Archives: September 2008

Yesterday many Facebook users were reporting significant problems when logging in to Facebook. Some users couldn’t access the site at all while others were having issues with the feed and were not able to access other services around the site. As Facebook shifts the users over to the new design there continues to be significant problems.

Some browsers can’t render the new Facebook forcing many away from the site. Many of the other complaints have stemmed from users being unfamiliar with the layout of the new Facebook design. Ultimately Facebook will need to work on educating users about the new site layout. There has already been a substantial fall-off in usage of certain areas of the site due to the redesign.

While certain features are still available many users simply don’t know how to navigate the site more effectively. One specific feature that many users haven’t been able to figure out is how to remove applications. While it has been benefiting application developers, many users are now clueless on how to remove apps completely. That’s because it now takes 5 clicks instead of 3.

While Facebook will make the new design the default design, it’s clear that the roll-out may not be that quick. That’s because Facebook is still resolving bugs. Have you been experiencing issues with the new design?

According to a new University of Georgia study, Facebook profiles can be used to detect narcissism. How do you determine narcissism exactly from looking at a Facebook profile? Well “the number of Facebook friends and wallposts that individuals have on their profile pages correlates with narcissism.” The article continued that “Narcissists are also more likely to choose glamorous, self-promoting pictures for their main profile photos, while others are more likely to use snapshots.”

After reading through the article I’ve determined that I must be a narcissist! According to the study not everybody on Facebook is a narcissist. The narcissists tended to have a larger number of contacts on Facebook and use those contacts for self-promotion. Random people were also able to detect narcissists by looking at user profiles.

Many of the younger users who grew up on MySpace and Facebook have been criticized for being overly narcissistic. Unfortunately this study couldn’t determine whether narcissism was growing, only that it is detectable on Facebook. Have you found that Facebook users tend to be more narcissistic? Do you think that it is easier to determine narcissism with the help of Facebook profiles?

Over the weekend eBuddy announced support for Facebook chat. This means that anybody can now visit m.ebuddy.com and easily access their Facebook chat account. The service lets you see who is currently online and send messages to them in real-time. While Facebook already launched chat support via their iPhone application, there currently is no chat service that works on all mobile phones.

This new application by eBuddy is web-based which means that any mobile phone can access the application through their browser and they are good to go. Ultimately it would be more efficient to have a separate application for phones like Blackberry so that the chat can run non-stop in the background. For now, this service by eBuddy will have to suffice.

It will be interesting to see if instant messaging on mobile devices will compete with SMS, the traditional mobile messaging standard. Chat makes it easy to send a text message to anybody no matter where they live. That’s probably the one advantage that mobile instant messaging has.

Over the past few days there has been a lot of buzz about Facebook Beacon. I wrote last week that Beacon was not actually relaunched but was instead never shut down. In the past day though, Facebook has shut down promotions of beacon and Techcrunch confirmed that Facebook Beacon was on the way out the door. Facebook Connect is the new system.

Beacon Was a Failed System

When Beacon launched, Facebook learned a lot of lessons including how not to launch a new advertising product. One of the largest problems initially was that the service was opt-out instead of opt-in. Immediately there was a substantial amount of backlash within the blogosphere about the new offering. Within days, Facebook made the system opt-in and suddenly we heard very little about the new product.

Last week a few bloggers noticed that Beacon was not completely gone and it drove some to write about how Beacon was back. While it had never left, it appears that Facebook may actually be shutting down the product for good as Facebook Connect begins to roll-out.

How Will Facebook Profit From Connect?

Beacon was launched as an advertising program that websites could participate in via direct agreements with Facebook. While the price of those partnerships were never revealed, it was clear that Facebook intended Beacon to be another revenue generator. So as Facebook Beacon slowly disappears and becomes a small piece of Facebook’s history, Facebook Connect is beginning to roll-out.

As I wrote last week, Facebook Connect is essentially the same as Facebook Beacon. The only difference is that there is no unnoticeable pop-up in the lower corner of your browser notifying you of an action that’s about to be posted to Facebook. The system is opt-in and this time around there is a good chance that the service could become commonplace across the net.

So if Beacon was intended to be an advertising product and Facebook Connect is essentially the same service for any site on the web, how does Connect help advertisers? Facebook Connect makes it easy for advertisers to promote a user’s activities taking place anywhere on the web. Did they just look at your product on another site? Post about it to their news feed.

Did a user just read an article on your news site? Post about it to their news feed. Facebook Connect makes it easier for product and service providers to publish any activities of a user within that company’s domain. This is a powerful product but how will it make money for Facebook? While Facebook has stated nothing about pay for placement, the only thing I can think of is exactly that: pay for placement.

While it could be a conflict of interest (the same way that Google owning an SEO company would be a conflict of interest), paying to ensure news feed stories make it to the general news feed is not a far fetched idea. Just last week Fred Wilson posted about opening up the feeds to marketers. While Facebook already has paid news feed advertisements, this could be another type of them.

If Facebook decides to move forward with paid promotion of news feed items from Facebook Connect activity, I can guarantee you that a large number of bloggers will lash out about the conflict of interest. Facebook needs to be making your news feed better, not charging advertisers to make it more inefficient. There’s one other way that Facebook can generate revenue that I’ve spoken about previously.

Facebook could start extending the Facebook advertising network to other sites with the help of Facebook Connect. While Facebook advertising has experienced mixed results on Facebook, off the site, the advertisements could prove to be much more effective. A few sources I spoke with last year suggested that Facebook had been testing out such a service but has yet to officially roll anything out.

How do you think Facebook will generate revenue from Facebook Connect?

Update
Facebook contacted me to let me know that Beacon was never actually an advertising service which is why they went and removed it from their “Business Services” page over the weekend. Also, we will see Facebook Connect rolled out across individual sites over the coming weeks and months and then later this fall Connect will be rolled out for everyone.

Yesterday afternoon Facebook posted that they had updated their Lexicon tool with a few new features. One feature is the sentiment feature which lets you see what the sentiment is for various topics based on wall comments. There is also a pretty slick associations feature which tracks what words various terms are associated with by date.

Currently Facebook is displaying a sample of the new Facebook Lexicon feature with 17 terms. Once it is rolled out completely users will be able to enter arbitrary terms. Right now the primary words are politically associated. One of the interesting charts is of the sentiment toward Sarah Palin since she was announced as the Vice Presidential candidate on August 29th (shown below).

Another feature, “pulse”, shows keywords “that frequently occur in the Profiles of users who mentioned” a given topic. “They are ranked by how many times the keyword occurs and how closely associated the keyword is with the topic.” There is also a maps feature which shows where people are talking about a given topic. Currently the feature is limited to the U.S., Great Britain and Canada.

Go take a look at the new Lexicon service to demo all the new features.

As many others in the blogosphere have noted, Facebook decided to join the national talk like a pirate day fun. By visiting the translations application you can quickly convert your Facebook interface into pirate jargon. The advertisements on the homepage sidebar have now become “ArrDs” and recent stories in the news feed have become “Recent Tales”.

Pretty much everything else has been translated as well. If you are looking to talk like a pirate, go to the translations application and select “English (Pirate)” as your language. Have fun!

This afternoon Mark Zuckerberg published a post regarding the new design. The post is reminiscent of what he published when the news feed was first rolled out an massive backlash ensued. As the protest against the new design has reached millions of users Zuckerberg felt compelled to comment:

It’s tempting to say that we should just support both designs, but this isn’t as simple as it sounds. Supporting two versions is a huge amount of work for our small team, and it would mean that going forward we would have to build everything twice. If we did that then neither version would get our full attention.

As such Facebook is going to move over to the new design but they are willing to incorporate feedback and ultimately nothing is final. While it would be great if the company could reveal a new design and be done with it, unfortunately there are still remaining changes to be made. According to Mark Zuckerberg 25 percent of people did not decide to continue using the new design after trying it out.

That’s a substantial amount. While we aren’t sure when the full design will be completely rolled out but given this new post we have a feeling that it’s close to complete. It will be interesting to see how loud the backlash against the new design gets before all is said and done.

Last year I got a juicy tip that Facebook was actively interviewing executives to head up what was going to become the Facebook Music division. Since then little information has been revealed about a service and many have assumed that iLike was going to be Facebook’s only music service. With MySpace preparing to release their own music service, the topic is back in the hot seat and some are wondering if Facebook might take a shot at releasing a competing service.

Internal Conflict

From people I’ve spoken to over the past week it sounds as though there is still ongoing debate within the rankings at Facebook. There are still people at Facebook that are pushing for a Facebook Music service but unfortunately not everybody wants this to happen. For one, there is some serious political issues. Mark Zuckerberg is friends with the Partovi brothers who run the iLike service and launching a competing service would most definitely spark some tension.

The conflict still remains and no final decisions have been made. While the conversation may have been pushed aside while more important issues are resolved (such as the new Facebook redesign), a service could still emerge.

MySpace Music is the Test

Facebook is sitting on the sidelines to see how MySpace Music performs when it launches later this month. With MySpace anticipating the new service to be a competitor to iTunes, there is much hype surrounding the product and everybody is waiting to see what happens. If the service does in fact generate a substantial amount of revenue Facebook will have to seriously consider launching a competing service.

With no quick solutions to boosting the company’s revenue, selling digital products seems like a great way to get there. Given that social networks have become one of the largest centers for consumer attention online, it seems like a perfect fit. Back in June of last year Sam Huelatt posted that Facebook could be the shopping mall of the future. I agree. The metaphor of social networks as digital shopping malls makes a lot of sense.

Social networks are sites filled with passive shoppers. Now we just need the products to tempt them. Music could be one of the best fits. For now Facebook Music doesn’t appear to be an immediate offering but by no means is the Facebook Music story over.

There’s some news being posted around today that Facebook Beacon is making a comeback! Well my friends, it never went away. You just probably never interacted with it if you didn’t notice it. If you’ve visited sites including Kongregate or Fandango you would have noticed that the service still functions as before. Techcrunch and Mashable also picked up the story.

Looks like even the technology media seems to forget about these things. No, Beacon didn’t disappear, it just wasn’t as obvious as it was previously. Another thing that will be functioning in a similar fashion to Beacon: Facebook Connect. While it doesn’t work exactly like Beacon, Facebook Connect will let anybody add Beacon like features to their site.

The only difference is that a suspicious looking pop-up at the bottom of the site doesn’t randomly show up when you visit a site. Instead you will be forced to log-in and grant access to the site you are visiting. In contrast, Beacon doesn’t require you to log-in. Beacon is actually more of a promotional offering in which sites can pay to have user actions published via their newsfeed (and mini-feed) without logging in to the service.

Is it a little more invasive? Definitely! Does it make sense for promotional purposes? Totally! So welcome back Beacon, a service which never actually went away. Some of us just forgot that it’s still around.

Facebook has announced that they will soon begin traveling around the country to recruit the brightest individuals in the country. While they haven’t actually stated it as “the brightest”, the list of Universities makes it pretty clear what they are looking for. Right now they will be traveling to Berkeley, Brown, Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, Columbia, Cornell, Duke, Georgia Tech, Harvard, MIT, Michigan, NYU, Stanford, Texas, UCLA, UIllinois, UNC, Washington, Waterloo and Wisconsin.

They also plan on recruiting from a few MBA schools including Berkeley (Haas), Harvard Business School, MIT (Sloan), Northwestern (Kellogg) and Stanford GSB. The company now has over 700 employees and continues to grow rapidly. If you are fortunate to attend one of these schools, go check out the University Opportunities page.

It also appears that Facebook is using some of the classic Google recruiting models. The company has posted a puzzles page where software engineers can go find interesting puzzles and submit innovative solutions. There is a high demand for top tier developers and this is a great way to filter out qualified developers. Some of the initial puzzles actually seem pretty straight forward and not too complicated. If you are a developer and want to work for Facebook it may be a great way to get hired!