Archives: April 2008

One of my German readers sent me a message earlier this morning notifying me that all German users now have access to Facebook chat. If you are into reading German feel free to check out his blog post. For those of us in the U.S. that aren’t fortunate to be in one of the existing networks with chat, we will have to resort to getting a sneak peak of Facebook chat.

Not sure why they decided to open up to Germany users but then again, Germany only accounts for around 400,000 users whereas all the U.S. networks amount to millions. German is also one of the initial languages that Facebook translated into so chat can already be displayed. Does this mean that France and Spain can soon expect chat to launch in their networks as well? Possibly!

It appears that Facebook is rolling out their chat slowly and testing scalability. I would guess that we will see them launch fully within the next month or two once they have tested their servers with tens of millions of users.

Still don’t have access to Facebook chat but want to take a sneak peak? One person emailed me this morning with details on how to do it. I tried it out and it worked for me. There were some minor issues but at least you can take a look and possibly test it out. All you need is the web developer toolbar and an installation of Firefox or Flock.

Once you’ve installed the developer toolbar, login to Facebook. Click on the “Miscellaneous” in the toolbar followed by “Show Hidden Elements.” The end result is what you see on the left. It appears to be a stream of all your recent notifications as well as basic access to chat. I tried connecting to the chat server but was unsuccessful. Facebook chat has been experiencing an extremely slow roll out and the majority of users still don’t have access to the tool.

There has been little feedback about the tool since its launch a few weeks ago. I already have a ton of chat applications and adding one more to the mix isn’t a necessity. Additionally, if you have a large contact list on Facebook your odds of receiving a random message is significantly increased, resulting in a reduction in productivity. Have you been fortunate enough to receive access to chat already? What are your thoughts on the feature? Thanks to Julian for the heads up!

Media Post has written, “A Texas resident has filed a federal lawsuit against Blockbuster for participating in Facebook’s Beacon program.” According to the suit, “Blockbuster violated the federal Videotape Privacy Protection Act by sharing information about her movie rentals and sales with Facebook without first obtaining her written consent.”

In the country with the most law suits in the world, it comes as no surprise that Facebook has been involved one way or another in some sort of legal issues over the past few months. Given that Facebook’s site has substantial privacy implications, I’m guessing that they will continue to be involved in legal issues and end up employing an entire team of full-time legal advisors. The complainant is seeking “$2,500 for each violation of the statute.”

There is no word on how many violations have occurred but this is a class-action suit so every time that blockbuster user data is being used would be included. Mike Arrington of Techcrunch should be part of the suit as I have seen him in my newsfeed plenty of times promoting one video or another. While this is the first Beacon related suit, I’d imagine that we will see more to follow as the program has already been a center for controversy since its launch.

According to the article, Facebook is not commenting on the suit.

Last night OpenSocial applications went live on Orkut starting in India. Given that India is one of the most popular networks on Orkut, this is pretty big news. In contrast to Facebook which had overloaded profiles thanks to the influx of over 20,000 new applications, Orkut is limiting users to adding up to 25 applications to their profile. “In the coming weeks” Orkut applications will be going live worldwide.

Read more on Social Times.

Tonight Facebook added a new feature that enables user to import digg to their mini-feed. Want to promote your Digg stories discretely? Now you can! Your recently dugg items will show up in your friends’ feeds automatically. Now your fellow diggers can’t complain that you were promoting your recently dugg stories on purpose. This will surely prove popular with the Digg fanatics out there. While I can’t say I’m a Digg addict, I can say that I’m an occasional user and being able to import my Digg activities could prove useful.

The feature is not complex and does not include all of the features I’d like to see. The service simply goes and checks your digg account on a periodic basis to see if you have added any new stories. If you have it puts them in your mini-feed. Currently I’m not so sure as to what the delay time is. I tested it out by digging a story and waited for it to display in my mini-feed.

After 5 minutes I was without a story so I decided to stop waiting. Whatever the case, Digg is an extremely popular site for sharing content. Integration with Facebook makes the service more viral and can enable your dugg stories to spread throughout the social graph. So keep on digging!

Earlier this week, Ted Leonsis posted about the future strategy of Facebook. He hits on how Facebook needs to figure out what they want to become and whether or not they “want to be needed or loved as a brand and as a service.” It’s the utility versus entertainment question and ultimately I think Facebook has already stated that they want to become the most effective social utility.

There only point of failure in my own opinion is that they haven’t yet manifested their ultimate goal which is being the center location of social knowledge. What is social knowledge? Earlier today I touched on the difference between social and search and how social could ultimately become the future of search. First they will need to have the largest aggregate of users’ social data and then be able to decide what individuals’ expertises are.

Facebook is best positioned to become the center of social on the web. They are rapidly becoming the largest social site on the web and is most effectively aggregating data about relationships and the conversations between them. As Ted says in his post, Facebook “will also have to innovate and redefine utility-like services such as email, messaging, search, chat, storage and self-expression.”

I’ve argued this before. Facebook has the potential to redefine how we handle email overload by creating filtering systems which are based on our social graph. Rather then going into details on the subject again, I’d rather simply say that Facebook is in the position to become the social search engine and the social homepage of the net. Since much of our information will be socially filtered, we need a system which most effectively maps the graph and tracks the influence of people.

There are an endless number of ways that Facebook could improve their system to become the center of social on the web. The only problem that they face is they become increasingly cluttered as the community grows. If they can provide more systems to reduce the clutter and reduce the novelty of their site, I think Facebook could become the center of social on the web. What do you think? Will Facebook be our central location for tracking all that’s social?

Facebook just recently settled a lawsuit by the founders of ConnectU who claimed that Mark Zuckerberg had stolen their code and their idea to create Facebook. Within weeks, the beginning of a new story is becoming more public. Aaron Greenspan, who is releasing a book on the topic, claims that he coined the term Facebook and was using it for the houseSYSTEM, a social network which he founded at Harvard.

Ultimately, there were numerous social networks that were being created on the Harvard campus around the same time Zuckerberg launched Facebook. Even I was building my own social network at the time. Either way, Aaron Greenspan sent me a copy of the cancellation filing that he is submitting to the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office requesting that the Facebook trademark (as well as a number of others) be cancelled.

Is this a way to build buzz for his upcoming book release? Possibly. So far there has been no legal action taken by Aaron Greenspan aside from a filing to the U.S. PTO which is really not much of an action, it is instead more of a statement then anything else. It will be difficult for Greenspan to file any sort of suit following the launch of his book since it could be argued that the suit is being used for promotional purposes.

While I’m not sure what side is “the truth,” I will leave it to the justice system and the heavens to make a decision about that. In the meantime I’m going to read an early copy of Greenspan’s new book and I’ll be sure to let you know what my thoughts are. Below is a copy of the first page of the cancellation statement being sent to the U.S. PTO:

Earlier today I had the opportunity to speak with David Recordon of Six Apart. He has been working on a Facebook application for the past few months that is pretty interesting and extremely simple. The application enables bloggers quickly post their blog posts from within Facebook and send notifications of that post to Facebook, Twitter and Pownce. I’ve been wondering for a long time why nobody had created an effective blogging software for Facebook.

While there is currently no WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor, it creates a simple interface for posting to your Typepad, Wordpres, Blogger or Movable Type blog. As David Recordon told me on the phone earlier today, the goal is to “bridge the gap between social networking and blogging.” The application makes it easier for bloggers to pull in their content from their own sites.

The application is extremely simple but David expressed the desire to add on features if the users express a need for more. You can find more by reading about it on his post on his blog. Six Apart decided not to add any viral components to this application because they wanted to focus on utility. While this will most likely have a negative impact on the growth of the application it will most definitely have a positive impact on the user’s experience.

If you want to blog within Facebook go check out the Blog It application.

Buddy Media new york based social media company has raised $6.5 million and will be announcing the launch of their new ad network later tonight. This is their Series B financing and consists of Softbank, European Founders Fund, GreyCroft Partners, Ron Conway and Buddy Media’s Series A investors.

Read more on the Social Times

In the next hour, a post will be going up to the Facebook blog announcing a brand new service that tracks the words used in wall posts to determine what’s popular. This is similar to the Google Trends service which tracks all queries made by users on the popular search engine. The new service enables users to “query as many as five strings of a single word or two-word combinations.” Want to figure out how popular something is on Facebook? Now you can with the new lexicon feature.

The walls from groups, events and profiles will be included in the Lexicon. Wall posts have been tracked since September 8th, 2007. If you’d like to use the tool, go check out the Facebook lexicon. Overtime, Facebook is going to “consider adding additional sources of public and semi-public data on Facebook.” This new tool enables Facebook to flex their data pooling muscles thanks to the massive amounts of data currently displayed on their service.

Currently the service does not search through the inbox, chat messages or invite messages. It will be interesting to play around with the data to see what are the most popular things discussed on Facebook. I would guess birthdays are the most popular wall post and “get well soon.” Have you found any interesting data after playing with the new Facebook lexicon service?