Facebook

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.

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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

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.

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’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!

Think you could do better running a platform than those slobs over at Facebook? If you’re in the area, you could get a chance to tell them face to face.

About an hour ago Facebook posted on their official Developers Blog that they’re going to start hosting Developer Roundtables to get feedback on their platform and to discuss “developing Platform applications, best practices, and monetization strategies.”

Getting yourself signed up to the roundtable means sending an e-mail to roundtable@facebook.com with your street cred (company, app(s), active users, etc). The list is in their post.

Jeremiah Owyang has posted some great insight about the fundamental tensions facing big brands who want to engage on the Facebook platform. The money quote:

In the presentation from BJ Fogg who co-ran the Facebook class at Stanford, they developed applications, that they estimated totaled $500,000 in revenue from the students efforts in advertising. They give out a list of learnings on what made them successful, often it included being flexible, quickly iterating, not listening to individual opinions or getting approvals, just launching them, and experimentation. It was very clear to me that that behavior is the opposite of large brands, who want safety, low risk, and pre-written plans.

Jeremiah suggests that businesses outsource application development, which might be effective. But I think it’s more important long term that all businesses learn how to take more calculated risks online.

What do you guys think?

I’m just assuming that since Facebook is talking at Graphing Social Patterns today, and that since everyone is there tweeting about it (including Teresa), that this tweet from Jeremiah is already everywhere:

“applications to accept credit cards is to come very soon” says Facebook.

Ding! Winner!

As I’m sure I’ve said before (but I’m too lazy to find a link. See? it’s the ‘search is re-find‘ problem), building in PayPal solves the monetization problem for everyone.

How? What changes?

1. Application developers can build apps that can rely on something other than ads to make money (I have complete confidence in the ingenuity of FB app develoeprs).
2. Facebook can play PayPal for their 200,000 developers…heellloooo pocket change.

Watch it happen.

I’m listening to Facebook’s Ben Ling presenting about the opportunities of the Facebook platform right now. He’s saying that Facebook will prohibit the very frustrating forced invitations that have plagued platform users. Ben is calling this tactic by application developers very shortsighted. Facebook wants developers to take a more long-term approach to gaining users and committing to the health of the platform.

Users will soon be able to report applications that force invitations and remove them automatically. This is definitely a step in the right direction for the platform.

I’m certainly guilty of clutter. There are plenty of apps that I’ve added to my profile and subsequently ignored. It’s not really worth the effort for me to uninstall them, so I just don’t use them.

The result? A profile full of applications I don’t use.

The extended profile was step one in reducing the “clutter” of unused or unwanted applications.

The new tabbed profiles will also, undoubtedly make users more conscious of the app display choices they make.

It will also encourage app developers to build applications that rely less on being seen (look at my profile box!) and more on the utility or metaphor they provide in social interaction (I poked someone). This is where the value to the user has been all along, of course, with profile badges mostly acting like “bling.”

I think this will be good for the platform overall. App developers should start thinking now about how they’re going to adjust for profile redeployment in the spring.

If you check out the official Facebook blog post today, you’ll find a link to a Facebook page that offers screenshots and previews of a possible new layout for profiles.

They’re looking for feedback from users on how it looks, so jump in and give your two cents (which means e-mailing them):

We want to know what you think, so please send all feedback to profilespreview@facebook.com. We will be reading these emails, but instead of responding to each one individually, we’ll be summarizing all of your feedback on this page.

Here’s my feedback:

1. cool looking profile updates! I like the “About” section in the first screenshot.
2. Open up the freaking facebook page for comments! Only taking e-mails? Not going to respond to them? It sounds a lot like you’re ignoring us. How can you expect other people to use comments and boards if you aren’t willing to use them yourself?

Check out the cool screencap though:

What do you think?

It feels like it’s hard to look around the blogosphere now without seeing the tech elite decrying Facebook for their privacy issues, lack of new, useful features, and inability to control applications (although I think they’re doing a good job).

The problem is that, like the tech elite with the MacBook Air, we often don’t get it.

Facebook was popular before we all decided it was cool, because it served a social purpose.

Facebook will be popular after we all decide it’s not cool anymore, because it still serves a social purpose.

I think what we’re seeing is that a bunch of the tech crowd got really excited about the developer platform and the opportunities built into the underlying, fundamentally cool technology behind social networks. But now it’s getting more mainstream and consequently more boring.

So the people who were excited about Facebook because the tecnology was cool are getting ready to move on.

But the people who are excited about Facebook because of how it lets them connect and communicate and create and manage community are just getting started.

The New York Times wrote yesterday about Facebook’s now-working delete your account option.

I can see the inside of the Facebook offices now:

“This is good news for Luddites.”

“When you participate in an online forum, do you go back to it later and remove all of your posts?”

“When you put pictures up on the internet, do you really expect to be able to take all copies away?”

“It sounds a little like the record companies asking for a ‘delete all MP3’s’ button.”

“If you’re concerned about what turns up in Google, change your profile. Why not use your high Google rank to your advantage?”

The problem is that none of those embodies the real issue. I think the Facebook team is a group of really smart, innovative people who really do want to make the site work for us users.

So, Facebook team, here’s what you’ve been missing, just to make sure you’ve got it now:

The problem is that you’re building a non-erasable file on our lives in one single place. Nobody likes knowing that there’s a dossier somewhere about them that they can’t get at.

It’s not about what’s on the internet. Not really. It’s about feeling like we’re in control of our identities.

We are so in the right business according to the Wall Street Journal. Lee Gomes interviews chief executive of Sparta Social Networks, who apparently is making big, big money from supplying dedicated social networks to companies. Don’t have plans to build your own? Better get on it:

“…social networks have become the Web site of this decade. Back in the ’90s if you didn’t have a Web site you were irrelevant; the same was true with having an e-commerce site in 2001. That is where social networks are right now.”

We’re helping clients now with specs and designs for their own private-branded social networks and it sounds like we are charging not nearly enough:

” A highly customized social network can run between six and seven figures. But those are ones with lots of bells and whistles.”

I say bullcookies to this. Almost all companies need a web site. A much smaller percentage need to provide a Facebook-style community to join. Harley Davidson fanatics are not the same as Clapper owners.

Given the open source solutions out there — seven figures as a relevant range figure seems outlandishly high to me, at least for the initial launch. I suspect you could push it to include the allocated overhead related to the time spent by marketing V.P.s and other high-level staffers required to make it take hold, and certainly maintaining servers dedicated to millions uploading videos etc. would require that kind of budget. A major marketing campaign could be a part the expense being considered here — but I doubt it.

For the vast majority of companies, a custom social network should run between four and five figures IMHO.

Launching a social network? Plan to spend seven figures? We want to have you speak at our next conference. Contact steve AT parnassusgroup DOT com.

Tim Davies has a good breakdown of the pros and cons of using either Facebook Pages or Facebook Groups to engage with your audience on Facebook.

I wrote about this split a while ago when Pages first showed up on Facebook, and most of what I said then still stands.

Pages and groups are very similar in what features they offer. The most significant division between the two is mental: a page is inherently more commercial than a group. I think you should pick your vehicle based on how commercial you’re planning to be.

If you’re promoting a well known business or anything that is unabashedly capitalist, putting up a page instead of a group shows that you understand the lay of the land in Facebook, and you’re not just a Clueless Marketer.

It’s like setting up your both on the show floor, instead of trying to exhibit in the middle of a session room.