Category Archives: Facebook

Facebook’s News Feed – Aggregating Together Your Friends’ Social Activity History (Or Not)

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Tonight, we continue our walk through Facebook, looking at what it has to offer.

In today’s active global society, it’s hard to keep track of what’s going on with all of your friends. Facebook is ingenious because its convinced users to record their social history in one central location. That social history can then be easily exposed to those that are within your social network.

Within Facebook, this was first done with by getting a very high level view of what friends had changed their profile. Later, Facebook added the ever infamous News Feed, which makes every change within a users social history available for public view. As we all knew this caused a outcry.

During the outcry, users finally started to realize the level of detail that they were exposing to their friends. Now instead of just exposing less of their social history through Facebook, users decided to just hide themselves from the News Feed. It’s entirely possible that there could be things happening with your friends that you don’t know about because all you’re doing is paying attention to the news feed.

What if I wanna expose my social activity history to some people and not to others? One of the biggest added values of Facebook is being able to see that aggregated view of your entire network’s activity. If key people are being hid, it makes it less useful. The thing is I’m forced to treat my long lost friend from 5th grade the same way I treat my best friends. There is no way you can choose who you expose information to.

I think so much could be done with the News Feed. I’d love to see it be rethought or redone.

Is Facebook creating better community or making our relationships more shallow?

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Lately, I have been thinking a lot about Facebook.   Jeremiah, Scoble, and Nick can’t stop talking about it.  Scoble recently called Facebook “the new business card.” For me, my excitement goes in waves.  I get excited about it and then I two or three weeks without using it.

I just wonder… is Facebook helping us to stay in touch with our community or is it making our relationships more shallow and voyeuristic?

A few weeks ago, I was saying good bye to one of my friends who was moving out of town.   I said something like, “We should make sure that we’re Facebook friends.  It’ll help us all stay in touch.”   So a good face-to-face relationship has turned into the Facebook Newsfeed and Wall posts?  Whats up with that?

There is the Facebook Platform which people are so excited about.  Just take a look at the top applications… Top Friends, Super Poke, Graffiti, Free Gifts, Fortune Cookie, and Horoscope.    While poking people can be fun for a little while, which of these Facebook apps really benefit my life in any way?  They don’t send me running to my computer when I get home from work.

I think Facebook Groups is probably one of the most underdeveloped features in the whole product.  For the most part, people don’t take advantage of the actual group aspects of the application.  Facebook Groups have become profile labels.  You can  be in the “I like naps” group.  This group doesn’t talk about naps or plan get togethers to nap.  It’s just a label.

The Facebook Newsfeed is cool but some people use it and some people don’t.  A lot of times the people that I want to hear from or about keep their updates private and so I’ll never see them.   I dunno.

Just so I’m not all negative… Facebook Events are great.  If I’m marketing a get together, it’s one medium for getting the word out.  For some reason, I still prefer Upcoming as a main marketing tool.   I like Facebook Photos but I feel pretty emotionally invested in Flickr.  I like Facebook Video, especially being able to send my long distance friend video messages.

I dunno….

Over the next week I wanna write a series of posts about Facebook.  I’m going to dive into more of the features.  I want to dive into the philosophy of Facebook and see if I can identify what about it is missing and were it could be improved.  I’ll also see if I can identify what type of social need its filling which is causing it to be so successful.

Are We Replacing Real Relationships with Facebook, Jason Calacanis Asks

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In a recent post, Jason Calacanis asks the question…

Is Facebook a more efficient, rejection-free, surrogate for the real world? Is that what we want?

I think Jason Calacanis is on to something. Granted there are TONS of positives to it but people can use Facebook as a way not having to deal with relationships in real life.

With Facebook, I can decide who I want to or not to hear from. There aren’t as many surprises. It’s me crafting my own little world that I want to live in. Is that healthy?

Part of life is learning to live with what you can’t control.

More on this to come…

We Need a Facebook & Netflix Mashup

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For the longest time, I was a Blockbuster Online user (I’m not sure why). I recently changed over to Netflix. I’m still not completely sure how the services are that much different but I’ll be reporting back soon.

Anywho… I was thinking that there should be an application on Facebook which takes what movies that I and my friends have seen through Netflix and shows them in my Facebook newsfeed. For example, I just got the movie The Queen. My friends would be “Oh, Justin got ‘The Queen’ on Netflix. He thought it was great Maybe I should get it?”

This would be even better then what Flixster is trying to do with their movies Facebook application because you already have a service (Netflix) which is recording a user’s movie viewing habits and their reviews.

Too many new applications ask me to do too much. They want me to add all kinds of information into their system. The thing is the information already exists in other places.

What’s the latest application you’ve used where you’ve had to review something or enter something that you’ve already entered in for the thousandth time?

Getting More Work-Related Friend Requests on Facebook.

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Is it just me or has anyone else also been getting more and more work-related friend requests using Facebook?  I bet within three month’s ill see my boss sending me a friend request on Facebook.

LinkedIn needs to bust some butt and offer some extra value-added services to its users otherwise it risks a mass-exodus.  All these LinkedIn evangelists will become Facebook fanboys.

I don’t think Jeff Pulver is alone in seeing Facebook as an exciting and vibrant community, even if it is a closed platform where good data goes to die.

E-Mail was used for so much that Facebook, Pownce, and Twitter do better

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Since the dawn of e-mail, it has been used for every type of person to person communication that someone can imagine.

The thing is e-mail was getting used for so many different purposes that messages were getting lost. People were sending messages to say that they were on the way home from work and it was getting mixed in with everything else.

This is where lightweight messaging services like the Facebook Wall, Twitter, or Pownce.  They fill the role that email did but they do it better than email.

The Facebook Wall allows you to say a quick hello.  Twitter says what you’re up to.  Pownce allows you to send someone a quick link or file.   They each only do these simple tasks and they do it better than email does.  Plus with the messages siloed out into these different services, you can process them much quicker.

As Jeremiah Owyang points out, because of these lightweight messaging services, e-mail usage may be on the decline.  It really doesn’t surprise me.

Angela’s Thoughts on Facebook Being Unfriendly to a Global Audience

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Angela Randall over at AllFacebook.com wrote a good post about her frustrations with Facebook not being designed better for a global audience.

She makes some great points like:

1. Seasons. If I write that I took a course with another Australian in Spring 2006 (ie: Sept, Oct & Nov 2006) that is going to mean an entirely different time of the year to an American Spring. Not to mention that not many countries outside the US use the term “Fall”. Why not just say the months? Then it’s the same for everyone.

I thought her post was appropriate considering my last post .

Is Flickr Just the Start of More Translated and Localized Web 2.0 Apps?

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Flickr UI Translated
My Flickr account translated into Chinese (I think?)

If you haven’t already heard, this week Flickr released seven localized versions of their user interface. It is now available in French, German, Italian, Spanish, Korean, Traditional Chinese, and Portuguese. This is exciting news.

While Flickr may have some more issues to work out, I have a feeling this will play a huge role in Flickr more effectively attracting a much bigger global audience.

Yahoo! VP (and man who the Flickr team reports to) Bradley Horowitz, referring to the recent announcement, recently wrote in his blog, “Flickr is stupid, and late… but redeems itself.” I think we all can learn a lesson from this.

Isn’t it time that all of the popular Web 2.0 applications start moving in the direction of translating and localizing their interfaces? We should be building our applications from the beginning with the understanding that we at some point will be localizing the UI.

It is a WORLD WIDE Web. It won’t take a long for a Web app to get a world-wide audience.

When will Digg or Facebook follow Flickr’s lead? Back in November 2006, there was a post on the Digg blog about how they were internationalizing their databases by moving to UTF8. There has been no sign of Digg taking any big next steps.