Roughly a day has passed since Facebook announced the details of their new Application Verification program, and it’s no surprise that several strong opinions have already been voiced in the Developer’s Forums. Here’s how most concerned developers are voicing thie cost vs. benefit.

The Costs

To most developers, the $375 verification fee is daunting. That’s certainly a large fee for any small to medium sized developer with limited income.

And while it may seem like a large fee, it could be more easily justified if it were only a one-time fee. After all, assuming it takes an hour to verify one application, the man hours could add up quickly on Facebook’s end - especially when you consider there are about 48,000 Facebook applications out there right now.

However the one-time fee is just a pipe-dream for now. As cited in the official documentation:

Verification will expire at the end of twelve months, and your application will need to be re-reviewed to maintain verified status. We will reach out to you at the end of your verification time period to remind you. At that point you will need to submit another verification fee, and the verification process will repeat.

This recurring $375 annual fee will be the deciding factor for many developers. This exclusivity is surely somewhat intentional, however. With fewer verified applications, verified apps will stand out much more.

The Benefits

The official word is that verified applications will have access to larger communication channel limits, a special application badge as seen above, and greater exposure within the News Feed, all to be rolled out in waves starting in early 2009. Another benefit which has not been mentioned widely is the $100 towards advertising credit. Is this really that significant? Several developers in the forums have also expressed concern over the potential for verified applications to become “favored” with respect to the Terms of Service.

Whatever life is like for unverified apps, verified apps are sure to see an increase in users. Just how much exactly is yet to be seen, as Facebook still has an important role to fulfill: educating the public about verification. If an average user does not believe there is substantial difference between verified and unverified apps, then developers are likely to be paying strictly to improve their brand in the app directory.

Conclusions

There is still a lot to be seen about the program. If you are looking for advice on whether to apply for verification or not, the most important thing is to consider is how much of a difference it will make for your target user base. If a user cannot distinguish between your application and a verified one, hundreds of successful applications and companies have already proven that you can become successful and profitable without verification.

It will also be important to see how many apps get verified. If only a small number do, then an average user is likely to use that “awesome new application” regardless of how unsafe or useless it may be.

In the coming months, the success of the program will ultimately depend on how well Facebook can impress users with the notion that unverified applications are less safe or useful than verified ones, and consequently, on how strongly users respond to this new idea.

Who said Facebook isn’t working on generating more money? This afternoon Facebook began testing out the display of three ads on the side rather than two. Previously ads were limited to either two Facebook ads, one Facebook ad and a banner, or just a banner. Now the company is testing out displaying one more.

It makes a lot of sense that the company would begin displaying more ads considering that users are scrolling further down the page on many applications and on profiles that contain more content. This is a pretty good way for the company to try increasing click-thru rates. While it’s not definite that this will accomplish their goal of generating more clicks, common logic would suggest it will.

The company has been doing an increasing number of ad tests over the past couple months including the addition of video ads which have shown up on the homepage with increasing regularity. It’s a small change but it has the potential to boost their revenue. Unfortunately we can’t yet take a look at the company’s quarterly earnings report since they aren’t public, once they are, we will definitely enjoy looking forward to how these changes impact the company’s bottom line.

We are all consumers online, so we need your help and input. We are in the process of gathering some accurate data about twitter usage & trends for some upcoming reports that we will be publishing. Please take 1 minute and click thru the 10 question survey. Your vote matters.

Please feel free to retweet as the more people that take the survey; the more accurate the twitter survey results will be. Thanks!

If the survey looks messed up in your browser you can also take the survey here.

If the survey looks messed up in your browser you can also take the survey here.

Share this on:

The new Facebook for BlackBerry, version 1.5, is scheduled for release in January 2009, according to crackberry.com. The latest version of the BlackBerry-specific mobile site hosts a few new features that you may find helpful.

New account creation lets you make a new account directly from your BlackBerry, and you can also access and manage your Facebook phone book. This includes the ability to view your friends’ phone numbers, publish your phone number, and request phone numbers. This is an important feature as it allows users to tie in phone numbers from Facebook straight into their BlackBerry contact lists.



As birthday reminders have proven to be one of the most useful applications of a Facebook account, it’s no surprise that the new version 1.5 has a birthday and BlackBerry calendar link, automatically importing and linking your friends’ big day to your phone’s calendar. This useful calendar integration goes for Facebook events as well, with multi-color differentiation for both birthday and event markings on the calendar. Need an additional reminder for birthdays and events? This can be set up as well.

With a major highlight of Facebook for BlackBerry version 1.5 being the furthered integration into the Facebook network and BlackBerry mobile device, there are some concerns that come to mind, considering the initial issues that arose for the first Facebook for BlackBerry release last year. Too much integration in an un-modified manner led to some overrun applications on the BlackBerry, as Nick experienced on his own handheld device.

Yet given Facebook’s involvement with the development of the BlackBerry version of the popular social network, as well as previous experience and the seemingly minimal leaps that the new version 1.5 features will offer in comparison to the first version, such BlackBerry malfunctions seem to be an unlikely occurrence. It’s also important to note that Facebook for BlackBerry version 2.0 is also reported to be in the works. According to crackberry.com, Facebook for BlackBerry version 2.0 is slotted for release later on next year.

I don’t know many high school students other than those in my immediate family, but the high school students I do know are often able to get a good idea about what college life is all about based on the photos shared by their college-age friends on Facebook.  But if this isn’t enough, the CheckMyCampus application could shed some light on what really goes down during those formidable college years.  A finalist in the fbFund competitive round, CheckMyCampus offers a media “viewing station” to provide first hand accounts of how awesome college life is across the nation. Facebook users can upload videos and images to show their own perspective of college life.  The ultimate goal of CheckMyCampus is to give high school students a realistic portrayal of life on a college campus.



There are some interesting checks and balances that CheckMyCampus has instilled, to ensure that uploaded content is in fact useful for the application’s purposes.  For instance, a user wanting to upload content of any kind will need to be associated with a college on Facebook.  That means that you’ll need to have one of those handy .edu email addresses registered with your Facebook account.  At first this seemed limiting, as there are those users that may have gone to a college but don’t have an alumni email account.  But even with this particular restriction, CheckMyCampus is still encouraging fresh and up-to-date content to be added to its application.

Once you’re able to add content, however, the process is fairly simple. Videos can be uploaded directly, and images can be imported from your Facebook albums. While the image import is convenient, having an image upload would broaden the amount of photos that could be shared to the application.  And the lack of a video import option appears to be part of CheckMyCampus’ business model, as original content is requested, and ads are placed on the CheckMyCampus video player.

Aside from the various features on CheckMyCampus, the only major concern I have is the type of content that could be shared through this application. Could there be a downside to college students showing videos of beer pong, and talking about getting hammered while watching the game? Though most college students hit the legal drinking age while in school, there are those that may concerned about the underage students in college, as well as the high school students viewing content on this app.

Nevertheless, a first-hand perspective of college life wrapped nicely in a Facebook application is actually quite helpful, as the real-life ramifications of a given campus are often the true deciding factors for a high school student picking a college.  Having a physical extension of CheckMyCampus, such as organized groups on various campuses for setting up interviews and tours, could become a potential avenue for growth as well.

If you enjoy the application, go vote for Check My Campus.

Guerilla marketers interested in finding ways of gaining significant distribution for free on Facebook are increasingly exploiting a Facebook feature designed to make photos more social.

Photo tag spamming, as it could be called, is a tactic by which marketers who have built large networks of Facebook friends proceed to “tag” their friends in photos in which they do not exist. Why? Here’s how it works.

The Viral Dynamics of Photo Tagging

Photos are extremely popular inside Facebook: Facebook gives both significant visibility on the profile page and significant distribution in the News Feed to photo-related stories. The reason Facebook is the most popular photo sharing site on the web is not because its features are the best, but because its Photos application is very tightly integrated with the social graph.

Tagging is the primary means by which photos are made social: when a user uploads a photo, they can “tag” their friends who appear in the photo. Notifications are sent to tagged friends letting them know that a new tagged photo of them exists on Facebook, and feed stories are published on both the tagger’s and taggee’s profiles.

Users who receive a notification that they have just been tagged usually investigate the photo. If they don’t want to be associated with the picture, they “detag” themselves from it. Similarly, users who see a feed story about their friends being tagged in photos often check out the photo.

Bottom line: Photo-related notifications and feed stories both get a lot of impressions and have a high conversion rate.

Photos as a Facebook Marketing Channel: Opportunities and Limitations

As noted in our Facebook Marketing Bible, which goes into depth on

dozens of marketing tactics inside Facebook, tagging Facebook Photos (and Notes as well) can be used to drive traffic. However, legitimate marketers using these tactics should be aware of a couple important limitations:

1. If you abuse the implied social contract with your Facebook friends by spamming them with photo tags, you’re sure to quickly develop a low conversion rate and lose friends. And if you tag spam too much, Facebook’s automated spam detection systems will simply shut down your account.


2. Unlike Notes, which can include direct links to destination URLs (inside or outside Facebook), Photos can’t. While you can caption the photo or label the photo album with a few words or a URL you’re trying to push, driving traffic to a Photo page through tagging is not likely to produce a lot of traffic to a destination page.

Rather, photo tagging can be used as a way to send specific messages to targeted people - a special kind of social capital transaction not entirely unlike sending a virtual gift or writing on a wall. It can be effectively used to occasionally notify select people whose attention you want to bring to content you’ve created.

Finally, some Facebook applications are making use of photo tagging as well. TouchGraph is a friend network visualization app that outputs photo albums and (somewhat overzealously) tags photos with your friends’ names. KnockedUp is a more interesting example created by an experimental marketing group at Microsoft.

Conclusion

At the end of the day, if Facebook hears a lot of complaints about people “hacking” Facebook Photos, it will likely tighten the controls on accounts that are tagging too much, showing a high detag signal, or getting reported frequently. Marketers should think about more creative, authentic, and social ways of creating “social memes” on Facebook - as opposed to simply trying to spam until they get shut down.

It is possible that Facebook will open up the Photos API more to applications and allow for more robust and viral features to be created by the developer community. If done right, doing so could be great for users, developers, and Facebook. Until then, applications will be somewhat limited in the way they can employ Facebook Photos in their applications.

This morning Jared Cohen, a member of the U.S. Secretary of State’s Policy Planning Staff, posted an article on Facebook’s blog. In it he covers something which I covered back in March, the creation of a group on Facebook to protest the FARC. This movement, that was created on Facebook, has been used as a case study for how social technology can impact the world. It also highlights the destruction of bureaucratic barriers between governments and citizens. As Cohen writes, “This really was a new wave of civil society in which there were no offices, government grants, or forms that needed to be filled out and filed for the establishment.”

This morning I had the privilege to sit in on a panel for the Washington, D.C. Economic Partnership, in which everybody in the room was excited about two things: the new administration’s full embrace of technology, and how social technology is transforming the political realm. It is no longer required for a group of people to get together in a room and make change happen.



Instead individuals can now create groups on social networks (especially Facebook) and the ideas of those groups spread virally. In a globally interconnected world, we all learn from each other and in the case of Oscar Morales, who created the group which led to the protest against the FARC, we have no doubt learned some valuable lessons.

Inspired by this change, “Facebook, Access 360 Media, Columbia Law School, Google, Howcast, MTV, YouTube, and the U.S. Department of State are bringing leaders of 17 pioneering organizations from 15 countries together with technology experts next month for the first-ever conclave to empower youth against violence and oppression through the use of the latest online tools. ” The event is called the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit.

We are in the midst of a tectonic shift as the barriers between government and citizens are eliminated, and this new administration will be part of leading the charge. Check out the video below to learn more about the FARC protest via Facebook, or go learn more about the Alliance of Youth Movements Summit.

Image of FARC Protest taken by AP and provided by the BBC

This week at the Digital Non-Conference, a program put on by the Ad Club of Cincinnati, Ted McConnell, General Manager of Interactive Marketing and Innovation at Procter & Gamble shared his perspective on marketing on social media in general and Facebook in particular, AdAge reports. A couple of interesting quotes:

“What in heaven’s name made you think you could monetize the real estate in which somebody is breaking up with their girlfriend? … We hijack their own conversations, their own thoughts and feelings, and try to monetize it.”

And:

McConnell cited Facebook applications as a potentially valuable vehicle for advertisers, one in which they can create an environment that’s favorable for their brands and consumers alike.

While reports from the Ad Club of Cincinnati may not sound interesting to some app developers off the bat, it’s important for more developers to understand the different perspectives of people investing ad dollars in the space, so that applications can collectively become a more viable channel for a greater variety of advertisers.

If your Facebook application has vanished off the face of the earth (or at least from users’ news feeds) since the redesign, the social network has just launched a new program to help you get your swagger back. The Application Verification Program, announced earlier this year at the Facebook developer conference, is now live, allowing developers to submit their applications for review.

Applications meeting Facebook’s standards will be marked with a verification badge, and more importantly, “users will see more information from verified applications as we increase their allocations for communication channels such as requests and notifications, and increase visibility of their stories in News Feed.� Those are of course the same viral channels that helped many applications grow rapidly when the platform first launched, but also caused users to feel the platform was spammy as opportunistic developers bombarded them with requests.

So what does it take to get your application verified? Facebook has published 10 “Guiding Principles,� with the central themes being that apps should be “Meaningful,� “Trustworthy,� and “Well-Designed.� It also takes $375 – the application fee that Facebook is charging to developers seeking to get their apps verified. Facebook will begin granting apps the benefits of Verified status early next year.

Essentially, coupled with the current fbFund finalists, Facebook is resurrecting the platform, which has been largely hidden to passive users (folks who ignore the apps completely) since the social network rolled out its redesign. It’s all been very methodical – first, bury the applications under a special tab on user profiles, then, dole out funding to the best app developers, and finally, offer everyone else a way to get their apps back in the game. Ultimately, it might get Facebook where they want to be – a platform offering several hundred high quality apps, as opposed to tens of thousands of useless ones.

---
Related Articles at Mashable | All That's New on the Web:

Facebook Announces Great Apps Program and FBFund Winners
Australia to Apply Film Ratings on All Commercial Web Content
Facebook’s New Sugar Mama: Virgin Mobile
AdBrite Serves Ads For Facebook Apps
Is Scrabulous Officially Dead?
Age Verification For Downloads Coming To The UK
Last.fm Releases Upgraded Facebook App

Want better distribution and visibility of your Facebook application? Today, Facebook launched the registration process for their previously announced “Applicatoin Verficiation Program”. How do you submit your application to be part of the program? Well, go fill out the Registration of Interest form for the Application Verification Program and you will be contacted shortly. Once you are contacted, you will have to pay a non-refundable $375 fee so that Facebook can review your application to ensure it follows the company’s guiding principles.

One of the biggest challenges for Facebook has been the proliferation of what could be subjectively described as less than useful applications. For example, the platform still continues to have an issue with simple quizzes such as “What kind of person do you attract?” Also there has been a revival of last year’s successful Snowball Fight! application. There is arguably not much value to throwing snowballs at other users but over 314,000 active users in the past month have participated in the fun.



So what exactly makes for a good application? According to Facebook’s integration point checklist, there are 12 important components:

1. Applications should not surprise or deceive users.


2. Email should be used to notify users of time-sensitive or user-requested application activity in their off-Facebook email inbox.


3. Requests should only trigger action if a user responds.


4. User-to-user notifications should be social, include both the sender and recipient, and should not request users to take action.


5. Application-to-user notifications should be relevant to and targeted toward a user.


6. News Feed stories should accurately describe a user’s action and full stories should come from high-user investment activities.


7. Publisher is leveraged to provide rich content to user profiles and reflects the user’s intent and expectations.


8. For tabs, Facebook has been a bit more broad and suggests tabs should “prominently and predominantly show information about the user”. Instead of using the tab as an alternative to the application, let the user share information about themselves.


9. The application information section should only show information directly related to the user.


10. Profile boxes should be compelling given that the user has entered enough information for it to be displayed.


11. Message attachment button text should begin with a verb and make it clear what the attachment will be.


12. Application should enable users to report inappropriate user-generated content and the application owner should respond to reports of inappropriate content.

One interesting component about the application verification program is that developers must have their application reevaluated every 12 months. The benefits of becoming a verified application have not been articulated by Facebook yet aside from a promotional badge and “increased visibility”. Specifics have not been provided in regards to what exactly increased visibility means.

Students and non-profits can receive a discount on the verification program fee and being accepted to the program will also result in discounts to the f8 developer conference. If you’d like more information regarding the program, you can go read about it here.