Last night Mike Arrington broke the news that Google is supposedly launching the OpenSocial tomorrow. Soon after I posted a response questioning the validity of this. Throughout the day I have been pinging people involved with Google’s new platform and everybody came back with the same response: “this is definitely news to me.” According to a number of sources Google will simply be announcing a new standard that enables developers to interact directly with the partnering social platforms.

In the coming months, Google is hoping that social platforms will announce that they use the “OpenSocial Standard,” designed and developed by Google. This standard is simply a public extension of the Orkut platform API and is similar to the iGoogle API. It sounds like Google just played a successful game of chicken in which they were able to convince a number of companies to sign something saying that they are non-exclusive “partners,” and will commit to supporting the OpenSocial standard.

In a sort of abstract way, the new standard is similar to the failed XFN standard. Given Google’s leverage in the industry, they were able to convince a number of less significant partners to join them in pursuit of Facebook. The funny thing here is that Google was unable to convince the two biggest players: Facebook and MySpace to join in the party. One unnamed source that I spoke with compared this to George Bush’s alliance in Iraq which was called the “coalition of the willing.” That alliance included the powerful armies of Nicaragua, Tonga, Hungary, Portugal and a number of other countries.

While this new platform should not be discounted as meaningless, the partnering platforms are not ready to launch yet. Hi5 and a couple other partners will be demoing the service at tomorrow’s announcement but none of the platforms are officially ready for launch. Rumor has it that the Orkut platform won’t be ready for launch until December 1st. However this pans out, one thing is certain: the Google P.R. machine may just be the most effective P.R. machine in the industry.

Facebook wouldn’t be Facebook without a little bit of childish behavior. That’s why the guys over at Hungry Machine thought it would be a good idea to launch the Halloween Candy application. The application is as useful as food fight, zombies and all the other Facebook applications that we love to hate but hey, it’s HHalloween and we all need some way to celebrate. Don’t let your celebrations end with this application though!

I’ll be headed out this evening but I haven’t come up with a costume. Would being my Facebook profile be too cliché? I think I’m going to skip getting dressed up. Any of you going out trick or treating tonight? Let us know! This application is a great way to say happy Halloween to all your friends today (well at least 20 of them due to Facebook’s invite restriction). If you want to throw candy at your friends to wish them a happy Halloween, go grab the Halloween Candy application now!

A couple years back one of my friends suggested that someone make a social network for families. After listening to their concept I agreed and began outlining a site which ultimately never saw the lite of day. It appears that others were more determined. FamilyLink.com is one of the sites that decided to tackle the problem of there not being a single place for families to connect.

While their website never gained traction, the creators of FamilyLink.com decided to launch a Facebook application. It was a great decision. Their application has now attracted over half a million users and has over 55,000 daily users. The “We’re Related” application enables you to list each of your family members that are on Facebook and how you are related to them. If your relative is not on Facebook, you can manually enter them as well. The cool part about having access to your family members that are on Facebook is the dynamically generated family photo album. The photo album mimics the iPhone’s album cover flow allowing you to smoothly flip through each of the images.

While this is a great first start to the application, there are many features that are lacking. I would recommend some sort of message board as well as a family cookbook to be added to this application. I’m sure there are a number of additional features that would be good but I can’t seem to come up with any others this moment. This application is a great first start and if the application owners decide to build this out they will surely have a sizable returning user base. If you want to keep track of your family on Facebook, go check out the We’re Related application.

Tomorrow I will be the New New Internet conference in Reston, Virginia. Some of the conference speakers includ Gary Vaynerchuk from WineLibraryTV, Ryan Carson, Tim Ferris, Om Malik, Ted Leonsis, James Surowiecki and my good friend Frank Gruber. The conference looks like it is going to be a great event. The organizers of the event have been kind enough to provide my readers with a $200 discount by entering the discount code: Facebook00.

If you are interested in attending, go check out The New New Internet website or register now. If you plan on attending, be sure to let me know so I can say hello at the event.

While I may end up eating my words for weeks to come, whether or not platforms will be ready for launch tomorrow, one thing is for sure: OpenSocial has arrived to counter the Facebook platform. The new APIs being provided by Google will (as Mike Arrington pointed out) enable developers to access profile information, friends information and activities. These are all things currently provided on the Facebook platform. While user portability across networks is not supported by this, each application will have access to data that enables them to be unique to the user.

The “applications” being developed for OpenSocial sound much more like widgets that reside within containers rather than robust applications. Perhaps most web developers will soon be widget developers. The web is suddenly becoming more social and as the web evolves our daily interactions with sites will become more personal. We will be able to view much on the web through the lenses of our friends. In regards to whether or not silos of users will continue to exist, under OpenSocial they will. Individuals can choose to use Friendster, Hi5 or any of their other platform partners or opt to go with Facebook or Myspace who are as of yet, not integrating with Google’s new system.

While this is a step in the right direction, this is not the final solution to cross platform identity portability that many have been calling for. Regardless, Google and the other platforms are definitely concerned about Facebook’s momentum and this is their answer. One thing that hasn’t been answered by this is: will Google develop a SocialAds competitor that enables targeted ads across platforms similar to those expected to be provided by Facebook on their new ad platform? Additionally, given that platforms get to choose how they wish to implement Google’s open social, how will application directories compare to Facebook’s applications directory? Finally, are the Facebook developers going to go running for OpenSocial?

All of these are unanswered questions that will soon be revealed in the coming months!

According to Mike Arrington, Google will be launching their new platform “OpenSocial,” this Thursday. Both Mike and myself had been hearing rumors that the platform would be delayed and that it wouldn’t be launching until December 1st. Apparently we all got it wrong (somewhat strange given that I spoke directly with multiple platform partners). According to Mike’s post, the new platform will allow users to transfer information across platforms in regards to profile data, friend data and activities.

So what platforms will developers be able to build for? Well Mike says that it will be “Orkut, Salesforce, LinkedIn, Ning, Hi5, Plaxo, Friendster, Viadeo and Oracle.” Oracle? I didn’t realize they have a social network and Salesforce isn’t exactly a system built for friending people, only listing your sales leads and contacts. Perhaps I am the only one confused here. Whatever the case, much of this story makes sense based on the fact that the competing platforms are looking to take on Facebook directly. According to the CTO of Hi5, who I spoke with less than a few weeks ago, their platform won’t be launching for 12 to 18 months.

OpenSocial is apparently a set of standards that all platforms will be able to integrate with but ultimately I see this as only an announcement, not the actual ability to develop for all the platforms. If all developers are suddenly capable of developing for all of these platforms starting Thursday it will be revolutionary. There is no way that this is happening though. As I said yesterday, Google will announce the platform on November 1st and not November 7th or 8th as Techcrunch previously posted. The actual platform will officially launch on December 1st.

Call me a skeptic but I’m calling Mike’s bluff on this one. This is not the official launch, it is just their announcement. Sorry! While the API will be listed, developers will not be able to integrate with all of these platforms immediately as they will most likely be rolled out over the coming months. The first of which will launch December 1st.

Update
After reading Marc Andreessen’s post which one of my readers pointed out to me, I still come to the same conclusion. While Google may release their set of APIs, as Marc says “Open Social is not quite ready to go live on Ning and the other partners. The API has to stabilize a bit, and containers have to finish testing and validating their implementations.” Perhaps Google also likes to call this a launch as well. There may be a rapid release of the new platform but I don’t see this happing on Thursday. Call me crazy. I’m putting myself out there and may just end up eating my own words. Oh well!

Everybody is waiting for the Facebook SocialAds announcement on November 6th. While we now know that Facebook will target users when they are browsing outside of Facebook, we don’t know when the actual network will launch. According to closely tied sources, Facebook is simply announcing the new network on November 6th, the day after Google was supposed to announce their platform. They will be announcing launch partners as well as seeking additional launch partners. Apparently they aren’t close to completion with their ad platform though.

In regards to Google, I’ve heard that the new date is November 1st for the announcement while Techcrunch is reporting that it will be the 8th or 9th, days after Facebook’s announcement. Whatever day it is, it is now obvious that both Facebook and Google are trying to be strategic in picking their dates to maximize and sustain the buzz around their platforms. Facebook’s much hyped ad network is still an unproven model and based on the click-thru rates displayed in leaked data, advertising on Facebook is currently not the most effective place for gaining exposure. Additionally, Facebook will be selling a new form of advertising which while in theory is awesome, has no data to back up such a claim.

The revolutionary new ad system that could become a rival to Google’s Adsense must generate a lot of buzz so that ad agencies are convinced that the new network is a worthwhile investment for their clients. Facebook is taking this seriously. The recently opened a New York office that most likely is focused on developing advertiser relationships. Even still, both Facebook and Google are now heavily invested in revolutionizing the social web and this is just the beginning. Every move matters and the shuffling of press dates by both companies is a sign of the times.

This morning I received an email from Markus Urban who notified me of an error within his Facebook flyers account. Apparently, Facebook was displaying ad data for another user’s account. As displayed in the image below, the data includes ad click-thru rates, cost-per-click information and the total amount that the person has spent. One interesting piece of this is how horrendous the click-thru rates are. While click-thru rates are mostly related to how good the ad is, the rates in the chart below are well below the estimated 0.04% click-thru rates that have been previously estimated for Facebook flyer ads.

While internal click-thru rates for Facebook are historically low, under their new advertising system, click-thru rates would be potentially higher given that they are targeted ads on less “attention consuming” websites. This is all speculation though. Whatever the case is, Facebook needs to figure out what’s happening with their flyer system that could cause this leaking.

One other interesting tidbit brought to my attention by Markus’ post is the fact that Facebook blocks all advertising that redirects users to MySpace. While speaking at SNAP Summit last week, Ami Vora, the senior platform manager at Facebook, could not comment on who Facebook considers a competitor. If there was anything to suggest that Facebook considers MySpace a competitor, this definitely does.

Update
Markus has since informed me that the bug seems to have been fixed as of this morning. It’s great to see that Facebook is responding quickly to any errors.

While the Facebook platform economy is probably worth less than $100 million annually currently, Facebook developers currently have plenty of options to monetize their applications. Developers can choose to serve video ads with VideoEgg, fill out user surveys with Peanut Labs or use one of the many cost-per-click and cost-per-install models offered by Social Media, RockYou and many others.

According to CNet, AdBrite is preparing to launch a Facebook ad network as well. While there are few details on the new ad network, other large web based advertising networks are also preparing to launch solutions for Facebook developers. Even with all of the hype surrounding Facebook advertising, existing solutions are still not making Facebook developers rich. At SNAP Summit last week, Todd Sawicki, the Vice President of Marketing at Lookery, was saying that most Facebook developers are receiving a 10 to 20 cent CPM.

While the top applications may pay for a nice house or car for a single developer, it is nowhere near a sufficient revenue model for multi-million dollar VC backed companies. Another downfall to the current advertising ecosystem on Facebook is that most of the internal ads are coming from other Facebook applications. Not only are they coming from other applications but many of the current advertising networks are having serious problems with filling inventory. There just aren’t enough advertisers out there that are willing to advertise on third-party applications. These types of revenues are hardly sustainable and are only a short-term play.

Conversely, for those that are willing to take high risks, there are potentially high rewards. The large players can afford to take these sorts of risks and are jumping into the market one after the other. There is no end in site to craziness that is the Facebook advertising market. It is the new gold rush in Silicon Valley.

According to a Valleywag post from yesterday, a Facebook employee reportedly modified a user’s profile picture to a graphic image after looking up her password and logging into her account. In a follow-up post, Nicholas Carlson has published a copy of his inquiry to the named Facebook employee and the response he received.

If there is any proof of this taking place, the Facebook employee should be fired. Last month I wrote about Facebook employees have unrestricted access to the Facebook database and can modify items within the database freely. Since then, Valleywag posted another article on this topic. Valleywag has alluded to the issue being a company filled with “angsty, hormone-riddled” youngsters having complete access to anybody’s profile.

While that’s a moot point given that this would still be an issue even if all the employees were “mature adults,” the issue remains that Facebook employees have complete access to anyone’s profile. Personally, I don’t want to mention the name of the employee given that I am now completely dependent on Facebook and I might risk having my profile shut down after being accused of a terms of service violation (as the Valleywag reporter did). One thing is for sure: Facebook is going to need to develop more stringent internal policies if they are going to expand into the multi-billion dollar company that many are expecting them too.