Archives: May 2008

I got an email from a Facebook user today who had noticed that some of their privacy settings had been adjusted. The new change was the removal of the online status privacy setting within the user’s privacy settings page. The online status has now been moved to chat toolbar. While you can toggle your online status on and off, the one setting that isn’t there is the ability to differentiate your online status for friends and those that you aren’t connected to.

My guess is that the online status has now been limited to friends only. Whatever the case is for the new settings, a number of users started a discussion about the new privacy settings. I have a feeling that most of these individuals simply don’t understand the settings. As the platform continues to evolve, privacy settings will be adjusted and for a few people this will create confusion. Facebook should provide users with a description on how to adjust their settings given the new modifications.

This also emphasizes how users leverage their privacy settings to have different interactions with different people on the site. Many people use the settings so that they can protect themselves from having unwanted access to their profile by people they don’t know. Have you ever been confused by Facebook’s privacy settings? Are there additional settings that you think would be useful?

We’ve heard a lot about the Google executives leaving the search giant to go join Facebook but we haven’t heard much about people quitting Facebook. Kara Swisher is reporting that Adam D’Angelo, Facebook’s CTO, will be leaving the company. Over the past few days I have been hearing an increasing amount of buzz about increasing tension among executives over at Facebook.

Much of the tension revolves around the hiring of the new Facebook COO, Sheryl Sandberg. According to one source I spoke with, Chamath Palihapitiya used to be the number two in command and in any important decisions which Zuckerberg needed support on he would turn to Chamath. Sheryl has since replaced Chamath as the number two and it has created some interesting unresolved tension among the company execs.

While we don’t have many more details about what’s going on over at Facebook among the execs, Kara Swisher states that “Facebook will not be replacing the CTO role, sources said, but has a search underway for a VP of Engineering.” Facebook has non-stop changes taking place among the top brass and I would imagine that this will continue as Sheryl Sandberg tries to make some changes within the organization. It’s ironic that this news takes place while Mark Zuckerberg is travelling abroad. I think we all know who’s leading the company when he’s not around …

Check out Eric Eldon’s post for his take on things.

Adium has announced support for Facebook chat in their upcoming release. This is the third instant message application to add support following behind Digsby and Gabtastik. While there is no word on when the upcoming release will officially launch, I would imagine that it will take place in the coming week. Facebook chat is rapidly becoming a ubiquitous platform of communication.

I have been using Facebook chat an increasing amount since I have so many contacts on the site. While Facebook chat doesn’t let you grant selective access to users yet, I’d guess that they will soon add more features. I don’t currently use my Mac as frequently as my PC so I haven’t had the opportunity to check out Gabtastik. It has received positive reviews from a number of people that I’ve spoken to about it.

Adium is one of the most popular chat applications for Mac users and I’d guess that this upcoming release will be extremely popular. Adium already supports 14 other chat platforms including ICQ, AIM, Yahoo!, MSN, Google Talk and a number of others. This will add one more to the lineup. Read more about it over on the Adium blog.

Just over 24 hours after Myspace’s announcement regarding their Data Availability initiative, Facebook has responded with Facebook connect. According to Dave Morin, “Facebook Connect is the next iteration of Facebook Platform that allows users to “connect” their Facebook identity, friends and privacy to any site. This will now enable third party websites to implement and offer even more features of Facebook Platform off of Facebook — similar to features available to third party applications today on Facebook.”

This is a massive announcement and considering the timing I would imagine that Myspace is actually the one that is behind Facebook with the technology. There will be trusted authentication which means external websites will securely interact with the Facebook platform. This is probably the biggest news since Facebook’s platform launch less than 1 year ago. Rather than hearing about applications from now on, we are going to start hearing about websites that leverage the existing Myspace and Facebook social graphs.

Just as Myspace said yesterday, Facebook expects this new service to be available “within the next few weeks.” Within one year we have seen the emergence of platforms across all social network sites and now we are witnessing the extension of social connections to websites around the web. As I said yesterday, this industry changes every 6 weeks and it looks like ever year there is a massive announcement that transforms the way people and businesses interact on the web. This is one of those announcements.

For a while now, Facebook has enabled users to include a link to event locations via Google Maps. At some point in the past few days Facebook expanded the mapping functionality to now include Mapquest, Microsoft maps and Yahoo maps. Why did they decide to expand the mapping functionality? No word but I would guess that at a minimum Microsoft wanted to be included. Given that they are one of the largest investors in Facebook (largest in terms of dollar amount) they definitely have some sway when it comes to changes to the site.

Facebook’s events feature is now the most popular events feature on the entire internet, attracting more traffic then e-Vite and competing event websites. Maps are a critical feature for any event registration utility and it’s great to see Facebook add a few more features. Facebook continues to make minor changes on a regular basis. While I know a number of people would like to see a few big changes (including message search functionality), at least Facebook is continuously refining their product.

This is the second big change that we’ve posted about today. While Mike Arrington claims that Facebook will be removing the 5,000 friend limit soon, one source who spoke with Mark Zuckerberg last week told me that they aren’t removing the friend limit anytime soon. Whether or not the friend limit will be increased, at least Facebook continues to make changes which improve the overall user experience.

Do you like these new mapping features? Are there any other things that you think should be added to Facebook events? Thanks to Boris Silver of Sport Interactiva for giving us the heads up!

Facebook has put an alert up on the site’s network pages, alerting users that the network pages will no longer exists and suggesting that they go use groups instead. No word on why Facebook has decided to do this but back in April, Facebook completely killed network tab from within their navigation. A quick look at a geographic network page reveals that a large portion of the posts appear to be spam.

This move also emphasizes Facebook’s desire to focus on connecting people that already have a real-life connection rather than having people meet through the site. Unfortunately I don’t have any statistics on network page usage but I can guarantee you that traffic dropped substantially following their removal from the navigation. The removal of network pages also emphasizes how Facebook is looking to avoid duplication of content.

Will you miss the network pages? Did you ever use them? What impact do you think the removal will have on the overall experience on Facebook?

Have you ever noticed the “is twittering” prefix for Facebook statuses? If you are my friend on the site then you definitely have. The Twitter application on Facebook enables you to display your Twitter updates via your Facebook status. It makes it easy to sync and prevents you from having to update your status in multiple locations. Most Twitter users probably have the application already installed.

For many people the “is twittering” prefix was annoying. I regularly had users asking me what “this Twitter thing” is and why I use it so much. While it could have been Twitter that removed the “is twittering” prefix, that wouldn’t make much sense because it built brand visibility for the company. As of now it appears that this was an action by Facebook but we don’t have any confirmation from Twitter or Facebook yet on this matter.

While it’s not a substantial change, for those that view their Facebook homepage on a regular basis, it definitely can be. Twitter has been building traction and I think that Facebook could very well be one of the primary sources of new user registrations. As I previously said, the “is twittering” prefix builds brand visibility and ends up driving new users to the site. It will be interesting to see how this impacts Twitter’s growth but as of now a look at the Twitter traffic chart shows that the site is beginning to show the classic hockey stick growth. It will be interesting to see if this continues.

Human Pets, an application with over 50,000 active daily users, was shut down by Facebook due to pornographic pictures that were supposedly showing up within the application occasionally. Patrick Shyu, the developer of the application, was notified at 12 am in the morning and was given a 2 hour time frame to take down the photos or have the application removed. Patrick made a series of frantic emails to Facebook to keep the application up but was unsuccessful. This was in response to the following email from Facebook:

Hi Patrick,

We ask that you remove your application from the site until you have removed all pornographic content. Our pornographic policy is very strict and we gave you a deadline until now 11:00am pacific time Thursday 8 May 2008 and all pornographic content has not been removed from your application. Below are just a few URL links of content that violates our Platform Application Guidelines section I.1 (see http://developers.facebook.com/guidelines.php). We take this violation very seriously and will have to disable your application until you have fully complied with our policy, unless you take it down to remove the content.

[Links to 10+ pictures]

Sincerely,
Facebook Platform Developer Operations & Suppport

This is just one of many emails that were exchanged in a series of emails between Patrick and the development team. Patrick had apparently devised a system which enabled users to mark uploaded content as “adults only”. Facebook’s platform team was not in favor of this and after a substantial amount of back and forth the application was ultimately shut down. The problem was that when Patrick prevented users from uploading pornographic images, they revolted and ended up posting more making it impossible for the moderators to handle the volume.

Ultimately Patrick needs to make his application work if he is going to accept image uploads. I would argue that they should use the Facebook platform for uploading photos and as such the users who are uploading photos that violate the terms of service will be banned. I can’t currently access the application to see how it functions but here is where it used to be. It will be interesting to see if this application is added again or if it’s gone for good.

Earlier today Facebook, the Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett along with attorneys general from 48 other states and the District of Columbia today announced that Facebook has agreed to significant steps to better protect children on the social networking site. This agreement appears to be something similar to the one that Myspace had agreed to back in January. The purpose of this new agreement is to better protect children on social networks.

Facebook will be joining the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, which was created after the January agreement with MySpace, to explore and develop age and identity verification tools. Every three months the task force will report back to the attorneys general and ultimately issue a formal report with findings and recommendations at the end of 2008. Facebook is already provides the most granular privacy controls of any social network on the web.

There are a few additional things that Facebook has agreed to though. According to Tom Corbett, Facebook agreed to changes which include providing automatic warning messages when a child is in danger of giving personal information to an unknown adult, restricting the ability of users to change their listed ages, and acting more aggressively to remove inappropriate content and groups from the site.

As Caroline McCarthy pointed out earlier, “The only state that did not agree to Facebook’s plan was Texas, which likewise did not sign on to the plan that News Corp.’s MySpace created in conjunction with the attorneys general in January.” Privacy will continue to be increasingly relevant especially considering Myspace’s announcement of the Myspace Data Availability initiative.

Some people say that beauty in on the inside. The people over at nip/tuck believe that beauty comes in the number 1.618. While I’m not so sure about the accuracy of this number, nip/tuck has built an application which tests to see if you face comes close to the golden ratios. The application lets you select a photo from your albums and test out your beauty.

I didn’t have a proper portrait to test but I’m sure it would have come out a perfect 1.618 This application could be pretty controversial and as such I would have imagined it to gain some more substantial traction but so far the application has reached less than 3,000 people. The application also had a problem with zooming in to my my photo large enough. I’m not surprised that this application wasn’t successful because it has absolutely no social feature whatsoever.

It just goes to show that no matter what your brand is, it doesn’t mean your application will be successful. I think that they could have potentially made this application into some sort of beauty contest and offered rewards of some sort but all they really ended up producing was an ineffective flash application. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to gain much value out of using this application and I don’t think other users were able to either. If you want to have a shot at it and see if you can extract some sort of value from the application, go install the nip/tuck golden ratio application.