Props to Rachel Strate, an Analyst from Epic Ventures (formerly Wasatch Ventures) who has offered to represent her Firm in providing food and drinks for the Social Media Developers Garage event on Tuesday. Rumor has it that they will be providing Pizza and drinks so come if anything for a free meal! The topic for the event will be a demonstration by Bungee on creating a Facebook App using their Google App Engine Killer, Bungee Connect. We’ll try to play some Wii afterwards as well.

Again, a big thanks to Epic Ventures for the food and Bungee Labs for hosting the event! If you would like to host or provide food for a future event (or even speak!) please let me know and we’ll make sure your company gets credit. This is a great opportunity for your company to get in front of a group of developers, bloggers and Social Media Evangelists for more exposure and future recruiting events.

While still vague in regards to details, Facebook today released some important information regarding their new design that is sure to excite those users that are considering leaving for other networks. The first of such features seems to be a slap in the Face (and maybe a token from former Google Execs) to Google Employee-founded FriendFeed. Facebook is calling the feature, “Publisher”, and from the Developer Wiki,

“The Publisher will be a central focus of communication and sharing in the new profile. It sits right on top of a user’s Feed inviting the user or others to add content. Applications can integrate into the Publisher to provide rich experiences for creating or finding content to post into their own and their friends’ Feeds…

This has replaced the old Wall Attachments feature. Now, Wall is just one type of application for creating content (text content), on par with posting links, or uploading photos or videos. For example, to add a video with the Video application, the user no longer creates a Wall attachment and adds the video. Instead, the user posts a video to a friend’s Feed just as if she were writing a Wall post.”

From the screenshots (to the left), it appears as though you can also comment on each posted item, further encouraging a “conversation” amongst members of the Facebook community. What’s most interesting is the integration with the Facebook Platform API and ability for developers to present items for discussion within a particular user’s Feed. It appears as though your applications will be able to actually utilize the text box within the publisher to present information on a user’s feed in different ways. More information regarding the new combined Feed/Wall can be found here.

Also very interesting is it seems as though Facebook will soon allow, via the publisher, the automatic playing of Flash, and onload events within FBJS. It seems this is Facebook’s answer to the demand from users migrating from Myspace and the competition from Bebo who allows such onload events.

In addition to the publisher, Facebook has released more information via their developers wiki about the Tabs that will be available, and how applications will be displayed via those tabs. It appears as though at first, all applications will be rendered in their current form in a tab called “boxes” (they mentioned earlier today that name may be temporary). What’s new though is it seems as though your application will be able to give the user options to render other forms of profile boxes to an “Info” tab on the user’s profile. It’s unclear, but this could mean your application will be able to have multiple forms of displaying itself within the user experience beyond just Canvas pages, profile boxes, and feeds. A new FBML tag has been created for this purpose called “<fb:add-section-button/>” which appears to give your application the ability to have the user add a “section” to their profile. (I now need to update FBML Essentials!) Such section will have the ability to display image objects or text that the user can type and provide to your application.

Facebook is also allowing your applications to register an “Application Tab URL” which will have your Application appear in a list of applications next to a “+” (plus) sign in the list of tabs. The user will then have the option to add your Application as a tab, offering an alternate canvas view of your application for the user’s friends to see.

Beyond the Info and Boxes tabs, it’s a bit unclear as to what the other tabs will be called. The most recent screenshot by them includes a “Photos”, “Wall”, and “Feed” tab, but it seems as though the Wall and Feed may be combined to produce the “Publisher”. It could be that the current “News Feed” will be under the Feed tab, while the combined Mini-Feed and Wall will be under the Wall tab. I’m sure we’ll see more screenshots soon. Also of note is that the Action items, the links below your profile image currently, will be no more. Instead you’ll be able to offer your users interactivity via the publisher and other integration points throughout the user’s profile.

It also seems as though the separate News Feed/profile is no more when you log in. It seems they are bringing the focus on the profile and including what is now the “News Feed” to become what will be the “Feed” tab. I like this new concept and hope it catches on - I think it will be a win-win for both Facebook, users, and developers in that it will bring a more fluid experience to users, and encourage discussion and people more than anything else.

With the release of this information to the developers wiki it seems Facebook is on the verge of releasing the new design very soon. I would expect to see such features in the next week or two, considering it was originally supposed to launch last month.

UPDATE: Facebook just released their official announcement here: http://developers.facebook.com/news.php?blog=1&story=107

I received a copy of the cover for FBML Essentials last Friday. I was waiting to figure out what the bird was on the cover before I shared it. The bird is a White Throated Dipper - from Wikipedia:

The White-throated Dipper (Cinclus cinclus) is an aquatic passerine bird found in Europe and the Middle East, also known as the European Dipper or just Dipper. The species is divided into several subspecies on colour differences, especially of the pectoral band.

My Editor tells me that usually they don’t have reasons for the animals they have on the covers of O’Reilly books, and that they usually choose an animal that fits well with the look and feel of the book. I guess one could say that most birds are “Social” - anyone know anything more about the White-throated Dipper? Here’s a video of one in the wild:

You can pre-order the book here - it should be available in print around June or July, based on the production schedule they sent me. There’s always a chance it could be at Graphing Social Patterns in June. If not, look for it at OSCON in the O’Reilly booth (and who knows - maybe I’ll be there to sign your copy!).

UPDATE: I forgot to mention - Nick O’Neill of AllFacebook.com, and Rodney Rumford of FaceReviews.com did the Foreword and Afterword for the book. Thanks to both of them (Rodney wrote his Afterword on his birthday!) for putting the time in for those! It’s an excellent read and reference for all already into or looking to get into Facebook development!

Our Utah Social Media Developers Garages (UTSMDev) happen every second Tuesday of every other month, and that is coming up one week from today. Our next meeting will be on May 13th from 7pm to 10pm at the same place as last time, Bungee Labs. We’ll bring the Wii or Xbox in case there’s time to play afterwards.

At this event, Bungee is going to show us a simple “Hello World” for Facebook using their Bungee Connect Platform. For those unaware, Bungee had “Platform as a Service” down before Google App Engine came out, and have recently even partnered with Amazon EC2 in order to provide full server access beyond their current platform. I have some videos of their stuff I took while at Web 2.0 Expo that I’ll try to post later this week in my “Utah Startups” series.

I am still looking for businesses to sponsor snacks and drinks (or even a full dinner - Bungee supplied Fuddruckers for our last event!) for the event - if your business would like some exposure I’ll be sure you get the credit. It could be a great way to meet new developers, Social Media experts, and bloggers!

As usual, while this event is targeted towards developers, everyone is welcome at the event, as it could be a good way for your business to meet developers in this area, as well as just learn a little more about the Social Media space! For future announcements of UTSMDev events, be sure to subscribe to our Google Groups mailing list here!

Bungee Labs is located in the old Wordpress building on the second floor - you can find directions here:

625 E Technology Ave B2300
Orem, UT 84097

http://maps.google.com/maps?f=q&hl=en&geocode=&q=625+E+Technology+Ave,+84097&sll=37.0625,-95.677068&sspn=34.724817,82.265625&ie=UTF8&ll=40.325575,-111.679738&spn=0.008163,0.020084&z=16&iwloc=cent

Please RSVP on our Facebook Event Page.

(I’m beginning to move much of my activity over to FriendFeed lately. Scoble calls it the “World Wide Talk Show” - please subscribe to my feed to comment and participate!)

I was going to write a few more of my annoyances with Twitter today, but a few pleasant announcements have come out of Twitter lately that I thought I’d share.

First, just announced today, Twitter will be shutting down accounts entirely that they have marked as “spam” on their blacklist. What??? Twitter has a blacklist? Yes, you heard it right.

Before today, Twitter would mark accounts as “spam”, but not tell the owners of the accounts they marked them as spam. Those owners of the accounts could follow others, but no one was able to follow them, and there was no way for the owners of those accounts to know they had been blacklisted. It was the same with the API - it was actually a huge headache for me as a Twitter API developer because despite me following the user, Twitter would respond with nothing as though the follow went through, but the next day the user would show up again as not being followed. I checked with Twitter and they confirmed the accounts I was having trouble with were indeed accounts that were on their “blacklist”.

Today, Alex Payne confirmed on the Twitter Dev mailing list that from now on users marked as Spam on Twitter will have their accounts suspended entirely for violating the Terms of Service. He also confirmed that they would avoid the headaches Facebook has had (aka Scoble’s account being suspended) and contact the owners beforehand to let them state their case.

I strongly welcome this new practice - Twitter has all the stats on their end to flag accounts as possible spammers, and by removing their accounts promptly this will make Twitter a much nicer place to use. The only other thing I would suggest they add now that this is in place is a way for developers to notify them of possible Spam accounts. You can do this as a user by “blocking” the account in question - I have no way to do this as a developer that I’m aware of.

The second, very welcomed feature is the addition of a “since” variable when requesting the friends or followers of an individual. In the past on SocialToo.com I had to do a request on all of an individual’s friends and all of an individual’s followers, and do a compare to see which of those following you, you weren’t following. For several A-list bloggers with near tens of thousands of followers, this was taking a few hours to complete the entire script, not to mention increasing the number of HTTP requests back to Twitter’s servers, I’m sure further burdening their already overburdened bandwidth.

Now, with the “since” variable, I can keep a tally of when I last checked your following/follower ratio and only do a request on those friends that have followed you since the last check. I can now go from checking those you follow on a daily basis, to checking almost every minute!

Last, Twitter has added the ability to determine, with one API call if a friendship exists between two individuals. Now rather than having to get a list of those you’re following, and then those that have followed you, I can just get a list of those following you and check to see that a friendship exists.

It is very refreshing to see such an active effort on Twitter’s part to help out the development community. I hope they continue to maintain the relationship they have with us, and continue to listen - many of us really want to see them succeed.

I have disliked the Twitter syntax since I’ve been on it (you can find me via @JesseStay on Twitter - go ahead and follow me!). As a long-time IRC user, everything seems backwards! I have often referred to Twitter as “IRC 2.0″. I’m not sure I can fully embrace that concept though.

For those unfamiliar with IRC, it predates even instant messaging. It brought out the original concept of a “chatroom”, and exists even today on various servers throughout the world. Ustream.tv currently uses it for its users’ channel chatrooms. It is the home for almost any “live” activity of any open source project (log into irc.freenode.net to see - I’m often in #utah there, as well as recently #codeaway). Traditions have been established, and virtual friendships have been bonded. In many ways it could have been the original concept of a “social network”, the first concept of linking friends together in a single place on the internet.

I was at a Perl conference just last year, and was happy to see the #YAPC chatroom in irc.perl.org open during the banquet. We had a ton of fun with that! Now, just this year, when I go to conferences, I see speakers leaving up Twitter, and answering questions via Twitter. The two seem to be serving similar purposes, in different ways.

That’s why I was astonished when I got on Twitter for the first time, and started seeing public messages directed to individuals with “@” signs in front of them! Is there a source for that that I’m not aware of? I know of no known documentation that Twitter themselves created to establish that tradition. In IRC you simply type “username:”, and then your message, and it gets highlighted in that user’s chat window in most IRC clients. Better yet, I can start typing the username and it tab-completes. You can’t do that in Twitter. That tradition and method has been around for years, yet Twitter seems to break the mold for some reason.

IRC also supports commands - I can type “/nick newnickname”, and it switches my username, automatically! It’s a basic standard that all clients support, open, and available for all to use. Twitter I have to go entirely to their website to do anything, and it’s extremely limited in what you can do. To direct message someone on Twitter, I have to type, “dm username message”. In IRC it’s just a simple command, like all other commands, and I can always type, “/help” if I don’t know what the commands available are. I simply type, “/msg username message”, and it messages the user, and again, it tab-completes the username!

Why couldn’t Twitter just use the IRC standard in their platform, and then expand upon it to improve the IRC standard and bring it to a mobile world? By all means many of their scalability issues may have been taken care of had they done so. Not just that, but they would now be able to support groups, and less development would be needed to manage their platform. Twitter says they have an open API - I question that openness. It’s not based on much of an open standard, and IMO, it’s causing them problems now because of it.

Looking to start a project? Always look at the open solutions that are out there first, then build upon them - you’ll have much fewer headaches if you do.

(Photo courtesy GapingVoid.com)

I’m thinking about starting a series on this blog of hot startups that I find interesting in Utah. I’d really like to show to the world the great startup scene that Utah has to offer - hopefully other bloggers in the area can pitch in and join in this effort as well. I am relatively new to Utah, and am just getting to know the scene out here, so please don’t take this the wrong way. My hope is that this is only because I’m new to the area - honestly, I only know of one or two established startups. I know of many that are “in the works”, but only a few have an actual business model with customers and revenue stream (or venture/private equity/angel funding to hopefully get to that revenue stream). I’m hoping I am just not “in the know”.

Do you have an up-and-coming startup you’d like me to feature? Do you know of any that stand out to you? I really am hoping those in Utah can step out of the woodwork and share via the comments (I monitor FriendFeed as well so you can also comment there) what you know. I hope to then pick out the best and try to get the word out about what you’re doing. Speak up, or forever hold your peace!

I’ve been analyzing various Social Applications Analytics tools lately, and have recently stumbled upon Sometrics. Sometrics handles full Analytics for your Facebook, Bebo, and MySpace applications, and will actually utilize the Facebook API to retrieve demographic info about those visiting your Application. As I examine the other Analytics solutions for Facebook and other Social Network Applications, I’ll try to post my findings of their strengths and weaknesses here, OpenSocialNow, and FacebookAdvice.com. If you’re not a techie, you may want to skip the next part, or forward it onto your IT department.

One thing I noticed about Sometrics is it seems to only provide code to paste on your Application pages for PHP, Ruby, and ASP.net. The code they provide is relatively simple, but in case you’re wondering how to do it in Perl, here is how I did it in Template Toolkit under Catalyst on Perl:

Enter this on all Application pages (I do it in my “footer” file):


[% IF Catalyst.request.param("installed") %]

<fb:iframe width='1' height='0' frameborder='0' src="http://halo.sometrics.com/fb_tracer.html?src=fb&installed=1&session=%7B%22session_key%22%3A%22[% Catalyst.request.param("fb_sig_session_key") %]%22%2C%22uid%22%3A[% Catalyst.request.param("fb_sig_user") %]%2C%22expires%22%3A0%2C%22secret%22%3A%22%22%7D&t=[% date.now %]"></fb:iframe>

[% ELSE %]

<fb:iframe width='1' height='0' frameborder='0' src="http://halo.sometrics.com/fb_tracer.html?src=fb&session=%7B%22session_key%22%3A%22[% Catalyst.request.param("fb_sig_session_key") %]%22%2C%22uid%22%3A[% Catalyst.request.param("fb_sig_user") %]%2C%22expires%22%3A0%2C%22secret%22%3A%22%22%7D&t=[% date.now %]"></fb:iframe>

[% END %]


Then add this in the “post-remove url” subroutine for your Applicaiton (or create one and add the URL in your App’s config):

=head2 remove

  Page that handles App removal

=cut

sub remove : Local {

  my ( $self, $c ) = @_;

  if ($c->req->param(”fb_sig_uninstall”)) {

    $c->res->redirect(qq{http://halo.sometrics.com/met.gif?a=u&app=}.$c->req->param(”fb_sig_api_key”).qq{&uid=}.$c->req->param(”fb_sig_user”).qq{&age=&sex=&city=&state=&country=&friend=&src=fb});

    $c->detach();

  }

  return;

}

I just realized I was missing about a week’s worth of comments from this blog. It looks like Google Reader at some point stopped tracking the comments (which is how I knew you were commenting), and I missed a few great ones, including one from BJ Fogg, whom I look up to. My apologies if it has taken awhile for me to respond to your comments.

If you want to track any of the comments feeds for any particular article, simply view the article, and append, “/feed” to the end and add it to your favorite RSS Reader. It will then send you updates of all comments for that article. Or, you can just click the checkbox next to, “Notify me of followup comments via e-mail” below the Captcha and it will e-mail you updates.

My apologies if I have not responded very quickly lately - that should be fixed now.

I have a sincere favor to ask of you. Would you, if you have not already, go to http://socialtoo.com and sign up and help me out in my cause? Share it with others, blog about it, Twitter it - this was written for you. Today, I launched something special on SocialToo.com, something that I hope will make a better environment on Twitter. It only works if lots of people use it though.

Today I launched an intelligent blacklisting feature on SocialToo.com. After registering and logging into your SocialToo! Dashboard, you’ll see a text box where you can enter twitter screen names you would like to blacklist. For each “spammer” you see, or individual you simply do not want to follow, enter their Twitter screen-name, and when a certain percentage of users on SocialToo.com all blacklist that same user (we have a unique algorithm that determines that, based on crowd-sourcing the definition of “Spam” on Twitter), we add that name to a global blacklist on SocialToo.com. When anyone chooses to auto-follow those that follow them on Twitter using the SocialToo! auto-follow feature, now those users will never be followed. You can now ignore them forever, hindering their reasons for being on Twitter!

SocialToo.com is a project I term, “the Companion to the Social Web”. After registering you have options such as the ability to automatically follow those that follow you on Twitter, add an automated message that gets sent to users (via dm) after they follow you for the first time, and on Facebook, redirect to your Facebook profile via yourusername.socialtoo.com. More features are being worked on for multiple social networks, and the idea is to find all the needs that just are not provided by the traditional Social Networks, and make them available to the public. If you have a need let me know. All scripts that run behind the scenes at SocialToo.com I am releasing on a single-user level via Open Source (GPL v.2) so you can run it on your own server should you desire.

The final feature, released today, is this Global, Intelligent, blacklisting feature. This feature, to me makes much more sense than services like twitterblacklist.com, since rather than depending on ratio only, we’re depending on actual user definition, by the masses to determine who is a “spammer” on Twitter. I’ll look to also integrate with twitterblacklist.com’s API in the future, and maybe even contribute back to it as we grow, but this is the start of something big. This is truly a Groundswell opportunity (I’m reading Charlene Li’s book right now) that you can be a part of.