Shortly after the keynote ended, I did a brief interview with Causes founder Joe Green, who outlined which of the features are a big deal for developers, and why they’re so important. Green has extensive experience with Platform — Causes was one of the first developers on Facebook Platform when it first launched, and it was a launch partner for today’s features.

Green has also written a pair of guest posts this week that go into more detail about Facebook’s major changes — including one on Smart Lists and one on the new Open Graph.

Note that we did the video via Skype, and while the video feed was a little iffy at times, the audio remains strong throughout.

This guest post was written by Joe Green, the Founder and President of Causes. Causes is the largest online platform for activism and one of the original Facebook Applications. Green’s approach to building online tools is rooted in his offline experience as a grassroots political organizer for federal, state, and local campaigns. He recently wrote a guest post on Facebook Smart Lists, and, as a launch parter at today’s f8 conference, has significant insight into how Facebook’s announcements will impact its developer platform. Disclosure: Green was an early advisor to Facebook and has a small amount of stock.

I was one of the first people to join Facebook in February of 2004, and launched one of the inaugural applications on the platform in May 2007. The new Facebook profile and Open Graph announced today, along with the launch of smart friend lists last week, is going to usher in a new era of the Facebook platform. And I believe entire industries will potentially be revolutionized by social, from travel to reviews to health to e-commerce, and of course charity.

Wait. Wasn’t this supposed to happen 4 years ago, when Facebook launched platform at the first F8? Yes it was, but it didn’t. Today Facebook Platform is known primarily for gaming. This is not to say that Facebook Platform has not accomplished a lot so far; we, for one, owe the existence of Causes to it. But it is still far from achieving its potential.

The original dream of Facebook Platform was to enable developers to build experiences that were social at their core, like Facebook Photos, without having to build their own standalone social network. Remember all of the “me to” social networks built just to have a social feature Facebook and Myspace didn’t have? I built one for political discussion called Essembly. It enabled unique and potentially transformative social interactions, but only 20,000 people ever used it.

It was in this context that Facebook launched platform, with the noble goal of making core parts of your life that are social offline equally social online, as Facebook had already done when it upended the already-mature world of photos. This aspiration was evident in many of the Platform launch apps: iLike in music, Flixster in movies, Where I’ve Been in travel, Causes in charity. (In fact, Where I’ve Been seems to be a new FB in-house app, maps). We launched Causes on Platform precisely because we believe that altruism is fundamentally social and should be core to online identity, as it is for most people offline.

When it first launched Platform, Facebook opened up every integration point they could think of, including friends lists, profile, news feed, email, and they even created new channels like requests and notifications. The main value Facebook intended to offer was providing everything a developer would need to make his or her product social. And to sweeten the deal (and I think as something of an afterthought), Facebook offered these developers some distribution. This last point, as it turned out, was key.

There were two main reasons that the first 4 years of platform played out as they did: 1) Communication Channels were overwhelmed by the distribution Facebook offered developers and 2) Facebook Profile did not offer an enduring presence for applications.

Communication Channels:

When Platform launched early in the morning on May 25th, 2007, from a ballroom at the W hotel with engineers sitting on the floor, apps grew faster than anything else in the history of the Internet. Causes was at a 1 million installs inside of a week. And the race was on. This massive growth was enabled by the opening of so many friend-to-friend promotional channels, but fueled by apps aggressively pushing users to invite their friends any way they could.

Apps grew very fast, but mostly because they would create lightweight but broad engagement, rather than deep engagement with friends.  Facebook spent the next couple years focusing on clamping down on spam on Platform, and slowly eliminated or restricted communication channels they had previously opened to developers . This was unfortunately necessary, but it also stifled the development of revolutionary applications in core utility areas because the same channels that are most ripe for abuse are also the ones providing the deepest connection between users.

Facebook’s attempts to deal with these issues also often ended up increasing spam, because as conversion rates of communications went down, developers increased volume. If you want 1 click and the conversion rate is 10% you need to send 10 messages, if you have a 1% conversion rate you need to send 100 to get that same 1 click. What succeeded on platform were, for the most part, applications that could get users to frequently and somewhat indiscriminately communicate with lots of friends.

The changes made over the past few weeks, along with those announced today, will fundamentally alter the paradigm for Facebook communication channels. Specifically, there are two main types of communication on Facebook: direct friend-to-friend, and feed posts. For the direct friend-to-friend communications, friend lists allow for appropriate targeting, therefore making more high bandwidth channels acceptable. Instead of having to send requests to donate to my birthday wish to 50 indiscriminately chosen friends, I can send an FB message or email to 8 of my close friends.

For feed posts, the new Open Graph with specific edge types allows Facebook to know a lot more about data coming into the feed and to filter accordingly. I also can do more to filter my feed manually, and I have been seeing much more interesting content in my feed as the people in my close friends list get more prominence. It turns out, perhaps against Facebook’s better judgment, that people are willing to do a bit of work to improve their experience.

Finally, it is worth mentioning that for the first time since live stream came and went, Facebook has increased the total amount of feed stories consumed with the rollout of a mixed real-time and top stories stream, which is a win for everyone publishing into the stream.

Profile

From the day Facebook launched in 2004 the profile was the most critical, and really, the only page on the site.  Only with the addition of News Feed in 2006 did attention shift away from profile.  People used to navigate the site by surfing friends’ profiles, and used their own profile as their navigational starting point.  The profile used to consist mostly of a list of interests, actively curated by the profile owner.  With the addition of news feed the entirely of your Facebook experience has moved toward representing primarily your recent and frequent activities, which is great for capturing someone in a given moment, but not the whole of the person.

For example, your favorite movie is likely not the one you most recently watched, and there is no way to represent that on the current profile except buried on the info tab. Likewise, you might only donate once a year to your favorite charity, but that one act may mean more to you than 50 moves you’ve made in a game. In other words, the current profile benefits applications that have frequent usage, such as games, but offers no way to show how deeply someone cares about something.

This was not always the case. Of all the integration points opened at the original F8, profile boxes were the ones both developers and users were most excited about. There was an entire category of apps that users did not interact with frequently but loved to have on their profile. One great application, called “Where I’ve Been”, let you put a map of the world on your profile and highlight every country you had visited. But like the communication channels, profile boxes quickly overwhelmed the profile and Facebook justifiably pared them back and then eliminated them altogether. The day the last profile boxes disappeared we received the most user complaints in our history, making it very clear to us that people want their giving to be represented as a core part of their identity.

This new version of profile, if it works correctly, should achieve a balance between displaying things you have done recently and representing a comprehensive view of who you are. Key to this will be understanding which actions you really care about, even if they happen infrequently, and which frequent actions you care less about. Facebook seems to be intending to do this algorithmically, but I bet they will end up incorporating a big dose of direct user curation, as they are now doing with friend lists. Being able to ‘star’ a story is a good start, but it will need to be able to happen more in the flow of posting.

Whatever you think of Facebook, you cannot fault it for lack of ambition. In the course of a month they have fundamentally altered pretty much every major part of their site—profile, feed, friends—sometimes more than once. User reaction will likely follow the usual pattern of initial outrage followed by gradual acceptance and embrace. The more open question is how the rest of the Internet ecosystem will react. Facebook is making its usual appeal to developers: “give us your data, and we will give you distribution and engagement.” This tradeoff has not always worked out as intended, but I think it will this time.

I am confident we will see major sectors, from music to reviews to commerce, revolutionized by authentic friend-to-friend interactions. We are fortunate at Causes to have a big start in one of the largest markets around, the $300 billion giving market. It is anyone’s guess if the other major categories will go social with their current leading companies, or if entirely new ones will emerge, like Zynga in gaming. Either way, it will be a fun ride.

As Japan works to recover from the horrendous earthquake and tsunami that struck last week, many companies and citizens are donating what they can to help. One of the easiest ways to help is to send a text message to the Red Cross (text REDCROSS to 90999 to make a $10 donation), but there are plenty of other options, particularly if you’re looking to support a certain charity or organization. Today, Causes founder Joe Green told me that tens of thousands of donors have given some $700,000 to Japan relief efforts thus far via the online platform.

As for the photo above — right now Green is appearing on a local Bay Area NBC special, where a phone bank sits ready to receive calls for donations to the Japanese Cultural & Community Center of Northern California. Salesforce has just agreed to match up to $25,000 in donations to the effort — which comes in addition to the $100,000 they already matched for donations to the Red Cross. You can find the JCCCNC’s Cause right here.

Green says that over 20 organizations have been using Causes to help raise funds for Japan (which probably makes it the largest multi-charity donation platform). These charities benefit from relatively easy transaction processing (which is conducted by Network for Good), and users who donate will be guided through the viral steps that are Causes’s bread and butter. One small nit, though: the credit card companies have yet to waive their processing fees for Network For Good (which they did following the Haiti earthquake) so Causes is still having to charge a small fee for each donation. Green is hopeful that the credit cards will waive these fees once again.

Other notable fundraising efforts include LivingSocial’s pledge to match over $1 million in donations (it’s matching all $5 donations through this deal, which is still live).

Causes has just launched a special promotion available at Causes.com/valentines. The concept is simple: buy a gift through the site, and you get to donate $10 to a nonprofit, like Campaign for Cancer Prevention or Invisible Children. You can also choose to donate the money to any of the Causes you’re part of on the site. Pretty cool.

Causes is essentially donating the affiliate fees they’d typically receive from their retail partners. The promotion is using different retailers for twenty countries around the world: in the U.S. it’s Proflowers, Spain has Aquraelle and Serenata Flowers, and so on.

Causes founder Joe Green says that the company’s main goal this year is to make as easy as possible for people to give — and this is about as easy as it comes. But the service did run into one snag: Causes has viral sharing down to an art, but they’ll have a hard time getting this promotion to go viral because writing “Jason bought some Roses on ProFlowers” to my News Feed would spoil the surprise.

Fortunately the service will still tell my friends that I donated $10 to a charity, so they’ll think I’m a good guy. For bonus points, donate your $10 to your sweetheart’s favorite charity (and don’t be shy about telling them).

As we’ve recently reported, Causes is transitioning from living primarily as a Facebook canvas application to running off of its standalone website Causes.com, with social connectivity through Facebook Connect. This change, along with some other optimizations, led to a two-fold increase in the amount of money the site raises in donations from its ‘Birthday Wish’ feature on a daily basis — $20,000 a day, up from $10,000 two months ago. It raises money though other channels, too, taking in a total of around $40,000 in donations a day.

The company has also recently landed a deal that will put Causes gift cards in every Safeway and Vons location in California. After buying one of these gift cards, users can sign onto Causes.com and donate it toward the charity/cause of their choice.  Causes earns revenue (it’s a for-profit company) by asking users for tips between 10-20%. Green wouldn’t disclose revenue figures, but says that Causes has 119 million installs on Facebook and has 25 million monthly active users.

Causes has now raised over $16 million, including a previously unannounced $5 million Series B round led by Case Foundation and philanthropist Ray Chambers’s MCJ Foundation, with participation from Founders Fund. That round closed in March 2008.

Former President Bill Clinton is looking to turn his 64th birthday into an opportunity to counter malnutrition in Colombia, reduce childhood obesity in the US, and improve lives around the world. And to do it, he’s turning to Birthday Wish, a service powered by Causes that makes it easy to ask your friends for charity donations in honor of your big day. Clinton will be sharing his Birthday Wish with his 366,000 Facebook fans, making this the most widely shared wish on the platform to date (and the first time a major celebrity has used it). You can find his Wish here.

Clinton has good timing — Causes cofounder Joe Green says that the service has been revamped in the last few weeks to better take advantage of Facebook Connect. Before now, Birthday Wish was used through a Facebook Canvas application — now it’s primarily hosted on birthdays.causes.com. Green says that offering the page through a website makes it more intuitive for users to share, and Connect sites also afford more flexibility than a standard Facebook app.

Green also shared some interesting stats about Birthday Wish. The service has raised nearly $6.5 million, and around $5 million of that has been raised in the last year alone. Also impressive is just how successful these wishes can be: Green says that if a Wish Creator (i.e., the person having the birthday) follows the service’s recommendations, the majority of the time they will generate an average of $100 in donations. Unfortunately not everyone follows the prompts (which entail thanking people who have donated, marking milestones, etc.), so some Wishes don’t fare that well.

Green says that Birthday Wish works because it efficiently taps into the viral nature of Facebook’s News Feed, and prompts your friends to donate in a way that isn’t too awkward. Rather than asking your friends repeatedly to donate money, Birthday Wish instructs you to call out each of your friends who donates with a Thank You update (and as your friends see those thank-yous, they’ll hopefuly donate too).

Here’s Clinton’s Wish List:

· Reduce malnutrition of Colombian students by 10 percent
· Give more than 20000 farmers in Malawi the tools to improve their lives
· Provide 5000 hours of expert help to support small businesses in underserved US communities
· Enlist 10000 US schools to create healthier environments for students & staff
· Reduce lighting energy use in major cities by up to 70 percent
· Improve lives around the world.

The results are in. Conway has raised $40,600 for the UCSF Foundation. He’s beaten Parker, who raised $32,130 for Malaria No More. TechCrunch readers donated to both causes generously, including by simply going to see Avatar with us last week.

Of course the real winners are the children, some 5,000 a year, who get treatment at the UCSF Children’s hospital. And 3,200 children will receive mosquito nets that will greatly reduce their chances of getting Malaria.

You can still donate to either cause of course. Just follow the links in the second paragraph above.

So far Parker is in the lead, with more than $15,000 raised (he’s tying it to his 30th birthday party tonight). Conway, who started later, has nearly $7,500. They’re both using Causes on Facebook, one of Parker’s companies, to raise the money.

Causes cofounder Joe Green answered our question on who he thinks will win: “Luckily because it’s for charity, with 2 great causes: Malaria No More and UCSF Child Life Services, they both win. And that is what Sean and I are after in creating Causes, getting people involved where everyone wins. This is an epic showdown between Sean, a pioneer in social networking, and Ron, the “Godfather of Silicon Valley.” This is pretty closely matched, but Vegas has Ron as a 3:2 favorite. Though it’s usually not a good idea to bet against that Parker kid.”

We’re not picking sides, and both are very worthy causes. Donate early and often. And consider asking friends to donate instead of giving holiday gifts.

The company – not to be confused with Good Technology – is also consolidating several of its brands (Reason Pictures, GOOD Magazine and GOOD Digital) under a single entity dubbed GOOD Worldwide.

In addition to the funding, GOOD is living up to its promise to help ‘push the world forward’ by striking several strategic partnership and investment agreements. These include deals with Causes, a hugely popular Facebook and MySpace app that promotes viral donations of time and money to charities and non-profit organizations, Goodrec (a personal inspiration and recommendation service) and Govit, an application that empowers citizens to take action by connecting with their elected representatives in the United States.

Founded in 2006, GOOD says its website, which is partly a network of blogs, now reaches over 2 million monthly uniques while its magazine gets into the hands of approximately two hundred thousand readers. The media company also organizes well-attended live events and produces videos that it claims have been streamed over 25 million times to date.

Yammer, which won the top prize at last year’s TechCrunch50, recently rolled out a bunch of updates to its web version, as well as its Adobe Air-based desktop client. We use the service on a daily basis for work, and those of us with iPhones are all eagerly awaiting the release of the new version of the iPhone app with Push Notifications.

As the core concepts behind Yammer are quickly becoming features that others in the enterprise space are realizing they will need to compete with, Parker’s guidance should help the company maintain an advantage, and push forward.

Parker is currently serving as the Chairman of Causes, one of the most popular social networking applications, and is a Managing Partner at the VC firm, Founder’s Fund. He is perhaps best known for serving as Facebook’s President during the time it was founded. That role is about to get the Hollywood treatment in David Fincher’s upcoming movie, The Social Network, based on Ben Mezrich’s book, The Accidental Billionaires, about the early days of Facebook.

Parker also served as an expert panelist at this year’s TechCrunch50 a few weeks ago.

Mr. Parker joins George Zachary, Keith Rabois, Adam Ross, Adam Pisoni, and David Sacks on Yammer’s board. The latter two serve as Yammer’s VP of Technology and CEO, respectively.

I don’t have comparable data to back it up, but anecdotally it seems the Web 2.0 generation is doing a better job at giving. Or at least Bebo founder Michael Birch is.

Birch has spent the last six months working with a team of two other people to build a social giving site for the popular organization, Charity:Water. It launched its beta site today, and with just a Tweet announcing it nearly 400 members have already raised some $3,000.

Charity:Water’s accountability and simplicity of purpose has made it a popular charity in New York, Hollywood and increasingly the Valley.  Here’s the value proposition: One-out-of-six-people on the planet doesn’t have access to clean drinking water. $5,000 buys an African village a well. Every dime you donate, goes to these wells. You can even watch the wells being tapped for the first time via Web video. The non-profit is turning three in a few weeks, and it’s raised more than $10 million over that time—much of it in $20 increments from a base of some 60,000 donors. It was Obama-fundraising-math before that was invented. As a result some 700,000 people in the world now have access to clean drinking water.

It was all started three years ago when Scott Harrison, reformed bad boy and Charity:Water founder, asked people to come to a huge New York party for his September birthday and donate $20 at the door instead of giving him a gift. He raised $15,000 and built six wells in Uganda. (They were cheaper than the wells Charity:Water usually builds because three were shallow wells and three were rehabs of existing wells.) Like any great accidental entrepreneur, Harrison knew he was on to something.

In addition to all kinds of creative fund raising, detailed in the video below, the following year, Harrison opened his birthday to everyone via the Web, asking them to donate $32 dollars, since it was his 32 birthday. That year, he raised $59,000 and other September birthday babies brought the total to $150,000, which went to wells in Kenya. Not bad, but they had to HTML hand-code each participant’s site. Pretty laborious work for a small non-profit.

The next year he got more September babies to “give up” their birthdays, and a company called InspEnv.com built them a site, but it wasn’t hugely social or scalable. Still 800 people “gave up” their birthdays and raised some $965,000 dollars to bring some 50,000 people clean water in Ethiopia.

But Harrison knew that the value of a lot of micro-giving campaigns like Kiva and the popular Facebook application, Causes, is rooted in the ability to make small donations super-easy to solicit and to make via existing online social graphs. He was trying to figure out sites that knew when a huge number of people’s birthdays were and after MySpace and Facebook, he came across Bebo. Early last year, he cold-emailed Bebo founder Michael Birch to ask if he’d be willing to send a note out to his September born users and Birch wrote back that it was “a bad time.” It was actually a great time for Birch—he was selling the company to AOL for $850 million.

Once the deal was done, Birch called Harrison and suggested he build him a site that could help people born in any month instantly “give up their birthdays” for Charity:Water’s mission. It was fitting since Birch’s next project was his pre-Bebo project, a site called Birthday Alarm. Nine months later, Harrison is about to turn 34, Charity:Water is turning three, and Birch has finished the site. For a free project, it’s a pretty nice looking site.

The recession makes this perfect timing. If you’re panicked about money and job loss, giving up your birthday is an easy way to give to those less-fortunate without having to spend a dime yourself. My husband has a September birthday and has already signed up. I plan to sign up for my birthday in December. You can create your own campaign in a matter of moments and with a few clicks, share it via all your existing social networks.

I’m sure the coders who were up until 4 a.m. last night will have mixed feelings about this, but this is one time I really want to see TechCrunch users break a beta site.

[Photo credit: Scott Harrison]

http://vimeo.com/moogaloop.swf?clip_id=6202666&server=vimeo.com&show_title=0&show_byline=0&show_portrait=0&color=00adef&fullscreen=1

The story of charity: water – The 2009 September Campaign Trailer from charity: water on Vimeo.

And it’s possible that this idea could work even better on Twitter, given the built-in viral nature of the service. Basically, each week on Thursday, TwitCause has a new cause they support. They ask that you follow the TwitCause Twitter account and then retweet the cause to show your support for it. These tweets contain a link to go back to the site where you can find a place to donate money if you choose to, using PayPal. The number of retweets and the money raised so far are all shown in real-time on the page, as are the most recently tweets about the cause.

The service launched today with the The V Foundation as its launch partner. The V Foundation is a hugely successful cancer research organization named after the late, great basketball coach Jim Valvano. With his foundation attached, TwitCause has already seen tweets go out from several official accounts of NBA and WNBA teams. The hope is to get other high profile athletes like Shaq and Lance Armstrong involved and tweeting throughout the week too.

Going forward, followers of the TwitCause account will be able to nominate other nonprofits and causes that they want want to see supported by the service. Armstrong’s Livestrong is currently leading the pack for the next cause. TwitCause is also hoping that businesses and brands will want to get involved to sponsor causes as well, matching tweets with dollar amounts in support.

As I said, the viral nature of the retweet seems to lend itself well to something like this. Plenty of other sites and services have used Twitter to help raise money or awareness for good causes, such as Blame Drew’s Cancer, which we covered a couple months ago. They are now also working with Livestrong and have seen over 20,000 tweets blame things on Drew’s cancer in support of the cause.

Causes co-founder Joe Green writes on the site’s blog that the community currently stands at 70 million users, who are supporting 270,000 different causes and 53,000 nonprofits. Monetary donations have come from a total of 192,000 different users, with an impressive average donation size of $25.

Causes also highlights a few of the site’s best performers: Birthday Wish, which allows users to ask their friends to donate to a Cause of their choice in honor of their birthday, has raised a total of $1.4 million.

Causes also details a few examples showing just how far $10 million can go:

Clean drinking water for 50,000 people for 20 years
1 million bed nets to stop the spread of malaria
Safe, private shelter for 10,000 refugee families of five
First-time internet access for 100,000 low-income households
50,000 baskets of baby chickens for families in Cameroon

For more, be sure to check out the Causes blog.

Writing letters to elected officials and government organizations is a time-old part of political activism. More recently, citizens had the option of using email vs. snail mail to send out correspondence. Now, citizens will have the opportunity to send letters and messages to elected officials directly from Facebook. Bi-partisan Political and digital strategy firm Grassroots Enterprise has launched an technology, called “Actions,” that organizations can use on Facebook to allow supporters and visitors to send messages and letters to elected officials or other targets directly from Facebook.

The Actions tab on an organization’s Facebook page will let visitors immediately send letters to Federal or state officials and will automatically match them to federal and state legislative officials, based on the addresses they enter. One of the other important functions of Actions is its ability to capture names and emails in an external database for later emails and fundraising. Grassroots Enterprise says the beauty of the Actions offering is the ability to for users to interact with the technology without having to download a separate application. And the “Actions” page is customizable for individual pages, enabling organizations to feature their own actions for their specific causes.

One of the first Action tabs Grassroots launched was for the “Confirm Sotomayor” effort on Facebook. The organization reports that in the first two days, the Facebook page had over 2,000 action takers. Grassroots says that they are going to be unrolling Actions pages for a variety of Faceboook pages, including the Sierra Club’s page, and a “pro-hockey” effort in Canada that’s trying to create another professional team.

Actions is similar in theory to Causes, a popular Facebook application that lets users support and donate to non-profits, causes and individuals. But for now, Actions is focused on helping movements with correspondence to spur action and harvest emails. Investors of Grassroots Enterprise include Reid Hoffman, Peter Thiel and Keith Rabois.

This morning you likely woke up to a flurry of nearly identical messages in your Facebook News Feed prompting you to get out and vote – the result of what may have been largest unified online statement ever as nearly 1 million Facebook members simultaneously changed their status messages. The effort was put together by Causes, the altruistic Facebook and MySpace application, which asked Facebook users to “donate” their status messages in the hopes of getting more of their friends to the polls.

The response to the application has been remarkable: the campaign went live on Thursday night, and had nearly 1 million users by the time last night’s message was sent out at midnight PST. The current tally stands at over 1.5 million users, who have posted over 4.5 million status messages in total (in addition to last night’s midnight rally, users have the choice of issuing more frequent status updates). You can still sign up if you’d like to send out reminders throughout the rest of the evening. Users have the choice of promoting their favorite candidate or proposition, or just sending out a generic message telling friends to get out and vote.

Causes President Joe Green says that while the Online Rally was built solely to prompt users to head to the polls, similar campaigns could also potentially applied to other altruistic missions (like stopping the genocide in Darfur). And while Causes may have purely benevolent motives in mind with putting on the Online Rally, they’re not coming away empty handed: everyone who signed up to donate their status message also installed the Causes Facebook app.

Finally, as if you needed another reminder, GO VOTE. Seriously.

The TechCrunch team is on site at the Facebook Developer conference, and we’ll be live blogging the news. Mark Zuckerberg’s Keynote starts at 1:30 pm PST.

Facebook’s press release is here.

Live Coverage

In a press briefing after the keynote, Zuckerberg stated “I wish I knew” when asked when the anticipated payments system would launch. He also hinted that Facebook is working on launching improved search, but they aren’t close to launching it yet.

2:49 PM: That’s it. The show is over.

2:48 PM: Great Apps can integrate with users just like native Facebook apps, and they get early access to features. The Great Apps program is in alpha stage and the first two partners are iLike and Causes. There will be a strong enforcement system with all apps, and they will disable apps that are a problem. Over the last year they’ve disabled apps for violation of privacy or other policies. They take this very seriously, he says.

2:47 PM: The second announcement is the Facebook Great Apps Program (Top Tier program). They embody all ten of the guiding principles, and they advance the mission of Facebook.

2:46 PM: They’re announcing two new programs: a verification program is first – this is the lower tier of the two programs. Starting in September they will invite apps that are secure, respectful and transparent to apply to be verified. Trusted apps get a special badge in the directory and app page. (we posted on this earlier, here)

2:44 PM: They have partnerships with partners to help developer (Microsoft), host and scale. They are launching a new developer website that gives all the information needed for a quick start. He says 1000 apps have been submitted to the Facebook fund. They are revealing the names of fbFund’s recipients to date: Challenge, ConnectedWeddings, Podclass, MyListo, Trazzler, Zimride, LuckyCal, Coursefeed, Hotberry, and J2Play.

They are announcing a new competition today. $2M will be given out over the next two months. Facebook will select 25 finalists who will each get 25k. Users will vote on finalists who will each get 250k.

2:43 PM: He says they must keep the ecosystem safe for users and fair for developers. A year ago equal distribution became overwhelming to users, then they made restrictive changes that hurt apps. Going forward they will have different rules. They are announcing several programs to help app developers. Get Started Quickly tools like adding easy FBML tags.

2:42 PM: He says that they’ve learned a lot in the last year, as they’ve had lots of challenges. Facebook is listening to the community. They’re trying to partner more closely with developers. He says they are making organizational changes that let developers incorporate feedback during the dev process, and they’re creating full time community management organization

2:40 PM: “Security is a big part of it, apps can’t share information with other users unless they obey privacy settings. Apps must also be respectful of the users attention and time. Don’t make users invite 20 friends before you use the app, or spam friends without them knowing. Apps must be very transparent. Users should get what they expect when they click, not an interstitial ad. Design is also important – clean design is a must. And apps must be fast loading and responsive. As the apps get faster, users use them more. Apps need to focus on being robust and scaling properly as they grow.”

2:39 PM: “Building trustworthy applications is important because we live in an ecosystem with network effects. If users leave, everyone suffers. Apps must be safe and trusted.”

2:37 PM: He says apps must be useful. The carpool app is great example, which lets users find carpool buddies. “Apps must also be expressive”- The graffiti app that lets users draw on friends profiles, is a good example. Finally, meaningful apps must be engaging. He says Playfish makes games that are highly engaging. Facebook users have played over 900 million minutes of Playfish games. That’s about 1800 years.

2:35 PM: Benjamin is announcing “guiding principles for great applications” which are based on dialog with community. It’s based on three pillars: meaningful, trustworthy and well designed. The best apps make use of the social graph. Applications must be social. A good example is the Lil Green Patch app, which helps users fight global warming by interacting with other users.

2:33 PM: Benjamin Ling, Director of Platform Program Management is now on stage talking about the “State of Platform.” He says that over $200m has been invested in Facebook apps, $34m this week alone. Additionally, 13 different ad networks have launched that pay out tens of millions of dollars to app developers. He says, “venture capital, ad networks, developers and academics are the ecosystem that makes Facebook platform a success.”

2:32 PM: Mark wraps things up, that appears to be the end of the announcements.

2:31 PM: Zuckerberg asked all Facebook employees who work on platform to stand up, then asked all app developers to stand up.

2:29 PM: “Give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected.” – Facebook’s mission statement

2:28 PM: To recap, he’s talked about new profiles and the highlighting of the news feed, the second item is Facebook Connect. The new profile launched Monday, he says. Facebook Connect will launch developer keys starting today – there will be a beta period.

2:26 PM: That’s it for launch partners. Mark is back on stage.

2:25 PM: A new site will have a “my friends” tab that shows reviews by friends in various cities.

2:23 PM: Mike Philips from Citysearch is taking the stage. He says they are launching a new site, where sharing information is a big piece. They are integrating with Facebook Connect. When a user looks for a hotel, restaurant, etc., Citysearch already has lots of reviews and data, but not a way to link up reviews from friends.

2:22 PM: When you login to comment, users can sign in via Movable Type or Facebook. If you sign in with Facebook, it will display changes – light blue boxes outline your friend’s comments.

2:20 PM: David Recordon from Six Apart just took the stage. They are releasing a plugin for Movable Type that allows people to comment using their Facebook profiles. Users can decide to profiles or keep them private.

2:17 PM: Digg is now allowing people to sign into Digg via Facebook or OpenID. There is no requirement to sign up for a Digg account.

2:15 PM: Launch partners are now coming on stage. First up is Digg by Joe Stump.

2:13 PM: Facebook Connect can show you which of your Facebook friends are also on the outside service, so you can link up with them there too. They are also allowing people to leave comments and requests on third party sites.

2:12 PM: Facebook Connect will let applications share data with Facebook. Users can bring Facebook friends with them to outside sites.

2:11 PM: Mark is now talking about Facebook Connect.

2:10 PM: He says he wants Facebook to be the platform and tools provider, but let apps do anything social they want.

2:08 PM: Mark says we are going to see the decentralization of social networking into apps on the web. Things will decentralize further, apps can run anywhere on the web, not just on social network platforms. They will all work together, just be decentralized.

2:05 PM: People (including us) are writing wall posts for Mark since he has his profile live on stage, but it looks like he’s actually using a fake profile, it shows just 8 friends.

2:03 PM: Mark is now showing a live demo of the new home page.

2:02 PM: Mark says they haven’t completely gotten rid of app boxes, they’re added a tab for them. Some apps really need them. Users can also add tabs for individual apps.

1:59 PM: He says the apps that leverage the news feed the best will be the ones that succeed.

1:58 PM: “The most important part of the profile is the wall and the news feed, which have now been merged. They also give developers an incentive to build apps that let users share a lot of information. This is a lot better than an application box, which people don’t interact with as much.”

1:56 PM: Mark is now talking about the new profile pages and how it fits in with their current goals.

1:54 PM: Mark says that over the last year Facebook hasn’t done enough to reward applications that provide a lot of long term value, and they haven’t punished the ones abusing the system.

1:53 PM: Mark is talking about lessons Facebook has learned. He says that they released the platform as quickly as possible, it wasn’t fully baked yet, and they didn’t anticipate the huge adoption.

1:52 PM: Mark says the most powerful tool on Facebook today is the News Feed. Traffic went up by 50% when they first launched news feed in late 2006.

1:51 PM: Mark is now talking about the social graph, a concept he introduced at the first f8 conference.

1:49 PM: LivingSocial just announced they received $5M in Funding, Flixster received $6M from Allen and Company, and Zynga got $29M from Kleiner Perkins Caufield & Byers. Zuckerberg says, “There has been more than $200 million invested in the ecosystem.”

1:47 PM: David Glazer (Director of Engineering, Friend Connect) is here in the audience (which is about 1500 people), it looks like he will announce something. Perhaps they are announcing some kind of agreement.

1:45 PM: “We’re opening up the translation tool to allow apps to be translated as well…We now have more than 400k developers building on top of the platform. The developer community is spread around the world. More than half are outside of the US.

1:43 PM: Mark is now talking about opening up Facebook for translations made by users. They started with Spanish and French, and now the site is available in over 60 languages.

1:41 PM: Mark is looking back over the last year and says it’s been pretty crazy. Over 24 million people were using Facebook a year ago – today they are at 90 million people.

1:38 PM: Mark says its time to take the Facebook platform to the next level. On a recent vacation he realized (1) they want to build a product that really lets you connect with people, and (2) they want to extend the concept of presence, have more open connections and share more. They want to make the world a more open place

“The most important information is only available if people share it, and have the power and the tools to do so”

1:35 PM: Mark takes the stage and welcomes the crowd.

1:30 PM: Still waiting for Mark Zuckerberg to take the stage.

Today is definitely Facebook day as they hold their second annual F8 developers conference in San Francisco. Last year they released their developer platform, which led competitors to hurriedly release their own competing offerings. What’s in store for tomorrow? We’ve made our predictions, and CEO Mark Zuckerberg takes the stage at 1:30 to make his keynote, and workshops will follow all day after that. The full schedule is here.

Some of the news is breaking early. For example, we will almost certainly see the Facebook payments platform launch in some form, for example – Facebook desperately wants to find a way to help application developers make money beyond advertising, and the iPhone App Store has shown that people are willing to pay for quality applications.

Even more certain is the launch of Facebook Connect, which will allow third party services to authenticate Facebook users and merge profile data into their offerings. Digg will be one of their launch partners, and will show off the new product on stage, say our sources. However, neither CEO Jay Adelson or Founder Kevin Rose will attend the event.

We’ve also heard from sources that Facebook will announce a tiering system for applications, confirming our previous post in March. Five to ten top tier apps, which have proven themselves trustworthy and which create as good or better a user experience as what Facebook is able to create itself, will be named in the near future. iLike (music) and Causes (charity) will be announced tomorrow, and more will come soon. We heard that Flixster (movies) was on the short list but was bumped at the last minute – perhaps due to their MySpace partnership announced yesterday.

Other apps will be grouped into a middle tier, where most of them will fall, and a bottom “unwashed masses” tier for untrustworthy or spammy apps that have little user value. Each tier will have different rules for engaging with users, particularly around invites, messaging and entry into the news feed.

The company says they’ve registered 12 million users who are now supporting more than 80,000 non-profit causes worldwide. $2.5 million has been raised for 19,445 different 501(c)(3) charitable organizations. Facebook reports 60,000 daily users of the application, and MySpace reports 25,000.

Causes was founded by Joe Green and Sean Parker. Sean, a partner at Founders Fund , previously co-founded Napster, was the founding President of Facebook, and co-founded the recently acquired Plaxo. His goal with Causes, he told me last year when the company was called Project Agape, is to apply the same ideas around virality that worked so well on his previous projects to the idea of altruism and activism.

So far, so good.

Nadia Plesner made a T-shirt that she’s selling to raise money for kids in Darfur. Her shirt includes an image of a malnourished child carrying a sexy purse that looks like something out of the Louis Vuitton Desiccated Trophy Wife line so popular with the ladies a few years back. Note that it doesn’t have the LV logo, just a bunch of squiggles, and it bears a passing resemblance to the concept of an LV bag remixed by an designer. It is as much an infringement of an LG bag as Exile in Guyville by PJ Harvey Liz Phair (sorry, I played guitar for a woman who loved PJ Harvey and she kept playing this so…) infringes on the Rolling Stones.

Well, that didn’t stop LV from suing her. She’s getting charged $7,500 a day for showing the image and another $7,500 for using the words Louis Vuitton. This is what we like to call around the barn “batshit insane.” Head on over, buy some shirts, and prove that the corpse of a leather goods manufacturer reanimated by effete and greedy SwissFrench nationals probably shouldn’t be messing with real artists.

The intent founders, which include Deepak Chopra’s daughter Mallika Chopra as well as Sarah Ross and Sal Taylor Kydd, will aim to fill a niche between lifestyle sites and medical properties – a destination for wellness content, a syndication platform, and a branded hub for people seeking to share their intentions (personal, social, spiritual and environmental). The site will include original content from wellness category luminaries, medical professionals, media personalities, and pop culture icons. They aren’t willing to disclose much more for now.

The company has raised under “less than $1 million” in an angel round of financing that included Richard Wolpert and other unnamed investors. The Intent blog is here.