Inside Facebook

Facebook, which has been filling up 5 offices on University and Hamilton in downtown Palo Alto with its now over 600 employees (and reaching close to 1000 by year’s end), today announced that the company is moving to an old HP/Agilent building just off of California Ave a couple miles away in Palo Alto.

While many had speculated the company would move to San Francisco, Facebook’s Debbie Frost told the Palo Alto Daily News that the company wants to stay close to its downtown Palo Alto home, since so many employees live nearby.

“We have loved our time in downtown Palo Alto and consider it part of the DNA here at Facebook. Many of our employees live in the area and will continue to be a part of the downtown community,” according to her e-mail statement… “The motivation behind the move was the need to scale the organization while taking into account employee preferences to be located together as much as possible.”

Facebook will move to 1601 California Ave, Palo Alto, a 152,000 square foot facility in Stanford Research Park, in the first quarter of 2009.

Using Google’s new Insights for Search tool, Inside Facebook has mapped Facebook’s US and international search growth over time from its launch in February 2004 to the present. Note that while these are not visits, searches and visits do generally correlate.

United States

April 2004

Facebook launches in February 2004 at Harvard University in Massachusetts.

June 2004

It then opens to other Ivy league schools and Stanford University in California.

August 2004

October 2004

December 2004

Facebook expands to colleges across the country. In December 2004 Facebook reaches 1 million active users.

June 2005

Facebook quickly took hold in the midwestern and southern US. By May 2008, Facebook supports over 800 college networks.

December 2005

In September 2005, Facebook adds support for high school networks across the country.

June 2006

In May 2006, Facebook adds support for corporate networks. In September 2006, feeds are launched. By December 2006, Facebook has 12 million active users.

June 2007

In April 2007, Facebook reaches 20 million active users. In May, the Facebook Platform launches.

July 2008

By June 2008, Facebook reaches 131 million unique visitors in North America (comScore).

Worldwide

July 2004

Facebook was started by Mark Zuckerberg and classmates at Harvard University in Massachusetts, USA in February 2004.

January 2005

In 2005, Facebook began to add international school networks.

January 2006

By the end of 2006, Facebook reaches nearly 2 million users in Canada and 1 million users in the UK.

January 2007

By October 2007, Facebook reaches 50 million active users worldwide.

January 2008

In 2008, Facebook launches translated versions of the site in Spanish, French, German, and releases a Translations application allowing users to translate the site into any language.

July 2008

In July 2008, Facebook reaches 90 million active users globally. Users have translated Facebook into dozens of languages. Facebook growth explodes in South America.

For more interesting maps on the growth of other sites, check out Andrew Chen’s recent post.

Additional Inside Facebook Resources

• Tracking Facebook’s 2008 International Growth by Country

Friendster, which has risen to become the largest social network in Asia after its precipitous fall in North America years ago, is today announcing  support for OpenSocial 0.7 as part of the Friendster Developer Program.

The Friendster app platform actually launched in late 2007 - it was the second social network to launch a platform after Facebook. Since then, thousands of developers have joined the Friendster Developer Program and about 500 apps have been released on the Friendster platform. Friendster told us today that 10 million unique users have installed at least 1 application so far, and half a million apps are installed every day. Of those who have installed applications, the average is between 2-3 apps installed per person.

Friendster’s Jeff Roberto says that the company will continue to support existing APIs as it adds OpenSocial support. “We plan to support both. This is really an extension of the Friendster Developer Program to developers of OpenSocial applications, who should now be able to run their apps on Friendster out of the box. We’re the only place that app developers can reach 55 million unique users in Asia on a single social network. And we have very low overlap with other social networks.”

Friendster’s platform as an open revenue model, meaning developers are free to monetize their apps however they like. One unique aspect to monetizing on the Friendster platform is that ads on the profile page are permitted - unlike other social networks.

“Friendster’s launch is another major milestone in the adoption and deployment of OpenSocial throughout the social web and around the world. We’re particularly excited that OpenSocial is helping Friendster bring new social applications to users in Asia, and we look forward to seeing users embrace these apps,” said David Glazer, director of engineering at Google.

Roberto says that while the company is not ready to announce specific dates yet, Friendster does plan on supporting the OpenSocial 0.8 spec. OpenSocial 0.8 adds REST API support - like the Facebook Platform does - something OpenSocial developers have been clamoring for for months.

From gaming conferences to gaming for a cause and from Facebook pets to Facebook movie promotions, here are this week’s highlights from Inside Social Games:

• Space Movers Lets Facebook Players “Game for a Cause”
• Virtual Goods Summit 2008 Coming October 10
• Playfish Keeps Rolling with Pet Society
• Traitor - Special Agent Games Promotes a Movie through Facebook Games
• Videos from 2008 Social Gaming Summit
• Battle of the Bands is Fun but Complex
• Word Twist is Fun, But Could be More Social

Unlike the early Facebook platform, the MySpace platform has undergone very controlled growth, as access to various viral channels has been slowly rolled out to application developers. Most recently, MySpace released their long awaited limited application invites offering. Given that in this relatively controlled environment most applications have thus far experienced “organic” growth, the relative popularity of certain application categories thus far is likely indicative of the platform’s future.

We’ve compiled a breakdown of the most popular application categories to date by adding up the total install numbers from the top 10 applications in each of the 23 application categories. Some major applications (mostly games) are counted in multiple categories, and this approach does ignore the long-tail of the application gallery. But generally the results are a fair assessment of the MySpace Platform’s early growth.

As you can see, only a few categories have reached widespread distribution on MySpace, while most have remained relatively small. Just how much MySpace will open additional communication channels for applications to grow remains to be seen.

Related Inside Facebook Resources:

• The Most Engaging Applications on Facebook
• Top 10 MySpace Apps after Day 1

With the upcoming release of Facebook’s redesign, a couple new communication channels have been opened allowing application developers to communicate with users in new ways. Facebook has expanded the notifications API to include a new type of “announcement” notification, now being referred to as “application-to-user” notifications. These new notifications can effectively be used as general announcements and updates to users. Previously, the best solution for publishing this type of notification has been through the use of automated CRON scripts set to run daily.

There are no set “best practices” for application-to-user notifications yet, as Facebook is still making tweaks to their allocation limits for these new notifications. However, the current limit (7 notifications per user, per week is the maximum and default) seems to discourage any type of “real-time” application notifications and places more of an emphasis on general daily updates. For example, sending a notification to a user to alert them of new application features. They are not limited to application updates, though, and can be utilized in more creative manners, so long as you stay within allocation limits.

Application-to-user notifications can only be sent to current application users. Also note that they may be sent to any application user whether or not that user has an active application session-key.

Finally, when a user receives an application-to-user notification, it does not have any text pre-pended to the front of it. It simply displays your application icon next to the notification text. This is in contrast to user-to-user notifications which pre-pend the name of the user who performed the action to the notification. You can see an example of an application-to-user notification at the top of this post.

Technical details for the new application-to-user notifications have been slow forthcoming. Even the most recent PHP Client doesn’t include support for the new type yet. However, you can easily add support into the latest PHP Client by adding a small code snippet to your facebookapi_php5_restlib.php file (click here for code).

For more information on application-to-user notifications, see the Developers Forum and the Developers Wiki.

While 10% of Facebook employees may have come from Google, the tide is now flowing in the opposite direction too. Ben Ling, who decided to leave Facebook this week, is headed back to Google to lead YouTube’s monetization efforts, Kara Swisher reports.

The move back to GOOG comes only 10 months after Ling left Google Checkout’s e-commerce platform group to run Platform product marketing for Facebook. YouTube’s former head of monetization, Saschi Shef, recently left Google to become chief revenue officer at KP-backed startup Cooliris.

Facebook launched a new kind of ad unit today that has the potential to drive much more engagement than any ad product on the site ever before has: embedded multimedia with comments visible to users’ entire friend list.

Facebook has created new home page advertising inventory with its upcoming redesign. However, this is the first time we’ve seen Facebook fill the sponsored home page slot with this kind of unit. The behavior:

1. Clicking on the ad image opens a video player in-line
2. Comments on the video are visible to your entire friend list.

The comments around the ad dramatically increase engagement with the unit, as the highly visible comments provide an opportunity for users to simultaneously draw attention to the ad by drawing attention to themselves. While this could backfire if comments degrading the advertiser are abundant (I saw a few “LAME!” comments about Tropic Thunder today), the ad comments powerfully take advantage of Facebook’s social dynamics to draw attention to an ad in a way that is impossible without the social graph. When is the last time you heard 9 friends talk about an online ad in the same day?

Ad comments are an interesting step forward in the evolution of “Social Ads.” While this kind of ad may not work as well outside of a few advertiser verticals, I expect that early advertisers will be pleased with its performance.

Facebook’s recent policy update prohibiting incentivized invites, originally announced on July 21, has now gone into effect.

The latest announcement takes Facebook’s February policy update forbidding forced invites further by no longer permitting applications to offer incentives to users for sending invitations to their friends. For example, in game apps where the aim is to accumulate gold, developers have introduced mechanisms whereby users are given more gold for each friend they invite. In other applications, developers have only allowed users to unlocks various features as they invite more friends. Both of these behaviors are now prohibited.

Application developers have been asking for more detail on the Platform Policy in the Developers Forum, and the Facebook Platform team has offered valuable clarifications in responses there. Specifically:

• Facebook says that incentivized invites fall within this policy, but actions within an application do not: “Incentivizing sending a notification is prohibited, but incentivizing an app action (like SuperPoking) is not banned (even if that action typically leads to a subsequent notification).  On the other hand, if an app provides bonus points for inviting friends, or just for sending notifications, that would be a violation.”
• Yesterday, the platform team issued this further explanation: “As noted in the blog post, the new policies prevent applications from creating artificial or inappropriate incentives to use Facebook features (including, for example, sending requests and adding profile boxes). Generally, awarding money, or bonus points that can be used to do things in the application or elsewhere, for sending invitations or for the acceptance of invitations, falls under the intended scope of what is prohibited by the policies.”

This new policy isn’t necessarily bad news for developers as some may expect. Facebook is continuing its efforts to improve the quality of messages that applications generate within Facebook communication channels, which should improve the conversion rates of app messages throughout the Platform as a whole.

Kristian Segerstråle, CEO of social gaming company Playfish, welcomes the new guidelines. “We think these changes are an important step forward to improve the overall user experience for games on Facebook and ultimately make the social games market grow faster. We are active supporters of Facebook’s new guiding principles for apps and are working through all our games to ensure we adhere to their spirit,” he told us.

We’ll be staying on top of any further guidance or clarification Facebook issues as it enforces these new policies.

In an effort to allow applications to more tightly integrate with the Facebook Events system, Facebook today launched new APIs that allow applications to create and manage Facebook Events from within the application.

Many applications like Party Buzz already add value to the Facebook Events system by aggregating what events your friends will be attending. The new APIs will enable apps to manage those events directly. Facebook writes,

For applications that already have events associated with them, like concert or class applications, now you can easily create and manage events that appear on Facebook, and your users can easily RSVP to these events from within the application. Stories about these events appear in the News Feeds of the friends of the attendee, and the person attending can invite  more friends after RSVPing.  In this case, you won’t need an active session to create events, since they’re associated with the application, and not the user. However, you’ll still need an extended permission and active session so a user can RSVP to these events.

Details on the API are available in the Developers Wiki.