F8 is happening today. Facebook will be live broadcasting the keynote live at 1:30 Pacific time (GMT -8). If you want to see the cast, log in here.

SocialMedia will be at the event at our booth. Don’t forget our day after party.

I’ll embed the stream if possible when the show goes live.

Zuckerberg - ensure that apps that provide greatest value succeed..

So, it’s the big day, F8. For many developers, it’s been a time of doubt as the platform undergoes the most radical retooling since launch. FB tabs, boxes, and new placements for FB’s own ad units have shaken up the natural order devs have become accustomed to on Facebook. After today’s event, developers will finally know where the chips lie.

Early this morning TechCrunch is reporting some new insights into F8. First, they expect a payment system to launch in some form. Second, Facebook connect will launch. Finally, and more importantly, they expect a three tiered app system. As has been speculated by Kara Swisher, Facebook will carve up app inventory into three tiers divided by quality. No word on what the yard stick will be, just that iLike and Causes are the first apps to make it into the top tier.

Depending on the details, Facebook’s new policies could potentially nuke virality for the applications of a lot of smaller developers.

One of the most profound changes in the new Facebook design is the width. I think it’s a net positive, and gives applications a greater control of user experience. However, developers that don’t adjust to the new width are going to miss out.

Facebook has placed new ads in the margin on the right hand side that are harder to ignore than the old placement under the application menu. This means that developers will be faced with the usual problem of having a user leave their app through an ad, but not get paid for it. Instead Facebook’s ads will get the traffic.

I suggest that developers widen their applications to take advantage of the new real estate with our leaderboard and upcoming skyscraper inventory.

Update: Simply checking “Use full canvas width” with push FB’s ads further away from your app while keeping the app the same in the old Facebook setup. The ads also show up sporadically.

Some Facebook users logged in this morning to find the new Facebook redesign as their default. The most notable change is that the site is much wider, but some others in the blogosphere have some more insights.

Facebook adds new ad units - Facebook double dipped their own ad units in the redesign. Canvas pages now have 2 Facebook ads and the sponsored feed item now sits alone on the right hand side of the home page. (InsideFacebook) I don’t know what this means for Microsoft, considering I’m only seeing their ads on search result pages.

Navigation rethought - The page is leaner. There’s no more application navigation bar. Instead app nav duty has been split between the menu bar and the variety of boxes and tabs announced earlier. (InsideFacebook)

Even more focus on feeds - Facebook is looking a lot more like FriendFeed after adding comments and carving out more space for updates (TechCrunch). This goes hand in hand with the platform permissions upgrade, which will let users have finer control over what happens with their actions on applications (InsideFacebook). Nick O’Neil highlights all the new techniques Facebook is using to get users to contribute content through their new app bar for Facebook’s own applications (photos, video, notes, etc.).

The new profile will offer some new advertising opportunities for app developers. Developers will find our leaderboard ad units to be more useful and also have the extra room to squeeze in a television unit. Skyscrapers will also be unlocked.

So, we’re continuing to put the “social” in SocialMedia by holding another open bar in our Pier 38 San Francisco office. It’s a post F8 networking event. We’re handing out invites at F8, but feel free to sign up here.

Who: F8 attendees
Where: Pier 38, San Francisco
When: 7-9pm

Our office:

Great video on F8 posted by Venturebeat.

SocialMedia is holding our first OpenSocial developer event called “OpenThread” on August 15th, 5pm - 8pm at SocialMedia’s SF office. The event will feature an hour and a half of discussion on developing on OpenSocial (short tutorial, developer panel, hosting discussion) followed by an “OpenBar”.

We’re limiting this to 150 developers due to space constraints, so we require all developers to sign up ahead of time. It’s a great event to network and learn more about if you’re missing out on OpenSocial.

Itinerary:

5:00 - 5:30 Sign In
5:30 - 5:45 Introduction and Brief History of MySpace / OpenSocial
5:45 - 6:00 Tutorial on building your first app (Hello World!) - MySpace demo
6:00 - 6:45 Panel with MySpace and other OpenSocial developers (How did you start?, What are the pros and cons?) - Linus Liang (CLZ Concepts), David King (Lil Green Patch), Kenneth Walton (Klicknation)
6:45 - 7:00 Application Hosting
7:00 - 8:00 Open Bar

Please RSVP by filling out the form below. Check this page for any updates about the program. Also, join the FB MySpace App developer group, specifically intended for cross platform devs.

For many of you, and even me, it seems like when we talk about social applications, we’re talking about the Facebook platform. Facebook has been around the longest and done a great job rolling out new features. However, MySpace is growing into a great complementary platform, with the added advantage that it’s an OpenSocial container. MySpace can currently monetize at the same rates as majority of Facebook inventory, as those with apps on both platforms already know.

Since cross development time is expensive for small groups of developers, we’ll be putting together some more resources on how to develop as well as user’s experiences over the next couple of months.

Moreover, as the web continues to “digest” social networking, there will be many more platforms where developers can create a living from applications. We’ll keep you posted.

CHow many of your app design discussions have ended with: “Okay, let’s test it”? Hopefully you didn’t answer ‘none’, because testing is the fastest way to learn. But it can also misinform business decisions if done carelessly. Instead, I want to help you be careful in the simplest and most common kind of test: The A/B test. Of course, a well-designed multi-variate test is the best use of resources, but we have to roll over before we can crawl.

The most common mistake in A/B testing is not running enough ‘trials.’ The second is running too many. The latter risks wasting potentially more productive opportunities, but the former is far worse because you risk managing by noise. How wasteful it would be to invest in a redesign because of a difference that might just be from random variation!

The table below shows some typical productive opportunities that you might present to a user. If the user pursues the opportunity, then the trial becomes a ’success.’ Otherwise, it becomes a ‘failure’. Typical success rates and appropriate sample sizes are included as well. Note that ‘A’ would be one ‘cell’ (group of users) and ‘B’ would be another.

Since SocialMedia enables developers to monetize their apps through ads, let’s suppose that you were considering moving an ad from the top of a page to the bottom. In this example, the ad at the top typically yields a click through rate (CTR) of 0.5%, but you say, “I don’t care about CTR, I care about money!”. We do too, but you ideally want to improve ad performance devoid of any market dynamics. It’s like testing a car on a dynamometer (like when you get your car smogged) because it removes the extra variability of road surface, wind, and driver habit.

The first question is this: “How much better would the ad on the bottom have to do for you to switch?” This is a business decision and becomes the substantial difference that will drive the test design. Do you see coupons for 1% off? Of course not, because marketers know that it’s not enough for people to act. Likewise, your test might precisely determine that moving your ad to the bottom will yield a CTR of 0.5001% - but so what?

While you have to decide at what level you won’t get laughed out of a conference room, I have found that web folks generally consider a 15% or more improvement enough to invest in creative development or site re-design. So our sample size question becomes “How many ad views do we need to declare a statistically significant difference between a CTR of 0.5% and one of 0.575%? This is readily calculable:

• number of samples required per cell = 2.7 * (p1*(1-p1) + p2*(1-p2))/(p1-p2)^2

So for our example we’d have to run:

• 2.7 *(0.005*0.995 + 0.00575*0.99425)/(.005-00575)^2 = 51,321 ad views for pages with the ad at the top and that many with the ad at the bottom.

(By the way, the pre-factor of 2.7 has a one-sided confidence level of 95% and power of 50% baked into it. These have to do with the risk of choosing to switch when you shouldn’t and not switching when you should. We’re not running drug trials here so these two choices are fine for our purposes. The above calculation will determine the minimum and also the maximum you need to run.)

—- Check out the rest of this post on InsideFacebook. —-

As a companion to this brief post is an equally brief (2 minute) demonstration video I made to give you an intuitive sense of why getting test sample size is important. And if this wikipedia article on sample size and related articles don’t quench your thirst for knowledge, then might I suggest a master’s degree?

SocialMedia Sample Size Demo from nick g on Vimeo.

Happy Testing!

You can download the spreadsheet Tim uses in the demo here. Be warned, it will take a while to load.

Last Thursday this leg of the Social Media Business School conference tour concluded. The tour brought myself and some of the SM team to San Francisco, Los Angeles, New York, and London. In each locale we shared our panelists and our own discoveries about succeeding as advertisers and developers within social networking sites. It was consistently rated as a high value event by attendees.

First a thank you to the sponsors:

While we brought our own thoughts and experiences to the table, the events couldn’t have succeeded without a list of highly qualified panelists coming from the development, advertising, and venture capital worlds. I just wanted to take a moment to share the list with everyone.

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