December 2007

There is a privacy setting within Facebook that allows you to keep people who are not your friends from seeing who your friends are. For some intensely private people, that setting is an excellent way of protecting friend connections from spammers and scammers.

But it has an unintended consequence, which our speaker Rodney Rumford delineated here.  When you send someone a friend request on Facebook, 9 times out of 10 the friend request lists how many friends you have in common with that person. But, if you don’t let non-friends see who your friends are, the system can’t show them your mutual friends.

This strikes me as an oversight on Facebook’s part. If I send someone a friend request,  I give them access to a special limited profile. That profile information ought to include mutual friends unless you specifically request otherwise with a separate privacy setting.

Update: And in any case, a request from a potential friend who has chosen to withhold mutual friend information should provide the user with that information. That way truthful people won’t wind up looking like bald-faced liars when they are not.

Of course, the larger problem with Facebook’s privacy settings is that they are growing ever more convoluted as they grow more granular. If I were Mark Zuckerberg, I’d bring in a usability expert to figure out how to simplify the whole system. It’s starting to look like the U.S. tax code.

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I was pretty darn excited when I read that Facebook is licensing its platform to Bebo. So was my good buddy Rodney Rumford, who promptly signed up for Bebo and sent me a friend request.

“Now is as good a time as any to sign up for Bebo,” I thought. So I clicked on Rodney’s request link and signed up.

A social network is no fun if you have only one friend — no offense to Rodney — so I decided to find out which people I already know. First, I entered my gmail username and password and looked through the list of my gmail contacts that are on Bebo. I sent invites to a select few.

Then I repeated the process with my AOL Instant Messenger (AIM) account. I typed in my username and password and hit the button to authorize Bebo to access my information. The browser munched for 60 seconds and then I got an error message saying that the AOL server had timed out. I figured I’d try again later and moved on to monitoring my Twitter feed.

That’s when Andru Edwards Twittered at me to let me know that he’d received a spam message from my AIM account. This is what he saw:

I was pretty confused at first, but then I realized that somehow Bebo must have erred on the side of sending out the notification anyway, even though the server burped.

In any case, I hadn’t planned on sending out a notification to my entire buddy list, so I do apologize to those of you who received spammy messages from me. How irritating of Bebo.

10 points for a clever headline? Anyone?

They did it for real this time. They let you erase the is:

These are two related—but different—questions. Jeff Jarvis today ponders the role of the news media in communities:

But I argued that the real question is, what is the role of the journalistic institution in its community? Is it merely to inform or is it also to organize (which, not coincidentally, is the advice of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg: bring your community elegant organization)?

I agree with Jarvis’s challenge (and with Zuckerberg), there is a key element of community organization that goes into a newspaper, especially those that are focused more locally than nationally. There’s an element of that in magazines, too (Goings On in the New Yorker?).

Is Journalism news or is it community?

It’s both (cop out!). But the larger point is that it includes an element of community. Up until recently, writing a good letter to the editor was one of the better ways to make your opinion heard locally. Now…why not blog it or put it on Facebook?

Which brings us to Is the NYT competing with Facebook?

Yes. The same way they’re competing with craigslist. A lot of the community functions that, up until five or ten years ago, were best provided by newspapers are quickly being replaced by online functionality, that is free, interactive, and often shiny. And we as a species love shiny objects.

This may be one of the reasons that newspapers are finding themselves in so much trouble; maybe just reporting the news isn’t enough to give life to a paper. Maybe there needs to be a real sense of community.

Side question: Are newspapers screwed?

My answer: No.

The big news at the top of techmeme today is that Facebook has opened up its API, and Bebo has cloned it.

Dave McClure says: welcome to the Social Graph Platform wars.

And I’m sure he’s right that this is part of the joust between Facebook and Google for who gets to own the development platform for social networks. So what exactly is Facebook doing?

From their developer news post:

Now we also want to share the benefits of our work by enabling other social sites to use our platform architecture as a model. In fact, we’ll even license the Facebook Platform methods and tags to other platforms.

That sounds to me like:

1. Feel free to clone us
2. If you pay us, we’ll let you copy+paste

This is probably going to work out fine for Facebook. Other networks would love to get access to the insane number of creative apps that have been developed for Facebook, and Facebook would love to get paid for that access (or at the least, not have apps being developed on OpenSocial).

In the long run, we’re still headed for an environment where a developer can build one app, and run it everywhere. Maybe it will be like PC desktop publishing, where you can use C, C++, Java, I don’t know, FORTRAN? Whatever, if you compile it, it runs.

More thoughts on this as things start happening…

In a post looking of the recent Beacon rollout (and rollback), Siva highlights one of the key differences between the Google targeting system, and the one that Facebook is building: Google’s is invisible.

Well, for one thing, the Facebook ad revenue strategy is an attempt to leverage personal preferences with more accuracy and influence than Google can. Google can profile most users by IP number and many users by personal identifiers (if they log in to Google to use GMail or some other service). But it’s an imperfect profiling system. Using search history as a proxy for preferences is rough. You need years of data to do accurate profiling and ad targeting. Facebook thinks it can do better.

Of course, there was massive protest to [Facebook's] move. The surveillance/profiling/publicity function was way obvious. Google’s surveillance/profiling function is discreet to the point of invisibility. That’s its brilliance and virtue. Your preferences are between you and Google (or so we are led to believe).

The problem with the Adwords/Beacon comparison is, of course, that Beacon is meant to be inherently social whereas Adwords is really meant to be inherently private. Who else needs to know that you’re searching for Neti Pots? That’s not the point.

According to ReadWriteWeb, Merriam-Webster has “Facebook” currently winning the race for Word of the Year:

Of the seven new words to make this year’s short list, four owe their etymology to the web. Leading the pack: facebook. We just named Facebook as this year’s Best Web BigCo for their undeniable landscape changing impact over the past 12 months. One thing we didn’t factor, though, was their potential impact on the English language. Is it possible that Facebook could enter our lexicon the way Google has?

I don’t know about you, but “Facebook” has been a verb in my vocabulary for a while already. I suspect that it will probably inch its way into the common vernacular sooner or later.

And don’t forget to vote for the word of your choice!

Let me preface this post by pointing out that Weblo violates the Facebook Terms of Service. If you decide to try it on for size, I will point and laugh at you if Facebook disables your profile.

In Bits today Louise Story writes about Weblo’s growing presence on Facebook profiles:

More than 1,500 Facebook users have started placing advertisements on their own profile pages — despite the social networking site’s rule against such ads.

Visitors to Weblo’s site will see that they can “earn money from your popularity online.” Weblo estimates people’s advertising value based on variables like how many friends they have in their social networks, and, thus, how many people will likely see ads on their pages.

Facebook does not allow users to sell ads on their profile pages. Chris Kelly, Facebook’s chief privacy officer, told me on Nov. 6 that is because Facebook does not want people’s profile pages to become cluttered.

Don’t want sites to become cluttered, eh? A likely story…

Although one of the things I *do* like about Facebook, especially over MySpace, is the way they’ve kept the interface clean and their conventions consistent, I have to admit that Weblo has a point.

My Facebook profile is something that I have created. Why shouldn’t I be given the option to monetize it?

Personally, I woulnd’t. I don’t have ads on my personal blog. If I could take the existing ads out of my Facebook profile I would do that too. I don’t like the look of it, and I don’t think my friends want to see ads on my profile (because let’s face it, that’s whose seeing the ads you put up — it’s the digital equivalent of having a sponsored birthday party with close friends and family).

But I don’t see why that shouldn’t be a choice.

Strong words against Facebook come from Matt Frye over at O’Reilly OnLamp:

There’s a lot of speculation at any given time about what the future of the web is. I don’t know what it is, but I think I know what it’s not. Facebook.

Yeah, yeah, I can hearing the booing from here. Easy now, fan boys.

The truth is that the web rides waves of innovation and everyone on of those waves has a trough between it and the next wave. Facebook is currently experiencing the slide down the backside of the wave and is headed into the trough. Why?

Matt is right that things tend to work in cycles, and Facebook might be strolling down the backside of their upward surge, but I think Matt’s reasoning is a little off. The five point he lists to explain why FB is on its way out are something like: Facebook is getting tons of new users and traffic (but MySpace is the cap of possible users), Facebook costs money to run and isn’t selling, Facebook is pissing off users, Facebook is getting sued, and Facebook sucks.

Number five is completely subjective. And given the value that so many people are getting from it, I’d say it’s hard to argue that it’s useless.

Numbers, four, two, and one are the same thing: money. Matt seems to discount the possibility that Facebook will be making money on its own, and might not need new investment money to move forward.

And number three? It might be true that FB is pissing off some of its users with privacy issues. But they are responding, and they have done this before. They’re still (insert Matt’s point one). So far, so good. I think Facebook is still doing alright.

The Lede, at the New York Times, has a post today about how Facebook may have worn out its welcome: it is being criticized and banned from all portions of the globe:

The Associated Press is reporting that Syria has blocked its citizens’ access to the popular Facebook social networking web site. No official reason has yet been given, but the A.P. report suggests that it may have to do with Damascus worrying that Israelis were using the site to somehow infiltrate Syrian social networks.

But I think Facebook is still good. Two nuggets from the past two days stick out in my mind that relate directly to this:

Nugget number 1: Lee Lorenzen said in his presentation that pushing too far with Beacon was (probably) not only intentional, but a very smart strategic move by Zuckerberg. In the long run, people will remember only that he responded to user complaints and ramped things back.

By going a mile and backing up .1, he got to .9 miles. If he’d gone half a mile, people would have still complained, and he would have ended up at .4.

Nugget number 2: At lunch on Day 2, Todd Sawicki was telling us that we complain about Facebook because we realize that we need to use it. It’s like Windows in 1995 - you complain because it’s so essential.

Below is the SlideShare of Jeremiah Owyang’s presentation from Web Community Forum.

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“I hope to convince people that I’m not drunk, on crack, or anything like that” - why is facebook worth $100 billion?

At the launch of F8, Facebook wasn’t really on Lee’s radar at all.

iLike added 600,000 users in 8 hours. “OK,” Lee thought, “there is something new on the planet here.”

Most of his career he’s been a software engineer and hasn’t had much of a public persona - not really a thought leader.

So he thought this was a great chance to experiment: he created an Altura Ventures group and recruited a bunch of top FB developers to join the group, then made them officers. This is to show off how many cool people he “knows.”

Your Facebook page is much like your digital resume.

On his FB page, he used his top friends app to show off all the people he is “friends” with who are important. It’s basically name dropping on facebook. Someone goes to FB and says “look at all these people he knows, this is someone I ought to be friends with.”

At graphing social, Lorenzen said FB is worth $100 billion, and was roundly criticized for the statement. “Are you drunk??” Calacanis asked.

(LOL Lee missed Zuckerberg’s “Steve Jobs impersonation” at F8)

[click to continue...]

Here is the Word Document of Lee’s presentation in case you’re interested  in following along on your own screen.

An overview of tips and tricks to use Facebook features for business productivity.

Ellen Leanse will present this session. If you’re interested in leaving a note for her about what you’re interested in hearing, please be sure to leave a note in the comments.

Mari Smith proposed our Unconference Session C on B2B Marketing which will be held at 4:30pm.

If you’d like to join Mari on a panel discussion, please leave a comment below or ping her on Facebook to let her know.

Also, if you see any additional topics under the B2B heading that you’d like covered, let us know.

B2B Marketing: Facebook Tips and Tricks

How to:

• Proactively build your community (Friends list).
• Discern which apps and activities to engage in for professional purposes.
• Use Facebook effectively for strategic business networking.
• Increase your credibility and visibility.
• Manage your reputation.
• Monetize your efforts.
• Track your results.
• Outsource your social media activity.

Mari is a Relationship Specialist and Marketing Coach. She teaches a free online introductory course on using Facebook for strategic business purposes at http://facebookfortunes.com, using the FB app, Podclass.com.