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.
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