Second Place: Gov Pulse: This application allows users to browse the Federal Register and create feeds on the most important proposals and information. Users can browse the latest government-related notices, respond to regulatory amendments and comment on everything from endangered species to homeland security.

Third Place: This We Know: This application gives you government-related info based on your zip code. It offers information on the number of factories within a 7 mile radius, the number of pounds of pollutants released, violent crime rates, cancer rates and related bills in Congress. This would actually be a great tool for environmental health advocates looking to make the connection between cancer hot spots and chemical pollutants.

Best Data Visualization: Quakespotter: This site creates a 3d visualization of earthquakes and matches it to data taken from those areas on Twitter.

For a complete list of entries visit the Sunlight Labs contest page.

Who Has the Biggest Brain

The first application during App Nite was the Facebook Game "Who Has the Biggest Brain" a game by the company Playfish. The concept behind the facebook application is a series of 4 minute games that lets you compare intelligence against your friends in Facebook. The game has 600k installs this week and 100k active users per day who play over 500k games per day. It's actually quite impressive that the average 'active user' is playing 5 games per day, especially when you consider according to the presenter it took 4 weeks to develop. It also doesn't require adding friends to be able to play the game (friend spam).

Just 3 Words

The next game was created by Scoob & Geko and is actually based on the parlor game where patrons would pass a paper around the bar each adding 3 words to a collective story. In this case, the application "Just 3 Words" has brought that game to Facebook. Interestingly, the average user spends 7 minutes per day on the site and a "statistically significant portion of the audience" spends more than 2 hours per day. So far over 60 thousand stories have been created across 3 million entries. All of the stories are licensed under creative commons.

Puzzle Messages

The next application "Puzzle Messages" was created by The Broth. The presenter admitted this was a very simple application, basically it allows users to create a jigsaw puzzle that encodes a message and send to the recipient who has to solve the puzzle to read the message.

Ski & Snowboard

The next application Ski & Snowboard is an application that allows Facebook users to identify, track and report on visits to ski resorts around the world. The application has a very nice map drive interface. There were two very interesting points from the demonstration. First, they came up with a really interesting (somehow feels less spamy) way to get users to invite their friends. They allow each user to state their skiing level, but requires 3 friends to confirm that level. The other interesting thing is that they actually started with 1000 resorts in their system, but through their users had about 200 more added and some of the geocoding corrected on the first 1000 resorts.

Dipity

Dipity is a startup focused on 'organizing the web using time.' In other words, they want to pull in data from Facebook. Currently 17,000 timelines have been created. At Graphing Social, they announced a new feature that allows their users to add other services' content streams to the timeline (such as Twitter Feeds.) Beyond creating personal timelines, users can create public pages on Facebook around other events such as this public page on the Federal Reserve.

Developer Analytics

The last presentation was by Developer Analytics. They have created a suite of tools for developers. These include a set of analytics for Facebook developers around revenue, virality and engagement. They also are displaying leader boards for the top applications and top ad networks. However, the thing I personally found most interesting (probably because I haven't created an app) is the fact they are also creating content - specifically case studies and interviews around Facebook applications.

Open Social Apps

Know Your Neighbor

The Know Your Neighbor app was positioned as "Twitter for your community & neighbors ... on steriods." Basically, the idea is that users can organize their friends list based on geographic location. Currently the version demonstrated automatically picks the most 10 closest friends, but when this launches it will let users pick how many users they want to group together. Then they can post messages to groups of friends. While this application is clearly very rough, I have already predicted hyperlocal will be a big theme in 2008 and it would be great to see some social apps try to tap into this.

Living Social

Hungary Machine presented next on their application Reading Social, which seems to have evolved from their Facebook app Visual Bookshelf. Bsically, the book allows user of a social network to share their reviews on books they read but now it works across social networks. Interestingly, they have more book reviews than Amazon today. They have also created a number of similar applications -- Drinking Social for Beer, Dining Social for restaurants, and Tune Social for music.

Trip Wiser

Trip Wiser is an application that works across social networks to discover things to do. The basic idea is that they have developed a 8 question compatibility quiz to try and determine your travel preferences. Once filling this out you can review different places you've visited and get recommendations of new places to visit. Currently, they have about 400 thousand locations reviewed across their network.

Chirp Screen

The final presentation of App Nite was Chirp Screen an interactive screen saver that shows activity across sites like Flickr, Facebook and Twitter. It also allows users to link back or post comments. Unfortunately, the screen saver only works in Windows right now but a OS/X version is on the way.

Conclusion

And the winner is .... First place - Developer Analytics, Second Place - LivingSocial , and third place Chirp.

• Profiles
• Relationships
• Activities
• Business Models

Profiles: A Universal Identity

Like most of us, Charlene has literally dozens of identities online (see slide below).

Moving forward she'd like to see a universal identity. Her specific proposal centers on either email and/or mobile phones, since this would be an identity she controls. Thankfully, Charlene also anticipates a federated approach (such as OpenID.) Also, she anticipates a few major players will probably serve as major federation focus points. We have already seen this happen begin to happen with both AOL and Yahoo! supporting OpenID.

Charlene also talked about the "Bill of Rights for Users of the Social Web," a document created by a number of thought leaders in the social web: Joseph Smarr, Marc Canter, Robert Scoble & Michael Arrington. The document states:

We publicly assert that all users of the social web are entitled to certain fundamental rights, specifically:

• Ownership of their own personal information, including:
• their own profile data
• the list of people they are connected to
• the activity stream of content they create;
• Control of whether and how such personal information is shared with others; and
• Freedom to grant persistent access to their personal information to trusted external sites.

I imagine there will be more conversation on this in the afternoon panel Dan Farber is moderating on Data Portability.

Relationships: A Single Social Graph

Over the next few years, Charlene pointed out that a unified social graph will develop. She showed her current social graph as it exists inside Facebook, and then pointed out what it was missing: colleagues, parents, extended family, school parents, neighbors (see slide below). I think this is something we all realize intuitively - so the overriding point is that our real social graph is far more complex.

New 'Entrants' Will Be Portals

I actually found this one of the more interesting points from Charlene's presentation. She proposed that the a number of 'new entrants' will emerge, except that they won't be startups at all. Instead, she predicts that a number of the major portals (Google, Microsoft Live, Yahoo!, and AOL) will actually fill the the relationship mapping gap. She pointed to 4 reasons why they are natural entrants:

1. Millions of Regular Users
2. Search & Deep Content
3. Ad & Content Networks
4. Relationship Maps

Activities: Social Context for Activities

Going back to 'social networks being like air', not surprisingly Charlene projects that social context will be important for most online activities. As an example of how this might happen, she used shopping. She talked about Amazon integrating with Facebook (or any other repository of social graph info) such that they could highlight book reviews from her friends. Charlene also pointed out that any portal could easily incorporate social data into their site. She used Yahoo! as an example saying they could:

1. Search based on what my friends find relevant
2. Elevate stories tagged by my friends -- anywhere (maybe multiple social graphs web 2.0 & shopping)
3. Compare daily portfolio performance to friends
4. In terms of advertising, which of my friends owns a Focus & what do they think of it?

Business Models: Social Influence Defines Marketing Value

When talking about business models, her basic point was that we have yet to properly value networks based on their social value. She pointed to Marian Salzman's (of JWT) concept of personal CPMs. The basic idea being that an individual's authority on specific topics plus their network's interest and authority on the topic, results in a value of reaching that user. If this is true then "social networks will have to compete to have the best experience for high influence people."

Conclusion

Based on the vision she laid out, Charlene ended with a map of how open she anticipated these open platforms evolving.

To realize this vision of ubiquitous social networks, Charlene pointed out 2 things that must happen:

1. We need the technology to evolve, which she wasn't that worried about
2. We need to increase trust, which she challenged the industry to think about

You can view all of Charlene's Slides here.

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• Background on O'Reilly Media
• A Web 2.0 Refresher
• What I Want from the Social Graph?

Tim started off by talking about the idea that "new technologies first exploited by hackers, then entrepreneurs, then platform players." A few good examples were the move toward adoption of universal WiFi access or webservices from network wifi groups and screen scraping hacks respectively.

Tim referenced the report on Facebook that O'Reilly Radar just released. You can see our coverage here. Basically, O'Reilly has been aggregating usage data from Facebook for a few months. They also normalized the data after Facebook shifted from reporting number of installs to true engagement. The most important finding from the report is that 87% of usage goes to 2% of applications. In other words, the Long Tail is not in effect for Facebook applications yet. Tim went on to segment this finding across different categories of applications, but it was consistent across all categories.

A Web 2.0 Refresher

Tim started by joking about the overuse of the term 'Web 2.0'. However, he felt it was important to offer a refresher on web 2.0 in light of the discussion on the "social graph" (see our explanation of the term here). He said that really web 2.0 is ultimately about "systems that harness the network effect to get better the more people who use them." In other words, it is about building 'collective databases.' He cited a paper by Dan Brickland entitled 'The Cornucopia of the Commons: How to get volunteer labor' (Dan was creator of the first spreadsheet Visicalc), which cites 3 Ways to Build Collective Databases:

1. Organized Manual: Pay people (ex: Yahoo! Directory)
2. Volunteer Manual: Get volunteers (ex: Wikipedia)
3. Organized Mechanical: Architect systems to get smarter automatically (ex: P2P)

Harnessing Collective Intelligence

Tim commented that "every true web 2.0 company is building a database whose value grows in proposition to the number of participants -- that is, a network-effect-driven data lock-in - with accelerating returns to winners." Tim repeated his oft-quoted claim that the Google Page Rank algorithm was the first Web 2.0 application. He also pointed to some recent examples, like Wesabe and Mint doing this in the Personal Financial Services space.

Facebook Can Be Doing Better

Next Tim transitioned to how he felt FaceBook could do better leveraging collective intelligence. He focused on the confirmation questions that Facebook requests, while that data is already available on the web. For example, he talked about friend requests from employees when data on the web already confirms they are employees. Also, O'Reilly Authors have requested to friend him and Amazon already shows they are friends. The fact this data exists is something we've explored reguarly with our coverage of the Semantic Web.

Questions you should be asking?

Tim wrapped up this section of his presentation by reviewing five questions that everyone should be asking:

• Am I doing everything I can to build applications that learn from your users?
• Does my application get better with more users, or just more busy and more crowded?
• If "Data is the Intel Inside" of Web 2.0, what data do I own?
• What user-facing services can I build against it?
• Does my platform give me and my users control, or take it away from us? (note: I personally spoke about this at the Always On Conference)

Conclusion -- What I Want from the Social Graph

Finally, Tim discussed what he believes we really want from social graph data:

• I want it to reflect my REAL social relationships (mine my phone and email)
• I want it to help me manage those contacts (how to reach them, updated status)
• I want to manage groups of people
• I want it to recognize asymmetry in relationships
• I want fine grained control over what I see and what I ignore. For example, he talked about wanting to see his daughter's flickr photos but not other updates.
• I want to discover interesting people and express the actual relationship.

What do you think? Is this what you want from your social graph data?

Seth Goldstein is a serial entrepreneur, who has been in the Internet business since 1995 - when he created SiteSpecific, one of the early Internet advertising agencies. Seth was also a Co-Founder of AttentionTrust.org, a non-profit group that explores and explains many of the issues around the attention economy. (For more information on the Attention Economy, check out our coverage here). He also helped start a company called Root Markets, that focused on commercializing many of the Attention Trust themes.

Seth's slides are available on SlideShare and embedded at the end of this post. The issue I want to focus on in this post is his vision for SocialMedia.com, which Seth described as an 'app network'. The slide below explains:

At this level, it is tempting to describe SocialMedia as 'Yet Another Facebook Ad Network'. After all, this is a very risky business due to the rumors that Facebook will create their own ad network. Seth had a great response to those concerns, drawing an analogy to FeedBurner - who he said is a "hero" for him. FeedBurner remember started up with no proprietary advantage or secret sauce to compete with Yahoo! and Google. Despite that, Goldstein credits Dick Costello with having a "clear vision for what he wanted to do with FeedBurner." The Feedburner team kept innovating and understanding their customers better than the big companies; ultimately creating something very creative and valuable.

Next Step in Attention Economy?

So what is Seth's creative vision as an analog to Dick's vision for FeedBurner? I think it ties back to his Attention Trust work. So in my interview, I asked Seth how SocialMedia related to his past work with Attention Trust. He responded:

"Attention Trust is a non-profit, so there is really no connection between commercial things that I or anyone else might pursue. At the same time, I'm one person I'm one person ... I think what ties a lot of my recent experience together is the way in which consumer data is seen as something expressive not something passive. And so the takeaway here is when you click on something, search for something, fill out a form, leave a trail of websites that you have visited. All of that in one regard is a passive residue of your historical behavior. But increasingly, web technologies and tools are enabling publishers and I hope increasingly individuals themselves to turn that data back into real end-user benefit. Whether that be personalized recommendations, better targeting things like that that really benefit and leverage that historical data. That is really where the attention data hits the pavement and we get some really good traction. Where I have been focused recently in terms of SocialMedia is trying to capture all of this user generated content and user generated response to create forms of advertising and other engagement tools to create better and more sustainable applications on the social media architecture."

Conclusion

I don't know if SocialMedia will ultimately be successful or not. It's early and this space is very crowded with players like VideoEgg, RockYou and App Fuel. Plus, as we already mentioned, Facebook is rumored to be creating their own ad network. I find the analogy to FeedBurner compelling - but it remains to be seen if Seth's vision will be enough to drive market innovation (as FeedBurner did).

Here are all of Seth's slides from his presentation today:

Note: Seth Goldstein photo credit B D Solis Flickr

This morning Charlene Li from Forrester Research gave a presentation entitled 'Big Brands & Facebook: Marketing Case Studies & Best Practices.' The theme that she came back to a few times was: Facebook marketing requires communication not advertising.

Assuming that advertising means 'interruption', I think anyone who has been using Facebook for anytime would agree with that assumption. Some of the implications around best practices were quite interesting, so in this post we'll explore those.

What Are Traditional Advertising Options on Facebook

Charlene's goal was to encourage the audience and advertisers (who didn't seem to be many in the audience) to think beyond traditional advertising. She started by establishing different appraoches to advertising on the Facebook platform. Specifically she outlined three approaches to buying advertising on Facebook:

• You can purchase IAB standard ad units. As has been the case since August 2006, Microsoft handles the sale of these advertisements.
• Another option is buying targeted messages to be placed in Facebook news feeds. According to data Charlene has received from Facebook, the click through rates on these ads are between 4 and 26 percent. While that is certainly a big range, the performance is impressive and actually closer to search advertising click through than I would have guessed.
• Finally, any user can create purchase Facebook Flyers, which are totally self service advertisements.

How do you communicate not advertise?

Going back to Charlene's opening theme of communicating and not advertising, she revisited the statement and started exploring effective ways to communicate. She specifically talked about Sponsored Groups. For clarification, while anyone can create a Facebook Group, the sponsored groups provide additional functionality including:

• Group page provides customized navigation, look & feel.
• Going back to the more traditional advertising, this usually includes a significant media buy to drive traffic to the sponsored group page.

As an example, the screen shot below is the Jeep Sponsored Group on Facebook.

Sponsored Group Best Practices

Charlene laid out five best practices for sponsored groups:

• understand how similar groups meet / don't meet the needs already
• crate a unique experience that really is engaging people
• enable discussion board, the wall, photos, etc ...
• read and respond to comments
• be transparent about your role & perspective

Brands That Can't Afford Sponsored Groups

For perspective, while this is certainly a compelling way to communicate with users, it's important to realize that only large brands and companies are able to afford creating sponsored groups. According to Charlene, the costs are usually in the six figures for a three month engagement. However, any company can setup a traditional group for no cost at all. For example, here is a link to the Read/WriteWeb Facebook Group.

Branded Applications

Charlene also touched on branded applications, although in her opinion there weren't any good case studies yet. Someone in the audience asked: "What is a good example of a facebook app that is true to its brand?" Charlene answered: "None, I keep waiting but there is a long way to go."

Conclusion

It was repeated a number of times today that it's the 'Summer of Facebook' (see Dan Farber's post). As the community continues to discuss new opportunities for building on top of the social platform of Facebook, it's important to realize that involving big brands will be crucial. Hopefully, some of these best practices will be helpful for not just the brands looking to engage, but also all of the developers looking to build those experiences.

Note: Charlene Li photo credit B D Solis Flickr