Next up, ‘Facebook as a Platform‘. A panel discussion on the Platform, talking to some of the top developers of apps. Chaired by Dave McClure… Hard to hear the panel on their sofa… so apologies for the lack of info here…

Keith Rabois – Slide available on both MySpace and Facebook. Around 35% of effort devoted to Facebook development.

Seth Goldstein – building a range of apps for Facebook.

Lance Tokuda – “neat thing about Facebook platform is that you can actually talk to your friends through widgets built on it”. Expects to see Facebook api implemented elsewhere; social graphs driving apps.

Ali Portovi – largest community on Facebook. Million active users on a daily basis… Stopped building their own website/app… and devoted their effort to an app inside Facebook… and this has paid off. Forty spare servers at startup, just in case… Deliberately launched at a quiet period over Memorial Day weekend. Within 24 hours, Facebook registrations exceeded main website traffic – 10,000 in first 12 hours. 10,000 more in next three hours. And ongoing. Borrowed/bought 40 more servers to cope. A good proof-point for commoditised compute resources like EC2, surely…?

Most people see Facebook/MySpace apps as hook to draw people to their application/ website. iLike see it the other way; their web site is an advert for their Facebook app.

Panelists seeing Facebook as important to their growth; 30-90% of revenue/effort around the table.

Sound improving…

350,000,000 application installs via Facebook Platform. Aiming at over 1bn by the end of the year. Hundreds of millions of page views. But most of the apps are “useless stuff”?

Slide – 90 millon installs of TopFriends. Are you still trying to acquire new users?

How do you measure success? Pageviews? Users? Dollars?

Seth – apps and dollars.

Keith – obsessive-compulsive about metrics.

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