Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook's annual developer conference F8

Facebook’s mega developer conference in San Francisco set the scene for the next 12 months of the social web. Mark Zuckerberg and team are setting the pace for how we interact with our friends online.

The main highlights:

• A mission about giving people the power to share, an ecosystem that will reward apps that help people share
• A set of ten core values for what an app should do: meaningful (social, useful, expressive, engaging), trustworthy (secure, respectful, transparent), well designed (clean, fast and robust)
• A verification and awards programme for great apps
• A way of logging on to existing web sites with your Facebook account so bringing your  details with you (photo, name etc) and seeing what your friends are up to on that web site (Facebook Connect) Read Om Malik on Why it matters and why Facebook will win for more.
  
• Lots and lots of excitement - the hype burn off that we’ve seen in London is definitely not here
• Increasing investment into app companies, especially those creating apps for students (fb fund recipients) as well as the usual suspects of travel apps, wish lists and games networks
• More improvements to the feed aggregation and story templates, new ways to view the feed - top stories, status updates, photos, posted notes and via the mini-profile. The feed is increasingly becoming central to the Facebook user experience - a bit as I predicted last year.
• Virtuous circle of sharing - the more people view stuff that people have shared the more likely they are to then share stuff themselves

Of the third parties I liked:

• Kontagent who have a really good tracking system for measuring cohort activity and A/B testing on Facebook apps.
• Flixster who have a solid money making business model paid for by the hollywood studios distributing blockbusters - their clients refreshingly were happy that users engaged with the product (viewed movie details, watched a trailer, added to want to see list) all within the platform and weren’t trying to count number of clicks to an external site
• CourseFeed - who were getting 30%-40% take up of their app within universities - by first signing up the university who then made it available to students. Shows the power of facebook within an enterprise context.

All in all, a useful conference: it was more to get inside the heads of the people building the platform, the sharing systems and how they are designing it. Understanding the thinking is very useful and will help me build better and more effective apps.

I didn’t get to meet Mark Zuckerberg unfortunately, but I did manage to meet his sister.. :o)

Toby Beresford and Randi Zuckerberg at F8

When applications had a really nice part of the screen real estate

Facebook rolled out it’s new clothes last night with changes to the user interface.  Due to hit UK users in a few days time here’s a guide to the things to spot in new look Facebook:

• user profiles now have a cleaned up home page with the wall and min feed being the priority - now it’s easier to see what a friend has been up to recently without the clutter of application profile  boxes littered everywhere
• navigation is rolled up into a single top bar - this lets us imagine a future where I “bring Facebook levels of privacy and my friends with me” as I surf the web
• when communicating in multi-media with a friend the best way to do this will be on their profile page using the new “publisher” box - want to share a photo, post to their wall or post a video? then this is the place to do it.

Where we find the apps on the new Facebook navigation bar

Overall these are excellent changes to the user interface for the user -  they clean it up and reduce the stress of loading giant profiles with mega amounts of crazy applications.

However there have been major changes to the way the applications platform will work:

• unloved third party application profile content is relegated from front page to the fourth tab of the profile under the poorly named “boxes”
• the left menu of applications is gone (see screenshot) and reappears now underneath an “Applications” menu item
• there is a space for 2 “loved apps” to get their own tab on the profile - this will be competitive profile real estate as apps jockey to get users to add them as a tab
• on the news feed home page  the only real estate left for applications is the “Bookmarks” section nearly two thirds of the way down on the right on the home page

Personally I thought one of the greatest strength of the Facebook platform was the ability to get your application link prominently displayed on every page the Facebook user saw.  ”Wow” I thought - “I can write useful apps that will feel part of Facebook, users can get my features without having to learn my user interface, remember how to log in or remember where to find me”. 

This Wow factor is still there but not as strong as before. It’s becoming harder to get my apps to be part of the Facebook platform and on a level playing field with Facebook’s home grown apps.

By removing the applications menu bar Facebook are risking being perceived as turning their backs on their “we are a platform” promise and returning to their roots as a vertical application. While it’s not a death blow for the applications it’s certainly a worrying trend.

I’m hoping that at the F8 Facebook developer conference on Wednesday in San Francisco I’ll hear some serious announcements that will restore investor confidence in the platform - like a proper mobile applications platform, plans for the payments API and some plug-in APIs for Facebook’s  Groups, Photos and Events apps.

With the launch of the iphone 2.0 bloggers such as Nick O’Neill at the Social Times (iphone daze) are wondering whether mobile phones are ready to be the device of choice for web 2.0 and the social web.

I’ve had a Nokia N82 for a while. It has the key features that are in the new Iphone: Wifi, 3G, GPS, tilt screen, 5 megapixel camera and most importantly a decent web browser.

My pattern of mobile web usage recently has sky rocketed.This is what I’ve done in the last two months:

* checked and sent emails, I’ve even tidied up my inbox (thank you Gmail for the interface)

* purchased two books from Amazon (in the middle of meetings very conveniently)

* found contact details for a client office I was trying to find while on the road

* synchronised my Gmail calendar with my phone calendar

* looked at friends statuses with Facebook

* watched a youtube video

What’s interesting is that all of the above services (with the exception of my client web site) had mobile ready web sites and reduced interfaces.

Mobile ready, reduced interfaces are still essential if you want meaningful engagement from users of devices with tiny screens and slow keyboards.

For brands and web site owners still in web 1 with their own sites, this creates just one more technical hurdle to overcome - more cost and more expense.

For those brands that have embraced web 2 and social media they don’t need to do anything - it’s now the job of the platforms (youtube, facebook, google et al) to format their content for the new devices.

That’s the advice I’d give any aspiring web entrepreneur. Take a market, find the niche within in, identify what their itch (the thing that’s annoyinng them) and provide a solution to the itch.

Take three successful web apps:

• Eventbrite helps you manage tickets for your event. The niche is people running small ish events (20 to 100 people) who can’t afford big conferencing systems but don’t want to have to di it manually. Eventbrite charge 50p per ticket (pretty expensive if you’re running a big 1000 people event but for under 100 people it makes it worth it)
• Unfuddle is focusing on computer software developers (a pretty small niche) who need what’s called a “subversion repository” - it’s a place where you can store your computer code so that others can work on it at the same time. Everyone needs a repository like this when programming but they are a hassle to set up. From around $4 a month unfuddle runs it all for you (for 4 projects) as well as project management tools thrown in.
• Freshbooks solves the problem of sending out a regular monthly invoice (by paper or by email) for a set amount. MicroAid’s newsletter tool: Newsletto uses it to great effect, especially when billing schools with www.school-newsletter.com who still need a paper invoice and can’t use credit cards.

In fact school newsletter is a good example of how web apps work best when targeted at specific niches. The MicroAid team in fact gets more interest from users who want the school newsletter than from those who are looking for a generic newsletter tool despite the underlying product being essentially the same.

Too many web entrepreneurs start too general and never find an itch in a niche (try pronouncing it the American way as ‘nitch’) and their web application dies because anyone could use it but there wasn’t a specific set of people who had to use it.