Archives: August 2007

Yesterday there was a lot of buzz on the web about Facebook being banned from workplaces. Apparently close to 50 percent of all businesses have banned the site. Supposedly in the U.K. more than 70 percent of businesses have banned Facebook and similar social networks. This seems like an extremely high number of businesses.

Only one of the places that I have worked in the past three years banned access to social sites. Now that my job surrounds Facebook, I certainly am not banned. My guess is that most of the readers to this blog have not been banned at work either. Although maybe this is where people come when they can’t get on Facebook. Are you allowed to access Facebook from work?

Back in July I theorized about a Facebook ad network which enabled advertisers to target their ads based on user profile data. According to the Wall Street Journal this morning, that ad network is not that far away. Supposedly, Facebook plans on launching an ad network later this fall.

The new service would let advertisers visit a Web site to choose a much wider array of characteristics for the users who should see their ads — based not only on age, gender and location, but also on details such as favorite activities and preferred music, people familiar with the matter say. Facebook would use its technology to point the ads to the selected groups of people without exposing their personal information to the advertisers.

These ads would show up differently than the banner ads and boxed flyers that appear on the borders of Facebook pages, say people familiar with the plan. Instead, they would be interspersed with items on the “news feed,” which is a running list of short updates on the activities of a user’s Facebook friends. In addition, the ads would show up on Facebook pages that feature services provided by other companies, one person says.

Facebook already has some targeted ads via their news feed as leaked last month. The main difference this time around is that “Facebook would use an automated system to process transactions instead of requiring advertisers to work with a Facebook representative.” Does this sound familiar? Facebook is about to take Google head on as they prepare to launch an adwords competitor.

Every single social network is going to be forced to develop similar systems when Facebook launches. Just as Yahoo was forced to build their moderately successful Panama system when Google AdWords began to crush them in ad revenue; other social networks will be forced to open their platforms and create ad networks just as Facebook has.

This new ad network shows how Facebook will be able to justify their $10 billion price tag. There is one key challenge to the new ad network though. According to the Wall Street Journal “advertisers say the addictive quality of social networking means users are so busy reading about their friends that they hardly notice display ads and, even if they do, are loath to navigate away to an advertiser’s site.” Many other sources have also expressed horrible click through rates on Facebook. Only time will tell but this is a huge step for Facebook.

As you may have noticed, I haven’t had many posts today. That’s because I’ve been looking for interesting things to cover and came across the Jetman application. Jetman is a simple game where you press down your mouse button to move up and release to move down. The only thing you need to do is avoid obstacles that come your way. It is as simple as that.

Ted Suzman brought up a good point in the comments of my post from yesterday about how much time people spend on Facebook. He stated that Facebook has replaced AddictingGames.com and I think he is correct. When people are bored, they can simply go to Facebook and play an additicting game, or interact with their friends. While it isn’t revolutionizing society necessarily, it surely is helping us to waste a little more time. If you want to waste a little time, go grab the Jetman application.

You may have noticed a small change to your profile that took place this morning. Facebook has added application favicons within your profile so that it is easier to navigate those application heavy profiles. By clicking on one of the icons, the profile will automatically scroll down to the area that you are looking for. Facebook has also created icons for the default profile boxes such as wall, information and education and work. It’s a small change but I definitely think it’s a cool one.

Facebook is known for their attention to detail and this is definitely one of those features. The only problem is that there is no link that moves you back to the top of the profile page. This reminds me of blogs that had all those icons for RSS and social bookmarking sites at the bottom of each post. It would be interesting to see what a profile with hundreds of applications would look like. Do you think this new feature is useful?

Recently I have been thinking more about the interesting dynamic resulting from individuals’ willingness to publicly reveal much of their personal information on Facebook. As I attend more and more technology events, I hear a consistent message taking place: open up social networks. The goal is to allow people to transport their connections from one site to another. Is this really smart?

In the United States, citizens are known for valuing their privacy. For some reason though, many in the technology sector would like to make their lives a little more transparent by granting social networks (and possibly search engines) access to their complex tree of social, family and professional relationships. I find this a little bit ironic because if the government was attempting to do something along these lines, citizens would be in an uproar over the violation of privacy.

Instead, we are slowly volunteering much of our personal information to random organization that allow us to visualize our connections with other people. Are we moving toward an environment in which we publicize all of our relationships across the web? In Facebook, even if you don’t know the person you can see who they are connected to. The same goes for LinkedIn. Instead of the government stepping in to monitor us, we will voluntarily do it ourselves. Is this not a little strange?

Almost two weeks ago I wrote about Facebook audio coming back. While Numair has yet to bring back the Audio application, a competitor has just launched. This one may be even better. You can upload songs and search any song. You can also take the songs and add them to your profile. Honestly, this one is much sleeker than the Audio application. One question remains though: is this a violation of copyright laws?

I certainly think so. Another item of interest is that there is no specified developer. The company is called “Audibie” and the domain is registered to Wing Lian. It also looks like Audibie is taking advantage of Amazon’s S3 technology. Will this one be shut down like it’s prior competitor? I would imagine so. Right now there are under 100 users but I have a feeling that this is going to spike immediately. Whoever built this definitely put a lot of effort into it. It is clean and runs smoothly. There isn’t much I can say negative about this application except for the fact that it is breaking the law. Aside from that it’s great! If you want to have a practically limitless jukebox on Facebook, go grab the Audibie application.

You probably saw the article yesterday outlining how Facebook will cost the Australian economy around $6 billion this year alone due to wasted productivity. Out of curiosity, how much time do you spend on Facebook? I of course spend most of my day on Facebook but it is pretty much my job at this point. I would guess that readers of this blog spend more time on Facebook than the average user. Perhaps I’m wrong. In addition to stating how much time you are spending, perhaps you can specify how much productivity you think Facebook has caused you to waste.

Last month I suggested that Facebook may be launching an email application. Today, Facebook took a huge step in that direction. Facebook announced a new feature that allows users to write messages to their friends that aren’t currently using Facebook from within the messaging system. Not only can they send; they can receive as well. Even if your friend is not a Facebook member, they can now reply to your messages.

Personally, I won’t take complete advantage of this because Facebook’s messaging system doesn’t have a robust feature set. This is a signal though that they are taking messaging seriously. It is also an excellent way for Facebook to increase their growth rate. They have also added in an additional feature:

Facebook will add any email addresses that you message to your “friend selector”, so you don’t have to remember everyone’s email address all the time. Also, if you message someone who is on Facebook but you use their email instead of their name, we’ll automatically forward the message to their Facebook Inbox. As we continue to make Facebook more useful for everyone, these changes mean that there’s no need to switch between Facebook and email for your daily communication needs.

This is one small step for Facebook, one giant leap for mankind. Well not really but it’s a big move on their part. All that I now hope for is that Facebook adds search functionality to their messaging system. Once Facebook adds effective search and indexing features I will definitely use their messaging system even more (which is difficult considering it currently accounts for at least 25% of my communication). What percentage of your communication takes place on Facebook?

Facebook sees the value in flexibility. Why else would users be able to choose what goes on their profile page, and in what order? Why else allow users to choose which applications to use? Why else allow multiple languages for F8 when it would have been faster and easier to offer PHP-only support? Flexibility allows users to shape their experience and gives respect to users’ differences. Choice makes people happy.

But not all of Facebook is as flexible and modular as the Profile page, the Applications and the Privacy Settings. The Main page however is reminiscent of the Profile page circa 2005, giving users access to the news feed, birthdays, application invites, pokes, status updates and a ‘monetization box’. All this sounds reasonably appropriate; and the news feed is configurable anyways. So what gives?

As Facebook extends its demographic reach into Professionals looking to network, users become more varied in their home page needs. My father isn’t too interested in how many pokes he has received and it is likely there are more profitable ways that he can be ‘monetized’ then by today’s new Candy Bear gift (only a million left!).

Dashboard Widgets for the Home page would be a powerful addition to the Facebook arsenal. First, every current component would be made into an application and subject to being resized or dragged and dropped or removed entirely. Applications, tons of which didn’t quite work on the Profile Page would fit perfectly as little useful widgets on the home page.

One widget could leverage the power of Facebook to quickly look up friends’ numbers. A calendar widget could update the user about upcoming events and meetings. A more advanced birthday application could allow friends to organize in groups to buy gifts for friends and give more variable notice time. A music widget which leveraged friends’ music tastes could be popped out right from the start page.

All of these applications can be built already and sort of work as widgets on the profile page. But Profile Page widgets allow friends to leverage bits of information about you and not the other way around. Homepage or Dashboard widgets would make Facebook a direct competitor to IGoogle or Netvibes and go from being one of a few Firefox home page tabs to the only one.

Facebook already knows that gifting flexibility to users and developers yields significant value. Already the news feed itself has been modularized; a third party with sufficient clout could release its own Facebook Dashboard Widget API (www.facebookdashboard.com is available). Google and Netvibes would be wise to offer widget-building tutorials specifically for Facebook Application developers. But Dashboard Widgets as key part of F8 would be more likely to succeed, being much simpler to integrate with an existing application and avoiding the ensuing compatibility that would likely ensue among third party social dashboards. Flexibility and simplicity, and everybody wins.

Alexey Komissarouk is a Technology and Business Consultant with literally months of experience with the Facebook F8 Platform. He is available at AlexeyMK[at]gmail.com

One of the biggest complaints about Facebook is the inability to embed videos in other places outside of Facebook. Thanks to Michael Medley, the creator of the Facebook Video greasemonkey script, that is no longer a problem. The script adds a small textbox to each video page which enables users to place the video elsewhere. I have embedded a video below of myself speaking at the first Washington, D.C. Barcamp about the Facebook platform using the script. In case you are interested I will be posting all of the D.C. Barcamp videos on my other blog. I wonder if Facebook is going to ban this. If Facebook decides to embrace this feature, they will become more of a competitor to MySpace, who’s video platform has become one of the largest on the web.