Update: Our live notes from Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote are here.
Today is definitely Facebook day as they hold their second annual F8 developers conference in San Francisco. Last year they released their developer platform, which led competitors to hurriedly release their own competing offerings. What’s in store for tomorrow? We’ve made our predictions, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage at 1:30 to make his keynote, and workshops will follow all day after that. The full schedule is here.
Some of the news is breaking early. For example, we will almost certainly see the Facebook payments platform launch in some form, for example – Facebook desperately wants to find a way to help application developers make money beyond advertising, and the iPhone App Store has shown that people are willing to pay for quality applications.
Even more certain is the launch of Facebook Connect, which will allow third party services to authenticate Facebook users and merge profile data into their offerings. Digg will be one of their launch partners, and will show off the new product on stage, say our sources. However, neither CEO Jay Adelson or Founder Kevin Rose will attend the event.
We’ve also heard from sources that Facebook will announce a tiering system for applications, confirming our previous post in March. Five to ten top tier apps, which have proven themselves trustworthy and which create as good or better a user experience as what Facebook is able to create itself, will be named in the near future. iLike (music) and Causes (charity) will be announced tomorrow, and more will come soon. We heard that Flixster (movies) was on the short list but was bumped at the last minute – perhaps due to their MySpace partnership announced yesterday.
Other apps will be grouped into a middle tier, where most of them will fall, and a bottom “unwashed masses” tier for untrustworthy or spammy apps that have little user value. Each tier will have different rules for engaging with users, particularly around invites, messaging and entry into the news feed.
Facebook’s redesign aims to make user profiles more dynamic by giving more prominence to the newest information, and it is cracking down on applications that violate privacy or user-control guidelines.
“willing to pay for quality applications” well that lets facebook out then
YAWN. look at where the first F8 got us. lots of hype that doubled Facebook’s valuation for the Microsoft investment. Nice job.
but for the users? FB apps suck! i haven’t found ONE app that is actually useful. it’s all spam.
thankfully developers are beginning to catch on to the fact that developing FB apps (except for a short-term rise in circle-jerk ad revenue among FB apps) is pointless. i could have told you a year ago.
so get ready for the next worthless announcement!
yeah!!! I am at least glad to see they are making attempts at progress. Still consider FB top choice for social network as I can control the noise there better than anywhere else. Hopefully the don’t ever squat and quit trying to keep up with Jones.
cody
are you related to larry?
jason
If i m not wrong then u r talking abt an online community named facebook.It is a good news that their developers took steps to improve it.Ya i aslo accept that word,ppl will pay pleasingly if they get good facilities.
Tier = caste
Everyday is Facebook day at Techcrunch
It would be no surprise to see a tiered system for apps. this makes some sense. as i blogged yesterday “don’t punish the village for the behavior of a few idiots” regarding the spamminess issues.
I will be at f8 reporting as well.
http://facerevi...ok-f8-what-next
Cheers!
Rodney Rumford
Added!
http://www.oriango.com
Am I the only one that realizes the cockiness of F8 actually meaning “FATE”?
I can only imagine how drunk Zuckerberg and some of the programmers were late one night when they came up with that name.
one day I will figure out what facebook is all about. i am still convinced that i am not missing anything for some reason…
As the FB app ecosystem space gets more competitive amongst developers, I think that more attention will be paid to metrics driven development by app developers across the board.
Much of year one of F8/FBplatform was about viral loophole/spam driven development. As Facebook cracks down, I think developers across the board are going to become much more methodical and metrics driven in their development efforts year two of F8/FBplatform.
Much the same way that the web has evolved.
I’m sure there will be some interesting discussions around the use of specialized social network/viral analytics at F8 today.
I’m sure because at least we’ll be there to talk about Kontagent Analytics. =)
Hmmn alot of news regarding facebook lately. Im still not convinced there moving in the correct direction with the new design.
Yawn!
Here is something better. Ashley Harkleroad PB Pics!
http://playboyp...tures-nsfw.html
Rodney i like Ana Ivanovic pics
thank you…
It will be interesting to see how apps get allocated across the tiers. If there are rules that app developers can apply to themselves to qualify for tier 1, that would be helpful.
I wonder what’s going to happen to those apps that got major funding but will end up in the coach class of FB apps. I guess that’s part of the risk of early adoption.
FB is in trouble. No one is clicking their ads and now they targeted developers canvas pages with the new design. They should find another way to monetize their traffic.
How about FB take care of the basics first – like letting users download friend information. Until then… *yawn*
Happy Facebook Day! Do MySpace and Friendster and Bebo have their days of TechCrunch fame too?
tiered… as in – nepotism?
Two things:
1. This Facebook day garbage makes me want to vomit.
2. If Facebook is going to allow developers to start charging for their “quality” apps (as mentioned by Michael in regards to the success of the iPhone App Store), what happens when these apps are made available by their creators in places other than Facebook? Nobody is going to pay for the same app on 5 different sites, and the chances of Facebook allowing users to export apps and use them across the web are pretty much non-existent – see your personal info…
Digg partnering with Facebook? When Google’s acquiring Digg… is FB doing its first step towards openness?
keep up wit ze gud work. Happy facebook day
tiered… as in – nepotism?