Facebook has announced it’s new funding arm of fbFund.

Through this fund Facebook will distribute 10 million dollars to developers of useful apps. There are a couple different ways these funds will go out but I will describe the 2 Million they are giving out in a competition.

A quick run down of how this will work is this:

Nearly $2 million in non-recourse grants will be distributed between two rounds of the competition:

Update: My history of SocialMedia.com contained some factual errors, and I was called on it and corrected. I am taking out the part I was wrong about and will add the corrections I received to the end of this post.

SocialMedia.com had a session at Google I/O, a developer conference.

Think about that.

SocialMedia.com have an extraordinary amount of data. In fact I feel safe in saying that other than Facebook itself, there is no one who has more Facebook social interaction data than SocialMedia and Adonomics.

SocialMedia.com will now be offering advertising via Open Social platforms like MySpace, Hi5, and Bebo (AOL) in addition to Facebook.

They are in an great place already, and to be an early player in Open Social is going make them incredibly strong as far as data goes, and since they have an existing ad system in place, they can quickly take over social media ads.

Oh, and they were invited to do a session at Google I/O, a developer event.

Think about that. Hmmmm, here is a company poised to be in a powerful position both data-wise and advertising-wise. I’ve heard Google likes stuff like that.

There is no formal relationship between SocialMedia.com and Google. I am not saying that there is, in fact I asked them…

“Do you have a formal relationship with Google?”

“No” was their reply… but their eyes were all twinkly when they said it.

SocialMedia.com (an ad company) had a session at Google I/O, a developer conference.

I’ll stop repeating myself now. It just seemed odd to me.

Corrections: I received this from the creator of Adonomics, in my original post I incorrectly stated there was a relationship between SocialMedia.com and Adonomics. I was wrong. Ooops. Here is what I recieved…

First, I’m the creator of Adonomics. I sold it to a startup in
Monterey, though, and no longer work on it.

Second, Adonomics is in no way affiliated with SocialMedia, and
they’re certainly not the same company.

Third, in June of 2007 I created Appaholic (no ‘s’). Appsaholic (with
an ‘s’) was launched the same weekend.

After I sold Appaholic we changed the name to Adonomics. Appsaholic
was brought under the SocialMedia brand name as they shifted their
strategy towards advertising rather than analytics. Appsaholic was
originally only a Facebook app, while Appaholic/Adonomics was always a
destination site.

Adonomics is owned wholly by KallOut, Inc. and Appsaholic is owned
wholly by SocialMedia Networks, Inc. They are two different
companies.

Hope that clears things up

Jesse E.I. Farmer

That did clear things up

Thanks Jesse.

I will be leaving the trail to attend a few things in the next three weeks. I hope to see you there, and also this will be the window of opportunity to get some face time with me if I am working on your projects. Contact me asap to arrage meetings, here is where I will be…

May 12th – Palm Springs (personal stuff)

May 15th – Sunnyvale, CA – Yahoo HQ – I will be at the Yahoo campus for an evening of drinking, er, I mean developer stuff

May 28th 29th – Google I/O -  I am looking forward to several goings on there, especially the MySpace/Open Social stuff, and of course the Google gadgets stuff as well.

Jun 3rd 4th – Seattle, WA – SMX Advanced - I will swing by Seattle for the SEOmoz party, and also maybe get a networking pass for the event.

Jun16th – New York, NY – WidgetWebExpo – I will be doing a session there on Widgets and SEO

I also want to mention that Smx Advanced will be having a developer day which programmed by Vanessa Fox, who has over 13 years of experience building websites, documenting APIs, and reading comic books.

Vanessa is starting a new thing Nine by Blue, which looks at the relationships between development, SEO, and online marketing silos and how the data from each of these areas can be used holistically to learn more about customer behavior. She also is features editor at Search Engine Land, a leading online journal covering the search industry. She previously created Google’s Webmaster Central, which provides both tools and community to help website owners improve their sites to gain more customers from search.

In addition to the above, she is also quite hot

There is a real benefit for companies to send their developers to this event, and I want to add that I personally think that if you are a developer and you are tinkering with the idea of broadening your horizons, this is a good event to go to. If you are thinking of working with me I would say the developer days would be required. (hint-hint)

Although this developer day is naturally orientated towards SEO, there are some very important basics to understand before starting a large project that will be useful to just about any development team out there.

My compliments to Vanessa for starting this.

That about does it, after that I will be back on the trail.

Ivan Pope, the founder of Sniperoo is presenting the WidgetWebExpo in New York on June 16th and 17th. This conference is his American version of the Widgety Goodness conference that he ran in the UK.

Except this is bigger. Way bigger.

I will be participating with this conference in a few ways, and can’t give out concrete details yet, but I will be speaking at the conference and I am hoping to do a day long, hands-on workshop for creating and promoting your website / business via gadgets where I can really take an active part in the participants needs and hopefully have everyone involved with my workshop leave with a gadget that they know how to promote and expand on.

For more details about the conference go to Ivan’s post at Sniperoo which highlights what is going on. The WidgetWebExpo has some neat things coming out soon so I recommend keeping your eyes on it. More to come on this soon.

Just as a note of warning, the reported Facebook usage numbers are temporarily very, very wrong. The numbers that are being reported by Facebook are incorrect and have been for several days.

This is not a time to buy a Facebook app if you are basing your price on reported usage.

Adonomics has frozen their value estimates to the last know good numbers (Feb 14th).

There has been little said about this problem from Facebook, but there are some fun threads about it in the Facebook developers forum.

Also of Facebook note:

Facebook has put an end to forced invites. This means that when you install a Facebook app, you will no longer be required to invite others just to use that app.

from Facebook:

“as part of our ongoing efforts to improve Platform through policy and technology changes, applications are prohibited from dead-ending users at an invite-friends page, and must never again prompt for invites after the user has declined.”

Many apps that have gone viral have done so via this method, and a major change of thinking will be required for those apps that used to force you to invite your friends in order to use it.

Read the full article from Facebook here

Facebook to begin taking steps to “unclutter” user profiles soon. User complaints of difficulty finding basic information on profile pages cluttered with apps will lead to Facebook providing two versions of a profile page. A “quick version” and an “extended version”.

From the announcement…

“we will soon be launching a “profile clean-up” tool. Similar to how your computer’s desktop will remind you to get rid of unused icons, this tool will give users the option to move extra profile boxes to an “extended portion” of their profile. Users can choose to move these boxes; we will recommend that they keep the Friends Box, Mini-Feed, Wall, Basic and Personal Information as well as the top 12 application boxes they have added. At the bottom of the profile will then be a link to “Show Extended Profile”.”

This will make the user engagement metric even more important for Facebook application developers. There is need for concern if you have authored an app that just sits there on a users profile, it may not be sitting there any longer soon.
Read the full announcement here

While learning how to make and edit Google gadgets, I have created hundreds of random gadgets. Many of these gadgets have nothing to with me, my brand, or my interests. I am simply playing and learning. I often will look for a developer’s page on any website I am on to see if anything interests me.

As a result of my “test” gadgets, I have actually created alot of traffic for people. Gadgets are being explored by more and more “recreational” developers who are just tinkering around. I was checking some numbers and I was surprised to see something.

I was creating more than a million Google gadget page views per month for one set of gadgets based on a website and product that isn’t mine.

They receive a massive amount of exposure from my efforts. Their products and links are sitting on thousands of peoples iGoogle page, simply because I was curious and wanted to figure out how to make gadgets.

It is a very good idea to have a developer page or utilize your “tools” page even if you do not have a developers program.

Let’s look at Sphinn and their “tools” page which I think is a very useful and informative page (my compliments Danny), and I will suggest a very simple but very important minor tweak to it.

Tool pages are essentially for your users, but they are also your gateway to developers.

The tweak I would suggest is to have clear contact info targeted towards developers. I don’t want to send an email or fill out a form without knowing it will be responded to. If there was a simple phrase like…

“Have a idea or questions about creating tools for our web site? Please contact (name of the technical person here) we would love to hear what you have to say”

Developers would be much more inclined to contact you with their myriad of ideas if they knew there was an actual person who will respond to them.

Or if you have a general contact form with a drop down menu of choices add a “web development” option so that such queries will actually get to the person who takes care of the technical details of your website and so that developers, recreational or not, will feel warm and fuzzy and feel confident that their email will get responded to.

Developers are very very important. They are the new “links”. If you have talented people in your user base, you want to make them feel welcome and know that their efforts are appreciated.

Sphinn has a great set of tools. Not because they made them, but because their users did.

Danny Sullivan provides an excellent example of how to both spread the news of tools to his users and reward the people who made them.

Even if no one has made tools for you or your brand, you know what? You can still have a similar page. If you blog, you are likely using plug-ins. Consider having a page listing your plugins or themes, thus thanking the developers and providing valuable info to your users. It could just be a “resource page” like the way Sebastian does it.

If you do have developers, have them put out a page about what they are doing, and the things they are testing out, for example, Kayak.com has a wonderful developers page, even though they do not have an actual open developers program.

It is dawn in the age of gadget distributed content, and developers are golden.

Are you developer friendly?

Think about the tiny tweaks you can make to your website that would be attractive to developers and implement them.

I did a little experimentation and you know what?

Unaltered Google gadgets work on all Open Social platforms.

And some big news…
Facebook now supports Open Social (more on this below, including screen shot)

But no matter who supports Open Social, they also do something else…

They support Google gadgets.

Any Google gadget (pretty much) will work in Open Social, to illustrate this lets use a monkey…

The monkey swinging above is a Google gadget, in other words, it is not a “Open Social” gadget.

But the thing is, it works (without any altering of code) on Open Social platforms…

Here is that monkey on Ning…

Ning is the only place so far that has truly live Open Social implementation. In other words, I can link to this one because it is on a live page, accessible by all. For the rest of these examples, it can only be seen by users of the sandbox, so I will just do screen shots.

Here is the monkey on Hi5…

Here is that monkey on Orkut…

and in Orkut, the unaltered code gets read so well that it auto generates the thumbnail image normally only used in the Google gadget directory…

The monkey also swings on Facebook!…

Facebook and Open Social

Okay so now that you see that Google gadgets work everywhere, lets discuss Facebook and the surprisingly quick way they have implemented Open Social. It is done via an application called Opensocket. If you want to learn more about Opensocket, they explain it very well on their blog.

It is an application that displays Open Social gadget on Facebook. It is important to note that it is in Beta, and only a few gadgets are “approved” to be added via OpenSocket. Dan Lester (one of the developers of OpenSocket) was nice enough to add the monkey gadget temporarily so that I could take the above screen shot. Thanks Dan!

To add Open Social gadgets on Facebook just add the OpenSocket App, and choose the gadget you want.

Back to Google Gadgets

The overall point of all of this is that Google gadgets are indeed universal.

They need not be altered to work in Open Social containers or anywhere else. This means that the Google gadget syndication directory is a mighty thing as I discussed in an earlier article. It is essentially a directory now of gadgets that can be added anywhere. Google gadgets are in a sense even more open than Open Social.

While the fact that they work in Open Social containers is no surprise to developers, Google has never explicitly discussed this, and I thought that non-developers could make use of this knowledge.

Google gadgets rock If you want that monkey, it is here.

Free scalable hosting for Facebook developers. Sweet.

Facebook announced that Joyent (partnered with Dell) will provide one free year of hosting to Facebook Application developers via Joyent.

This is a dream come true.