Liveblogging Facebook Advertising Announcement (Social Ads + Beacon + Insights)

I am at Facebook’s social advertising announcement in New York City, where Mark Zuckerberg is about to take the stage and tell us all what we already think we know: Facebook is getting into the advertising business in a big way. Much of what will be announced today, such as projects code-named Beacon and Pandemic have already leaked out. We’ll see how much of that leaked information was correct, and what more there is to add. Facebook is certainly pulling out all the stops with this announcement, on the agenda later on is a panel with Microsoft’s Kevin Johnson and Blockbuster CEO Jim Keyes that will be moderated by Charlie Rose (who charges a lot to do these things, or so I hear).

Facebook is announcing three things: Social Ads (ads targeted based on member profile data and spread virally), Beacon (messages in feeds), and Insight (marketing data that goes deep into social demographics and pyschographics which Facebook will provide to advertisers in an aggregated, anonymous way). These three things together make up Facebook Ads. Here are the press releases for Facebook Ads, Project Beacon, and its launch partners.

Zuckerberg just took the stage (keep in mind that he is addressing advertising executives and press in the audience). The following notes are in reverse-chronological order:

3:06 PM: “Everything you have seen here is launching tonight.” Launching with 40 partners [press release says 60] (including Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, The Coca-Cola Company, The New York Times, Sony Pictures, Verizon, Dove, and Zazzle). “This is something we have been working on for a long time. It is really good to share it with you guys.” [Zuckerberg walks off stage]

3:03: Insights. Aggregates profile data. “We look at the people your ads are reaching and break it down by age, gender, interests, and a whole lot more we are adding soon.” Says none of this will be personally identifiable. “We will be able to track how much people are talking about your brand in public forums across facebook. As you run ads on Facebook you will be able to see the exact mind share you are getting.”

2:57 PM: “Social Actions + Content = Social Ads.” They spread your message virally through the social graph. these ads will appear both in people’s feeds and as a personalized banner ad.

“Let’s talk about targeting. With Facebook you will be able to select exactly the audience you want to reach, and we will only show your ads to them. We know exactly what gender someone is, what activities they are interested in. their location, country, city or town, interests, gender,” work history, political views [Like what they’ve already done with Facebook Flyers].

2:52 PM: Social distribution, now here is where it gets interesting. When somebody engages with your page, that os spread virally through the network. When someone says they are a fan of your brand, that becomes a trusted referral. It goes right to their Mini feed. A strong trusted referral for your brand. You will be able to craft the types of social actions you want to spread across the social graph.

“We have created a product called Beacon that let’s you do this. Beacon will let users send information to their page, we confirm it, and share it on Facebook. One partner is eBay.” Can share listinsg from eBay on Facebook. So usres can share social actions from other websites and share them on Facebook. “This will be completely free.”

2:48: “the next hundred years will be different for advertising, and it starts today. As marketers pushing our information out is no longer enough. We are announcing anew advertising system, not about broadcasting messages, about getting into the conversations between people. 3 pieces: build pages for advertisers, a new kind of ad system to spread the messages virally, and gain insights.”

Advertisers can build their own Facebook pages and design them any way they like: “We have photos, videos, discussion boards, any Flash content you want to bring to your page, plus any application a third party developer has made.”

2:46 PM: Messages spread virally. All you need to do is get your friends to engage with it and add it to their profiles. Gives example of how causes are spread across Facebook. Support Breast Cancer, more than 2 million members.

2:44 PM: Zuckerberg is explaining the social graph. “Where Facebook really excels is in helping you keep up with all of your connections at the same time. It is making the cost of communication so low that information can be pushed out more efficiently than it ever could from a few big companies.”

2:43 PM: Z: “More than 80 applications have more than one millions users.”

2:37 PM EST: Zuckerberg: “Once every hundred years media changes. the last hundred years have been defined by the mass media. The way to advertise was to get into the mass media and push out your content. That was the last hundred years. In the next hundred years information won’t be just pushed out to people, it will be shared among the millions of connections people have. Advertising will change. You will need to get into these connections.

“People influence people. Nothing influences people more than are recommendation from a trusted friend. A trusted referral influences people more than the best broadcast message. A trusted referral is the Holy Grail of advertising.

“Have already passed 50 million users, doubling once every 6 months. only active users who have used facebook last 30 days. More than 25 million people are using Facebook every single day. Each person is viewing more than 40 pages a day, more than 65 billion page views a month.”

Notes:

Beacon Partners (Facebook advertising buttons that exist on other sites and when clicked are reflected in members’ feeds as a brand endorsements—how many of these brands would you bother to explicitly endorse to your Facebook friends, opr even identify with?):

eBay
Fandango
IAC brands (CollegeHumor, Busted Tees, iWon, Citysearch, Pronto.com, echomusic)
Travelocity
AllPosters.com
Blockbuster
Bluefly.com
CBS Interactive (CBSSports.com & Dotspotter)
ExpoTV
Gamefly
Hotwire
Joost
Kiva,
Kongregate
LiveJournal
Live Nation
Mercantila
National Basketball Association
NYTimes.com
Overstock.com
(RED)
Redlight
SeamlessWeb,
Sony Online Entertainment
Sony Pictures
STA Travel
The Knot
TripAdvisor
Travel Ticker
TypePad
viagogo
Vox
Yelp
WeddingChannel.com
Zappos.com.

The Main source : TechCrunch

Source : Digg here

Facebook Outage

Facebook is down, and has been so since at least 10 am PST. Anyone notice it down earlier than that? We’ve emailed the company for their comment.

Update: Facebook is now back up as at 11:30am PST

Update: Statement from Facebook:

This morning, we temporarily took down the Facebook site to fix a bug we identified earlier today. This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them. The site has now been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have

How Much Is A Facebook User Worth? At Least $0.30

People aren’t wasting any time trying to figure out how to monetize all those thousands of Facebook apps that have sprung up over the last couple of months. At least three advertising experiments have launched - the most promising, by far, is RockYou.

fbExchange

The first out the door was FBExchange, a copycat of the LinkExchange idea from the nineties. It was created by the 30Boxes Calendar team - Narendra Rocherolle, Julie Davidson and Nick Wilder. Display others’ ads on your facebook application and build up credits, which can then be used to run your own ads on other apps. It’s a cheap and easy way to get exposure for your application, should the viral Facebook machine not create enough growth to keep you happy. See GigaOm for more. The company says they’ve booked $200k in revenue after just two weeks live.

Lookery

Lookery, founded by serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer, is a straight up advertising network targeted solely at Facebook applications. They say they’ll have access to deep demographic data on users and can therefore target ads to users with very specific characteristics - a woman between the ages of 20-25 in New York, for example. That theoretically will lead to much higher advertising rates. I like the idea, but Facebook itself has access to the same data and more and has had trouble selling high CPM ads at scale. Lookery needs big scale to be successful, and so will likely struggle in the early days. For now, Rafer says, they are passing 100% of revenue to content providers and will start to take a cut in a month or so when the economics support it.

RockYou

RockYou has been quietly testing their own idea of an advertising network - selling “users” to other applications. They’ve had a tremendous amount of success building viral applications on Facebook so far. Their Super Wall app, for example, has nearly 3 million users and is adding hundreds of thousands of new users each day. It’s basically what it says - a better “wall” where friends can leave messages. With Super Wall, people can add pictures, video and other rich media.

They’re offering to promote third party applications on Super Wall, and charging on a per-user-acquired (CPA) basis. When a user is signing up for Super Wall they are asked if they’d like to also add a additional application (the advertiser). See the screen shot to the right (click for large view).

The test so far are going very well. CEO Lance Tokuda told me today that they moved $30k in inventory in just four hours. They are testing various price points, but the low end seems to be around $0.30 for each user they sell to another application, and they believe they can get as much as $1 over time. The effective CPM (or revenue per 1,000 pages) is a “multiple of $20″ he says. This make them possibly the first Facebook application to have found a real way to monetize users and pageviews.

Tokuda also says they have developed an API for Super Wall and will give free access to other applications to build their functionality into it. This can make your head spin a bit - Facebook is now widely considered a platform, and now Super Wall is a platform on top of a platform. It’s a good thing I guess that no one is slowing down long enough to really think too hard about how quickly the online world is evolving. Instead, they’re experimenting wildly. And some of this stuff is going to stick.

Facebook In Court With ConnectU; Press Conference at 3 PM PST

The Facebook/ConnectU litigation is moving ahead steadily - lawyers for both sides are in court today arguing over a preliminary motion to dismiss portions of the case. ConnectU has scheduled a press conference immediately following today’s hearing, roughly scheduled for 3 PM PST. We also expect some sort of statement from Facebook shortly. Stay tuned.

ConnectU Given Two Weeks To Finalize Facebook Complaint

A Massachusetts District Court Judge has given ConnectU two weeks to revise their complaint against Facebook, according to a CNet News report.

ConnectU is due to give a conference call at 3pm PST. We’ll be back with more as we get it.

Conference call Live notes

3pm ConnectU Counsel states that they can’t talk about the litigation in the intro aside from what is in the public domain. Not a good start.

3:05pm: one of ConnectU’s founders claims that they are not trying to shut Facebook down.

3:10pm: explanation on background. They don’t like Mark Zuckerberg; the claim is that Zuckerberg worked for ConnectU and stole the idea

3:13pm: ConnectU’s founders claim that the case is not about the money

3:15pm: Q&A, first question isn’t answered due to “legal issues.”

3:16pm: current action was filled in March 2007, although it wasn’t made clear why there was a new legal action. Obvious question: if it’s not about the money why was it refilled in 2007?

3:20pm: Q&A from conference call participants. Simply ConnectU wont discuss anything remotely interesting.

3:25 conference call ends. Yawn.

Conclusion

I’ve had a number of people tell me today that ConnectU doesn’t have a leg to stand on; I’ve tried to keep an open mind to date and whilst there may still be some chance that ConnectU has a case, this conference call will have done them no favors. ConnectU’s founders and Legal Counsel gave nothing interesting in the call and were indeed elusive when it came to the questions the media asked; questions that in a proper presentation of ConnectU’s case should have been answered. It should be remembered that ConnectU called this conference: this was their opportunity to defend their case and instead they wasted the time of a slew of Tech Journalists.

Previous TechCrunch coverage of ConnectU vs Facebook here and here

UPDATE: Facebook responds:”We are pleased with the outcome of the hearing today. We continue to disagree with the allegations that Mark Zuckerberg stole any ideas or code to build Facebook.”

Truemors For Facebook

Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors is testing out a new version of the service for Facebook. This is a very different application from Truemors.com, which is a sort of Digg for rumors. TFF is an application to spread rumors just with your friends, or a subset of friends:

TFF is very different from Truemors.com. Our site is for you to “tell the world,” so if you post something at Truemors.com, anyone with a browser can read it. With Truemors.com, our intent is to spread information as far and wide as possible.

By contrast, TFF is for you to “tell your friends.” You can post something that only your friends can read and discuss. In fact, you can get even more specific: Selecting just a few of your friends.

Now We’re Not Talking: Telstra Bans Facebook

Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company, has banned its approximately 49,000 employees from using Facebook.

As Cameron Reilly at G’Day World puts it, “This would be a retarded move for ANY company, let alone a company that is trying to position itself as a company that “gets” online.”

The move is strange given the growing worldwide popularity of Facebook as a corporate tool. German company and international electronics powerhouse Siemens already has 6000 employees using Facebook, with plans to deliver exclusive Facebook apps for employee use in the future. According to Robert Scoble, Facebook could well become a substitute for Siemen’s corporate intranet. Facebook is also growing in popularity as a business networking tool.

How Much Is A Facebook User Worth? At Least $0.30

People aren’t wasting any time trying to figure out how to monetize all those thousands of Facebook apps that have sprung up over the last couple of months. At least three advertising experiments have launched - the most promising, by far, is RockYou.

fbExchange

The first out the door was FBExchange, a copycat of the LinkExchange idea from the nineties. It was created by the 30Boxes Calendar team - Narendra Rocherolle, Julie Davidson and Nick Wilder. Display others’ ads on your facebook application and build up credits, which can then be used to run your own ads on other apps. It’s a cheap and easy way to get exposure for your application, should the viral Facebook machine not create enough growth to keep you happy. See GigaOm for more. The company says they’ve booked $200k in revenue after just two weeks live.

Lookery

Lookery, founded by serial entrepreneur Scott Rafer, is a straight up advertising network targeted solely at Facebook applications. They say they’ll have access to deep demographic data on users and can therefore target ads to users with very specific characteristics - a woman between the ages of 20-25 in New York, for example. That theoretically will lead to much higher advertising rates. I like the idea, but Facebook itself has access to the same data and more and has had trouble selling high CPM ads at scale. Lookery needs big scale to be successful, and so will likely struggle in the early days. For now, Rafer says, they are passing 100% of revenue to content providers and will start to take a cut in a month or so when the economics support it.

RockYou

RockYou has been quietly testing their own idea of an advertising network - selling “users” to other applications. They’ve had a tremendous amount of success building viral applications on Facebook so far. Their Super Wall app, for example, has nearly 3 million users and is adding hundreds of thousands of new users each day. It’s basically what it says - a better “wall” where friends can leave messages. With Super Wall, people can add pictures, video and other rich media.

They’re offering to promote third party applications on Super Wall, and charging on a per-user-acquired (CPA) basis. When a user is signing up for Super Wall they are asked if they’d like to also add a additional application (the advertiser). See the screen shot to the right (click for large view).

The test so far are going very well. CEO Lance Tokuda told me today that they moved $30k in inventory in just four hours. They are testing various price points, but the low end seems to be around $0.30 for each user they sell to another application, and they believe they can get as much as $1 over time. The effective CPM (or revenue per 1,000 pages) is a “multiple of $20″ he says. This make them possibly the first Facebook application to have found a real way to monetize users and pageviews.

Tokuda also says they have developed an API for Super Wall and will give free access to other applications to build their functionality into it. This can make your head spin a bit - Facebook is now widely considered a platform, and now Super Wall is a platform on top of a platform. It’s a good thing I guess that no one is slowing down long enough to really think too hard about how quickly the online world is evolving. Instead, they’re experimenting wildly. And some of this stuff is going to stick.