Facebook has publicly stated their intent to launch a payments platform and have even begun testing it with multiple application developers but one area where they’ve yet to integrate is their own products. While the company has tested a system which enables users to send credits, nothing has been released since those initial tests. One area where we see a ton of potential is Facebook events, which has become one of Facebook’s most popular applications.
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Over the past day there has been significant discussion about what the future holds for real-time search, and no matter what conversation you look at, Facebook is always part of it. Just last month, Facebook started testing a new version of search and over the past few weeks, I’ve taken the time to play with the system and compare it to other “real-time search engines”, primarily Twitter search.
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With Google announcing the launch of a PC based operating system and the emergence of a fierce battle to become the leading mobile operating system, it’s clear that the platform wars are back in full force. Recently Techcrunch posted impressive statistics regarding Firefox’s growth, highlighting that the browser wars have been revived as well. Over a year and a half ago I argued that the social web platform wars were now taking place and what’s becoming increasingly clear is that there is a single battle for the hearts and minds of developers.
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Mark Zuckerberg has said on a number of instances that the future of Facebook does not exist on Facebook.com. The emphasis is on Facebook as an identity platform and Facebook Connect which will continue to expand over time. If the entire platform is going to take place elsewhere on the web then it would only make sense that we begin to see Facebook Pages do the exact same thing.
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This is a guest post by Bill Grosso, the Chief Technology Officer of Twofish.
As the social application space has started to mature, more and more application developers have adopted a “metrics driven” approach to game design. Driven partially by the availability of data gathering and analysis tools, partially by the distributed nature of the internet, and partially by the quick turnaround times that are possible if you analyze customer behaviors in real-time, it seems like almost every aspect of application design has gone under the analytical knife.
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Facebook’s most recent feature announcement about the new granular publisher controls received a lot of attention for being a move against Twitter. We’ve been covering the drawn out battle between Facebook and Twitter for months now but what’s more important is the immense amount of control that Facebook is attempting to give the user. While Facebook has been criticized on numerous instances for aggressive new features that push the limits of access to our friends’ information (news feed, beacon, etc), the company is trying to hand control over to the user rather than giving them the twitter-like option of private or public.
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While there are many uses for Facebook, the most popular use of the site within applications has become games by a large margin. 7 of the top 10 non-Facebook applications based on daily active users are all games and the trend continues on down the Facebook application leaderboard. I’ve been speaking with a number of new developers who are looking to build successful applications and I keep emphasizing the importance of integrating some sort of game feature.
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First Facebook and then a number of other sites were being blocked by Iran. It isn’t exactly an atypical action by a regime who has done so before on a number of instances. This time something was different though. Twitter became the unlikely hero of a large group of individuals who were calling for a vote recount and regardless of the outcome were furthering a movement. What’s becoming increasingly clear is the widespread impact that social technology is having on the world.
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We’ve been saying for a while that Facebook’s payment platform is a huge opportunity for the company to start making serious cash but there’s one issue with that logic: the majority of users don’t have credit cards. While nobody knows the exact number of Facebook users with credit cards, the most recent estimates are that only around 30 percent of Facebook users 25 percent of internet users have access to a card. The other 75 percent either have a mobile phone, that they can pay with via Boku or Zong, or are out of luck when it comes to making an online transaction.
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Facebook is in the midst of transforming the way businesses interact with their customers and it has all been built on top of the Facebook platform. In an interview with Robert Scoble, Mark Zuckerberg only briefly mentions the Pages product and how that has been a recent focus of the company. It’s entertaining watching the video because Zuckerberg and his team of developers are in the process of developing a product which essentially duplicates the majority of the features within Ning, the product of Marc Andreesen, a fellow Facebook board member.
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