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Foreword for the Chinese and Spanish editions

15 months ago I left Facebook and soon started writing Inside Facebook, on the same flight I ride today bound for Japan. How much can possibly change in one year? Facebook is now battling with qq.com for 10th largest global website, and qq.com is the second largest site in China. Facebook serves more pageviews than Ebay.com and will likely soon pass Google.com.

Facebook launched its API platform in the early summer, and thereby revolutionized the internet. As I write within this book, web surfing should be a social activity, which you do with your friends, neighbors, groups and family. My web experience should be informed by information about me, and Facebook application developers are busily benefiting from the rich profile information available to them, only for my and my friends benefit. Now web surfing will certainly be both a fully social and a more uniquely personal activity, as every social network moves to replicate and supersede Facebook's innovation.

The core message of Inside Facebook, that You should go build an online business right now, is much more true than when I wrote it. The bar for success and costs are even lower, and the potential rewards higher - in a networked society where attractive niche products can get to their audience, and generally popular applications can spread unbelievable well.

Honesty Box, a very cool utility for sending anonymous messages to your friends, grew to over a million users in a few weeks from launch, and now has over 2.5 million users and growing. It was developed by an entrepreneur in a weekend, and all together has involved about 30 engineering days to optimize and maintain, and stands as a monument to the wisdom of grabbing first mover advantage. For all of us, the social internet has only just begun.

I've built 3 applications in two months, and "I Am Green" delightfully grew from zero to over 10,000 users in less than a month. Now 20K+ members are sharing and committing to ideas for saving the planet with their friends. Who could have imagined, such viral power before the launch of the Facebook API?

I'm without internet access, finally resting as best as I know how, yet my Facebook Apps are serving thousands of pageviews an hour, and growing members 10% a day. I'm not doing anything, unable to do anything, yet the technology I cobbled together in a few weeks, is interesting enough to attract thousands of visitors a day. And 300 other applications are growing at least as quickly, even if they are less serious and planet saving :-)

I see I was wrong about the specific companies I picked as interesting in my prognosticating chapter. I was right that Microsoft's Wallop took a big wallop, but I hadn't even heard of the big players today, like Rockyou and Slide.com. It's much easier to spot trends than winners, and we can all float a trend.

I see one other major financial trend, so on a personal note, I've extracted all of my personal investments (excluding facebook) from the booming stock markets and am still waiting on housing prices. Primarily I believe in the trend towards rising commodity prices, especially as China and India rise to fair prosperity. Noticing how hard it is to spot a futures trade winner even within that trend, I've created the "Fantasy Futures Exchange" Facebook App on my PTrades.com platform, to teach people about investing in Futures, which I foresee as an increasingly important financial market. Everyone wants stuff, and as over 2.5 billion people come to rightfully share global wealth, there will be more people sharing that same amount of stuff. You can't just print stuff, in the way that powerful people have been creating company shares and fiat currency. Yet nor can you make money investing in Stuff without learning an entirely new set of skills.

The growth I appreciate for my own sites is nothing compared to the most viral applications, usually involving vampires, giving gifts or flowers or pretty fish, bikini models or novelties like a vibrating hamster. Some group games like poker or chess seem to be growing well. "I Am Green" is showing that a serious application can succeed, and many will follow.

How is it possible that someone could build something interesting and useful in a few weeks, spending only a few thousand dollars? Facebook is doing most of my work for me. They are serving the pages, I'm just passing some content. They are providing all of the marketing and tools. They are integrating all of the information about my friends, which makes my application interesting. Anyone can make a website saying how green someone is, but only on Facebook could I build it so as to easily share that information with my friends, in a just barely attractive enough way. Now all social networks will follow suit, and Facebook applications will be able to run on other platforms. Facebook is in a great position to continue to lead the innovation.

Facebook and I can do it because the freely available LAMP platform gives so much flexibility and power. As I've built, all of my developer tools, software infrastructure and web hosting service costs between $60 and $300/month. I'm stunned as I type that, because only 8 years ago during the dotcom boom, companies were taking tens of millions of dollars to put up a website. Facebook was built and deployed on the savings of a few college students, and my sites are being created out of my ordinary paychecks.

Appreciating the true cost of Stuff, and knowing where and how it is made, is very Green. As prices rise, there will be much less waste, but I fear there could be much conflict and suffering. "I Am Green" and its friends will lead towards a moral conscience on Facebook, and we'll see powerful, pro-social benefits of internet technology. This is my passion today.

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