Facebook

I know a lot of App developers have designed their applications to require that users invite some number of friends to the app before all (or even any) of the features in the application will be unlocked.

This is one of those strategies that works according to the data, despite the fact that it’s clearly more antagonistic. If you’re just looking at the numbers, it seems like developers have to make a choice: ingratiate themselves to their users and retain a smaller number of loyal installs, or annoy their users and get a far more viral spread.

Alec Saunders recently threw together some rough data that supports the gut feeling you already have: forced invites aren’t liked by Facebook users.

I think the choice you make as a developer should depend largely on what type of app you want to develop. I mentioned in my earlier post that there are at least two fundamental different approaches to building facebook applications:

1. Building an application as a product or service
2. Building an application to promote your existing product or service

At this point, it should be obvious where I’m going. If you’re trying to build an application that needs to support itself on ads or other revenue models, and you need a large if transient audience, I’d say that forcing user invites is the way to go.

If you’re trying to build an app to promote your brand, you should take pains to make sure that the way you market the app (not just the way it works) reflects the image you want potential customers to walk away with. I think that means holding off on the forced invites.

Facebook just put in a sidebar link on your requests page that says “Ignore all requests.”

Too many requests?

We’ve added a “clear-all” option for when you have lots of requests waiting on your Requests page.

It took them long enough.

Thing is, I think I’m going to keep using my Ignore All Application requests bookmarklet because it leaves all my other requests alone. I like being able to clear out the app requests without having to get rid of group requests or friend requests.

Still, at least they’re doing something. I’m still pulling for my expiration method - I have yet to see a better solution.

In what seems to me like a move encouraged by Microsoft (and as a further strike at OpenSocial), Facebook recently restructured their platform and API to pull down some of the garden walls. As Mashable reported:

Nick O’Neill of AllFacebook is reporting today that, without much fanfare, Facebook integrated their platform with their API. What does this mean to you and me? It seems that your favorite applications could possibly start popping up on ordinary websites and blogs any day now.

Web apps will be able to use cookies to track the users when they are using the app in other places on the Internet. So, in theory, you could play a game on any site and your stats will still be tracked.

So that’s what it means to “you and me.” What does it mean for an application developer?

By now, everyone is familiar with sidebar widgets. Those little mini-programs that people can embed in various portions of their websites are a great way to easily multiply exposure of your features and functionality across tons of sites.

But one of the big drawbacks of classic widgets is that there’s a limit to what you can really do with the user who plays with your app for a few minutes on a third party website. You don’t have a really reliable central data set about the user. You can’t really give a user stats or rewards unless they click through to your site. And you can’t put your widget on Facebook without re-coding it for their platform.

But now, if you build a Facebook application, you’ll be able to “widgetize” it for external sites as well as for people’s Facebook profiles. And what’s even better, you’ll be able to use cookies to track who is using your app on external sites. Hmmm…opportunities abound.

We haven’t exactly been “tight-lipped” about this app while it was in development. If you showed up at our December Web Community Forum or ran into us at CES, chances are you heard something about InDesign Tips somewhere along the way.

What we’ve been whispering in the aisles is that we’ve put together an app that lets InDesign users submit and rate tips on how to use Adobe’s famous software efficiently. Oh yeah, and you can win prizes.

Well, in a similar, whispery fashion, we rolled it out earlier this month (bugs intact) for everyone to add and check out. To be honest, I was a little curious about how virally it would spread without any announcements whatsoever. So far so good.

But I can’t help feeling just a little bit bad letting the whole month of January roll on by without pointing out that we’re giving away some truly excellent prizes to the Top Tipster and the owner of the Top Tip.

For the Top Tipster - that means the person who has garnered the most points from all of their submitted tips, we’re giving away a free copy of InDesign CS3!

For the Top Tip - that means the single tip that has been voted up by the most people (and, theoretically, down by the least), we’re giving away a free pass to the InDesign Conference in Miami!

Interested? I would be. See how many points you can pull together by February 1st.

We just posted a sample Facebook Application Spec on our Parnassus Group site.

Developing an app spec can mean a lot of different things to a lot of different people. When we draw up Facebook Application Specs for our clients, what we deliver is a document that any competent developer should be able to use to build your application with few or no hanging questions.

In other words, it’s a complete blueprint.

If you’re hiring someone to create a Facebook App Spec for you, you should make sure that both parties are clear on what you’re going to be given: is it going to require some refinement on your part, or is it going to be something that you can hand off to a developer?

I’d recommend checking out our sample spec for an example of what you should expect.

A while ago I made a post outlining what I think is probably the best solution to the Facebook app request problem (the problem: there are WAY too many of them).

And just now I noticed that JoJotheBandit had left a comment with a link to a bookmarklet he made that clears out all the outstanding Facebook app requests with one click.

Since I haven’t bothered to ignore any of the app requests I’ve gotten for a while, I thought I’d give it a shot. It works like a charm. Check out the video (I did narrate this, but apparently my mic was acting weird):

Facebook launched a feature today that allows users to create an “extended profile.” So far as I can tell, this profile is a no-man’s land where Facebookers can put profile boxes of applications that they are bored with but can’t bear to actually remove.

The upside of this is that my profile is much cleaner. It actually looks like something you’d find on Facebook — as opposed to, say, MySpace.

Facebook has been doing a lot recently to give users control over their outputs. Making lists of your friends will — someday soon, we hope — give users customized control over the types of content their different friends have access to.

But it’s equally, if not more important that users have control over their content inputs. Facebook has lately become a jumble of sponsored announcements, badly targeted advertising, unwanted application requests and group spam. The tools they give you to make sense of, categorize, manage and store all of this content are sub-optimal at best.

I’d like to see Facebook implement five input management features in the next few months:

1. A tagging interface so that users can build a folksonomy around content. User-generated tags could drive content specificity as well. I’d love to be able to tell them that I’d like to see more stories about politics in my news feed and fewer stories about television shows. These preferences could be used to drive advertising
2.  Separating my news feed out by friend lists. I’d like to have one news feed for my high school and college friends, another for my professional contacts and yet another for people I’m currently hanging out with. If Facebook wants to be the dashboard for my life, they’ll need to give me the opportunity to compartmentalize my inputs just like I do in real life.
3. Let me say “no more application invites.” I’m pretty proactive about seeking out the Facebook applications that add value to my life. I usually find them on my friend’s profile pages or in my news feed. I don’t want my friends to invite me to any more applications. I know that some think this feature would significantly throttle the platform, but I argue that people who would flip the switch to turn off app invites aren’t adding new applications anyway. The impact would probably be less than some people think.
4. Better e-mail management. Facebook e-mail is broken. It’s just, broken. I get looped in on group e-mails and the next thing I know, I get every reply. I can’t loop new people in on a conversation. I can’t export my messages anywhere. I can’t save them to a folder. I can’t categorize them.
5. Separate shared items from messages. When someone shares a link with me privately, it comes into my inbox. I’d like a separate inbox just for content spitting.

What input management features would you like to see?

In the article Small Firms Tap Amazon’s Juice, Web-Services Unit Gains Popularity Renting Storage, Server Capacity, reporter Mylene Mangalindan profiles Renkoo Inc. Renkoo created a program called Booze Mail for Facebook, and uses Amazon’s online computer services to host it.

If you can’t predict the amount of traffic, then (Amazon’s) service is really awesome because it removes risk,” says Ms. Park. “You don’t have to invest in a lot of hardware you don’t have to use.” Renkoo pays Amazon about $1,000 a week for the service, she says.

I asked our developer to look into this a few months ago, and was told that the effort needed to get an app up and running on Amazon’s servers was more daunting than the writing of the application itself. I’d love to talk to someone who’s done it and get some additional insight.

For those of you who don’t watch 60 minutes (probably most of you) and who haven’t spotted it already on Kara’s blog or Rodney’s blog (not very many of you), I’ve re-embedded the 12 minutes of 60 minutes that talks about the rise of Zuckerberg and Facebook.

I think the part of this that annoyed me the most was how she kept calling Facebook profiles “pages.”

I also disagree with Kara.

Last night Facebook disabled Robert Scoble’s account for violating the terms of service. Specifically, they disabled it because they detected page view activity that was consistent with an automated script.

Scoble posted the actual e-mail that he got from Facebook, so you can read it if you’re curious.

For a lot of people, getting sandboxed by Facebook is really bad news for them. It might hurt their business. It might kill a lot of their social interaction. For Robert, getting sandboxed by Facebook is bad news for Facebook, because that big fat elephant that was lurking in the back of their office—you know, the one about who owns your contacts?—has now been dramatically pushed to the forefront of the discussion.

Guess what: you don’t own the contacts you have in Facebook. You can’t take them with you.

Robert was disabled for using a beta Plaxo Pulse feature that pulls your contact data from Facebook and links it up with your Outlook. Which is, stupidly, against the Facebook Terms of Service.

Robert’s planning to do a live broadcast today at 2pm (pacific) to answer all sorts of questions about Facebook and Plaxo. I’m also looking forward to picking his brain at our CES party next week

The bottom line is, everything goes in to Facebook, and nothing comes out. It is a black hole. Which is dumb, because Facebook is based on your input. There are only a few things where, if I put stuff in, I never expect to get them back out. The stock market, for example. (Oh, Zing!)

On Twitter, Andru Edwards, Teresa, myself, and others are having a cool discussion about the validity of Facebook’s ToS. Worth following (start from the bottom):

dbrowell @TeteSagehen , IMHO, I feel that I should b in control of my privacy, not Scobel; not FB either, which is why Beacon made people mad, right? 7 minutes ago from web in reply to TeteSagehen

AndruEdwards Facebook has a TOS. If you agree to it, use it. If you don’t agree, then don’t use it. It’s that simple! Don’t agree and then break it. 10 minutes ago from twitterrific

AndruEdwards @jasonp107 - so that you can contact me off of facebook, not so you can scrape all my facebook data out of it. 11 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to jasonp107

jasonp107 @AndruEdwards then why do you list your e-mail address in FB? That’s a totally external piece of information… less than 10 seconds ago from web in reply to AndruEdwards

AndruEdwards @jasonp107 - yes, you get what info i provide ON and WITHIN Facebook. That is what i agreed to. 5 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to jasonp107

jasonp107 @AndruEdwards I get your point on privacy, but I feel like friending on FB = you get whatever contact info I provide 7 minutes ago from Snitter in reply to AndruEdwards

AndruEdwards @TeteSagehen - it was his data he wanted. it was his friends data. I didnt agree to that when i joined facebook. 17 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to TeteSagehen

AndruEdwards @TeteSagehen - it’s not lame to block someone who violates TOS! 20 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to TeteSagehen

trishussey @TeteSagehen but there are ways to do it w/o breaking the TOS http://urltea.com/2gpp -would you want FB to allow screenscraping for info? 22 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to TeteSagehen

TeteSagehen But really, it’s just that their TOS is shortsighted. If they claim a monopoly on my relationships, it makes me less likely to use the site. 25 minutes ago from twitterrific

TeteSagehen @trishussey and @jspepper it’s DUMB that they won’t let you suck things out of Facebook. Other sites do. Also, he’s Robert *effing* Scoble. 26 minutes ago from twitterrific in reply to trishussey

trishussey @TeteSagehen is it though? He did break the TOS. Plaxo is complicit, IMHO. Maybe it should be lesson for all of us. We can’t break the rules 30 minutes ago from twhirl in reply to TeteSagehen

TeteSagehen Facebook is going to be royally fucked if they don’t let @scobleizer back on the site. INCREDIBLY lame that they blocked him. 44 minutes ago from twitterrific

[ Update: Scoble's FB profile just came back online ]

I haven’t tried any of this myself, so I have no idea if it works, but if you’re one of the unfortunate people who have to live sans-facebook during the workday because the site is blocked, there may be a way through:

A new service called MoDazzle makes it possible to use Facebook (and LinkedIn) through email commands.

For instance, you can send an email to fbreadwall@modazzle.com with the subject SELF to read messages posted on your Facebook wall - alter the subject like JOHN to read John’s Facebook wall.

Now I’ve always thought that blocking Facebook—or any other social media outlets—from the workplace is generally not the best approach to the internet. It’s a bit like ignoring the huge glacier that’s crushing Ooog’s hutt next door.

There’s a lot of good that your employees can be doing for your brand just by being out there. Your customers don’t want to deal with a faceless monolith. They want to deal with people. And just knowing that you’ve actually got some of those can be helpful.

For those of you who are curious about how Facebook affects the political sphere, you might check out this post that breaks down some of the interesting info you can scrape about politicians and their campaigns from within Facebook:

Does it surprise you that that internet legend Ron Paul (53,104) has more than four times the friends Rudy does? (Well, Rudy has gotten in some trouble about his friends). He is also the only candidate to actually list his positions as part of the site’s Debate Group application. (“No” on waterboarding. “No” on changing the electoral college system. Pretty much “no” on everything.) Paul has no interests, but he does say that he has delivered more than 4,000 babies.

And so on. Well worth a quick read.

Facebook’s new lists feature now allows users to build groups of their friends and message them all at once. This is a very cool thing, but there’s just one tiny problem: Facebook’s messaging management system sucks. There’s no way to filter messages, no way to flag them, no way to export them to “real” e-mail.

Imagine receiving a bunch of mass mailings and not being able to do anything with them except read them, delete them or mark them as unread.

Facebook needs to improve message management if it wants large-scale mass messaging going on.

Facebook has launched a feature today that allows users to categorize their friends into lists. So far, I’ve created lists for my high school friends, college friends, post-college friends and professional contacts.

Now I want to set the permissions for each of these groups. Where is that function, Facebook? You said you would let me, “organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what.”

I want the “who sees what” part.

Update: Facebook’s official blog says this feature is coming soon. Via Mashable.