Facebook added a small feature this afternoon which sends birthday notifications to users via email. This is an extremely useful feature and I’m guessing many people will leave this on. The only problem with this service is that you aren’t provided with your friend’s e-mail address. Instead you simply receive a notification.

There are currently a number of other applications on Facebook for birthday reminders, as well as those that help you send friends gifts on birthdays as Harry Huai Wang writes. This will definitely hurt applications like Birthday Alert as it practically duplicates that application’s functionality.

Developing an application based on a single feature on Facebook is always an extremely risky activity. Unfortunately the developers of Birthday Alert will find that out the hard way. Now you won’t forget birthdays anymore as long as you are connected to your friends on Facebook! In order to manage the birthday alert notifications you can head over to the email notifications page in your account settings.

This afternoon it appears as though Facebook has gone completely down. We are waiting to here when the site will be back up but it has been down for at least 10 minutes and the site isn’t resolving at all. We’ll keep you updated.

Update
The site is back up. It appears to have been a local name resolution issue for a few people on the east coast. I’m not sure what the issue was but it has been resolved. Back to facebooking!

If you are looking for insight into the state of the Facebook economy and whether it’s able to weather the slowing U.S. economy, look no further than SNAP Interactive (OTC: STVI). The company which is behind the popular “Are YOU Interested?” and “Meet New People” applications has filed their quarterly report. The numbers are looking pretty good.

For the three months ending September 30, 2008, the company had a Net Income of $410,283 on revenues of $871,324. If we consider that all of their revenue comes from advertising, we can calculate approximately how much each user is worth. According to company reports, they have around 17 million users, 14 to 15 million of which are Facebook users. If we take an average of 15 million users across the three months ending September 30, that results in $0.005 per user, not a lot of money.

The company also receives around 1.4 million visits per day, which would amount to around 126 million visits for three months. That would amount to around $0.007 per visit. These numbers don’t really paint a clear picture though as the majority of users are much less active, and therefore bring in substantially less revenue than the more active users.

If you think about the business on a user acquisition basis, there is very little incentive for pushing new users to this application. Contrast that with offer-based advertising which can generate upwards of $100 for a converted user, and you quickly realize that SNAP has a ways to go in converting visitors into money. Also of interest is that the company was able to increase their revenue while experiencing a more than 25 percent decrease in their traffic due to Facebook’s profile redesign.

SNAP Interactive doesn’t stand alone when it comes to troubles with revenue conversion. Facebook has billions of weekly page views but they can only generate $300 million a year. Then again, with 120 million active users (and an average around 90 million users for the year), the company is generating over $3 per user per year. That’s far better than the $0.02 SNAP Interactive is able to generate per user on an annual basis.

The calculations done in this article are in no ways scientific though and what it really means is that SNAP Interactive has a huge opportunity to more effectively monetize their traffic. Considering their revenue has been growing quarter-over-quarter, there’s a good chance that they will be able to keep up the growth despite the slowing global economy.

Below is a copy of the company’s 10-Q published earlier this week.

Last month we wrote that there won’t be any Facebook Android application coming anytime soon. The reason is that the company has put no resources toward developing on the new mobile platform that was pushed out by Google. Well, for those Android users that want to use Facebook but have an Android phone, Next Mobile Web has put out an application called fBook.

The application is essentially a Android wrapper for the iPhone version of the site. It also has the ability to upload pictures and send you alerts every time you receive new messages and status updates. Best of all, the application can run in the background on the phone, which means you can get alerts even while the application isn’t loaded, a feature which is foreign to the iPhone.

While Facebook continues to protest the Android platform, these entrepreneurial developers have taken the liberty of providing Android users with an application that many were waiting for. Additionally, if you were waiting to buy an Android compatible phone until a Facebook application launched, your time has arrived.

Then again, there are still a few bugs on the application. As the developers of the application point out, “Facebook expires your session when you are logged into too many places.” In other words if you are on your desktop, on an instant messenger client, and logged in on your phone, there’s a good chance you’ll be logged out elsewhere.

Nobody that I know of has come up with a resolution for this problem yet and that may be one of the hurdles for developing external Facebook applications that rely on sessions. While these developers try to figure out a workaround, Facebook should work on developing an official Facebook Android application. There’s no excuse to avoid the platform.

Back in October I wrote about the upcoming release of the Facebook phone by 3 Mobiles, a mobile provider in the U.K. Today, the company announced it and it’s pretty much as expected. The phone integrates your Facebook contacts directly with your phone contacts, placing their status updates right under their name in your personal phone book.

There is also a Facebook application which functions similarly to most other mobile Facebook mobile applications. The company website suggests that notifications are also sent directly to your phone with alerts. I’m not quite sure that I’d want to receive all my Facebook notifications right on my phone outside of having the option to load the application.

Could you imagine getting an alert every time one of your friends changed their relationship status, tagged you in a photo, or installed a new application? Then again, perhaps that is the new world that we live in. A world in which all of our friends’ personal activities are just a click away. I’m assuming you can turn off notifications though which would make this phone bearable.

Calling this phone the “Facebook phone” is somewhat misleading though considering the level of integration. The contact list is not completely based on your Facebook contacts but this is definitely a step in the right direction of a theoretical “Facebook phone”. Unfortunately I’m not in the U.K. so I won’t be able to test it out. Let us know if you are able to get your hands on one of the phones and send us photos!

Update
Just to clarify, the phone is called the “INQ1″ but appears to be marketed as the first Facebook phone. According to Facebook, “The INQ1 includes a pre-loaded Facebook application deeply integrated with the phone. We are currently working with a variety of partners to deploy deep and rich Facebook user experiences on as many mobile devices as possible.”

This morning one of my readers sent me a screenshot of the advertisement pictured on the left. I wouldn’t exactly call it an “advertisement” but it appears to replace other ads that would have been placed on the right hand side of the Facebook interface. Currently the ad is titled “Friend Profile Preview” and it shows your friend’s picture, name, and their recent status updates.

Now why on earth would Facebook substitute precious advertising space to alert you to one of your friends? Honestly, I don’t think they would. Instead, I believe (which is as of yet unconfirmed) that Facebook is testing out an ad network for displaying personals. I’ve discussed with a number of friends the opportunity for personals ads on Facebook.

Imagine being able to target potential matches based on their profile. There is tons of data including the schools they went to (for instance if you only want to date Harvard grads), the interests they have, and numerous other data. Rather than having a cost per click (CPC), or cost per thousand impressions (CPM), you can have a cost per date (CPD)!

Still Speculation

This is complete speculation though unfortunately. Perhaps Facebook is having inventory issues due to the struggling economy and decided to place other internal advertisements as filler. Typically the company would place advertisements for their own ad platform though and not substitute advertisements for friends.

As such, it’s difficult for me to rationalize any alternative reasons for Facebook to display profile previews of friends without the long-term goal of making it an alternative to the traditional “personals”; the dating ads that used to be popular in newspapers. Can you think of any other reason that Facebook would test this out? Honestly, I think this could be extremely popular.

Update
I just called the New York Times to find out their rates for personals ads, and they quoted $48 for one week, $72 for two weeks, and $96 for four weeks. That’s not a bad business and considering that the advertisements are not targeted, Facebook could be a great substitute.

Update from Facebook
Facebook sent us the following statement:

“Facebook is not offering personal ads on the site. The unit you noticed is a test running to a limited number of users that previews the profiles of a user’s friends. It is not a paid advertisement but surfaces friend information to help enable more sharing in more places on the site. Users are only shown profile previews of their confirmed friends and only see the information if they have access to it on a friend’s profile. Facebook will continue to be testing various versions of this preview and similar units, but it has not launched it widely on the site.”

Today Facebook sent an email out to their advertisers about three new types of Insights reports that will help advertisers understand how their advertisements are performing. The three new types are:

• “Responder Demographics” report - This report provides the aggregate age, gender, and geographic location of the users who have clicked on an ad.
• “Responder Profiles” report - This report provides psychographic information including common interests, favorite TV shows, movies, books, and music.
• “Advertising Performance” report - This report provides you with a downloadable version of existing ad metrics, as well as “a new section for performance data specific to” advertisements “that contained social actions, if applicable.”

This is a huge addition for Facebook and it’s one that I can guarantee advertisers will welcome. I’ve tested out at least one of the reports which provided some great data on impressions by demographic, but it didn’t provide click-thru data. I’m not quite sure why some data appears and other data doesn’t but this is much better than the data previously provided to advertisers.

Ad Facebook looks to beef up their advertising platform it’s critical that they provide advertiser with better statistics regarding overall ad performance. Below is a screenshot of Facebook’s new advertising reports interface. I hope to see more advertising metrics rolled out in the coming months.

We couldn’t help but play in the favorite Silicon Valley game of “Name Facebook’s Valuation!” Yesterday Henry Blodget posted that Facebook has officially begun to let employees sell shares at a valuation above $4 billion. He states that “the source recalled a strike price of $9.27 per share, versus a prior round of $8.90.” Regardless of what the valuation is, many employees at Facebook may have a great holiday season with much more cash in the bank.

Henry’s anonymous sources also claimed that revenue will be $265 million this year instead of $300 million. As Eric Eldon points out though, “Facebook’s fiscal year doesn’t close until the end of December, so that number is strangely specific given the present uncertainty about advertising spending and virtual gift revenue the company might bring in during the approaching holiday season.”

Ironically $265 million is exactly “how much eMarketer projected Facebook would make in U.S. advertising”, Eldon writes. We could sit and try to piece together how much Facebook is earning but regardless of exact revenue numbers, a more important sign of the company’s future growth is their sucess (or lack of success) in approaching Madison Avenue.

According to Jessica Vascellaro, “The company says 70 of the U.S.’s 100 largest advertisers have advertised on its site since 2007. But its share of total number of U.S. online display ad views was just 1.1%, according to market research firm comScore Inc., in its most recent report in June.” Compare that with Fox Interactive Media who has attracted “15.9% of display-ad spedning, according to comScore.”

Why does MySpace account for such a large percentage of display ads? That’s pretty easy! A quick look at the site’s design shows how the company is excessively ad heavy. The site is splattered with advertisements which arguably decreases the user experience. That doesn’t matter to MySpace though as they continue to experience solid revenue growth.

On site ads don’t represent the full potential though as the company may soon decide to expand their advertisements to other publishers. Whether or not the company decides to do so, they certainly have time remaining before they begin rolling out alternative monetization solutions. As Mark Zuckerberg tries to consistently emphasize, it is still early for the company.

Speculators aren’t so confident in Zuckerberg’s assertion but then again none of us are running the company, are we?

Image from American Shelf Life

Just a couple weeks ago we released news about the second round of fbFund winners. The second phase involved user voting in which users will be able to vote, via the fbFund voting application, from tomorrow until November 30th. The top 5 finalists will then be announced on December 8th. Users can return to the application to vote on a daily basis between now and the end of the voting period.

Each application in this round has its own page which describes the application and a contestant generated video about the application. Below are screenshots of each of the pages. This part of the contest is extremely important as the 5 finalists will be given $225,000 each in non-recourse grants. There are currently 25 applications that are being voted on including:

• BarTab - Send a drink to a friend, with Facebook! BarTab allows users to send real drinks to each other for only $1. Drinks are redeemed through the user’s cell phone at partnered bars and restaurants.
• Black Drumm -Black Drumm develops applications that helps users organize events with friends. Whether it is going to a local concert, or planning a trek on Kilimanjaro, the application seamlessly coordinates offline activities; no more chains of emails to sort through, or spreadsheets to maintain.
• Bottle Rocket - Bottle Rocket helps users pick the perfect bottle of wine. Users can compare wines with friends on Facebook or on the Bottle Rocket iPhone application. Bottle Rocket then analyzes the wines users have liked with ratings from their friends to make informed recommendations.
• Check My Campus - Check My Campus makes the college search process easier, better and more fun. The application allows current college students to share photos and videos about life on their campuses, giving high schoolers an inside look at what real life is like at these different schools.
• Daikon - Daikon enables users to build powerful applications on the Facebook platform without writing a single line of code. Daikon produces applications that focus on increasing the enjoyment and productivity of the Facebook experience.
• Faithfeed - FaithFeed is an application where users can share about their journey of faith with friends. Through the application, users can share praises, prayer requests, resolutions and the details of what God is teaching them. Users can also keep each other accountable and support each other throughout the week.
• Good Call Sports LLC - Good Call Football is an app developed by Good Call Sports that allows users to predict each offensive play during a televised football game, in real time, and compete nationwide based on the accuracy of their predictions.
• GroupCard - GroupCard lets users rally their friends to sign the same printable online card to celebrate any occassion. Each friend can add a message, upload photos or audio, and even make a gift contribution. GroupCard started at Stanford, and is already used by thousands of groups worldwide.
• HitGrab - MouseHunt, a HitGrab creation, is a game of epic proportions. Players are hunters, hired by the king to trap mice that infest his kingdom. For each mouse caught, users will find a reward, bringing them closer to being the best MouseHunter in the land.
• Kontagent - Kontagent is the leading viral analytics platform for social network application developers. Kontagent analytics provides deep social data visualization and analysis that delivers actionable insights delivered via a hosted, on-demand service.
• Koofers - Koofers helps students create and share information that helps with classes. Users can share old tests, quizzes, and study guides; view current and past grade breakdown and average GPA for every class and professor; review professors and read ratings before signing up for new classes, and get help from other students in the same class.
• Newsbrane - Newsbrane recommends news stories and other online content to users based on their interests. Vote items up and down and Newsbrane learns the stories a user wants to see.
• Party Buzz - Party Buzz is your source of information for what’s happening offline amongst your friends. Check out your friend’s events, discuss weekend plans, and find the best parties. Bonus feature: for each event check the median age, guy-to-girl ratio, number of singles, and more!
• Pongr - Pongr is a mobile price comparison service that lets you check prices online and at nearby stores. While shopping, users can share items with their Facebook friends. Pongr mobile apps, texting, and image recognition makes bargain shopping fun!
• ProfessionalProfile - Professional Profile leverages a user’s existing social connections into a professional network.
• RealGifts - RealGifts is a social gifting application that allows users to send their friends real, tangible gifts in the mail, without needing to know their friends’ delivery address.
• Socialfly - Be twice the friend in half the time! Socialfly lets users write their own notes about people, set reminders to talk to friends, and plan fun activities together. Socialfly will soon be available on both Facebook and the iPhone.
• Teach the People - Teach the People is an open educational platform. Teachers get the tools to share their expertise, allowing their knowledge to go viral, attract an audience, and be monetized effectively. Students get access to high quality, low cost education in Facebook’s social environment.
• The Game Creators - The Game Creators built Social Arcade, an application which users get creative and design their own game from shoot-’em-ups to platformers to racing games and more. Users can give friends the gift of a game and even personalize it.
• TrailBehind - TrailBehind helps users find great places to hike. Avid hikers can explore maps, plan trips, log their travels, and work together to build better maps of the outdoors.
• Twenty20 Cricket - Twenty20 Cricket was created for cricket fanatics around the world to connect and share their passion via an exciting online cricket manager game. Users compete to be the best team by training their players, and then challenging their friends and other team managers!
• vDream Racing - vDream would be Henry Ford’s favorite application on Facebook. vDream offers users access to real cars, real parts, real performance specs, and the ability to connect and compete with other car enthusiasts.
• WedSnap - WedSnap created Weddingbook, a social network on Facebook for those preparing for a wedding. Brides and grooms meet on Weddingbook to get advice, support, and inspiration during their engagement and wedding planning process.
• Wildfire - Wildfire enables consumers to discover, share and engage with interactive promotions like contests, sweepstakes and give-aways and enables companies to easily create their own attractive, branded promotions that are automatically integrated with Facebook’s social features.

To vote go install the fbFund voting application. Remember that you can check back daily to vote. Best of luck to the fbFund participants!

Wayne Change of Facebook posted a blog post this afternoon about the results of adding the ability to comment on friends’ status updates. According to the post, the company received “nearly a million status comment in the first 24 hours.” That’s pretty impressive but what’s more interesting is the notable increase in user comments on status updates.

Over the past few months I’ve noticed that friends have increasingly commented on my status updates. Well Facebook has said that this has been an overall trend and mobile access has been key to this growth. The site’s new design can also be attributed to this increase in comment traffic. While there are other social networks with more mobile members, Facebook is rapidly on track to become the largest mobile social network.

Facebook’s Blackberry application has over 1.8 million installations and their iPhone application is one of the most popular in the iTunes app store. As the site continues to expand globally, their mobile presence expands as well and it becomes an increasingly integral component of Facebook’s success.

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