Creating Bebo Applications

Intro to creating Bebo Applications presented at Graphing Social Patterns (Bebo has embraced OpenSocial):

OpenSocial and Google App Engine

Patrick Chanezon (API Evangelist) and Paul McDonald (Product Manager for Google App Engine) presented a technical overview of OpenSocial and Google App Engine at Graphing Social Patterns East. If you aren't familiar with OpenSocial see the second presentation below, first.

Adam Lovallo of Inside Facebook was live blogging the session.
Introduction to Google OpenSocial

Here's a video of Patrick Chanezon:


If you're interested in building OpenSocial Applications using Google App Engine, you may want to check out the article Building an OpenSocial App with Google AppEngine by Lane LiaBraaten, Google Developer Programs.

Open Social: Open For Business - Presentation

From the Graphing Social Patterns conference I blogged about the Open Social: Open for Business session. Following are the slides from the session and covers Google OpenSocial, hi5, imeem, MySpace and my.aol.com

Viral Marketing and Advertising Strategies for Social Networks - Presentation

Earlier, I blogged about the Graphing Social Patterns session, Viral Marketing & Advertising Strategies for Social Networks - Presentation.

Kevin Barenblat, co-founder of Context Optional uploaded the slides to slideshare.net (Thanks Kevin!). I have embedded them below.

“one of the best [presentations] i've ever seen on this topic”- Dave McClure (500 Hats)

I agree with Dave as it was certainly one of the best and most thought provoking sessions at the conference and I am not alone in thinking that. I heard rave reviews from attendees after Kevin finished his session.

Following presentation is by Jeff Ragovin, VP of Sales for Buddy Media.

Mobile Social Networks - A Comparison

In the Social + Mobile = Sociable (Social Networks for SMS, IM and Mobile Devices session, at Graphing Social Patterns East, Benjamin Joffe presented a full of insights session comparing mobile social networks and what makes them so powerful and successful in Asia. I found Benjamin's slides on slideshare (embedded below).

Among other things, Benjamin focused on ARFU (average revenue from users), sticky features, business models, page views growth, services, revenues and profits for various social networks. Very interesting presentation.

If you missed Graphing Social Patterns East this year, make sure you go to the next year one. You may also want to check out Graphing Social Patterns West happening in CA later this year. Otherwise, you'll be missing a lot.

Dave McClure - Top 5 Things That Fail and Win on Social Networks

Dave McClure, master of 500 hats and the host of Graphing Social Patterns, opened the conference with a brief but thought provoking presentation on top 5 things that fail and win on social networks.

Top 5 things that fail on social networks:

• Too many friends
• Too many apps
• Virality is dead
• Ain't no money (targeted advertising fail)
• Your privacy isn't

Top 5 things that win on social networks:

• Poking
• Multiple platforms
• News Feeds
• "App" - vertising
• Data portability

The presentation was quick, simple and brief but had an important message for social networks . Dave is right that having too many friends can fail a social network. You just don't feel connected to your friends if there are too many of them. Virality is also a very crucial component of social networks. If there is no proper platform for viral engagements, it can adversely affect the social network. Finally privacy is something that social network operators just can't ignore. It is much too important today and users are quick to sound their opinions. Just recall what happened in the case of Facebook Beacon, a poorly executed strategy from Facebook that didn't respect privacy. It's no surprise that Facebook took it down after experiencing a major backlash.

Two points I'd like to add to the list of things that cause social networks to fail are scalability and addition of poorly thought features. If your social network isn't scalable and you don't have a high availability strategy then eventually users are going to leave. They may not leave immediately, but they will, especially if a high availability strategy isn't implemented. Addition of poorly thought out features that are primarily there for monetization and don't directly benefit users will hurt user experience causing them to become less engaged on the network.

Overall, this is a very interesting list to remember. Thanks Dave for sharing this.

Graphing Social Patterns - Recap

Jefferson Memorial - Washington DC

I got back today around 5 PM from Washington DC. There was a 3 mile backup on the turnpike because of an accident.

DC was very hot and humid. Back in New York, the weather wasn't much cooler either.

Now that I am back, I wanted to take a few moments to recap my experience and thank the incredible people whose hard work made this conference so much fun.

Dave McClure - The awesome host who made it all possible

Graphing Social Patterns East was a lot of fun, definitely invaluable and one of the best ones in terms of networking opportunities and content if you are interested in penetrating or capitalizing social networks. Dave McClure (the very awesome host), the speakers and the O'reilly conference team did an outstanding job overall to make this conference an unforgettable one.

I have already blogged about few of the sessions. My intention was to take notes from every session but I failed to keep up. At times the conversation became so interesting especially during the panels that I wanted to listen in carefully than having to type everything. In my upcoming posts, I will try to find the slides and other blog posts for you. Here are quick links to my summaries:

• Geek Metrics: Using App Analytics to Drive Distribution, Engagement and Monetization
• Open Social: Open for Business
• Social + Mobile = Sociable (Social Networks for SMS, IM and Mobile Devices
• Widget Strategies and Social Platforms
• Facebook Business and Marketing Solutions
• Viral Marketing and Advertising Strategies for Social Networks
• Developing and Promoting Social Network Applications (Rules of Thumb)
• Social Networks for Business and Marketing Managers

The video clips Dave had painstakingly gathered fit right in with the presentations that followed them and were a lot of fun. Dave has posted the links to videos from both day 1 and day 2.

Sebastien de Halleux - COO of PlayFish

On Sunday night, as I was about to head to my room, I saw two gentlemen sitting at the bar. As I approached closer, I had to ask, "Are you Dave McClure? You look just like your photo on your blog." To which he made a very friendly reply, "Yes." I ended up sitting with Dave and Sebastien de Halleux of Playfish for a couple of drinks. Very quickly I was impressed by the insights Dave has regarding just about everything. Sebastien's company is growing very fast on Facebook and one of their games, Bowling Buddies, is in fact addicting. I highly recommend checking it out.

Chris Bissell - Chief Software Architect of MySpace

For the first time, I got to meet the MySpace team. Dave introduced them the night before the conference. Really cool and original folks who are not only at the top of their game but also very helpful in lending advice. I had great chats with Allen Hurff (SVP Engineering), Chris Bissell (Chief Software Architect) and Max Newbould (Platform Lead and Product Owner). I was pleasantly surprised by their personalities as I had wrongfully thought that being owned by News Corp., MySpace team would be a lot corporate. But that wasn't the case. Quickly after meeting the team, I was having engaging conversations with them.

Max Newbould - Platform Lead and Product Owner for MySpace

Another thing that pleasantly surprised me was that how much effort MySpace is putting in creating relationships with developers. They have created a dedicated channel on IRC just for developers and are hosting DevDemo days to interact on a more personal basis with developers. In addition, Allen put his friendfeed and twitter streams along with his MySpace and email addresses to give developers multiple ways to connect with him. Watch OpenSocial MySpace Application Demo by Chris Bissell. Immediately after the conference, Max took off to give MySpace presentation in various countries.


Ro Choy of RockYou presented an informative session on viral growth and how users use social networks. His presentation was full of examples on differentiating viral from anti-viral with countless tips on building viral engagement. For anyone wanting to explore marketing opportunities with social applications, this session alone was worth the price paid for conference ticket.

I also met Sachin Rekhi of imeem. Sachin had an incredible story about how he left his very promising job, formed a company, worked very hard to secure licensing contracts, got engaged and sold his company all within a year. A true entrepreneur at heart, Sachin was offering great advice to anyone interested in music startups. He warned about the complexities in negotiating music licensing deals. Sachin used to work at Microsoft creating Visual Studio. He had to go to great lengths to create an Open Social container at imeem since his team wasn't ready to use Shindig. Today, anyone can start creating their application utilizing imeem's Open Social container. Be warned that Sachin is more interested in quality than quantity when it comes to applications. As I learned more about imeem at the conference, I couldn't help but think that Sachin and his team have build an incredible product despite the licensing hurdles they had to face. Thanks, Sachin for great conversations and for building imeem.
Adam Ludwig of Give Real is an entrepreneur working on another disruptive idea. I have known Adam for sometime now and it was a great pleasure to catch up with him at the conference. Adam generously invited me and Michelle for a wonderful lunch at the roof top of Hyatt. Thanks Adam!
Adam Ludwig chatting with Benjamin Joffe
After hearing the thoughts of Benjamin Joffe (Plus Eight Star), I wanted to engage in discussion about mobile social networking and monetization with him. Benjamin had unmatched insight into how to monetize social networks and factors behind the success of mobile social networking in Asian markets. His presentation was one of my favorite ones.

At lunch one day, I sat on a table with Chris Sandoval (Director of New Business Initiatives, Enterprise Hosting at NTT). Chris had a great offer for startups to show how dedicated his company is to acquire business. IIRC, Chris' company hosts Twitter. He told us a joke that went something like: if you throw a stone in US, it would hit a lawyer. if you throw a stone in Japan, it would hit someone who works for NTT.

Scott Slack (founder of a100voices) was also at the lunch table. He is working on a very interesting project as well that focuses on social networking and locality to create content. Check out a100voices.org for more details.

Also sitting with me on the table was Durjoy (Ace) Bhattacharjya (VP, Interactive Marketing, Digital Media of Core Performance). Ace's company trains top athletes and they recently signed a deal with Sheraton to provide a custom program to integrate their services with health clubs at Sheraton.

As I stepped out to smoke a cig. (bad me!), I met Sonu Kansal (CTO of Associated Content). Sonu runs a large infrastructure to support the operations of Associated Content which now has an incredible amount of content. We talked about various scalability and high availability challenges among other things.

On another smoke break, I ran into Peter Foley (CTO of Artez Interactive). Peter's company offers online fund raising solutions to non profit organizations including Canadian Breast Cancer Foundation, Children's Miracle Network and National Ovarian Cancer Foundation. We talked on a variety of things ranging from utilizing social networks to technical challenges. Thanks Peter for a great conversation!

Adam Nash - Senior Director of Products, LinkedIn

Adam Nash (Senior Director of LinkedIn) gave a high level overview of his company that was very interesting. Of all the social networks LinkedIn is the one I use the most. LinkedIn is working on opening their platform to developers so we can expect to see some great applications. Adam, did you get my LinkedIn invitation? :)

Michael Lazerow - Buddy Media

Michael Lazerow of Buddy Media is really good at his job too. His presentations and insights were eye opening. His company has been working on disruptive applications. Unfortunately, although I wanted to, I didn't get to chat with him one on one. I can't wait to run into him next time.

I really enjoyed meeting, probably the funniest guy at the conference, Mo Kakwan (of MoBouy) as well. His sense of humor was incredible making everyone laugh and smile. I could see that everyone enjoyed Mo's company very much.

As the presentations ended on the last day, I sat in the lobby with a few friends including Mo. There I had some great conversations with Siqi Chen (CEO of Serious Business). Siqi had to catch a flight so we cut our conversation short. He is a very smart entrepreneur with a great personality who created the Friends for Sale application that is getting rave reviews and has a very impressive number of daily active users (IIRC a million plus). Siqi understands social graphs and social interactions on social networking sites and plans to create more engaging games that are built around these interactions. Read Siqi's blog post on Startupism.com, "How to Not Suck at Facebook Apps."

Also sitting with us in the lobby was Brendan King (CEO of MyFrontSteps). Brendan is a real estate veteran and an entrepreneur working on creating exciting solutions for the real estate market.

While we were sitting, Marc Porcelli (Chief Marketing Officer of SinglesNet) joined us. Marc's company is a leading provider of online dating services and he was interested in buying more impressions for his site. It's impressive how much Marc's company is dominating the online dating market. He provided many usability gems as to why his company is perceived better by online daters than eHarmony or Match.com.

In the session, Geek Metrics, Hiten Shah (CEO of KissMetrics), Albert Lai (Kontangent), Ian Swanson (Sometrics, Inc.) and Roy Pereira (Refresh Analytics) provided intuition on the metrics for applications and widgets. Dave moderated the session and herded the panel to highly unique selling proposition of each of the analytics provider. Later, I had interesting conversations with Albert Lai who is an established serial entrepreneur having sold several companies.

Oh, I almost forgot about Mark Sendo (CEO of Urturn). A very approachable, friendly and smart guy, Mark has a background in Macroeconomics and his new company is creating a promising virtual currency for social networks. Urturn has been covered by TechCrunch and several respected sites.

At the dinner on the last day of conference, Dave introduced me to his long time friend Justin Won (President of JayDub Enterprises, LLC). As I conversed with Justin, who used to be involved with databases years ago, I couldn't help but be impressed by his understanding of what a proper scalable solution would comprise of. Very quickly we covered bottlenecks of most infrastructure related issues. I really loved Justin's quote that "DBAs are a different breed than programmers."

David Recordon (Open Platforms Technical Lead for Six Apart) was also present at the dinner. He had quite a bit of industry knowledge including the challenges that some of the popular websites are facing (no, I won't name the sites). Thanks for your insights David.

I am also thankful to Ahson Wardak (founder & CEO of ShareMeme), John Maver (founder of Thought Labs), Chris Saad (Founder and Chairperson of Data Portability Project), Jared Goralnick (Productivity Evangelist at AwayFind), Keith Schacht (Founder & CEO of 42 Friends) and Erik Giberti (AF-Design) for great conversations and insights that they all generously shared with me.

I am sure I missed out some of the names (sorry for my bad memory!). My apologies and a big thanks to everyone with whom I conversed but didn't list here.

Now, I am definitely looking to the next conference.

Geek Metrics: Using App Analytics to Drive Distribution, Engagement, & Monetization

On the next panel, Geek Metrics: Using App Analytics to Drive Distribution, Engagement, & Monetization, the panelists are Dave McClure (500 Hats), Hiten Shah (CrazyEgg / KISSmetrics), Ian Swanson (Sometrics, Inc.), Albert Lai (Kontagent) and Roy Pereira (Refresh). Dave McClure is moderating the panel.

Why would I use third party analytics solution?
HS: It boils down to resources (experience, scaling problems) and insights.

IS: Resources, relationships and partnerships that developers can't build on their own.

RP: Launched on May 1. App developers should focus on core making it viral and as successful as possible.

AL: We develop viral analytics. Most customers tell him that customers don't have bandwidth (time, retention etc).

Are you shipping currently?
AL: Private beta shipping to select customers. Currently not releasing customers. 80% of our time goes into scaling, building infrastructure.

RP: already launched. Their target is application networks (companies that have lots of applications) and ad networks.

IS: Launched in January this year. Currently doing 15 million daily unique active users. He is from Userplane. They have a long tail. 90% facebook, 8% myspace and 2% spread across other networks.

HS: Several large customers lined up. Shipping next week as private beta. Less focused on monetization and more focused on engagement and growth.

Are you currently charging?
RP: Free model right now. Plan on introducing value added functionality in coming months. Fundamental functionality will always be free.

IS: free product. last week launched a social ad platform. They have some premium services. Kind of like atlas or DART but for social space.

HS: base analytics will be free but subscription services will cost some.

AL: I am going to pay million dollars to everyone for using :)

How is your product better than say Google Analytics?
AL: We are focused on viral channels, enagament and allow easier access to A/B testing methodologies like big guys (Slide etc) do.

What are the risks are going forward and what keeps you awake at night?

HS: Social networks control us and the developers. That's what keeps us up at night.

RP: Social networks changing APIs etc.

Specific example of viral analytics?
AL: Very very quickly adapting to traffic that's coming in. Providing the ability to forecast virality based on changes. Framework that allows to test various changes.

HS: Viral growth factor number and equation that's getting standardized. Related to invitations and engaging users. The equation is called k-factor.

Why are you better than other guys?
IS: make money
HS: great insight. use all analytics you can.

Another great session at the Graphing Social Patterns conference.

Social + Mobile = Sociable (Social Networks for SMS, IM & Mobile Devices

Last session of the day is a panel discussion. Panelists include Benjamin Joffe, Ben Keighran, Gregory Cypes, Craig Dalton and Chris Butler.

BJ: Spent last 8 years in Asia (4 years in Japan, 3 in Korea and 1 in China).

Information Arbitrage: Identifying most successful best practices.

Some history: Mobile SNS (Social network services) are not new. ImaHima ("are you free now"). In 2001, they had 250,000 users.

What changed? numbers and speed of data access. Also, what you can do with phone. Mindset of people using mobile has changed.

It works: Japan is #2 economy, #1 mobile society. 80% penetration of 3G. China is #1 mobile and Internet population. QQ has 500 million users. Cyworld has 35 million and mixi has 90 million compared to 200 million Facebook users.

Mobile users: 50mln for QQ, 3 mln for facebook, cyworld 45 mln,

Revenue: fb: (50 mln), QQ 250 mln

FB is focused on profile page, IM and groups. QQ has avatars, paid games also.

Sticky feature: FB (applications.
QQ: IM digital currency, pmt system.
Cyworld: real friends, digital currency , pmt systems
mixi (footprints)

Business models: FB: ads, QQ (digital goods, paid games, mobile VAS)
cyworld (brand pages, digital goods.

Revenue mix (ARFU: avg revenue from users):
fb: 0%?
QQ 87%
cyworld: 80%
mixi: 5%

Mixi has more page views on mobile than PC. Mobile CPM is half the price of PC.

Community and Social networks are turning into full-fledged media. Cyworld is the nicest mobile application in social networks.
These top mobile SNS in Asia won't "invade us" as they are busy in home markets and they lock cross cultural expertise. Cyworld started and closed operation in Europe.

Myspace has started operation in China, Japan and Korea but so far has failed to gain traction revenue wise.

How to make mobile social networks work:
1. high speed network and flat fee: (No one from large mobile network present in the audience.)
2. Proper payment systems: seems a low hanging fruit.
3. Girls: it's not rocket science.
4. Companies and Schools: Because employees and students spend so much time on it that their computer access is blocked and so they turn to using mobile services.

benjamin at plus8star.com

Panel Introduction:

Ben Keighran (BK) ben at bluepulse-inc.com
Launched in December 2006. built world's largest social messaging platform.

Gregory Cypes (GC): gregory.cypes at corp.aol.com
QQ is trying to break into US market. GC is tech lead for open AIM. Big component of open AIM is mobile. AIM does over a billion IMs a day with 80 million users.

Craig Dalton (CD) (craig.dalton at hookmobile.com)
Hookmobile in mobile development for last years. Now in multimedia messaging. Created a platform to integrate messaging with social networks that takes away complexities such as device recognition. Just launched platform in April.

Chris Butler (cbutler at dash.net):
They do crowd sourcing. People can do Yahoo! mobile search from their car. Twitter from the car :). Working on facebook apps.


What's view on social network on mobile in US?

CD: XHTML is going to die.

BK: Browser is rapidly getting faster and is faster than it was ever before. iPhones, Android and Safari are fast. Create it as a browser based application.

GC: Every application needs SMS strategy.

BK: SMS gives you a huge touch point and advantage but times are changing.

How do you think operators are positioned? Do they hinder or support initiatives.

Careers are changing, they are opening up more. Interest around the browser is very great as it allows companies to come together and create standards.

Google has made cost of information really low.