Archives: December 2008

The politics of Facebook are nothing compared to the politics of the state of California, but as Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, Chris Kelly has had plenty of experience in dealing with the social network’s ongoing negotiations with Attorneys General around the U.S. According to TechCrunch, Kelly plans to run for the office of Attorney General of California in the 2010 election as a Democrat, whereupon he would leave Facebook mid-2009 in order to run his campaign.
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This has been an amazing year for Facebook and the platform. The site has grown from just under 40 million active users at the beginning of the year and possibly more than 150 million by the end of the year. 375 percent growth isn’t too bad and to add to that, the site is now the largest global social network. I’ve take a look at all of the articles I’ve written over the past year. Those which were big news and those which have received the most traffic. Between traffic and news worthiness I’ve come up with the top 10 Facebook stories for 2008, ordered by date:
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Today Facebook has announced a new invite feature for applications: email. Yes, application users can now invite their friends to use your application via e-mail. When users enter their friends email addresses, they are not used against your daily invite allocation limit. I would say that developers should be enthusiastic about this but honestly I’m not sure how much of a value add this feature is.
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When Facebook fan pages launched last year, people rushed to lock up the names of large brands in the hopes that they could make a quick buck or get some free promotion. For most people the strategy hasn’t paid off. Fan page squatters are not the only people trying to profit from squatting on Facebook. Yesterday Brad Ward posted that he had found numerous incoming freshman groups were being squatted on as well and the company behind the squatting has the ironic name of “College Prowler”.
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Last week I wrote about how Facebook’s policy for widget developers was a little too restrictive. The reason was that I was ultimately prevented from making it simple for site owners to quickly implement a Facebook version of MyBlogLog. I still believe that Facebook’s policy is overly restrictive and new practices will need to be developed for Facebook Connect to proliferate. Just take a look at some of the tweets below found when searching for “Facebook Connect” on Twitter and you’ll see a few reasons Facebook Connect doesn’t already have widespread adoption.

Fortunately for me I have 8 years of self-taught web development experience under my belt. It was my job for the most part until I launched this blog last May. That’s why when I saw Facebook Connect launch for the masses, I figured that it was about time to dive in and try out some code. As many other developers are experiencing, Facebook Connect isn’t easy to implement the first time around. Once you start playing with it though you quickly begin to understand what’s going on.
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When Facebook released their platform last year hundreds of thousands of developers jumped at the opportunity to build new applications, but after a year and a half I have to wonder who’s helping who. Facebook clearly presents a large opportunity for brands and developers looking to gain exposure. Companies build applications, and then get their products spread throughout the social graph. It’s a great opportunity and it’s not surprising that many have taken advantage of it.

The system is genius on the part of Facebook as well though. Developers build applications on Facebook’s platform and they’ll grant you access to their users’ identities (who are also your users) on a temporary basis. You’ll then share all the activity they are doing on your application or site with Faebook. The more you share, the more likely your application will be distributed through the social graph and the more your application will benefit.
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When you think of fraud and identity theft on the internet, the first thing that typically comes to mind is stolen credit cards, not stolen Facebook profiles. In the fraudulent black markets that proliferate in private ICQ rooms and underground web forums, credit card information is currently trading for around 37 dollars per account according to Ecommerce Journal. Facebook profiles are trading for just over 1 dollar.
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We’ve covered extensively how Facebook has been impacting the global political landscape and much of what we’ve discussed has been about the spreading of democracy. Now for the first time, it appears that Islamic terrorists are preparing to spread Jihad through the largest global social network. In a post entitled “Invading Facebook: Theory and Practice”, Umar Abd al-Hakim of Syria covers how Facebook can be used to spread Jihadi media to the masses.
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Over the past two weeks I have been seeing a spike in the number of users emailing me to see how they can get their Facebook account re-enabled. Why are they emailing me you ask? Well, they’ve emailed Facebook, haven’t received a response and are now trying to figure out how to get their account back. While I’m sure that the frequency of these e-mails will increase as the site grows in size, over the past couple weeks I’ve seen a large increase in the volume of such emails.
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When I started to implement Facebook Connect last week I thought it was going to be quick and easy, boy was I wrong. While Facebook Connect was working as it should, the problem that I ran into was a problem that many people have run into when developing plugins for WordPress. If you have installed WP Cache, or in my case WP Super Cache, it’s pretty much guaranteed that you’ll have issues with displaying a user’s information after they login.
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