Tete

I logged into Facebook this morning to the usual flurry of messages, notifications, pokes and friend requests. As I was responding to each point of contact, I noticed a couple of distinctly weird new behaviors.

First, in my notifications, I was told that someone by the name of Derek had joined Facebook and that I should friend him.

I have no idea who this Derek character is, so it came as a surprise to me that Facebook would want me to friend him. I assume this is part of Facebook’s new friend recommendation feature.

The feature is cool in theory, but it needs to be dialed down in its intrusiveness in practice. I really don’t want to get pinged with new potential friends. I want to go through the list of recommended friends at my leisure and decide who I might want to connect with the way Linkedin does it.

If this is indeed part of the new feature, then it’s really news to me. Facebook shouldn’t just unilaterally launch features that fundamentally change user interactions with the site, say by notifying them about something they’re not used to getting notified by, without discussing it with the user base first.

Obviously, this isn’t as big a deal as the News Feed or Beacon being unilaterally thrust upon users, but at this point — given all the information that comes flying at my head every time I log into FB — it’s just as annoying.

After screen-shotting the offending friend notification, I went about dealing with the rest of my inputs. When I got to the pokes, I noticed that a strange man — someone I do not know and am not friends with on the site — had poked me. This is odd because, as you can clearly see below, I have disabled the function that lets non-friends poke me.

I don’t know how this fool was able to poke me, but I don’t like it. It doesn’t matter how young and hip you are, a random uninvited poke from a guy you don’t know is just plain creepy.

Update: Apparently, despite having my privacy settings tuned to disallow poking in search results, the poke option is still showing up in my search listing. My friend and colleague Ellen Petry Leanse was kind enough to send me these screenshots of how my search listing looks:

and how it should look:

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Microsoft has produced a hilarious ad that perfectly encapsulates the major issues facing advertisers and consumers:

One of the five possible goals of online community building covered in Charlene Li and Josh Bernoff’s new book Groundswell is listening, which is not something some advertisers are doing very well these days.

[Via Ken Burbary.]

Facebook has launched a new feature that shows users who they might be friends with based on their existing connections. Based on my connections, Facebook has recommended 26 new friends. Of those, I actually know four and could appropriately consider being “Facebook friends” with another three.

I’m curious, how accurate has your friend offering been thus far?

I’ll be speaking along with a lot of amazing people at the Forum for Women Entrepreneurs & Executives: Business Applications of Social Networking event this morning. If you’re interested in watching, join us via Ustream.

Update:

Here is video from the entire event split into two.

I made a video this morning that details how Facebook’s new Friend List Privacy feature works. It’s a really cool way to customize the experience your friends have of your Facebook presence depending on how well you know them.

In the long view, anything that makes the Facebook user experience better is good for everyone involved, including marketers who are using the site to engage with potential customers. But in the short run, the newly announced privacy improvements present some new challenge for marketers and community builders.

Up until this point in its development — and with a few notable exceptions such as limited profiles — Facebook content has been available to just about anyone with whom a user has established a connection. Because of its roots as a college network, it didn’t really need to segregate who could see a particular photo album. But when Facebook opened its doors to all comers, the requirements changed.

Starting tonight, users will have access to a tool called “Friend Lists Privacy,” which will enable them to use the friend lists feature launched in mid-December to assign permissions to different chunks of content within the site.

Those of you for whom user-generated content and content sharing is a major word-of-mouth marketing vehicle will need to be aware of these changes, which could potentially limit the viral opportunity for any particular chunk of content within the site.

Furthermore, the soon-to-be rolled out tabbed profile interface will further allow users to customize their profile experience. Visibility of content will be more customizable.

More user control is a good thing. It also means that marketers and community builders will have to develop more useful tools to stay front-and-center. That’s why building a useful application for your user base is more important now than ever.

As we’ve said many times before, the cardinal rule of social media marketing is “be useful.” Think honestly about what might be useful to your core audience, then roll it out quickly and iterate as needed.

For more coverage of Facebook’s new features:

• WSJ
• TechCrunch
• AllFacebook

Six months ago, I interviewed Linkedin CEO Founder Reid Hoffman at the first Graphing Social Patterns conference where he keynoted. I’ll be in the Bay Area next week and I’d very much like to swing by Linkedin’s offices — or wherever he’s at — and interview him again.

What do you say Reid, are you game?

Next Tuesday, I’ll be on a panel moderated by Forbes’ Erika Brown along with Karen Appleton, Katie Jacobs Stanton, and Lena West. Other incredible speakers include our good buddy Jeremiah Owyang and Ning CEO Gina Bianchini.

If you’d like to join me at the event for a discount of $50 off the current price use discount code SNC325 when you register. It’s going to be an amazing day!

See here for a full list of speakers and to register.

Aspiring iPhone developers are getting rejection letters by the thousands. Meanwhile, developers who have made it into the beta program are reporting that the shallow integration leaves next to no opportunity to build anything meaningful. Update: Developer Craig Hockenberry has a very interesting perspective on one of the major issues at stake in the debate.

A few months ago at Community Next, Mitch Kapor was bemoaning a similar problem with regard to the Facebook platform. It appears that at first pass, most developers are going to be dissatisfied with the options available to them on any platform.

This is symptomatic of one of the fundamental tensions Kapor described in his talk: platforms want to open up slowly and test the waters. Developers want to do everything right away. In the end, smart people usually find a way to work around platform limitations and go on to build cool stuff.

That said, there is a right way and a wrong way to engage with developer communities, and it’s safe to say that Apple isn’t doing a great job. At the risk of driving everyone nuts with another Mark Zuckerberg / SXSW post, I’d like to hold the Facebook team up as an example of how to start doing things right.

After his much-lambasted keynote interview, Zuckerberg made the decision to appear at the Facebook developer garage the following afternoon. During the Q&A, I noticed that he was more at ease onstage than we’ve ever seen him. Perhaps it had something to do with the fact that he was in his element chatting informally with geeks.

Whatever the cause, he was positively ebullient — by Zuckerbergian standards, anyway. Afterwards, he made himself extremely accessible. And since then, he’s been giving out interviews left and right, which has earned him some — IMHO, undeserved — scorn from Valleywag.

If Facebook keeps this up, they’re going to become a poster child for how to interact with developers. Of course, I don’t expect Zuckerberg to pull a Steve Ballmer anytime soon. Running up and down a stage screaming “Developers! Developers! Developers! Developers!” doesn’t really strike me as his style.

But as we watched his eyes light up while answering our questions about the site he has built from the ground up, many of us in the room gained a deeper understanding of his passion for and commitment to the platform. As I told him afterwards, that was the moment when a many of us decided, “this Zuckerberg guy isn’t evil.”

At base, what this really means it that for platform owners to maximize developer engagement and productivity, they need to overcommunicate, demonstrate passion, and offer inspiration. That doesn’t mean that they need to tell developers what to do.

Zuckerberg — rightly, I think — demonstrated great reluctance to tell people what kinds of applications to build. But platform owners need to say, “Together, we are going to build something amazing! What’s more, it’s going to be fun! Developers of the world, to me! Now, here’s how this is going to work…”

Apple has every right to take baby steps with the nascent developer community forming around the iPhone. But in the process, they can make the road less bumpy for themselves by offering an unprecedented opening of the kimono.

I’m not holding my breath — it is Apple, after all. But even a statement as simple as, “we want to take it slowly because of x, y, and z,” would be sufficient.

Wow I’m tired! I just wrote up a big long post about online community building best practices from last nights Online Community Round Table. Then I accidentally posted it on my personal blog instead of here. This is what you get for spending way too much time traveling on business.

Rather than deleting it from my personal blog and re-posting it here, I figured that I’d just leave it up over there and let you guys check it out. There’s a link at the bottom of the post that will bring you back here when you’re done so that you can easily check out the rest of our awesome site.

Today’s Facebook developer garage was a lot more satisfying than yesterday’s very scripted conversation between CEO Mark Zuckerberg and Business Week reporter Sarah Lacy. Zuckerberg took the stage for a good 45 minutes to take questions from the crowd.

He wasn’t as open as I would have liked, but I did get more of a sense of who he is and what his vision will be. During a question from a gentleman who wanted to know why there is no network for Palestine, he revealed that Facebook will one day move away from top-down dictated networks and instead, allow users to build their own networks.

He also talked about Facebook’s concerns with regard to moving their service into China as they continue to internationalize.

Yesterday, I wrote that the problem with the Zuckerberg keynote wasn’t Sarah Lacy. The “conversation” between the two of them felt scripted because it was scripted. I stand by most of what I wrote, although I have to say that given his response to the Q&A today, I’d say that Zuckerberg may not love his bubble as much as I thought he did.

I had a lot of impressions throughout Zuckerberg’s talk, and I tweeted each of them. Here are my tweets — and the relevant tweets of my friends — in chronological order:

• Me: Zuckerberg is taking questions from this developer audience. I asked him what he’d like to see developers build that would patch some holes
• Me: Zuckerberg gave me kind of a non-answer. I want to know what he would like to see developers build that would really add value to his vision
• Me: Still, even though he’s still being a closed book. I do appreciate the fact that he’s here and talking to us.
• Eston Bond: @tetesegehen what holes? product holes or feature holes?
• Me: @eston feature holes, like privacy stuff we were talking about last night. Or not being able to hold onto content that people share
• Eston: @tetesegehen you couldn’t fix that kind of stuff through platform anyway. that’d be like trying to patch a windows feature by installin word
• Me: @eston did you see what the drop.io guys were talking about?
• @eston They’re building a private place within Facebook to share and permission information. That strikes me as a stopgap measure.
• Me: What is the view on sharing information with the government? Good question!
• Me: I’m really glad that Facebook is taking the China and privacy issue seriously.
• Me: I love this Q&A, I have much more of a sense of who Zuckerberg is than from the keynote. His eyes light up when he talks about geekery.
• Me: @scobleizer is asking Zuckerberg some very tough questions about people getting kicked off.
• Me: Zuckerberg says that there’s a standard appeals process, he doesn’t think it’s true that people can’t get back into the site.
• Me: Zuckerberg says that they’re going to allow users to create their own networks in the future. “Facebook Curmudgeons” network, anyone?

What I really got out of this talk — apart from all the geeky insights — is that Facebook is more open that it first appears. They really do care about reaching out to the developer community. The problem is that they are not yet reaching out beyond the developers.

Ordinary users — like some of my friends who are still in college, or older people — are fed up with all the application invites, multiple inputs and user interface conventions they don’t understand. Those are the issues that Facebook will need to increasingly connect with users over.

I went to a great panel at SXSW yesterday afternoon called “Getting Unstuck.” The conversation was all about designing and developing applications for the mobile Web.

I walked away with a better understanding of the fundamental tensions at play in this increasingly mobile world. One of the most profound is the desire to create frictionless experiences while developing for the widest possible audience. With so many different handsets, browsers and interfaces, it’s impossible to create a mobile tool that will serve everyone on every handset.

Since developing for everyone is impossible, developers are going to work with the platforms that allow them to distribute their applications to the most users. We are entering an era where standards for both social and mobile platforms are up for grabs.

Another salient point that came from the panel is that the mobile phone is an inherently different space from the desktop computer, and American consumers use the two tools differently. Mobile phones are very personal devices where information is accessed on the fly. Zumobi’s John SanGiovanni mentioned that as a Web developer, you want your site to be “sticky” — that is, you want tons of eyeballs for long periods of time. As a mobile developer, you want your site to be “bouncy” — users can get in, get out, and get on with their lives in the real world.

Online community geeks who want to build and evangelize their tools for users on the go have a lot of hurdles to overcome. But just as when you’re developing for the social Web, you’ll need to be iterative. All the panelists agreed that throwing spaghetti at the wall to see what sticks is the best strategy for developing powerful mobile tools.

If that sounds familiar, it’s because it’s the same wisdom being applied to social application development. Iterative, repetitive attempts at building good apps appears to be the best way to deal with these new platforms, especially when the dust has not yet settled on universal standards.

One of the main reasons I came to SXSW was to see Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg speak. I thought he might reveal something new, or talk about something big, or even open his own kimono a bit so that we can get a sense of who this kid really is.

Unfortunately, that’s not what happened. The hour-long keynote interview was profoundly unsatisfying. The audience didn’t have to look far to find a scapegoat in the interviewer — Business Week reporter Sarah Lacy — but her presence on the stage and her style of interviewing seem to me to be symptoms of a much larger problem.

Mark Zuckerberg is almost certainly sweet, shy and utterly brilliant kid. But he hasn’t shown me anything yet that says he’s ready to be the visionary and outspoken public face that an organization needs in its leader. Quite the opposite, in fact. I get the sense that he likes to exist in a bubble. That’s where Lacy comes into the equation.

Lacy seems to value her relationship with Zuckerberg more than a reporter should — a fact she made apparent while onstage by referencing their friendship at every possible turn. This is obviously an age-old, fundamental tension between luminaries and the reporters that cover them. But Lacy and Zuckerberg take it much too far. She is “his” reporter. That’s why she’s allowed to get so close in the first place.

The true story of this keynote is not what was said, but why so much remained unsaid and unasked. Facebook has many fundamental technological hurdles to overcome, which I will address in a separate post. But their single biggest issue is the attitude with which they approach their community and the public: despite all the rhetoric about connecting people, the company and its CEO keep themselves at a distance.

Update: Nick O’Neill posts about the keynote and calls it a “disaster:”

Sarah Lacey, the author of a Newsweek cover article as well as a book on Mark Zuckerberg, appeared to spend more time discussing the personal moments that her and Mark shared before.

Also, Valleywag’s post on the keynote calls me a “typical privacy-and-sharing paranoiac” for asking when we’ll get better data organization and privacy control tools. But considering how many people came up to me after my question to thank me for asking it, I think that I tapped into one of the community’s major concerns about the site. It’s not wrong to repeat something as long as it continues to be correct.

I went out to dinner with Baratunde Thuston in Austin last night. This is his third South by Southwest and he’s been teaching me the ropes.

Baratunde is a self-described “conference whore.” He makes the rounds of the geeky conferences every year because, he says gesturing back and forth between the two of us, “you can’t replicate this online.”

Companies looking to build communities online need to be aware of that fact. For example, I’ve long argued that the online “I Love My Dog” community built by Del Monte Foods — the makers of Snausages — to bring dog lovers together around their product needs to have a connection to real world.

If I were working for Del Monte, I would plug into the Google Maps API, and crowdsource my dog loving user base to build a map of every dog park and off-leash area in America. Then, I’d encourage users who had connected in my online space to find one another offline and arrange playdates for their dogs.

The investment here is about giving back to the community that has spent time and money reinforcing your brand. The return is increased customer loyalty and the power of passionate, word-of mouth recommendations.

Yes, things get out of control when online communities meet in the real world. (It’s becoming rapidly clear to me that the primary purpose of SXSW — as “Four Hour Workweek” author Tim Ferriss put it last night — is to get drunk with bloggers.) But in this brave new marketing world, it seems that out of control is where the magic happens.

I’ve seen a lot of ham-handed Facebook marketing of late. Just last night, I got a canned promotional e-mail from a PR person who doesn’t know me from Adam. I also got a friend request — with no note, I might add — from a company that had set up a profile for itself. I wonder how it did that…

But it looks like the folks over at Guinness have a solid idea of how Facebook works. They’ve been using it — and other social networking services — to encourage people to sign their petition asking that St. Patrick’s Day be declared a national holiday. The Facebook group they’ve started has over 15,000 members as of this posting.

This campaign is innovative because it leverages the already existent “activist” behavior on the social Web to promote a product. For example, Facebook users routinely join groups to support the causes they care about. Oftentimes, that’s the extent of their “activism.”

But for a marketer with a goal of better brand engagement in the run up to St. Paddy’s, that’s all you need to see.

Nicely done!