Yesterday, I had the opportunity to speak on a panel at Snap Summit. During the panel, a discussion came up surrounding “platform wars” and how companies (including Google) were racing to develop a competing platform to Facebook. I completely agree that the race has begun but the real battle is over the “social graph.” A number of people have suggested that the word “social graph” make little to no sense given that Facebook is just a social network.

While Facebook may be a social network, it currently has the most accurate understanding of all of my real world relationships. As I announced yesterday, Facebook knows who my mom is (yes, she is indeed on Facebook). While I may be one of a few peope that have added a large number of my family members as “friends” on Facebook, the reality is they know how I met a large portion of my friends. Whether I met someone through a conference that I just attended or whether they added me as a friend after reading this blog, Facebook knows.

No other social network on the web has as much valuable data. So while MySpace, Friendster, Bebo and Hi5 can launch a platform, they can’t achieve what Facebook has achieved in the past few years. As Facebook continues to grow over the next year, they will continue to expand the most accurate map of the social graph on the web today. There is no site that is close to competing with it yet. Google and Microsoft may argue that thanks to the massive about of data stored by user emails, they too can accurately reveal an individual’s social graph. I whole heartedly disagree but maybe we’ll just have to wait and see when Google opens up later this year.

Until then, Facebook has accomplished what the U.S. government could only dream of accomplishing: accurately mapping individuals’ social graphs. While the job is not done yet, Facebook has taken the lead, leaving their competitors far behind. Who do you think will be able to compete with Facebook in mapping the social graph?

Today is Friday and the developers of the Naughty Gifts application are preparing to throw a massive bash in New York City. I would have been there to cover it but I am in California at the Snap Summit. The party is exclusively for users of the Naughty Gifts application and is by invite only. Adam Gries and Natasha Chatilo are the developers that will be hosting the party.

It has been interesting to see how developers have decided to leverage their large user bases on the Facebook platform. I think the Naughty Gifts team have the right idea and I’m sure they’ll be massively successful with their parties. MySpace had previously used a similar model by throwing parties for users of the site. The major difference here is that within applications there are niche groups that can be targeted for attending parties. That’s in contrast to advertising to an entire social network.

If you are attending the party tonight be sure to send us the photos! Otherwise, enjoy your weekend and hopefully you too get to party like a rockstar wherever you are!

If use the iTunes player for listening to music then you know how the application has a really great user interface. Girard Kelly, one of the developers of the iTunes.fm application sent me a message about their application. I’m glad I checked it out. This application has to be the slickest twist to the original audio application. This morning I discussed the new Audio application. The Intune.fm application takes the new Audio application one step further by enabling the sharing of music among your friends. Ultimately, the Intune.fm application has duplicated most of the iTunes application feature set.

Honestly, this is one of the best music applications that I have used. The only downside to the application is that there were some buffering issues when I tried to play songs. Aside from that, this application is awesome! If you want to use a web based duplicate of the iTunes application, go grab the inTune.fm application.

With Facebook receiving a $15 billion valuation, Peter Lauria suggests that MySpace would be worth $65 billion based on the fact that they have 185 million users. As I said yesterday, the present value of Facebook is nowhere near $15 billion. If Facebook was worth $15 billion today, Myspace still wouldn’t be worth $65 billion. Why?

The value of a MySpace user is much less than a Facebook user. MySpace has a less efficient method of tracking user activities whereas Facebook is clearly effectively tracking user interactions as news items. Additionally, a large portion of MySpace users are not actual users. Facebook is pretty stringent about about ensuring that each user profile is a real person. On MySpace there are a large number of commercial profiles as well as fake profiles. Additionally, a large number of MySpace users are not active anymore. This is a similar thing that occured with the Friendster wasteland.

While MySpace is trying to build their value through becoming more of a media entity rather than a social platform, they have yet to prove a highly effective business model (they supposedly have $500 million a year in revenue but that would definitely not justify a $65 billion valuation). How much do you think MySpace is worth?

While Numair Faraz, the orignial developer of the Audio application, has not returned, Jake Jarvis has decided to revive the idea. The only difference this time is that it is legal. Rather than providing a searchable and browsable directory of uploaded songs, Jake has decided to enable users to display their own music on their profile. All you need to do is upload your song through the application and it is immediately accessible from your profile.

Jake is covering all the storage, you provide the tunes. So how is the application doing? Not to shabby but nothing to brag about. The main problem is that the illegitimate brother of this application, Audibie (which I featured in my list of top 25 Facebook applications), provides all the same functionality as the original application. Given high school and college students’ history of downloading illegal songs, I seriously doubt that they are going to go the legitimate route. I could be wrong though!

The ironic part of this application is that the song must be DRM free. While iTunes provides some DRM free tracks, they are still selling a large portion of their songs with DRM encryption. If you do have DRM free tracks (that you legitimately or illegally acquired) you can upload them to this application. If you want to take the safe route and legally play music on your profile, go check out the new Audio application.

Well, they’ve done it.

The fastest growing Facebook group ever has reached its goal of 1,000,000 members in nine days. I must admit, I joined this group relatively shortly after its creation, coming in at number 22,436. I never would have thought that in just over a week, one million Gen Y’ers would be able to assemble for any cause, let alone in support of a presidential candidate, and apparently neither did anyone else.

This leads me to wonder, though. If a cable television host can rally the support of such a massive number of Facebook users to vote for him in such a brief period of time with no campaign marketing budget and no door-to-door canvassing, why are 40% of this one million not yet registered to vote?. Are we to believe that Gen Y has come to its senses that suffrage is the “reason” why US troops are in Iraq? Does this signify a sudden surge in interest in the 2008 election? Is this Facebook group indicative of next year’s “Get Out The Vote” campaign figures?

Probably not. Diddy’s Vote or Die campaign turned out to be all sizzle and no steak, and Colbert’s presidential aspirations will likely fizzle out by election time. As is evidenced by another Facebook group, “I watch Comedy Central for my news and Fox News for my Comedy”, this politically inactive and seemingly apathetic demographic is just going through the motions of showing their support for a candidate, but then again, no one believed that Colbert could muster this massive outpouring of support in a week.

Today is 15 billion dollar day at AllFacebook.com. Given that just about every piece of news related to Facebook today is about Microsoft’s investment, I thought I would touch on it one more time. Scott Karp is questioning if Facebook is actually losing value due to their open door policy. His basis for the argument is a quote from Paul Saffo who wrote an Economist article and said “The value of a social network is defined not only by who’s on it, but by who’s excluded.”

While I understand the argument, I completely disagree. To date, social networks have not been built with an effective filtering system to separate among your various affiliation groups. If your professional contacts see pictures of you getting wild in Cancun, that is going to be bad news for you. That has been the primary issue with Facebook but fortunately they have announced that will soon enable grouping features. So while this expresses my disagreement with the inverse of Metcalfe’s law, none of this answers the question: is Facebook overvalued?

Yes! I don’t thing that the present value of Facebook is $15 billion. While financiers may argue that it is worth that because that’s what Microsoft valued it at, I disagree based on a stratospheric earning multiple. The investment was a bet by Microsoft. Eventually Facebook may be worth much more than this but it also was a defensive maneuver to block out Google from access to the highly valued Facebook web search. As Greg Sterling has pointed out, this investment most likely secured Microsoft with access to Facebook’s future web search. While I personally may stick with Google for web search, many users on the web just want ease of use. One less click means a time savings for the user and more money for Facebook.

So while Microsoft’s investment in Facebook, may leave everyone questioning whether or not it was a good investment; the reality is that this was a bet by Microsoft that Facebook will soon be worth much more than $15 billion. I have to say that this was a really good bet. It’s time that Microsoft starts making some serious bets given that they are rapidly gaining the reputation of an old school company that doesn’t have a grasp on the future of technology. Do you think this was a good bet?

The online media company Revision3 has just launched their official Facebook application. The application appears to display absolutely all of Revision3′s shows via the application. The only interaction among users within the application is a wall for each episode. While I think this is a great feature for interaction, the application is limited to the amount of interaction between users. I’d like to see things such as what are my friends’ favorite shows? What are the most recent episodes viewed by my friends and by people using the application? What are the most popular shows and what are the most recent comments? The addition of a rating system would also be great.

I think that the many organizations have decided to limit their feature sets and simply port over their existing websites. This is a bad choice. While I’m sure Facebook would like to see absolutely everything on the web end up within their site, I don’t see this happening. Ultimately, websites need to encourage interaction among the users of the site, otherwise their application will fail. The only applications that can survive without significant user involvement are widgets that express individual affiliation groups (Barack Obama supporters, Stephen Colbert supporters, favorite sport teams, etc).

While the Revision3 Player is significantly limited, it does what it claims to do: plays things. While I didn’t expect much more from this application, it would have been nice to be pleasantly surprised. If you want to check out some of the Revision3 videos then go grab the Revision3 player. For your viewing pleasure, I have included the most recent version of the GigaOm show which features my good friend Gary Vaynerchuk of Wine Library TV. Check it out!

According to Elizabeth Corcoran at Forbes, Facebook raised a total of $740 million thanks to two $250 million investments from separate hedge funds. This doesn’t come as much of a surprise given that is was rumored that Facebook was seeking to raise $750 million. Whatever the case, Mark Zuckerberg must be happy now that he is worth $4.5 billion based on Facebook’s new valuation of $15 billion. It’s definitely time for Zuckerberg to go out and party like a rockstar.

It’s good to know that investors are headed to the tech industry following the sub-prime mortgage fallout. On the scale of risk from fallout from recession, the tech industry seems to be one of the industries furthest from risk of fallout. This can be attributed to Microsoft’s promised investments over the next five years and the hedge funds’ rumored investments in Facebook. All signs point to good times in Silicon Valley for at least the near future.

While the remaining hedge fund investments are just rumors, the rumor does come from a reliable source (not just Fake Steve Jobs). Whether or not the rumors are true, employees of Facebook surely have a good reason to start the weekend a little early.

As Techcrunch pointed out last night, Friendster has officially announced their developer platform. The primary differentiating factor between the Friendster and Facebook platforms is that the Friendster platform is for widgets, not for robust applications. Given that Friendster has received guidance from a number of widget providers on how to build their platform, it comes as no surprise that the platform is widget based.

There are four points of integration with the Friendster website for the new widgets:

1. Widget Directory – A directory that displays widgets by category.
2. Widget Install Page – My guess is that this is similar to the Facebook installation page
3. User Profile – Just like Facebook, each widget gets its own piece of real estate within the user’s profile. Currently, widgets can only use Flash and HTML on the profile.
4. Tracker – A similar conc

Friendster began working on this project soon after Facebook launched their platform. So who cares? Developers should. Friendster has over 50 million users which is larger than Facebook’s rapidly growing user base of over 46 million. I can guarantee you that all of the large widget providers (RockYou, Slide, iLike, etc) will be ready to go at launch time (supposedly November 30th). I have to disagree with Mark Hendrickson of Techcrunch who claims that this is little more than fluff.

The bottom line is that developers want to gain access to users and no matter what distribution channels they have available to them, they should seize as many of those opportunities as possible. The only issue here is that their widgets will need to be translated into a number of southeastern Asian languages. That shouldn’t be to difficult for a few smart developers though, right? There is no doubt about it, Facebook’s open platform has been a significant catalyst for change in this industry. The next few years are going to be exciting as we see the opening of both web and mobile platforms.