Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Sean Flannagan, the product manager at Etsy responsible for their recent Facebook Connect implementation. Numerous companies have been implementing the service and we’ve been keeping track of the experience for developers as well as marketers. Etsy recently launched their first integration with Facebook Connect and from the sounds of it, have a number of other exciting Facebook-enabled products on the way. Below is my interview with Sean Flannagan about the company’s experience with implementing Connect.

Nick O’Neill: Who are you and what do you do at Etsy?
Sean Flannagan: My name…

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The past two years have been an interesting ride as the Facebook Platform has become more restricted in order to protect the user’s experience. When Facebook first opened up there were countless ad networks and developers looking to seize the opportunity to make millions. Many have generated large sums of cash and a few continue to be extremely profitable to this day but what has been most interesting is watching Facebook carefully navigate the gray policy areas.

Millions Are Made In The Middle
Thousands of developers rushed to the platform in the first land grab opportunity since the early internet…

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Last night Eric Eldon confirmed that Super Rewards, the offer-based virtual goods monetization platform, had been acquired by Adknowledge. Super Rewards, a direct competitor of Offerpal Media (both sponsors of this blog), has become one of the leading ad networks on the Facebook platform as well as other large social platforms like MySpace. According to Venturebeat the company could pull in close to $60 million in revenue this year, which wouldn’t be surprising considering Zynga, the largest Facebook app developer, is expected to bring in almost twice that.

While the relative “life time value” of affiliate offers has been debated,…

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They say imitation is the biggest form of flattery, so Playfish should be pretty flattered by German-based Wooga’s latest game: Brain Buddies. The application takes a similar approach to “Who Has the Biggest Brain?” but provides new forms of brain teasers. There are four alternative challenges, one of which is almost identical to one of the challenges in Playfish’s competing application. Right now the most popular strategy for success in the social gaming arena appears to be copy others and then promote.

The result has been multiple legal battles although none of them have resulted in any game changing decision…

There has been continued speculation about Facebook’s projected revenue for 2009 and many have posted estimates in the range of $400 to $500 million. If those are truly accurate estimates, Facebook’s revenue per employee falls somewhere between Adobe and eBay based on revenue estimates provided by Royal Pingdom. For a company which has yet to find a “breakthrough” revenue model, it’s most definitely producing competitive results.

Does that mean Facebook’s revenue will scale proportionally to the number of employees they hire? Probably not but considering the large number of employees allocated to non-revenue generating activities (fighting spam, building out the…

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Just over a week ago I wrote that LivingSocial has become the top Facebook application. The company has continued to expand their lead and as of today have become the largest Facebook application ever based on monthly active users. Previously, Causes held the record of 26.95 million monthly active users. Today LivingSocial breached the previous record, jumping to 27.13 million monthly active users, up from approximately 20 million just over a week ago.

It’s an impressive feat yet what’s strange is the massive gap between LivingSocial and the second largest Facebook application: Super Wall. As far as I know, there…

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