Facebook

Leading Social Utility Extends Reach to Desktop

Since its debut in 2004, Facebook has grown to include more than 20 million members who use the social utility to share information among friends in their real-world social networks. In order to extend and enhance its product, Facebook provides third-party developers an open platform so they can tie their applications into Facebook functions. To showcase this development platform, Facebook worked with Microsoft and Avenue A | Razorfish to create a unique gadget based on the Windows Vista™ operating system. The gadget extends Facebook’s leading online photo-sharing application to the desktop and offers other innovative functions that foster closer social relationships. Facebook anticipates the new gadget will make photo uploads even easier for Windows Vista users and therefore increase photo-sharing among friends on the site.

Fast Facts
Design and development team	4 people
Estimated months to complete	2 months
Programming languages	JavaScript, DHTML
Programming model and technologies	AJAX, ActiveX
Facebook users	20 million
Page views for Facebook.com	33 billion per month
Photos hosted	1.5 billion
Photos uploaded every day	7 million
Average site visit	20 minutes

Situation

New students at U.S. colleges and preparatory schools often receive facebooks: publications with photos and names of campus community members meant to help people get to know one another. Building on that concept, Harvard undergraduate Mark Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004 as a way to foster relationships among students on campus.

Today, Facebook is a social utility built to facilitate the spread of relevant information among real-world social networks based on schools, workplaces, or geographic location. Facebook now includes more than 20 million active users and is, according to comScore Media Metrix, the sixth most-trafficked online destination in the United States and the number one photo-sharing application on the Web. Greater user activity helps the company drive advertising and sponsorship revenue.

The secret to Facebook’s growing popularity is enabling online social interactions among people who are already involved with each other in real-life communities. By doing so, Facebook provides people with a means of controlling how they share information and with whom they share it. Facebook measures success in terms of how much time people spend on the site interacting with friends.

This gadget allows us to expand our reach and helps users interact more easily with their friends. It illustrates what is possible with Windows Vista and the Facebook Platform. Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager, Facebook

Enlisting Community Development
Behind the scenes, Facebook offers a refined platform for building new applications that extend functionality. This set of application programming interfaces (APIs), called the Facebook Platform, allows outside developers to add social context to their applications and take advantage of data from Facebook’s core components—friends, photos, events, and profiles. Many of these applications expand the reach of Facebook and tap the creativity of the broader development community. Facebook offers a full-fledged developer site replete with documentation, developer tools, and discussion lists.

“We are a technology company. Our focus is on optimizing the user experience and developing innovative functionality. What we’ve done with our Facebook Platform is opened up our toolset to allow other Web firms, start-ups—anyone—to take advantage of the Facebook social utility in their own applications. We believe the end result will be to expand the reach and relevance of Facebook,” says Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager at Facebook.

Engaging New Opportunities
With the launch of the Windows Vista™ operating system in January 2007, Facebook decided to create a Windows Vista-based application that would both showcase the Facebook Platform and make photo-sharing easier for users. Since Facebook introduced its photo feature, people have uploaded more than 1.5 billion photos. “Because we are the largest photo-sharing site on the Internet, photo views and photo uploads are very important to us. We saw an opportunity to extend our application directly to people’s desktops using Windows Vista-based technology and the Facebook Platform,” says Morin.

Additionally, many Facebook users will likely soon upgrade to computers running Windows Vista for work, home, or school. The company expects that an appealing and easy-to-use tool based on the new operating system will illustrate the value of the Facebook Platform, which allows any developer to build a new application or feature for Facebook users.

Solution

Microsoft and Facebook enlisted Avenue A | Razorfish, a leading interactive Web agency and Microsoft® Gold Certified partner, to build a Windows® Sidebar gadget that would bring Facebook information and functionality—especially the photo-sharing feature and the “poke” function—directly to people’s desktops. Gadgets for Windows Sidebar are simple, miniature applications that connect with Web services to provide information at a glance and access to frequently used tools.

The overall design and development time for the Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista was two months, and the project began in the middle of January 2007. The project involved a project manager, creative director, senior designer, IT architect, and user-interface designer from Avenue A | Razorfish, as well as staff from Facebook and Microsoft in consulting roles.

With gadgets for Windows Vista, Microsoft makes it easy for Web developers to reach into the desktop while still allowing them to tap into the power of the Web and Web services. Jonathan Padilla, Microsoft Practice, Avenue A | Razorfish

The gadget uses Asynchronous JavaScript and XML (AJAX) technologies to access the Facebook Platform APIs. Information received from Facebook is interpreted by JavaScript and rendered in the gadget as DHTML. “With gadgets for Windows Vista, Microsoft makes it easy for Web developers to reach into the desktop while still allowing them to tap into the power of the Web and Web services. Developers can easily pull information from multiple sources to create interesting, focused applications on the desktop,” says Jonathan Padilla, who heads the Microsoft practice for Avenue A | Razorfish.

Slideshow
The Slideshow function is the most prominent feature of the Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista. The gadget automatically runs a slideshow of photos pulled from Facebook albums and, at any time, the user can double-click on an image to pull up the corresponding Facebook page in their browser. Every several minutes, the photo-stream is updated automatically so that people can see the most recent photos of their friends.

Photo Upload
Facebook took advantage of the APIs for Windows Vista making photo uploads with the gadget a drag-and-drop experience. Instead of having to upload photos on the Facebook site, people can now simply drag a single photo or folder onto the gadget to initiate upload. The gadget offers a setting that pulls up the Facebook album page in a browser after upload, allowing users to categorize and tag their uploaded photos.

Figure 1. The Facebook gadget displays photos from people’s albums and those of their friends.

Share
One of the unique functions on Facebook is Share, which allows people to send Web pages or information about events or groups to friends in their social networks. In effect, the Share function facilitates viral communications within the entire Facebook community. The Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista offers a Share capability for photos displayed in the slideshow. When someone sees a photo they want to share with their friends, they simply move the cursor over the photo and a Share button will appear. Clicking on the Share button brings the user to a page where they can select recipients, posting options, and enter comments.

Facebook also took advantage of the gadget platform to promulgate their Share function in Internet Explorer® browsers. During the gadget installation process, people have the option of adding the Share button to their browser toolbar. To accomplish this add-on capability, the gadget developers used an ActiveX® control to copy bookmarks into Internet Explorer.

Figure 2. Customization options

Poke
In Facebook, one person can virtually “poke” another to get their attention, initiate a conversation, or to teasingly annoy. This feature is surprisingly popular among some groups, and may include long back-and-forth exchanges described as “poke wars.” (The winner is the one who pokes last.) The Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista lets people see their outstanding pokes from their desktop instead of having to log into the Facebook site. Taking a cue from instant messenger clients, the gadget vibrates to notify people when they have received a new poke.

The photo-sharing aspect of the Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista will get people more engaged with each other and make them want to share their content. Dave Morin, Senior Platform Manager, Facebook

Download and Set-up
Facebook members can download the gadget from the Facebook developer site’s product gallery and from the Windows Live™ Gallery at gallery.live.com. Once people initiate the download process, they are prompted to sign into Facebook and retrieve an activation key. This code snippet matches the gadget installation to the particular user’s profile.

People can customize their Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista by adjusting the control settings during installation or any time afterwards. Available preferences include:

• What photos are displayed in the slideshow. People can choose all of their friends’ photos, photos that are tagged with their name, or photos from their own albums.
• How frequently photos cycle through the slideshow.
• Whether photo uploads are automatic, or involve album organization functions.
• Whether photos are cropped to display in full frame, or left at original aspect ratio.
• Whether the Poke icon is displayed on the gadget or not.

Benefits

The Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista delivers core Facebook experiences directly to people’s Windows Vista desktops. Facebook users that purchase a new laptop or upgrade their operating system to Windows Vista will have a compelling new application with which to engage their friends on Facebook.

“This gadget allows us to expand our reach and helps users interact more easily with their friends. It illustrates what is possible with Windows Vista and the Facebook Platform,” says Morin.

Makes Photo-Sharing Accessible from the Desktop
Because the Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista sits directly on people’s desktops and runs locally, it is much easier to view and upload photos on the photo-sharing application. Without having to open a browser and log into Facebook, the gadget allows people to receive automatically updated photo-streams from their friends. And because the gadget includes Facebook’s Share function, people can easily engage with their friends by sharing photos.

Besides providing more reasons for people to share photos, the gadget also simplifies photo-uploading by making it a drag-and-drop experience.

“One of our business requirements for this project was to increase the number of people who frequently uploaded photos. The photo-sharing aspect of the Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista will get people more engaged with each other and make them want to share their content more,” says Morin.

Facilitates Increased Interaction Among Friends
Facebook is dedicated to optimizing people’s experiences using the social utility. The Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista offers people an easy way to stay updated and participate in their social networks. The Slideshow allows people to easily see what friends in their social networks are doing, and the Share and Poke features on the desktop add immediacy to the Facebook experience. In measurable terms, the Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista will drive more traffic to the Facebook site and encourage people to use the site’s functions more extensively.

The Share feature increases the value of Facebook’s social networks. Facebook expects that, with Share on their desktop for photos and in their Internet Explorer browser for Web content, people will become more accustomed to using the Share feature, and use it more often. The Poke feature is a key tool that adds nuance to online relationships and is a measure of popularity for many users. The Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista notifies people when others are interested in them without requiring those people to visit the Web site. Including the Poke capability in the gadget will enhance social interaction among Facebook users.

Reflects the Simplicity of Facebook
The Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista is a perfect showcase of the Facebook Platform and offers new Windows Vista users a compelling set of functions. Because Windows Vista gadget technology is flexible and easy to develop with, the project team easily recreated the Facebook experience. One of Facebook’s design principles is to keep user content preeminent in the experience and minimize design elements that interfere. The Facebook Gadget for Windows Vista captures Facebook’s minimalist aesthetic perfectly.

“The Facebook gadget captures and translates Facebook's brand and unparalleled user experience to a desktop context in a unique way that highlights the capabilities of the Windows Vista gadget technology. It adds a new dimension to the social networking features that Facebook is known for,” says Pradeep Ananthapadmanabhan, Vice President of Technology at Avenue A | Razorfish.

 
Windows Vista
Windows Vista can help your organization use information technology to gain a competitive advantage in today’s new world of work. Your people will be able to find and use information more effectively. You will be able to support your mobile work force with better access to shared data and collaboration tools. And your IT staff will have better tools and technologies to enhance corporate IT security, data protection, and more efficient deployment and management.

For more information about Windows Vista, go to:
www.microsoft.com/windowsvista

 

For More Information
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For more information about Facebook products and services, visit the Web site at:
http://www.facebook.com/

 

For more information about Avenue A | Razorfish products and services, call (415) 284-7070 or visit the Web site at:
http://www.avenuea-razorfish.com/

© 2007 Microsoft Corporation. This case study is for informational purposes only. MICROSOFT MAKES NO WARRANTIES, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, IN THIS SUMMARY.