Archives: July 2008

Late last night Facebook updated user newsfeeds under the new profile design. The move was expected as Mark Zuckerberg gave a first preview during the f8 keynote last week. The new feature enables users to filter through “Top Stories”, “Status Updates”, “Photos” and “Posted Items”. This means that users are now going to have access to many more news stories beyond the pre-filtered ones that Facbeook chose to display. There are two significant changes to this update.

FriendFeed-Like Commenting Added

One of the most significant changes is that there is now commenting on certain news feed items directly from within the feed. This is one of my initial complaints when Facebook launched commenting for the mini-feed. My guess is that we will start seeing a lot more commenting taking place as the new site design is rolled out to more users. One downside of this new feature is that not all stories can receive comments. It appears that you can add comments to all posted items, none of the photos, some of the status updates and certain stories within the “Top Stories”.

While it is not a total addition of comments, this is yet one more step that Facebook has made to totally duplication all of FriendFeed’s functionality. As Facebook adds the ability to import from more sources, they will eventually replace FriendFeed for mainstream users.

The Return of Story Preferences

Facebook removed the first iteration of preferences on news feed stories which simply displayed at thumbs up and a thumbs down. This time around Facebook has gotten a little more specific. You can now choose whether or not you want more or less stories about a specific user and more or fewer instances of a specific type of story (e.g. Posted Items, Events, Photos, and Videos). One thing that users can’t choose to reduce the frequency of is Fan Page additions. My guess is that this is due to Fan Page news feed stories are related to Social Ads.

It will be interesting to see if this new version of the news feed preferences will succeed.

Conclusion

It’s clear that the Facebook News Feed has received a total makeover. There is now the addition of comments to stories and the return of preferences. Facebook moves closer to full FriendFeed functionality with each new feature. Given the site’s reach, this could soon totally eliminate the need for using the FriendFeed site by mainstream users. It will be interesting to see how the FriendFeed – Facebook battle plays out. If FriendFeed plays their cards right they could end up getting acquired by a competitor of Facebook.

If they don’t play their cards right, I honestly think they could be rendered useless for most users.

One of the big news stories this morning is that the Argarwalla brothers who founded Scrabulous have launched a similar application called “Wordscraper”. The application, which is similar in style to Scrabulous, has attracted over 8,000 people so far. It also appears that the brother no longer have an announcement message on Scrabulous and have instead completely pulled down the application. When you try to view Scrabulous a message appears which says “Application ‘Scrabulous’ has been restricted. We’re sorry but you’re unable to access this application due to restrictions put in place by either the developer of the application or by Facebook.”

How the brothers are driving traffic to the application is unknown at this point but my guess is that they are investing in application installs rather than cross promoting. Otherwise Hasbro could theoretically argue that the brothers leveraged Scrabulous, an illegitimate application, to cross promote their new application. While this is not a blatant violation of the terms, it could theoretically be argued that the brothers leveraged Hasbro’s brand to promote their new application.

As such it appears that the brothers will stick to traditional tactics and try to spend money on promotions. With all the buzz generated today, perhaps the brothers will get a nice free boost. While this new incarnation will most likely protect the brothers from future legal matters, obtaining over half a million daily active users again will definitely prove challenging. It’s unfortunate that the brothers had to completely remove the application rather than change the existing one.

It will be interesting to see if the team can generate as much buzz as before. This time around their going to try to do it legally!

Well the time for Scrabulous may have just come. As Caroline McCarthy pointed out this morning, the Scrabulous application is no longer running. When you visit the application a box appears that simply says “Scrabulous is disabled for US and Canadian users until further notice. If you would like to stay informed about developments in this matter, please click here.” The link then continues to a page that requests user email addresses.

The signs don’t look too good for Scrabulous who was sued last week by Hasbro. While we don’t officially know that this is the cause of the application being shut down, we do know that Scrabulous has been facing some heat from Hasbro for months now. Just a few weeks ago, Hasbro launched the official version of Scrabble on Facebook and after facing an uphill battle for new users, it looks like the company has turned to the law for protection.

Is this the last that we’ve heard from the Argarwalla brothers who developed the application? Right now We are completely unsure as no comment has been made yet from the dynamic duo. I’m hoping to receive a comment later today so I will be sure to update this post, if and when I do.

Update
Rajat Argarwalla has forwarded me the following statement on behalf of the Scrabulous team:

Facebook has informed us that they have received a legal notice from Hasbro in reference to the Scrabulous application. In deference to Facebook’s concerns and without prejudice to our legal rights, we have had to restrict our fans in USA and Canada from accessing the Scrabulous application on Facebook until further notice.

This is an unfortunate event and not something that we are very pleased about, especially as Mattel has been pursuing the matter in Indian courts for the past few months.

We will sincerely hope to bring to our fans brighter news in the days to come.

Last week following the f8 keynote Mark Zuckerberg, Ben Ling and Chamath Palihapitiya sat down to talk with members of the press. My internet access has been slow since then so I didn’t have the chance to upload the video I shot of the event. Below you will find a video of most of the questions asked at the press event. Enjoy!

Last week Facebook announced that it was suing StudiVZ, the German based copycat for running a “knock-off” version of the Facebook site. That comes a few months after the company launched in German. That’s not the only country that Facebook faces stiff competition from cloned social networks. In China, Xiaonei is the leading Facebook copycat and they have a massive war chest after receiving over $430 million in investments.

An AP article today highlighted a number of other clones that are competing against Facebook. In Russia, the social network Vkontakte already has over 14 million users. One Russian user of Facebook also claimed that the newly translated version of the site is “poor-quality Russian” thanks to the Translations application which lets users translate the site.

In many countries, Facebook is experiencing increasing traction but for those countries with existing social networks, it is much more difficult to convert users. One Facebook employee, Alex Moskalyuk, claimed that Facebook will spend its time innovating their product rather than chasing down competitors. While this month’s suit against StudiVZ goes against that trend, at f8 last week, one Facebook spokesman also emphasized that the focus continues to be on innovation.

While Facebook continues to grow at a rapid rate, the real question is if Facebook will decide to switch strategies once growth starts to slow.

Apparently there has been a little bit of an uproar over the past few days over one of the actions on Slide’s SuperPoke application. Users were able to “shank” each other. “Shank” is a slang term which refers to stabbing other people. The action was considered distasteful as there have been a number of London teenagers who have been killed this year in violent attacks. Slide decided to have the feature removed following being contacted by the Sun. When asked to comment on the issue a Slide spokesman stated:

“Slide does not condone violence whatsoever, and our SuperPoke! application is meant to foster fun, virtual communications between friends. We have removed this particular action as it misrepresents the SuperPoke! brand”

This highlights the complex relationship that developers have with Facebook. Don’t expect the SuperPoke application to be approved for Facebook’s new Great Apps Program anytime soon. Whether or not this was Facebook’s call is debatable. One user on Facebook simply suggested that users not use the feature. Unfortunately it wasn’t within a user’s control to prevent themselves from being shanked by other people. As such, the feature was shut down.

Update
Slide has been in contact with us and they said that it appears that the Sun put an interesting twist on the story. Slide has not been contacted by Facebook about shanking users. Apparently the Sun blew this out of proportion and the article spread around various media outlets, including the multiple sources I received this information from. Gawker provides a good take on the story. Slide sent me the following comment:

1) Facebook did not force us to do anything; we were contacted by The Sun last week – the first time we had even heard that there might even be a hint of misunderstanding about this particular action. We immediately removed the action because it is true that it does not represent the SuperPoke! brand, which is about fun, often silly, messages that friends send to each other. We also gave The Sun immediate comment, which they did not include in their initial coverage.

2) There has never been a user outcry; we have millions of SuperPoke! users and get comments from them all the time – the vast majority are positive and no one has complained about violence. The Sun is a tabloid and sensationalized this story to the extreme – they have never told me who they were getting their claims from.

Today Facebook announced the hiring of a new Director of Engineering, Mike Schroepfer. Mike led the the development team at Mozilla and was CTO at Sun Microsystems. Mike will be reporting directly to Mark Zuckerberg until a Vice President of Engineering position is filled.

Facebook continues to hire top tier employees to add to its ranks. There has been a significant amount of discussion about new hires as well as previous executives leaving the company. In the media, many of the executive exits have been suggested to be a result of tension with Sheryl Sandberg, the ex-Google turned Facebook exec. Based on the people I have spoken to the company has been turned around since Sheryl joined and many employees feel the company is now on the right path.

As the company expands, I’m sure we will see an increase in executive hires. While the development team at Facebook was already a world-class team, I’m sure Mike Schroepfer will be a great addition.

An interesting thing happened to me over the weekend when I was down in Miami this weekend. At some point during the weekend I logged into Facebook and noticed an ad for South Florida Rehab Homes. Prior to now, I always thought the Facebook ad targeting program used profile data to target users. For instance, if you try to create an ad through the Facebook Social Ads tool, you can target by location.

I always assumed that when you selected a city, state or country, the information was displayed via profile data. If you select Florida, the estimated number of users in that demographic is 1,348,540. According to the Social Ads help section, “Facebook determines the location of a user based on IP (Internet Protocol) addresses, which can help identify the country or city where a user is physically located. The location of a user is not based on the city or hometown they may have listed and is also separate from any geographic networks that they may have joined.”

My guess is that the estimated number of people that will see your ad versus the actual number differs substantially. Does this matter? I think so. For instance, imagine if I’m a visitor to Florida versus a resident. The “Rehabs in Florida” advertisement most likely won’t be as appealing for visitors. Facebook could easily determine that I’m a visitor since my current location varies significantly from what I’ve actually entered in my profile.

Facebook has had challenges in developing more relevant advertisements and I think this is just one example of an area that Facebook could improve. Perhaps Facebook could add one more option to their targeting form when creating a new advertisement which allows the user to select between “Residents & Visitors, Only Visitors or Only Residents.” Just a thought!

According to Facebook, only 5 percent of users have been granted access to the new profile design. This is taking place while Facebook works through it’s bugs and responds to user feedback. It is clear that everything isn’t completely ready for prime-time yet. Personally, I have been having browser issues with my chat not displaying and there have been little glitches hear and there. It’s smart that Facebook didn’t roll it out for everyone overnight as all the bugs probably would have created a serious backlash.

This also means that there is still potential for user revolt due to the new design. Facebook users tend to be highly reactive to significant changes and the new design will most likely not be an exception. The only reason that no major backlash has occurred yet is that the new design hasn’t been rolled out to the majority of users. There is no word on when Facebook will finish rolling out the profile to users but at least one person that I’ve spoken with said it will at least be a few weeks before it is completely rolled out.

It’s clear that the new design has an emphasis on improving the overall user experience. Whether or not users think it actually does has yet to be seen. Do you have access to the new Facebook design? Would you describe your experience as positive?

Think Facebook knows a lot about you from all the information you enter into the site? Well it now appears that Facebook may soon know a lot more than you thought. In the past few days Facebook added a new feature on the Friends page which enables you to view “Friends without Facebook Profiles”. I checked it out and Facebook seems to think that none of my friends aren’t on Facebook. While inaccurate, I’m not sure if I am relieved to see that Facebook doesn’t know which friends aren’t registered.

So how does Facebook mysteriously determine which of your friends aren’t on the site? One theory I have is related to photo tagging. Frequently, users will tag other people in photographs that haven’t registered for the site. My guess is that if you end up in enough photos with that unregistered user, they will be added as a friend not on Facebook. Another theory I have is related to Facebook’s new Facebook Connect feature.

When you login to a site outside of Facebook with Facebook Connect, the external website has the ability to pass back all of your friends that you are connected with on that site. In turn they pass back all of the email addresses and names of your friends. If that email address hasn’t been registered on Facebook they will show up in your friends list as “Friends without Facebook Profiles.” Do you have any other theories about how this shows up?