General

Jason Calacanis is at it again. I knew he was self-absorbed when he wrote his linkbait rules back in April, but this just confirms it. Jason has been inundated with friend requests, friend detail requests and a number of application requests. Poor guy! Boo hoo, I’m so popular that I have 150 friend requests. I’m sure he cries himself to sleep at night with all of the pain that he experiences from so many friend requests that he doesn’t have the 2 seconds to click “Confirm Friend Request.” I agree with him that the neck-biting, movie tagging, skype calling and all the other application invitations are getting a bit absurd but deal with it! Seriously, does Facebook really decrease your ability to enjoy life? The solution to Facebook overload? Walk away from the computer. As soon as I finish up this post I’m going to try it myself … at least for a few hours. Although I guess I can browse Facebook from my blackberry but I’m going to avoid that for the time being. Jason: get your head out of your bum! The time it took to write that post could have been spent doing something more productive, such as watching one of those Netflix movies that you have sitting around or eating some Chinese food so you can get a real fortune cookie!

After reading an interesting post the other day about how to use Facebook professionally, I thought I would have a little fun and put a twist on the professional aspect of Facebook. Given that your social and professional lives can end up on Facebook, I figured why not show what you probably shouldn’t be doing on Facebook. If you are using Facebook you may have seen or experienced some of the items that I cover in this post. Trust me, these are things that you shouldn’t be doing.

Message Contacts When You Don’t Know Them
So you have now come to realize that there are some great contacts on Facebook. Why not start leveraging these contacts whenever you have the opportunity, right? If you want to use Facebook unprofessionally, get out there and start messaging people that you have never even met. That’s always a great way to form lasting relationships. The world is yours for the taking so get out there and leverage all those relationships that you’ve never created.

Post Photos of those “Good Times” You Had
So you had a little to much fun one night. If you don’t have memories of it I’m sure one of your great friends will be there to capture it on camera. Call up your friends and tell them to post all those pictures from when you and your friends went out and had a blast. Make sure that they tag you in the photo so all of your contacts can see the evidence. This is a great way for you to get hired. When your potential employer sees the photos, no worries! Everyone has a wild side, right?

Randomly add friends
Go browse for attractive people and send them messages like “Nice butt baby!” Then proceed to add them as a friend. Next find people with similar interests and send them a friend request without ever having spoken to them or sending them a message. Some say that, “The quality of your Facebook experience will be based on the quality of the people in your network.” Boy are they wrong. Get out there, browse through people at random and start adding them as friends. This is a competition to see who is the most popular. So get to it!

Put 100 Applications on Your Profile
Consider this: your friends load up your profile with the intention of writing on your wall. Instead of just scrolling down real quick, they spend the next hour scrolling through all of the applications you have placed on your profile. With each application you think to yourself about how this will force your friends to spend more time on your profile. Don’t be selective in your application selection, just start adding. There are over 2000 applications so there has to be at least 100 that you can add to your profile. Don’t think about it, just do it. It will make your profile look more pretty and user friendly.

Set Your Security Settings to a Minimum
You are an amazing person, so let the whole world know about it. Rather than allowing only your friends to view your profile, let everyone see in. While you’re at it, also make sure to place your home address, phone number and any other personally identifiable information that you can come up with. This will make it easier for others to get in contact with you. Isn’t it great when a random person knocks on your door and says “Surpise, I saw you on Facebook so I thought I’d stop by!”

If you follow the 5 steps that I have outlined above, you will be on your way to using Facebook unprofessionally. Seriously, there is nothing wrong with letting the whole world know that you’re amazing and want to be their friend! Be wild, be popular, be transparent. This is the place to let your personal life out into the open! Party time!

While browsing through YouTube last night, I came across a couple of videos about an application being offered at Facebotonline.com. The goal of the application is to automate all of your Facebook activities. As I previously discussed, Facebook can be effectively used as a marketing tool. I personally have used Facebook to market my blog and other applications with resounding success. The only thing though is that you cannot spam Facebook. They will quickly give you a temporary ban and if you continue to spam they will block you completely. Facebotonline.com claims that they can do the following:

• Add hundreds to even thousands of Facebook friends!
• Broadcast Event Invitations to all of your friends in your network!
• Send messages to any Facebook user!
• Send a note to all your friends at once!
• Use Facebot with MULTIPLE Facebook accounts! (I guess they want you to become the super spammer)
• Automatically save and store each of your Facebook account’s messages, comments and bulletins! (Doesn’t Facebook already do this?)
• Post a comment to all your friends walls at once.
• Import and export friend ID’s to work with over and over! (Why do I want to import and export my friend’s IDs?!?)

The bottom line is this: if you are looking to perform effective Facebook marketing, Facebotonline.com is not the way to go about it. I can guarantee you that trying to use the application as a tool for marketing will have you banned by Facebook in no time. If you are looking for real Facebook marketing advice, give me a call or shoot me an email and I’ll help you out. You can learn enough about Facebook by reading through the almost 300 posts on this site. You don’t need an application to go do your work for you automatically. There are ways to go about generating buzz on the site but I’ll refrain from covering that in this post.

A new marketplace for widgets and applications has just launched. WebAppSale is the one stop shop for posting your widget or application for sale. Currently there are only 2 widgets posted on the site. Will this site work? Hard to say but I doubt it. The main reason that I don’t think this will work is that any application or widget that grows a large user base is going to be acquired by a larger company without them posting it for sale. The amazing thing about the new widget environment is that within a matter of weeks of launching an application on Facebook you can tell whether or not you have any shot of success. Previously, web companies would spend months or years developing an application only to have it fail to gain any traction. Thanks to the viral component of Facebook, your application will make or break it within a matter of days or weeks. You can then call it quits or move right on to the next thing. It’s a hit or miss environment. Conversely, if you want to set up hundreds of applications that only have a couple hundred users, you could package all of your applications and sell them as a whole. I am fairly skeptical about this new site. I think the market is a self-selecting one and any application that gains a solid user base will start receiving offers whether or not they publicly announce their application for sale. What do you think?

This morning I woke up to an interesting email:

Hi,

A Facebook user reported that your application Bush Countdown Clock violates out Terms of Use. The user reporting it selected Inappropriate or pornographic content as the violation. This person also said:

“This is anti-American and ridiculous!”

Please investigate this issue.

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

If my Bush Countdown clock is not patriotic, then I don’t want to be American. Patriotism is freedom of speech. There is nothing more patriotic than questioning and challenging the system. While I don’t want to go off into a political tirade, I wanted to share the letter with you all. Hopefully Facebook doesn’t remove the application!

Hey Facebook! Fix your application directory. There have been over 150 applications added since the beginning of this past weekend and I can’t view any of them! If you click on the “Newest” tab all that is displayed is “Getting results…” but no results ever display. Hurry up and fix this so I can continue to evangelize your product and immortalize the application developers (maybe this is a little dramatic, but hey)!

Thanks!

For the past couple days I have been having serious problems trying to see the new applications being added to the Facebook apps directory. This has been part of the reason for the downswing in postings. Also, I have some big news in the coming days so stay tuned! If Facebook fixed their directory I can get back to work and keep providing application reviews! What’s going on Facebook?

Remember the days when you couldn’t access Friendster because the site wasn’t loading? How about the annoying page on Facebook saying that they were performing server maintenance? This morning I received a message stating the following: “Hey, your account is temporarily unavailable due to site maintenance. It should be available again within a few hours. We apologize for the inconvenience.” What the hell? Don’t you know that I have a blog to maintain? This is completely unacceptable. I have to be honest, I kind of thought that Facebook was invisible to the troubles of past social networks. Looks like they may not be. Darn it! Guess I’ll just have to weather the storm.

I was browsing through the Facebook applications directory earlier today and noticed the listing on the left. I found it pretty funny that the description to says “I can’t find a way to unsubmit to the application directory. I don’t want this application published,” yet for some reason they continued to approve the application. As for my Bush Countdown Clock (which I was wondering about why it wasn’t approved), it has been rejected from the directory. My guess is because I didn’t have a separate removal page and they said I was collecting user data. Honestly, I was keeping track of when users added the application but that’s about it. I’m guessing I’ll be approved once it’s resubmitted. It was also interesting that they replied as soon as I posted something on this blog. I guess they are actually listening! Is their process an automated process or is someone physically reviewing the application? If you would like to go use a completely useless application or check out the listing for yourself, go take a look at the Aurora Calendar development test.

It is time to start on a new journey. While I have many things that I am personally considering, I am currently focused on launching a Facebook development team. If you are a reader of this blog then you already know of the potential offered by the Facebook platform. Where is it headed? I don’t know. Will the market get flooded? Possibly. Is there money to be made? Definitely. Unfortunately I missed out on the New York City Facebook developers meetup on Wednesday, but the Facebook revolution has officially begun. If you are interested in working to provide high end Facebook applications to clients, please get in touch. I am in need of primarily developers and a single designer. Additionally, if you want to contribute to this blog, please feel free. If you know Facebook, are highly enthusiastic about Facebook, and have something to contribute to the team, please get in touch ASAP. Simply shoot an email to allfacebook [at] gmail [dot] com and I will respond as quickly as possible. By the way, if you are looking to work on the team you must be located in Washington, D.C. or New York City. Bloggers on the other hand can live anywhere. Isn’t it great to be a blogger?