Social Application Development 101: Elements of Style

Jia Shen (RockYou), R. Tyler Ballance (Slide.com)

Jia started. some basic info/stats on social channels (FB, etc.) App verticals – channel, content, quiz,games, gifts, self -expression.

viral multiplier – apps grow without marketing. 1 user causes more than 1 to install. need to track. notifications needed also.

Then need engagement of users. Virality vs engagement – grow outside of core. get users to spread. don’t hurt user experience.

engagement – build user experience. stickiness. prevent uninstalls.

email is important for engagement/reengagement. in profile engagement is also useful. non-user page is even mopre important because it engages them before they install.

OpenSocial – can add functionality. but can monetize? Different model that used to. huge audience. profile vs news-feed. what is the viral channel?

opensocial channels – profile. also main page on FB. but most opensocial channels are up in the air since many are being conservative.

plan is no different than Facebook launch. focus on demographic. instrument virality but focus on Apps that are not dependent on virality.

Tyler – works at slide (used keynote on Mac). will take about FB platform (include Bebo also). need to understand audience. need to be ready for cross-platform development that is more than just specific widgets. FB has had 10 months. Bebo is getting closer. but FB has a lot more to use (i.e. mobile).

transition from widget to apps. can use same codebase going from FB to bebo. FunWall is example. but need to maintain look and feel (myspace is hectic. FB is blue.) but need to maintain branding. example iLike is orange. slide has a banner logo.

FBML tags are important aspects of look and feel.

[Via WebStrategy By Jeremiah]

Widget Strategies Panel:

The four panelists did a great job yesterday handling my barrage of questions in the Widget Strategies and Social Platforms session, Hooman Radfar (Clearspring Technologies, Inc.), Walker Fenton (NewsGator), Pam Webber (Widgetbox), Ben Pashman (Gigya) discussed widgets strategies. I asked each of them to suggest an image or icon that best represents their company (an idea to make the panel more memorable from Pam) and they each suggested the following:

Clearspring was like a cable, as they were a connector
Newsgator was like a kitchen where you come and create
Widgetbox was like a DIY Pottery store where you come in and make your own product
Gigya was like a like a spine, as they were the backbone or infrastructure

While there are many challenges to widgets (and every industry) the panelists did a great job refuting them, demonstrating their expertise in the area, and suggesting how to work around any bumps that we may see. If you want to refute the challenges, I certainly encourage you to leave comments on that post or leave a link demonstrating how you can overcome those. It’s all part of a healthy dialog.

The challenge questions? on the difficulties of measurement, lack of brand control, the hurdles of distribution, and how to monetize the space. I also asked them to share how they help clients develop strategies, and to provide clarity around the most common misconceptions. Each of them shined in their own right.

To hear what the rest of the panel said, Alex Nesbit did a great job live blogging the session. Beth Kanter (who did a great job presenting with passion yesterday) shares her notes from the session. And Peter Kaminski, CTO of SocialText writes on his wiki the high level notes. It makes sense if everyone updated the wiki, rather than having several blog posts it could centralize and make the effort more collaborative and efficient.

Jeremiah demonstrated how to moderate a panel. He had asked each member to come up with an image to represent the company. This required each of them to give some deep thought about what their company was. This is a great exercise for any company. And a couple actually brought nice visual aids. Widgetbox had a wonderful ceramic frog that would also serve as a nice logo for the company.

The questions Jeremiah asked were short, focussed and allowed each company to shine in its answer. Each got a chance to give a nice answer and the panel was not dominated by the most vocal member, as many panels are. Obviously, lots of preparation by Jeremiah was important.

Google & OpenSocial: Let’s Get This Shindig Started

David Glazer (Google)

The cloud is now! He recommends Nick Carr’s book The Big Switch. We want fast, easy access to tools, once the tools are ‘good enough.’

Cloud is getting the computer out of the way in order to increase productivity. The social cloud is to make it easier to interact. And more productive.

People are the Killer App of the web.

Old is new. Email, ftp, gopher, bbs. All big 1.0 apps were social.Used to get news by reading specific dead trees. Now get it from anywhere.

For the dummy – lower the wall between people. Use web to answer social questions – find insurance agent. Find new car. Find new music. Plan a trip.

Authentication – lots of passwords. some important. some not. Who shares the same password?

Lots of places where fragmentation of identity makes it harder to find, interact with friends. Needs to be fixed. Connect to anyone without any barriers.

OpenSocial – lots of people want. hard to figure out where to start. OpenSocial was result. if you can build a web app, you can make it social. Invent it, build it. run it.

What have they learned large breadth of interest. not only socializing networks but also enterprise and hobby communities. Use open source (apache shindig). to get it right – clear mission,open license. engaged community. real-world use. Open works when it is open.

Has to be used. need to have people who could fail if shindig does not work (his makes sure buy-in is complete).

Any app to people is work in progress. But also need to get people to any app.

They just announced the winers of AppNight. Developer analytics won a MacBook that had been engraved with a social network graphic. I want one! Reading Social and Chirpscreen won $2000 Apple gift certificates. Nice. I loved chirpscreen, which made a screen saver out of your social networks (i.e. photos from Flickr, facebook, chirps from Twitter). Best screensaver I have seen in a long time.

DiSo & The Web Citizen: Distributed Social Networking Starts Here

Chris Messina

discussed previous communities (Civic SPace; Flock; BarCamp; OpenID)

social networking is not about the ads; lots of friends you never meet; forced friendships.

so try distributed models.. first social networks had niches (mySpace, Facebook, Linkedin)

Each system required you to create yourself each time. Lots of repretition. So have system-centric views of use. leads to hypervaluations. users not the same as customers. users are ants. customers have friends, perhaps in the State Dept. (good laugh).

want to make it citizen-centric. his example: each transit system in San Francisco are system specific. How to get from San Fran to San Jose, must go through different websites and systems. want to have a single system.

who is the web citizen? they have identity, they have provenance. they have friends with identity and provenance. has agency – people have choice. can move data, friends, etc. somewhere else.

a distributed social network – identify where you come from. place to live. manage it from one place. web services subscribe to me, not other way around. If I change address, I should only have to push that out once.

Flexible permissioning. if I only have to update One site, more likely I will make sure data is up to date.

challenges – how do you find friends? hard on open web. maintain interface fidelity. (i.e. Firefox and add-ons). makes interface less intuitive. upgrading a problem.

components of DiSo site – activities. create easily used interface of life. display friends. more than email address. messages and notifications. make it easy. filtering hue number of unread messages across different sites. groups. grouping is ad hoc coming together (GSP is an example).

identity needs to be consolidated. technologies that exist today – openid. microformats. OAuth. atom (atomenabled.org).

current status – started in december. starting with wordpress. diso-project.org

Widget Strategies & Social Platforms

Jeremiah Owyang (Forrester Research), Hooman Radfar (Clearspring Technologies, Inc.), Walker Fenton(NewsGator), Pam Webber (Widgetbox), Ben Pashman (Gigya)

Jeremiah – moderator. 2/3 of online teens visit social networking sites daily. only 8% use them daily. what do they do? see frends are up to; send messages; peeping at somsone’s profile that don’t know; look for someone that do know.

nothing says anything about money.

challenges – difficult to monetize. metrics; spammy; lots of clones; multiple APIs; poor user experience.

Jeremiah – give a simple description of yor niche.
Hooman – connect users and advertisers.
Walker – a kitchen. aggregator.
Pam – ‘colorme mine’. build your own widget.
Ben – spine within a growing body.

measurement and ROI – no industry std. Hooman – can get some of it technically (click throughs, etc.) but therer is education gap to connect with metrics already used by companies.. “How does it measure up to flyers and coupons?” Can see direct bump up when use coupon. How do online approaches do this?

challenges for branding (consumers own brand, not company) – many things can not be done online. Pam talked about difficulties. “Do not want to have brand on specific web site” can not easily be done. Better to evangelize the brand by giving users the ability. can try to prevent general types (i.e. X-rated sites) but at end of the day, it is in user’s control.

Ben – for some brands do not need help getting out (porshe) but how do smaller groups find out if anyone is using their widget. can’t be easily one virally. try doing with advertising unit. low clickthrough.

Hooman – how do you make money? 2 distinct markets – social market (facebook) – traditional (banners, etc.) build CPI network..

this requires standardization to work. widget lives on other sites so who owns money. some people want just distribution. some want money. how to reconcile. CPI (cost per impression) also called CPM

Strategy is dependent on goal. do you want them to look at it or to install. need to define market objective. Then design widgets for use. Walker – define what top 2 things your website is for. Then design widgets that allow them to take it away.

Biggest misconception – Pam – need to really understand website. so putting ebay widget on Facebook not relaly useful since most people do not go to FB to buy things. better widget will drive traffic. Ben – if you build it, they will come. Mixing desktop widget with social software. Does your widget live up to the “make my day” question. Does it make people smile and want to send it out to friends? If so, it is useful.

Social Networks & the NEED for FEEDS

Sean Ammirati (mSpoke / ReadWriteWeb), Ian Kennedy (Yahoo!), Bret Taylor (FriendFeed), Kevin Marks (Google), David Recordon (Six Apart).

I’m not sure who is who but it is a nice discussion.

difference between email (where immediacy is important) and blogs (where response is much more leisurely. Public vs. private approaches. what is in feed should be public or not?

lots of info is public in technical sense but not in a useful fashion. by making flickr photos open to all lowes rebroadcast of them in huge fashion. but this means levels of privacy need to be controlled.That is, it should not be easy for someone to easily release all sorts of important private information by accident [as in email and reply all]

Users need to have control or they will not use it. Uploading photos need to be included also. FB can pull in my newsfeeds but makes it impossible for users to tell others what they are doing [like twitter?]

technical issues becoming a problem. FB made choices that it may have top adjust. i.e. flickr allows users to make photos public in ways that fb does not.

sites are getting better at granularizing privacy. adding layers becomes complex. contacts change (i.e. leaving a business) so how does apps reflect this. so starting early and simple. then add more as needed.

adam – kevin marks (microformats). how do you remove supes (i.e. photos on flickr, twitter, etc.) needs for consistent look. media rss 9diffferent thumbnails, etc.)

Your Business on Facebook: Facebook Marketing 101 – Rodney Rumford

Average time online – online 20 minutes a day.

FB core is as a communication platform. Need to leverage WOMA. low cost acquisition of client. Acquire customers easily.

Use for lead generation. extend brand. allocate funds for extension and experimentation. use targeted ads, beacon, paid groups. guerilla marketing. This takes time and transparencies.

need very specific and cohesive strategy. half assed approaches do not work well.

microtouch – can play game online and gives way to start new communication. easier and quicker than real life communication.

Where I’ve Been – 65K users each day. opportunity for relevant brands and relevancy.

Sponsored groups. Firefox – 25K members. spread its influence.

Facebook ads – very specific targeting of ads. much better discussion of why it is useul and relevant rather than just targeting at. not very high click-through rates. [I hate use of TARGET. need better marketing ;-)

better if ad has friend;s face on it. [but need to make this user permission given rather than by FB]

Are pages better than a group? Better control and branding when it is small number.

3rd party Ad networks – Adknowledge. asychronous gaming is a possibility, like Zynga and SGN.

Need to make sure there is a definition of success. What is FB? is a problem when dealing with decision makers.

lowering number forced invites is a good thing. feel free to friend him on FB.