Benjamin Ling of Facebook is currently speaking at the Graphing Social Patterns conference. I hate to be overly critical of Facebook but as usual the presentation displays nothing new. Benjamin is giving an overview their new profiles and how the wall is different. I’m not quite sure why Ben called this a “sneak preview” because it definitely isn’t. Ben is going over how many applications, application developers and number of users engaging with applications are on Facebook.

Ben is going over how they are trying to “remove friction” on Facebook. They are trying to make it so you can write an application once and use it everywhere. This can be done via Facebook’s licensing model. This licensing platform was announced back in January the same day that the Bebo platform launched. Ben is going over other things that have already been covered on this website including partnerships they’ve made with Joyent and Amazon.

Ben is now pitching usage of the developers marketplace. Following this, Ben is discussing the mult-language capabilities now available on the platform. He is mentioning how they are in Spanish. I actually wrote about how they launched German on Saturday. Now Ben is discussing how to leverage the social graph. I can’t describe how rehearsed this presentation sounds (just a side note). They have a really pretty visualization on the screen showing how people are connected via the social graph.

Ben is now going over what is usually brought up by all Facebook presentations: they have the largest photo application in the world. Sometimes I wonder if Facebook’s PR firm creates these presentations. Ben is now discussing how they are going to add Facebook payment services. This has been rumored to launch during the first quarter this year. Applications will be able to access the same payment system that is used for purchasing gifts on Facebook.

The next topic discussion is spammy applications. He discussed how they have decided to remove forced invites and displays a screenshot for reporting. He is emphasizing that people should be building high value applications such as the Visual Bookshelf application that has been created by the D.C. company, Hungry Machine. That’s the end of the presentation. It was well rehearsed and the powerpoint presentation was phenomenal!