Continuing in my Facebook series, I figured I would outline what I see as the different classes of applications available on Facebook. Of the 3500+ apps you can find now on Facebook there are 2 key types out there: throwaway, and immersive. Mind you I don’t mean to put down any app by labeling it a throwaway, I just couldn’t think of a better term. Maybe a superficial app? Not much better.

So a throwaway app is from my perspective an application that has an extremely low cost of use (time or energy), but also gives you less incentive to keep it around for that same reason. Something like a vampires or a werewolves app is a throwaway. Although incredibly, and i mean INCREDIBLY, viral in nature, these apps have limited depth to them (at the moment). They do not bring the user into their world as they can be used for 2 seconds, and then abandoned. Also after their initial buzz has worn off and you’ve bitten half a dozen or a dozen of your friends, what is your motivation to keep playing? So with that in mind your opportunity cost of removing the app becomes much smaller.

An immersive app or engaging app is a completely different story. They don’t typically have the same super-easy-super-viral nature, but when they do bring in a new user, they are likely to keep them in much longer. iLike is a classic example of an immersive app. iLike lets you share with your friends your interests in music, which gives it a viral sticking point, and it lets you explore new music and new interests via your friends. This last part is what makes it a kick ass application, the engagement factor through your friends. The key to having a stellar immersive app is to create a mountain of value for the user the longer he/she uses it. By building up this content and value, the user is also becoming less inclined to remove the app altogether, as they’ve invested so much energy, their opportunity cost for removing it is becoming increasingly higher.

It’s not easy to create an application that engages and is extremely sticky, it may seem easy to do either one or the other, but in the end it’s not. Although it is possible to create something simple and sticky, and then later transition it to a more immersive program. Ultimately the question boils down to: are you adding any value to the user experience? If you are, then you should do fine either way you look at it. So hurry up and make some apps. When they are ready, send me an email brian[at]webpl.us so that I can check it out.

So you’ve decided that your company needs a social media strategy, and you’re missing out on what’s next now. Now the question is where do I start? Well before we get into the nitty gritty, we need to cover the basics of social media, the proper way to craft your message, the proper way to target your message, and after all that we can then cover how to get started.

I recently gave a brief bit on social graph marketing, but for all intents and purposes, i’ts basically the same as social media marketing. Social media according to Wikipedia is “the online technologies and practices that people use to share content, opinions, insights, experiences, perspectives, and media themselves.” At its core SMM is about creating and positioning your content (be it your message, picture, video, sound bite, whatever) in a medium where it can propagate itself as much as possible virally. These mediums can be anywhere on the web where people share with each other. If you pay close attention to the web, you’ll notice one thing: people love to share (even if they don’t have the rights to the content - oops!). Some of these places are social news sites like Digg, social networks like myspace or facebook, or social video sites like Youtube.

Social media is not about being the coolest kid on the block everyone knows; it’s about being the one interesting enough to make people want to talk about him. That my friends, is the value proposition of social media, becoming so interesting that people LIKE to share the idea of YOU.

So weak metaphors aside, the first step is to figure out your message, and how you want to craft it. Your message can be anything, but the smart way is to make it inherently viral. Make your message something that people will like to share. Just like a successful facebook application should make your users want to engage each other, a successful social media campaign will shoot for that as well. If you look at a lot of the examples of successful campaigns out there, they tend to ask the user to participate in either the product or the brand, and then share that creation with their friends.

So you’ve created this über cool message which you are sure its going to be seen by billions of people worldwide. What do you do next? Well there are two schools of thought on this, one where you carpet bomb everyone with the same message regardless of whether or not the recipient is interested in it (aka old school media) OR you can figure out where your users congregate and start there (aka smart media). The smart SM marketer will understand his or her targets, and engage them in those places. You wouldn’t go to linkedIn trying to get teens to buy your CD, just as you wouldn’t try to get Facebook users to buy diapers (well maybe soon, but not yet). So at this point in the quest, you need to create a list of sites where your potential customers and marketers (the best customers tell people about their experiences, remember that) are spending time.

You’ve got your message, and you’ve got your list of sites where its likely to be well received, now what? Well your next step should be to start using the communities and sites you’ve chosen. Not use them to promote, but use them as your customers do, and experience them first hand. If you don’t have time for that, find someone who has that experience to hold your hands through this process. One of the biggest pitfalls of social media marketing could be not understanding the mediums, and misusing them. If you fall into that trap, your whole campaign could be dead before it even gets going.

So remember to craft your message in a way that your customer would like to share it, find out where they are hanging out, and finally become part of their community.

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Unless you’ve been living under a rock for the last 3 months, you are likely to have heard about Facebook’s new platform code named f8. On May 24, 2007 Facebook opened up its gates to developers worldwide. Since that day over 100,000 developers have requested permission to build applications, and over 3,500 applications have been launched.

Before you run off and start building/plotting your next Facebook app, there are a few things about the Facebook platform that you need to examine first: what you are building on (what is the platform); why you are building it; what could go bad (potential pitfalls); and lastly what the potential market is (why it’s important).

I am often asked to explain the Facebook platform to people in and around Miami, so let me first explain what it is, then what it is not. First off, the platform is really an extended API more than anything. Facebook has provided us with a tool that lets us interact with Facebook user data, and piggyback off Facebook’s existing user base (its members). In return for Facebook giving us tons of user data, they keep their users in Facebook longer, since your application runs within Facebook’s domain and site navigation structure. When you boil it down, Facebook is creating a shell to wrap around your application in exchange for providing you with pre-verified and authenticated users. With that in mind, it’s important to remember what Facebook is not, it is not an application hosting service. Facebook will not be hosting your application or its services in any shape or form, they are relying on you to foot that bill, and manage it to your best ability.

So now that you understand (sort of) the concept of the Facebook platform, the next step is to figure out why you are thinking about building an app for Facebook. From my experience with Facebook, and the application development platform, I think the key reasons to consider when planning your application should be: how can I leverage the immense user data, and how can I leverage the strength of Facebook’s social graph? Once you’ve thought of that, then you are ready to start plotting your app. Before you dive in headfirst, you should be able to answer yourself the following:

• Does the utility of your application increase with each additional user?
• Is someone doing exactly the same idea on Facebook already (not a deal breaker IMO)
• Is this for an existing or new application?
• Would Facebook integration enhance your existing site’s utility?

Assuming you wrote down or made a mental note of your reasons, I’ll go on to outline the potential pitfalls. Perhaps the biggest pitfall I can see is cost. Infrastructure costs can soar immensely. If you don’t first put in place a plan to scale well, you could be dead in the water before you know it. One of the notable examples of this was the Where I’ve Been application which skyrocketed to 250,000 users and was costing the developer thousands in server costs to keep it running. Aside from server costs, the only other major pitfall is that your application, if not designed to scale on the software side, could prove unusable if it’s not architected to serve hundreds of thousands or millions of users (something newbies might not know to do before setting out).

Ok, so enough doom and gloom, what are we talking about potential wise? Well, as of the last measurement, in July sometime, Facebook had 30Million active users, and was growing at 100,000 new users per day. Fast forward to September, and we are closer to 35Million users, and growth has escalated to closer to 150,000 new users per day (over a million per week!). So you’ve got this amazing potential user base with a low-friction barrier to entry into your application/service. You’ve got a mountain of user data you can play with (contextual, relational, and, potentially, behavioral advertising material), an inherently viral platform to deploy it on, and tons of companies chomping at the bit to help you monetize your work. Sounds to me like the potential far outweighs your costs.

Now you know what Facebook is, why you should build on it, what could go wrong, but also what could go well. So what are you waiting for? It seems to me that if you are involved in web services, your company needs to start investigating the potential of social media, and the value that Facebook might be able to add to your existing or new products or services.

• @danrubin, technorati tags and categories are interchangeable, relevancy is most important though, to appease lord google #

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So I was walking Bear today and thinking about the lack of prefab housing designed for the Florida market. It all seems to be oriented to people living in seattle, california, or arizona. By prefab I mean something like the glidehouse not a double wide trailer.

So my question to you all is multipart: 1. is it possible to build a house which would meet or excede the florida building codes (toughest in the country), 2. be eco-friendly, and 3. look modern and attractive.

Prefab in my opinion (and I know very little about home construction) seems like the logical step towards lowering home costs and improving quality. If lots of the parts and pieces can be pre-made in factories where the cutting and assembly is laser precise and checked for quality, then you should be able to build homes faster and more effectively. right?

If any of you know of an architect tackling this problem, let me know, i’d like to pick their brain.

Hey folks, sorry for the relative quiet around here lately. I haven’t had much time the last 3 months to post to this blog, or any other blog for that matter. In the next few days you’ll see the revised layout implemented, the feeds fixed (that was a royal pain), and several new articles about facebook.

We’ll be selling ads on the site soon, so if you are interested, shoot me an email breslin[at]infinimedia.com  thanks!

While browsing the vimeo blog I came across this new feature they are calling the hubnut, its a really smart way to improve an already great site.

I put videos I create on Vimeo. You can see my profile.

The hubnut makes sharing all your videos in one place a much simpler and more viral event. Not to get into too much detail, but it seems like this is taking the idea of a video channel out of the video sites, and putting it everywhere. good job vimeo team.