Category: Facebook

Facebook Fan Pages Improvement

I just noticed this improvement to Facebook fan pages, which may make them a lot more popular.

It’s now really easy to share a fan page with your friends. In the upper right navigation of fan pages, you now see the following:

facebook fan pages

When you click Share with Friends you get a standard sharing interface, like this:

jeremiah.jpg

I like Jeremiah a lot, but this graphic is for demonstration purposes only. I don’t think my kids are really into Web Strategy. 😉

But on my Facebook profile I have posted a link to a fan page we’re developing related to my work. Previously there wasn’t an easy way to share these pages. Now you can do it passively (by posting to your profile) or actively (by choosing to send a message to particular friends.)

This could make pages much more useful and worthwhile. But for organizations and companies, I agree with Jeremiah that it’s important to have a strategy and plan for how you will engage.

The voluntary sharing feature just makes it more likely those strategies will succeed if you engage meaningfully.

Netflix on Facebook

Netflix Facebook

The posts have been sparse for the last couple of weeks for three main reasons:

  1. Life isn’t blogging. This will surprise some of my co-workers. I had 11 days off from work, during which time we had about 35 extended family members celebrating Christmas in our home and had our college students home. When you’ve got all that real life happening, virtual connections via social networks take a back seat.
  2. I’ve been switching computers, from a Macintosh PowerBook G4 to a MacBook Pro. I expect to be writing about that soon (the process has been great, and I love the new laptop), but it’s taken some time to be sure I have all of the files synchronized. It’s been a good chance to do some digital file hygiene, and get rid of files that had built up over the last three years or so.
  3. Netflix. While we also patronized our local cinema, including 10 of us catching the Enchanted matinee on Christmas Eve (I also took my bride to National Treasure: Book of Secrets and my youngest to Alvin and the Chipmunks), by far the biggest consumer of our family leisure time was Netflix, both in the DVD methodology and through the “Watch Instantly” feature.

That’s why I was excited to see the development of a Netflix Application for Facebook (hat tip: Anthony LaFauce) that puts the movies you’re watching and the movies in your queue on your Facebook profile.

Read Anthony’s review for fuller details, but I installed it and it’s pretty nifty. It’s one more example of Facebook being a platform that can integrate feeds from your various web activities in one place.

Some people complain about Facebook being a walled garden, and that you can get data in but can’t export it.  Some kinds of export and feeds have happened, but mainly Facebook is taking the Apple approach: engineer such a great experience that people will want to use it as the integration point (like iTunes and the iPod) because it’s so easy.

Compared to the vaporware of Google’s OpenSocial, I think it’s a winning strategy for social networking.

Facebook Friend Grouping – Finally!

I’ve said previously that grouping of friends within Facebook was an inevitable new feature because of the very logic of the service, and that this would substantially aid Facebook’s effort to edge out LinkedIn as the place for both professional and personal networking. If Facebook wants to accurately represent the “social graph” it needs to enable users to account for the fact that some friends are closer than others.

Facebook users got some great news just before Christmas (and in my family time off, with three straight days of Christmas visitors I haven’t been blogging, so I’m just getting around to writing about it.) Facebook has implemented the first phase of friend grouping, and it’s really well done.

Applications like “Top Friends” and “Circle of Friends” are fine, but the problem is they are out there for everyone to see. So if you add someone to a group using one of those applications, everyone who has access to your profile can see who is in what groups.

The best thing about the new baked-in friend grouping in Facebook is that it’s private. I’ve created five new friend groups, for example, but they’re only visible to me. So I can organize my Facebook friends in a way that makes sense to me, which enables me to have various spheres that reflect the reality of how close we are.

The other neat new part of the Facebook friend grouping is the ability to send a group message to everyone in the group. Here’s a message I sent earlier today to my Family friends.

friendgroupmessage.jpg

I found through sending this message that when you send a message to a group, every recipient sees the name of every other recipient. They don’t necessarily find out the name of the group list you’ve created, but they can “reply all” to all of the other members.

So, in essence, this is a great way to create a messaging distribution list, to take advantage of the spam-fighting features of Facebook. It makes it more realistic to rely on Facebook as a messaging alternative to email.

The even better news about this development of variable friend grouping in  Facebook is that now we know there will be further enhancements related to these groups. As Mark Slee concluded his post in the Facebook blog:

This is just a start. Expect to see lots of new Friend Lists features in 2008 that will give you more control over the information you share on Facebook and who you share it with.

When this becomes reality, and when we can truly segregate the personal from the professional within Facebook so that professional friends won’t have complete access to our personal lives, then we will see Facebook achieve its goal of being the one-stop social utility. Then, as Nick says, sites like LinkedIn will find the competition much more difficult.

Proud Papa Post

Time for a point of personal privilege for a proud Daddy: Sunday was a big day for Lisa and me, as our oldest daughter, Rachel, graduated from college at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse.

rachelgraduation.jpg

This will be part of the Christmas letter/blog post I write in the next week (a great way to beat the postal service mail delivery holiday crush and to include multimedia that isn’t possible with a paper card), but this is a big accomplishment that deserves a post of its own.

Rachel was introduced to her now-husband Kyle about two years ago through Facebook (which was my introduction to the service and its potential). They were married last Dec. 30, and he graduates in May. Later this year they’ll be headed to California, where Kyle will start seminary.

And of course, Rachel’s a blogger, too. Here’s the blog she writes (with occasional posts from Kyle), and here’s his.

Rachel’s official last day of college was yesterday, when she completed her finals.

Congratulations, Sweetheart!

In Case You Slept Through 2007

Jeff Jarvis has a year-end wrap-up column in The Guardian that does a great job of summarizing the key developments in the media world. He calls 2007 “the year of Facebook.” I certainly agree with that, as regular readers of this blog would attest. I highly recommend this column for anyone looking for a succinct analysis of trends affecting both mainstream and social media. And check out his blog for more regular dispatches on the topic.

Jeff says it’s been Facebook’s year, but the century belongs to Google…so far. It’s good that he added that qualifier, because the century is still young. Facebook didn’t exist four years ago. Google is less than a decade old. We can’t imagine the changes we’ll see in the next 92 years.

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