Inside Facebook: the Facebook Book

The FB site has been down this morning, from around 6:30am PST according to my logs, so going over 2 hrs now. I’m suspecting a DOS attack related to the platform changes, discovered around the valley yesterday. I have no evidence for that at all. I did notice that the developers documentation pages went down shortly after the stories hit valley way for a few hours.

20070629 9:28:56|error|219|acting
20070629 9:28:57|error|219|home:total:a:1:{s:5:"total";s:4:"8708";} 

20070629 12:08:38|error|217|acting
20070629 12:09:10|error|217|acting

Some developers are vocally upset, since their weeks of feverish work are less likely to hit wide adoption. As invites go 10/day vs all right now is a tectonic shift - from very likely to explode to may grow quickly. Users will need motivation to go back and invite.

Why? Because the high early adoptions of the initial apps didn’t result in high usage or great satisfaction. Not a huge surprise, because the first of anything is rarely great, and applications will mature and improve.

So now, only 10 people per day will get to shout that your app is great, which will benefit the tone of the entire app process. It’s unfortunate that the early movers got such an advantage, and that there will be intertia against uninstalls - so basically they have an open window to make their apps effective at retaining users and building daily usage.. which is exactly what facebook wants them to be doing.

I am Green has been growing steadily, even with notifications down for 2 days, and without invites. So I’ll just be happy knowing those work even a little bit.

I’m upset about how this was (not) communicated though. I spent at least 6 hrs over the last two days fixing and fixing a bug in my invite system which wasn’t a bug.. it was the new way. Similarly, if notifications are down (and i haven’t received any in two days) that deserves a posting to some developer rss feed, so I don’t wonder what I did wrong. FB should give app developers more love, just as ebay did to power users. We’re energentic, grateful, and passionate, and there are 69,791 of us.

The Facebook F8 Platform will propel the site ahead of myspace in total pageviews, within a year.

This alexa graph of myspace vs. facebook looks quite innocuous, so my prediction is not self-evident. Myspace has grown above 2.5% of total traffic and claims to be adding 300K new users/day. Facebook just tickling both 1% of traffic and 2% of Reach.

Two factors will enable this:

1. The Feed will become so rapidly changing and interesting that we’ll all need to check it more often than email.
2. The Profile will really become our online identity.

Currently few FB page views are of the Profile, because it hasn’t been interesting enough. Well, now it will have both the mini-feed rapidly updating - where I can see what this friend Tried to put in my Feed, and unique application boxes, interesting enough for my attention. There is no archive of the Feed .. once you miss it, it is gone, and I think it would be against the TOS to cache it. So you gotta go look at yours now.

The developer application/group crossed 33K members today. Each one can have up to 10 application keys. I’ve created two applications, Lists and Shout, and have 6 other keys in development. That means hundreds of thousands of applications are coming, and the beauty of the viral application adoption model is that the most useful applications get use. Even those useful only to whatever niche they serve. Some of these applications will be backed by serious marketing efforts, by companies to are paying to develop them, and betting heavily on their success.

Mark has pulled thousands of application developers into his fold, and they are rushing to fill a rapidly closing opportunity: to be the first X, Y or Z application on Facebook. I personally have been pushing myself beyond my physical limits (down to 3-5 hrs/day of sleep for 9 days) yet delighting in the chance. Google search is now within the site. I’m be putting wikipedia in, unless happily some person beats me to it. I’m only one of thousands, and that is great for Facebook.

To exceed myspace, FB only needs to double membership, and double pageviews for each member. Since 50% of all members visit daily (a metric myspace will never match), this is extremely achievable in one year.

Since this is my first annual prognostication column (on my daughter’s birthday) I will also add that FB will IPO within 5 months of that date, at a total valuation greater than $10B. Google’s was $21B several years ago, and FB has much greater relative traffic and share than google did at the time.