Facebook Removes “Is Twittering” From Statuses

Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 9th, 2008 11:55 AM

Have you ever noticed the “is twittering” prefix for Facebook statuses? If you are my friend on the site then you definitely have. The Twitter application on Facebook enables you to display your Twitter updates via your Facebook status. It makes it easy to sync and prevents you from having to update your status in multiple locations. Most Twitter users probably have the application already installed.

For many people the “is twittering” prefix was annoying. I regularly had users asking me what “this Twitter thing” is and why I use it so much. While it could have been Twitter that removed the “is twittering” prefix, that wouldn’t make much sense because it built brand visibility for the company. As of now it appears that this was an action by Facebook but we don’t have any confirmation from Twitter or Facebook yet on this matter.

While it’s not a substantial change, for those that view their Facebook homepage on a regular basis, it definitely can be. Twitter has been building traction and I think that Facebook could very well be one of the primary sources of new user registrations. As I previously said, the “is twittering” prefix builds brand visibility and ends up driving new users to the site. It will be interesting to see how this impacts Twitter’s growth but as of now a look at the Twitter traffic chart shows that the site is beginning to show the classic hockey stick growth. It will be interesting to see if this continues.

Facebook Shuts Down Human Pets

Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 8th, 2008 10:58 PM

Human Pets, an application with over 50,000 active daily users, was shut down by Facebook due to pornographic pictures that were supposedly showing up within the application occasionally. Patrick Shyu, the developer of the application, was notified at 12 am in the morning and was given a 2 hour time frame to take down the photos or have the application removed. Patrick made a series of frantic emails to Facebook to keep the application up but was unsuccessful. This was in response to the following email from Facebook:

Hi Patrick,

We ask that you remove your application from the site until you have removed all pornographic content. Our pornographic policy is very strict and we gave you a deadline until now 11:00am pacific time Thursday 8 May 2008 and all pornographic content has not been removed from your application. Below are just a few URL links of content that violates our Platform Application Guidelines section I.1 (see http://developers.facebook.com/guidelines.php). We take this violation very seriously and will have to disable your application until you have fully complied with our policy, unless you take it down to remove the content.

[Links to 10+ pictures]

Sincerely,
Facebook Platform Developer Operations & Suppport

This is just one of many emails that were exchanged in a series of emails between Patrick and the development team. Patrick had apparently devised a system which enabled users to mark uploaded content as “adults only”. Facebook’s platform team was not in favor of this and after a substantial amount of back and forth the application was ultimately shut down. The problem was that when Patrick prevented users from uploading pornographic images, they revolted and ended up posting more making it impossible for the moderators to handle the volume.

Ultimately Patrick needs to make his application work if he is going to accept image uploads. I would argue that they should use the Facebook platform for uploading photos and as such the users who are uploading photos that violate the terms of service will be banned. I can’t currently access the application to see how it functions but here is where it used to be. It will be interesting to see if this application is added again or if it’s gone for good.

Facebook Agrees to Strict Privacy Standards

Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 8th, 2008 4:43 PM

Earlier today Facebook, the Pennsylvania Attorney General Tom Corbett along with attorneys general from 48 other states and the District of Columbia today announced that Facebook has agreed to significant steps to better protect children on the social networking site. This agreement appears to be something similar to the one that Myspace had agreed to back in January. The purpose of this new agreement is to better protect children on social networks.

Facebook will be joining the Internet Safety Technical Task Force, which was created after the January agreement with MySpace, to explore and develop age and identity verification tools. Every three months the task force will report back to the attorneys general and ultimately issue a formal report with findings and recommendations at the end of 2008. Facebook is already provides the most granular privacy controls of any social network on the web.

There are a few additional things that Facebook has agreed to though. According to Tom Corbett, Facebook agreed to changes which include providing automatic warning messages when a child is in danger of giving personal information to an unknown adult, restricting the ability of users to change their listed ages, and acting more aggressively to remove inappropriate content and groups from the site.

As Caroline McCarthy pointed out earlier, “The only state that did not agree to Facebook’s plan was Texas, which likewise did not sign on to the plan that News Corp.’s MySpace created in conjunction with the attorneys general in January.” Privacy will continue to be increasingly relevant especially considering Myspace’s announcement of the Myspace Data Availability initiative.

Find Out How Beautiful You Are on Facebook

Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 8th, 2008 11:57 AM

Some people say that beauty in on the inside. The people over at nip/tuck believe that beauty comes in the number 1.618. While I’m not so sure about the accuracy of this number, nip/tuck has built an application which tests to see if you face comes close to the golden ratios. The application lets you select a photo from your albums and test out your beauty.

I didn’t have a proper portrait to test but I’m sure it would have come out a perfect 1.618 This application could be pretty controversial and as such I would have imagined it to gain some more substantial traction but so far the application has reached less than 3,000 people. The application also had a problem with zooming in to my my photo large enough. I’m not surprised that this application wasn’t successful because it has absolutely no social feature whatsoever.

It just goes to show that no matter what your brand is, it doesn’t mean your application will be successful. I think that they could have potentially made this application into some sort of beauty contest and offered rewards of some sort but all they really ended up producing was an ineffective flash application. Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to gain much value out of using this application and I don’t think other users were able to either. If you want to have a shot at it and see if you can extract some sort of value from the application, go install the nip/tuck golden ratio application.

Facebook Announces Profile Redesign Integration

Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 7th, 2008 8:52 PM

Facebook has just announced their new profile launch and how developers need to integrate. Here are the details:

New Mini-feed Design and Integration
The mini-feed has now been combined with the wall within a user’s profile. This new design was previously announced but details have been revealed about how applications will interact with this new design. There are now three different ways to display a feed story: in one line, in short stories or full stories. Applications will be able to publish one line stories as they previously could without user approval. Short stories and full stories will require user approval.

Applications can also publish these stories in the owner’s friends mini-feed and news feed. This will be limited to 5 friends’ mini-feeds at a time. You can read more about the new feed wall within the developer wiki.

New Profile Integration
Applications will integrate differently with new profiles. As I said earlier this morning there will be a boxes tab and there will still be the ability to display applications within the left-hand narrow column. The “boxes” tab that I wrote about this morning will have two columns, both wide and narrow, that enables applications to have even more points of integration. This provides three separate columns since the profile is now going to be wider then before.

Not only can applications be displayed within the “boxes” tab but they can also be displayed within a new “info” tab which displays profile information that a user feels is important to them. This “info” section is a brand new point of integration. According to the developer wiki, “each application info section comprises a series of fields (like favorite book, friend, or band), where each field can contain one or more items. Items can be text-only or images with titles and descriptions.”

Finally, there will be two types of information sections: text-only info sections and object info sections. To read more about it, check out the application info sections page in the developer wiki.

New Left Column Narrow Boxes
The new narrow left-hand column will be the same as before except that the height is now limited to 250 pixels. According to the developer wiki, “when users switch to the new profile design, up to five of their existing profile boxes will be migrated to the main part of the profile, with additional boxes appearing in their ‘Boxes’ tab.” I can see this change causing some problems for a number of applications that display images down the entire side of users’ profiles.

New “Feed Publisher”
Facebook is completely redefining how users interact with walls. There is now something called a feed publisher which users create content from. Rather than content just displaying on user walls, content can be published directly to feeds. Rather than simply creating wall attachments, there will be feed attachments which show up as wall postings as well as mini-feed stories. More details can be found on the new design publisher page in the developer wiki.

Conclusion
There are a lot of profile design changes coming soon and this is going to significantly change how applications interact with application profiles. Many of these changes could potentially break applications or screw up the way that they are displaying content. While it appears that users can switch between the classic profile design and the new profile design, developers will be working frantically to get their applications updated. You can read more about it on Facebook’s blog post.

Microsoft Trying to Acquire Facebook?

Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 7th, 2008 1:10 PM

If you can’t buy them, beat ‘em? That appears to be the new strategy of Microsoft who according to Kara Swisher is trying to go organic like Granola and acquire as many Web 2.0 properties as possible. This strategy will supposedly differentiate them from Google. One of those companies that they are looking to potentially acquire is Facebook. Will they be willing to give Facebook half the value of Yahoo? Not sure but apparently they are interested in making an acquisition.

If Microsoft went ahead and acquired Facebook it would be the largest social networking acquisition in history and it would also could be one of the most over-valued acquisitions ever. Making moves like this makes Microsoft look desperate. They are obviously struggling to figure out a way to compete with Google and it appears that they are willing to spend anything it takes to get there, even if it doesn’t pan out.

The one problem with acquiring “hot” Web 2.0 properties? Most of them haven’t figured out a way to make money. Kara Swisher references one of her prior posts, stating that:

Here’s a list: LinkedIn. Digg. Flixster. Slide or RockYou. Veoh. WordPress. Sphere. Sugar. Some international stuff. And more.

Then, some noted, Microsoft would have to give massive financial incentives to those entrepreneurs to stay and thrive. Most importantly, it would have to keep its Redmond hands from interfering.

Now that would send shivers up the spine of Larry and Sergey.

Really? Would Google be scared if Microsoft purchased a suite of disconnected web services? Kara Swisher seems to think so. While the web services that Kara mentions definitely have value to their entities, I’m not so sure that they could figure out a way to make these services profitable. This current strategy appears to be a last ditch attempt for Microsoft to acquire a large group of web services and build a new web powerhouse from the ground up.

It has never been done this way and I’m not sure that it ever will. If anybody is going to try though, it would definitely be Microsoft. Do you see any purpose of Microsoft to make a bunch of disconnected acquisitions?

Kongregate Enters Facebook Territory

Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 7th, 2008 11:03 AM

Yesterday, news surfaced that the social gaming site Kongregate had launched a Facebook widget which enables you to display your Kongregate profile data within Facebook. This is only the beginning as Kongregate recently raised a round of funding from Amazon founder, Jeff Bezos. I’ve been wondering for a while why many of Kongregate’s games are not already on Facebook. I have spent hours playing Dolphin Olympics 2.

Currently, the primary social level to Kongregate games is the chat room next to each game. Aside from that there isn’t much that’s social about the site. Their entry into Facebook should be interesting and given their financing and history of growth they should prove to be formidable competitors to SGN and Zynga, the current leaders in the space. There are a number of companies that are trying to become the dominant players in the space but overall this competition appears to making the pie a little bit bigger for everyone.

While nobody knows if users will grow tired of games on Facebook and other social networks, both Zynga and SGN have been relatively successful so far at retaining users. Kongregate already has a loyal following and hopefully that will transfer over to Facebook and any other platforms the company decides to launch on.

Facebook Can’t Figure Out Profile Design

Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 7th, 2008 9:48 AM

Last night Facebook posted an update to members of the Facebook Profile Previews Page. The update included the updated profile design shown below. The update means one thing: Facebook still can’t figure out how they want the new profile to look. Facebook has been continuously adjusting the way that applications interact with the profile. This most recent way decreases the importance of applications within profiles.

While I think that the news design makes the profile cleaner, application developers should be concerned as Facebook continues to juggle with how applications are emphasized. They previously mentioned that applications would only be displayed in the left hand narrow column and had removed the wide column all together. This new version places both wide and narrow applications within one box. The one thing I don’t understand though is why they called the tab “Boxes” rather than “Apps”.

Initially a new design was expected to be rolled out in the first quarter but Facebook continues to consider feedback received from users and application developers. While some of the changes should concern developers it is great to see that Facebook continues to listen to feedback from developers. What do you think of the new profile design?

Depressing Numbers Revealed for Facebook Platform

Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 6th, 2008 5:01 PM

Jesse Farmer has compiled an impressive set of statistics pertaining to the Facebook platform which suggest that the Facebook platform peaked months ago and is on the way down. The beginning of the discussion surrounds a decrease in overall activity on the Facebook developer forum over the past few months. New developer registrations has also decreased substantially in the forums since the initial launch of the platform.

While the forum statistics are only part of the data Jesse uses to suggest a decrease in platform activity, a more important metric yields some less positive results. Jesse created groups of applications based on the week they launched and then checked the average daily active user level for the group of applications three weeks later. Since early November, the average number of active daily users has decreased more than 80 percent.

This means that the average application that launched three weeks ago is now getting less than 2,000 active daily users in comparison to applications which launched in early November and had close to 10,000 active daily users on average. There is no way to say why developers are leaving but we can surely speculate. Here are a few reasons that we think developers are leaving Facebook:

It has become increasingly difficult to attract news users to applications
Multiple platforms have now launched including MySpace, Bebo and hi5 and it’s no longer worthwhile to invest all your time on Facebook applications
Facebook continues to implement selective rules which make it harder for new developers to experience substantial growth

As Jesse says, this doesn’t mean there is no opportunity, it’s just that opportunity is found in new locations. We are seeing consolidation in the space and real build out from larger networks of applications including Zynga, Social Gaming Network, RockYou, Slide and similar companies. Consolidation will continue and the primary players in the space will be forced to pay for new users rather than obtaining new users through the traditional viral channels.

Marc Andreessen to Join Facebook’s Board

Posted by Nick O'Neill on May 6th, 2008 1:31 PM

Kara Swisher has news that Marc Andreessen, the found of Netscape, has verbally agreed to join the board of Facebook. The announcement came hours after Kara first reported about yet another Googler leaving the search engine to join Facebook. Not only will Facebook get a new head of communications but they’ll also get one of the most sought after investors and entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley.

Mark Zuckerberg has been amazingly successful at building a team of top tier executives and board members to help build the company into a world class organization. Facebook is increasingly the hottest startup to work for in the valley. Even though the company has yet to figure out a solid long-term revenue model, they have had no challenge in attracting the top talent. You can bet that the top Googlers are not too happy about the talent shift taking place.

Expect more big names to hop on the Facebook train as they chug toward one of the most anticipated IPOs since Google.