SNAP Summit – SNAP Stands for Social Network Application Platform

by julieblaustein on October 31, 2007

words and pictures by Julie Blaustein

Organizers of SNAP Summit; Christian Perry of SF Beta and Brian
Zisk of The Future of Music

Panel for Designing Virality and Retention

It was another beautiful day in San Francisco and 200 folks at the SNAP Summit were not disappointed.

It opened with a strong panel focusing on Viral Marketing; how to create it, how to track it, how to measure it, and what metrics to pay attention to.

Susan Wu of Charles River Ventures asked the tough questions and got the answers from Jia Shen, CEO & Founder of RockYou boasting 26 applications on Face Book along with Dave McClure of PayPal fame and now the founder of Master of 500 Hats, Keith Schadt of 42 Friends and known for his Grow-a-Gift with over 3 million downloads of it and Mark Kantor, Developer of Graffiti.

”So many applications out there and So little time” is the problem so many are facing now. Its not so easy to gain users attention just by receiving an email and the consensus is that email needs to be targeted and the applications need to serve a specific purpose in their lives. In other words, engaging. A nifty place where you see the all the data on all the applications can be found on appsaholic on Facebook.

It was refreshing to hear from a real Facebook employee; Ami Vora, Senior Platform Manager. She gave a convincing talk that suggested Facebook is all about its Users and not just seeking out to gather as much information as they can for their social graph. She did provide some great suggestions for developers who are thinking of contributing to the Facebook Platform.

1) Provide engaging Content

2) Focus on Social Aspects

3) Use Facebook Integration Points – there are 12 points to impact users on the site

4) Develop and Iterate

5) Provide Intelligent Promotion

6) Incorporate Privacy features

Vora mentioned the Facebook Fund too. Though the grants are not huge, it covers developer costs and shows Facebook is interested in the growth of applications for Facebook. Some interesting stats were mentioned; There are over 5,400 applications available on the platform today with over 100 added daily, over 50 page views a day by Facebook users, the US leads with 44% of the market with Canada at 15%, followed by the UK at 14% and most incredible, over 85% of users have downloaded an application since its launch in May, only 5 months ago!
Of course with so many applications being downloaded, it would only follow that those developers who seemingly love to stay up all night creating these widgets would want to make some money off of their efforts.

Rafe Needleman of CNET moderated the panel on the future of advertising. Again, data was key to coming up with ways to create ad supported applications. Demographic data from the social networks is key.

Lookery is one of the first, if not only ad platforms to offer gender targeted ads based on the data they gather. Monetizing applications at such an early stage means the cpm’s aren’t pretty – a penny to ten cents at the most for run of network, more for targeted of course. With more data and research available, its expected to get better. Let’s hope!

There are a number of advertising networks out there in the space and the big question is, will Facebook create their own advertising network especially now with Microsoft having a stake in it. Keep in mind these networks will also be available for the other social networking sites such as MySpace, Goolge, Bebo and Friendster.

Blogger Roundtable

A free for all blogging discussion over which applications is going to make it big and which platforms will survive took place with Robert Scobel of PodTech of , Dan Farber of ZDnet, Justin Smith writer of Inside Facebook, Nick O’Neil of AllFacebook and Justin Smith of InsideFacebook. There was lots of discussion over who is going to win the social networking wars; Google, Facebook or Microsoft? Hmmm, there really wasn’t much mentioned about MySpace. Have they lost the battle already?

The conference wound down with a discussion of what works and what doesn’t. It all came down to once again; demographic targeting, taking actions, metrics and if you are fortunate enough to have sponsors, to provide them information so they will keep on sponsoring you.

Included in the panel was Steve Polksy, President and COO of Flixster. I guess their application has done really, really well as it was announced Tuesday on TechCrunch that IAC had submitted a letter of intent to purchase them or at least a stake. In closing, the entire conference it seems made their way to the Thirsty Beer where lots of beer was consumed and many data hungry developers talked amongst one another to trade secrets about the building the next killer app.

Nicolas Darveau and Kit Codik of the Green Lake Group

Shon Burton of The Forbin Group and Joel Sachs of AdBrite