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The White House is famous for hiding unpopular policy announcements on Fridays when no one is paying attention. In this holiday week, it looks like two major developments are going on at Facebook that could see ramifications going far into the future, but which were probably scheduled to coincide with universities’ Thanksgiving break.

The first is the launch and response to Facebook Beacon (no relation to us, or so they would probably claim). Beacon integrates your site with Facebook and posts messages to your feed to say that you interacted with that site, so hopefully your friends will as well. The catch?

That it pops up a little notifier in the bottom right of the screen, telling you that a story will be posted on your feed unless you opt out within a few seconds. This bug already exists on such sites as Blockbuster and Fandango, and MoveOn has a quick demonstration of how it works right here.

More on the reaction, as well as a more positive new change, below the fold…

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Amy’s recent post on Facebook’s new social ads got me thinking about ways that non-profits could leverage these new ads to microtarget possible donors or members (incidentally, the social ads system confirms my theory of a couple months back that the infuriating fluff stories were a way to bolster interest filling out, which is the basis of how these ads do their targeting).

The system is  perhaps the ultimate affordable segmentation engine. While direct mail houses can segment out people to a very fine degree, it becomes prohibitively more expensive the more variations of a mailing you have to print to reach them all. What’s more, non-profits can’t go in and fine-tune their specifications in real time to see exactly who they’re hitting with each message.

Facebook social ads bring microtargeting to a whole new level. Let’s say that Beaconfire was looking for a Tech Lead (we are, incidentally - check our job listings for more!). I’ll walk through the process of creating the universe, and how you can do the same, below the fold.

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Facebook says their newly launched Social Ads will help you ‘reach the exact audience you want with targeted relevant ads.’ I’ve been toying around with this the last couple days and think Social ads are definitely worth a closer look. The ads come together in four easy steps.  This is how it works…

Get Started - You select whether your ad will direct to a Facebook page or your organization / campaign website.

Chose Audience - Determine who you want to reach.  Rich segmentation opportunities abound.  You can chose to reach out to Facebook users by several key parameters such as geographic location (down to city-level), gender, age, education (including schools attended), interests and political views.

As you manipulate the criteria within the Chose Audience Screen, the number of individuals your ad is targeted to reach adjusts in real-time.

Create Ad - Create a title, drop in some ad copy and upload an image.

Set Budget - Ads are pay as you go for the duration of your campaign. You set a daily budget and bid on placement by impression or click.

The payment minimums are around $5 / day the ad runs and the scenario goes like this…

For any available ad inventory, Facebook selects the best ad to run based on the cost per click or impression and ad performance.

If you choose a Pay for Clicks (CPC) model, you will also bid on how much you are willing to pay for each click on your ad. Facebook will display your ad in the Ad Space, News Feed, or both. The amount you are charged will never exceed your daily budget.

If you choose a Pay for Views (CPM) model, you will also bid on how much you are willing to pay for every thousand impressions of your ad. You will need to select if you want your ad to appear in News Feed or the Ad Space. The amount you are charged will never exceed your daily budget.

And then you launch. PRESTO!

You can find the link to Facebook Social Ads in the footer under Advertisers. When you try it out, let me know how it goes.

Microsoft’s $240 million purchase for a 1.6% equity stake in Facebook had everyone buzzing recently (read more). While that’s a lot of money to you and I, it’s probably a drop in the bucket for Microsoft and well worth keeping Google out of the picture (if you’re Microsoft anyway). Microsoft had already struck a deal with Facebook (in 2006) to sell display ads on Facebook. With the new deal, Microsoft has also won the rights to sell ads on international versions of Facebook through 2011. While the international advertising spend online isn’t as high as the US, it’s not insignificant either. Research firm eMarketer reports that advertisers plan to spend $900 million advertising on social-networking sites in the U.S., compared with $335 million overseas. So Microsoft also stands to gain some piece of that pie.

While the deal represents a nice infusion of capital to invest in technology and people, it’s a double-edge sword on the people side. The Wall Street Journal expects the deal to raise the valuation on Facebook stock options, which may make it more difficult to recruit new key talent. Given that Facebook wants to double their workforce in the next year, how much of a hurdle will this turn out to be?

It was my pleasure to address the Council of Michigan Foundations this morning. As promised, here is the presentation available for download as a PDF File.

Web 2.0: Joining the Online Marketplace of Ideas

One of the attendees asked an astute question about identifying and reaching specific subsets of the users of MySpace.com, YouTube, etc… Here is a collection of resources for you to explore.

Thanks for your time and attention!

Until recently building a Facebook application meant either having to use your own real account, which could cause friction with friends who get with invites for your application in development or having to create a test account that would likely get banned and force you to start over. As the Facebook Wiki notes:

Facebook’s Terms of Service require that all accounts be linked to your real identity, so its not allowed to make fake accounts to test things with. The status quo is the following cycle: developers make test accounts, developers test with those accounts for a little while, our Customer Support team comes across those test accounts and identifies them as fake and disables them, developers are annoyed and frustrated, developers make more test accounts. This is pretty bad.

No longer - in a little-ballyhooed announcement, Facebook recently opened up the ability to create test accounts that would live in a quarantined zone, free from fear of banning. More below the fold…

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One of the first indications that Facebook would be the  Meetup of the 2008 election was when the membership of the Facebook group "One Million Strong for Barack" started skyrocketing. Suddenly, everyone in the political world could see how viral Facebook could really be, and how fast you could grow a community.

This group’s visibility also shed light on the true impotency of groups in Facebook - once they hit more than a 1,000 people, the organizer can no longer message to the group. That’s about as useful as a fundraiser with no donation box or a rally with no speaker - just a mob of people who can’t do anything. That didn’t stop people from creating groups, just to get a momentary press hit (note the "1,000,000 Strong against Hillary [Clinton]" group - this was founded by the New Hampshire Republican party and is populated by people who don’t know this), but that was about all they got from it.

That could be changing soon, though.

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Baaaaa.

That’s my response to the appearance of “fluff stories” on my Facebook feed. These increasingly annoying additions have one clear message: join the herd. Enjoy these movies, these books, these groups. Everyone else is doing it.

I just have one small problem with this: I don’t care at all about this information - I never find it useful. I takes up way too much of my feed. And I can’t turn it off. So I guess that’s three problems.

Okay, now that that’s done, I’ll go into why this is a step away from what makes Facebook more useful than other social networks. I’ll also investigate why Facebook may have gone this direction - privacy advocates, the answer may outrage you.

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A little over a year ago, Stephan Colbert recently defined wikiality as

A reality where, if enough people agree with a notion, it becomes the truth.

That seems pretty close to Netscape’s opinion of social news, if you read their recent statement closing shop at their own social news portal (emphasis mine):

Many of you may remember that Netscape.com used to be much different than it is today. In fact, it used to contain more mainstream news before we shifted to the social news site you see now.

We received some feedback that people really do associate the Netscape brand with providing mainstream news that is editorially controlled. In fact, we specifically heard that our users do have a desire for a social news experience, but simply didn’t expect to find it on Netscape.com.

Now, to be fair, they did indicate that they plan to build a new social news site, but the bottom line is that by using words like “mainstream” and “traditional,” Netscape is saying that they just didn’t like the stories people were voting on (As a sidenote, I found this story on Digg, ironically enough).

Sound like a tough allegation? Follow me below the fold…

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Just two days ago, I wrote a post about how some applications were cheating their way to the top of the “most installed” list on Facebook. It seems that they’re already taking action to curb these sorts of abuses, starting with changes to the code (someone with more programming knowledge can probably fill in more here - if you’ve got a sense of what the code changes mean, post a link in the comments). But what I find more interesting is a new feature added today that tracks stats not solely by installs but by engagement. If you look at the application summary page today, you’ll see that instead of total installs, it now shows “Daily Active Users.” This change completely turns the application rankings on their head, and will likely have a major effect on how applications are developed and what gets installed.

So what is a “Daily Active User?” And what’s the percentage? Dave Morin explains on the Facebook Blog:

With a change this foundational to Facebook Platform’s measurement, we want to make sure that you completely understand how we will be measuring engagement. We define engagement as the number of users who touch your application every day (measured from midnight to midnight each day).

These touch points are:
- Canvas Page Views
- Link Clicks in FBML
- Mock-Ajax Form Submission
- Click-to-Play Flash

The number of engaged users is calculated by putting all of these touch points together. We display this as the number of “Daily Active Users.” Next to it we also show what percentage that is of the application’s total number of users.

So you can still figure out the gross reach of an application by taking the daily active users and dividing by the percentage. This leads to some new questions about what’s the most useful gauge of how much real influence an application has.

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