Last week news feeds now enhanced notifications!

We just went live with a very compelling feature that will notify friends that you added an item to your own personal top3Clicks list.

What does the feature do? If you add 'Phillies' to your personal watch list all of your friends that ALSO use top3Clicks will receive a notification that you added an item.

We added this feature so you can leverage the expertise of your friends. If Brett is a Phillies fan and is looking for Phillies jerseys then you may be interested as well.

Please let us know what you think!

Fiddling with new Facebook UX features when old features fail

When we launched top3Clicks, as third party developers, we focused about a third of our attention around the users Facebook 'profile' user experience. This was the major way to keep your friends in tune with what you are watching, etc.

With the new Facebook user design, we have found the profile section (now the boxes tab) to be absolutely useless (or to be nice - 'less useful').

We took a hard look at where we could make changes to get friends thinking about friends again and it became crystal clear that the 'news feed' is the only road for seeing what your friends are up to. Sooo, we just released a new update, tweaking our use of 'news feeds' focusing on tipping off your friends when you add items that you are watching in top3Clicks.

For example, if you are interested in watching 'Phillies' items. You can add the item to top3Clicks, example below.

Now notice below that once the item is added, it will appear in your news feed as something you recently added. Your friends will see this item and can either add the item to their top3Clicks page or they can click on an item that is available at Amazon (like the Phillies jersey). This gives your friends a chance to impulse purchase the item.

As the top3Clicks community adds more items this feature is going to really be cool.

Feedback (good & not so good) always welcome.

-The BaconMarathon

Note that the BaconMarathon is supporting the Phillies this year to win the world series over the Rays. The first time since 1980 when Mike Schmidt and Steve Carlton ran the show. Go Phils!

BaconMarathon was at F8 yesterday...

...and here are the take aways.

The BaconMarathon opinion of the state of the Facebook Partner Platform:

Year 1 = a ton of abusive applications taking advantage of the fb tools that were provided

Year 2 = will be about creating engaging 'real' applications by playing by the rules to build user trust and focusing on engagement

Year 3 = making money. So much talk about needed payment systems, etc.

The new Facebook user experience is all about the 'news feeds'. When we started top3Clicks the news feed was really the 'third' option behind the emails and notifications for getting the word out to friends on what is going on.

In the business track, Mark Pinkus and panel had some great advice for the young entrepreneurs:

1. If you are building an app on Facebook today you are way ahead of everyone out there today.

2. F8 feels like the first Internet World back in 1995 (we were there and agree!)

3. If you go to Yahoo's front page there will probably be an fb app for every link on that page by next year.

4. Make something engaging and use the social graph as a 'tool' to achieve viral-ness. don't make something viral then figure out engagement.

5. Good VC's focus on the team first and the idea second.

6. Ship often and learn <-- something we learned many many years ago.