MarketMe 2.0

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!

If you are looking for insight into the state of the Facebook economy and whether it’s able to weather the slowing U.S. economy, look no further than SNAP Interactive (OTC: STVI). The company which is behind the popular “Are YOU Interested?” and “Meet New People” applications has filed their quarterly report. The numbers are looking pretty good.

For the three months ending September 30, 2008, the company had a Net Income of $410,283 on revenues of $871,324. If we consider that all of their revenue comes from advertising, we can calculate approximately how much each user is worth. According to company reports, they have around 17 million users, 14 to 15 million of which are Facebook users. If we take an average of 15 million users across the three months ending September 30, that results in $0.005 per user, not a lot of money.

The company also receives around 1.4 million visits per day, which would amount to around 126 million visits for three months. That would amount to around $0.007 per visit. These numbers don’t really paint a clear picture though as the majority of users are much less active, and therefore bring in substantially less revenue than the more active users.

If you think about the business on a user acquisition basis, there is very little incentive for pushing new users to this application. Contrast that with offer-based advertising which can generate upwards of $100 for a converted user, and you quickly realize that SNAP has a ways to go in converting visitors into money. Also of interest is that the company was able to increase their revenue while experiencing a more than 25 percent decrease in their traffic due to Facebook’s profile redesign.

SNAP Interactive doesn’t stand alone when it comes to troubles with revenue conversion. Facebook has billions of weekly page views but they can only generate $300 million a year. Then again, with 120 million active users (and an average around 90 million users for the year), the company is generating over $3 per user per year. That’s far better than the $0.02 SNAP Interactive is able to generate per user on an annual basis.

The calculations done in this article are in no ways scientific though and what it really means is that SNAP Interactive has a huge opportunity to more effectively monetize their traffic. Considering their revenue has been growing quarter-over-quarter, there’s a good chance that they will be able to keep up the growth despite the slowing global economy.

Below is a copy of the company’s 10-Q published earlier this week.

Last month we wrote that there won’t be any Facebook Android application coming anytime soon. The reason is that the company has put no resources toward developing on the new mobile platform that was pushed out by Google. Well, for those Android users that want to use Facebook but have an Android phone, Next Mobile Web has put out an application called fBook.

The application is essentially a Android wrapper for the iPhone version of the site. It also has the ability to upload pictures and send you alerts every time you receive new messages and status updates. Best of all, the application can run in the background on the phone, which means you can get alerts even while the application isn’t loaded, a feature which is foreign to the iPhone.

While Facebook continues to protest the Android platform, these entrepreneurial developers have taken the liberty of providing Android users with an application that many were waiting for. Additionally, if you were waiting to buy an Android compatible phone until a Facebook application launched, your time has arrived.

Then again, there are still a few bugs on the application. As the developers of the application point out, “Facebook expires your session when you are logged into too many places.” In other words if you are on your desktop, on an instant messenger client, and logged in on your phone, there’s a good chance you’ll be logged out elsewhere.

Nobody that I know of has come up with a resolution for this problem yet and that may be one of the hurdles for developing external Facebook applications that rely on sessions. While these developers try to figure out a workaround, Facebook should work on developing an official Facebook Android application. There’s no excuse to avoid the platform.

Back in October I wrote about the upcoming release of the Facebook phone by 3 Mobiles, a mobile provider in the U.K. Today, the company announced it and it’s pretty much as expected. The phone integrates your Facebook contacts directly with your phone contacts, placing their status updates right under their name in your personal phone book.

There is also a Facebook application which functions similarly to most other mobile Facebook mobile applications. The company website suggests that notifications are also sent directly to your phone with alerts. I’m not quite sure that I’d want to receive all my Facebook notifications right on my phone outside of having the option to load the application.

Could you imagine getting an alert every time one of your friends changed their relationship status, tagged you in a photo, or installed a new application? Then again, perhaps that is the new world that we live in. A world in which all of our friends’ personal activities are just a click away. I’m assuming you can turn off notifications though which would make this phone bearable.

Calling this phone the “Facebook phone” is somewhat misleading though considering the level of integration. The contact list is not completely based on your Facebook contacts but this is definitely a step in the right direction of a theoretical “Facebook phone”. Unfortunately I’m not in the U.K. so I won’t be able to test it out. Let us know if you are able to get your hands on one of the phones and send us photos!

Update
Just to clarify, the phone is called the “INQ1″ but appears to be marketed as the first Facebook phone. According to Facebook, “The INQ1 includes a pre-loaded Facebook application deeply integrated with the phone. We are currently working with a variety of partners to deploy deep and rich Facebook user experiences on as many mobile devices as possible.”

This morning one of my readers sent me a screenshot of the advertisement pictured on the left. I wouldn’t exactly call it an “advertisement” but it appears to replace other ads that would have been placed on the right hand side of the Facebook interface. Currently the ad is titled “Friend Profile Preview” and it shows your friend’s picture, name, and their recent status updates.

Now why on earth would Facebook substitute precious advertising space to alert you to one of your friends? Honestly, I don’t think they would. Instead, I believe (which is as of yet unconfirmed) that Facebook is testing out an ad network for displaying personals. I’ve discussed with a number of friends the opportunity for personals ads on Facebook.

Imagine being able to target potential matches based on their profile. There is tons of data including the schools they went to (for instance if you only want to date Harvard grads), the interests they have, and numerous other data. Rather than having a cost per click (CPC), or cost per thousand impressions (CPM), you can have a cost per date (CPD)!

Still Speculation

This is complete speculation though unfortunately. Perhaps Facebook is having inventory issues due to the struggling economy and decided to place other internal advertisements as filler. Typically the company would place advertisements for their own ad platform though and not substitute advertisements for friends.

As such, it’s difficult for me to rationalize any alternative reasons for Facebook to display profile previews of friends without the long-term goal of making it an alternative to the traditional “personals”; the dating ads that used to be popular in newspapers. Can you think of any other reason that Facebook would test this out? Honestly, I think this could be extremely popular.

Update
I just called the New York Times to find out their rates for personals ads, and they quoted $48 for one week, $72 for two weeks, and $96 for four weeks. That’s not a bad business and considering that the advertisements are not targeted, Facebook could be a great substitute.

Update from Facebook
Facebook sent us the following statement:

“Facebook is not offering personal ads on the site. The unit you noticed is a test running to a limited number of users that previews the profiles of a user’s friends. It is not a paid advertisement but surfaces friend information to help enable more sharing in more places on the site. Users are only shown profile previews of their confirmed friends and only see the information if they have access to it on a friend’s profile. Facebook will continue to be testing various versions of this preview and similar units, but it has not launched it widely on the site.”