Facebook

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.

A little while ago Facebook launched a Spanish edition of the social network, and since then I’ve heard pretty much nothing about it. So how is it doing?

A quick Google search yields this piece on the American Observer, which has a collection of Spanish user reactions:

Carlos Sanchez, who accesses the network from Spain, appreciates having the option to switch to Spanish, but he won’t.

“I’m already used to the English one, but I think it’s a good way of attracting more people to the site. Most of my friends didn’t use it because it was in English and that might change now,” he said in a conversation through the site.

Unlike Sanchez, Miguel Mayol bets that Facebook will continue to be a network of multilingual users that don’t need editions in their own language because they already speak English. “I think a minority will only have contacts and belong to groups that speak their language, but I don’t think there will be monolingual non-English speakers in Facebook. It will remain a social network for people with higher-education experience,” he said.

A lot of the reaction to the Spanish edition is mixed. Some people wish that the translations were better—apparently there are some sentences which lose their meanings due to poor literal translations.

Personally I think it’s far more important that Facebook support discussion in other languages (in other words, people from China can use character languages in discussion groups) than it is for Facebook to re-write it’s site copy in other languages.

Facebook is far more about what the users put into the conversation, not what Facebook has already “set up.” My guess is that English is fine for the infrastructure, and communities based on language will spring up on their own so long as their keyboard is supported.

Paul Jeffries, who leads the Platform Developer Operations & Support team at Facebook, posted this morning on the Official Facebook Blog with a rundown on the new features they’ve put together to deal with the “application spam” problem.

The lesson for app developers: don’t be spammy, you will get smacked.

You can read the whole post, but here are a few of the juicier controls being put in place:

- Applications must now give you advanced warning if you’ll need to invite friends to get information or access content. So you should always know ahead of time if that quiz you’re taking will require you to invite friends to see your results. If you see applications withholding content without warning, go to that application’s About page to report it.

- Your feedback now determines how many communications an application can send. When invitations and notifications are ignored, blocked, or marked as spam, Facebook reduces that application’s ability to send more. Applications forcing their users to send spammy invitations can wind up with no invitations at all. The power is in your hands; block applications that are bothering you, and report spammy or abusive communications, and we’ll restrict the application.

- When you get a request from an application, you now have the ability to “Block Application” directly from the request. If you block an application, it will not be able to send you any more requests.

Kudos to Facebook for putting ever tighter leashes on one of their best potential properties (the app platform) in order to keep users happy. To me, that says that Facebook is still about user experience at least as much as it is about enticing developers, which will benefit the company in the long run.

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.

The terms “online conversation,” “community,” and “social graph,” are popping up like errant moles nowadays. I often wonder how many of us really know what we’re talking about.

It’s still interesting to me that when you break down all social interaction on the internet, you basically just get “links.” Hyperlinks connect blog posts and blogs, they connect Twitter conversations, they connect profiles on social networks and topic threads on forums.

What’s powerful is how links have gone from being structure to infrastructure. Yes links connect Twitter conversations, but what’s more important is that Twitter’s system recognizes the @name nomenclature and treats it appropriately.

Links are invisible, which is awesome.

And I think conversations and communities are most strong where those links are the most invisible. I feel like I connect with people on Twitter and Facebook more readily and easily than I do from my blog posts. It’s more immediate, and somehow more personal. But I bet Seth Godin connects more with his blog.

Obviously, ‘the online conversation’ is happening everywhere. Bits and pieces are on Twitter, bits are on Pownce, Facebook statuses, Myspace photo comments, everywhere.

I think that’s pretty amazing.

If you’re looking to find and join cool conversations, you should probably check out Teresa’s webinar tomorrow or wednesday morning.

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.

Robert Niles at Online Journalism Review posted a couple of good reasons why it might make sense for Facebook to make completely removing a profile a more difficult process than just hitting a button:

Here’s a scenario: You require readers to register in order to contact other registrants through the site. Someone registers, spams selected readers with who-know-what abuse, then immediately deletes his or her membership. It’s the online equivalent of a drive-by shooting.

Definitely worth a read.

A little while ago a pointed you all to a post explaining how the $15bn Facebook valuation could have been a carefully designed trap laid out to close off all of Facebook’s exit strategies.

I pointed you to their post because I’m not smart enough to explain the details right.

Today, Fred Wilson, another guy with a lot more financial chops that I’ve got, explains why pulling a maneuver like that can occasionally come back to haunt you.

Another interesting read. And a clue as to why Rupert Murdoch owns most of the world already.

In case you missed Rodney’s late night tweets, Facebook sent out an e-mail message last night to all app developers using that “forced invites” trick that simultaneously works so well and pisses people off so much:

Invites Violation
Dear developer,

Your application has been temporarily restricted from using requests/invites. This is because users of your application get trapped in a UI interaction for inviting friends.

If the user clicks the Facebook-rendered buttons “Skip”, “Cancel”, or “Skip This Step”, he must not be re-presented with an invite friends UI unless he explicitly selects to invite friends from a page that offers more than that single option.

You should jump over to his post for the whole e-mail, but the gist of it is that you’d better get your ship in line or their not going to let you invite ANY more users.

I think that, given the prevalence of this technique, and the lack of any statements from Facebook about it thus far, it would’ve been more appropriate for them to send out a notice, something like “you have seven days to remove this UI trap from your application, OR ELSE.”

It’s a little like smiling at a child while he reaches slowly for the TV remote and then yelling at him when he grabs it.

Ben Worthen on the WSJ Business Technology blog tells us that Bill Gates has quit Facebook:

None of those reasons caused Bill Gates to abandon his Facebook account, however. His problem is excessive celebrity. After Microsoft invested $240 million in Facebook last year, Gates spent 30 minutes a day on the social-networking site, the Sun reports. “But he signed off after getting more than 8,000 friend requests a day, and spotted weird fan sites about him,” says the Sun, citing an unnamed colleague. The article linked above says he deleted the account. A Microsoft spokesperson tells us that Gates hasn’t deleted it, but that he has stopped using it because he was inundated with friend requests.

Of all the reasons to stop using Facebook, I’m not sure that’s a good one. You can turn off email notifications and you can now use Facebook’s built in ignore all requests button to churn through that problem in about 20 seconds.

I think the real problem with Gates’s Facebook use is that it was probably symbolic in the first place. Here is a man who probably, I’m guessing, doesn’t get a lot of personal value from the service. That’s fine. Facebook is not for him. Facebook is not for everybody.

Facebook is a great tool, but it’s communications-oriented. I’m guessing it’s not the best place to be a hermit

( Give us a Digg, eh? )

It looks like even the New York Times is now getting concerned about the permanence of people’s profile data on Facebook.

To me, it’s always been a bit of a head-scratch. This isn’t your private rolodex. You’re creating an online profile. Thanks to the wonders of caches and things like the Way Back Machine, practically everything you ever put on the internet, anywhere, is likely to survive in some way or another.

You should be aware of that when you sign up for Facebook.

But regardless, the fact of the matter is that when you “delete” your Facebook account, not much really happens. They keep all of your friends, preferences, apps, discussion posts, messages…everything. You just can access it by logging in with your e-mail and password. Yes, I said can. Yes, you can. Try it.

So the only difference between a “deleted” facebook account and an active one is that you’re not logged in, and your friends can’t visit your profile anymore (but they can still tag you and invite you to groups and events). Seriously.

In the end, I really think it’s not that big of a deal. There are legit ways of getting rid of your account, and I think it’s unlikely that anything is going to stick around and haunt you, especially as more and more people use and understand online social networks.

Still want out? Simple: violate the terms of service.

Remember all those complaints about disabled Facebook Accounts? Facebook goes through and pulls your discussion posts, takes down your profile and everything.

So here are a few tricks that are likely to get your account deleted for real:

1. Post a lot of identical messages to a lot of discussion boards, REALLY QUICKLY.
2. Suck in your Blog & your Twitter Account, and post a whole bunch to both of them REALLY QUICKLY
3. Switch your name to something obviously fake, like “Buy Viagra”
4. If you’re feeling particularly rebellious, import some porn. Post some lude and lascivious content to their servers, and send an e-mail to support@facebook.com telling them you did it

Or you can hunt through the terms of service and break any number of other rules you find.

I think you get the idea. My one suggestion might be, though, make sure you’re really done with Facebook before you do it.

[ Update:

I just got an e-mail with a quote from Brandee Barker at Facebook:

There are two different ways to remove your information from Facebook. The first is to deactivate an account. Once a user deactivates the account, his or her profile becomes inaccessible on the main Facebook service, and the data is kept by Facebook only to allow easy reactivation. The second option is to delete the profile altogether. When a user deletes his or her profile, personal information -- such as name and all email addresses associated with the account -- is deleted from Facebook servers.

If a user decides to join Facebook again, he or she would need to create a new profile. We are working to better explain the simple deactivation process, and to ease the deletion process for those who want their personal information removed from our servers. Additional information can be found on the Facebook help page at http://www.facebook.com/help.php?page=5

The relevant portion of that Facebook help page is the following:

If you do not think you will use Facebook again and would like your account deleted, we can take care of this for you. Keep in mind that you will not be able to reactivate your account or retrieve any of the content or information you have added. If you would like your account deleted, please contact us using the form at the bottom of the page and confirm your request in the text box.

Needless to say, it's a bit of a quieter way to go

They also point at Google for an example of "data delete" requests from other services. Here's a snipped from the Gmail TOS:

You may organize or delete your messages through your Gmail account or terminate your account through the Google Account section of Gmail settings. Such deletions or terminations will take immediate effect in your account view. Residual copies of deleted messages and accounts may take up to 60 days to be deleted from our active servers and may remain in our offline backup systems.

I guess the difference is that you don't hear many stories about people trying to delete their Gmail accounts and failing to do so.

It's also a different story because Gmail doesn't have the same kind of social networking functionality built in...it's harder for your friends to stumble across old emails from your Gmail account than it is for friends to accidentally discover old profile data buried in Facebook.

It's also interesting to note that I don't normally get these kinds of follow up emails on my posts, so it's possible they're doing some damage control from today's NYT article...

]

Everybody knows that the Facebook Terms of Service are a bit more strong-arm than the TOS on other sites. Mostly this has to do with content creation and storage - what you are allowed do with the content you bring in to or create on facebook, and what they are allowed do with it

The tricky part about fine print is that it’s pretty easy to ignore. That’s the whole point. That’s why in Europe, cigarette packs have giant block letter on them saying things like “SMOKING WILL KILL YOU.”

The point is that people are wired to forget these things. But when you’re uploading and importing content to Facebook, you are tacitly agreeing to the terms that they set. Does your value match the cost?

Edward Bilodeau deided today that he would stop pulling in his blog posts and FlickR, based on his examination of the Facebook TOS:

I’ve decided to remove my notes and photos from Facebook. I’ll still be posting items, status updates, etc, but I will no longer be pulling content in from Flickr or my weblog.

Why? Compare the Facebook’s terms of service regarding user content (the relevant portion that affected my decision is in bold)

If you’re curious to see what jumped out at him, go read his post.

I think there’s a fair chance that the liberties facebook takes with user content is more to cover their collective legal butts, since it allows them to regulate their site content without any pesky ownership rules getting in the way. But if that’s the case, it still might not send the right message to users.

I’m a few days late on this bit of news, but two things happened today: first, I saw the ad on television, and second, I saw a post about it on TUAW.

Pretty cool for Facebook to be, as far as I know, the first iphone web app to make it into an iPhone commercial. I gotta admit though, the Facebook web app is one of the best designed iphone web apps I’ve seen. I almost like it better than regular Facebook.

I would like it better if it let me play Scrabulous.

Nick O’Neill at AllFacebook just posted a really interesting comparison between Google’s AdSense and Facebook’s SocialAds based on a semi-scientific experiment that you can find here. By the numbers, Google takes the cake:

Visitors coming from Facebook:

* pages per visit: 1.22
* Bounce rate: 82.84%
* average time on site: 13 sec
* 3.92 % clicked to Amazon
* 7.84 % clicked to Audible
* total conversion rate (clicked on product links): 11.76 %

Visitors coming from Google:

* pages per visit: 1.61
* Bounce rate: 67.21%
* average time on site: 42 sec
* 12.31 % clicked to Amazon
* 9.94 % clicked to Audible
* total conversion rate (clicked on product links): 22.26 %

I’ll admit, I’m not an advertising junkie. I don’t know everything there is to know about ads, CTRs, conversions, yield, and whatever else is involved.

But I’m pretty sure that there’s more to this than just “by the numbers.”

One of the things I think we’ve really lost track of with CPC (cost per click) ads is the value of the impression. For example: billboards on the highway. Nobody is expecting drivers to flip open their cell phone and order that new car, right now!!.

The idea is exposure. The same goes for most advertising throughout the history of advertising. Advertising is supposed to make it so that when a person goes to the store and looks for pens, she thinks “Bic.” Once you start focusing on action…now you’re talking about something else entirely.

Just to be clear, I’m not saying that Facebook ads are more effective. I’m just saying that I think the CPC metrics are wrong for most advertising contexts. It works for Google and other search engines (and google is clearly the leader in monetization) because people are there to *click* on things.

Almost everywhere else on the web, though, I think we may eventually have to rely on other metrics. I wonder how many people on FB already owned the book? They’re fans after all. The FB ads had images in them, unlike the Google ads. How many people bought the book a week later? How many people thought about the book the next time they were at the book store?

We can’t measure these things, but they are real effects of advertising. I think you have to consider them before you throw SocialAds out the door.