Recently funded, web-based video chat tool TokBox has just anted up its Facebook application by making it available directly in chat. TokBox’s web-based platform is a Flash-enabled browser plugin that simplifies the video chat process by offering a service that doesn’t require downloads or any cumbersome setup process, granted you already have a working webcam or computer microphone.

The existing TokBox Facebook application worked like most other chat clients, but now you can start a video chat directly from your Facebook chat tool. After installing the TokBox plugin for Facebook (currently supported for Firefox only), then you’ll see a link beneath your chat buddies’ names, giving you the option of launching a video conversation with them. Tell the app that you allow access to the webcam, and you’re good to go. As with all TokBox video chat conversations, you’ll see your screen on the left, and the screen of your buddy on the right.

Having the option to begin a video chat right within your chat window is quite handy, and there’s also the option of holding multiple video chat conversations at once, with each chat appearing in its own window. Presenting this immediate-gratification chat option is more than handy, but is also necessary for TokBox to further its growth.

Inserting itself into as many places as possible makes for easy access to end users, but also as a value add to any company with which it partners. Facebook chat is a pretty basic offering, and gains a great deal of value and functionality from third parties integrating it into other chat clients (i.e. Digsby), and by having other applications like TokBox layer features into it as well.

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Today Tokbox launched a Firefox plugin that enables video chat within Facebook’s IM service. I checked it out an the plugin is pretty slick. You can install the application by checking out the Tokbox plugin page. The application places a link under each of your friends in the Facebook chat application and when you click it a lightbox is displayed as pictured below. This is really slick the way that is displayed directly within the browser.

There are other chat applications that have been launched on the platform but none of them work without navigating to a separate page. This is a great addition and I’m expecting that we’ll see an uptick in Tokbox usage with this new application. If you aren’t familiar with Tokbox, it is a web-based video chat utility. With Tokbox you can quickly create a video conference which is accessible via the click of a single URL.

Not long ago I tested out the Tokbox application. We had over 20 people simultaneously chatting which made for a lot of noise when people weren’t wearing their headphones. While this new add-on is not developed for chat with multiple users, I think it will attract a large number of users. Go check out the new add-on and let us know what your experience is!

Facebook is at again shutting down yet another large application on their platform for privacy violations. This time around they’ve picked off the 24th most active application on the platform, Social Me. As Justin Smith writes., “If two's a coincidence and three's a trend, then the disappearance of Social Me tonight should raise all developers' eyebrows.” This is the second time in under a week that an application has been pulled off the platform.

Facebook is known for actively policing their platform but the real question at hand is how scalable is Facebook’s policing process? With over 30,000 applications on the platform it has become increasingly challenging for Facebook to monitor the activity that all developers are up to. This is a similar problem Microsoft faced with their own platform, Windows. Microsoft’s policy was to let users install applications at their own risk.

Facebook on the other hand is looking for privacy violations and shutting applications down. While Facebook has stating that the applications have been shutdown for “privacy violations”, it is known that some applications on the platform should probably be shut down for terms of service violations, such as storing data for an extended period of time. Whatever the company’s rationale for shutting down the applications has been, it is clear that Facebook is taking violations seriously.

Facebook needs to make sure that they monitor all applications equally. Developers are clearly nervous about Facebook’s recent actions, wondering if their applications could be shut down overnight.

Yesterday, the Telegraph reported about a woman who had her identity stolen on Facebook. The strategy is simply: create another profile of a person but have inaccurate data about them in their profile. When people search for the user they end up finding a false version of their profile which can have horribly inaccurate details about them. The result was that Kerry Harvey was branded as a prostitute on a fake profile.

Then today Ryan Kissiellondon reported about a man who had a fake profile created about him on Facebook as well. The profile had his name and birth date accurate but it also had him registered to a number of gay groups. Mathew Firsht is now “suing old schoolfriend Grant Rapheal for libel and misuse of private information in what is believed to be the first defamation case involving Facebook in the UK.”

These are not the first cases of users having false duplicates of their profile created. In a video posted on College Humor. back in March, this trick was the brunt of a joke movie trailer. This leads to the question of whether or not Facebook should be verifying user profiles when a user registers. As of now there isn’t much of a verification process but perhaps we will start seeing new processes implemented in the future.

Many developers have been asking whether they should develop for international markets now or wait for Facebook to release its crowd-sourced translation tools for applications. New data is available tonight on applications developed in other languages.

• In total, there are 527 apps currently listing a language other than English as their primary language. That’s about 1.7% of the 30,000 Facebook apps currently in the directory.


• The most popular apps in languages other than English are Sexo Quizz (French), with 25,000 daily active users, Horoscope (French), with 18,000 daily active users, and Tarot Gratis (Spanish), with 13,000 daily active users.


• Spanish is by far the language with the most apps developed at 330. Next comes French at 134. Trailing far behind are German (11), Italian (9), Japanese (7), Danish (6), and Finnish (6). Less than 5 apps have been developed in Chinese, Catalan, Dutch, Norwegian, Polish, Swedish, and Korean.

Developers keeping track of Facebook’s user counts in international markets will note that there remain tremendous opportunities for local developers in languages with huge user populations on Facebook.

And as a final note, in addition to adding a language filter to the application directory, Facebook also removed application counts from the directory. Now, you’ll need a third party service to count.

Five days ago, the Facebook Platform policy team made waves throughout the developer community by suspending Slide’s Top Friends application, the third largest application by daily active users, for a privacy violation of the Developer Terms of Service.

Tonight, it appears that another Top 25 Facebook app has disappeared from the Platform as well: Social Me, normally with over 280,000 daily active users, is showing the same signs that Top Friends did a few days ago:

1. Going to the Social Me app page redirects to the Facebook home page


2. Searching the application directory for “Social Me” yields nothing


3. The Social Me box is missing from all profile pages

If two’s a coincidence and three’s a trend, then the disappearance of Social Me tonight should raise all developers’ eyebrows. Several of Social Me developer SocialHi.com’s other applications have gone missing as well. If this turns out to be another case of application suspensions due to user privacy concerns, then Facebook is definitely making a statement with its actions. We’ll have more soon.

Twitter is having some reliability & scaling problems. This is not news. I had maintained for a month that twitter having some problems was the best thing that ever happened to them. Thousands and thousands of bloggers complained about the problems they were experiencing; which only drove more brand awareness, more blog posts, millions of new users, engagement… and larger problems.

These boys got blogosphere coverage bigger than anything in recent memory (other than facebook perhaps). The exact number of mentions of the twitter brand in the blogosphere in the last 30 days is 138, 225. Not all of these mentions are negative. Many are very positive and just voicing frustration with the down time of the service.

Except now the jig is up, the failure novelty is wearing thin on many millions of users. They are now in serious danger of not being able to shake the unreliable wrap and might just do irreparable damage to their brand.

We will see how it all plays out in the coming months. My bet is twitter will get it right since they have Amazon’s Jeff Bezos investing in this latest round. Amazon knows a thing or 2 about creating scalable websites.

A Twitter fan created a 3D sculpture of the twitter fail whale. The fail whale is what you see when twitter is over capacity and broken. Millions of people know this image.

When people create art around your ongoing failure it means 1 of 3 things.

1. They are too familiar with your failure mode.

2. They care enough about your brand to go create artistic sculptures. (they love you)

3. You might end up a joke on the footnote of web 2.0 start-ups that blew it.

Technorati Tags: twitter, fail whale

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Facebook has posted updated details. on what panels will take place at their F8 event in San Francisco Later this month. Aside from a keynote by Mark Zuckerberg which will announced all of the new features on the platform, there will be three tracks that developers can take. While it appears that there will be a panel on developing on Facebook Connect there is no discussion of building on top of Facebook’s soon to be released payment platform.

This evening I was thinking about it more and the combination of Facebook’s payment platform with Facebook Connect could be a force to be reckoned with. For example imagine event payment solutions similar to Eventbrite which take advantage of social distribution channels (such as the newsfeed) and also accept payment. This is just one idea though.

The real thing that I’m waiting to see is the launch of Facebook’s payment platform. It appears to have been delayed significantly. Post in the comments if there are any other things you are looking for Facebook to announce. Here are a few of the panels at the event, check out the Facebook blog post for more details:

• User Experience
  
  
  
  • Introducing the New Facebook Profile & More
  
  
  • Integrating Facebook Connect into your Website
  
  
  • Building Great Applications on Facebook
  
  
  • Design and User Experience at Facebook
  
  
  
  


• Technical
  
  
  
  • Advanced App Building
  
  
  • Feed and Social Distribution
  
  
  • Building to Facebook Scale
  
  
  • Made for Mobile
  
  
  
  


• Business
  
  
  
  • Building a Business on Facebook / Metrics & Analytics
  
  
  • Marketing your Application on Facebook
  
  
  • Entrepreneurship on Facebook Platform
  
  
  • fbFund: A Look Inside — Seeding Opportunity on Facebook Platform
  
  
  
  

Breaking News: Facebook Ads Newsletter is now live: In an effort to proactively reach out and educate marketers and advertisers facebook has just launched the premier edition of the “Facebook Ads Newsletter”.

Per Facebook: “These newsletters will keep you updated about what we’re doing to improve your advertising experience including news, product iterations and improvements, best practices and lots more to help you make the most of your Facebook Ads.”

The newsletter shows a few tips from a featured advertiser. It also has a few links that users can follow to become more educated about the product advertsising and marketing offerings from facebook and how you can give facebook money.

To get the newsletter you have to have set up an advertising account we believe (awaiting confirmation on this).

The thing that I like about this is that it is a proactive move by facebook to educate their advertisers. It has a link to their help page. Below is a screen shot of the Facebook Ads Newsletter.

Technorati Tags: facebook, facebook news, facebook advertising

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China is well known for their aggressive tactics in blocking content online due to heavy censorship policies. Their strategies appear transparent to the end user who simply sees the websites they are trying to access as unavailable. As such it is extremely difficult to detect whether there are actually DNS propagation issues or if Facebook is simply redirecting packets and making it impossible to access a site.

According to the Wall Street Journal though, this issue “affects only a fraction of China’s huge Internet user population.” For those attending the Olympics in Beijing this summer concerns of not accessing Facebook are most likely not substantiated since China claims that “the Internet will be uncensored during the Olympics.” That’s a common strategy used by many communist states: when international visitors come to the country they set things up to make everything appear normal.

Facebook hasn’t complained so far about issues. They instead want to get a piece of the highly competitive Chinese internet market which amounts to a whopping 225 million users, one of the largest in the world. Currently the company has less than half a million people in China according to statistics provided by the company’s SocialAds service. It will be interesting to see if the company runs into any other challenges aside from the highly present competition.