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Asia Continues to be Facebook's Strongest Growth Region
November 20, 2009
With Facebook topping 330 million active users over the past week, the company's strongest growth region continues to be Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook added close to 17M active users in Asia alone. Since my previous post, the share of active users from Asia grew by 2% (to 13.5% of all users), and roughly 1 in 7 users now come from the region. With a market penetration under 2%, Facebook is poised to add many more users in Asia (and Africa).
What Does Innovative Social Engagement Look Like For Businesses and Governments?
November 18, 2009
I've been thinking about the topic of Government 2.0 a lot lately. Part of this topic deals with the multi-directional engagement between government and citizens. It seems to me that everyone can celebrate the fact that government entities merely have a YouTube channel here, a Twitter account there, or a Blogger profile some other place (the so-called "TGIF revolution"), or we can think a little harder about what the goals of citizen engagement really might be, and how to go about achieving them.
The War For the Web
November 16, 2009
It is becoming clear to me that we are heading into a bloody period of competition that could be extremely unfriendly to the interoperable web as we know it today. If you've followed my thinking about Web 2.0 from the beginning, you know that I believe we are engaged in a long term project to build an internet operating system. I've outlined a few of the ways that big players like Facebook, Apple, and News Corp are potentially breaking the "small pieces loosely joined" model of the Internet. But perhaps most threatening of all are the natural monopolies created by Web 2.0 network effects. We're facing the prospect of Facebook as the platform, Apple as the platform, Google as the platform, Amazon as the platform, where big companies slug it out until one is king of the hill. And it's time for developers to take a stand. If you don't want a repeat of the PC era, place your bets now on open systems. Don't wait till it's too late.
Using Flash Remoting for Authentication to your AFCS/Facebook AIR Application
November 4, 2009
If you have had an opportunity to look at the Adobe Flash Collaboration Service (AFCS) you could see that there is a huge opportunity to do interesting multi-user applications without needing to write all of the server side code. However there is the challenge of how do you control who comes into your application and what they are allowed to do. In addition, keeping your application credentials safe in case your SWF file was decompiled. So as the title suggests you can use a service like Facebook to take care of the users authentication and Flash Remoting for the application authentication.
Four short links: 22 October 2009 - Cognitive Surplus, Scaling, Chinese Blogs, CS Education for Growth
October 22, 2009
Isaac Mao, China, 40M Blogs and Counting -- "Today, there are 40 million bloggers in China and around 200 million blogs, according to Mao. Some blogs survive only a few days before being shut down by authorities. More than 80% of people in China don't know that the internet is censored in their country. When riots broke out in Xinjiang province this year, the authorities shut down internet access for the whole region. No one could get online." This and more in today's Four Short Links.
There are Over a Million People Actively Using Facebook Right Now
September 24, 2009
A little over a week ago Facebook reached a major milestone: 300 million active users. The fastest-growth region continues to be Asia, but growth in other overseas regions such as the Americas and Africa have also been strong.
Report: Facebook A Haven For Hate Groups
By Caitlyn MartinSeptember 18, 2009
Dr. Oboler published a new report on Tuesday and this time he has targeted Facebook and with good reason. Despite a prohibition in the popular social networking website's Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, Facebook has remained a happy home for Holocaust denial and racist "white pride" groups.
Fallacious Celebrations of Facebook Fans
September 17, 2009
Publishing "top 10" lists is unfortunately a staple of modern journalism. But alas, writers must drive readers' eyeballs, even when discussing serious topics like the government. And so we find a new list that mixes Web 2.0 with the government: "Top 10 agencies with the most Facebook fans." For the record, this list is topped by the White House with 327,592 fans, followed by the Marine Corps, Army, CDC, State Department, NASA, NASA JPL, Library of Congress, Air Force, and Environmental Protection Agency. Congratulations to all these hard-working agencies. But what exactly are we celebrating here?
Show Off Your O'Reilly Media Books!
September 15, 2009
Have a bookshelf full of O'Reilly books like our Facebook Fans Michael Pelikan and Kay Bieri do? Use it to win more! Take a picture or record a short video of your books and post it on the O'Reilly Media Facebook Page before 5pm PT Thursday, September 17, for a chance to win two ebooks of your choice.
Tamar Weinberg on Brand Building, Tweet By Tweet - How to leverage social media to market your business
August 19, 2009
"With money tight these days, businesses need to find new ways to market themselves without spending a lot. Online brand evangelism is one way to advertise your products, and it costs little or nothing," says Tamar Weinberg, author of The New Community Rules, in the most recent O'Reilly Insights column at Forbes.com. She continues: "If you are looking for a fun way to empower your customers and encourage positive discourse, brand evangelism programs are a great way to promote your brand. Give your customers a voice in the communities where they already have influence. There isn't much to lose and a whole lot to gain." A writer and Internet marketing consultant, Tamr specializes in blogger outreach, viral marketing, and social media. Read more.
Facebook App Case Study: Additional elements and gotchas
August 19, 2009
Welcome back to the series and the concluding article of the exciting facebook series. So far we worked hard to implement features like the front end, administration, loading of YouTube videos etc. In the last article the application came finally to life. We implemented a database that contains 14 levels for the game.
Facebook App Case Study: Administration module
August 4, 2009
Last time we talked about how to work with YouTube videos and how to implement those into our app. We worked hard to implement typical features that can be found on most video sites like play, pause, seek etc. As we already know, there is one external library used in our application that allows us to load videos into the swf and manipulate the video using ActionScript 3.0. Now it’s time to actually work on the admin part of the app and the features that allow us and all our application users (players) to add their own videos along with mistakes. This way the application will much more extensible. There are lots of Facebook users who are movie fans and we will give them the ability to contribute.
Facebook App Case Study: Preparing the Elements
July 21, 2009
Welcome back! Finally we will work on a real world application that will go live. The application that we will be creating will be named “Movie Expert”. One reason why I chose it is because I am an avid Movie fan and I will have lots of motivation to work on it in detail. The other reason is because it is really a sample that has the potential to utilize the facebook actionscript 3 library the proper way.
Jonathan Heiliger on Web Performance, Operations, and Culture
June 24, 2009
We were honored to have Jonathan Heiliger, Facebook's VP of Technology Operations, as our opening keynote speaker at Velocity. Jonathan is one of the most accomplished leaders in our field, and is a master of the craft. Here is his keynote in it's entirety...
Facebook Adds Million of Users in Asia
June 19, 2009
Since my previous post on Facebook users by country, the company has grown rapidly in Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook grew 90% in Asia going from 11.4 to 21.7 million active users. With a Market Penetration of only 0.6% in Asia, Facebook has barely scratched the surface in the region.
FBML, YML, OSML oh my! HTML, meet Social
By David RecordonJune 8, 2009
Given how quickly the Social Web is coming together, I believe that HTML will need to support social elements someday soon. It's great to see this type of innovation by Facebook running in the wild, but the web itself ultimately evolves best when multiple competing approaches come together. Just as OAuth brought together the best practices from AOL, Flickr, Google, Yahoo! and others, there is a similar opportunity to bring together FBML, YML and OSML along with the client-side benefits of XFBML.
2 Years Later, the Facebook App Platform is Still Thriving
May 14, 2009
In a few weeks, the Facebook application platform will mark its second anniversary. While it garnered lots of press coverage in the months after it launched, the arrival of the iTunes app store shifted attention away from Facebook's vibrant ecosystem. The media glow is understandable: among other things, the younger iTunes platform is adding apps at a much faster rate than Facebook or Myspace.
Component Architecture for Facebook Applications
May 12, 2009
In the last tutorial we discussed the new library that was released by Adobe. The new library from Adobe fits much more naturally into the whole architecture of facebook applications that are built using the Flash platform. We need to know that the previous approach using the PHP library is not useless. In order to create stable and useful Facebook applications we need to know about many ways how to achieve the same goal. If you followed the series from the start then you are on a good way to be able to create truly cutting edge facebook apps as we have discussed have to grab results from DB and we also make use of the ActionScript library.
Goodreads vs Twitter: The Benefits of Asymmetric Follow
May 11, 2009
I am never more painfully reminded of the limits of symmetric "friend" -based social networks than I am when I post a book review on Goodreads. I love books, and I love spreading the word about ones I enjoy (as well as ones I expected to enjoy, but didn't quite). Most of the time, my reviews go out quietly to a small group of friends, whose book recommendations I also follow. It's a lovely social network. But every once in a while, I post a link to one of my reviews on Twitter, and am immediately deluged with friend requests. Some of them are from people I know, but whose taste in books I may not share (or even care about), and many are from complete strangers. If I say "yes" to any of them, I have to see every book they review as well. As you can imagine, it doesn't scale.
Active Facebook Users By Country
April 20, 2009
Since I last posted numbers on Facebook's user base six week ago, the company has added close to 20 million active users. I've had a few requests for detailed numbers by country so I quickly assembled an update. Among countries with at least a million users, the fastest-growing are Indonesia and the Philippines.
Will Facebook (all but) replace corporate websites?
By Martin KelleyApril 9, 2009
I'm looking at the work of a potential non-profit client now. They have a fine website: recently redesigned, it looks good and gives off the air of elegance that they want to project. The client is world-renowned, rich in history and staffed with some fantastically-creative people, yet the website feels more boring than you would think it should. With the rise of the real-time update streams being popularized by Facebook, Twitter and FriendFeed, users are becoming accustomed to a constantly-changing flow of pictures, videos and new snippets. Even actively-maintained websites seem locked in languid stupor in comparison.
Creating a Hello Friends App using ActionScript 3.0, PHP and Facebook API
April 7, 2009
As we all know life is much more colorful with friends, Facebook it's the best example on the internet for this case. Its even more colorful when you can use the Facebook API to create applications on that platform. Using Flash, PHP and the FB API we can utilize ActionScript OOP features to make the applications perform better then with standard FBML. I'm not trying to say here that FBML is bad, no, this series will try to teach how implement the existing knowledge of Flash into the Facebook application platform.
Hack in the Box (Dubai) 2009 / Psychotronic(a) / Hacking the Psyche
By Nitesh DhanjaniMarch 31, 2009
I will be presenting Psychotronica: Exposure, Control, and Deceit at the Hack in the Box Conference in Dubai (20th - 23rd April 2009).
"Right Here Now" services: weaving a real-time web around status
March 12, 2009
The "status update" has become the ultimate social gesture (ala Twitter tweets). Now, imagine Status and Location as application ingredients that can be combined together to create new application compounds using social ingredients, like People, Places, Localities, Times, Topics and Events. The composite that results is what I call "Right Here Now" services, and the focus of this post.
Facebook Growth Regions and Gender Split
By Ben LoricaDecember 4, 2008
Since we began tracking Facebook demographics in late May, weekly growth has held steady, usually in the low single-digits on a percentage basis. More importantly, it's fair to say that the company has successfully expanded overseas. With close to 128M users, the share of U.S. users is down to around 30% from 35% in late May: Over the last three...
Why I Love Twitter
December 1, 2008
If you care what I think, you know that Twitter is just about the best way to learn what I'm paying attention to. I pass along tidbits of O'Reilly news, interesting reading from mailing lists and blogs I follow, and of course, tidbits from the twitterers I'm following. These are all the things I could never find time to put...
Dear Facebook: You Lost My What?
By M. David PetersonNovember 25, 2008
Highlighting the importance of the phrase "data backup" with an "Are you kidding me?"-type moment, it seems Facebook has some serious "'splaining to do" as to how they /lost/ my (and I assume others) application notification settings.
Facebook Growth By Age Group: Share of College-Age Users is Declining
September 17, 2008
With the U.S. now accounting for only about a third of all Facebook users, we are starting to see a gradual shift away from its original demographic of college-age users (18-25): 46% of all users are 18-25 years old, down from 51% in late May. The number of users in the 18-25 segment is growing, but at a slower pace...
How to Write Your Own Facebook Applications
By Mary RotmanAugust 14, 2008
I recently had a chance to ask Jesse Stay, author of FBML Essentials a few questions about his book and just why it's so important right now. His book revolves around the fundamentals of the Facebook Markup Language--Facebook's version of HTML--which makes it easy to develop applications specifically for Facebook. If you can think of a niche that hasn't yet been filled in the Facebook application world, but don't quite know how to build one yourself, then this book is for you. Keep reading to see why Jesse wrote this book, as well as how you can win your own copy of this essential reference.
Do you have an idea for a Facebook application?
By O'Reilly MediaAugust 1, 2008
FBML Essentials — Learn how to build it quickly using the Facebook Markup Language (FBML) and other easy-to-use tools in the site's framework. This book not only gets you started with this toolkit, you also get a complete reference on every FBML tag Facebook has ever written, with advice on the best ways to use these tags in your code. Browse the book.
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