Archives: December 2007

Bobbie Johnson has posted an interesting article about Facebook whales. According to a recent New York Times article, people with more than 800 friends are perceived as insecure. Good think I currently have 760 friends! I should avoid approving my more than 200 friend requests so that I can maintain my personal security. Honestly though, I probably personally know a little over 500 of my contacts and the remainder are readers from my site. My younger cousin has over 1,000 friends though and is still in college.

I’d assume that college students and high school students are more generous with their adding of friends. Honestly, it is pretty difficult to know over 1000 people but for super networkers it is definitely feasible. Just think of all the people on LinkedIn with over 800 contacts. Are all those people insecure? I think some of them definitely are but not the majority. Then again we all have our own insecurities.

How many friends do you have? Do you think 800 is too many?

Facebook has finally consolidated their requests notifications. This has been something that many people had been calling for. A few months ago I wrote about request overload and the problems of having hundreds of application requests. While the average user may not have hundreds of requests, they do have tens and that has become a problem. As a result, Facebook has decided to consolidate those requests to make each user’s homepage more clear.

This is a great move by Facebook but developers may not be as satisfied with this update. Rather than showing all application requests, it now displays the most recent request. This is a huge relief for me but then again, now my requests page will only get more filled up. Thanks to Leora Zellman for giving me the heads up. Do you think this was a good idea to consolidate the requests?

So you decide to take the risk and join an online dating site. You upload your photos take a profile and of course link to your Facebook profile. Well, all of those activities are typical sans the Facebook link. Match.com has announced the launch of the Little Black Book application that will enable Facebook users to find other Match.com users within Facebook. In theory there is nothing different then other dating applications on Facebook except that this one links to your Match.com profile.

Isn’t the only reason for using Match.com or any other dating site is to keep your dating separate from your general social life and avoid visibility from your friends and family? I guess there is also the component of the unique matching algorithms provided by each dating site but let’s be honest. Users of this application will “receive potential matches among Facebook users and non-Facebook users who are signed up with Match.com.” Pretty much it is just an extension of Match.com.

Want to meet any of the users that are on Match.com? Go signup and create your own profile on their site. While not a bad marketing concept in theory, I don’t thing this will be very successful. There are already plenty of highly successful dating applications on Facebook such as the Are You Interested? application. If you plan on using the new Match.com application you will have to hold on until Thursday unfortunately (not sure why they sent out their press release two days early).

Today’s Wallstrip video is about Facebook. Lindsay doesn’t appear to be a big fan of the site thanks to all the ex-boyfriends that are hounding her on the site. Too bad you can’t buy stock in the insanely popular website. Howard Lindzon doesn’t think it’s such a hot site anymore. He’s “apathetic.”

Are you a big fan of writing but just can’t find the words to write an entire novel? Worry no more as you can now rely on the support of your friends and other members of Facebook to get the job done. The Just Three Words application is a simple concept that has powerful results. Users can either create a story from scratch or join another story. Each story has its own unique topic that has interesting twists and turns since each writer is limited to only three words per post.

There were some extremely well written pieces scattered throughout this application. With close to 5,000 daily users, it is not a surprise that this application has produced such impressive results. As I browsed through the various pieces created by the users of this application, the most common theme was a sexual one. Each piece sounded like a cheesy romance novel that you would find on the shelves of your local supermarket.

One story that I decided to participate in was about Facebook application and was created by my friend Dan Peguine. So far, the story has not become very elaborate. “Facebook apps are an enigma; some are ridiculously stupid and others mind-blowing. For example, the idea of writing an app where people make themselves heard through various voice recordings is absurd, yet also, well, sort of titillating.” I added the words “voice recordings is.” I think I am indeed a novelist at heart!

If you want to join the story with others, go check out the Just Three Words application.

A site called Facebook Business Solutions is a pretty funny example of some false Facebook advertising services for businesses. I have included the pictures of the services below but I thought I would highly some of the best ones. Facebook Surf enables brands to track their customers every move across the web. Not only will they know which sites they have visited but they will also know how much time was spent at each one.

“Facebook Recycle” is another funny one. It displays all of a user’s trashed files from their personal computer into their newsfeed. One of the funniest quotes from the recycle application description is, “The last thing Facebook wants to be for the user is intrusive. We have designed the Facebook Recycle Application to be very clean and neat, and to sit nicely on any user’s Profile Page. It runs quietly in the background, collecting data from the user’s personal computer, and requires a minimal amount of RAM.” This one is definitely less intrusive than Facebook Beacon

“Facebook Receipt” keeps physical copies of each of your physical receipts from purchases in stores. This is valuable data for advertisers! “Facebook Locate” enables brands to track their customer’s every move. And for that worst case scenario, “If the user heads in the opposite direction of your store, don’t give up! Facebook Locate will then begin to text various sales deals and promotions that you provide us.” Yes, Facebook Locate will bombard the consumer with advertisements enticing them to change direction and return to your store.

If you aren’t making purchases in my brand’s store all day long then you aren’t spending as much as you could! Check out the screenshots below. One thing that I should note is that this site is not affiliated with Facebook. They have literally duplicated the design of Facebook and as such I would assume that they will soon receive cease and desist letters in the coming days.

Facebook Surf

Facebook Image Scan

Facebook Recycle

Facebook Diary

According to the Toronto Star, Facebook is suing the company SlickCash for attempting to access the Facebook servers over 200,000 times. According to court documents, SlickCash was attempting to access user profile data without the approval of Facebook. Facebook is claiming to have suffered over $5,000 in damage. I would guess that the legal fees are going to end up costing Facebook more than $5,000 but at least they can get an injunction filed against the company.

Luckily for users, the porn company that attempted to hack Facebook was unsuccessful and only returned error messages. Too bad it took them 200,000 attempts to realize that they weren’t getting back valuable data. They must have hired a pretty crappy hacker! I can understand why any company would want to access user data on Facebook but a porn company? Perhaps they were looking to steal user emails to send out spam.

The lesson here is to not try and hack Facebook. Facebook has extremely valuable data about each of their users. I would even argue that they have better information about each of their users than even the State Department. As such, Facebook must have extremely high security in order to protect each of their users. It appears that their security worked effectively in this instance. I’m sure this won’t be the last time that we hear about attempts at hacking Facebook.

Last night I was browsing the web and came upon a post advertising mass Facebook friend adding. I had to check it out because God knows that I want 10,000 friends on Facebook that I don’t even know. Well you are actually limited to 5,000 friends on Facebook currently but I definitely don’t want to load up on people that I have no relation to whatsoever. The software is called “Facebook Friend Adder” but for some reason the audio on the site calls it “Facebook Friend Bomber.”

Anybody that decided it would be a good idea to end a product name with “Friend Bomber” probably doesn’t deserve to make many sales. As such, I thought I would protect my readers from making the poor decision of purchasing this product. Soon enough, this application will be blocked and will no longer be functional. While increasing the number of friends you have on Facebook can be useful for promotional purposes, using this software to do so is a horrible idea.

Oh and in case you were wondering you can now purchase this product and send out “Mass Facebook Amber Alerts.” Is this person serious? This is the biggest waste of money I have ever seen. Disagree? Be sure to let me know about it in the comments!

Someone had to say it. As CEO of an application oriented company, I’m really disappointed so far with the Bebo Platform Launch. My bias is upfront: my company was left out of the launch in Sports, an area where we were one of the leaders on Facebook. According to a graph on Adonomics, our Fantasy Football application against the soccer applications from our rivals Fantasy Moguls and Pickspal (both of whom were included in the launch). Looks like we’re crushing one and keeping fairly close with the other.

Here’s the essence of the Bebo Platform as explained by Mark Hendrickson on Tech Crunch:

“While applications from about 40 launch partners will go live tonight on the “new” platform (with a total of 50 applications), the platform won’t be open to other developers until a couple of weeks or so from now.”

So… Bebo is launching an application Platform and waiting a couple of weeks to open it up to other developers. Why even bother releasing a platform? Why not just say, “hey these are the hand chosen special companies that will get to grow on our platform” ? That’s what this launch feels like to me. The early companies are getting enromous advantages in growing their userbases and exploiting bugs in the current version of the Bebo platform. RockYou already has an application out with about 110,000 users and it hasn’t even been 48 hours since launch. In application platforms, it’s a huge uphill battle to catch up if you’re even a couple days late on launch.

Here’s an easy example comparing 2 similar applications from the Facebook Platform:

228,091 daily active users on Free Gifts

2,531 daily active users on iGift

The difference? iGift launched a little under a week on Facebook and Free Gifts was able to grow like fire before iGift was able to get their application out. The results are clear: Free Gifts is a dominant application.Imagine being 2-3 weeks late on a launch all because Bebo tied your hands behind your back and opened the golden doors to the hand picked companies. Now imagine that your company is doing just as well or better than the hand picked companies on other platforms. How would you feel?

Facebook has just updated their statuses so that “is” can be removed. The word “is” has finally become a throwback. Not much to announce except that it has been removed. It is almost a month since Facebook announced the change. Apparently there were a lot of technical issues that took place according to the developer news feed. Fortunately, Facebook has overcome those issues and the update is now live.