• Track 1: User Experience
• Introducing the New Facebook Profile & More — Learn how to cope with us killing all the viral tricks you used to get users to add your applications.
• Integrating Facebook Connect into your Website — See how easy it is to let our users use all your features and stay on our site, as our users. We're the platform; you're the app, bitch.
• Building Great Applications on Facebook — We'll discuss guiding principles and best practices. For example: no more apps based on R.L. Stine characters.
• Design and User Experience at Facebook — Hear directly from the Facebook Design team on how we think about design and how little we think of yours.

• Track 2: Technical
• Advanced App Building — It's easy to build a simple Facebook app in a couple hours, but you'll just be embarrassing yourself and annoying our users. In this talk, learning the caching features of FBML, advanced features of FBJS, smart uses of the API, and more.
• Feed and Social Distribution — With the new Facebook profile, you won't be able to spam users into submission. Learn how to design great Feed stories!
• Building to Facebook Scale — Facebook handles hundreds of millions of requests per day. Your apps probably can't. We'll try to help you fix that.
• Made for Mobile — Mobile devices are opening up and creating new opportunities. For Apple iPhone developers. Why are you here?

• Track 3: Business
• Building a Business on Facebook / Metrics & Analytics — Learn everything about how to build a business on Facebook Platform from developers who are doing it. This way you'll believe its possible, and they'll be flattered by our attention.
• Marketing your Application on Facebook — You've developed an application. Now what? This session will cover how to trick users into thinking their friends won't like them anymore if they don't install it.
• Entrepreneurship on Facebook Platform — In this session you'll hear from industry luminaries in venture capital and seasoned, multi-company entrepreneurs who owe us favors or are living off past successes and have nothing else to do.
• fbFund: A Look Inside — Seeding Opportunity on Facebook Platform — Learn about the inner workings of fbFund and see what the grant winners are developing so you can spend all your time copying them while some developer in Austin who stayed away from this pointless gabfest actually builds something no one else saw coming.

The news, long expected, that Facebook would open-source its platform is not reviving the buzz. And the comparisons people are making now are not as complimentary.

A revamp of how Facebook handles third-party applications is "Orwellian," one observer says, which I suppose makes Zuckerberg Big Little Brother. "We've heard from many users that adding applications is cumbersome," writes Facebook developer Pete Bratach. And yet application-tracker Adonomics reports that Facebook users have installed more than 912 billion applications. The real effect of Facebook's redesign is to make it less likely that Facebook users will install applications their friends use. This may reduce complaints about annoying applications, but it will also slow the spread of applications on Facebook from user to user — an overwhelming part of the Facebook Platform's appeal.

It's sensible for Facebook to do something about its reputation for being all about zombies and pirates. What doesn't make sense is dissembling about the reason it needs to. Facebook's problem isn't that applications aren't popular enough; it's that they've become too popular, and grown out of control. The changes to how applications get added, as well as changes to the design of profile pages which downplay applications, will put more of Facebook's screen real estate back in its control. Why not just say that?

Because Facebook needs to maintain the loyalty of developers, if only for appearance's sake. I've never been convinced that widgets add that much to Facebook in a business sense. But they gave Facebook Valley buzz, which it cleverly, and profitably, capitalized on. Microsoft would never have invested in a mere social network — but start talking about Facebook as a computing platform, and the likes of Bill Gates get interested fast.

Which is why, when Facebook executives get up on stage talking to a Wall Street crowd, as Mark Zuckerberg and Sheryl Sandberg did last week at the D6 conference, they're swift to talk up the work of developers. But on the site itself? They'd just as soon the developers disappear.

(Photo by Brandee Barker)

The Google I/O conference is off to a roaring disaster. The backlog at the prereg[istration] desk was so long (500?) that they told people to just come inside. Conversely the onsite reg was empty.

• No incentives may be given to a member for sending a message, bulletin, comment, or any other form of communication. This includes "points," "bucks," increased standing, or even features within the app.
• It must be very clear to a member what they are sending, when they are sending communication. "Share with friends" is not sufficient messaging, the link must state "send comment," "send bulletin," and so on.
• The "no popups" rule we have had in place since day one applies to messaging windows. This means no more popping up a messaging window the first time someone tries to use an app. No popping up messaging windows without a user clicking on a very clearly marked link.

FB's valuation is driven by the perception it can serve as a platform (or launching pad) for derivative businesses. Without that perception, FB is a $3-5 B company. Period. When developers lose enthusiasm for the "platform," every FB employee has their net worth cut by 67%.

Building gimmicky widgets that serve no real use, third-party developers had too much success, too early, too easily, on Facebook's platform. For all his puffery, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg is correct that useful applications could and should be built on the connections between people and their shared interests. Yet so far, I can't think of a Facebook application I've installed that I can't live without. So why should the developers who built so much junk continue to be successful? They shouldn't. And if Zuckerberg's new rules force these developers to dream as big as he does — sometimes awkwardly and in public — then good.

His other argument is that sponsored applications, such as Federated Media's BMW "What Drives You?" campaign, can provide — take a deep breath — "more directly aligned and integrated brand experiences" than Facebook's own Pages product, which maybe lets users post some video if they like.

Smith is preaching to the choir. His readers are mostly hopeful developers who have already bought into Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg's promise of an ecosystem on the Facebook platform, so we're sure his optimism is appreciated. The problem with Smith's theory is that for apps to take advantage of user intent, they need to offer actual services in specific areas like travel, finance and shopping. So far, all most of these optimistic developers have built are apps intended to provide a pixelated picture of "fun," or prey on adolescent insecurities.

Developers, both small and large, told us they hated the idea. Still, since Facebook owns the platform, Zuckerberg should have been able to ignore their criticisms and protect Facebook's new moneymaking plan. Now, instead, there's a new tab on user profiles for just the News Feed. When he launched Facebook's platform, Zuckerberg drew comparisons to Bill Gates, the creator of another powerful platform. But Gates bullied developers, not the other way around.

At the very least, it's no longer a Mark Zuckerberg production. The widgetmakers have taken it over. Large Facebook-application developers — VC darlings like Slide, RockYou and Zynga which have thrived on Facebook's platform since it launched last May — panicked when they saw Zuckerberg's plans. And, perhaps because Google's rival app platform, OpenSocial, gave them leverage, the widgetmakers' collective kiboshed Zuckerberg's plan to launch the redesigned profiles in April. They wanted to see changes first. And now, we hear, they got them. Zuckerberg and his team are already "improving the design to have less radical implications for developers," one tells us.

Back when the Facebook platform launched, reporters compared Zuckerberg to Bill Gates. Gates ruled programmers who wrote applications for his Windows platform with such an iron fist that Europe's courts still aren't over it. But how often did third-party software makers push Gates into making Windows the way they wanted it? By contrast, Zuckerberg is hardly putting the "eek" in his ecosystem.

Much of the backlash was the result of an overhyped product release. Perfect rollouts are best left to Steve Jobs — and as much as Zuckerberg idolizes his Palo Alto neighbor, his reality distortion field is not yet in place. The Beacon failure resonated because Mark Zuckerberg promised to change media for the next 100 years. He shouldn't have promised anything past 100 days. Changes to Web software like Facebook should come in small, perhaps imperfect but easily fixed steps. That seems easier.

Depicted in the portrait as a charming toddler, she grew into quite the Lady before being bled to death by her doctors at age 36. The amount and nature of her contribution to computing is controversial, with rumors attributing her with everything from substance abuse and gambling to manic depression and delusions of grandeur. Which tells me not much has changed in the developer community over the past two centuries.

4:34 p.m.: Zuckerberg offers a mea culpa for yesterday's interview: "We should have opened it up to questions earlier, and that's why I'm here."

4:35 p.m.: "Why do people spend twice as much time on MySpace as on Facebook?" asks an audience member. "I'm not sure that's true," says Zuckerberg, who then claims Facebook doesn't measure that statistic.

4:37 p.m: Zuckerberg confesses he wasn't able to get his grandparents to join the site until he introduced them to Scrabulous. "I don't talk to them much, but I do play Scrabble," he says. "Props to those guys."

strong>4:39 p.m.: "There are entire categories we didn't anticipate getting popular," says Zuckerberg. "We weren't even thinking about [that] before." He then admits that what he's saying is a "non-answer" to the developer's question about friends lists. Facebook evangelist Dave Morin answers the actual question: "There is an API to friends lists" — software which allows developers to write applications which make use of a Facebook user's friends.

4:42 p.m.: "A lot of the information that's going to be shared, and this is probably the largest category of information on the Web, is information that's shared only with some people," says Zuckerberg. "It's not a solution to all the world's problem, but it will help with efficiency and sharing information."

4:44 p.m.: Zuckerberg addresses Beacon, the controversial ad program. "Beacon is part of the platform," says Zuckerberg — in other words, while the rest of the planet thinks of it as a kind of advertisement, Facebook internally thinks of it as a tool for developers.

4:47 p.m.: On users' privacy, "we're not openly working with governments," says Zuckerberg. "But we have to follow the law. One of the things we're thinking about internally is China. One of the scenarios is that you don't have servers in China, in which case they make your servers slow and make it look like it's not a good service. If you put them in China and the government doesn't like what's on them, they come and arrest the people who administer your servers. It's not a great set of tradeoffs."

4:50 p.m.: Zuckerberg gives a non-answer on the fate of Parakey, the Web-operating system startup Facebook acquired from Blake Ross and Joe Hewitt. "So you're scrapping the product and just hired the guys, right?" I shout out. Zuckerberg gives another non-answer.

4:51 p.m.: "How has Facebook affected your personal relationships?" asks an audience member. "I did say you could ask about anything, didn't I?" says Zuckerberg.

4:52 p.m.: "We feel like we've aligned people's incentives personally," says Zuckerberg. Developers are rewarded just for getting people to install their app, he explains. That's why Facebook is now adjusting the limits to the number of invitations apps can send. What, no more zombie bites? "If users are finding them spammy, their distribution is going to be dialed way down," says Zuckerberg.

4:54 p.m.: Robert Scoble takes the mike, and confesses his sins personally to Mark Zuckerberg, seeking expiation for the incident which got him banned from Facebook. (He improperly used a program which exported data about his friends from the site.) Zuckerberg says Facebook's trying to figure out what to do about data portability, or making it easier to get data off Facebook.

5:00 p.m.: Last question, about Facebook's involvement in political campaigns. Zuckerberg says he expects other developers will build better applications for political organizing, but the company is going to keep doing what it's doing for now.

"While this change definitely curtails the ability of low quality apps to spread, it doesn't allow high quality apps enough channel access to thrive," Inside Facebook's Justin Smith writes. High quality? Why doesn't Zuckerberg just get rid of every app besides Scrabulous? That seems easier.

As Facebook hires more grownups, Morin could well be looking for a new challenge. MySpace certainly could use the help. Then again, perhaps he's just visibly consorting with the enemy to scare a promotion out of his bosses. That would suggest Morin's critics have underestimated his cleverness.

c++ standard library: developer platform
java with hibernate & struts: developer platform
ruby on rails: developer platform
myspace: not a developer platform

Cell-phone coders can write iPhone-friendly Web apps now, or wait until Android-friendly phones show up at some point in the future. Today, Android apps run on every single one of the exactly zero Googlephones in consumers' hands. Money is always nice. But there's something fame-seeking programmers prize just as much: People using their software.