Il primo punto di forza di Facebook Connect è la registrazione minimale, poichè - come abbiamo visto nella prima parte di questo percorso - si possono utilizzare le stesse credenziali Facebook: in questo modo la soglia di interesse necessaria all’iscrizione ad un sito si abbassa notevolmente.

La rivista UGC di viaggi Ruba, per esempio, ha da poco integrato Facebook Connect, in modo tale da incentivare gli utenti a caricare e condividere velocemente contenuti user-generated.

Grazie a Facebook Connect, gli utenti hanno accesso veloce alle esperienze di viaggio condivise dai propri amici Facebook, conoscere i loro ultimi spostamenti, e quelli in programma. Ma non solo: gli utenti possono costruire le proprie rubriche, scrivere le proprie guide, condividere reportage audio e video.

Facebook Connect consente di legare gli account degli utenti sul nostro sito con i profili Facebook. In questa maniera l’utente può loggarsi sul sito utilizzando le credenziali di Facebook e il sito stesso può pubblicare notifiche sui profili degli utenti.

FB Connect consente di effettuare il single sign on sul nostro sito utilizzando le credenziali di Facebook, tra le più diffuse tra i navigatori; contemporaneamente la pubblicazione di messaggi sui profili degli utenti innesca dinamiche virali e può essere utilizzata per attirare traffico verso il proprio sito.

Per capire meglio cosa è possibile fare diamo un’occhiata al sito di The Insider, un magazine della CBS.

Al momento dell’iscrizione posso decidere di associare il profilo sul sito ai dati di autenticazione di Facebook, e quindi non dovrò inserire username e password per il sito, mi basterà usare le credenziali che già uso per accedere a fb. Naturalmente le applicazioni Facebook Connect consentono l’iscrizione anche a chi non ha un account FB, o semplicemente non vuole collegarlo al sito: tutto resta come prima, e l’utente dovrà inserire nome utente, password ed eventualmente altri dati richiesti con l’iscrizione.

E’ possibile visualizzare i propri amici FB che sono già iscritti al sito ed invitarne altri, attraverso una semplice interfaccia grafica. Posso accedere alle notizie segnalate dai miei amici, oppure segnalarne a mia volta.

Quando inserisco un nuovo contenuto, ad esempio un commento, una finestra di conferma mi chiederà di pubblicare una notifica sul mio profilo Facebook, che sarà visibile ai miei amici. La notifica contiene il link al contenuto appena postato.

The Insider è uno degli esempi più conosciuti, ma esistono già più di 8000 integrazione di Facebook Connect su siti. Molto conosciuto è anche City Search: in questo caso le informazioni di profilazione di Facebook, come la città di provenienenza, sono utilizzate per personalizzare il contenuto del sito.

Facebook Connect è un ottimo modo per integrare un sistema di single sign on sul proprio sito (FB ha lanciato il supporto per openid!) e naturalmente per scatenare meccanismi virali che permettono di attirare traffico. I indicati per l’integrazione sono i siti di contenuto, ad esempio quelli che permettono agli utenti di pubblicare commenti e recensioni.

L’integrazione viene solitamente effettuata durante la progettazione del sito, ma è anche possibile aggiungere Facebook Connect in un sistema di autenticazione esistente, con una sua base di utenti. Le modifiche da effettuare al backend e al database sono minime.

Hi Everybody in Milan at the Developer Garage. Sorry I can’t be there. My name is John Earner. I am VP product management at Playfish. We are a Social Games company. We make four of the top ten games on Facebook. We are really looking forward to talking with you guys about what we’ve learned on Facebook so far. We are really excited about the turnout in Italy. It is our fastest growing and one of our largest markets so we are really happy about that.

Like I said is, Playfish is a social games company. What that means is, is that we make games for friends to play with each other online. We were founded in October of 2007 . The founders are mobile game developers veterans. They had previously created a company called macrospace which had merged with another US mobile gaming company to form gluemobile. They took it public and have a lot of experience in gaming. They saw an opportunity that we have all jumped on and that opportunity is really that Facebook has a social graph that makes online gaming much more fun. It brings gaming back to its roots. Which is to say gaming had been historically about a board game, two friends maybe more and the interaction of the game was really about the friends more than the game itself. With the social graph that Facebook provides we are now able to recreate that sort of gaming experience. So we set out to do that on Facebook. We launched our first game in January it was called “Who has the biggest brain?”. Basically, a brain training game. Not a new concept I think the novel part of it was the competitive nature of the game, with your friends. So now it actually mattered what your score was because your friends would see it on a leader board and obviously if one of my friends gets a higher score than me or is smarter than me I wanna try and beat them. So it really tapped into this social competitive element. We’ve gone on to launch 6 other games. The most recent of which actually just launched in the last few days called “restaurant city”. I think I said earlier we’ve got about 4 of the top 10 games on Facebook. With a total of about 4.5 million daily active users and we have about 25 Million monthly active users cumulatively. So things are going great for us and we are really looking forward to the next year where we plan on launching a lot more games and continuing to create things that people can really enjoy to play with their friends.

Our business model is a combination of micro transactions and advertising. Our target demographic is everyone. Not just people who traditionally consider themselves gamers but the entire mass market of people we think can enjoy games with their friends.

Thanks! Now we want to talk about the power of the platforms. The Facebook ecosystem seems better, almost sometimes better than the web about spreading applications or services. What do you think about the virality of the Social Platforms?

Yeah, I mean first of all, certainly for what we are doing the kinds of games we make, its much better than the web for us. I would agree with your point that it is more viral, the numbers are the evidence there. We’ve only been around a little over a year and we’ve got the 25 million monthly active users. And so that’s important, its a very tough struggle historically if you are trying to make a casual games portal to get people to find out about you, even if you have a great product. We really think that the various viral channels that Facebook has created allows for friends to communicate with one another. We have no marketing budget. We entirely getting our users from word of mouth. So that’s great but I guess a point I also want to make is social networks like Facebook provide something other than just virality and I think there is a tendency in our community to purely think of it as a viral play. It also provides a social graph that can create a whole new way of interacting with friends instead of strangers. So in the case of social gaming as I have said a few times what really makes these games stand out is that unlike Xbox Live you are not playing against some stranger 14 year old who kicks your ass every time. You are now playing against your mom or your friend or your college roommate. So its not just about virality, Facebook is about bringing together with the people who matter most, your friends.

Do you guys also do games not on Facebook or are you guys exclusively a Facebook game producer?

Yeah, our primary goal is to develop games wherever there is a social graph. Facebook is the most mature of those right now but we are on a total of four social networks and we are also on the iphone. But presumably, we think social graphs and Facebook in particulare will be a powerful tool in the future and as those social graphs go to different places we hope to follow them.

You spoke briefly also about the business model and as far as the economic situation for the games what do you think is the best way to make money, Not necessarily your guys’ in particular but the way that money can be profited off of these games, systems, services, everything.

Sure, well first of all I think you can make money as an App developer on Facebook. We are profitable and each of our titles is profitable. So we are managing to do it and do it in quite a big way. We think there is a great market out there. My answers are very much focused on gaming just because thats what we do that what all of our backgrounds are. But if you look at the gaming market I think its a better perspective to say that the entire sum total of the gaming market right now is over 50 Billion US Dollars every year. So if someone were to approach this from the angle of Social media and to say well its very small nascent market of trying to monetize apps thats one thing but if you were to say we can grab a few percent of a 50 billion dollar world wide gaming industry you’re talking about real money and that’s not a far fetched goal. We are actually managing to begin to do that as are some others. So in terms of how to make that specific, I think everyone knows the basics there is an advertising pay, there’s a micro transactions pay and then there’s some incentivized offers: CPA ’s as its called. We are having luck with all of those. I think that it is important when you are starting your business out to have a variety of business models and to experiment and see what works. Certainly for gaming we know that micro transactions work well. The premise of the model is that the games are very easy to access. You can play them for free so there really is no barrier to purchase. In the old gaming world you would have to spend up to 60 dollars on a console game before you knew if you even liked it or not. And to make that purchase you would have to go to a store that only gamers went to. So now we have really democratized this entire industry. Anybody can download this game, its on flash, in a matter of seconds and be playing it. Some small percentage of those people who love the game so much that they will be willing to spend a small amount of dollars or maybe even a large amount of dollars to make that game experience better. Maybe for one game that means buying items like in Pet society for example to make your pet or our pets apartment look nicer. Or down the road it will be for more competitive games as we have already seen in Korea in their market where someone will spend money to make their character more powerful. So we know thats a powerful market. In terms of communication apps or productivity apps I think the micro transaction pay is more difficult but it seems to us from our own personal experience like there are a number of ways to monetize these apps. That even if your average revenue per user is lower than say a world of warcraft you have so many more users that you can more than make up for it.

As you said before Italy is one of the fastest growing Facebook markets. Is there anything in particular that you guys would use to take advantage of the situation here?

Yeah, well we haven’t made any announcements about that, other than to say that, Localization is extremely important. We already translate our games into efigs: so French, Italian, German, Spanish and English. We are having a lot of success. I think that we can continue to do further localization at a community level. We have a volunteer community monitor team and Italy is a big part of that. We can localize through more payment methods. So for example, we recently launched OneBip. Which is really not popular at all in our traditional markets, the US and UK where we live. But we learned its extremely popular in Italy and so we launched that exclusively to go after the Italian Market as a payment method that is relevant to you. That’s worked great so far. So the more we can localize the community, the game itself, the payment methods we think the more success we are going to have. I think that at the core this is a global business and Playfish in particular is configured with that in mind in the long run. We’ve got offices already in four countries. The headquarters is in the UK, I’m in San Fransisco, we have a studio in Norway and another in China. Italy is going to be a big part of that. It is pretty clear from the numbers already and at a per capita level it is unbelievable how much activity there is in Facebook in general and our games specifically. When you run the numbers it seems that everyone between the ages of 18-24 in Italy must be on Pet Society. I’d love to hear from you if that is really true but certainly looking at the numbers it feels that way.

I think that sums it up. Thanks!

Thanks a lot I appreciate it and I hope you have a great developer garage.

Our company friend to friend is really focused on connecting people and products on social media. So we see a great opportunity, people naturally like to talk about products with their friends. And typically in the online experience that has been difficult because people haven’t been connected to their friends. But with social networks and social media in general that’s where not only people are but their friends are and using products as a catalyst for discussion and other social actions we think is a very big opportunity on social networks. So at friend to friend we focus on social actions like recommendations, like wish lists, like sending gifts and like quizzes to get people talking about things and doing actions with their friends. A couple of examples of our applications one would be product pulse which was our very first application when the Facebook platform opened which I think was in the summer of 2007. And in that application people recommend products or give their opinion on them in a gaming like scenario where they love or they hate something. When they take that position on the product it messages their friends and their friends can weigh in on that conversation they can have a dialog about the product. What we found about Product pulse was that it was a pretty complex fully featured application. And we started to take subsets of that interaction like just making a list of your favorite products. We came out with other applications like our “my island” application. What products would you take to desert island. What are your favorite must-have accessories. We found that people really like putting things in lists and sharing those lists with their friends. We also come out with some applications like “I love Chocolate”. Which is simply an application where you pick a chocolate and you send it to your friend with a message. Those application have proven to be pretty popular with users and they are very light weight and easy to create.

What about the viral dynamics of Facebook applications? What about the power of the spreading applications using Facebook, using the friends and using the news feeds and all the features of social networks and Facebook?

Yeah, so I am going to wrap this into another questions which I get a lot. Why do you develop on Facebook? Why don’t you develop your own site? First off, I’d say Facebook is an environment with 200 million users so we are talking about the size of a really large country right there. The other interesting fact is that even if you can bring a large amount of users to your independent site… You probably will not have all of that users’ friends. In the new web, the way people want to interact is by including their friends and Facebook gives you that opportunity to engage not only the user but their average 120 friends. And that is really powerful and that is the power of social media today. And social media and virality I think really go hand-in-hand. So when you can get one user to participate and do a social action that logically creates connection with their friends. You have virality built in o your application. Facebook merely provides the communication channels: Really various different types of messaging, whether its notifications, whether its feeds, whether its the ability to send emails, its all taking behavior which naturally occurs offline that would offline would probably happen one-to-one and Facebook allows it happen one-to-many and create many interactions and conversations as a result.

So you prefer to create a Facebook application rather than create a website. Is there any possibility to earn money creating a Facebook application?

Absolutely! So first of all I’d say to anyone in the webdesign space whether ultimately this is Facebook or not. This is where the consumer internet space is going. The genie is out of the bottle the world is changed forever. Today is about what is personal to me what is relevant to me what can I create what can I share with my friends, what can I discuss with the community that I want to hang out with. Now today Facebook is absolutely on the forefront of that trend. So as a developer you want to be where the future is going to be. That environment is on Facebook. That is where the monetization, I believe is also going to be invented. When your on environment with 200 million people interacting with your applications. That is just a lab bench to innovate, experiment and find out what works as quickly as possible. So today, in terms of monetization most Facebook applications are going down the path of using ad networks to monetize the ad space on their applications That can be successful, it can be successful if you have a huge amount of traffic on your applications. However, I don’t think that is going to be where the large opportunity is going forward. The large opportunity is going to be around things like potentially virtual gifts which Facebook is doing a great business in today. Virtual gifts are virtual products could extend beyond gifts to avatars, to special ingredients for the virtual activities that you are participating in. Also affiliate fees. There are companies who are making plug-ins for App developers where if you have an application where users need to earn points or need to use chips to continue using the application. They can go down the path of engaging in certain offers to earn points. Certain applications are making a huge amount of money, monthly, by working with these affiliate programs to monetize their apps that have points. The best opportunity there, is if you are a gaming application. Finally I’d say that brand advertising and brands need to be where people and where their demographics spends time. We just found that in the 18 to 40 year old demographics people are spending more time on the internet than they are in front of their tvs. We are also finding that in younger age demographics those users are spending more time on social networks than on any other media.

What that means in a nutshell is that advertisers are gonna need to be where the people are hanging out which is increasingly in places like Facebook. Which means that brand advertising is gonna need to move in to applications. That is where we see that a great opportunity, is brands becoming part of that interaction between people and products. And therefore sponsoring applications, integrating campaigns into applications, we see that as a great monetization strategy over time. Its not there yet because a lot of brands are just coming up with what their social media strategy is but in the years to come we see that as a great opportunity.

Thanks good luck with the event. I am sure it will be a great success.