Toronto Facebook Camp – July 8, 2008

Tonight I attended the Toronto Facebook Camp, an event put on jointly by Trapeze and Refresh Partners. The night started with a recap of what has been going on with Facebook and its platform since the last camp, which was well done but had a varying level of value depending on how close you had been following Facebook over the last few months.

Next up, was Rebecca Sawyer from Facebook’s monetization team, which you can imagine was highly anticipated given how great the representatives Facebook had previously sent to Toronto had been and the fact that anything related to monetization of social networks (particularly Facebook) is bound to draw a crowd.

Unfortunately, Rebecca’s presentation turned out to be rather disappointing as she didn’t speak about how Facebook developers can monetize their applications (as many of the attendees, including myself, were expecting and hoping to hear) or even about Facebook’s monetization plans, but how effective Facebook Ads can be and how to set them up, but not even specifically in relation to applications. Needless to say, the crowd, which was about 1/3 marketers (who are all well aware of how Facebook Ads work) and 2/3 developers (who want to hear how they can realize returns on their investment in Facebook, not how they can invest more), wasn’t too impressed. Luckily, the crowd was given the opportunity to direct their ire at some weirdo who insisted on pursuing a senseless line of questioning about pornography in Facebook ads and applications. I don’t blame Rebecca as she was likely told what to present and did a pretty good job of it, but instead Facebook, who should of sent someone who could present content that was more relative to the audience, especially given the prominence of the Toronto community (Toronto is the world’s largest Facebook Camp). This may be due to the new profiles launching next week and f8 coming up soon, but it was disappointing nonetheless.

Following Rebecca, the Facebook no show continued as my coworker Andrew Cherwenka did an admirable job presenting the new Facebook profile based on a DVD that he was sent by Facebook from another Facebook Camp. I am not sure if it was the fact that everybody realized that nobody from Facebook was there to answer questions about it or if it was just Andrew’s charm, but I was somewhat shocked by the lack of reaction the crowd had to the implications that the new profile presents for Facebook application developers. For those that don’t know, all the applications will be relegated to a “Boxes” tab, one that I am sure that I and most other users will rarely look at, limiting one of the channels for viral spread of applications and removing value for those users that use applications as a form of self-expression. As someone who finds most applications to be junk, I like the redesign, but if I were a Facebook application developer, I wouldn’t.

After that, Refresh Partners introduced their Facebook application analytics tool, which I found to be fascinating and it looks to be an excellent tool, although I am a little skeptical of their claim to be able to provide a influencer rating for users (I imagine it is calculated primarily on number of friends, which in my experience is not really an measure of how influential a user might be).

Following that, three Facebook applications were demoed. The first one being Praize’n'Raize, an application that looks promising and pretty well made, but will likely have trouble luring users away from the Yelps of the world, but they do have a nice distribution strategy (multiple access points, open API) and a revenue stream in addition to the standard Adwords (they have refferal deals with Yellow Pages in Canada and Yellow Book in the US). The second application was Mouse Hunt, which looks like one of those Facebook games where you have to continually accumulate more of a digital commodity (similar to Mob Wars) by playing, referring friends and making purchases, which may be fun, but doesn’t have anything terribly innovative about it. The last one was Slang Book, which seems fun and well made, but again nothing Earth shattering.

Overall, I enjoyed the event, but was disappointed in Facebook’s poor showing and lack of support for a large community of self-organizing supporters.

Update: This morning I woke up to see Andrew’s Facebook status updated to “Andrew Cherwenka is thanking Rebecca Sawyer from facebook for setting the gold standard in post-garage q&a. Outstanding.” I guess I shouldn’t have ducked out of the post event social so quickly.