Facebook’s late-comer HTML5 mobile app platform lags way behind the Apple App Store and Android Marketplace. Yesterday I spotted Facebook’s latest effort to catch up — a test showing bookmarks for third-party applications at the top of the mobile news feed. Currently, Facebook buries HTML5 app bookmarks at the bottom of its mobile site’s pull-out navigation menu, and only shows them in the iOS or Android Facebook app’s search bar.

Placing them much more prominently atop the mobile home page could increase engagement — the first step in attracting developers to the platform and earning money on in-app purchases.

The Facebook mobile app platform launched in October to help the social network start monetizing mobile through in-app payments on which it collects a 30% tax. Apps run through an internal web browser within its iOS and Android apps, allowing it to circumvent Apple and Google’s tax.

However, the platform hasn’t gained serious traction with developers or users, and that’s a serious risk the company noted in its S-1 filing to go pulbic. Some developers don’t want to re-fork production to support HTML5 in addition to iOS and the various Android versions, at least not until Facebook’s platform is a proven money maker. HTML5 also needs time to mature before it can handle the most advanced native apps.

With limited choice, and no ads to promote third-party apps within Facebook’s own mobile apps and HTML5 site, users aren’t installing them in the first place. Since bookmarks for the HTML5 apps are only found at the bottom of the Facebook mobile site’s nav menu, and have to be located through the search bar in the Facebook iOS and and Android apps, users aren’t reengaging with HTML5 apps either.

But Facebook has been pulling its punches. It has hundreds of millions of daily active mobile users who first see the news feed where these bookmarks are being tested. Facebook says similarly styled bookmarks on the web interface’s games canvas page have been proven to drive traffic.

The small percentage of m.facebook.com and Facebook for iPhone users in the test could click bookmark and after some confusing lag an internal browser would launch Words With Friends, The Washington Post Social Reader, CityVille Express, Warimals, or another game or app. The test may have run on the Facebook for Android app as well.

Facebook is likely testing to see if users click these bookmarks, and if their presence decreases news feed engagement or session length. If Facebook can get more eyeballs on third-party app bookmarks without degrading the user experience, it may have found a way to leverage its natural assets to begin the steep uphill battle against Apple and Google’s mobile platforms.

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Now that Facebook is preparing the biggest tech IPO in history, it is possible to compare its financials and potential market value to Google’s when it went public. At first glance, all of Facebook’s numbers look bigger. Its pre-IPO revenues of $3.7 billion in 2011 are more than two and a half times larger than Google’s 2003 revenues of $1.5 billion (Google’s IPO was in 2004). Facebook’s $1 billion in profits is ten times larger than Google’s pre-IPO profits of $106 million. And its expected market cap of between $85 billion and $100 billion will dwarf Google’s IPO market cap of $23 billion.

Facebook, no doubt, will be emphasizing these differences. But in many ways it is a false comparison. Facebook is going public after 8 years as a private company. Google went public much earlier in its development, after 5 full years. So, yes, Facebook at Year 8 is much bigger than Google was at Year 5 of its trajectory. A better way to see how the two companies stack up is to compare their revenues and profits at the same points in their histories. In 2008, Facebook’s fifth year of existence, its revenues were only $272 million, and it lost $56 million.

If you chart Facebook’s revenues for the past five years and compare them to Google’s for the five-year period preceding its IPO (see below), a truer picture emerges of each company’s size at similar points in time. You need to compare Facebook as a 5-year-old to Google as a 5-year-old.

Matching both companies year-for-year, its is clear that Google grew faster and was always substantially bigger no matter what year you look at. Year 8 for Google was 2006, when its revenues were $10.6 billion and its profits were $3.5 billion. As an 8-year-old, Google’s profits were almost as large as Facebook’s revenues as an 8-year-old. (Google was incorporated in September, 1998, so I am using 1999 as Year 1 for the purposes of this analysis. Facebook started in January, 2004, which I am counting as it’s first full year).

But which company grew faster? It turns out that the 5-year compound annual growth rate for each one’s revenues during these comparable periods (2002-2006 for Google, and 2007-2011 for Facebook) was almost exactly the same: 89 percent a year (Facebook grew a smidgen faster at 89.22 percent a year versus 88.96 percent for Google, but Google started with almost twice the revenue and thus ended up much larger five years later).

Facebook’s growth is astounding, but it is important to keep it in perspective. In many ways, it is still trying to catch up to Google’s past.

Editor’s note: Guest author Keith Teare is General Partner at his incubator Archimedes Labs and CEO of newly funded just.me. He was a co-founder of TechCrunch.

Much ink has been spilled these past few days on the Facebook IPO filing. Much of it analyses the details revealed in the S1 initial document. Some of it has focused on revenue and growth; some of it on control and corporate governance, some on valuation and how reasonable or not it is likely to be, and a little on whether or not the IPO represents the end of Facebook’s growth cycle.

So, should you be a bull, and buy? Or should you run as fast as you can away from the bulls?

For guidance turn to the risk factors part of the filing.

For me, the most interesting part of the document is that part focused on Facebook’s mobile strategy and associated risks, and what that tells us to be alert to in the future.

Now, to be clear, Facebook and its employees have done the most wonderful job of riding the transformation of the Internet from a place where anonymous individuals surfed the web, consumed information and media and accessed services to discover relevant things into an Internet where named individuals publish information to each other and discover things from friends. Facebook dominates the modern Internet. Its APIs extend its reach outside of its garden into almost every website on the planet – this one included. It is awesome to behold and it generates significant revenues already, and even more significant profits. Hats off to all involved.

This success shouldn’t blind us to the relative size of company we are talking about. Last week Apple reported profits of over $13 billion for a quarter, Google’s revenues were lower than that number, and Facebook’s revenues are lower than Google’s profits. Facebook is huge by startup standards, but not by Internet standards. There is much more in its future.

But this article isn’t about that. It is about the context within which the human Facebook IPO is happening. The Facebook S1 is clear on that context. In the risk factors of its filing it states:

Growth in use of Facebook through our mobile products, where we do not currently display ads, as a substitute for use on personal computers may negatively affect our revenue and financial results.

We anticipate that the rate of growth in mobile users will continue to exceed the growth rate of our overall MAUs for the foreseeable future, in part due to our focus on developing mobile products to encourage mobile usage of Facebook. Although the substantial majority of our mobile users also access and engage with Facebook on personal computers where we display advertising, our users could decide to increasingly access our products primarily through mobile devices. We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven. Accordingly, if users continue to increasingly access Facebook mobile products as a substitute for access through personal computers, and if we are unable to successfully implement monetization strategies for our mobile users, our revenue and financial results may be negatively affected.

Facebook initial S1 filing, 1 Feb 2012, page 13

The reason this risk factor jumps out of the page – for me – is that this trend to growing mobile use is inevitable. What is more, it will be both rapid and enormous. How do we know this? Well, human beings are flocking to mobile platforms in droves. This is happening to such an extent that Kleiner Perkins partner Mary Meeker went on the record almost 1 year ago to say that we are now in the 5^th major technology cycle of the past half century (mainframe; mini-computer; desktop; internet and now mobile) and that mobile traffic will “grow 26 times over the next 5 years”. The presentation linked above is 56 slides long and is well worth a read.

So the risk that “our users could decide to increasingly access our products primarily through mobile devices,” is not a risk. It is a certainty.

When Google reported its financial results for the quarter 2 weeks ago it failed to meet a key metric – Cost Per Click advertising rates. This too was driven by the growth in the relative proportion of traffic derived from mobile. In mobile, ad clicks are fewer and ad rates are lower.

Google’s present – and Facebook’s future – involves the painful fact that the very success of mobile platforms in helping human beings be productive, on the go, has a negative impact on the desktop-based advertising programs of the past 10 years. Mobile growth impacts web advertising revenues, except of course for Apple who make money from hardware and software and so benefits from these trends. The reason is simple. We do less ad-centric activities on mobile than we did on the web. And we are less likely to click away on an ad when we are focused on a specific goal on a largely single window device.

The challenge faced by any content based mobile platform will be to try and figure out a revenue strategy that can monetize mobile use as mobile minutes cannibalize desktop minutes in the months and years ahead. There are many efforts to figure this out. From virtual goods in the context of games (Zynga and others); to subscriptions for high quality content (Wall Street Journal, The Economist); to advertising and sponsorships in content (see Fotopedia’s “Japan” app); and Payment systems (Square).

None of these are the solution – although all are valid and scalable. The billions spent on the web each year by advertisers will have to find a way to be effectively spent in the place consumers increasing will be – on smartphones. The mobile platform needs an innovation that fits it as closely as Google’s Adsense and Adwords were a fit for the desktop era. One thing we know for sure. Revolutions in computing are harsh on those who fail to adapt to what is new.

Photo credit: Camilo Rueda López

The Gillmor Gang — Robert Scoble, Kevin Marks, John Taschek, and Steve Gillmor — trembled in the face of Facebook’s IPO and all-out war on the open Web, also known as Google. Me, I go back to Bill Gates during the DOJ deposition when he basically said we don’t need no steenkin’ breakup when Google will come along and be invented.

@kevinmarks makes a good college (fitting) try of defending the open schmopen set, while none of us seem to notice Social Spring just keeps on rolling over conventional wisdom. Me, I’m pretty jacked up waiting for what this means for Twitter. Go Giants!

@stevegillmor, @scobleizer, @kevinmarks, @jtaschek

Produced and directed by Tina Chase Gillmor @tinagillmor

“Have you ever had the problem of finding something again you have already seen on Facebook or elsewhere on the Internet?,” asked Gerald Bäck, co-founder of Archify. A few vague nods of agreement flickered around the audience as Gerald explained some of the difficulties in remembering where you’ve read a piece of content online.

This was at Startup Bootcamp’s London investor day last week, where twelve startups pitched for investment cash. Archify is a browser plugin which, once installed, saves everything that you browse online – including every update from you and your friends on your social streams. If you search for something on Google, a little overlay will appear telling you that there are also results in Archify.

Archify is like your own personal browsing archive. In addition to indexing all the content you’ve viewed, Archify also takes a screenshot of each page you visit, allowing you to not only find content, but view it exactly the way it looked on the day you visited the page.

Archify is three guys from Vienna - Gerald Bäck, Max Kossatz and Walter Palmetshofer -  who have launched startups previously but sold them last year to concentrate their efforts on Archify. It’s currently in private beta and they’re hoping to launch it publicly by the end of Q1 2012. For now, you’ll have to submit your email address and wait for an invite – or if you can’t wait, The Next Web has 100 invites to give away (see further down).

How Archify works

So…how does Archify work? Well, when you activate your account, your browser should automatically detect the correct plugin and prompt you to install it – this works with all the major browsers, including Firefox, Chrome, Internet Explorer and Safari. You then set up your account, including username and password, and you can choose to register without connecting your Twitter and Facebook accounts if you like. However, if you connect with your social media accounts, it will enable you to archive your browsing there too.

As it’s a browser plugin, Archify works away in the background snapping your every search. When you enter keywords in into a search engine, an overlay appears informing you that there are search items with your keywords included already in your Archify archive. It’s worth noting here, that the product was previously called egoArchive, and this branding still exists on the plugin for the moment, though it will change in the coming weeks.

You can either click on the link within the overlay, or you can visit your account at Archify.com any time to search directly within it.

The one thing I’d say is the search box within Archify seems needlessly big and dominates the page, as you can see here:

Archify also lets you filter your search results to include just your search engine browsing history, or Facebook and Twitter. It also lets you specify time-frames, including the last day, week or month.

Your search results also let you delete specific archives, share them with the social sphere and even favorite them – the latter meaning you can choose to search specific results that you have personally bookmarked as ‘important’.

 So…what exactly does Archify record?

When you browse a website that uses the secure https protocol, Archify doesn’t record the pages – after all, most people don’t want their online banking pages saved for posterity. And if your Twitter’s Always use https is enabled, it won’t record your Twitter browsing either, though if you’re accessing Facebook, Twitter or any site using http they’ll be archived. It’s worth noting here that Archify won’t record your browsing if you’re in private ‘incognito’ mode.

However, when you choose to actively ‘connect’ Archify with Facebook and Twitter, Archify automatically archives all updates from your friends on Facebook and all the tweets from the people you follow on Twitter, as well as your own tweets and updates. This happens in the background, regardless of whether you actually visit Twitter or Facebook.

Interestingly, all your browsing is stored to your Archify account, meaning that no matter what browser you’re using on what computer, your online activity will be archived in a centralized repository in the cloud. Assuming you have the plug-in installed on each browser, of course.

Plugin updates will be rolled out prior to the full public launch, and we’re told that new versions due out imminently will also archive a user’s geo-position and display it in their search results as a marker. This means that in the future, you will be able to search for what pages you viewed on a given day in a specific location.

In terms of money, basic Archify accounts will always be free to use. In the coming months, more features will be added, including social-graph technologies, additional filters and labels, some of which will be available as part of a premium service offering. However, for the duration of the alpha and public beta, all features will be available to all users.

The verdict…and the invites

Archify is certainly an interesting project, and it does what it professes to do. Of course, it’s still in development so there are a few bugs – for example, some versions of Firefox don’t yet have the overlay feature built into the browser, though this is being fixed. And there are a few other niggles here and there which will be ironed out as the tool is developed.

It’s probably worth mentioning the performance too – there’s a danger with such plugins that they will adversely affect your computer’s processing power. I installed Archify and forgot it was there until I decided to check out exactly what it had been recording.

Meanwhile, The Next Web has 100 invites to giveaway – first come, first served. Simply visit this link, and the special invite key should already be filled in – it’s tnw01. Just complete the rest of your details and you should be good to go. But you’ll need to be quick…if you miss one of the 100 invites, you can submit your email address and join the waiting list.

➤ Archify

I dare you to Facebook Like or even comment on this post. You can’t, because the Facebook Javascript API, the backend system which allows developer applications and Facebook’s own apps like Likes and Comments to communicate with the data available on the social network, is down, and has been down for at least an hour as far as I can tell, begging the question, “If article falls on a blog and no one Likes it, does it make a sound?”

Okay, that was lame, I’m sorry.

The JavaScript API status on the Facebook developer blog reads:

“Currently, the JS SDK is returning /* Not a valid locale. */. We are working on a fix now. We will update the live status as we have more information. You can following along in https://developers.facebook.com/bugs/20327564310313″

Presumably thousands in the developer community are somehow affected (I’ve emailed Facebook for more concrete details and will update this when I have them), for example apps like Turntable.fm, Quora and TinyChat have lost their Facebook Login capabilities.

“I think this is the longest downtime ive seen of their API,” said one concerned developer.

Maybe we should all get off the Internet and just, like, go outside while it’s fixed? Got Diet Coke? Sounds like a plan!

Update: Comments and Likes seem to be working again. Comment and Like away!

Those of us who have been following the social gaming industry already know that Zynga makes up a big portion of Facebook’s revenues. But lots of public investors only seem to have gotten the memo on Wednesday evening, when Facebook’s S-1 filing revealed that the developer accounts for 12% of its total revenues, or $445 million.

In the two days since, Zynga’s stock has gone up more than 26%, to close at $13.39 this evening.

This is far more than most analysts had previously projected. The ones who began covering Zynga after its December IPO had pegged its stock well under ten bucks. When analysts at banks who underwrote Zynga entered the fray a couple weeks ago, they were unsurprisingly more bullish. Following the end of the quiet period, Goldman Sachs, Morgan Stanley, J.P. Morgan and Barclays Capital, along with analysts from banks not involved in the IPO, all put their target price above Zynga’s public opening amount of $10.

This drove the Street’s average target price up to $11.08, as you can see from the StreetInsider table below.

Existing industry research, namely the Inside Virtual Goods report from my previous company, Inside Network, had indicated as of last fall that virtual goods revenue from Facebook applications reached $500 million last year. Facebook’s prospectus more than confirmed this on Wednesday, revealing that a strong fourth quarter had actually put the number a little higher, at $557 million.

There are other data points you can use to try to figure out Zynga’s position with that number. AppData traffic shows that it has a dominant traffic position on Facebook’s platform. It gets 90% of its revenue from Facebook, but first Facebook collects 30% of its virtual goods transaction sales, per terms that have been in effect since midway through last year. And, Zynga has since at least 2009 used Facebook ads as a main way to bring in new and returning users.

The problem is how to add this up. The Wall Street Journal’s Rolfe Winkler explains the confusion in how to calculate the results:

Different assumptions lead to different estimates for Zynga’s fourth-quarter “bookings,” which is the preferred method for measuring Zynga’s top line. Macquarie analyst Ben Schachter’s quick-and-dirty analysis says Facebook’s disclosure implies $268 million for Zynga’s bookings for the fourth quarter, short of the $302 million analysts are expecting. Baird Equity Research analyst Colin Sebastian digs deeper, making more assumptions, and comes out with a number of $315 million. Both analyses included many caveats.

Zynga will do its first ever earnings call on February 14th. Get ready for some new estimates.

Want to watch the big budget Super Bowl commercials, but can’t wait till Sunday or don’t care about football? Facebook and USA Today have just launched Ad Meter, a Facebook app where you can watch many of the TV spots right now. Then from kickoff until Tuesday night you can vote for your favorites. Traditionally an offline poll done live with handheld meters, USA Today has finally brought Ad Meter online so you can judge ads both in real-time and post-game.

Facebook tapped Involver to build the app, and has secured early previews of roughly 20 commercials. The rest of the ads will become available through the app at game time. On Tuesday night at 6pm EST the results of the voting will be announced.

Several Internet companies have plopped down the big bucks this year in an attempt to court the mainstream. Arrested Development’s Gob plugs Hulu, and Teleflora.com touts the lovin you might get if you use it to send a Valentine’s Day gift. Etrade, Careerbuilder.com,

Investing in Super Bowl ads makes more and more sense for web services as the general public becomes more internet savvy. They should tread cautiously, though, considering past ads from Salesforce, Groupon have been voted most disliked and caused PR crises. Let’s hope no one gives our industry a bad wrap this time around. Oh wait, GoDaddy’s ads filled with body-painted models and angels in the cloud are just as sexist as ever.

It’s the Super Bowl season, when a host of services and apps debut just in time for the biggest television event of the year. And, if you’re a fan of Madden’s NFL Superstars (a web app that’s available through Facebook), then you’ll like this launch: the game is now available as a Pokki right here.

Pokki, for those that haven’t used it, is a platform that lets you install lightweight apps that live in your Windows Taskbar (a Mac version is on the way). Each app gets its own icon — click on it, and the app will pop open immediately, click away and it’ll hide itself, and when you click it again, it’ll pick up right where you left off.

The point is to give you quick access to apps without having to deal with browser tabs or standalone windows, and it works well.There are other apps and services that do something similar (Mac users may want to check out Fluid), but Pokki’s platform features apps that are specifically designed for its quick, pop-over design.

Pokki has landed two major gaming companies so far: Kabam and, with this launch, EA, and it seems likely that more will follow suit (the platform is well-suited for quick sessions of gaming throughout the day). And there are other apps available as well, including Gmail and eBay.

The company says that Pokki is still in beta and hasn’t yet focused on marketing, but that its early numbers are very promising — so far they’ve seen “hundreds of thousands” of app installs, with users who have used the apps “tens of millions of times”.

The platform is also seeing strong traction with its built-in app market: 60% of users are browsing and installing two new apps per month.

Pokki is one of two main products from SweetLabs — their other major product is OpenCandy, which lets developers include targeted ads within their application’s install flow.