Update, 4pm: Significantly, Zuckerberg said Facebook is encouraging developers to build applications to make money, both from advertisements and other transactions. Developers would do this from a “canvas” page given to developers to work on. Zuckerberg stressed two other themes, “deep integration,” and “mass distribution,” examples of which are illustrated in our Agape/Causes on Facebook story posted after this one.
Update, 3pm: Mark Zuckerberg is giving some notable updates:
–Facebook is adding more than 100,000 users a day, or three percent a week, the size of San Francisco every week
–40 billion page views a month
–Sixth most trafficked site in the U.S, recently passed eBay, and working on passing Google
–Predictions for 2007: 50 million users, 75 percent outside of college
–50 percent come back everyday
–No any major social network has 15 percent of their users coming back every day
–Facebook Photo application has more than twice the amount of traffic than all others combined (!), even though Facebook Photo is pretty basic, without the sort of features of a Flickr. This is because of the “social graph,” he says, which keeps users connected with their friends. When a user uploads a photo, others can see it too.
–Same for Facebook Events.
–So what are we going to do with [the social graph]? “Spread information with it.”
–Users often don’t want to spread their photos through the whole social graph, but merely to their friends.
–But friends see the application and then want to spread it. So the application spreads through the rest of the graph…
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VentureBeat will be covering the Facebook’s official launch today of its “Platform,” a set of tools that let third parties develop applications on top of Facebook and its data.
The company continues to impress, and expand in influence.
Hitwise reports that Facebook has more than doubled in size, to around 22 million now, since it opened up to anyone last year. This is no college-only phenomenon: For a couple of months now, we’ve been writing about the growing influence of its Platform, and how Facebook is expanding rapidly around the world and across demographics.
The company appears ever more confident of the value of what they have — a database of people’s lives, created and shared willingly by the users themselves. The site’s earlier experiments, like news feeds, have successfully tapped into this already. Platform, since it first started last August, is the most ambitious effort yet. Today, we’re expecting to hear more about Facebook’s plans to integrate with the rest of the world.
Yes, the name of the event, “F8,” is a bit over-the-top, but we’ll have updates on throughout the day, with one post already planned for 4pm. We’ll also be live-blogging the hackathon following the regular presentation.
Tags: co:Facebook, f84 Comments
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Karel Baloun said:
FB’s ambition has been to be the “social operating system” of the internet. Ebay was an original platform for business, and FB ads the social dimension, and has already passed ebay’s pageviews. I pointed to this ambition from the start of the company in “Inside Facebook” at http://www.FBbook.com. A key link on FB’s marketplace shows the listings of your Friends. It’s clear we’d prefer to do commerce with people we know, and this is a natural evolution of the internet - in
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BetterLabs said:
I am really really surprised why everyone thinks this is new. Salesforce.com did the exact same thing several years back, and it should not have taken any large social network to have epiphany to think of this. The on-demand platform model worked very well for Salesforce.com, but I am not sure the same applies to consumer social networks. Its tough to think that we will do “all” our social interactions in one network. If this is just a way for them to boost their traffic… sure, it definitely will do that I am sure. Essentially, the app developers who build for facebook will market facebook further as well.
I am not sure this is SO market changing and SO big. And Salesforce.com did the same long back. Ofcourse, I am also not sure if I am right :-)
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Karel Baloun said:
(my post was cut by a “less than” charcter”)
It’s clear we’d prefer to do commerce with people we know, and this is a natural evolution of the internet - in less than 10 years I predict most web activity will be social. It’s just more natural. Ebay is market capitalized at $44B, half off of its 2005 high, so is this commercial foray works out, FB will be easily over $5B.
Formalizing the position of businesses using the Platform (previously call Facebook API) will encourage designers to invest the development time. For example, I’ll implement it on PTrades.com my niche commodities trader social web application - so that for my on-Facebook members, their executed trades will appear in their mutual news feeds.
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Facebook Remix said:
Saw this funny remix video about this facebook announcement. These guys are sooo young, but kudos to them.
3 Trackbacks
5:05 pm
Big Day For Facebook | NathenGrass.com said:
[...] Coverage More Webware VentureBeat coverage Facebook: The social Web utility company Facebook’s new face Facebook’s plan to hook up [...]
8:44 am
Facebook Thinks Big « PodTech Network said:
[...] miss thorough reports from for example Dan Farber at Between the Lines and Eric Eldon at VentureBeat. Here is Eldons summary: Zuckerberg said Facebook is encouraging developers to build applications [...]
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mind new media » Analyzing the Facebook Platform, three weeks in said:
[...] VentureBeat’s launch coverage [...]