I agree with Sam Gustin when he says that yesterday’s Facebook Developer Conference in San Francisco was in the end a snoozer, but not because CEO Mark Zuckerberg failed on stage.

First of all, saying the event itself was sleep-inducing is just factually incorrect. Before and after the keynote they played music so loud that a deaf person would complain. I was alarmed and somewhat panicked by the noise, but certainly not sleepy. And on a more serious note, Zuckerberg himself was much more at ease and charismatic on stage than I’ve ever seen him previously. He’s no Steve Jobs yet, but he’s no slouch, either.

I left the event feeling fairly upbeat about Facebook. They sent a clear message to developers that they need to build compelling apps and learn to play nice. And they created a clear reward and punishment system to deal with both ends of the spectrum.

But I’ve learned that I need period of reflection after these super-shows before I can really digest what happened. And after reflecting, I’m feeling more than a little let down by Facebook’s product focus and ability to execute.

Snatching Mediocrity From The Jaws Of Victory

A year ago Facebook set the Internet on fire with the launch of Facebook Platform. Competitors rushed to respond, and since then Facebook has been on a tear.

Facebook has all the momentum as the worlds largest social network (if not the most valuable), and they’ve always been willing to launch bold and controversial new products that change the way people perceive the company (News Feeds, Platform, Beacon).

Everyone looks to them to see what comes next. When rumors surfaced in May that they were going to announce Facebook Connect, a way for third party sites to integrate their services with Facebook profile data, Google and MySpace rushed to announce their own versions of the product, with nearly identical features and, in the case of Google (Friend Connect), a suspiciously similar name.

But today they were not bold, and they did not act like thought leaders. There was no controversial but exciting new product experiment unleashed on a gushing audience. Instead, there were minor tweaks to a platform that needs a major overhaul.

Facebook Connect, the most exciting new product on the agenda, is still vaporware. A parade of partners came out on stage to talk about all the great things they’ll do when it eventually launches this Fall. Meanwhile, Google’s product is in working alpha, and MySpace has fully launched Data Availability.

The new three tier ranking system for apps, which we first wrote about in March, addresses the problem of black hat developers, but it may create more pain than it’s worth. Developers have long complained that Facebook plays favorites.

More disappointing is what Facebook didn’t announce today. No payments platform, even though developers are begging for a way to make money beyond pitifully-low (and falling) CPM ads.

Nor did Facebook address their now quaint and basically unusable messaging system, even though MySpace paved the way for them by implementing Gears nearly two months ago.

Facebook also didn’t take the opportunity today to make amends with Google and cross-integrate their products. Competition is fine, but users are best served with interoperable products. In effect, Facebook is continuing to tell their users exactly what they can and cannot do with their own data.

Finally, Facebook chastised developers who build slow applications, telling them that they need to speed things up and think about scaling. But user complaints about the slowness of Facebook in general are on the upswing. Perhaps its time for the company to listen to its own advice.

Suddenly Facebook is acting more like a company with lots to lose (and therefore defend) rather than a scrappy young underdog startup looking to shake things up, capture our imagination and change the world. It’s time for them to be audacious again, and take some risk. Otherwise, they risk becoming simply boring. And that’s the fast lane to mediocrity.

If you were actually a fan of the MINI Cooper on Facebook, you would be able to tag the photo and that photo would be displayed on the brand’s page. This way you don’t need to individually navigate to and upload photos on the actual brand’s page. It’s a great opportunity for brands and a great way to extend the existing platform. Facebook videos can currently be tagged as well so that would be yet another opportunity for Facebook.

There are a number of competitive services that are working to develop brand tagging in media some of which are completely automated. While I can see this technology being useful, enabling users to tag images and videos with brands themselves would be sufficient in my own opinion. Do you think tagging images and videos with brands would be smart? Why hasn’t Facebook done this yet?

Then today Ryan Kissiellondon reported about a man who had a fake profile created about him on Facebook as well. The profile had his name and birth date accurate but it also had him registered to a number of gay groups. Mathew Firsht is now “suing old schoolfriend Grant Rapheal for libel and misuse of private information in what is believed to be the first defamation case involving Facebook in the UK.”

These are not the first cases of users having false duplicates of their profile created. In a video posted on College Humor. back in March, this trick was the brunt of a joke movie trailer. This leads to the question of whether or not Facebook should be verifying user profiles when a user registers. As of now there isn’t much of a verification process but perhaps we will start seeing new processes implemented in the future.

This evening I was thinking about it more and the combination of Facebook’s payment platform with Facebook Connect could be a force to be reckoned with. For example imagine event payment solutions similar to Eventbrite which take advantage of social distribution channels (such as the newsfeed) and also accept payment. This is just one idea though.

The real thing that I’m waiting to see is the launch of Facebook’s payment platform. It appears to have been delayed significantly. Post in the comments if there are any other things you are looking for Facebook to announce. Here are a few of the panels at the event, check out the Facebook blog post for more details:

• User Experience
  • Introducing the New Facebook Profile & More
  • Integrating Facebook Connect into your Website
  • Building Great Applications on Facebook
  • Design and User Experience at Facebook
• Technical
  • Advanced App Building
  • Feed and Social Distribution
  • Building to Facebook Scale
  • Made for Mobile
• Business
  • Building a Business on Facebook / Metrics & Analytics
  • Marketing your Application on Facebook
  • Entrepreneurship on Facebook Platform
  • fbFund: A Look Inside — Seeding Opportunity on Facebook Platform

Tonight, it appears that another Top 25 Facebook app has disappeared from the Platform as well: Social Me, normally with over 280,000 daily active users, is showing the same signs that Top Friends did a few days ago:

1. Going to the Social Me app page redirects to the Facebook home page
2. Searching the application directory for “Social Me” yields nothing
3. The Social Me box is missing from all profile pages

If two’s a coincidence and three’s a trend, then the disappearance of Social Me tonight should raise all developers’ eyebrows. Several of Social Me developer SocialHi.com’s other applications have gone missing as well. If this turns out to be another case of application suspensions due to user privacy concerns, then Facebook is definitely making a statement with its actions. We’ll have more soon.

Update: Social Me has indeed also been suspended from the Facebook Platform due to privacy violations. According to Facebook, “The Top Friends and Social Me applications have been temporarily suspended by Facebook due to their violations of Facebook’s privacy policies.”

Throughout most of this year, Facebook has taken fairly a fairly algorithmic approach to regulating the Platform economy. By limiting developers’ access to communication channels based on user feedback, Facebook has been able to squeeze much distribution arbitrage out of the system, and align developer and user interests much more than it had before. (Before allocation limits, for example, it was cheaper to make a quiz application than buy inventory.)

However, there are always some types of user experience issues, like privacy concerns, that cannot be managed with automated systems. As such, Facebook has demonstrated that they’re willing to enforce some policies publicly. Public case by case policy enforcement is a necessary approach for more mature economies.

Earlier in the year, Facebook responded to abuse by outlawing the tool being abused (for example, in the case of forced invites). This would be akin to outlawing something like assault rifles that almost everyone agrees are harmful to society. However, in more complex cases, outlawing the tool at hand is not necessarily what’s best for the system. For example, removing APIs that access profile data from the Platform altogether because of one application’s privacy concerns would hurt the overall Platform economy significantly: many developers and users would be negatively impacted. This would be somewhat like outlawing kitchen knives because they were once used in a crime. Instead of removing knives from society, the better solution would be to hire a district attorney and set up a court system and bill of rights: news of verdicts and sentences would deter many future cases. Of course, that’s a very expensive proposition, and sufficient accountability must be enforced for stakeholders to have faith in the system.

While the government analogy breaks down in many senses (policy makers aren’t exactly elected officials in this case ), ultimately most of the “assault weapons” have already been removed from the Platform economy, and we’re beginning to see more cases of “kitchen knives.” Kitchen knife cases are more expensive to police and enforce, but even the libertarian-laden Silicon Valley would agree that policy enforcement is necessary for any mature Platform to be healthy.

Will Facebook choose to publicly comment on future cases, like Facebook’s Director of Platform Product Marketing Ben Ling did on Friday? I’m not sure that they always will, but I think it would help everybody to know as much as possible about what’s kosher and what’s not.

Facebook’s approach to platform governance is becoming decreasingly dependent on algorithms and increasingly based on policy-enforcement. So if you’re looking for a career in (platform) law enforcement, I know at least a couple social networks that are hiring!

Tonight, it appears that another Top 25 Facebook app has disappeared from the Platform as well: Social Me, normally with over 280,000 daily active users, is showing the same signs that Top Friends did a few days ago:

1. Going to the Social Me app page redirects to the Facebook home page
2. Searching the application directory for “Social Me” yields nothing
3. The Social Me box is missing from all profile pages

If two’s a coincidence and three’s a trend, then the disappearance of Social Me tonight should raise all developers’ eyebrows. Several of Social Me developer SocialHi.com’s other applications have gone missing as well. If this turns out to be another case of application suspensions due to user privacy concerns, then Facebook is definitely making a statement with its actions. We’ll have more soon.

Update: Social Me has indeed also been suspended from the Facebook Platform due to privacy violations. According to Facebook, “The Top Friends and Social Me applications have been temporarily suspended by Facebook due to their violations of Facebook’s privacy policies.”

Throughout most of this year, Facebook has taken fairly a fairly algorithmic approach to regulating the Platform economy. By limiting developers’ access to communication channels based on user feedback, Facebook has been able to squeeze much distribution arbitrage out of the system, and align developer and user interests much more than it had before. (Before allocation limits, for example, it was cheaper to make a quiz application than buy inventory.)

However, there are always some types of user experience issues, like privacy concerns, that cannot be managed with automated systems. As such, Facebook has demonstrated that they’re willing to enforce some policies publicly. Public case by case policy enforcement is a necessary approach for more mature economies.

Earlier in the year, Facebook responded to abuse by outlawing the tool being abused (for example, in the case of forced invites). This would be akin to outlawing something like assault rifles that almost everyone agrees are harmful to society. However, in more complex cases, outlawing the tool at hand is not necessarily what’s best for the system. For example, removing APIs that access profile data from the Platform altogether because of one application’s privacy concerns would hurt the overall Platform economy significantly: many developers and users would be negatively impacted. This would be somewhat like outlawing kitchen knives because they were once used in a crime. Instead of removing knives from society, the better solution would be to hire a district attorney and set up a court system and bill of rights: news of verdicts and sentences would deter many future cases. Of course, that’s a very expensive proposition, and sufficient accountability must be enforced for stakeholders to have faith in the system.

While the government analogy breaks down in many senses (policy makers aren’t exactly elected officials in this case ), ultimately most of the “assault weapons” have already been removed from the Platform economy, and we’re beginning to see more cases of “kitchen knives.” Kitchen knife cases are more expensive to police and enforce, but even the libertarian-laden Silicon Valley would agree that policy enforcement is necessary for any mature Platform to be healthy.

Will Facebook choose to publicly comment on future cases, like Facebook’s Director of Platform Product Marketing Ben Ling did on Friday? I’m not sure that they always will, but I think it would help everybody to know as much as possible about what’s kosher and what’s not.

Facebook’s approach to platform governance is becoming decreasingly dependent on algorithms and increasingly based on policy-enforcement. So if you’re looking for a career in (platform) law enforcement, I know at least a couple social networks that are hiring!

We realized Facebook would be most useful if more people were allowed to join, but we also weren’t willing to compromise the security of the site by removing all methods of verification, especially for high school students and minors. Unfortunately this meant that most homeschoolers weren’t able to register. For security purposes, users under the age of 18 were required to affiliate with their current high school, but it was nearly impossible to extend this system to homeschooled users.