I’ve been experimenting with Facebook ads. Like Fred Wilson, I found I was getting very few pageviews and no clicks at all until I created this ad that started last night, and bumped my CPC bid from $0.10 to $0.15. Within a few minutes, it had 1000s of views and started seeing clicks.
In a couple hours, I’d reached reached 138 clicks ($10 worth). Then Facebook banished my ad, and I have no idea why.
Today the ad page updated to tell me my ad was in violation of Facebook’s Advertising Guidelines, sections 4, 5, and 6. It’s strange… you can see my ad in this screenshot, and I can’t really see how it’s in violation.
Here are sections 4, 5, and 6 of Facebook’s Ad Guidelines:
4. Grammar, spelling, and capitalization
Ad text must be in logical sentence form and contain grammatically correct spacing.
Ads must use correct spelling.
Ads may not include unnecessary capitalization (such as ‘FREE’). Acronyms may be capitalized.
Ads may not include excessive repetition.
5. Punctuation and symbols
The use of all symbols, numbers, or letters must adhere to the true meaning of the symbol.
Repeated and unnecessary punctuation or symbols is not permitted.
Symbols may not be used to substitute for letters (e.g., “$ave” instead of “save”).
6. Language and image content
Provocative images will not be accepted.
Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote adult content, including nudity, sexual terms and/or images of people in positions or activities that are excessively suggestive or sexual.
Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote offensive, profane, vulgar, obscene, or inappropriate language.
Ads may not contain, facilitate or promote defamatory, libelous, slanderous and/or unlawful content.
Any ideas?
Me: I told you about my idea for doing an STD app, right?
Me: Instead of giving your friend a little virtual balloon or birthday cake, you give ‘em herpes
Mike: LOL!
Me: Then it spreads, you know, virally. New STDs released every so often.
Me: and your profile says you got herpes from mike g
Mike: oh, that’s brilliant! you should make that before some college kid thinks of it.
Me: haha. I don’t how you’d make money off of it though.
I know, I’m sorry, I’m a bad person. But if someone were to build this, I think it’d spread like wildfire. It’d be interesting to graph the trajectory and see which STDs proved most popular.
Posted on 17 October '07 by Amit Gupta, under Asides, facebook. 10 Comments.
I spent the the day at Community Next Platform. Here’s a few things that jumped out.
- Dan Peguine revealed the most common word used by people sending anonymous messages to others through Honesty Box: “Love”
- Zachary Allia, developer of one of the most popular facebook apps, Free Gifts, when asked why his competition had not seen the same success: “He’s a jerk.”
- The developers of the most popular apps shared a strategy: just start coding and put it up. Some admit this strategy may not work any longer.
- App developer after app developer says the “Invite friends” page is dead. Notification and invite saturation has rendered it useless.
- Akash Garg, CTO of Hi5 (3rd-largest social network in the world) started the day announcing that Hi5 is the latest to join the platform bandwagon. They plan to open their site in 6-8 months. I hope all these new platforms mimic Facebook’s API to make it easier to port apps.
- Dean Moss, CTO of widgetbox, gave me a demo of their App Accelerator — a tool that lets anyone make a quick Facebook app with all the invites, notifications, and other Facebook-specific functionality built-in. They’ll even sell ads and do a rev share with you. Neat idea; I bet many will use this tool. They’re currently seeing 30-40 new apps a day created through the service.
- Overall, people seem really, really excited about the Facebook platform. Working on it, putting money into it, etc. Perhaps a little too much so. Many are starting companies focusing solely on Facebook apps.
I’ll be in San Francisco and the valley tomorrow through Wednesday. Going to Noah’s Community Next Platform conference on Facebook Friday and Saturday, moving some stuff to my apartment, and meeting folks (including Kevin Smokler of BookTour about a San Francisco Jelly).
Wanna meet up? Email me
Adding a new administrator to a group you run is a seriously convoluted process. After 10 minutes of clicking back and forth in frustration, I actually needed to go to Google to figure out how to do it. Their events UI has always seemed off to me, too.
p.s. Thanks to Michael Galpert for stepping up to plan the next NYC Facebook Developers meetup.
My pal Noah Kagan is putting on a conference to discuss platforms development and business, including Facebook, on October 5-6th. (Schedule) There should be some interesting sessions, and I’ll be there.
Register here and use code nycfacebook for 10% off.
The Philadelphia Inquirer writes about a new co-working space my pal Alex Hillman has been working on for the past few months. (Jelly also gets a shout-out.) They open on Sept 1st, go if you can!
Tina Roth wrote about bARTer, the party/art auction/games night Saha, Isuru, and I started on her excellent design blog Swiss Miss. (We also made PSFK’s purple list.) It’s this Friday in Brooklyn!
This week Newsweek ran an article on Facebook by Steven Levy with research by my friend Charlene Dy! Congrats to Charlene, and my friends at Facebook. It’s a good overview if you’re looking for the history and background. (And my profile pic made it in!)
Sanford Dickert’s organizing a Facebook hacking session during the day today at CooperBricolage, the new coworking joint in NYC. If you’re working an app and free during the day, check it out!
As many of you know I’ve been following the evolution of Facebook pretty closely, so I was interested to see Plaxo’s rumored response land today.
Up till today, Plaxo has been an address book management tool that’s gotten decent adoption among the business crowd. It syncs with your desktop (Mac or Windows) and makes sure that when one of your Plaxo-enabled colleagues changes his contact info, your copy is auto-magically updated. It’s useful.
Today they slapped on a social network. And surprisingly, it’s not half bad.
- They recognize that the newsfeed is one of the killer features of Facebook, and that many of us already live online on many different sites. So they let you link up with your existing webservices (screenshot) like Twitter, Flickr, Picasa, your blog, Del.icio.us, Last.fm, My Space, Xanga, LJ, Yahoo 360, etc. Smart.
- They also recognize that being able to control who sees your information among groups of people you know — your business contacts, your friends, and your family — is a common request on Facebook. So they let you control it on a feed-by-feed basis. (screenshot)
- They’ve even built in lightweight twitter/pownce-like functionality (screenshot) and, like everything else on Plaxo, given you control over which of your groups sees what you want to send.
So what’s wrong with it? Well the site feels a little creaky and doesn’t work in Safari yet, but that can be fixed. The bigger problem is you have to create all your connections all over again!
It’s astonishing that this is the case, but despite the fact that Plaxo Pulse has access to my address book (and the best tools of any social network for keeping it in sync) it’s not smart enough to connect me to the people I know automatically (say, by looking to see if each of the people in my address book also have me in theirs.)
Instead, I must invite people to my network one-by-one. (screenshot)
Plaxo’s done some smart thinking in designing Pulse, but it doesn’t seem to be an open platform (yet). And do we really want to go establish our connections one-by-one on yet another social network?
Related: Brian pointed me to his posts on Portable Social Networks as part of the work he’s doing with Tantek and others.
For those of you following the facebook buzz, Altura Ventures recently announced they’d formed a fund, AppFactory, that would invest solely in facebook platform apps, advising entrepreneurs from launch to traction to monetization to liquidity.
When Facebook announced its platform, a set of application programming interfaces (APIs) and services that allow outside developers to inject new features and content into the Facebook user experience, Facebook, in essence, became the Social Operating System. Historically, the creation of an operating system, or a platform, has led to a new economy which includes a marketplace of applications.
— AppFactory Fund Group
Dave Henderson from Social Media sent me a link to their Facebook App Dev Con taking place in San Fran in 12 days. (Noah Kagan is also putting together a platform conference for later this year.)
I hosted the fourth NYC facebook meetup last week. Packed crowd, lots of great discussions, including a ton of demos. It’s clear that the deeper apps everyone’s been waiting for are just around the corner–we saw some of them last week!
We saw a great crowd this time with broad representation: big media companies (VH1), industry pundits (Jeff Jarvis), political junkies, individual and company developers (Daylife), even companies focusing exclusively on facebook (David Henderson of Social Media, which is hosting a conference on facebook apps in San Fran.)
Discussion centered around what the real numbers of installs and churn must be, future platform potential, and app monetization. The buzz around this platform is still insane, and the excitement’s only growing here in the Alley.
There’s some overzealousness apparent, but the killer apps (and there will be many) have yet to be discovered. With adoption and viral growth that’s already faster than any new technology on the web so far, it’s easy to see why people are so excited.
Jeff Jarvis has more in his writeup.
Facebook viral application growth continues to astound me. Amazin’ Giftbox, which Gil and released about two and a half weeks ago, has been seeing consistent total userbase growth between 15-20%, DAILY.
And it’s on autopilot right now–we’re doing nothing to make it grow. Wow.
A few things worth noting: (1) Fridays, Saturdays, and Sundays seem to be “slow” days on Facebook. (See top chart.) (2) # of app installs per hour still correlates well to daytime hours in North America. (3) To increase the total userbase by 15% everyday, the raw number of people who add the application each day has to be dramatically greater than the day before. From the top chart here, you can see that’s exactly what’s happening (minus the slow weekend.)
FWIW, among apps with between 10k and 100k users, Amazin’ Giftbox is the 5th most viral app on facebook right now, according to Appsaholic. (It’s tied at 20% daily growth with the 4th place “Harry Potter Magic Spells”)
My friend Gil and I launched a facebook just under a week ago called the Amazin’ Giftbox.
It’s a simple free gift app with a twist — instead of sending gifts consisting of little graphics we create, we allow you to choose any item on Amazon.com and turn it into a virtual gift. Send a Segway, a book, a Camaro, flowers, diapers, anything. Amazon really does sell it all.
Anyway, it’s been interesting to see how viral apps can grow even now as app fatigue has started to set in. (See graphs at right.) Started from zero less than a week ago, we’re now at 3,562 users with zero promotion (beyond demoing the app a few times, which had minimal effect on the numbers.)
Top graph shows # of users added per hour, bottom is total user growth. It’s only a week, but still interesting.
Built from the ground up to be viral, Amazin’ Giftbox has outgrown our first app, Amazin’ Wishlist, which had a 4 week head start!
Tonight’s facebook developer meetup went really well. We had 67 confirmed, but I think we may have packed in more. Much thanks to Andrew Parker for making things run super smooth, and to him and Union Square Ventures for giving us the space for the night! Andrew posted a writeup of the event, as did Fred Wilson.
(Here’s another pic on Fred’s stream showing the viral growth of our new app, Amazin’ Giftbox)
