Emoinstaller is an application that allows Facebook users to more easily express the context of their Facebook chat instant messages by using emoticons.

Boasting a clean and simple interface; Emoinstaller is a new Windows application that provides additional high quality emoticons for use in Facebook chat conversations.

The software application allows users of Internet Explorer, Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome to send and receive hundreds of additional emoticons in Facebook chat messages.

Emoinstaller is compatible with Windows XP, Vista and 7.

According to Daniel Offer, Managing Director. “It’s now easier than ever to express ones mood in Facebook by using these new Facebook chat emoticons.”

When a user visits Facebook.com, Emoinstaller conveniently places a small monkey icon in each instant message window. Clicking on this icon allows users to select an emoticon to accompany their Facebook chat message. Users of Emoinstaller are able to choose from fourteen categories and three sizes (small, medium and large).

“Emoinstaller is branded and personified by ‘Emo’ the monkey,” said Operations Director, Henrik Larsson. “Emo has been designed to represents that Emoinstaller is a fun, simple and personality expressing Facebook application.”

In short, Emoinstaller has been developed with the belief that chatting with friends should be an immersive and fun-filled experience.

Key features of Emoinstaller include:

• Hundreds of Emoticons – Over 900 emoticons in a variety of styles, there is something for everyone – young or old.
• Fourteen Categories of Emoticons – From Love to War and from Animals to Words, we’ve got all the Facebook emoticons you can think of and more!
• Various Sizes of Emoticons – Use traditionally small, medium or large emoticons – it’s your choice!
• Animated Emoticons – Animation gets your Facebook messages noticed.
• Simple Interface – Add an emoticon to your message with a single click.
• Multi-Browser Support – Emoinstaller supports Internet Explorer (version 8 or above recommended), Mozilla Firefox and Google Chrome.

Emoinstaller can be downloaded for free from http://www.emoinstaller.com

Chit Chat is a free Facebook chat instant messenger (IM) that allows you to chat with your Facebook friends from your desktop.

Chit Chat is a facebook chat client,it connects to Facebook and removes the need of a web-browser to talk over Facebook Chat.

Chit Chat Features:

• Fun and Free – Convenient and fun way to chat with your Facebook contacts without the hassle of surfing Facebook
• Free Your Web-Browser – No need to keep your web browser logged into Facebook
• Easy To Use – Download, install and then login with your Facebook username and password – easy!
• Popular? – Swift and fast tabbed chat Interface making it easy to talk with many Facebook friends at once
• Instant Message Notification – Lets you know when you receive an instant message.

Download Chit Chat

Remember how Facebook used to lumber and strain? And have you noticed how it doesn’t feel slow anymore? That’s because the engineering team pulled off an impressive feat: an in-depth optimization and rewrite project made the site twice as fast.

Robert Johnson, Facebook’s director of engineering and a speaker at the upcoming Velocity and OSCON conferences, discusses that project and its accompanying lessons learned below. Johnson’s insights have broad application — you don’t need hundreds of millions of users to reap the rewards.

Facebook recently overhauled its platform to improve performance. How long did that process take to complete?

Robert Johnson: Making the site faster isn’t something we’re ever really done with, but we did make a big push the second half of last year. It took about a month of planning and six months of work to make the site twice as fast.

What big technical changes were made during the rewrite?

Robert Johnson: The two biggest changes were to pipeline the page content to overlap generation, network, and render time, and to move to a very small core JavaScript library for features that are required on the initial page load.

The pipelining project was called BigPipe, and it streams content back to the browser as soon as it’s ready. The browser can start downloading static resources and render the most important parts of the page while the server is still generating the rest of the page. The new JavaScript library is called Primer.

In addition to these big site-wide projects, we also performed a lot of general cleanup to make everything smaller and lighter, and we incorporated best practices such as image spriting.

Were developers encouraged to work in different ways?

This was one of the trickiest parts of the project. Moving fast is one of our most important values, and we didn’t want to do anything to slow down development. So most of our focus was on building tools to make things perform well when developers do the things that are easiest for them. For example, with Primer, making it easy to integrate and hard to misuse was as important to its design as making it fast.

We also built detailed monitoring of everything that could affect performance, and set up systems to check code before release.

It’s really important that developers be automatically alerted when there’s a problem, instead of developers having to go out of their way for every change. That way, people can continue innovating quickly, and only stop to deal with performance in the relatively unusual case that they’ve caused a problem.

How do you address exponential growth? How do you get ahead of it?

You never get ahead of everything, but you have to keep ahead of most things most of the time. So whenever you go in to make a particular system scale better, you can’t settle for twice as good, you really need to shoot for 10 or 100 times as good. Making something twice as good only buys a few months, and you’re back at it again as soon as you’re done.

In general, this means scaling things by allowing greater federation and parallelism and not just making things more efficient. Efficiency is of course important, too, but it’s really a separate issue.

Two other important things: have good data about how things are trending so you catch problems before you’re in trouble, and test everything you can before you have to rely on it.

In most cases the easiest way for us to test something new is to put it in production for a small number of users or on a small number of machines. For things that are completely new, we set up “dark launches” that are invisible to the user but mimic the load from the real product as much as possible. For example, before we launched chat we had millions of JavaScript clients connecting to our backend to make sure it could handle the load.

Facebook’s size and traffic aren’t representative of most sites, but are there speed and scaling lessons you’ve learned that have universal application?

The most important one isn’t novel, but it’s worth repeating: scale everything horizontally.

For example, if you had a database for users that couldn’t handle the load, you might decide to break it into two functions — say, accounts and profiles — and put them on different databases. This would get you through the day but it’s a lot of work and it only buys you twice the capacity. Instead, you should write the code to handle the case where two users aren’t on the same database. This is probably even more work than splitting the application code in half, but it will continue to pay off for a very long time.

The most important thing here isn’t to have fancy systems for failover or load balancing. In fact, those things tend to take a lot of time and get you in trouble if you don’t get them right. You really just need to be able to split any function to run on multiple machines that operate as independently as possible.

The second lesson is to measure everything you can. Performance bottlenecks and scaling problems are often in unexpected places. The things you think will be hard are often not the biggest problems, because they’re the things you’ve thought about a lot. It’s actually a lot more like debugging than people realize. You can’t be sure your product doesn’t have bugs just by looking at the code, and similarly you can’t be sure your product will scale because you designed it well. You have to actually set it up and pound it with traffic — real or test — and measure what happens.

What is Scribe? How is it used within Facebook?

Scribe is a system we wrote to aggregate log data from thousands of servers. It turned out to be generally useful in a lot of places where you need to move large amounts of data asynchronously and you don’t need database-level reliability.

Scribe scales extremely large — I think we do more than 100 billion messages a day now. It has a simple and easy-to-use interface, and it handles temporary network or machine failures nicely.

We use Scribe for everything from logging performance data, to updating search indexes, to gathering metrics for platform apps and pages. There are more than 100 different logs in use at Facebook today.

I was struck by a phrase in one of your recent blog posts: You said Scribe has a “reasonable level of reliability for a lot of use cases.” How did you sell that internally?

For some use cases I didn’t. We can’t use the system for user data because it’s not sufficiently reliable, and keeping user data safe is something we take extremely seriously.

But there are a lot of things that aren’t user data, and in practice, data loss in Scribe is extremely rare. For many use cases it’s well worth it to be able to collect a massive amount of data.

For example, the statistics we provide to page owners depend on a large amount of data logged from the site. Some of this is from large pages where we could just take a sample of the data, but most of it is from small pages that need detailed reporting and can’t be sampled. A rare gap in this data is much better than having to limit the number of things we’re able to report to page owners, or only giving approximate numbers that aren’t useful for smaller pages.

Source How Facebook satisfied a need for speed

Today marks another milestone, as our own David Recordon joined Mark Zuckerberg onstage at Facebook’s F8 conference to demonstrate a live, working implementation of Facebook Connect for Movable Type. Facebook Connect is a powerful new initiative from Facebook that lets you bring your Facebook profile and social graph to other applications and websites while still giving you full control over privacy. We’ve shown off (and will soon release for download) a free, open source plugin for Movable Type that enables Facebook Connect on any MT-powered site.

Simply put, this is another huge leap forward in the effort to make the personal web more open.

Read more http://www.sixapart.com/blog/2008/07/facebook-connects-with-movable.html

announced Friday

The client library allows users to make Facebook API calls from any web site and create Ajax Facebook applications on that website.

Wei Zhu from Facebook explains the benefits:

Since the library does not require any server-side code on your server, you can now create a Facebook application that can be hosted on any web site that serves static HTML. An application that uses this client library should be registered as an iframe type. This applies to either iframe Facebook apps that users access through the Facebook web site or apps that users access directly on the app’s own web sites. Almost all Facebook APIs are supported.

Nick O’Neill at All Facebook writes:

Want to build your own social gaming platform that resides on your own website but leverages the power of users’ Facebook relationships? Now you can! There had previously been applications that could leverage the Facebook API prior to the launch of the platform but there are some significant differences now versus before. The first significant difference is the broader access to Facebook’s core features that the platform provides.

I’m not sure anyone saw this move coming, but Facebook may have just changed the game again by essentially becoming an application host. It’s a clever move by Facebook in a year its competitors will get more serious about offering platforms themselves.

[via Techcrunch]

Facebook has always recognized that using social context is an essential part of providing a great experience for users. That’s why we first released the Facebook Platform API in August 2006, which enabled developers to incorporate the data users chose to share into external websites and desktop applications in order to give users a more social experience wherever they were. The latest version of Facebook Platform also opened up the Facebook website itself, giving developers even stronger distribution models and access to all the integration points Facebook uses to build applications.

Facebook Platform unlocks significant value for both developers and users: it gives developers access to the core of Facebook’s value – the social graph – and gives users a better social experience on all Facebook applications, whether they’re inside or outside the Facebook website. A primary goal of Facebook has always been to make it easy for users to share information, and Facebook Platform opened up that information to benefit users and developers everywhere.

Developers’ Reception of Facebook Platform

Developers and users alike have embraced Facebook applications. 100,000 Facebook developers are currently building on Facebook Platform, and over 85% of Facebook users have used Facebook applications. Facebook Platform is open to all developers and companies, no matter what their size, goals or technical expertise. Our platform has been proven successful across audiences over the past 16 months, and we want to share the benefits of our work.

Opening up Facebook Platform Architecture

In the next step of opening up Facebook Platform, Facebook is now making its platform architecture available as a model for other social sites. Facebook will even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags for use by other platforms, which means that the 100,000 developers currently building Facebook applications can make their applications available on other social sites with no extra work.

Of course, Facebook Platform will continue to evolve. And by enabling our industry partners to use what we’ve learned, everyone benefits — users have a better social experience no matter where they are on the web, developers can make their applications available to new audiences, and social sites can offer more applications for their platform.

To clarify how you can use Facebook Platform as a model, we’re including some example FBML tag implementations, and also offer our test consoles and full documentation. Take a look at the High Level FBML Specification.

If you’d like to license the Facebook Platform methods or tags for your social site, please contact the Facebook Platform team at platform@facebook.com.

http://wiki.developers.facebook.com/index.php/PlatformArchitecture

RockYou and Widgetbox have teamed up to offer awidget for Facebook apps. Those applications that have been created with Widgetbox’s App Accelerator will display ads sold by RockYou, and participating developers get a 50/50 split with Widgetbox. The App Accelerator is a new release from Widgetbox, which appeals to the non-technical crowd that wants to get in on all this Facebook action. As more companies become distributors of widgets, and offer self-service options for publishers and developers, it’s increasingly important for companies like Widgetbox to stay competitive, and this looks like the right way to do so.

Other services that enable Facebook app creations include Clearspring and Splashcast. There’s also the Drupal release that’s just come out. If you’re looking for other ways to make money via Facebook apps, try Lookery, Chitika or 30Boxes options which came out over the summer. If there’s any Facebook app that’s likely to get you a little bit of pocket change, RockYou may be one of your best bets. The company has maintained top status for Facebook apps since their inception.

[via widgets lab]

A couple smaller tweaks include the ability to control volume on the music player, a music history link complete with options to see what your friends are listening to (how very social!), and customizable options for the player as well. New options for forums lets you see all of your posts, and save other posts as well. Forums search and a font tool bar are on their way. So a few of the major changes include the new friends view on the profile page, which lets you filter your friends based on who’s online, who’s a mutual friend, etc. Some of these options were available specifically from the Friends page, but now they’re accessible from your home page.

The photos section has also been modified for easily moving and deleting a large group of photos, picking an album cover, and the ability to link images to friends’ profiles. For composing messages, you can now save your friends’ information so that you can send a message without having to go to their profile page. This is also helpful because you’ll now be less inclined to get frustrated while searching for a friend that’s changed his user name. I’m so glad that MySpace recognizes the difficulties in finding other users within its network, and I hope that its search greatly improves in the coming months.

Most importantly, there are also new privacy options for your ac count, with the addition of a spam tab. This new tab lets you select things like who can send you messages, what type of person can add you as a friend, and the requirement of a CAPTHCA verification in order to send you a friend request. I’m sure you’ll all reading this and thinking the same thing I am–sounds like Facebook. From the tightening of content around your social sphere (or is “graph” the official term now?), to the new privacy capabilities, MySpace is changing its navigation and privacy options for the better.

Unlike Digg users, I think the MySpace community will appreciate these changes made to their personal network. Friendster has also been making some changes to its profile options, including fan profiles and the new “separate circles” options.

Appsaholic isn’t banner advertising like Lookery offers, or developers can get through traditional ad networks. Instead, Appsaholic sells click-throughs to other Facebook applications across their network of affiliated sites. It’s similar to FB Exchange’s link exchange model, but has more features (reporting) and seems easier to use (FBEx requires separate filings, Appsaholic can use PayPal). They have plans for other models as well, including a advertising that rewards users for engaging in advertisements.

How It Works

Developers become a member of the network by tracking their application on Appsaholic and adding some embed code to their application. The embed code adds an iFrame that serves paid links on their affiliates’ applications. The links go to the highest “AdRanked” advertising developer on their live bidding market. AdRank is determined by multiplying two factors, the offered price per click, and the advertising application’s quality score. The quality score is based on a function of the application’s clickthrough rate and viral growth within the network. The idea is that higher quality applications should be rewarded with cheaper advertising. This dissuades disliked apps from spamming the service.

So, for example, a developer whose application has a quality score of 60 and is willing to bid $.10 per click, has an AdRank of 6. Since ads are served in AdRanked order, the developer could boost his AdRank and position in the queue by bidding a bit higher. Currently PPC rates are 10 to 20 cents. Appsaholic takes 12-30% of that revenue.

How It Pays

While that doesn’t sound like a lot, people are still making some significant cash off the platform. Click through rates vary from 0.2%-3.0%, effectively paying about $0.60-$3.00 for every thousand visitors to your application. SocialMedia’s Seth Goldstein is optimistic and only sees these rates as the beginning.

The company cites Greg Thompson as one of their recent successes. Thompson, a contract programmer from London, Ontario, is known for making the popular Facebook application My Aquarium. The application has about 2.2 million users. Within less than a day of running SocialMedia’s ads Thompson made over $500. While CPM rates on VideoEgg can upwards of $8.50, Thompson found they had less inventory. Over the past three months, Thompson has made around $100,000 in Facebook advertising overall.

SocialMedia has shared their network’s revenue to date viewable to the right.

Going Forward

While Facebook hasn’t clobbered an application yet, they’ve definitely laid out some advertising plans of their own. Facebook has also shifted away from installs to engagement, thereby improving how users can discover applications and perhaps undercutting the need for affiliate linking to get big. There’s no telling if Facebook will directly take on advertising within applications. Playing in Facebook’s garden may be risky business, but Facebook need only look to MySpace’s dwindling approval amongst the developers to see what a heavy hand can ruin. (Nick Gonzalez)