allfacebook - the unofficial facebook blog

On May 28th last year I embarked on what would turn out to be an exciting journey. I launched AllFacebook because I saw the significance of the Facebook platform. It turned out to be a great idea and the site experienced the most growth of any project I have ever worked on. Within a couple of months over 100,000 people had visited the site and many of them continue to come back to this day.

I am extremely grateful to all of you for sticking through as I face the challenge of running what is ultimately a one-man team with a little bit of support now and again. I’m also thankful for each of the contributors that have provided a fresh perspective. I will continue to write on this blog in addition to Social Times. While the majority of my attention has shifted to my other blog, I still continue to provide as much news as possible related to Facebook on this site.

Whether it is development issues or breaking news about changes within Facebook’s organization, this site will continue to cover the stories pertaining to the rapid growing social network. Thanks for reading and I look forward to continuing to serve you!

The Canadian Internet Policy and Public Interest Clinic, has filed a privacy complaint against Facebook. I’m not so sure how significant this really is since it appears to simply be a finding by a team of law students. The group of students analyzed the Facebook’s policies and practices as part of a clinic course this past winter and identified specific practices that appear to violate the Canadian Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act.

As Facebook expands their global reach, they continue to face risk of violating international privacy laws as witnessed in this complaint. The complaint suggests that Facebook’s default settings are not strict enough and are set to enable users to share their information in most cases. One of the law students suggested that changing the privacy settings required a “high level of aptitude and experience with the site.” One law student even suggested that “Facebook is deceiving its users.”

Whether or not Facebook is clear enough with their intentions when users register is up for the Privacy Commissioner in Canada to render her findings within a year. Facebook recently agreed to strict privacy standards with the Pennsylvania Attorney General. This is only the beginning of the complaint. It appears that this was an educational case for the law students which may eventually result in actual action.

When speaking at the D6 Conference out in Carlsbad California, Mark Zuckerberg emphasized that Beacon was a big mistake. While I was personally a big critic of the system due to the inability to opt-in and the default setting of opt-out, I don’t think that Beacon was a horrendous idea. People want to let others know about some of the activities that they are up to online. Mark Zuckerberg tends to dismiss the entire program though and I think that it is a poor cop-out.

Little was said about Beacon as Kara Swisher moved on to the next question. As far as I’m concerned, Beacon wasn’t really a complete disaster. While it was a disaster among blogs, if you ask the average person what Beacon is, they probably can’t tell you. One person I spoke with last night mentioned that the difference between Microsoft and Google is that Google simply gives up on projects after trying to see what sticks whereas Microsoft remains persistent with their projects.

Facebook appears to fall into the Google category (in my broad generalization) in that they were not persistent when trying to develop Beacon. The system still works though and if you go to a few third-party sites, a notification will show up in your newsfeed. I’m not quite sure if Facebook has decided to kill Beacon or if they have quietly gone back to the drawing boards to work up a new strategy. Whatever is going on, simply dismissing the project just doesn’t seem like a good solution. Do you think Facebook should have just killed Beacon or is there potential in the project?

Facebook has decided to make significant changes to the profile mini-feed with the new profile design. The feed is actually the primary focus of the new design and the types of stories that can be posted have expanded. There are now three types of profile feed stories:one line, short, and full. One line stories work just as it sounds: stories are described in short, one-line statements such as “Nick just reviewed a book.” The short stories are “more involved than one line stories.” Facebook renders “short stories in various predefined layouts (like we do today); currently there’s one default layout, but more are coming soon.”

Full stories enable users to be even more expressive with few limitations. The stories can be up to 500 pixels wide and 700 pixels tall and function extremely similar to the way that wall postings currently exist. Pete Bratach posted more details about the change on the Facebook developer blog:

Once the redesigned profiles go live, we’ll begin deprecating the existing Feed publishing API methods (feed.publishActionOfUser, feed.publishStoryToUser, and feed.publishTemplatizedAction). The existing API methods will continue to work during the transition period to the new profiles, so you can publish stories using either the existing API methods or feed.publishUserAction.

During the transition period, you should only publish the story once, so you should make use of the old methods or the new methods, but never both. If you are still using the existing Feed methods once the new profiles are launched, stories posted via those methods will only appear as one line stories to News Feed and the Feed tab on the new profiles.

We’ll announce a cut-off date soon — after that date, the existing methods will no longer be able publish stories to Feeds. You will have plenty of time to update your applications to use the new Feed API calls. We recommend getting started now so you can take advantage of the new features as soon as they go live to users!

To learn more about the changes you can check out the details about feed stories on the developer blog or read the post by Pete Bratach at Facebook.

Facebook sent us the following statement this afternoon:

“We’re working on an open-source initiative that is meant to help application developers better understand Facebook Platform and more easily build applications, whether it’s by running their own test servers, building tools, or optimizing their applications. As Facebook Platform continues to mature, open-sourcing the infrastructure behind it is a natural step so developers can build richer social applications and share what they’ve learned with the ecosystem. Additional details will be released soon.”

I hadn’t thought about developers setting up their own test environments but this could be great. It also sounds as though this new initiative is for developers and not for commercial purposes. Rather than using the platform code to build your own social platform it is being used as a way to help developers build better applications. More details will most likely be released at the Facebook developers meeting later this week in Palo Alto. Techcrunch claims the new project is called “fbOpen.”

One of the largest benefits for developers building applications on Facebook are the less restrictive policies on the Facebook platform. Well at least the less restrictive policies of yesteryear. While Facebook has increased their restrictions on the virality of applications, there are still relatively few limits on the type of content that can be displayed within applications aside from not displaying pornography. This is in contrast to sites like LinkedIn where all applications are subject to strict approval.

Facebook’s decision to launch their platform with no restrictions one year ago, led to an onslaught of crappy applications. While Facebook could argue that the users are best suited to judge the utility of applications, I’m beginning to think that perhaps some sort of initial filtering process would prove useful. There are some obvious challenges with a system where not all applications are allowed to launch. I’d imagine the chief issue being politics.

I can think of a number of ways to work around this. One solution would be to provide a beta launch during which a limited number of people are granted access to an application. If the application takes off, it is grated global access. Whatever alternative model could be devised, the real question is: did Facebook’s willingness to accept anybody as a developer and approve just about any application backfire?

Laurence Hooper of Loladex things that a “poisoned atmosphere” has been created by the numerous spam applications. As such, it is extremely challenging for utility based applications to gain traction. While I agree with that, there are also other applications that have been gaining traction in recent months. Do you think Facebook’s initial loose limits were destructive to the platform?

Mike Arrington is reporting that Facebook will soon announce that they are open sourcing the Facebook platform. This will enable other social network sites to easily integrate platform features. It will also help the large social network sites to make tools which help to convert Facebook applications to be compatible with other platform standards such as OpenSocial.

Mike Arrington suggest that this is a response to OpenSocial. He also suggests that Facebook is being “out maneuvered by competitors” more recently. I definitely disagree with Arrington’s assertion that they are being out maneuvered and I also thing open sourcing the platform will help to eventually make social applications more transportable. The one downside of making the platform open source is that developers who integrate the platform into their own site will need to make regular updates as Facebook makes adjustments to their own platform.

This is an interesting move by Facebook. It will make the conversion process from social networking site to social platforms more efficient for third-party websites. It’s also yet another action which extends Facebook’s goal of becoming one of the standards on the social web.

Today marks the one year anniversary of the Facebook platform. The platform was the inspiration for this blog which I started four days after the launch. Since then a lot has happened. When the platform first launched, everybody knew that something big had occurred, we just didn’t know how big it is. Today, there is an entire industry built around Facebook applications. There are 25,914 applications with over 1 billion combined installs according to Adonomics.com. At the time I made some wild predictions:

• “Within the next month Facebook will easily become the social network of choice to all Myspace users unless Myspace can immediately go open source.”
• “Facebook is going to rapidly manifest itself into Google’s biggest competitor.” They will become the people search engine.
• Facebook will defeat LinkedIn
• A golden application will arise

Absolutely none of predictions came true but it has been an absolutely wild ride. Venture capital funds were created for the Facebook platform and a number of small businesses have been created from the platform. As long as people keep visiting social network sites and enjoy staying connected to others online, there will be an industry surrounding the users. We have seen the launch of ad networks, conferences, development companies and gaming networks in the past year.

During this time Facebook has more than doubled its user base to over 70 million active users. This impressive growth inspired all the competing social network sites to launch their own platform and now the race is on to see who can extend their social networks beyond the walled gardens and to the rest of the web. While there is still a substantial amount of debate surrounding the control of user data, the debate was not as heated one year ago.

There are now thousands of developers still racing to try and build mini-empires of users across all the social network sites. Many of these developers have created a wasteland of spam while a few have developed valuable user experiences. We still don’t know where this is going aside from the fact that Facebook wants to make sure that they have the largest image of the global social graph.

While it may sound evil, Facebook is a business and there job is to continue to thrive. As hundreds of thousands of people sign up everyday for the site, there is no question that the growth will continue for at least the short term. The next year will be an important one. Will Microsoft buy Facebook? Will they file their long awaited IPO? Will Facebook tear down the walled garden and support total open standards or will they continue the fight to become the standard?

There are many things that are unknown but one thing is certain: the past year has been a wild ride with the Facebook platform. I only hope it continues for the second year.

Earlier this week I suggested that Facebook needs to start copying their competitors. One competitor that I mentioned briefly was FriendFeed. I suggested that they add the ability to comment within the newsfeed. Well, a few days later Facebook has made updates that move it one step closer to FriendFeed. While they aren’t the changes I suggested, they are definitely useful.

Users can now import from a whole slew of new websites including Hulu, Google Reader, directly from blogs, Last.fm, YouTube and a number of others. This is clearly a step toward FriendFeed and I would expect Facebook to further continue the expansion of sites that they let you import. For those who blog, there is one limiting factor to the blog import feature: you can only import one blog. I for one hope that they update this as soon as possible so I can import all of my feeds.

Then again, I currently use the Flog application on Facebook but soon enough there will be no more need for that. Once Facebook adds comments to mini-feeds and newsfeeds, I don’t really see much of a need to use FriendFeed anymore. Read more on the Facebook blog. Do you use FriendFeed? Do you import items on Facebook? What do you think of this new feature?

Jeremy Kirk of the IDG News Service has published information about a new security vulnerability found in Facebook. According to the post:

A researcher has spotted a security problem in Facebook that could lead to hackers taking control of user accounts.

The flaw allows a hacker to execute scripts on Facebook, which could potentially be used to create a fake log-in page and capture people’s passwords, according to the XSSED security blog. The discovery is credited to “Mox.”

“Malicious people can exploit this issue to execute script code in the context of Facebook or obtain sensitive information from its users, such us clear text authentication credentials with a fake login form,” according to the blog post, written by Dimitris Pagkalos.

A cross-site scripting vulnerability can let an attacker display data from another Web site or run malicious code, which can compromise user data on the targeted Web site.

Cross-site scripting flaws are increasingly becoming one of the favored vectors for hackers, and security experts have warned that a vast number of Web sites potentially contain the vulnerability. In 2006, the Web Application Security Consortium surveyed 31,373 sites and found that 85.57 percent were vulnerable to cross-site scripting attacks.

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