I'm at Sun tonight (as in Microsystems, not the red-top) for the London wing of Facebook's second annual F8 developer garage.
Photo by b_d_solis on Flickr. Some rights reserved.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg will be speaking at 1.30pm (a 'convenient' 9.30pm in the UK...) for a full hour and half. I'll go for the highlights.
There was a whole big bag of Skype FAIL earlier tonight as the organisers tried to connect the room with senior platform manager Ami Vora to answer a few questions on new features. Battling through the glitches, Vora answered a question on whether Facebook and Bebo would eventually offer developers the same platform.
"There's a bunch of players in this and we are all trying to work to make the best projects for users and developers. On the internet people tend ot converge around a few different players and we're not there yet [in terms of standards]. There's so much on the internet and so much going on - we're just concentrating on building something that is valuable to users.
Vora was asked if Facebook is talking to other social networks about agreeing standards for developer platforms, but she wouldn't say. "We're trying to stick to standards wherever possible," she said.
Another developer asked rather pertinently: "We're your second biggest market. When are you actually going to come over here?" Vora seemed to take that on board.
What do we want to know? Probably: 'How Facebook can tackle Facebook Fatigue?' That's already setting in with the mainstream, let alone early adopters.
What can Facebook to do keep people on the site, and keep feeding its application-based ecosystem?
More when the big guy starts talking...
The Zuckerberg is up
Mark Zuckerberg sounds a little like he's been on a Vision Quest, talking about meditating on Facebook and thinking about how it helps to feel people. There is some tittering, but we gloss over this.
"Last year we transformed the social graph from an abstract concept to a tool to help millions of people.," he said. "We have built a large and thriving ecosystem, but we have made some mistakes. Figuring out how to work closely with the developer will be a priority this year."
He continues by talking about how Facebook is helping to connect people, make the world more connected and bring people together, but there is only minimal tittering because he move on to hard stats.
Facebook now has 90 million unique users each month globally, and $200m has been invested in application firms. That's quite an ecosystem.
Zuckerberg said he expects Facebook to have 200 million users by the end of the year, and adds that Canada (whoop, says someone) has the most intense users with 40% of people in Canada registered on the site.
Spanish was the first language to be opened up for translation by users, and the full site had been completed in two weeks. French was the second, and that took less than 24 hours - after that almost 70 languages have been opened up to users to translate. Next, the translation tool will be opened up so users can choose what they translate. (I predict a Klingon translation riot...)
$200m invested in apps
More than half Facebook's application developers are outside the UK., he syas, but goes on to describe two US apps.
Look at the music sharing app iLike and MySpace; the top 5,000 bands have more fans on MySpace than any other site on the web, and have built that audience in less than one year. Betting game Zynga has four times more people playing Texas Holdem' each day than Las Vegas has hotel rooms. (He's telling us this to demonstrate the scale of the site...)
There has been more than $200m invested in the Facebook ecosystem, said Zuckerberg; just this week movie review application Flixster raised $6m funding and Zynga raised $26m.
Traffic went up by 50% after the introduction of the news feed, which he gave as an example of the "virtuous cycle of sharing" that drives traffic and take-up of applications on the site. That's how more than one million people had used iLike just four days after launch.
Facebook will reward 'good' apps
Zuckerberg said that when the application platform launched, they had imagined it would slowly be picked up and they could improve it quickly, so they just wanted to get the platform out of the door. It was a challenge, then, when it skyrocketed and they had to keep up with the demand.
Facebook doesn't want to be full of applications that are just trying to spread themselves virally and not "furthering our movement". He said he wants to reward the good citizens in that ecosystem, or punish the abusive applications. The site will do that by 'surfacing' the applications that are adding something to people's profiles.
Among the changes on the news site, users can choose from different templates to publish stories in their newsfeeds, and so give different emphasis to things. (That's not unlike the theguardian.com homepage, incidentally.)
Those annoying boxes that popped up when you went to an application have been ditched, and photos are given their own tab. All these changes - the new profile pages - are live from today so you can see them now.
Facebook is decentralising itself
"We're at the beginning of a movement," said Zuckerberg. Like at the beginning of computing, the movement needs to be decentralised so that the ecosystem can grow. That's what needs to happen with social applications. "In the next few years, the major ways people share information will come form otehrs in the ecosystem. As time goes on, less of this movement will be about Facebook.com and more about these applications and the experience we grow together."
We've heard much about Facebook Connect - today is the official launch. It does what Facebook Platform does - taking feeds of Facebook content - but makes it available across the rest of the web. It means 1) developers can build the same kind of applications across the web 2) share information across the web and 3) users can control their information across the web.
That means the identity components, then their events and more detailed information - but events are controlled by the same privacy settings so a co-worker might not see as much as a family member.
Digg is just one launch partner; Facebook's 90m users can "join the Digg army" with one click. Looking like he'd felt-penned the Digg logo onto his hoodie, Joe Stump showed how Facebook users won't even have to log in to use Digg.
That was pretty much it; there was more tittering in the audience with Zuckerberg's performance. But then it's late, and they provided free beer. And pizza.
"When you do these demos yourself, you can really start to sympathise with Bill O'Reilly," quipped Zuckerberg. I wonder who'll get barked at when he's done?
