facebook application development

Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg and other company executives visited Washington, D.C. this week, the latest moves to fend of possible legislation around privacy and online advertising.

National politicians have begun paying more attention to online business in the last couple of years, with Facebook getting special attention around issues like privacy policy changes.

Zuckerberg’s first official trip to Capitol Hill included private meetings with politicians, including with Utah’s Republican Senator Orrin Hatch, as well as other members of the Senate’s Republican High-Tech Task Force. Hatch came out of the meeting talking about job creation, not privacy. “It was a productive meeting that underscored technology’s importance as a key engine in fueling job creation and putting the nation on the road to economic recovery,” he said in a statement, according to Politico.

Meanwhile, other company executives testified along with other technology employees from AT&T, Apple and Google at a Senate Commerce Committee hearing about online privacy where senators said they’d be eyeing new online privacy rules by next year.

Democratic Massachusetts Senator John Kerry said during the aforementioned hearing that he was working with Arkansas Senator Mark Pryor, also a Democrat, on proposed legislation for 2011. Politico reported that Kerry is likely to have “the full support of the committee’s top Democrats,” who have been involved in several privacy hearings this year. Separate online advertising regulatory bills have been drafted by some members of the House.

Facebook Chief Technology Officer Bret Taylor also testified that vague legislation could ultimately harm technological innovation. AT&T’s Senior Vice President of Public Policy Dorothy Attwood and Google’s Engineering Lead for Privacy Alma Whitten had similar messages, advocating a loose regulatory framework around online businesses.

Privacy changes, security problems and other issues — along with rapid growth — have put Facebook in the political spotlight.

Facebook has been busy this year taking on the issue of online privacy, with other executives meeting with the Obama administration. Much of this prepping included hiring people to oversee global policy, D.C. legal expertise and even a California lobbyist. Of course Zuckerberg’s first trip to D.C. coinciding with Senate hearing testimony is also a part of the company’s committment to address privacy.

[Zuckerberg photo via Gabriel Bouys AFP/Getty]

Mazda’s new Mazda2 is the star of the company’s new Facebook game called DriverVille, a title that has you souping up your car then racing it. It is also, of course, meant to get more people paying attention to the launch of the new Mazda2 model, with an accompanying sweepstakes also running on the Mazda Facebook page.

The game appears to have been built by Frima, a Quebec-based game developer that creates branded titles. All in all, the quality is good. There’s plenty of built-in advertising, but it doesn’t feel overblown or forced. And it’s actually informative, so it should appeal to casual gamers and those actually hoping to learn a little more about the Mazda2.

The gist is pretty simple — you complete missions to level up, earning Driver Bucks and items along the way that range from a pair of cowboy boots to your very own virtual Mazda2. The Driver Bucks earned can be used to purchase items to accent your Mazda2, your home garage or your DriverVille avatar.

All the activities in the game can be broadcast through your newsfeed to share with friends, and several of the trophies that can be earned in the game center around bringing more people into the game, adding to the viral element.

Once inside the DriverVille universe, you and your friends will be able to move between several locations, including an arcade with interactive games, a movie theater with video clips of Mazda2 advertising, an outlet to use your Driver Bucks to buy items and a Mazda dealership, complete with a brochure rack full of PDFs for all Mazda’s 2011 models.

The actual driving in DriverVille is done on one of several race tracks and leaves a little to be desired. It’s Spy Hunter-esque. The controls are simple and intuitive, so it should appeal to the broad range of people that will probably be playing the game. Most of the attention has been placed on the social elements of the game, and those are well thought-out and complete.

As you wander through the world of DriverVille, you’ll encounter the avatars of other players. You can engage them to see their garages and cars, and you can also choose to visit their actual Facebook pages.

The game coincides with a sweepstakes run through the Mazda2 Facebook page, with the grand prize being an actual Mazda2. Several 64GB iPod Touches will also be awarded as weekly prizes. The campaign is being run by the ad agency Doner, which also worked on the Mazda3 launch for Mazda.

Those with access to Facebook’s Questions feature are seeing a new design of the home page publisher used to share status updates and other sorts of content. Users must now decide whether they want to publish a simple status update, a question, upload a photo, or post a link and website preview. While displaying the different things you can do with the publisher, the design change hides the status update prompt “What’s on your mind?” and the rest of the publisher behind an additional click, which could reduce sharing.

Previously, users were always greeted to the home page with the status update prompt, which folded out to reveal options to post photos, video, events or links. However, a user could simply input a Facebook event URL or a link to a website, and the publisher would adapt to the post. Video and event options have now been removed. If one tries to post an event URL into the status box, it only shows the URL, while posting it into the link publisher returns an error stating “Application sent an invalid response”.

When a user chooses to upload a photo, a status update-esque input field appears prompting them to “Say something about this photo…”. You could add text to be published with the photos using the old publisher, but no prompt explained the relationship between the text and photo.

Using the publisher to post a question instead of the Questions application itself will increase the likelihood that it will be seen by friends, according to a Questions answer by Facebook’s Zach Ritter. In an effort to educate users about the privacy implications of using the Questions applications, the Question input field with the prompt “What do you want to know?” is accompanied by a warning “Your questions will be visible to everyone”.

Splitting up the publisher may help remind users of the different types of content they can share. Facebook wants to strengthen their position as a portal to third-party sites, and placing a “Post Link” button on the home page may increase traffic driven. However, requiring an extra click to use the publisher could decrease sharing and increase spectating, stagnating the news feed.

If you had told developers during the time of the earliest generation of social games on the Facebook Platform – games like Vampires and Zombies, circa mid 2007 – that The Walt Disney Company would be acquiring an app developer for somewhere between $550 – $750 million three years later, most would have been very skeptical, if not incredulous.

But Disney’s acquisition of large social game developer and publisher Playdom yesterday marks another symbolic moment in the evolution of social gaming on Facebook (and MySpace, where Playdom invested early and has had success). Following EA’s acquisition of Playfish last November, Disney is the first media giant to pull the social gaming acquisition trigger in a big way.

It wasn’t that long ago that social games and apps were thought of as just another vast repository of low quality advertising inventory – if not worse. But Disney’s acquisition of Playdom, even more so than EA’s acquisition of Playfish (given Disney’s breadth of brands and media interests, and how careful they are with protecting their IP portfolio from potentially scarring issues), will now validate the virtual goods model to many media executives and investors who were hesitant to believe that something as trivial as inviting your friend to mop your restaurant might be a promising way to build a business on the internet.

As social gaming has become increasingly mass-market throughout the west and – this year – increasingly popular in the east as well, media companies like Disney are betting on the idea that new brands and IP can only take you so far; existing IP will become increasingly important in separating from the pack of developers vying for consumer attention, especially as customer acquisition costs increase.

We continue to hear of many social game developers and media companies interested in talking more with one another. If anything, we’ve been seeing that developers are getting more eager to have conversations than was the case six to nine months ago, but the number of potential acquirers sniffing around has also been increasing throughout the year as well.

Overall, we continue to expect to see more M&A activity in the space over the coming months. There are a lot of companies who are now confident enough that virtual goods inside games on social networks will be sustainable and are trying to figure out what exactly their move will be.

To dig deeper into the social gaming market, check out our recent Inside Virtual Goods reports:

• Inside Virtual Goods: The Future of Social Gaming 2010,
• Inside Virtual Goods: Spending and Usage Patterns of the Social Gaming Audience, and
• Inside Virtual Goods: The US Virtual Goods Market 2009-2010.

Today, Facebook launches a new in-house application called Questions which aims to make it easy for users to get recommendations, advice, and opinions on any subject. Users can pose questions which are displayed in the Questions Dashboard and the news feeds of the author’s friends, friends of friends, and people who like things related to a question’s tags. Answers are voted as helpful or unhelpful, surfacing the best responses and hiding the worst.

All Questions content is public, meaning it will quickly form a huge knowledge base that could best other Q&A sites like Quora if Facebook can keep the quality of content high. Facebook says that users frequently used status updates to ask questions, and they wanted to facilitate this behavior while making the knowledge created available to anyone interested.

Facebook is slowly rolling out the feature so they can closely watch how behavior patterns develop and react accordingly. Users who create top voted questions and answers may be asked to become community moderators to help guide the application’s users towards best practices.

A new Questions navigation button on the home page’s left sidebar leads to the Questions Dashboard. Here you are shown an input field asking “What do you want to know?”, and a list of relevant questions based on your interests, Questions activity, and friends. The dashboard also suggests topics and lists trending topics, a term pulled directly from Twitter, in the right sidebar.

When a user clicks on a question they are shown its existing answers, along with an input field to add their own answer. Some features from Quora that appear here include the option to follow a question so you receive notifications about its activity, and the ability to “Ask a Friend”. This option allows a user to direct a question to someone specific by typing in the name of a friend, or, unlike Quora, choose from a few suggested friends represented by mini-thumbnails of their profile pictures. Keyboard shortcuts for actions such as following a question, changing topic, or adding an answer are listed along the bottom of the screen.

The answer page’s right sidebar lists who asked the question, along with their work info, network, and a mutual friend if you have one. Below that are related questions, related topics, and recent activity across the entire Questions application. At the top of the screen is a navigation bar that allows you to move to the next question in the currently viewed topic, or choose a new topic to browse, such as sports, The Simpsons, or everything, which brings up a random question. However, currently a bug is making navigation to topics unstable, often looping users back to the topic selection screen and showing the message “There are no questions about [this topic]” even if there are many. Facebook has acknowledged the bug and claim it will be fixed soon.

To initiate asking a question, a user types the query into the input field at the top right of the Questions dashboard, or into the new section of the publisher on the home page. This brings up the question editor, where a user can add a more detailed description, insert photos, and set up a poll between two choices in addition to text answers. Facebook will automatically scan questions and answers for keywords and tag them forming links to their Questions topics. Users can augment these auto-tags by manually adding pertinent topics. Authors can delete questions or edit them, even after they’ve been answered, creating a moderation concern since an author can change a question to make existing answers seem inappropriate or embarrassing.

The answer editor provides formatting options like bold, numbered or bullet point lists, and indented quotes. There is currently no way to add photos to an answer, and inserting a URL doesn’t bring up a preview of the website. Other Pages a user is an admin of can be selected as the answer’s author by using the “Publish answer as…” drop down.

The Questions application has implications across Facebook. User profiles now include a tab displaying their Questions activity. Community Pages now display a tab showing Questions content that mentions them, as well as Questions input field asking “What do you want to know about [this community Page]?”. Most visibly, those with access to Questions are seeing a new design of the publisher, which allows users to initiate asking a question right from the home page. Facebook’s Zach Ritter explains that initiating a question from here instead of the Questions application makes it more likely to be seen by friends.

Questions also sends a large volume of notifications which can’t be turned off to a user’s notification inbox, signaling actions including someone following your question or your answer being voted as helpful. A new section in the Account-> Notifications settings allows users to select which of these messages are sent to their email or phone. Since users are directed questions from strangers based on tags matching what they like, the Pages a user is connected to now have greater influence on what they see. This could encourage users to like more Pages they care about and drop those they don’t but added out of sympathy or social obligation.

Further integration of Questions into the Facebook experience could redefine how cliques make group decisions, especially if privacy settings were introduced to the product. Creating a natural segue from Questions to events would make it easy for users to poll the preferences of their friends, then use the data to create an event they know people want to attend. For instance, instead of blindly posting an event inviting friends to a movie, you could ask if they wanted to see a movie or go out to dinner, then plan an event accordingly.

Questions has the potential to change the way people think about acquiring knowledge. Much the way Wikipedia is now the go-to source for objective knowledge, Questions could be the first choice for soliciting or finding subjective knowledge, thanks to its ease of use and enormous user base. Facebook’s inherently social atmosphere makes it perfect for digitally requesting recommendations and opinions about everyday life, but perhaps less suited to more academic questions that Quora hosts. To prevent competing with the much larger Facebook, Quora needs to lock down its specialization in more complex topics. Meanwhile, Q&A services without a clear niche like Aardvark, ChaCha, Yahoo! Answers rightfully have something to fear from Questions.

Facebook’s challenge is now to closely monitor the content flowing through the Questions application and eliminate useless content which could make the product untrustworthy, boring, or juvenile. They also need to closely monitor how users react to the inclusion of Questions stories in their feeds, as too many posts could make users resent the product and worry their own questions will annoy their friends. If these points are handled successfully, Questions could become the new killer app, providing high utility to users, creating new inroads to Pages which will excite brands, and further increasing engagement and time on site.