Top 10 facebook stories of last year

Facebook is a huge online community to get together and make friendship. It builds a close network for your friends and contacts.

To say it’s been an eventful year in the world of Facebook and the Platform would be quite an understatement. 2007 saw the birth of a new way of building and distributing software on the web that spurned on the imagination of entrepreneurs and awoke industry giants. In the future, we may look back on this year as a time of “social networking frenzy” that turns out to be more hype than substance. Or, we may look back on it as a time when the way the people use the Internet changed.

Here’s a look at the top 10 Facebook stories of 2007, as told through the eyes of a product manager in Silicon Valley:

1. Facebook launches Platform, intends to become “social operating system”

On May 25, Facebook unveiled the “Facebook Platform” at f8 in San Francisco. Dozens of apps were showcased from several launch partners. Breaking from the command-and-control approach to third party widgets employed by others at the time, the Platform allowed deeper integration points than any other API, and allowed anyone to sign up and start developing–and keep all the revenue. Hundreds of developers gathered for an all-day hack-a-thon to kick the tires on the new Platform, and by the end of the year, over 10,000 applications had been launched.

2. Facebook Platform becomes the most viral software distribution system ever

Within two weeks, music application iLike added 1.7 million users, making it one of the fastest growing applications on any platform ever. Within three weeks, an astounding 10 applications added over 1 million users each. Software developer Craig Ulliott, creator of the then-side-project Where I’ve Been application, asked, “I have 250,000 users, now what?” as his servers crash under the traffic load. 65 million applications were installed in the first month - an average of 2.5 per user. By December, that number had risen to over 700 million.

3. Facebook user base, traffic numbers soar

After the Platform launched, traffic and new users to Facebook soared: after three weeks, page views increased by a third. The post-college crowd helped Facebook’s reach double from 2006 to 2007. Facebook’s total userbase grew from about 15 million in January to 30 million in July. In December, it stood at about 58 million. Facebook added an average of 250,000 new users per day in 2007.

4. Facebook’s News Feed offers a new paradigm for sharing information (and marketing)

When the Mini Feed and News Feed launched in September 2006, users were concerned by what it meant for privacy. Since then, the News Feed has come to be accepted as one of the most important advances in social networking technology. Facebook filters an average of 30,000 story candidates into a customized stream of 60 stories for each user every day. For social networking marketers, getting into the News Feed has become just as important as getting into the first page of Google’s search results.

5. Facebook Platform creates an application economy

When Facebook announced the Platform, it announced that application developers could keep 100% of the revenues their apps generate. This, in turn, led to a frenzy of early acquisitions and investments. Just a month after the Platform launched, SideStep acquired Extended Info. Shortly thereafter, Slide bought Favorite Peeps for $60,000, the first publicly reported transaction price. Lee Lorenzen started a trend by making Altura Ventures “the first Facebook-only VC.” In July, Bay Partners launched AppFactory to invest in Facebook application developers. Over the course of the summer, several ad networks were started to sell Facebook application inventory. In September, Mark Zuckerberg announced the formation of the fbFund, a Facebook-affiliated fund specifically set up to deploy grants to innovative application creators.

6. Google organizes OpenSocial, Facebook opens Platform architecture

After failing in its bid to partner with or invest in Facebook, Google announced the OpenSocial API, an open API that would allow application developers to build apps to run on multiple social networks. However, manged by a consortium of companies, OpenSocial has failed to get off the ground due to an incomplete spec, and the first social networks supporting it are not expected to be ready until early next year. Meanwhile, in December, Facebook announced it was opening its Platform architecture for adoption by other social networks, and Bebo launched its platform by announcing it was completely adopting Facebook’s architecture from the start.

7. Microsoft invests $240 million in Facebook at $15 billion valuation

In a major strategic coup over Google, Microsoft won a minority stake and an expanded advertising relationship with Facebook in October. The price? A mere $15 billion valuation - or about 100x TTM revenues. (Facebook execs allegedly played the two off each other masterfully, driving the valuation way up.) Rumors that Facebook also took $500 million from two hedge funds proved to be false, but the company did take $60 million from Chinese billionaire Ling Ka-Shing in December.

8. Facebook backtracks on Beacon

With a splashy launch in New York, Facebook announced several new advertising products for businesses in November. One of them, Beacon, was particularly aggressive: it allowed partner sites to send information about a user’s off-Facebook activity to Facebook for sharing in that user’s News Feed. After privacy advocates spooked advertisers by complaining that the program was opt-out instead of opt-in, Facebook reversed course.

9. Facebook lures top talent

Planning to increase head count to over 700 by the end of 2008, Facebook was able to hire top talent (before its massive valuation increase) in 2007, including some top engineers from Google. Former Googler Justin Rosenstein called Facebook “the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago,” adding, “I have drunk from the Kool-aid, and it is delicious.” Benjamin Ling, a former Director of Product Management at Google, left for Facebook in October.

10. Facebook courts businesses with Pages and Social Ads

In an attempt to monetize its “social graph” more effectively, Facebook allowed businesses to create a presence inside Facebook for the first time (except for expensive sponsorships) in November with the launch of Pages. At the same time, Facebook launched Pages, a souped-up version of its old Flyers program, which together offer advertisers unprecedented levels of targeting and analytics inside a social network.

Top 10 facebook apps: extension

Facebook is a huge community to share your thought and ideas. You will perform here by taking all kinds of support from other websites.

The final installment in our look at the top 50 Facebook apps will look at 10 apps for extension. These apps extend Facebook's core functionality to improve upon existing features (for the most part). This was the hardest list to create because there is probably more overlap in this category than any of the others, which meant excluding a lot of apps. This is a completely subjective list, so not everyone will agree with our picks and I encourage you to debate them in the comments.

This post is the last in a 5-part series that has identified our picks for the top 50 Facebook apps (10 each in 5 categories). Be sure to check out Part 1: Work, Part 2: Play, Part 3: Media, and Part 4: Utility as well.

Extended Info

Extended Info is the perfect app to start off this list -- it even uses the word extended in the title! This app, which won the F8 Hackathon contest, allows you to tell the world more about yourself by adding custom profile fields such as activities, interests, favorite coffee shops, or whatever you can think of. With Extended Info your profile also supports videos, images, MP3 files, and colored text.

SuperPoke!

Who wants to poke someone when you can pinch them instead? SuperPoke! extends the built in poking application on Facebook by allowing you choose from an extensive list of additional actions. What sets SuperPoke! apart from other poking apps, is that you can choose to dole out new pokes, rather than just adding new forms of poking to your own profile. It would be great, though, if like the popular X Me app, you could define your own original poke styles.

Advanced Wall

The Advanced Wall app takes the Facebook wall to new levels by adding support for styled text, images, videos, and flash. This is all made possible through a nice wysiwyg editor. Some people might argue that this type of app causes the "MySpacification" of Facebook and should be shunned. But millions of people disagree, having already installed this app and others like it.

Top Friends

Top Friends is by far the most popular third-party application on Facebook, and with good reason: it's actually pretty useful. I have about 150 friends on Facebook, but I only regularly interact with a handful of those. Top Friends lets you create a box on your profile of your 32 favorite contacts for quick access. Rather than having to slog through your entire list of friends to find the buddy whose profile you're after, you can just click once after making him or her a Top Friend.

Live Blog

Live Blog replaces Facebook's notes app with a full blog that is displayed on your profile. It has support for YouTube vidoes and HTML, and includes commenting. Coming soon: RSS/Atom feeds, draft and preview functions, and built-in image upload.

Friend Stats

Friend Stats brings Facebook's network stats closer to home by showing you what your friends are into. It's a pretty interesting way to learn about your group of friends or coworkers and gives you a ton of statistics culled from their profiles including age, sex, political leaning, who writes the most notes, has the most wall posts, has held the most jobs, and a lot of other interesting facts. For example, among my friends, the most popular movie is "Boondock Saints" and the most popular TV show is "Family Guy."

Widgets

Like Advanced Wall, many people feel the Widgets app from Widgetbox contributes to the "MySpacification" of Facebook. And they may have a point. Widgets allows users to add any of the more than 10,000 Widgetbox widgets to their Facebook profile -- just like MySpace -- but thankfully, it doesn't let users get around the no autoplay rule Facebook imposes on Flash widgets. Many of the widgets available in this app let you add functionality from outside apps that have yet to make the jump to Facebook, and so this application will have a use for many people.

Graffiti

Graffiti is the most popular of the Facebook drawing apps. It's not the most advanced, but I think it is the easiest to get the hang of. And you can actually make some pretty impressive art with it if you A) have some modicum of talent and B) have the patience to do it (see below for an example). Graffiti places a simple drawing app on your profile that lets your friends leave you drawn obscenities (or works of art -- whatever they fancy).

van Gogh's "Starry Night" reproduced in Facebook.

Moodsic

There are a number of Facebook apps for displaying your mood (an extension of the built-in status app) and when I started I honestly didn't think I would pick this one. But Moodsic is one of the more novel of the mood apps. With Moodsic, you set you mood and the app matches how you feel with songs from popular artists. Moodsic got serious points for matching my mood of "somewhat sleepy" with "The Weight" by The Band -- a classic. Moodsic is also a monetized app -- you and your friends can purchase the music you're listening to. Some annoying bits: You can only play tracks once, and if you skip too many it disables skipping (similar to Pandora, in that respect).

I pulled into Nazareth, I was feelin' about half past dead;
I just need some place where I can lay my head.
"Hey, mister, can you tell me where a man might find a bed?"
He just grinned and shook my hand, and "No!", was all he said.
--The Band

iGift

This was a tough one to choose. Both of the two top gifting applications on Facebook, which let you send Facebook-style gift icons for free, have the same number of gifts and more or less identical interfaces and features. In the end iGift won out for two reason: it has marginally better artwork than its chief rival, and it is categorized, making it easier to find the perfect gift for any occasion (or at least any occasion where sending a thumbnail image of a hot dog is appropriate).