Archive for the ‘Events’ Category

Streaming Web 2.0 Expo Keynotes Live

Posted by Nick O'Neill on September 17th, 2008 2:56 PM

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If you are interested I am streaming the Web 2.0 Keynotes live here.

Social Ad Summit Final Announcement

Posted by Nick O'Neill on September 11th, 2008 12:23 PM

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Today I happy to announce the final schedule for Social Ad Summit. We’ve been working hard for the past couple months to put together an incredible lineup and have finally solidified all of our speakers and panels. I look forward to seeing you at the event! Below is the current schedule for the event:

9:00am - 9:45am - Social Network Advertising
• Spencer Ante, Computers Editor at BusinessWeek and author of “Creative Capital” (Moderator)
• David Borstein, Director of Sales, MySpace
• Bill Alena, VP of Advertising & Business Development, MyYearbook.com
• Mike Trigg, Director of Marketing, hi5
• Martin Green, COO, Meebo
• Mark Dillon, Vice President of National Sales, Classmates.com

10:00am - 10:45am - Media Buying on Social Networks
• Brian Morrissey, Digital Editor, AdWeek (Moderator)
• Shiv Singh, Vice President of Social Media & Global Strategic Initiatives, Avenue A | Razorfish
• David Bear, Executive Director of Mobile, BBDO
• Jennifer Bertheaud, Director of Account Management & Strategy, Noise
• David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media, 360i

10:45am - 11:00am - Sponsored Plenary Keynote
• Mike Lazerow, CEO & Founder, Buddy Media

11:00am - 11:15am - Sponsored Plenary Keynote
• Gordon Peters, General Manager, SocialCash.com

11:15am - 12:00pm - Branded Experiences on Social Networks
• Ian Schafer, CEO, Deep Focus (Moderator)
• Scott Monty, Global Digital & Multimedia Communications Manager, Ford Motors Company
• Deborah Korb, Brand Manager, JP Morgan
• Don Steele, VP of Digital Marketing, MTV Networks

12:15pm - 1:30pm - Lunch
12:35pm - 1:05pm - Sponsored Lunch Keynote
• Anu Shukla, Founder & CEO, Offerpal

1:45pm - 2:30pm - Social Ad Network Solutions
• Allen Stern, Editor, CenterNetworks (Moderator)
• Gordon Peters, General Manager, SocialCash.com
• Seth Goldstein, CEO & Co-Founder, SocialMedia
• Anu Shukla, Founder & CEO, Offerpal
• Scott Rafer, CEO, Lookery
• Chris Cunningham, CEO, appssavvy

2:45pm - 3:30pm - Social Advertising Metrics
• Sean Ammirati, Contributor at Read/Write/Web, Founder of mSpoke (Moderator)
• Albert Lai, CEO, kontagent
• Ian Swanson, Co-Founder & CEO, Sometrics
• Cam Balzer, VP of Emerging Media, Doubleclick Performics
• Jodi McDermott, Director of Analytics, Clearspring

3:35pm - 4:20pm - Widget Monetization
• Kevin Barenblat, Co-Founder & CEO, Context Optional
• Hooman Radfar, CEO & Co-Founder, Clearspring
• Carnet Williams, Co-Founder & CEO, Sprout
• Sam Wick, Head of Business Development, Userplane
• Ben Pashman, VP of Sales & Business Development, Gigya
• Heidi Henson, Director of Advertising, RockYou

4:30pm - 5:15pm - Alternative Social Advertising
• Mike Lazerow, CEO & Founder, Buddy Media
• Matt Sanchez, CEO, VideoEgg
• James Gross, Director of Sales, Federated Media
• Alex Blum, CEO, KickApps
• Clara Shih, Director of AppExchange Product Line, salesforce.com and Creator, Faceforce
• Ari Gottesmann, Co-Founder, Sightix

5:30pm - 7:00pm
Networking reception with open bar.

If you are interested in attending the event but have yet to receive an invite, please fill out the form on the Social Ad Summit homepage and we will try to get you an invite immediately. There are 15 seats remaining for this event as of last night and it will sell out so please let us know that you are interested in attending immediately.

Social Ad Summit Final Lineup

Posted by Nick O'Neill on September 3rd, 2008 12:04 PM

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9:00am - 9:45am - Social Network Advertising
• Spencer Ante, Computers Editor at BusinessWeek and author of “Creative Capital” (Moderator)
• Suzanne Skop, VP of Sales, MySpace
• Bill Alena, VP of Advertising & Business Development, MyYearbook.com
• Mike Trigg, Director of Marketing, hi5
• Martin Green, COO, Meebo
• Jeremy Helfand, Executive Vice President and Chief Sales Officer, Classmtes.com

10:45am - 11:00am - Sponsored Plenary Keynote
• Mike Lazerow, CEO & Founder, Buddy Media

12:15pm - 1:30pm - Lunch
12:35pm - 1:05pm - Sponsored Lunch Keynote
• Anu Shukla, Founder & CEO, Offerpal

5:30pm - 7:00pm
Networking reception with open bar.

I would also like to thank our sponsors, who without their support this event would not be possible. Our platinum sponsors Social Cash and Offerpal Media and our Gold Sponsors Buddy Media, SocialMedia, appssavvy, Sometrics, KickApps and JESS3. We may be announcing one or two more speakers in the next week and a half prior to the event but this is pretty much final.

If you are interested in attending the event but have yet to receive an invite, please fill out the form on the Social Ad Summit homepage and we will try to get you an invite immediately. There is limited space for this event and it will sell out in the coming days so please let us know that you are interested in attending sooner rather than later.

Announcing the Social Ad Summit Speakers

Posted by Nick O'Neill on August 13th, 2008 1:49 PM

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I’m happy to announce a great list of speakers for the upcoming Social Ad Summit. We will be announcing more speakers in the coming week (a few which I’m personally extremely excited about) but I wanted to provide an update. We just recently began sending out invitations to the event so if you haven’t received one, do not worry, we will be sending them out over the coming week. Also, if you are not sure whether or not you have received one, fill out your information on the Social Ad Summit homepage. Here is an updated list of speakers that will be in attendance:

Brian Morrissey, Digital Editor, AdWeek, Moderator
Allen Stern, Center Networks, Moderator
Martin Green, COO, Meebo
Jeremy Helfand, Executive Vice President, Classmates.com
David Berkowitz, Director of Emerging Media, 360i
David Bear, Executive Director of Mobile & Social Media, Atmosphere BBDO
Sam Wick, Head of Business Development, Userplane
Seth Goldstein, Co-Founder and CEO, SocialMedia Networks
Scott Rafer, CEO, Lookery
Anu Shukla, Founder and CEO, Offerpal Media
Chris Cunningham, Founder and CEO, Appssavvy
Michael Lazerow, Founder and CEO, Buddy Media
Gordon Peters, General Manager, SocialCash.com
Sean Ammirati, Contributor at Read/Write/Web, Founder of mSpoke, Moderator
Albert Lai, CEO, kontagent
Ian Swanson, Co-Founder and CEO, Sometrics
Cam Balzer, VP of Emerging Media, DoubleClick
Hooman Radfar, CEO and Co-Founder, Clearspring
Carnet Williams, CEO and Co-Founder, Sprout
Ben Pashman, Vice President of Sales and Business Development, Gigya
Alex Blum, CEO, KickApps
Clara Shih, Salesforce

Also, thanks to the following sponsors who are making this event possible:

We are in the process of finalizing speakers and sponsors over the coming week. We will be sure to update this site with more information regarding the conference as it gets closer!

A More Mature Facebook

Posted by Nick O'Neill on July 23rd, 2008 10:10 PM

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Today’s f8 was one marked by hype, speculation and confirmation of news which had been written about for the past few weeks. Just over one year ago Facebook announced their platform and today they announced that they are extending it to the web. Last year there weren’t as many attendees at f8 and there wasn’t a mini-industry of companies vying for attendees’ attention. It was a bunch of people that took a risk and decided to launch applications and try to build businesses.

It was the event which inspired me to launch this blog and while I wasn’t at the first one, I think a little piece of all of us covering the space hoped that something big would come out of f8 today. By no means is it right to downplay the changes that have been made. For the first time we saw the potential of applications that truly benefit the users. Visual Bookshelf was demoed with some great capabilities including the ability to interact with an application on a user’s profile without having to add the application.

We also saw samples of Facebook Connect in action. Will other sites embrace the new service? Potentially, but now it is completely left to the market to decide the fate of Connect and competing offerings. The crazy entrepreneurs that set up businesses just over one year ago continue to push forward with building out their businesses. What their businesses are in the long-term isn’t really known but they will continue to push on.

At f8 you have everybody from individual developers to sizable businesses with large coffers stuffed by venture capitalists. There were small developers that have been pushed to the limits on resources and the reality is beginning to set in that they are locked into the Facebook platform. While the next shiny object (the iPhone) is gaining their attention, it is unfortunately out of reach for many. This year around there are even mature businesses that have been in the internet space for years but are just now entering the Facebook market.

Developers and entrepreneurs came from around the globe to hear what revolutionary new product or service Mark Zuckerberg would be announcing. Unfortunately this time around it wasn’t a new platform that’s ready for launch, providing new businesses with millions of new users. Instead we found a more cautious and more wise company that is now focused on improving the overall experience for users. For many of us (myself included), I think that the reality set in that you can’t revolutionize industries once a year.

It takes time to build businesses and while starting is quick, expanding is not as easy and takes a lot of hard work. Even for Facebook it sounds like they aren’t sure what the future holds. From the tone of Mark Zuckerberg after the keynote, the payment system appears anything but certain. I can understand their concern. Does Facebook want to have a payment system which is simply used to build a virtual gifts economy?

There are a lot of uncertainties and complete unknowns at this point. One thing is clear though: most of the people at f8 today are along for the ride and the ride is not going to be a short one.

Liveblogging f8 Mark Zuckerberg Keynote

Posted by Nick O'Neill on July 23rd, 2008 4:27 PM

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I’m live at f8 at the Design Center in San Francisco, California. Mark Zuckerberg is prepared to take the stage in five minutes. I will be posting video and audio of the entire keynote which you can also access via http://www.visualwebcaster.com/Facebook/. Stay tuned for live updates.

1:35 pm- Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage, “Hi guys!”

1:37 pm - This year we will be talking about new products as well as way that developers can build cleaner and more engaging applications. We tried to start articulating our mission 6 moths ago. I was travelling through Instanbul on what some bloggers called “my vision question”. I had the opportunity to clear my mind and stop thinking about all the products we were trying to develop. I met a Turkish entrepreneur and got to be “fully present and focus on the sharing that was going on”. I took two things away from that experience: the first was that I want to build a product that people can feel like they are with themselves. The second is to help people share more.

1:38pm - The most important information is that which is not out there. We need to “give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” In the world we’re building it we are helping people be more “good to each other.” We want the community and ecosystem to be aligned with us.

1:40 pm - A while back when we were a small group of people we began focusing on how we can help people share information with each other. The last year has shown that a lot of people are sharing this movement. Let’s take a look at the results. He is showing a graph with a hockey stick chart that shows that they had 24 million people one year ago and today they are at over 90 million users.

1:42 pm - A lot of this growth is now international. Today 68 percent are international and we have one person in Greenland. Almost 40 percent of people in Canada are on Facebook. Mark is now going over the translations application and says that it took two weeks to translate Spanish and less than 24 hours to translate in to French. The site is now in over 15 languages. We are now opening the translations tool to applications so that developers can leverage it to translate their apps in to foreign languages.

1:44 pm - We started with a small base last year and today we have over 400,000 developers building on top of the platform. More than half the developers are outside the United States. He is now going over all of the Facebook developer garages around the world. We have 4 developer garages going on right now in Berlin, Paris …

1:46 pm - I’d like to share some interesting statistics. Let’s compare iLike and MySpace music. Now let’s compare Causes and Al Gore. The Causes application has more supporters than Al Gore’s alliance for climate change.

1:47 pm - Another good example is Zynga versus Las Vegas. Zynga has 4 times more people playing Texas Hold’em than Las Vegas has hotels. There has now been a lot of investments in this space including more than 30 companies. Zuckerberg mentions D.C. based Living Social’s funding, Flixster and Zynga. There has been more than $200 million invested in this ecosystem and if you add it up it is a multi-billion dollar ecosystem.

1:49 pm - Mark Zuckerberg is now showing an abstract graph of “user connections”. More emphasis on sharing.

1:50 pm - One of the most powerful ways of sharing is through feeds. In an environment where people are constantly sharing, users can rely on feeds to view what’s really going on. We call this the “virtuous cycle of sharing”.

1:51 pm - The most powerful system today is newsfeed.

1:52 pm - Within four days last year, iLike had millions of users. We will discuss a new feed we have created shortly. We’ve also had a lot of lessons in the past year.

1:53 pm - As happy as I am with the growth of the past year, there are a lot of mistakes that we have learned and things that we need to do differently. I know that we don’t want an ecosystem of applications that are simply trying to build themselves virally. We need to work with developers to build these type of applications and align incentives. If we want to have an ecosystem that supports sharing, we need to build a more elegant solution. Over the past several months we have been working with a number of developers to help build the new platform. We had three goals:

1. Give people more power tools to share.
2. Reward applications that help people share.
3. Simplify the site

1:55 pm - Under the new system, the applications that help people share the most and are engaging will be the ones that succeed. What we are launching is called a full story. He is simply providing an overview of the three types of feed stories available in news feeds. Zuckerberg is now going into a more detailed overview of feed items. Not very exciting. Zuckerberg is now showing the profile publisher and the profiles page. You can view a detailed overview of the Facebook Profile rather than listen to his entire overview

2:01 pm - “Storytime.” This was a monumental job getting this new profile out. Zuckerberg is showing the Bill O’Reilly video of him flipping out. You can view the video here. O.k. this is the cue for the demo.

2:03 pm - We’ve updated the homepage newsfeed to have different types of stories. “Top Stories”, “Status Updates”, “Photos”, “Posted Items” and “All Stories”. This part is still in development. He’s highlighting how he can interact with the Visual Bookshelf application on someone’s page without ever adding the application. He is also demoing that visual bookshelf from within the feed.

2:09 pm - We are going to see the social networks decentralize and have the sharing of social applications across the web. I think we are at a turning point in the industry. Mark says that this was similar to back when Apple and Microsoft were decentralizing the stack. We fully expect that over the next few years, the good applications and the way people share are going to come from other people in the ecosystem. This is going to be less about the site Facebook.com and more about the experiences people are having. Every application that is built is a way for people to share a new type of information that wasn’t shared before.

2:11 pm - Today we are going to talk about Facebook Connect. It’s our version of the Facebook platform for the rest of the web. The first goal is to build the same kinds of apps across the web. Second, to enable peopel to share information across the web and finally to be able to control your information across the web. All you need to add is the “Facebook Connect button”. Once they are connected, you can view all of their information that was available in Facebook. All their profile information, photos, etc. The privacy controls are coming with it. In addition to all this information they can bring their connections and friends with them.

2:14 pm - We enable you to send us hashes of user emails to us and it can help maintain all of peoples connections through Facebook. In addition to information from Facebook, they will be able to share information between sites and within their profiles. We’ve paid a lot of attention to making sure that the information that people share, people have control over it. We have a number of tools that are available to people on Facebook, available to sites including fb:comments, fb:invite, etc.

2:16 pm - I’m going to have other people come up and share what they did. The first is Joe Stein from Digg. Joe starts talking. “All of the 90 million Facebook users can build the Digg army with the click of a button.” I’m going to show you photos now of what this experience will be like. You don’t need to register for a Digg account. I no longer need to do email verification or complex registration forms.

2:19 pm - David Recordon from Six Apart is up next. Today millions of people interact with a movable type site at the same rate. We’ve developed a commenting system that enables Facebook commenting on blogs. This integration also takes available of dynamic privacy. For example some users don’t wish to share their photo and it won’t display. This took us a day and half to implement.

2:21 pm - Next up is Mike Phillips from Citysearch. We’re going to be launching a new site soon and sharing information is one of the big pieces of the puzzle. What could be more helpful, more trusted than reviews and recommendations from your friends and your networks. Most important is the “My Friend’s Favorites” tab which shows all the trusted content from their friends on Facebook.

2:24 pm - Thanks to those three and all of our launch partners from Facebook Connect. Those are a couple of big evolutions for us today. The developer keys for Facebook Connect are available today and then there will be a beta period before they launch. Next year I hope that when we all come together that we will be able to point to a large community and a good number of really meaningful applications within Facebook and outside of Facebook via Facebook Connect. Mark asks the developer platform employees to stand up and then all of the people that will develop an application to stand up.

2:27 pm - Thanks to everyone that helped build the platform and enjoy the rest of the day. Now there is a pretty entertaining video that is documenting f8 and Facebook.

2:30 pm - Following Zuckerberg in Ben Ling. Thank you for choosing to invest and build on the Facebook platform. We’ve seen over 13 ad networks launch that help people monetize. We’ve seen a substantial amoung of venture capital and we’ve seen help from application development companies. We’ve also seen classes launch about Facebook platform.

2:32 pm - As Mark alluded to, we had a vision. Today I am pleased to announced our guiding principals for great applications:

1. Meaningful
2. Trustworthy
3. Well designed

What does meaningful mean? It means they should be social, useful, expressive and engaging. A good example of a useful application is the carpool application. A fifth of people at Cornell use the application. The grafitti application is a good example of an expressive application. When they ran this campaign for the BMW one series there were over ten thousand designs built in the first week. A good example of engaging applications is Playfish.

2:37 pm - The second piece is about being trustworthy. It is important for us to build a safe and trusted ecosystem. We will provide them with important privacy controls. Applications should also be secure, respectful and transparent. I don’t want an application sending out messages to my friends without me knowing. Finally, applications must be well designed. They should be clean, fast and robust.

2:40 pm - We encourage all developers to use these principals to build great applications. One of the things that we’ve engaged the community in is a set of guiding principals. Where we haven’t been doing a great job is on the online forums. We will be working on making this better. We are now working on incorporating feedback from developers. We are going to:

1. Partner more closely with developers
2. Keep ecosystem safe for users, fair for developers
3. Help you create more, better apps

The platform team, we spend a lot of time learning from these things. We would like to work together with the developers now. We will begin providing you with tools and partnerships. We have partnerships that will help you develop, host and scale. We are launching a new and improved developer website. We thing people need some capital to help get started. That’s why we launched the fbFund. Today we are pleased to announce the intial winners:

Challenge, Cconnected weddings, Podclass and a number of others. We encourage other developers to apply to the Facebook fund. We are announcing a new competition. We are giving out up to $2 million over the next 2 months. We will be giving $250k for each application. Today I’m pleased to announce two new programs:

1. Facebook Verification Program - Being trustworthy is extremely important so what we will do is enable applications to apply to be verified that the application is trustworthy. There is a badge that will display in the application directory and the application about page. Developers will now have more trust, more visibility and they’ll end up with more users.

2. Facebook Great Apps Program - Great application embody all 10 of our guiding principles and they advance the mission of Facebook (”Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected”). These applications will have a history of adherence to our principals. How does this benefit developers and users? User’s receive a more integrated experience. They also get more content from great applications. Developers get increased visibility early features and Facebook feedback. Today we will announce iLike and Causes as inaugural partners.

2:52 pm - Going forward we would like to articulate how we will build a safe and fair ecosystem for developers:

1. Clear principals - We will be enforcing based on the principals. It is impossible for us to list out how an application is deceptive.
2. Transparent process - We are going to make efforts to make the process significantly more transparent.
3. Consistent implementation - We hope to establish a fair and safe platform for all developers and users

Finally we are making the world more social with Facebook connect. There are 5 major pieces:

1. Authentication
2. Identity
3. Friends Access
4. Dynamic Privacy
5. Social Distribution

This fall were announcing Facebook conect for the iPhone which is a coco platform. As part of Facebook connect I’d like to talk about the Open Web foundation.Â Tomorrow David Recordon will be announcing the Open Web foundation.Â We will support and contribute to it.

This fall we will launch the full version of Facebook connect for users.Â Now we are starting the hackathon.Â Thanks for coming!

Mark Zuckerberg Keynote Live

Posted by Nick O'Neill on July 23rd, 2008 12:35 PM

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If you want to view live video of the Mark Zuckerberg keynote today at f8, Facebook will be streaming it online. We of course will be live blogging and posting video of the keynote as well. The keynote will be taking place from 1:30 PM until 3:00 PM Pacific Time. You can view the webcast by visiting visualwebcaster.com/Facebook. You should probably register on the site early as there will be a lot of people visiting the site to view the keynote live.

As I mentioned, we will be providing live, up to the minute coverage of the event so be sure to stay tuned to this site as well.

f8 Arrives

Posted by Nick O'Neill on July 23rd, 2008 12:23 PM

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Today I will be attending Facebook’s f8 event in San Francisco. Me and the SocialCash team will be providing video coverage, live podcasts and live blogging. There is a lot of speculation about what will be announced (as I mentioned yesterday). A lot of industry insiders that I spoke to last night don’t think that Facebook will be making any massive announcements today and will instead be discussing the benefits of the new redesign, announcing five winners of the first FB Fund and talking about Facebook Connect.

Others are hoping for big announcements that will help transform the businesses that they have spent the past year developing on the Facebook platform. A little over one year ago, Facebook announced the launch of the platform and now we have a mini-industry built around it. Just last night, Zynga gaming network announced that they had raised $29 million, led by Kleiner Perkins. Nobody knows what they’ll be doing with their massive war chest but they are now officially a serious force to be reckoned with.

As more funding pours into Facebook application companies, the industry awaits to see what is announced today. With all the anticipation, something big has to come out of this event. If you haven’t noticed, there is something else that has been attracting developer attention: the iPhone. While the iPhone doesn’t currently have the user base that Facebook has, the potential offered by mobile is something that no entrepreneur can ignore.

Whether or not big news comes out of f8 today, we will be providing up to the minute news about what is going on. If we don’t have it, chances are good that it simply isn’t happening! Stay tuned throughout the day for updates on what’s going on.

SWAT Summit: What went down

Posted by Gordon Peters on July 19th, 2008 2:54 PM

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The SocialCash team and I are camped out in SFO for a bit, so we wanted to give everyone a quick debrief from the SWAT Summit yesterday. Here’s the quick and dirty:

About: SWAT is a conference focused on how social networks are transforming advertising (and vice versa). Speakers included David Smith (Mediasmith), Sonya Chawla (Slide), Chris Cunningham (Appssavvy), and Ian Swanson (Sometrics). It was a good time.

What we thought about: This was a speaker/panel conference, but much of what went on was focused on identifying the right questions to think through. Here’s what was on everyone’s minds:

1. Which metrics are important for engagement in different social application settings? Advertisers want tangible metrics, and there is a bit of tension in environments like Facebook that have myriad methods of interaction. It seems as though more and more advertisers are starting to involve tangible actions (giving email, fan page additions, etc.) to help them quantify engagement.

2. Social networks and apps are melding communication and entertainment. How can brands become part of the conversation w/o interrupting it? The brands desperately want to get in, but they are concerned about maintaining control. The thing is that to really get in the middle of the user experience, they have to cede a fair amount of controlWe talked through case studies of the Acura TSX, Nielsen, and the Ethanol Information Council. Everyone seemed to agree that adding either a discovery experience or way for users to express themselves in a different way was highly effective. The Ethanol Council hosted a â€œFuel the Changeâ€ video contest, but then gave users myriad ways to express interests or opinions.

3. How can we give advertisers better information about the users on social networks? It’s a bit of a problem, but with emerging platforms like Sometrics, we’re slowly figuring out better ways to summarize user data and couple it with engagement data to give advertisers a full picture. All of us are excited to see what tools develop over the coming months.

After the panels were done, we went for drinks and mingled with the people. Alright â€“ back to DC for us. See you all at F8.

Gordon Peters is the General Manager of SocialCash, a leading monetization engine for social networks.

f8 Speculation: What Will be Announced?

Posted by Nick O'Neill on July 7th, 2008 12:37 PM

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This month is one of anticipation. The first full week of July is the week that everybody is waiting for the new iPhone to be released. With the new iPhone application directory preparing to be launched, the device is set to transform the social web as well as mobile gaming. Within weeks there is another event that many in this industry are anticipating: f8. Last year’s event helped spawn an entire industry around social applications.

This year is expected to a pretty big one as well. Many are now speculating what will be announced at the upcoming f8 event. So far there appears to be three large things to come out of the event.

1. Launch of Facebook Connect
Facebook recently announced their Facebook Connect service which extends the Facebook platform to the entire web. MySpace was the first to launch a similar service but little buzz has been generated since the launch more than a week ago. I see a huge potential for the new Facebook Connect service and I expect a lot of external websites to start using the service. Simply put, not all activities on the web can happen in Facebook and that’s why Facebook Connect is being launched: to make the whole web more social.

2. Launch of Facebook Payment Platform
While Facebook has made no promises about this launching at f8, most of us are expecting it. I have even suggested that the payment platform will be Facebook’s answer to the monetization problem, helping them to boost their valuation overnight. Also, if their payment platform is as easy to develop with as the application platform, there’s a great chance that it will be a huge hit with developers.

3. Updated Mobile Platform
The iPhone launches this week and while there is a lot of buzz about the new applications, many have been wondering why Facebook doesn’t have a better mobile platform. While there are currently ways to build mobile applications, it is simply not as easy or enjoyable to develop as the Facebook general platform is. Jesse Stay speculates about a new mobile platform release. I know for a fact that Facebook has been working on an updated iPhone offering but I don’t know how robust that new offering is yet. I have a feeling that we’ll learn more at the f8 announcement.

This appears to be the three big announcements to come out of the f8 event later this month. Are there any other announcements that you wish to speculate about?