DISQUS

Yes, they are the future and I posted on that at my blog a few weeks ago.

However, where I would extend that is to games like Live Gifts. Even though they aren't traditionally an embeded flash game, they are simulations like The Sims and Sim City...which out sell traditional games.

@Nick
Yes, it's a good thing as we commented on yesterdays post that it's about quality not the quantity of apps.

@Tom
If an app requires someone to invite friends in order to use features of an app then that is very poor design. An application should stand on it's own merit and have it's own intrinsic value that makes it worthy of a friend invite.

Also, the scenario you outlined is against the terms Nick posted here, there has to be more than just message saying you must invite someone on the page following a skip.

@Johnathan
Exactly, in the end we all want quality vs. quantity. They could easily cut this down even more by making it relational to grouped friends with a priority score attached to each group. Who cares if a friend of a friend of a friend did xyz with abc app.

I still believe that even though the old ones are running the show like you said that if a new one were to come in and do things better it wouldn't have to rely so much on viral activity as it's primary means for installs. Remember, there are a ton of crap applications, and there are reasons they don't spread.

Another reason these networks need to have priority buckets for friends. He could've easily put 99.9% of them in the "I don't care about you bucket" and have Warren B. and Steve B. in the other bucket. ;-)

@Jess
I agree, it's all about games. I bet if you saw the Fifa08 Flash soccer game instead of a banner ad you might give it a try, and especially if you only saw that add on someones profile who was also a player of that game.

That's where Beacon can work....the friend recommendation has to have context to what the user has done or is doing on their own profile itself, not on some 3rd party site that doesn't have any context to actions on their profile. The missing link in Beacon.

Your question as to when is now, it's already happening. But, even with Friend Feed it's more about the "who". I don't think Friend Feed allows this, but, Ideally I should be able to bucket people into priorities. RSS Readers need to do the same vs. topical buckets. That way, if I only have 5 min I could just look at my priority A list (closest friends and family) and if I have more time I can go out to my priority C list that has 50-100 people in it vs. the A list of say 5-10.

@Seomotion
Exactly, the communication will always be there, but, the major social networks do a whole lot more. Simply communicating wont bring in the revenues, the users have to be able to interact with each other in terms of culture and or entertainment. There is a reason these sites have API's. It wont be long before you see social networks doing buyouts of applications.

Games games games games........ok, i'll stop now with my rants. Social Ad's are not about "choose a keyword and write an add". Social Ad's are all about what one can DO with your add...interactive ad's. Agencies who know that space will thrive over the coming years...and...another boom for designers and programmers.

See once again as I've said before, Facebook is all about games. It seems they are starting to realize this.

The obvious reason for the low CTR is becuase social network users are not performing long tail searches. Social Network advertising should be in the context of what one is DOING with EACHOTHER not what they said to eachother.

Facebooks advertising options should include the following as an example to what I said above...

-User Plays Games (identifiable by how many game apps are installed)
-User Likes Photos (identifiable by photo gallery apps and qty of photos used/viewed)
-User Likes Videos (same, but with videos)
-User Likes Moderating (identifiable by how many apps theve installed that allow you to rate and mod people)

Now, with that data, a Facebook app developer can really target their adds much better, and, have a hight CTR.

@Steven
Games, it's all about games. Be it sending someone a $1 gift and comparing your gifts to someone else's or playing Scrabble it all boils down to games.

Nobody cares about Johnny's tweet that he just went to a concert, and you cant monetize someones musings at the bottom of the pyramid of followers. So that leaves you with "what do you actually DO with your friends on a social network"...that DOING is Playing Games!

http://www.trumptheniche.com/2008/01/27/online-...

Cmon buddy, obviously they werent getting into porn and you of all people shouldve been able to decipher that it was either for advertisers or it's new payment system...exactly what I thought when reading your post.

Dont walk the same blog path as Perez Hilton.

I also posted on Facebooks payment system and social payments in general on my site today.

Where they will make money is games, 17% of their revenue came from 24 million $1 gifts that people sent to eachother. I outlined on my blog how the value in the social web is games.

http://www.trumptheniche.com/2008/01/27/online-...

This does have me worried a little. For a new facebook developer but long time web developer the app listing page can bury new and worth apps amongst apps that have un justified category tags. Some things tagged as "games" are not a game or even close to being called a game.

And to answer your question, I have spent a lot of time browsing the directory, but I'm sure most dont.

Nobody is mentioning the fact that with EC2 there is no immutable storage for your database. You literally have to hack together a backup/sync/recovery routine into and out of S3 or somewhere else. If your EC2 instance goes down, highly likely if you get enough traffic, or, if Amazon's cloud goes den then your DB is SOL.

Everyone is saying "what's the advantage here"?. Maybe these people havent experienced the limitations a facebook application developer has within their canvas pages. You have some 400 odd pixels width to work with, and, nested branding.

Ive been elaborating for a week now and specifically just today (before hearing a word about any of this) as to how Facebook is becoming a gaming framework.

http://www.trumptheniche.com/2008/01/27/online-...