Sociablecode

It’s now been a few weeks, things are settling on hi5 at last. According the engineers over there, a new notifications system has been implemented (pushed on Monday) something along the lines of an actual queue system. The changes they have made definitely show, not just in how our applications load but they are reflected in our stats:

I can’t offer real numbers, sorry! But I promise they aren’t exactly in the hundreds or anything. hi5 is definitely chugging along. If you didn’t hear or see it, hi5 posted some stats about their platform during the Web 2.0 conference last week:

• Production launch 3/31, full launch to 100% of users 4/4
• 65 applications at launch, 328 today in 21 categories
• Averaging > 1 million new installs each day
• 5 apps with > 1 million installs, 11 more with > 500k installs
• Top apps getting > 1 million daily canvas views

• ~50% of active users have at least one application installed
• Active users average ~3 apps on every profile, with as many as 16

While hi5 is giving developers instant success in some cases as I have talked to a few developers, MySpace continues to stagnant:

This is the number 1 application on MySpace right now, it’s called Truth Box (to no surprise, there are 4 of the same Truth Box style applications on MySpace). How its growth reached where it is, is quite suspect at this point but if you take a look at the weekly trend you’ll see that it’s closing in everyday on becoming more and more flat given the potential of MySpace’s real network effect. It’s growth is less attributed to MySpace and moreso to advertising and cross promotion with larger audiences on other social networks that probably also exist on MySpace as well.

A number of applications are already flat. MySpace is not pushing out fast enough and as a result we’re starting to see more blackhat techniques implemented to spark growth in lieu of actual ways to grow viral. postTo is weak attempt, I think others would agree. It may convert, but it sure as hell doesn’t convert well.

At this point, MySpace is the best platform to create the largest revenue stream while hi5 is the best platform to grow virally as expected but you’ll find it hard to be able to make revenue with the same weighted value as MySpace. It’s difficult to say who to go after but often easier to make the choice to do both. A lot of us are doing that.

MySpace give us something to grow a user-base and I bet you you’ll see some real application innovation and less black hat techniques to subvert your users. You’re not doing a great job of helping your now starving developers. We need concrete dates, we need to know exactly what’s going on. Additionally, features need to stop breaking during every push, when breaks occur they need to be documented.

One of the silliest ideas yet was for changes to not be pushed live anymore. I am not sure who came up with that idea but hi5 has created an almost brilliant one: Make a REFRESH button. Let us publish changes, see them in development mode and when we want them to go live, let us hit a nice shiny button that makes it instant. You guys are smart engineers, would you like it if we made you wait an entire day after you pushed an update to MySpace.com to see how it went? No, that would be chaotic, why impose the same restrictions on us?

I don’t even think I really even have to mention how bad Orkut is doing with their entire platform launch. I don’t think anyone cares either at this point with the bigger networks actually iterating. To sum up Orkut, I’ll write some code:

if ($network == ‘orkut’) {

while(true) { continueToBreakMorePromises(); }

}

Max Newbould (signal_loss) popped in the channel today. He’s parading around Asia hyping up the MySpace Development Platform trying to get more developers, talk about the platform, etc.

It didn’t take me long to emphasize the slow development, problems, and qualms that I was having with the developement platform these last few weeks. I partly think it’s because Max is away and not as active in the community since he’s off in Asia. It started out fairly strong hence my disappointment.

Anyway, to the juicy stuff! I asked Max to provide a straight answer for the virality API, particularly requestSendMessage() (Notifications) and he stated “April 30th, unless something goes terribly wrong.”

I complained about adjustHeight(), he stated he was drafting an email to his team at the same time. Expect a fix soon hopefully.

Max stated invite sending is a good month away, so no real ETA on it–apparently a separate team is working on it.

I suggested an analytics service for us as it’s been very helpful on hi5.com, he expressed some interest in it–hopefully it made his email.

Max said he has been spending sometime additionally working on a better client caching system. Anyway, hopefully Max gives his team a swift kick in the ass tomorrow or the next day all the way from Asia. To keep up with what’s happening, Max writes actively on his blog on his MySpace profile at:

http://myspace.com/signalloss

Max stated that he was planning on taking Friday off (today!) but said he may pop in the channel, get his team ready:

signal_loss: ok, im off
signal_loss: flying back to seattle
signal_loss: take care all

This is a quick overview of what’s happening in the beautiful, frustrating, and highly hyped OpenSocial machine:

hi5:

1. Much better growth than MySpace, growth rates rise everyday. The only container that actually has viral growth! (Orkut’s 1% of Estonia does not count)
2. Stability issues occasionally that might be fixed now. This heavily stunted viral growth as no one has probably been able to compound their viral growth everyday. Ouch.
3. Huge language barriers with dense communities who do not necessarily speak English. hi5 ramp up your translation services, my i18n file is still in escrow and it hurts. Click here for the full explanation on how to do it.
4. Everything is ready for you on hi5 to explode in growth, once again, we just need stability.
5. Lots of bugs but lots of fixes are happening daily. Unlike MySpace the hi5 devs push daily are machines who are awake at night to help you even with the smallest problems. Paul, Lou, Anil, Zach–you guys are awesome.
6. Best support you’ll ever get is in #hi5dev. And hey it’s 10:30 PM here and they are still awake answering questions.
7. hi5 actually has analytics! Zach expressed in providing analytics later the way Facebook does, we need this quickly!
8. Oh RockYou put out a press release about reaching 2 millions users, that happened about 4-5 days ago so they are probably much bigger now

Suggestion to hi5: The language barrier is a growing issue for many developers. Some developers even see more growth on MySpace. Is there anything you can do to catering our applications harder to native English speaking users? This would let us grow properly until the i18n issue gets resolved. It’s difficult to grow under the dense Thailand users as well as the huge Spanish base.

MySpace:

1. Frustration.
2. EXTREMELY slow development process.
3. Stop staving us off with tricks like presenting us old functionality such as postTo which Zachallia (FreeGifts) has been using since the platform’s inception.
4. Cool you finally found the courage to link the gallery, great now we get a few hundred users and watch the growth decline like it did when you first launched. This is not enough.
5. Vague deadlines, nobody has a damn clue when the viral API is coming out. First it was a couple weeks, those past by, where is it? If postTo was it, that was a mean trick.

Orkut:

1. Yay! You’re launching in about a week except you should probably put this in really tiny font: 10% of your users only.
2. Wait a second, wasn’t Orkut supposed to launch before everyone else? Does anybody really care anymore about a #6-7 social network that has a tiny non-native english speaking population
3. Before you get too excited, Orkut has limited viral API such as no requestShareApp and probably no notifications either.

Other news, I am adamant about releasing my OpenSocial wrapper/framework to the public eventually. I am not sure when but here is an outline of it currently. I have working implementations of it on both my applications. Comments about the structure are appreciated:

A brief overview of some interesting things that it contains:

- Works beautifully on all containers (Orkut, hi5, MySpace)
- owner/viewer PERSON info caching.
- Friend request batching (which can emulate paging very easily).
- Less verbose than opensocial API.
- Like any framework, utility methods to ease the pain.
- Wrappers around everything in case things change.
- Easily obtain person info without it failing on certain non-implemented fields: getUser(person).aggregate(); // Obtains all possible data at once!
- doRequest() (makeRequest) supports caching/refreshing/signed requests.
- Fully implemented viral API that is ready to go.
- MediaItems made easy for viral API.
- Fully tested, mother approved.

<Param name=”invitePingUrl” value=”http://host/path”/>

Try it out…

We’re a few days into the first full-scale release of an OpenSocial implementation. Look what’s happening; this is no joke.

Developers who made the initial hi5 gallery, and who took advantage of the viral channels offered by the network, are watching with keen interest as their servers heat up…

Talk in the IRC has turned from details of refreshing external js and implementing new API functionality towards stats tracking and methods for scaling apps. This is an exciting time.

<Optional feature=”hi5-lifecycle”>
<Param name=”installPingUrl” value=”….URL here…”/>
<Param name=”removePingUrl” value=”….URL here…”/>
</Optional>

This and other hi5 OpenSocial Extensions.

Looks like the MySpace application numbers (limited to total installs) have corrected themselves. Hooray!

First, read this.

This admirable result is the product of a lot of conversation, both on IRC and certainly at the hi5 headquarters. Developers have been begging for some visibility into relative performance of applications, specifically requesting install numbers to be made public. Many containers take the easy way out and make their install numbers public. Some (sorry MySpace, we still love you) even rely on this questionable metric as the sole factor for ranking within the application directory.

Suhail brought up a very good point which is that public metrics provide developers a proxy for monitoring the app ecosystem. Spamming and other nefarious tactics become transparent when a community of developers has their finger on the pulse of install rates, relative pickup etc.

PL makes a strong case against simultaneously exposing the ranking metric(s) values and relative importance: developers will inevitably jump to optimize that/those metric(s), effectively throwing user experience to the side in order to arbitrage their position. This is a strong argument, and leads happily to the conversation we see started above by Zack in his blog post.

Developers need something to watch, and as Paul points out, will inevitably optimize their apps pursuant to the reward mechanism of the container. For MySpace developers, it is easy to watch installs all day, and live and die on how many people are using the app. But today, two days into the hi5 launch and with a sea of opportunity before us, what is the thought process invoked by the proposed ranking algorithm? Answer: focus on quality. I can have 10 users, but if I as a developer can optimize the experience of my - few - users, I have a shot at the system rewarding me handsomely.

The past two months have been hectic as well as wrought with unrealistic promises, high expectations by all parties, skepticism from outside the OpenSocial community. The whole Orkut fiasco was in part explained away by a (sudden) emphasis on fairness, and we’ve seen both MySpace and hi5 totally surpass a certain larger organization in their ability to implement this new technology as well as support an enthusiastic community of developers.

The emphasis should be squarely on building quality apps that add value to the host network. Without this principal, there is no reason for meganetworks to even ‘go there.’ OpenSocial excites big networks because it represents an opportunity for third-party development to affect their own bottom line positively. It’s the - now old - F8 philosophy: your apps generate pageviews, eyeballs, loyalty and more, so bring them on and keep all the money you can make with them. Quality is key here. Frankly I use Facebook less now after being barraged by notifications.

“Laura has sent you a banana! Click here to peel it!

Yeah… I’m all set.

Momentary sycophancy notwithstanding, another hi5 decision bears mentioning. As the network rolls out the brand-new app gallery to its users, hi5 is randomizing the gallery order until they have collected enough meaningful data to rank the apps intelligently. Fantastic.

Whatever hi5’s algorithm is, it will certainly change over time as the team receives feedback and more data with which to work. The direction is the right one, and only good can come of it.

-Christopher (markitecht)

Maybe hi5 convinced them or StephanieBamBam convinced them but MySpace finally has some viral API. Most notably for now is notifications similar to hi5. SuperFortune Cookie had a pre-built try-catch code to automatically execute viral API if it ever got instated–same code used on hi5, this is my wrapper function around it that I used to get it working on MySpace:

network.sendMessage = function(recipients, title, body, type, callback) {
try {
// Build message object
message = network.buildMessage(title, body, type);

// Send message to recipients
opensocial.requestSendMessage(recipients, message, callback);
} catch (ex) {
callback(false);
}
};

Try it out, MySpace currently except <a> tags in the body and titles of sendMessage. You can use TYPE: NOTIFICATION and EMAIL to do this. Best of luck, check out SuperFortune Cookie do it in action!

There was a sizable dip in installs numbers for MySpace OpenSocial apps today (3/31/2008). I noticed in the zynganomics numbers that some apps experienced this dip yesterday, and a brief survey didn’t turn up any apps that weren’t affected at some point.

There is one - little - thread about it here.

Any news or knowledge, please post it in the comments.