BJ Fogg presented about how the student’s of BJ’s Facebook class developed 50+ amazing apps, 10 million installs, and 1 million daily users.

They start by running through the background to the class and the founders of the class. They call it the Stanford Facebook Class and describe how they were making it up as they went. They thought they were going to have each student make 3 apps each, which may have been over ambitious.

Thought they would get 20 students, and 120 showed up for the class. They ended up with 80 students. BJ, Dave McClure and the TA’s aught 2 classes per week.

Four or five applications were really successful, such as KissMe. They got lots of press coverage, some of which was good, some not so good.

Students independently set up a Sunday group meeting that is still going on. The final was an open expo with over 500 people attending to see demo’s of the applications. You can find the student presentations at bayCHI

$500,000-$1,000,000 revenue generated by class, three companies formed, 2 companies acquired, lots of job offers and a few drop outs.

Phase 2 - 2 month experience to try again eg Oregon Trail (sp?)

Takeaways:

• Never too late to build new app
• Simple apps won
• Speed and iteration matter
• Community cooperation leads to success - more sharing, more success
• Individual opinions are worthless, need the crowd to judge
• Copying success is cheap/fast way to succeed
• Metrics matter, but today’s tools are weak - had to build their own
• This is a learnable skill
• Success comes from chaos/control cycle
• Mass interpersonal persuasion is finaly here

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, Stanford Facebook Class

Ben Ling, director of Platform Product Marketing at Facebook, speaks about Facebook’s platform. Ben starts by telling a story about a dinner with folks from Flixter talking about changes in Facebook platform.

The focus is on creating long term value. He says their strategy has three parts: frictionless platform, leverage social graph, and world class applications.

Frictionless Platform

What they want in terms of making the platform frictionless for users

• Helping users communicate
• Meaningful activity
• Valuable information
• User trust

He describes the changes on the site’s experience an enhanced wall, profiles profile boxs, profile action links that increase application uses.

He says they also want to make it frictionless for developers. Shared reusable technology, core infrastructure, and viral distribution of applications are all parts of this strategy. They are licensing the technology to others like Bebo. They are also have a marketplace for developer resources that connect marketers to developers.

Ben discusses how they had users suggest translations and vote on results which resulted in a very scalable translation/localization process. He says that this can be used by developers to localize their applications.

Leveraging the social graph

Ben describes the power of Facebook as an asynchronous conversation with your friends. You update everyone efficiently about what’s going on. He describes the example of the Causes application and their Photo application, which is the largest photo application in the world.

For developers, we want social applications for Collaborative authoring and design, multi-player games, sharing experiences

World class applications

They see applications progressing to other industries and to productivity. Sports, health, religion are all attractive segments. He also describes how they will be providing commerce functionality with developer APIs, secure purchasing and new types of application monetization models.

Ben discusses how they want to increase user control. He describes the problem of having to invite 15 friends to get the results. They are now adding ability for users to complain. He says that they want to support applications that users support. He is looking for positive user value loops. He describes Bookshelf, Dogbook, and Quizer as positive examples.

Questions:

How do you see social driving ecommerce? A variety of experiences are inherently social and that will lead to new applications. Who’s going to do something, join them. (Sounds like MatchActivity.com)

What is timeframe for ecommerce? Later this year will take credit cards.

Who else has licensed the Facebook platform? Involved in a number of discussions - no announcements

Why limit number of invites? Want invites to be quality invites. Need to balance quantity with relevance.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, Graphing Social, Facebook, Ben LIng

Amit Kapur from MySpace speaks about MySpace as a platform. He is talking about how MySpace looks at it’s developer platform and how it fits into their business model.

Starts by focusing on how they think about the internet. Internet becoming more personal, more portable, and more collaborative.

Myspace core business is driven by two key engines and enablement platform( tools to create your own experience as a user and developer tools) and a connectivity platform (the MySpace social graph). MySpace wants to use these core engines to drive change in the internet.

Launched a developer platform on February 5. Phase 1 is developer only (30 day head start). Phase 2 will go live to users and launch an application directory. Phase 3 layer in an additional services for developers.

What it to be a democratic process to give developers a voice and level playing field.

The platform will be based on open standards, eg, Open Social.

Amit states that there is a commitment to keeping MySpace safe and a commitment to monetization.

Five surfaces for an application

• directory listing
• profile
• canvas pages
• embeds on profiles
• embeds on home pages

API to public profile data
authenticate user
access friends list
public information
photos
videos
status mood

Amit focuses on the business of social platforms
Its been hard to monetize because traditional approaches don’t work. He says they are “laser focused” on solving this problem.

• 300 people in sales class 1 branded sales, class 2 perfromance sales, class 3 network ads
• 150 engineers and product managers focused on monetization technology
• all inventory runs off of one ad server and we can yield optimize every single impression

The philosophy - sell people not pages. Need to go beyond keywords to learn about what images, blog posts and unstructured data to create hyper targeted interest groups.

He shows an example of Brad - the sports and music fan. He then goes on to do a comparison of hypertargeting vs traditional web proxies. He shows the range of data that MySpace knows about it’s users and examples of how detailed they can get with people’s interest data. Southern Girl example is a marathon runner with a count down to the next marathon - imagine what you can do with that information.

He says they are seeing 300% improvement in click through for 150 initial advertisers using hyper-targeting.

He says they have developed a self-serve advertising system for MySpace that will open up the advertising possibilities for small business marketers.

He sees this as just the beginning of scratching the surface. They will continue to focus on smart monetization technology to unlock value in social media.

Questions

How much does hyper-targeting pull in? - Pulls in a lot of un-structured data. Uses smart machine learning technology - points to 300% improvement as evidence.

How will developers make money? Help facilitate with marketing. They will be developing their own ad network to help monetize this.

Where do you see engagement going? A few things that are important to consider, what are the metrics of a advertising system, what works at scale for advertisers, tie ins to new applications people are developing. Things will become more customized in terms of user/advertiser engagement

When will third party apps go live? Very soon, over the next few weeks.

Technorati Tags: gspwest08, graphing social, Graphing Social Patterns, Amit Kapur, MySpace

I’m here at Graphing Social West in San Diego. The guys from O’Reilly were kind enough to extend me a press pass so I get to see/hear what’s going on. The agenda looks good with presentations from analysts and company executives.

Charlene Li, from Forester, kicks things off with a presentation on the future of social networks, then Amit Kapur from MySpace speaks about MySpace as a platform. After that, there’s lots more on the agenda.

The event focuses on social networking with a heavy dose of MySpace and Facebook. I will do my best to pick up the high points of the show and report them throughout the day on my CinchCast, where I call in to Blog Talk Radio’s Cinch service and record a short audio about what’s going on.

Technorati Tags: Graphing Social, gspwest08, social networking