to them and knew Trakzor could assist in that social discovery process.

How did you come up with foodfight?

DG: I’m a day dreamer. There’s really little else I’d rather be doing than thinking about new product ideas. Food Fight and most everything else I’ve ever done was something that just popped into my head at one point or another. The trick with Food Fight was to turn the “throw food” brainstorm lightbulb into a deeper, nostalgic experience. Thus, cafeteria menus were born, lunch money was given, and now even 40 year olds are dying to throw “mystery meat” at their friends.

What Facebook application are you most impressed by?

Graffiti is a winner. Simple, social, self expression.

What is your ultimate goal?

Having somebody recognize me at the mall.