Category: Social Media

This is huge.

I noticed it when I got a Facebook message today on my Blackberry, and the actual text of the message was there, instead of a link that forced me to log in to Facebook to see the message content.

Then I saw the news confirmed in a couple of blogs tonight. As Michael Arrington says, this makes Facebook much more useful for messaging. And AllFacebook points out that the text of Wall posts also now is included in email messages.

Which suggests that Cory Doctorow’s comments from last week, as I said last week, overestimated Facebook’s venality:

Facebook is no paragon of virtue. It bears the hallmarks of the kind of pump-and-dump service that sees us as sticky, monetizable eyeballs in need of pimping. The clue is in the steady stream of emails you get from Facebook: “So-and-so has sent you a message.” Yeah, what is it? Facebook isn’t telling — you have to visit Facebook to find out, generate a banner impression, and read and write your messages using the halt-and-lame Facebook interface, which lags even end-of-lifed email clients like Eudora for composing, reading, filtering, archiving and searching. Emails from Facebook aren’t helpful messages, they’re eyeball bait, intended to send you off to the Facebook site, only to discover that Fred wrote “Hi again!” on your “wall.” Like other “social” apps (cough eVite cough), Facebook has all the social graces of a nose-picking, hyperactive six-year-old, standing at the threshold of your attention and chanting, “I know something, I know something, I know something, won’t tell you what it is!”

Facebook will likely see a short-term drop in page views because of this change, but this makes it a much more useful service that will lead to long-term growth.

If, as Doctorow said, Facebook was a “pump-and-dump” service, Zuckerberg would have sold for a billion-plus last year. He and his gang certainly made mistakes with Beacon, but they’ve come around and offered the global opt-out. And I thought Mark’s apology hit all the right notes.

About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I’d like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon….

It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better.

Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.

I’ve been impressed that the people working at Facebook really are in it to change the way people communicate. I’m glad to see that they seem to have come back to their senses.

Technorati: Facebook, email, Beacon, opt-out, privacy, Zuckerberg, Doctorow, Arrington, social networking

In a previous post I answered a question about how to have your blog posts automatically imported into Facebook. This led to a follow-up question on whether it’s possible to import other RSS feeds. “Can I bring the RSS feed for my company’s news release into my Facebook profile?”

Thanks to an application called Simply RSS, you can.

Not only can you add up to three RSS feeds to your profile, but you can also add feeds to a Page you’ve developed. This is particularly helpful for businesses and organizations, in enabling them to have their Facebook Pages regularly updated whenever they do a news release.

So I added Simply RSS to my personal profile, and also to the Mayo Clinic page we’re developing.

You can drag the Simply RSS box to either the wide or the narrow column of your profile or page. I decided it looked better in the narrow column, so here’s how it appears on my personal profile:

And here’s the one on our Mayo Clinic page, including one of our audio podcast feeds:

Overall, I would say this is a quite elegant way to add RSS feeds to pages or profiles within Facebook, and I look forward to seeing what other applications developed for profiles can also be used on pages.

What applications have you seen that would be good for an organization’s Facebook page?

Technorati: Facebook, RSS, pages, Simply RSS, feeds, social networking

In InformationWeek, “How Your Creepy Ex-Co-Workers Will Kill Facebook,” Cory Doctorow predicts Facebook’s demise because

Having watched the rise and fall of SixDegrees, Friendster, and the many other proto-hominids that make up the evolutionary chain leading to Facebook, MySpace, et al, I’m inclined to think that these systems are subject to a Brook’s-law parallel: “Adding more users to a social network increases the probability that it will put you in an awkward social circumstance.”

…

For every long-lost chum who reaches out to me on Facebook, there’s a guy who beat me up on a weekly basis through the whole seventh grade but now wants to be my buddy; or the crazy person who was fun in college but is now kind of sad; or the creepy ex-co-worker who I’d cross the street to avoid but who now wants to know, “Am I your friend?” yes or no, this instant, please.

It’s not just Facebook and it’s not just me. Every “social networking service” has had this problem and every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by it. I think that’s why these services are so volatile: why we’re so willing to flee from Friendster and into MySpace’s loving arms; from MySpace to Facebook. It’s socially awkward to refuse to add someone to your friends list — but removing someone from your friend-list is practically a declaration of war. The least-awkward way to get back to a friends list with nothing but friends on it is to reboot: create a new identity on a new system and send out some invites (of course, chances are at least one of those invites will go to someone who’ll groan and wonder why we’re dumb enough to think that we’re pals).

You can read the rest of the article here, but I think Doctorow (not a Facebook friend, and I’ve never beaten him up, either) is mistaken in his analysis. When he says “every user I’ve spoken to has been frustrated by” the problem of the Biffs of their past

coming Back to their Future, it suggests to me that maybe Cory flocks with some nervous birds. His reported experience doesn’t match mine at all, and my 40 or so co-worker friends on Facebook have a different story, too. Many of them are amazed at the people with whom they have reconnected. And on the few occasions they’ve gotten an unwanted “friending,” they just ignore it. Some are more active on Facebook than others, but none have felt the need to pack up and leave.

If it really was a 1-1 ratio of pleasant relationships renewed vs. creepy reminders of the past for “every user,” Facebook wouldn’t be growing at its phenomenal 3 percent per week. This is just the hyperbole of a columnist who makes a name by being controversial.

Facebook is much more like the phone than it is like Friendster.

There was a time when the telephone had lots of potential to put people in awkward social circumstances, during the party line era. Before the technology evolved to allow each family to have its own direct line and number, particularly in rural areas, several would be joined on one line. Each house had a different ring (or number of rings), but it rang in every house on the circuit, so you never knew for sure which of your neighbors was eavesdropping. See an Andy Griffith Show rerun for examples.

Direct lines made all the difference in creating some privacy, and as the number of people with phones increased the potential number of connections, the growth of the telephone accelerated. (That, incidentally, is why the Zune was a bomb; Microsoft touted the ability to share songs wirelessly, but that’s useless if none of your friends has a Zune.) But as phones have continued to evolve, so that now families like mine have six cell phones and no land lines, this is the way everyone communicates, whether by voice or by texting their BFFs.

Likewise, as Facebook continues to grow by 250,000 people per day, it becomes increasingly likely that you will be able to find and connect with long-lost friends. Or as Jeff Jarvis notes, younger people probably won’t lose touch with high school and college friends, unlike their parents’ generation.

Facebook’s privacy settings, if you take time to adjust them, have largely solved the “party line” problem. And when Facebook implements different categories of friends, a process that surely is underway, its “social graph” will recognize the fact that one label doesn’t fit all. Nick agrees.

Cory may even want to include his seventh-grade bully among his “acquaintances” if Facebook develops such a category, so he can keep tabs on Biff’s whereabouts. But I don’t understand why he should be so mortified about ignoring a friend request or “unfriending” someone. Does he think that person will seek him out for a physical pummelling?

Facebook’s pending multiple categories of friends, each with different user-defined levels of personal disclosure, will give the fainthearted an angstless way to move people into a more distant orbit without ejecting them from their personal solar system.

Facebook has billion$ of reasons to not become the next Friendster, and I’m pretty confident that Zuckerberg and Co. are learning from the mistakes of others and will build in the multiple friend levels that will make Facebook an important way for almost everyone to communicate. You’ll go there because your friends are there, and because you don’t have to hang out with those who aren’t your friends.

Packing up for a different social networking site may be an easy way to avoid an unpleasant social situation, but it still takes effort. I’m confident Facebook will do what it takes so people won’t feel a need to abandon the links they have in Facebook.

Technorati: Facebook, Cory Doctorow, InformationWeek, social networking, Jeff Jarvis, MySpace, Friendster, telephone, cell phone