Dave Morin - Facebook Platform Head
Within the last month, a woman built an app to 300K active users and sold it.
Over 67M active users.
More than half of users outside of US.
13% in UK. 20% of entire population of Canada.
100 apps added per day. Licensing FBML and platform to other sites - like Bebo.
Launched FBFund - grants to get going on apps.
Next year: how to enable commerce.
Focus: creating long term value.
- Frictionless Platform
Leverage Social Graph
World Class applications.
Frictionless Platform
How can FB provide value to users. Maintain trust.
Valuable Information, what activity is meaningful.
Facebook Profile Upgrade is coming.
New things coming to profile: focusing on Wall, and actions you are taking.
When you come to the new profile, you get a feel for the current version of a person.
Adding tabs - available to devs. Users can choose to add your app in a tab.
Apps can still add profile boxes on left (narrow module only!)
Facebook believes that only one social graph exists in the world - their goal is to and map it.
Strengthening relationships, building empathy.
Facebook likes apps that drive users to interact with each other.
4B photos in the system, but if I look at the home page, i just see my friends'.
What are world class applications:
Not many apps are taking on sports or medicine.
The next phase is apps that help people work better.
Religion is underutilized in terms of apps also.
More commerce functionality is coming - allowing credit card payments.
Maximize the user experience
- respect the ecosystem
- blocking types of behaviors (force invites)
- ensure long term value
- every time they see a news feed, they need to know how it relates to their friends.
What's next?
- share tech and tools
- provide core infrastructure and resources
- enable viral distribution tools
FBFund
Backed by Founder's FUnd and Accel, $10M fund.
Infrastructure partners; Joyent, AMazon Web Services, MS Popfly
User Driven Internationalization
- volunteer translations
- FBML tags that can help you get your apps translated by FB users
Future of Platform:
Over 30K apps on FB.
Question: we have a viral app that brings in a lot of new FB users. We don't have metrics.
Answer: Ok, more data needs to be made available.
Question: Preferred Application Developer Program?
Answer: we've thought about, but it's no something we're working on necessarily.
We're doing roundtables, no formal program.
Question: Will gifs app credit card database be available to developers?
Answer: still working, and we don't know.
Question: FBFund, how many grants given out?
Answer: don't have specifics, but we have given out grants. $25-$250K is the range of grants.
Question: Things are so unpredictable. Allocations change so ofen.
Answer: We're trying to engage the community to balance user needs with dev business needs.
Roundtables, develper blog, etc.
Question: CBS had 100 invites... are we going to see more of this?
Answer: Yes, we've heard the feedback. We have a history with CBS. Can't say it won't happen again in the future.
Question: Any plan to eliminate duplicate invites? Why can someone who has an app receive another invite.
Answer: thanks for the feedback.
Quesion: Status of instant messaging and timeline of interoperability?
Answer: It should be available next week. Open as possible. Evaluating Jabber. Scale problems wih chat.
Question: Is OpenSocial in your plans?
Answer: We haven't chosen to participate. We have 300K devs on our platform. It's one of those things.
We're not ruling it out.
