Tim O’Shaughnessy is one of the knowledgeable Facebook developers I’ve talked to.  O’Shaughnessy is the CEO and co-founder of LivingSocial, a company that has created applications used by over 6 million users.  Clearly in this white paper that he released, he would like to see other Facebook developers succeed and work around the new interface.  Earlier this year Facebook rolled out a new design that forced applications to be placed in a separate “Boxes” tab. 

When Facebook application developers complained about the new design, the Facebook product development team released a tool known as Publisher.  O’Shaughnessy pointed out that not many developers are taking advantage of Publisher.  Publisher is the reason why LivingSocial applications did not lose a lot of page views as compared to many other applications.

Using the Publisher tool, those who decide to add applications will have real-estate on the user’s profile.  Those applications will also still be exposed when user’s are looking at other people’s profiles:

Notice how Visual Bookshelf and Causes are right next to where it says Add Photos, Shake Link, and Update Status?  Displaying apps in this fashion is pretty similar to the system tray in Microsoft Windows.  Certain application are favored over others and if you want to see more apps, you have to click the arrow.

“If the profile owner adds the application to his or her profile’s Publisher, then users who are visiting their profile can interact with the application, even if they have not installed the application. From the user’s perspective, contextually relevant content and providing a first glimpse at
the newly found application were of utmost importance,” stated O’Shaughnessy in the white paper.  “This use case presented an opportunity for LivingSocial to upsell the application to the user. LivingSocial chose to present the user with two options: searching for an entity or recommending an entity from the owner’s collection or from the most popular entities in the application.”

The way LivingSocial setup Publisher is if two users have the same application installed, then the application finds correlations between the users.  For example: if I have The Lord of the Rings book and you want to read it, then you can ask me if you can borrow it.

Brilliant!

This morning I spoke to Tim O’Shaughnessy, co-founder and CEO of LivingSocial and Amy Jackson of Atomic PR.  Tim gave me a sneak peek of some of the new features coming out for LivingSocial.  LivingSocial is a social discovery network that captivated the interest of 6% of Facebook’s total user base thus far.  LivingSocial has about 6 million users that have added 90 million favorite movies, books, restaurants, and beers to their profiles.

The new upcoming LivingSocial features are exciting.  Although I won’t be discussing all of the new features today, one that I will be focusing on will be the lists function.  LivingSocial users can publish top lists for restaurants, beers, books, movies, etc. and then connect them to a widget which can be embedded in blogs or social network profiles.  Below is a sample list that Mr. O’Shaughnessy created:

I believe that lists have grown in popularity ever since David Letterman started reciting the Top 10’s on his show many years ago.  A lot of lists appear on Digg.com on a daily basis.  This means that people love writing lists and people love reading them.  Many publications have a heavy focus on publishing lists whether it is AskMen.com’s annual Top 99 Women or Top 49 Men and Maxim.com is jam-packed with lists.  The lists function built around LivingSocial could be a big hit. 

The LivingSocial list feature is currently in Beta and will be fully launching soon.

LivingSocial started about one year ago and integrated their applications into Facebook, Orkut, MySpace, Hi5, and Bebo.  LivingSocial raised $5 million from Grotech Ventures and Steve Case in July.  LivingSocial has a revenue generation partnership with Amazon.com.  Prior to creating LivingSocial, O’Shaughnessy worked at Revolution Health where he led with the integration of acquisitions.  O’Shaughnessy worked on product launches at AOL before that.

LivingSocial is a company that makes popular social network applications.  Their applications are used highly on Facebook.  LivingSocial creates applications such as ReadingSocial, TuneSocial, ReelSocial, GamingSocial, DiningSocial, and BrewSocial. 

LivingSocial has just raised $5 million in Series A funding from Grotech Ventures and Steve Case.  Tim O’Shaughnessy, co-founder of LivingSocial is a former AOL employee and also worked with Steve Case on RevolutionHealth.

LivingSocial has about 6.4 million beta users who have reviewed about 80 million items.  Personally I use ReadingSocial the most to tell my friends what books I’ve read, books I want to read, and books that I am currently reading.  I also use this as a way to tell myself that I need to hurry up and finish reading a book because it’s been on my profile for so long already.  ReadingSocial/Visual Bookshelf is LivingSocial’s most popular application with about 36,984 daily active users.

What will LivingSocial do with this round of funding?  My guess is that they’ll hire additional talent and create additional applications.

Related Links:
LivingSocial.com
Grotech Ventures