[Picture Credit: CNET]

Ben Ling of Facebook is planning on leaving Facebook within the next couple of weeks.  Ling was hired from Google.  Ling was the leader of the Facebook developer platform on the product marketing team.  Why is Ling leaving?  “Other career opportunities” reports VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon, who broke the story.

Elliot Schrage, the former VP of Global Communications and Affairs oversees the platform product marketing team at Facebook.  Facebook is still looking for a VP of Engineering and VP of Product.  As Facebook continues to grow and continues to receive large investments, perhaps the company is becoming “too corporate.”

AllThingsD reportedly spoke to Ling directly.  “Facebook is a tremendous organization and I would not leave it if it were not for a great opportunity,” Ling told AllThingsD.  When we find out what Ling is doing next, we’ll be sure to report it.

 
In the past year, Facebook’s traffic in Japan has more than tripled.  This past year, Facebook was translated into the Japanese language.  However, Mixi.jp is still the dominant social network in Japan.  mixi, Inc. (TYO3:2121) had 12.7 million unique visitors this past June.  Facebook had 538,000, MySpace had 1.2 million, Orkut had 638,000, and Gree had 455,000. 

“The competition between social networks in Japan is beginning to heat up with the recent introduction of the Japanese language version of Facebook,” stated Maru Sato, Managing Director at comScore Japan. “The popular social networking site’s launch of Spanish, French and German language sites earlier this year resulted in strong traffic growth in these markets. If this is a reliable indication, we can expect to see Facebook’s growth in Japan follow a similar trend.”

As Facebook is growing in popularity worldwide, there are many Facebook clones appearing.  These clones include Xiaonei and StudiVZ.  Fed up with the duplication, Facebook had decided to take legal action against StudiVZ last month.

Related Link:
1. MarketWatch

 
This Fall, Facebook employees will be able to unload some of their shares in order to capitalize on some of the work that they have put in the top social network.  This is important to employees as Facebook claims that they have no plans on selling themselves or going public anytime soon. 

However, most of the shares being sold are nowhere close to the $15 billion valuation that Microsoft predicted the social network was worth when investing $240 million for 1.7% equity.  Laurence Albukerk, a Managing Director at EB Exchange Funds stated that he knows at least 9 executives at Facebook unloading stock.  Coincidentally, EB Exchange Funds’ homepage states “EB Exchange Funds creates partnerships that enable entrepreneurs who are Accredited Investors to pool their pre-IPO stock.”

Maybe there is a Facebook IPO happening soon?

BusinessWeek confirms that Mark Zuckerberg and former VP, Matt Cohler are involved with selling some of Facebook’s shares.  Albukerk stated that a couple of Facebook Directors and a former executive contacted him recently to sell stock with a $5 billion valuation.

VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon reported that Facebook employees would be limited to selling 20% of their shares at a $4 billion valuation.

Related Links:
1. BusinessWeek
2. Silicon Alley Insider

 
Instead of displaying daily active users for their applications, Facebook has steered in a direction that focuses on monthly active users.  Through the daily active user count, a company called Adonomics was formed.  Adonomics evaluates daily statistics on Facebook applications and then places dollar valuations on the application companies. 

Application developers will most likely be able to view daily active users from internal Facebook metrics, but the daily active count will no longer available to the public.  By hiding a daily active count, this should keep developers motivated to keep inventing applications.  Sometimes it takes time for the Facebook community to accept a good application. 

A developer told CNET that it will be nicer to have a 22,000 monthly stat next to his application information page than a 1,500.

Related Link:
1. AllFacebook

VentureBeat’s Eric Eldon has heard from a (see comment #1) multiple sources that Facebook is allowing employees to sell some of their stock at an internal valuation of $4 billion.  When Microsoft announced that they would invest in Facebook, the software giant pegged the social network’s valuation at $15 billion.

Since Facebook isn’t planning on selling themselves off or having an IPO anytime soon, this should motivate employees to stick around for longer.  Former employees do not need permission to sell off their shares vested in Facebook, but current employees require permission.  Some former Facebook employees have already been selling stock at a valuation of $4 billion or more.

How will selling the shares work?  Facebook may arrange for a single investor to buy up all the shares in one transaction.  Facebook may allow employees to decide who to unload the shares to themselves.  Or Facebook may borrow money to buy shares back themselves.

At the end of the day, Facebook needs to beware of who is getting their shares.  When a former Craigslist employee sold his shares to eBay, it caused some internal problems with the company.  Now eBay and Craigslist are suing each other back and forth.  Facebook and their shareholders need to be on the same page.

Related Link:
1. Techmeme Discussion

Slide, Inc., the company created by PayPal co-founder Max Levchin, is taking some heat from The Sun U.K.  The Sun U.K. is blaming Slide for a violent epidemic happening in London because in the SuperPoke application, users can virtually “shank” friends.

Slide immediately removed the “Shank” feature from the application.  “Slide does not condone violence whatsoever, and our SuperPoke! application is meant to foster fun, virtual communications between friends. We have removed this particular action as it misrepresents the SuperPoke! brand” stated a Slide spokesperson.

I agree that “Shanking” friends on the virtual application is distasteful, but I disagree with the way that The Sun reported the whole thing.  The Sun U.K. interviewed the uncle of Rob Knox, an actor who played Marcus Belby in the Harry Potter movies.  Rob Knox was killed by former classmate , Karl Bishop with a knife in front of a bar when trying to protect his little brother.  Knox’s uncle was quoted by The Sun:

“Wait until one of their family members is a victim of knife crime and then see what they say.  The stupidity of having this on their site is unbelievable. And they deliberately use the street term ‘shanked’, which is even worse. They are targeting the kids who are on street corners carrying knives.”

The first sentence of that quote was very distasteful.  Violence happens everywhere.  When something bad happens, media sensationalists have a tendency to try and find scapegoats.  I believe that Slide is being wrongfully accused here.  Some of the SuperPoke features can easily be offensive, but at the end of the day we are all human and a majority of us have control of our own actions.

Related Links:
1. AllFacebook
2. The Sun UK article
3. Slide.com

 
As you may remember, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) made a solid $240 million investment in social network juggernaut, Facebook.com.  Out of the deal, Microsoft gained 1.7% ownership and exclusive advertising rights to the social network.  Microsoft SVP, Satya Nadella announced that the company will be expanding their partnership with Facebook in the form of search.

“As part of the deal, Microsoft will work with Facebook to bring its customers Live Search-powered web search and search ads by the end of the calendar year,” stated Nadella. ”Facebook will work with Microsoft to design the best search experience for Facebook’s customers and advertisers.”

Google has a very similar search deal with MySpace, Friendster, and AOL.  This enabled Google’s marketshare to increase substantially.  Microsoft Live Search will instantly have access to the 90 million users currently on Facebook.  Facebook is growing at a much faster rate than MySpace and has surpassed them on Alexa traffic rankings. 

Microsoft Live Search is expected to be rolled out fully by the Fall, just in time for school to start up again.

Related Link:
Search Engine Land

Facebook had their second f8 conference today.  I’ve consolidated all of the information without all the fluff in this blog post.  Here are some of the key takeaways from the presentation.

iPhone Framework
Benjamin Ling, Director of Platform Product Marketing for Facebook announced that the social network company will have Cocoa framework for iPhone application development available shortly.  Application developers will be able to use this framework to integrate with Facebook Connect.  The importance of making applications compatible with the iPhone is proven by the number of applications sold in the iPhone 3G’s first week.

24 Connect Partners
As Facebook launches Facebook Connect in Beta on Monday, the company will be launching with 24 partners.  Those partners include CBS, CNET, CollegeHumor, Disney-ABC Television Group, Evite, Flock, Hulu, Kongregate, Loopt, Radar, Seesmic, Red Bull, Socialthing!, The Insider, StumbleUpon, Twitter, Uber, Vimeo, Amiando, Plaxo, and Xobni.

Application Translations
Facebook has a community of translators to make applications compatible in 63 different languages including Persian, Arabic, Hebrew, Hindi, Yiddish, and Urdu.  Below is a screen shot of Facebook Languages:

When Facebook’s partners officially launch on Connect, I’ll start individually reviewing them.

Facebook has officially launched the new look & feel of their site.  It is available to anyone that goes to http://www.new.facebook.com.  I would be interested in hearing your thoughts on the new user interface.  Here are mine.

Below is what the new homepage looks like.  This is the page you see as soon as you log-in.  What I like is that Add Photos, Add Videos, link sharing, and note writing is right at the top. 

I don’t like the location of where Facebook put “log out.”  I think it should be right at the top and have it’s own text.  You’ll notice that the logout button is in parantheses next to Welcome Amit.  Log Out also shows up when putting the mouse over the lock button.  Finding the log out button should be easy for users because it is just as important as logging in.

I like the location of the lock button.  The lock button is the place to set up privacy settings.  This is how you prevent certain people from looking at your pictures, a very useful feature.

The Friends button shows you all of the new status messages written by your friends.  The ability to create a new friend list is a cool new feature.  This allows you to closer track the friends who you want to see more of and filter out the rest.  Below is what it looks like when setting up a new friends list.

I don’t like the way that Facebook is handling their applications.  Facebook segregated applications away from the main profile.  The applications that are able to be placed in the sidebar have the benefit of appearing on the main Facebook profile page, but other applications are placed under a tab called Boxes.  The applications I choose to use on my profile are aligned with my personality so they should be right next to my profile.

The Inbox feature doesn’t look any different.  It would be cool if there was a way to somehow integrate Facebook’s chat system with their Inbox system. 

Overall I give Facebook’s new look about a 6 out of 10 stars on the way it looks.  It looks clean, but segregating the applications isn’t really beneficial.  If anything it screws over the developers a little bit.  Fortunately there is a way to opt out of the new look when it goes live.  And that was a smart move by Facebook.  I’m sure a lot of people will switch back to the old look since they’re so used to it.

Yesterday Facebook filed a lawsuit against German social network, StudiVZ.  Facebook accused StudiVZ of being a knock off and for copying the look, feel, and features that Facebook has.  StudiVZ has about 10 million users and they self-describe themselves as the most successful social network in Germany, Austria, and Switzerland.

In November 2006, I wrote an article about how StudiVZ will be reaching 1 million users.  Ehssan Dariani, the site’s founder adminitted that StudiVZ is a Facebook replica.  “It was also clear from the get-go that we would strongly distinguish ourselves by other things, that we wanted to be original,” stated Dariani. Because the German version was successful, Dariani created an Italian version.

StudiVZ was bought out by a German media company called Georg von Holtzbrinck for a price that was close to €100 million a few months ago.

Related Links:
TechCrunch
Financial Times

Update: Facebook took it down.

The new Facebook user interface is now live.  It won’t be available if you just go Facebook.com.  It’s available if you go to http://www.new.facebook.com and then log-in.  What do you think of the new user interface?

Personally I like that it is more AJAX-driven and it looks a lot less cluttered.  The default login page is your mini-feed.  And to view your entire wall, you have to click on a small link that says Wall Posts:

Facebook should stick to keeping news feed as the default page and having wall posts being one of the first things that you see when logging in.  I do like how Facebook kept Photos as it’s own separate tab because we all know that photos is Facebook’s most popular feature.

Give the new look a try and let me know what you think of the new Facebook in your comments.

Source: Mashable

LinkedIn and Facebook together are now worth roughly $16 billion based on valuations given to them after funding.  Since Facebook and LinkedIn have not been acquired by public companies, I cannot help but wonder what they would say during an IPO of their own.  What would they say is their contributions to society or what are they doing to solve world problems?

The only joy I get out of Facebook personally is that I can mass upload photos that I take on my digital camera and tag my friends.  As a matter of fact, that is Facebook’s most popular feature because over 14 million photos are uploaded per day between their 80 million users.  YouTube solved a similar problem, but their emphasis was on videos only.

Is Facebook’s contribution to society “being a place to mass upload photos for your friends to see?”  Or is Facebook’s contribution to society “being a storage of personal information on your friends?” It seems like that they are all over the place.  Facebook self-describes themselves as a “social utility that connects you with the people around you.”  Their most popular feature makes me want to compare them to Shutterfly, but the way they describe themselves makes me want to compare them to Classmates.com or Match.com.

Facebook is one out of the top two sites in Alexa’s Top 10 sites that do not belong to a public company.  The other sites in the top 10 include Yahoo.com (Yahoo! property), Google.com (Google property), YouTube.com (Google property), Live.com (Microsoft property), MSN.com (Microsoft property), MySpace.com (News Corp. property), Wikipedia, Blogger.com (Google property), and Yahoo.co.jp (Yahoo! property).  Wikipedia is the other company that is not public, but the open source encyclopedia does not walk around sporting over a billion dollar valuation.

The aforementioned companies, Yahoo!, Google, Microsoft, and News Corp. all have a pretty clear purpose and are constantly innovating otherwise their shareholders would get pissed.  Their innovations all revolve around their core services.  Yahoo! and Google have an emphasis on finding information quicker, Microsoft makes software that computers need to run on, and News Corp. distributes media all over the world.

Ford and GM’s valuation combined is about the same as LinkedIn and Facebook combined.  What makes this disturbing is because we know that those two automotive companies have done more to advance our society today than a couple of social networks.  The Richter Scales music video points it out too.

Perhaps there’s something I’m not seeing about LinkedIn and Facebook that makes their valuations worth it, so I encourage you to help me understand in the comments.  This is not intended to bash social networks, it is only to provoke discussion.

  
Judge James Ware of U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California has made a ruling in Facebook’s favor.  Facebook has agreed to pay an undisclosed amount to the owners of ConnectU through an acquisition. 

The settlement roots back to an accusation that Mark Zuckerberg and other founders in Facebook stole the idea for Facebook from the ConnectU team.  The ConnectU team consists of brothers/Olympic rowing hopefuls, Cameron and Tyler Winklevoss and Divya Narendra.  The tentative settlement was made this past February, but then ConnectU delayed to the settlement due to an accusation that Facebook failed to provide crucial documents for the case. 

ConnectU also settled to not make further claims against Facebook.

“The ConnectU founders understood the deal they made, and we are gratified that the Court rejected their false allegations of fraud,” stated a Facebook representative. “Their challenge was simply a case of ‘buyers remorse,’ as described by the Boston Court earlier this month.”

Mark Zuckerberg used to work for the Harvard Connection, a company founded by the ConnectU before creating TheFacebook.com.

[Source: Reuters]

I’m at the GSP East conference listening to the Facebook Poke Back platform. They have just said that they are going to be rolling out a way to make payments from within Apps. When Dave Mclure, the panel moderator, asked when this feature would be avialable no date was given. Dave McClure pushed that if they don’t push the feature out by the end of the year he will take it as a “Vapor” feature.

Having a way to make payments from within the application would mean that giftbox like facebooks own would be a possible. That monitization option would make it possible to create gaming like situations which companies like SocialCash are hoping to capitalize on by Cost Per Action payouts to the app developers.

The panel consists of Benjamin Ling, Dave Morin, Ruchi Sanghvi, Josh Elman, and Dave Mclure as moderator.

Most of the talks here at GSP East are about how to monetize social network applications. The honeymoon phase is over and developers are feeling the pain of seeing a million plus users on their application and not a cent from the activity. Which is why I was interested when i heard that SocialCash had a way to monetize your application.

SocialCash, which launched today, gives developers a point system called PointCash which can be turned into a virtual cash system for implementing gaming properties in an application. Think World Of Warcraft where instead of getting gold for killing a rabbit with 5 legs to buy a fire-sword, you get in game currency for signing up for netflix for 6 months. Upon signing up for a service you are given a share of the revenue and the social application user is given some point which can be used to purchase virtual goods which are implemented in your application.

The PointCash system provided by SocialCash is smart way to monetize. Gaming is a great way to increase the virility and stickyness of an application and then to have a system to easily pipe the in game point system to a revenue flow is a great boon for developers. Facebook applications have high user engagement and in such situations users are not interested in clicking on simple banners or link.

Course if you’re old school, SocialCash still provides a system for placing banner ads on your application called BannerCash which are targeted to your users. If you’re a developer of a social application and are looking to monetize your application and increase the addictiveness of your application. Definitely take a look at SocialCash.

The point system model is one that’s been in video games for years and it’s because it works! For that reason alone I would think that developers would flock to this service.