Tuesday, March 29, 2011

"Facebook has become a social platform that underlies all Web services"

Facebook organized, Tuesday, March 29, the first of a series of meetings with developers in Paris. Assumed operation of seduction, intended for start-ups and big companies. Interview with Christian Hernandez, director of international development at Facebook. Why run these meetings with developers? Facebook has three audiences: users, advertisers and developers, and we seek to build on these three tables.

To win new users, we enter into agreements with other social networks, in countries where we are not the majority, such as Russia or Japan. To attract new advertisers, we are signing partnerships that help us to improve the value of advertising, with UEFA for instance. And we pay special attention to developers, they work for media sites or commercial, studio, video games or mobile applications.

Facebook is not a company that has unlimited resources: we focus on a few companies that have a strong power of broadcasting, and we choose five with whom we work at first. In France, for example, are TF1 or DailyMotion. At the other extreme, we are also looking for SMEs who develop software or services based on social relations.

Spotify, for example, has radically changed the way people listen to music, developing an engine based on recommendations from friends. Our credo is twofold: to make large companies more "social", and start-up "social" larger. Seen from Europe, Facebook seems a very American platform. Yet 70% of Facebook application developers are not in the U.S.: You do not need to take a plane to California to work with us.

I know a developer who has built his game development studio in China Facebook. His company has since been bought out and became Zynga Peking entrepreneurs create their studio in China even as the Chinese do not have access to Facebook! More generally, each country has its specific needs that we can not understand from the United States.

Take Turkey: the most popular application of the country is Okey, a game of mah-jong close. We could not create it, but we can help these applications to boost their growth. There is an exception in Europe: Germany, which faces competition from Facebook platforms German. Yes, but we're also number one in Germany last year.

We believe today that our service is good enough to win the battle in India, we've already beaten Orkut. It remains to show developers that our platform is best. Somehow, the question for them is whether they prefer to have access to 20 million German users or 500 million users in Tech News Buzz whole.

Last month we held a meeting in Berlin for developers, and 300 people made the trip. You have developed in recent months appropriations Facebook, your own money system. Some publishers, including games, Facebook does worry that eventually this system where you collect a commission. From 1 July, application developers will indeed provide Facebook credit as a payment option, but they can continue to offer other solutions.

When you're a small business of two people in Nantes, you do not have the time nor the resources to go and negotiate with PayPal. If you want to create your own virtual currency, you must consider many risk management: interoperability, attempted fraud ... Facebook supports it for you. In return, we receive a commission of 30%.

Game publishers are among the largest advertisers on Facebook. During the 1990s, a bubble was created because companies buying advertising at a high price on sites which they depend ... The situation is very different today. Zynga has acquired 5% of its audience through advertising on Facebook: 95% of its growth is organic.

In general, even though it is a very important offer of services, SMEs can become a major player tomorrow. And we are the best platform to gain the hearing. What kind of services could there be found on Facebook tomorrow? Our long term vision is that Facebook has become a social platform that underpins all services across the Internet.

The New York Times notes that readers who come through Facebook read more articles, and it makes sense. If you read an article on the crisis in Libya because a friend recommended it already has a "weight" emotional. If, once the site of the New York Times, you see other friends you recommend further reading, you're more likely to click on the link.

We have 500 million users, and there are 900 million objects - pages, groups, events ... - In the "social graph". That is also the beauty of the social web: opportunities for interaction are endless. Imagine you are a fan of Tom Jones, and you have "loved" and you will find services that alert you when this artist is visiting your city and you intend to buy tickets for his concert.

The Warner announced they extended their offer movies on-demand streaming on Facebook. Is this an experiment or an underlying trend? We had already had discussions with Warner in the past, but we did not sit around a table to discuss a general plan for movie rentals on Facebook. Warner worked with an independent developer, launched this feature, and suddenly everything Hollywood had a passion for their service.

For now, it only works in the United States. The rumor of launching a search engine "social" back regularly ... But there is already a search feature in Facebook! Initially, it was used to retrieve contacts, but now it allows to search across all content according to your Facebook social graph, and find pages or events that you or your friends have "loved" by example.

Is it still allows to easily find content or page? Not necessarily. But it's still a real search functionality.

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