MarketMe 2.0

It’s true, Facebook makes it pretty easy to connect with friends online.  But what happens after you’ve mutually agreed to be friends with someone? The Facebook news feed does a good amount to inform you as to what’s going on with those in your friends list.  But beyond the Birthday reminders, there’s not a whole lot that Facebook does to help you manage your online relationships.  If you feel like your friends are falling through the cracks and you just can’t keep up with all the things you need to do for relationship maintenance, Socialfly is here to help.

A finalist in the current user-voted fbFund round, Socialfly is looking to take the next step in helping you keep track of your friends and the activities you’d like to do with them. Acting as a social secretary, Socialfly will track the friends that are most important to you, and send you a reminder for when you should shoot them a private message.  You can indicate various things like an activity or task you’d like to do with a particular friend, such as going to the movies with them on Friday, or sending them an email next week to follow up on their latest accomplishment.

One downfall for Socialfly’s current system is that it still requires a level of self-initiated updating to the Socialfly system.  Who’s going to remind me to do that? Offering remote input options, such as email or SMS submission, would allow users to send Socialfly a friend-specific reminder request if I’m not logged into Facebook, or even if I’m on the go.

Another upcoming Socialfly feature will be a ratings-like ability to mark the priority level for tracked friends, which, if automated to any degree, could be somewhat similar to Skydeck’s “real social network” concept that determines importance based on the levels of ongoing communication.  Socialfly will also layer in a Timer addon, which will allow you to indicate how often you’d like to be reminded to get in touch with particular friends.

As Facebook has been adding more functionality to the news feed, such as the option to see varying amounts of information pertaining to one friend or application, I imagine many of Socialfly’s features can be layered into Facebook’s native news feed.  Being a potential winner of the fbFund makes me think that Socialfly and its useful relationship maintenance tools would make an attractive acquisition for Facebook, should Facebook ever decide to acquire an application.  Otherwise, any duplication of Socialfly’s features that Facebook does add to the news feed could eventually render Socialfly an unused application, which is becoming a real fear for apps like BirthdayAlert.

If you are a fan of the Socialfly application, go vote for Socialfly via the fbFund application.

Last week I posted about Zynga’s Live Poker application. Within days the application has jumped to become the number one free application on the phone and number 8 overall. Social Gaming Network, a competitor of Zynga, experienced similar success on the iPhone with the launch of a could Wii-like games but their success appeared to come at the expense of their social application network.

Zynga on the other hand continues to have wide spread success. The company claims that they are the number one app development and social gaming company when you count across platforms. Personally, I haven’t done the math but I wouldn’t be surprised to find out that they are accurate. While the application isn’t yet the number one free application, it’s still impressive to see that the company is experiencing success.

It appears that the games that embrace movement, such as SGN’s iBowl, tend to be more successful on the iPhone platform. It’s difficult to embrace movement into a poker game. The application is currently the most popular poker game and given how robust the game is, I wouldn’t be surprised to see this one stay on top for a while. If you haven’t checked out the Zynga Live Poker application on the iPhone I definitely recommend it.

Go grab the application from the application directory now to play poker live with other users from around the web.

Currently, Facebook has limited the use of profile feeds by developers to 10 stories per day. Yesterday while testing out a few applications I realized how completely flawed this is. For example, I was using the MTV Music Videos application and realized that everytime I listen to a video, that is an activity that my friends should be notified of.

FriendFeed, the popular activity aggregation tool, makes sure to publish all of your activities and then provides a filter of your network’s activities based on a number of factors. Facebook performs a similar service and when you view your main news feed on the Facebook home page, this is a highly filtered set of news stories. The reason that Facebook limits application feed activity makes sense, they want to filter out application spam.

Facebook already filters out hundreds of stories daily and display the ones that they believe are most important based on their custom algorithm. The news feed filter is what’s of most value for Facebook and as such they should accept as many stories as possible so that they can improve their story filtering algorithm. This would also benefit applications as they get to publish all of a user’s activities.

How would Facebook be able to verify that a user took an action? Easy, Facebook simply needs to verify that some sort of request variable has been posted from the previous page. I believe they already do this for many of the API calls which currently have restrictions. Do you have any problems with news feed spam? Would you benefit from having more stories published about your activities?

Any good journalist knows that in order to get close to a company and its executives, there is a fine line when managing your relationship and you need to be careful about just how critical you are publicly. Somebody should of taught that to Simon Garfield who interviews Mark Zuckerberg in an article for the Guardian. Perhaps Simon Garfield doesn’t want to interview Mark Zuckerberg again but if he did, there’s a pretty good chance he lost his second chance.

As Caroline Waxler points out, Garfield starts the article with “I was told not to expect a human whirlwind, but when Mark Zuckerberg walks into the room there is barely a breeze.” That’s only the beginning. The reporter drops little insults about Zuckerberg throughout the article. Rather than rehashing each insult, I’ll let you read the article but suffice it to say, Garfield isn’t too kind in his take on Zuckerberg and Facebook.

The media’s fascination with Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook is not surprising. Microsoft invested in the company at a $15 billion valuation and the company continues to have a soaring user base which has surpassed 120 million users. The tone of the article is pretty clear: how can this less than intimidating 24-year-old be running one of the largest and rapidly online media sites in the world?

One thing that Garfield highlights that I partially sympathize with is Zuckerberg’s fascination with “sharing”. If you’ve heard Mark speak at conferences around the country (and world), you would have heard about Facebook’s mission of helping the world share with each other. After you hear it enough, you realize that sharing is caring and Facebook is all about it.

Why is message so simple? Well do you think Zuckerberg is going to tell you about all the internal monetization tests the company is running or about usage trends? Definitely not and if I was running a company like Facebook I’d spend a ton of time playing with all the data which rests at my fingertips. I would guess that many people working at the company are the same way and while it may be one of Zuckerberg’s favorite things to do, he can’t talk about it with journalists.

As such the message is always the same: “Facebook is about making it easier for people to share information with their friends.” Sounds good to me! Now we have to wait and see what monetization solution the company comes up with. Hopefully that comes along soon.

Mark Zuckerberg photo by Phil Fisk for The Guardian

A couple weeks ago I wrote about MTVMusic.com on Social Times. The service makes MTV’s entire music video library available for the general public. It’s an impressive site and best of all, you can take the videos and embed them anywhere. If you didn’t think mainstream media would ever embrace new media, this will prove you wrong.

I hadn’t even noticed this application until it showed up on my radar for being one of the fastest growing applications on Facebook (as pictured below). I went to check it out and I’m surprised that the application currently has less than 4,000 monthly active users. Then again, the application doesn’t really leverage many of Facebook’s social features.

While the application doesn’t leverage all Facebook’s social features, there is at least a wall for each video that lets users have a conversation. One thing about this application which was slightly annoying is that the songs are censored to remove curse words. That makes sense though considering you can embed the videos anywhere on the web.

One thing lacking from this application is the ability to post videos to your friends profiles. That would be a pretty amazing feature and would instantly make this a viral application. While they are missing a few features, a pretty slick feature is the application’s playlist. Rather than clicking on each individual video you can add your favorite videos to a playlist and play them in one stream.

This is similar to MySpace music which gives users a custom playlist. The only thing left for this application to add is a link to purchase the song you are listening to and it would be a great MySpace Music substitute. If you’d like to go browse MTV’s library of more than 16,000 music videos, go check out the MTV music videos application.

For the past few years there has been a movement of entrepreneurs trying to leverage the power of the web to spread good throughout the world, Causes is the only application to experience massive success. One of the biggest challenges facing the movement is that most services until recently were unable to grow beyond a certain level. Change.org, Idealist, Zaadz (later converted to Gaia.com), Razoo, and countless others have struggle to get beyond a certain level.

Recently there has been a continued drive toward finding the right solution online. Causecast.org and numerous other sites are all taking a shot at changing the world through social networks but Causes is the only one that has experienced massive growth and has grown to levels previously unreached by sites looking to do good.

Conspiracy Theories and Controversy

If you’ve been following the impact of the new design on Facebook and the rapid growth of Causes to be come the leading application, you’d probably also know about the controversy surrounding the application. Causes and iLike have been the only applications selected to be part of Facebook’s “Great Apps” program which grants both applications access to additional viral channels and an increased number of daily invites for users.

The result was massive growth (as pictured below). On September 16, the application had just over 3 million monthly active users but within just two months, the application ballooned to over 18.2 million active users and the growth doesn’t appear to be slowing. If you are looking for conspiracy theories, Causes would be a great place to search.

Sean Parker, co-founder of Causes as well as numerous other infamous startups (Napster, Plaxo, etc) has had a historically tight relationship with Mark Zuckerberg. He even served as President of the company until he supposedly got in trouble for a drug incident. Whatever took place, there is clearly a benefit to having friends in high places.

Causes is honestly working to do good though regardless of how they got to be so successful. When I spoke with Sean Parker at f8 earlier this year, he emphasized the company’s commitment to finding the best way to incentivize users to contribute to Causes for good. Even if you are into conspiracy theories, there is no doubt that doing good is a naturally viral activity and Parker’s tight relationship with Facebook is not the only reason for their success.

Doing Good Online is Still Unsolved

Even for Causes, generating money or action for causes is a substantial challenge. The top cause on the application, “Support The O Campaign for Cancer Prevention”, has almost 4 million members but has raised just over $75,000. While $75k is nothing to sneeze at, one would imagine that raising millions of dollars with millions of active users shouldn’t be so hard.

Other sites like Kiva.org have developed creative models for generating money for causes but it’s still extremely difficult despite the countless attempts at generating more money. Perhaps raising money shouldn’t be the only goal, perhaps inspiring others into action is a better model. The only problem with that is there is no accountability.

What creative solutions have you seen for doing good online? What are the most successful ones you’ve seen?

This afternoon Facebook posted an update advertisements stating that pages you’ve become a fan of will soon be listed in your public search listing. This means that when people search for you in Google or even in Facebook, there will be additional details about you that are now displayed. All of this can be controlled via your search privacy settings page.

For a sample of what a public search listing looks like, take a look at the screenshot I’ve provided below. This means that there is potentially additional promotional opportunity for fan pages. The only problem is that users can’t select what pages are displayed within their public search listing. For example, the majority of my fan pages are related to Facebook.

While the photos of my friends in my public search listing appear to rotate, my fan page listings don’t appear to rotate currently. I’m guessing that this will eventually change given that the search functionality is not yet live. It’s definitely a small addition but it will definitely impact the search engine optimization of fan pages as links to those pages will show up for user’s public search listings in Google.

In our continuing coverage of the fbFund second round participants, we’re taking a look at the Social Arcade application. Developed by Rick Vanner and Dave Milton of The Game Creators LTD, the application contains a library of simple games that you can play as well as “gift” to other friends. I went ahead and tested out a few of the games which reminded me of the days of playing the simple TI-82 games back in middle and high school.

I tested out three games which are pictured below called “Cool Egg”, “Bird Hunt”, “Extreme Jumper”. The applications were amazingly simple and appeared to be generated from a single game engine that the company had most likely developed internally. I started off with Cool Egg, and immediately was frustrated. Every time I started off jumping across from one ledge to another, I would miss the other ledge and die immediately.

The game required pin point accuracy, and when I’m playing a game to blow off some steam, getting frustrated is not something I look forward to. The second game, “Bird Hunt”, was reminiscent of Nintendo’s Duck Hunt sans the handheld gun. Using the mouse on my laptop was relatively challenging but calculating the direction of the ducks was not since they all moved in straight line.

Extreme Jumper was the best one I played. The only problem? There is only one level! I was done playing in about 40 seconds and then tried to beat my own time which I succeeded at the second time around. After that I was done! I think the application has a lot of potential but rather than churning out a ton of simple applications, the company should focus on building a few high quality ones.

I understand the value of building a gaming engine, but the engine can only be as valuable as the games it creates. If you want to vote for Social Arcade, you can vote here. Also, make sure to first check out the Social Arcade application.

UPDATE
Wow … so it looks like I totally missed the point of this application. Apparently users are able to create their own games using this company’s game engine. While users aren’t building the next World of Warcraft using the engine, it’s cool because users get to create and share their own custom games. I definitely should have looked into this one better.

Facebook added a small feature this afternoon which sends birthday notifications to users via email. This is an extremely useful feature and I’m guessing many people will leave this on. The only problem with this service is that you aren’t provided with your friend’s e-mail address. Instead you simply receive a notification.

There are currently a number of other applications on Facebook for birthday reminders, as well as those that help you send friends gifts on birthdays as Harry Huai Wang writes. This will definitely hurt applications like Birthday Alert as it practically duplicates that application’s functionality.

Developing an application based on a single feature on Facebook is always an extremely risky activity. Unfortunately the developers of Birthday Alert will find that out the hard way. Now you won’t forget birthdays anymore as long as you are connected to your friends on Facebook! In order to manage the birthday alert notifications you can head over to the email notifications page in your account settings.

This afternoon it appears as though Facebook has gone completely down. We are waiting to here when the site will be back up but it has been down for at least 10 minutes and the site isn’t resolving at all. We’ll keep you updated.

Update
The site is back up. It appears to have been a local name resolution issue for a few people on the east coast. I’m not sure what the issue was but it has been resolved. Back to facebooking!