[Notes from the Social Graphing Patterns conference in San Jose.]

Intro to Platform, Apps, & Metrics - Dave Morin, senior platform manager, Facebook. [Note: This is the ONLY Facebook representative at the conference!!!]

We are a technology company.

We now have 43m users, 225k per day are new, or 3 percent.

We are doubling every 6 months.

Over 50% users come every day.

We are 6th largest web site.

Facebook is largest photo sharing site. Not because of more features but because it leverages the power of the social graph.

Facebook is largest event site, larger than evite. Not because of more features but because it leverages the power of the social graph.

Best practices, using "photos" as an example:

-Profile box is not that big, not very necessary.

-Enable engagement, leave comments is very important.

-Mini-feed: We've noticed people aren't using it as much as we'd like them to.

We want to help developers get past the growth stage, allow engagement and then get to make money. These are things that are super important.

We launched the fbFund, rants to get developers started. We don't take equity it is about community.

We have 5,000 apps. We have 90,000 developers in the community.

80% of users have adopted 1 application or more. We could not have dreamed this growth.

These aren't just our users they are your users.

We haven't yet seen a whole new class of work applications. There are lots of opportunities there.

We are still a small company, just 300 staff, we still have a lot of work ahead of us.

- - -

Building Facebook Applications with ASP.net, Silverlight, and Popfly - Dan Fernandez - Microsoft

Users are the stars, take good care of them.

The same way YouTube enabled sharing of videos, we want to do the same for consumers building and sharing applications.

Your software should build self-expression.

Popfly is free, client side file hosting, we don't do server side processing, works with open source AJAX Frameworks.

We built 40 Popfly blocks but there are now over 400.

Your application can live anywhere iframes is supported.

A demo of Popfly and how to deploy on Facebook, all done without coding.

- - -

Facebook App Design: Elements of Style - Jia Shen, RockYou.

The viral spread of Facebook apps is 7 times greater than other platforms because of the API.

Think mathematically, who you are targeting and how people will see it.

Don't go through long development process, be quick. Release early.

Follow how many people click on it and other user behavior.

Use Google Analytics and other site stats.

Launch in phases, make sure it works, then go full out.

Aim for about 1k users to test initially.

Promote on ad networks.

Myspace is like a single-player game, Facebook is multi-player.

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