Facebook Developers

Over the past year, we have been amazed and at times even overwhelmed by the sheer volume of development on Facebook Platform. During our f8 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday, we shared the many lessons we've learned in the past year including the need for us to do more to partner closely with developers and to make sure our ecosystem is robust and ultimately thriving. We made several announcements about our commitment to improve, and I'll highlight a few here.

First are our guiding principles for great applications. Our vision for Facebook Platform has been to give you the opportunity to create applications that are deeply social and meaningful to users. After hearing from many of you and many users, we realized we need to be clearer about what this means. We've now published our guiding principles, which fall into three dimensions of meaningful, trustworthy and well-designed.

These guiding principles are core to Platform and you'll see us refer back to them in much of what we'll be doing with Platform going forward.

Secondly, we announced our Great Apps program to reward the applications that have provided value to Facebook users by embodying all of our guiding principles. These applications will gain greater visibility and deeper integration opportunities on Facebook, have earlier access to new features and receive more feedback through Facebook's growing partner management team. iLike and Causes are our inaugural Great Apps, recognized for how they've revolutionized user experiences in music and activism, respectively.

Finally, we know the openness of Platform when it was launched in May 2007 resulted in an overemphasis on viral distribution. While applications have provided countless benefits to people on Facebook, this emphasis on distribution also impacted the user experience and led us to limit access to communication channels. Our Application Verification program is designed to offer extra assurances to help users identify trustworthy applications -- applications that are secure, respectful and transparent, and have demonstrated commitment to compliance with Platform policies. Verified applications will benefit from added visibility on Facebook.

The verification program complements our ongoing policy enforcement against those applications who do not agree with our guiding principles around being trustworthy. In the coming year, enforcement will be based on principles in addition to rules, simply since we can never articulate a rule for every way an application could deceive users. This makes consistency and transparency on our part absolutely essential so you have a good understanding of what types of behavior are and aren't allowed. Our verification program and enforcement efforts will help the Platform ecosystem be safer for users and fairer for developers.

We are really excited to announce more Great Apps and to bring out the first batch of verified applications. Both selection and review processes will be open to you starting in September. Meanwhile, keep an eye on our new developer Web site for more details. We are committed to helping you succeed; these two programs are just the start of a new era for our partnership.

f8 ‘08 is here!! It’s gonna be a jam-packed event with something for everyone, and we’re psyched to welcome folks to the Design Center in San Francisco in a couple hours.

For those of you around the world that can't be here in person, we’d love for you to join the keynotes via webcast from 1:30 – 3:00PM PST on Wednesday 7/23. Mark Zuckerberg and Ben Ling will be speaking, and there is plenty of room for everyone.

If you can’t tune in then, we’ll be uploading the video to developers.facebook.com afterwards.

Webcast Link: http://www.visualwebcaster.com/Facebook/

The business track is an opportunity for developers to converse with colleagues and experts from the venture and start-up world. The panels and talks will be an end-to-end deep dive on building successful businesses within the Facebook ecosystem. Get the tools you need as an app developer to master business conception, execution, marketing, profitability, and fund-raising in a track that promises to be faster and cheaper than getting an MBA. No calculators required.

What to expect:

3:30-4:15pm Building a Business on Facebook
Joe Greenstein (CEO, Flixter), Tim Kendall (Director of Monetization, Facebook), Jeremy Norberg (Founder, All Widgets), Shervin Pishevar (CEO and Co-Founder, Social Gaming Network), Tim O’Shaughnessy (CEO and Co-Founder, LivingSocial)

This panel will unravel the elusive intermediary step between building an application...and achieving profitability. If you’re interested in exploring solutions for profitability on the Facebook Platform, then come discuss with the CEOs and Founders of top-notch social technologies and social media companies.

4:30-5:15pm Marketing and Measuring your Application on Facebook
Dave McClure (Master of 500 Hats), Jai Shen (Co-Founder and CTO, RockYou), Kent Schoen (Product Marketing Manager for Facebook Ads, Facebook)

When it comes to marketing your app in a murky and vast sea of applications, who better to help you navigate than 3 Pirates? Dave McClure, renowned for coining the famous marketing strategy “AARRR!,†will be joining Kent Schoen and Jai Shen to share their perspectives on viral marketing, app metrics, and analytics. This session promises to be an engaging look at achieving virality from three awesome Silicon Valley personalities who put the fun in analytics (seriously).

6:00-6:45pm Entrepreneurship on Facebook Platform
Mike Cassidy (Entreprenuer, Founder of XFire), Matt Cohler (VP Product Management, Facebook and future GP, Benchmark), Bing Gordon (Partner, Kleiner Perkins), Reid Hoffman, Mark Pincus (Founder and CEO, Zynga)

The Entrepreneurship panel of veterans may only have a mean age of 35, yet they are some of the most seasoned, multi-company entrepreneurs and venture capitalists in the area. With these five superstars combined, you might think this session could be the pilot episode for Entrepreneurship Idol. Come have a meaningful dialogue about starting a company with the giants as they reveal their secrets for success.

7:00-7:45pm fbFund: A Look Inside - Seeding Opportunity on Facebook Platform
Cat Lee and fbFund Recipients

If you ever wanted a piece of the $10M fbFund – then come meet Cat Lee and engage with 10 fundees at the fbFund session. Extra grant $$ >> ramen noodles. You’ll learn about what selection criteria the fbFund is looking for and how you can apply for a grant.

This track is more like an "extended conversation" to help you make your ideas happen. Our speakers are looking forward to sharing their experiences and hearing great questions from the audience. We encourage you to react, contribute, and converse throughout this track.

Looking forward to seeing you all again this year!