It seems like every few months Facebook rolls out a new design, or changes on existing designs. For users, these changes are often frustrating, but for developers and designers, it can be downright crippling to turn the blind corner. There's no miracle tutorial, but there are a few very simple thing you can do to ensure that your next project doesn't go up in flame (or completely disappear) when Facebook incorporates its next round of updates.

1. Keep Up With the Timeline. No Facebook project ever keeps an exact date of completion, but the Facebook Developer's Wiki has some pretty good estimates that you can follow along with. Bookmark the site and check back regularly for updates. Even if a change goes live prior to expected date, you'll already know what was in store and know how to deal with it. Also, add Mashable, Facebook Insider, and All Facebook to your daily blog reader for other news and tips. 

2. Design With Changes in Mind. You can't always predict what the next big update will be, but remember that as far as Facebook goes, nothing is set in stone. Many companies spent thousands of dollars on promotions that use capabilities that are either no longer available, or not allowed any longer; that's wasted money and time. Of course you want to put your all into everything you develop, but keep the Developer's Wiki in mind. Maybe you want to roll out a game that has unique Application Dashboard settings now, so when that change comes, you're ready. Maybe it's time to begin designing in 520px and preparing your Boxes tab for removal. Any decision that prepares you will be well worth it.

3. Bounce Ideas Off the Like-Minded. If you aren't surrounded with Facebook-on-the-brain friends, try the F8 Conference. This Facebook conference, scheduled for April 21-22 in San Francisco, is a great way to catch up with other Facebook Developers. There's no shame in not being versed in every single detail of upcoming updates, particularly for a platform that changes so sudden and rapidly, which is why keeping a roster of friends around is handy. Who can tell what tiny detail you've missed that a friend can remind you of -- and vice-versa.

4. Expect Change. Certainly you expect change; you work on social platforms, after all. But your client doesn't. Gently remind anyone you create Facebook promotions for that this is a fast-moving system. Today’s great idea might be tomorrow’s ancient history. Online is not traditional marketing and everyone needs a little patience, and to go in and out with the tide. With this in mind, you’ll never have all your eggs in one basket with the chance of total failure should your well-developed pixels or sidebars change around. Plus, once this process is understood -- and once you've built-up trust -- you'll be working with a client who is open to so much more of what's offered out there, and you'll have more fun. 

To add to a recent streak of policy changes and feed edits, Facebook has updated their guidelines to restrict all promotions to just two locations on the popular networking site: a specified applications box in a pages tab, or on the canvas page of an application.

What does this mean for marketers?
Because this limits promotions to third party applications, all contests of this kind must now be approved by Facebook at least seven days in advance. Plus, the viral nature that made Facebook such an effective marketing tool, user to user notices, will now be limited to invites. If a user doesn't opt-in on an invite, any and all information is lost in the abyss. Even for users that do opt-in, updates will be sent via email, not published on their wall. Additionally, mom-and-pops without the big bucks to create third party apps will seriously miss out on Facebook promotions.

What does this mean for users?
Because most activity will be privatized, users who've grown tired of cow-milking Farmville feeds can rejoice. By limiting promotions to these application guidelines, Facebook is effectively removing all promotion notifications from the Wall. Contests requesting fans to upload photos, videos, or make status updates are now forbidden, as are promotions that require purchase or participation in a "lengthy task." Plus, users will have to opt-in to any promotions, regardless of location, before their experience is interrupted by them.

Of course, there's no restriction for companies who chose to link to an off-site promotion via banner or widget. However, the viral quick-click style of yesteryear applications is gone. Will further limitations push for custom promotional apps in other mediums? Will this encourage developers to create more contests in mobile app form? 

See full list of guidelines and restrictions at www.facebook.com/promotions_guidelines

I’d like to follow the President's example and post my own Fathers Day thoughts.   I don’t have Parade magazine but I do have the Flightpath Digital Insight Blog.  And I was feeling good Sunday after a nice brunch with the Lindgren Family. So here it goes.

My son, Travis and I watched the election with awe and wonder. I can recall the president calling out to fathers in America asking them to take more responsibility. We silently contemplated the meaning of that statement; as we watched the president speak in Denver from our respective couches in our dorm room like apartment. 

Like the president, Travis has grown up in a single parent household (with supportive grandparents). I wondered how life will change for him when he is a father one day because of the technologies that helped get President Obama elected.

I often tell people when I arrived at Penn State, in 1990 as a Freshman, I was not issued an email address. When Travis was born I set aside school and went in the Army. When I returned in 1994, everyone had an email account. I got mine jkb107@psu.edu. In many ways I was blessed with a son and email (which proved to be the gateway to my decade long career in the digital world).

Travis and his generation have always been associated with advancments in technology, as opposed to Gen X’ers like myself. I had a walkman, an analog TV, Atari and the Commodore 64. He has two ipods, an HDTV, a Wii and an Xbox.  And of course; he has grown up with the internet. We had a land line growing up he has had 4 mobile phones.

And they use all this technology at once: these kids can play xbox online, speak to the other players via a headset, text message via cellphone and use Facebook, all the while listening to a video on youtube.  They can even text message with their phone in their pocket while pretending to pay attention to a conversation with an adult.
 

Parenting in this fast paced world of technology is challenging for two parents, let alone one.  I participated in a study while at Penn State that became a book: The Single Parent Resource by Brook Noel (to date this is the only book in which I have been quoted – page 230). The book was designed to provide guidance to single parents on everything from how to save a little money, to getting back into the dating game, and how to juggle work, play and family time. The book never contemplated the explosion of the internet and its partners in crime at MTV Networks. 

Freud said that technology creates the necessity for its own conveniences. He would need no telephone if there were no trains to take his son hundreds of miles away. We would need no telegraph if there were no ships for overseas voyages. What would Freud have to say about text messaging, Facebook, Twitter and the places those technologies take our sons and daughters?

One of the key jobs of a parent is to help keep their kid focused. When my son messes up, I try to use the ancient technique of grounding him. However, I forget there are so many access points to circumvent this archaic notion of punishment. For example, in school they have computers in the library with access to Facebook and Myspace. Not to mention, most kids now have access to the internet on their phones.
 
But there are pluses to this technology. I can often be found showing off video of my son playing soccer or hoops via my own Facebook account. Some parents actually “monitor” Facebook to see what their kids are up to. As a Gen Xer, this seems too big brotherish for me, but I understand the temptation. I have also participated in conversations with him and his friends on Facebook, which is always fun.

We spend a lot of time at soccer tournaments. This weekend for the first time I saw that Twitter announcements are being used at a major tournament.  While I won’t be Twittering or sending a Facebook message to my own father, who will get a phone call (on his cell phone) I suspect it won’t be long before we will all be following and communicating to our millennial children primarily through digital means. 

Hopefully we can find ways to enjoy life with them as we all ride the groundswell. Like the children themselves, the digital technologies they are growing up with are consternating and amazing all at once.  We love both and yet they frustrate us at times.  I feel fortunate to be working at an organization that is focused on "Bringing It to Digital" because I am involved in helping brands leverage the technologies my son uses everyday. 

PS - Son, I love you and I admire your courage. Being your father has been a great joy and the most rewarding challenge of my life.

PPS – Dad, thanks for being there. No matter what stupid stuff I did in my analog world.
 
Happy Father’s Day!
 

So is Social Networking maturing?

Abbey Klaassen and Beth Snyder Bulik write in their Ad Age Article (http://tinyurl.com/c7e347): “While social networking used to be the domain of the under-30 crowd, its use among older adults is skyrocketing. As of January 2009, more than 50% of Facebook users and 44% of MySpace users in the U.S. were over 35 years old, according to ComScore estimates. The single biggest age demographic in the U.S. on both Facebook and MySpace is between 35 and 44. Indeed, Facebook says its fastest-growing demo is 55-plus.”

I'm hearing the question more and more these days. Isn’t Facebook just for the young kids?

Well, everything comes of age, including myself. Now even I am on the cusp of the ripe old age of 37, which puts me in that 35+ category when I fill in online forms, and perhaps more importantly when I sign up for the rec basketball league at the NYSC. And of course right smack in the middle of this facebook question.

At the ironically named, AdAge Digital Conference in NY recently, Sheryl Sandberg, COO of Facebook told the audience that older generations are some of the most rapidly growing segments of Facebook and a common question she fields at events is, "how can I get my kids to be my friend on Facebook?" (You can review our Tweets from Ad Age Conf. twitter.com/FlightpathNY with #aadigi)

Fortunately, when I got started on Facebook, my son became my very first friend. But I had to hoodwink him into it by telling him my boss made me get into facebook because I needed to know it for work. I’ve since been friended by a few of his buddies (we all talk a little friendly trash) but I can recall the comment from his girlfriend at the time: "How could you friend your DAD!?#$%."

And I have to admit, when I first got on Facebook and I friended my son, I thought I was very hip. Then more and more “friends” came streaming in. As my dear friend and colleague Ryan Kitson wrote in his blog post To Friend or Not to Friend (http://tinyurl.com/cddo4d), sometimes it's hard to determine who is and isn’t a “friend.”

And then I got to wondering about who my own friends are on Facebook. My HS “friends” are definitely on Facebook. My younger family is there and active, my parents are not there yet (at least I don't think they are), and then there is my hoops crew. Only a few of them are on Facebook.

The over 35 Hastings-on-Husdon hoops group is a little social network of its own and we recently got to play hoops in Madison Square Garden to celebrate one of our member’s 50th birthday! Now that I think of it, the invitation for this party unlike most of the others I’ve received lately didn't come out on Facebook. Nor have the pictures been posted on Facebook to my knowledge….yet. Don't get me wrong, guys, I'm not calling you all seniors!

I’ve heard 40 is the new 20, so that means I can look forward to lots more hoops and lots more Facebook. And next year when we play at the Garden we’ll have to send the invite and post the pictures on Facebook.

Aside from a few exceptions, the currency of the web (or at least, social media) is social capital. You know, the number of friends you have on Facebook, your 2 million views on YouTube, your “SuperUser” badge on Foursquare, your hundreds (or thousands) of followers on Twitter and Tumblr. None of those things have any direct monetary value, although some people are trying to cash in on them through things like the Twittad network, or a good old fashioned TV deal-a-Tequila. As things currently stand, money can’t buy you love or Elite status on Yelp; the only way to get that is by earning it through creation of “compelling content” and/or being an “influencer”.  But something is in the works that’s going to change that, and potentially the way we view social currency in the online world.  

Picture this: you’re playing an online game. You run around and interact with other players of the game, and get points for everything you do. You can buy things with these points, and give these points to other people. You can spend real money to get these points, or you can just earn them (although to get the really good stuff, it’s going to take a while). Sounds familiar, right? It’s Second Life, or World of Warcraft, right? Wrong. It’s Facebook. Or it will be, in about 6-12 months.

Last week, a sales rep from Facebook came to Flightpath to have a discussion with us concerning the most recent changes to the site. During the course of the meeting, he revealed that Facebook will soon be allowing users to earn Facebook Credits by simply engaging with their friends, whether it’s by “liking” a status, adding a friend, or posting a video. People will also be able to gift Facebook Credits to others, along with using credits to purchase gifts. In short, Facebook is going to have a currency. Holy Terms Of Service.

According to the calculations of Lightspeed Venture Partners, Facebook made $35 million on Facebook Gifts in 2008 alone. That’s right. Those tiny little icons for $1 (or 100 credits) netted Facebook tens of millions of dollars last year (which is paltry compared to Zynga's $50 million). Ok, you’re saying to yourself, so what? I don’t care about little icons on my profile. Facebook isn’t going to make any money off of me. Well, you’re right—for now. You’re also probably over 25. And while you may not care about a teddy bear icon or some other form of digital embellishment, there are at least 27 million other people who do. They’re kids under 12, and they’re the people Facebook is ultimately planning for.

Maybe not all of you have kids. But those of you who do, or who have ever been around a kid who’s 12 or under, know about Webkinz and Club Penguin. For the uninitiated, Webkinz and Club Penguin are sites that are essentially Facebook for the under 12 set, only instead of a picture of yourself and your dog, the kids are COPPA-compliantly represented by animated animals. A social network combined with a game, they can play for free, but the really good stuff (digital furniture, digital pets, special invites, etc) goes to those who fork over the dough.  And fork over they do: with only 12 million registered members, Club Penguin made $35 million in profit ($65m in revenue) last year.

So what does this all mean? Well, it basically means that Facebook has the potential to make a lot of money. Kids who grew up having online access from an early age don’t have as many mental barriers between the online world and the real world. They don’t have problems spending a lot of (your) money to make their online room just as cool as their physical, brick-and-mortar room. Talking online for them is just another extension of talking in real life. So by attaching an actual value (10 credits, 15 credits) to the various actions one takes in the course of a 20 minute (or 4 hour) session on Facebook, Zuckerberg and Co. are actually monetizing social capital, which is pretty revolutionary. If you can get a special invite to a new Facebook feature by possessing a certain number of credits, you’ll essentially be able to buy your cool—which, ultimately, isn’t that different from the real world. But it’s certainly going to be a profitable revenue stream.

I start this piece by making one assumption--everyone is a Facebook  user. 

Isn’t that what makes social communities great? When they have hit a critical mass of users? Your entire community of close friends, family, coworkers, old college buddies, business acquaintances, and that girl you met at the Digital Wednesday’s networking event are all hanging out together in your Facebook friends list.

Now let me ask a rather blunt rhetorical question, “Would you invite all of these people over for Thanksgiving dinner?” Let me put things into my perspective.

My father just recently sent me a friend request, which unfortunately is still sitting in my inbox, after seeing me over Thanksgiving. My girlfriend’s sister rolled her eyes for denying her friend request after I tried to explain, “My Facebook page is really just for work purposes.”

My friends list is quite small, only consisting of coworkers and a handful of close clients. I have deliberately kept my personal   life separate from my Facebook one. This is not out of fear of possibly inappropriate content, but of the calamity that would occur if all the pieces of my social life melded into one unified bucket.

There is a huge opportunity for Facebook to expand its breadth from simple social networking into a true relationship management tool. No one   has just “friends” in his or her life. We dissect our social life mainly into family, work, and play. How are these very distinct aspects of our real social life going to interact in this digital social stew? I understand the argument—interpersonal transparency can be the catalyst for social discovery; however, we manage the relationships in our lives differently than how Facebook currently presents it to us. 

About a year ago, Facebook added a new feature that allowed those of us who have 5,000 friends to manage that immense data slurry into user-created categories. However these user-created categories are little more than a light contact list-building tool. This is the first step in the direction that I propose below. 

Facebook should allow you to designate your own categories for people in your friends list. Each of these created “friend categories” could have a separate sub-profile page where a user could design a page around that unique social interaction. This could simply all boil down to a privacy setting. You allow one category of friends to see a certain module on your profile. If a friend on your other list views your profile page, they would simply not see the module.

If you created a category of friends called “business networking” Facebook could finally be used as a quasi-Linkedin without the fear of your business prospect seeing pictures of you at the MTV beach party in Cabo last summer.

This would open a huge opportunity for Facebook to capitalize on the business side of our social communities. Lord knows as much as we all love Linkedin, there is little "social interaction" beyond the prospect of upward career mobility, which does not usually make for great conversation. 

I wish I could create a friend category called “work” and use Facebook as an internal communication and content management system. Most companies  already use Instant Messenger as a more efficient way to communicate internally than email. IM poses its own set of similar issues. If you use the same IM username for work and at home, while you’re at work your friends outside of the company are just one tempting click away to distract you. To circumvent this whole issue I have created a IM  account specifically for work—but, if my idea happened, I wouldn’t have to.  

Facebook would do the filtering for me, and I could finally become digital friends with my girlfriend’s sister, my coworkers, my clients—and my dad.  

Like the rise and fall of great empires before us, it looks like even the mighty Facebook is not immune to its community deserters. 

According to a report from 20bit entitled The State of the Facebook Platform, the number of active users within the Facebook developer community has declined 27% since January, while the number of highly active users has plummeted 47%.

In the article 20bit argues that there are four main reasons why activity within the Facebook developer community has fallen.  

- Facebook’s proprietary platform pigeonholes developers into an either-or proposition. Bebo and MySpace use OpenSocial, which allows developers to create a product that can cross multiple social networking environments and audiences. This makes developing on OpenSocial a more financially lucrative solution than Facebook.

- Developers are consolidating together, which may have had an impact on the number of users within the Facebook developer’s forum. With an increase in competition, developers are less likely to help one another out.

- Facebook is taking action to limit the spammy aspects of applications, which has had a negative effect their “viralness.” For instance amount of people you can send the application invitation has been limited to 5, news feeds and alerts have also been restricted.

- Increasing competition from other social networking platforms like Hi5, MySpace, Friendster, and Bebo has taken a bite out of theFacebook populous.

All of the statistical data is interesting and does confirm the author’s hunch of some sort of ebb in the activity of Facebook application development. It seems likely that developers are not going to exclusively develop applications for the Facebook platform. It is too risky to become dependent on one social networking platform.

What is also interesting is Facebook applications are predominantly games or “just for fun” applications as defined in a report by Flowing Data, entitled A Breakdown of Facebook Applications. You can actually track the analytics of Facebook applications from a website called Adonomics.

It still is a bit of a wild west out in the land of social networking applications. Developing a lucrative and successful Facebook application is still an uncertain path. There is no doubt that social networking is here to stay, and developing for it will be worth it at some point. However the last standing platform may not be in Facebook, MySpace, Friendster, Hi5, or even Bebo down the road.