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

Charlene Li of Forrester presents on the Future of Social Networking. Charlene speaks about her kids and how they are setting up online playdates. Meet at such and such a site at this time etc. I know this too. My son does exactly this on Runescape.

Social networks will be like air, she says. It will no longer be a list of destinations and multiple identities, but will be universal id. What will it be. My email, my phone number etc. The ID will be federated like OpenID, with a few major players serving as focal points.

The big guys are beginnig to talk - Data Portability Group.

She encourages us to think about the Bill of Rights for the Social Web.

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

* Ownership of their own personal information, including:
o their own profile data
o the list of people they are connected to
o the activity stream of content they create;
* Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
* Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

Sites supporting these rights shall:

* Allow their users to syndicate their own profile data, their friends list, and the data that’s shared with them via the service, using a persistent URL or API token and open data formats;
* Allow their users to syndicate their own stream of activity outside the site;
* Allow their users to link from their profile pages to external identifiers in a public way; and
* Allow their users to discover who else they know is also on their site, using the same external identifiers made available for lookup within the service.

The graphic flat graph does not work, but is really much more complex and multi-dimensional. There a lots of places and lots of invites. This is a real problem.

Charlene thinks there will be some real opportunities here. The Portal players, Yahoo, Google, AOL are well positioned for this.

What people are doing on social networks. It’s about social, friends, games, movie sharing. She says what’s missing is shopping. Charlene takes us through an example of how Amazon could connect to friends’ reviews of books. Connect via the universal ID to bring in the content to where the user is.

She goes on to describe an example of how yahoo could incorporate my friends input into search, stories, stock portfolios, who has bought what’s being advertised, etc.

The under-rated value of networks should be recognized. It depends on the authority your networks interest and their authority on the topic, and the trust level among your network.

Charlene focus on the value of what Digital Podcast calls Super Fans. She says that marketers will pay to reach and influence valuable influentials, that each person will have their own personal CPM, and social networks will compete to have the best experience for high-influence individuals. Think of the power of Super Fans.

She projects 2008-2009 to be the era data portability and 2013 to be the timing of the ubiquitous social networks. Technology will not be the barrier, trust will be the barrier.

Her recommendations:

• Create linkages between services based on individually controlled identity federation.
• Compete on creating the most compelling social experience, not social graph lock in.
• Develop social applications that have meaning.
• Integrate social networks into existing activities
• Design business models that reflect the value created by people’s social networks

Questions:

What about the average Joe - will they have influence? Yes, depends on Joe’s social graph. Within it he will have influence.

What should people not on social web do to build network? Look to your email contact list. It will become automatic at some point.

UPDATE: Slides

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Technorati Tags: gspwest08, Graphing Social Patterns, Charlene Li, Forrester

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