Facebook Senior Platform Manager Dave Morin gave the afternoon keynote talk today at the Snap Summit in San Francisco.
He revealed (or in some cased confirmed speculation around) a number of interesting tidbits about the Facebook business and upcoming products:
- Morin said Facebook Chat will launch next week. When the chat product was confirmed on March 18, Facebook would only say it would be launched “in the coming weeks.” Morin would not give a more specific launch date, so until we hear otherwise, the outside date is Saturday, April 5. See a video demo of chat here.
- Morin answered a question about whether Facebook would continue to give preferential treatment and bend rules designed to improve the user experience to revenue partners, as they did with the CBS March Madness application. Despite heavy user and developer backlash, Morin’s answer was “I can’t say it won’t happen again.”
- Morin said that the $10 million fbFund, set up by Facebook, Accel and Founders Fund, has now gone through two rounds of reviews with application developers and has made some investments (he wouldn’t say how many). He said that investments were between $25,000 and $250,000, with the average at $200,000.
- Someone asked if Facebook has any intention of supporting the OpenSocial standard for developers. He said they might in the future “if it becomes interesting.”
- Morin confirmed rumors that Facebook would be rolling out a payment system to allow developers to collect payments directly from users, sometime in the next 180 days. No additional details were given.
- There are close to 4 billion photos on Facebook.
- It’s estimated that 20% of Canada’s population is on Facebook.
Facebook to work with Open Social?
It was a great keynote — with some very reassuring info about the status and future of the Facebook Developers Platform.
Who uses facebook? Of those, who will use it when the next myspace comes along?
look I do realize that face book is an 800 pound gorilla in a land of web 2.o minnows and that asking for less Facebook coverage has been often expressed in the comments section, but i do feel that we are over saturated in the minutia of Facebook (the low piont being this post: http://www.techcrunch.com/2008.....t-facebook)
so as a reader who visits this site daily (if not hourly) I implore you oh mighty TechCrunch less Facebook coverage please!
TechCrunch is a vital work tool for me, along with silicone alley insider, you are my Bloomberg and I, nor any other web entrepreneur can ignore FB but seeing it ALL the time in these pages is starting to drive me nuts.
many thanks,
Facebook might have to work with OpenSocial in the near future or the community will begin to resent Facebook if companies need to dev two separate apps.
Facebook is done. That is quite apparent. People are wising up and realizing publishing details about you personal life online is a poopy idea. The developer platform is duganish and not one application is really useful for anything but wasting time. I’m going to work on succeeding in my life and while all the dugans waste countless hours farting around on facebook. Less competition for me.
yep get back to covering startups please.
If Twitter added an Ajax pop up(over top their tweets) to view your followers (Flickr) pictures then you’d really have no reason to use Facebook - its bloat compared to Twitter.
I just want to know whats going on with friends and view their photos. Thats all u do in a social network anyway!
4 billion photos….isnt that more than google’s image search/
“7. It’s estimated that 20% of Canada’s population is on Facebook.”
Here in Norway, we are 4 751 563 people as of today (according to the official pages at http://www.ssb.no/befolkning/).
Facebook has 1 013 320 users in Norway as of today.
That makes 21,32% of all Norwegians…
Re: Twitter with Ajax, Facebook bloated. People like bloat! The average user loves to jam as much stuff as they can on a profile. If its efficiency you want, go binary, if its personalization and socialization, bloat!
Re: Facebook is done. Younger folks are accepting that the divide between public and private life its details can be mediated through a filter such as Facebook. What is though of as public/private is changing and it is critical that we understand that change brings new opportunities and challenges.
Canada’s population is somewhere near 33 million. The last I heard, Facebook had about 8 million active users in Canada, so that’s more like 25%. However, it could be higher because for a Canadian to be “on Facebook” the user does not need to be active.