platformer

AOL has formally launched the third-party mobile-advertising division of its Platform-A ad-serving technology, the company said Monday. The division has sprung out of Third Screen Media, a mobile-ad start-up that AOL acquired last spring.

Third Screen Media runs its own mobile-ad network, but Monday's announcement is focused on a new technology that enables publishers to put their ads on multiple networks using a strategy that AOL calls "inventory partitioning." They can, in other words, use a Web interface to pick and choose what percentage of their available ads go on which networks.

Mobile advertising got a big … Read more

Update 12:35 p.m. PDT: I corrected a reference to AOL's parent company.

AOL said Wednesday it's integrating interactive "widget" ads with Platform-A, the Time Warner subsidiary's advertising network.

Widgets are small Web-based applications, and widget ads offer more interactive possibilities than conventional ads. AOL acquired Goowy in February to advance its widget push, and the Goowy technology for creating and managing widgets is now integrated with Platform-A.

Widgets already could be distributed on AOL's Bebo and on Facebook through Advertising.com service, which is part of Platform-A, but Platform-A has a much … Read more

LivingSocial, the parent site for six user review services including ReadingSocial, TuneSocial, and ReelSocial, is announcing two things today: First, a $5 million round of venture funding, which will be used to expand the business. And second, an interesting new strategic twist for the company: a destination Web site. LivingSocial has, to date, relied almost exclusively on its social-network apps and widgets for traffic, so this is a departure.

There's no doubt that Facebook and other social networks have served LivingSocial well: The company's services have 6.4 million users so far, who have posted over 8 million … Read more

Only a year ago, there was a huge buzz around Facebook's new application platform. Big money was made by some, while others simply threw together whatever they could and released it to the masses in the hopes of being the next iLike.

Today, the Facebook platform is alive and well, but the hot new platform is the iPhone. People are lining up for hours to get their hands on one, and developers see dollars in those lines: Unlike with Facebook apps, you can charge for iPhone software, and developers keep 70 percent of the money collected through Apple's app store.

One of the 550-plus new iPhone applications was Facebook's own, a slightly amped-up version of the Web-based Facebook for iPhone Web site introduced late last year. It's more useful than than the mobile Web site, but it's still watered down from its desktop cousin, with just a contact list and a chat app. Notably missing are the other Facebook applications that have helped make the social network such an appealing service for both users and developers.

It would make sense if the next step for the Facebook platform was a mobile version--something where whatever you developed would work on both desktop and mobile devices, starting with the iPhone and later Android. In that regard, Facebook's mobile iPhone application is only the beginning, and just a preview of what's to come.

I think we'll see at next week's F8 event a product or service that will help developers shrink down their applications to fit into Facebook's mobile application framework. It's a move that goes squarely against Apple's engrained apps marketplace by having developers spend resources on coding for Facebook instead of themselves; however, the result will be the augmentation of the mobile Facebook experience that's closer to what people have gotten accustomed to on their computers.

Facebook's UI has already begun to change to match the finger-friendly style. The latest profile refresh has moved the applications from a sidebar to different tabs--the same look can be found in Facebook's iPhone-optimized Web app. Such a style could easily be shrunk down to fit a smaller screen, whereas the old one could not.… Read more

Gannett Co., which operates 23 television stations and 85 newspapers in the U.S. including USA Today, has signed on to AOL's Platform-A as its digital advertising partner. More specifically, it'll be using Platform-A's Adtech, marking the U.S. debut of the formerly Europe-only division.

When the deal has rolled out completely, it'll encompass all of Gannett's local news markets for both print and broadcast, USAToday.com, and other Web properties that the company owns. No target date was provided. But it's a big deal for AOL, considering the reach of USA Today as … Read more

Functional, useful, and always on, the note-taking application Evernote goes beyond mere cool program architecture and is also interesting. It's a true three-platform play: it works very well, and somewhat differently, on desktop computers, mobile phones, and over the Web. You can download it for Windows, Mac, and your mobile phone.

One of the cooler features is that when Evernote runs on your camera phone, it will automatically upload your snapshots to the Evernote server, creating a useful archive of them. The killer feature is that it also does OCR on your images so you can find them later … Read more

Facebook understands what makes its service tick: lots of users and developers.

On July 23, the social-networking powerhouse will hold its second annual F8 platform conference in San Francisco. The company claims 400,000 developers in more than 160 countries and 24,000 Facebook applications in its directory.

Facebook also recently reached a milestone, according to ComScore, catching up with MySpace on the unique-user metric.

Both social networks attract about 115 million members on a monthly basis. However, most of Facebook's growth has come from outside the United States, which could be more difficult to monetize than U.S. … Read more

ARLINGTON, Va.--A quartet of Facebook's platform engineers took the stage on Wednesday morning at the Graphing Social Patterns: East conference, for a discussion led by conference organizer Dave McClure about what's next for the social network's developer initiative. Speaking to the developer-heavy audience at the small conference were senior platform manager Dave Morin, program manager Josh Elman, product manager Ruchi Sanghvi, and director of platform product marketing Benjamin Ling.

Morin said that the social network has hit the milestone of 80 million active users worldwide.

As is typically the case with conference panels featuring Facebook employees, … Read more

This post was updated at 1:21 p.m. PDT with comment from Tim Kendall.

NEW YORK--It would've been cool: Facebook director of monetization Tim Kendall hinted Monday that the company would offer "a product" to help third-party companies "accelerate" participation in its developer platform when asked whether the company had any plans to start directly monetizing the technology.

Since no further detail was provided, and Kendall had said that this would deal with "whether an application is within Facebook or outside of Facebook," this reporter inferred that he'd meant something involving … Read more