Fred Wilson is commenting this morning on Jim Breyer’s words at Fortune’s iMeme conference last week on unfounded blogosphere rumors of a multi-billion dollar Facebook acquisition.

Barron’s quotes Breyer, the Facebook director and Accel VC,

Part of it is always price…The company will do well over $100 million in revenue, and profitable, and significant EBITDA positive this year. Right now our job is to build out the company as significantly as possible. In our case, sold best companies too early…sold Perabit to various networking companies, a series of our networking companies that today would have been possible IPO candidates.

Fred adds,

But selling the Company would be a huge mistake. First and foremost for the users. Any buyer will screw up Facebook. It’s greatness comes from the fact that the people who run the company live inside the service, they built if for themselves and it works because of that. They have their pulse on the community and they are not likely to screw it up too badly…So why do companies sell? Because of fear, boredom, and personal financial issues.

It’s great when companies and investors have aligned needs and timing–if that’s the case, perhaps Facebook will IPO in the next year or two indeed. But Facebook’s investors ultimately have a responsibility to generate a return for their investors, and thus will always be promoting their portfolio while saying they’re not for sale at the same time, just like Breyer did at iMeme last week.

Technorati Tags: facebook, ipo, acquisition

I’ve checked out countless applications related to books and reviewed a couple. Most of the applications have the same features but one of them has been extremely successful. The iRead application has over 110,000 users and it looks like growth has started to peak. Perhaps that’s why they reached out to me to write a review. As a duty to my readers I have to be honest and honest I will be. I have checked out tons of books applications and literally each one seems to be a carbon copy of the next. Each application allows you to display all of your books in your library and the books that you would like to read. iBook is a little different in that it allows users to also post reviews about each book. Aside from that it seems to be a carbon copy of each of the others. I have to credit them though with being one of the original book applications. This may be the primary reason that the application has been so successful. iRead has some pretty impressive statistics:

• Almost 20 percent of the users have added Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows to their books


• Over 2 million books have been added by the application users


• On average, iReaders spend 22 minutes per session on iRead (I’m not sure where they came up with this statistic given that Google Analytics were only added to Facebook applications a couple of days ago)


• More than 40,000 unique book reviews written by over 13,000 unique iReaders

Aside from the impressive statistics I am not that impressed by the application. Once Amazon launches complete Facebook integration, I don’t see any of the book applications holding up. The only opportunity that I see with books currently is an automatic book swapper. Today’s free application idea brought to you by Nick O’Neill! Imagine if at the end of each semester, college students could automatically view users that have the books that they need and want the books that they have. Additionally, if they don’t want to swap their book they can find the estimated amount that they will receive for selling their book on the internet. If you love books and are willing to settle for the existing application offerings, check out the iRead application. It is one of the better book offerings currently.

In reading through my daily Facebook articles this morning, I came across a CNN article where a reader had the opportunity to ask the Fortune Small Business team a question. The reader’s question was as follows:

My partner and I started an online business selling college textbooks at a deep discount two years ago, in our first semester as students. Now we’re 20 and still in school full-time. Our business is doing pretty well, but we want to take it to the next level by trying some rogue marketing. Do you have any suggestions? - Justin Tomevi, Co-Founder, halfcollegebooks.com, Philadelphia

Anne Fischer, a Fortune Small Business writer responded:

College students offer an appealing target market for relatively cheap but effective rogue-marketing tactics. First, if you haven’t already done so, buy a small ad on Facebook (facebook.com).

Wrong! I’ve purchased one of those ads before, targeting my school for the purpose of marketing my own online book price comparison engine that I developed. The results? Pretty horrible. I may have received a couple of clicks (if that) and I had no sales conversions. Given that there already a bazillion textbook search engines, Justin is going to have to come up with more effective marketing techniques. Granted, Anne Fischer didn’t give him completely horrible advice. For instance, she advised Justin to start a blog. Great idea! What she failed to suggest was to develop a Facebook application. Facebook applications have become the new tool in the marketing professional’s arsenal. While I’m not sure how long this tool will remain effective, there is still a huge market to be filled and Facebook has a large percentage of users within the college demographic. So my advice to Justin is to go find a developer that’s on campus and work together to build a slick book price comparison application. Do you think I’m wrong in suggesting this?

There have been a number of people that I have spoken with that tell me their stories of getting temporarily banned from Facebook. One person, a recruiter, was reaching out to Facebook users as a recruiting method. While there are effective ways for doing this, his method of contacting a number of people individually was not as effective. After reaching out to an unknown number of users, he was temporarily banned and received a warning. Then yesterday, I was speaking with a Facebook application developer. He was telling me about how he was temporarily banned for promoting his application in the developer forums. The lesson? Facebook is heavily invested in monitoring community activity. Anything closely resembling spam-like activity is automatically flagged and sent through a review process. In my own opinion this is a smart move by Facebook.

I used to receive a countless number of spam messages on my MySpace profile. Since I rarely login to MySpace, the profiles were deleted by the time I viewed the message, but the message was still in my inbox. Facebook’s strict monitoring of community activity ensures integrity within the Facebook environment. Ultimately you should not be receiving spam. Additionally, Facebook is extremely strict with monitoring news feed activitiy. Only 0.2% of news feed articles are approved for dispaly. That is a measily 2 out of 1000. Pretty darn impressive! Anyone looking to game the system is going to have an extremely hard time. While spammers and pranksters have been successful at creating Google bombs (a linking strategy that puts random sites to the top of specific Google searches), they are going to find it extremely challenging to game the Facebook system. As internet users are exposed to an increasing amount of spam on a daily basis, they will be driven to signup for Facebook as they search for a safe haven from spam. Who do you think will win the battle in the end? Spammers or Facebook?

Introduction

Developing any computer application is a process that will inevitably involve many mistakes, bugs, and other trials. Indeed, half of writing an application is just testing the code to make sure it behaves correctly, and scratching your head when it doesn’t. Clearly, you want to shield your end-users from experiencing the app in such a state. So, one important and popular web application development technique is to have a local test server for development, only pushing code to the live server after it has been appropriately tested. This is a relatively easy process, especially if your local server (be it your laptop or some other computer on your local network) runs the same OS as your server.

Writing Facebook apps adds a layer of challenge to this development pattern, since you can’t exactly download the Platform and run it on your computer, and anyway with all the overhead you wouldn’t want to. Furthermore, each app has a specific server to which it is linked, and there’s no current way to list “test” servers alongside the live one. Hence this tutorial.

(What follows assumes you’re already somewhat familiar with the Facebook Platform and the Developer Application, and, obviously, that you know how to write an application. If not, go to Facebook’s Developer page for more information).

Step 1: Preparing Your Local Environment

The first part of local prep is to ensure that your local server has web server and script interpreter software installed. By far the most common arrangement of these is the LAMP set-up (Linux/Apache/MySQL/PHP). Various LAMP (or “WAMP” for Windows) installer packages exist for just about every platform. In Ubuntu, simply search for the individual packages and install them. For Mac OS X, I like Marc Liyanage’s packages here. For Windows, I have used WAMP Server.

Once you’ve got your server operating locally, the next step in local Facebook app development is ensuring that your local server can be accessed from the external web. There are a number of ways to do this, but unless your server has a dedicated external IP, it will involve port forwarding from your internet gateway (perhaps a DSL modem and router) through to your server. Since each internet gateway is different, the actual steps in the process will themselves differ, but basically, you need to ensure that port 80 is passed from your gateway to your server. It makes it easier if your computer has a static IP internally, that way you can forward port 80 to that IP and you know it will always go to your server. Otherwise, every time you reconnect your server/computer to the local network, you may have to change the internal IP address to which you’re forwarding port 80. To get instructions for forwarding with your particular router, check out portforward.com.

Third, you need to find the external IP for your internet gateway. If you already have a dedicated IP, you’re set. If not, you need to find out what your external IP is. The easiest way to do this is to go to whatismyip.org. Copy and paste what you find there, and save the IP for later.

Finally, ensure your web server accepts connections from the wider internet by pasting the IP into the address bar of your browser. If you get a response from your server, you’re good to go! If not, you need to fix your server set-up, or if your server works fine locally, your port forwarding. Note that if you have a home network with an internet gateway (DSL router) and a wireless router, and you’re connected to the wireless router, you’ll need to forward port 80 from the gateway to the wireless router first, and then configure the wireless router to forward port 80 to your computer. This is a complicated set-up, but hopefully isn’t too common.

Step 2: Preparing Your Test Facebook App on Facebook

Since Facebook doesn’t allow you to have a “dev mode” for your new application, you’ll need to create a whole new test application. Call it whatever you want. Make sure to give it all the same settings as your real app, except (1) Use the IP you copied in the last step for your server (plus any subdirectories you may be using), and (2) Make sure you pick a new name/canvas page URL for the test app. Most importantly, check the box that makes the app restrict adding to developers only (so random people can’t add it)!

When your app is successfully created, note that it has a different API key and secret key than your “live” app. Copy these values down somewhere.

Step 3: Coding Your App / Modifying Your App to Run Locally

If you haven’t coded your app yet, now’s the time to do it.

If you have, you’ll need to make a few changes to ensure it runs locally. First, replace your API keys with the test ones. Second, make sure that any references in the app to your live server are changed to your local server (for images, urls, etc…). Third, ensure that your database connection strings are valid for your local database.

…And that’s it! (One word of caution, however: given that your test app is, to Facebook, actually a different app than the live one, your app’s functionality vis-a-vis the “friends” system will be hampered somewhat. One way around this is to designate a few volunteers as developers also, so you can test multi-user behavior. Also, you will want to be careful with News Feed actions and stories, since these will actually show up on the live site, but may confuse your friends who see them.)

Anyway, you should now be able to add your test app on Facebook and Facebook will query your local server for its pages. You can make changes to the code and see them reflected instantly, without uploading anything. This is by far the most efficient way to develop, or continue development of, a Facebook app.

Step 4: Avoiding Dev/Live Sync Pitfalls

A problem exists, if you’ve followed the instructions faithfully: You now have two apps, one local and one remote, each with its own version of the code. Your well-tested local app now contains the newer (and better) code, but if you just uploaded it to the remote server, or committed it to your versioning software (I heartily recommend using SVN, by the way), you would overwrite all the live server’s settings, including API keys, local URLs, database connections, etc…

The best way to get around this problem is to extract all such settings to an environment file which is required by and parsed before all other scripts. In my environment file, I define PHP constants like API keys, database connection information, server IP, and so on. These constants will then be available for my app, and will be appropriate to the server at hand. This environment file should never be added to SVN or uploaded to another server, because it only pertains to its own locale.

With this technique, you can happily “svn ci / svn up” or FTP upload your code revisions from your local dev server to the remote live one, and they will take effect at that time, while still using the server’s own particular settings.

Conclusion

I hope that this tutorial has been useful. There is really no more efficient way to develop than when your local code changes can be tested immediately. But one reminder: if your internet gateway is restarted or acquires another IP address somehow, you will need to change the test app’s settings on Facebook (and any references of your own to that IP) to reflect this. Also, if you are traveling and using someone else’s internet, you’ll need to have access to their router to go through the steps above of ensuring port 80 forwarding to your machine, adjusting the test app’s server settings on Facebook, etc… Still, I have done this at a number of houses around the US, and it has worked like a charm.

Another alternative is of course to use a service like no-ip.com, which tracks your gateway’s IP changes and allows you to always access it using a certain domain name. If you do move around a lot, this could be a time-saving solution (though you’ll still need to pass port 80 to your box).

If you have any tips, techniques, or strategies of your own, please leave them in the comments!

Technorati Tags: facebook, apps, local-development, development, how-to, tutorial, facebook-apps

Everyone in Silicon Valley and the rest of the tech world have a new favorite drink: Facebook Kool-Aid. I think Facebook may just be the solution to everyone’s problems. Soon enough, someone will develop a Facebook application that cures cancer. Today I spent one hour in a meeting discussing “social networking marketing strategies.” As part of the discussion, I asked the CEO of a popular startup in Silicon Valley about what the most effective social networking mechanism is. He responded “Facebook.” Not that I didn’t already know the answer, but when you are sitting in on meetings where discussion will actually impact the future direction of a company, it suddenly becomes more significant. Everywhere you look, someone is talking about how wonderful Facebook is. Whether it is the general user, who doesn’t care at all about the future of technology or a technology elitist such as Jeff Pulver. Today, Jeff Pulver stated that he is leaving LinkedIn completely and just using Facebook. Pulver states his rationale plainly:

In LinkedIn, everything centers around establishing a connection. In Facebook, connecting is just the beginning. Facebook is all about community. And this can been seen by doing things like leaving messages on users’ walls, joining groups and having discussions, as well as some of the more social applications built for Facebook.

I also have been having a similar experience to Jeff in that I am adding most of the people I meet at technology events to my Facebook friends. So has Facebook become the most effective platform for both professional and social interactions? Possibly. I am able to keep tabs on all my contacts much more easily on Facebook than any of the other platforms. Conversely, I still prefer to use LinkedIn after attending a networking event because it is the easiest way for me to separate my social and professional lives. Will you leave LinkedIn for Facebook?

Facebook is under attack and it isn’t pretty. Mark Zuckerberg, the creator of Facebook, is being accused of stealing the source code and business plan of ConnectU, a social network with a similar strategy to Facebook. According to VentureBeat, “The plaintiffs have demanded that Facebook be shut down and that full control of the site - and its profits - be turned over to them.” The shocking part about this case is that it started 3 years ago. While it is nothing new, it has still been dragging on. Both sides have powerful legal teams and there are big stakes. Without having this case resolved, it is going to be extremely challenging for Facebook to file for an IPO. My guess is that there is going to have to be a pretty large settlement at the end of this that covers the costs of the plantiffs’ lawyers and compensation for stealing the concept.