Less than a month we wrote that Facebook had just trademarked FishVille. Weeks later the company is officially launching FishVille. Happy Aquarium, the application which FishVille is based on, is now the 5th largest application on the Facebook Platform. Given Happy Aquarium’s presence, I’d expect to see FishVille advertisements all over Facebook.
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This afternoon Facebook posted an update about all the television networks that have integrated Facebook Connect, including ABC who has two new exciting integrations. The first is a promotion for the series “FlashForward” which takes advantage of Facebook Connect to integrate your profile data into a promotion. It’s similar to other promotions we’ve seen such as the Doritos promotion and the Prototype XBox game trailer.
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Facebook has continued to grow at an impressive rate throughout the year, most recently announcing the 300 million user milestone. According to Facebook’s own advertising statistics though, the company is now beyond 325 million users and continuing to grow. The story has become relatively repetitive at this point: Facebook is growing like a weed and doesn’t appear to be slowing.
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Last night Facebook restated their commitment to fighting off aggressive advertisers and as part of that commitment they have shut down two more ad networks which continue to violate the platform terms. Unfortunately we have no idea which ad networks they shut down and even after talking to multiple sources we have yet to uncover who those networks are. Perhaps the people who were shut down are irrelevant, but as I wrote at the beginning of the week, casualties were inevitable.
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At the Web 2.0 Summit a couple weeks ago, Owen Van Natta, CEO of MySpace, told the audience that “I really don’t view Facebook as a competitor.” It’s funny because absolutely every quote from the company in the press over the past couple weeks involves a differentiation from Facebook, and the more they discuss how they’re different, the more they appear to be a competitor. It’s an unfortunate truth for the company which missed its minimum traffic levels last quarter, costing the company $100 million.
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Facebook is known for leaving subtle easter eggs around the site. Whether it’s the contra easter egg, Facebook photo easter eggs, or any other small quirk, Facebook developers and designers like to make small changes to the site that only the most obsessive users would notice. This morning while checking out images of the upcoming homepage changes, I noticed the slight shading of left-side navigation. The color used? #fbfbfb
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Despite casual public acknowledgement of the impact of Facebook killing off notifications, many developers have been scrambling behind the scenes. The reason is that Facebook’s upcoming changes make it practically impossible for developers to re-engage users after they’ve visited an application for the first time, unless they bookmark the application. Yesterday I suggested that Facebook’s new Bookmark button would help curb some of the impact of the upcoming changes. At the time we failed to notice one other subtle change by Facebook.
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While Facebook announced in May of last year that they would be launching XMPP support for Facebook Chat, the launch hasn’t taken place yet. There have been a few services, including Meebo, that have been working with Facebook to test out external support of Facebook’s chat service however XMPP support is still not live. That may all change shortly according to process one who suggested earlier today that the launch of Facebook’s chat XMPP connection interface is imminent.
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As we’ve written previously, there are over 2.5 million users that support the addition of a “dislike” button to the Facebook feed. Unfortunately for those users, it’s highly unlikely that Facebook will ever add such a button, however that’s not stopping developers from coming up with creative solutions. One developer has created a Firefox plugin which lets users dislike feed stories.
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With the impending removal of notifications, bookmarks have become exponentially more important for developers. With the increased importance for developers, Facebook has announced this afternoon that they are adding an FBML tag for a bookmark button as well as FBJS methods to get users to bookmark your application. The bookmarks will be required in order to show counters within the redesigned navigation which is expected to launch in the next month or so.
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