This evening I spent the better half of an hour watching a French documentary about the growth of Facebook and the impact it’s having on the world. It’s one of the better documentaries that I have seen so far and it’s definitely worth watching. One thing that stood out to me during the documentary is that they continuously state that there are 150 million users on the site. According to Facebook, they have over 130 million users and based on their ad platform, there are over 133 million users.
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This afternoon LivingSocial published a white paper giving their lessons learned from building successful applications on the Facebook platform. The argument presented in the company’s white paper is that if developers take advantage of the profile publisher, “the recent losses in page views and engagement” resulting from the new site design “could be mitigated”.

I definitely agree and as Mark Zuckerberg emphasized at f8, Facebook is all about sharing. LivingSocial made what I consider an accurate assumption which is that users wouldn’t realize their applications had been moved to the “boxes” tab. As a result, they integrated a substantial amount of functionality into the publisher which enabled users to easily interact with the application from their own profile.

The white paper is a great overview of the various types of integration points developers should make when building for the new site design. LivingSocial has taken advantage of all the new channels and as such, they should at least continue to maintain a substantial majority of their avid user base. Another interesting case in the white paper is when both a profile owner and the user visiting a profile have an application installed.

The publisher shows information that is relevant to the relationship between those individuals. I cannot emphasize how important this is and how much value is produced by making this type of information available to users. If you are information in more of LivingSocial’s lessons from the new site design, go download their white paper. If you’d like more information about the company check out the LivingSocial website.