Facebook has announced the release of the profile sandbox for developers. If you have added the developer application, this means that you can now check out what your new profile is going to look like. You can view the profile at www.new.facebook.com/profile.php. Facebook has also provided a new developer library and a sample application that developers can check out to see how all the new integration points work.

The launch of the profile sandbox means that developers now have at least two weeks to get their new profiles out. Most likely it will take Facebook longer then two weeks to get everything rolled out. Facebook has also said that the new profile design could change as it is still in beta. Read more about the changes over at Facebook. I was able to access the new profile and came up with the following screenshot:

Gawker has the exclusive on a brand new book being authored by Ben Mezrich, the same author who wrote the book “Bringing Down the House.” The new book deal is more than a million dollars and could easily be turned into movie once it is published. The source that Ben Mezrich used to develop the book was Eduardo Saverin, one of the early founders of Facebook who is also currently being sued by Mark Zuckerberg according to Gawker.

Gawker has published a series of segments from the book which is clearly a sensational take on Facebook. Funny enough, much of it makes sense. According to the book segments that were published, Facebook was initially developed as FaceSmash which was a joint effort between Mark Zuckerberg and Eduardo Saverin, of which Zuckerberg performed the majority of development including hacking the Harvard admissions office. He used FaceSmash as a hot or not for the girls at Harvard.

Another interesting portion of this book is that Mark and Eduardo turned into playboys that were traveling around and partying at the Playboy Club in LA and eating on the yacht of the CEO of Sun Microsystems. This is where the book appears to turn to fantasy, but who knows, maybe the founder of Facebook is a player at heart. There are some other ridiculous claims in the book but the fantasy story of Facebook definitely sounds exciting.

I’m interested to see how soon this book is published as well as if this will eventually turn into a movie.

Here’s an interesting video that someone sent me last night. While it’s not as viral as Facebook in real life, it’s definitely a well produced video. Check it out below!

On Monday I made a list of suggestions for Facebook. One of those suggestions was that Facebook integrates Twitter functionality into their site. As of today you can now update your status via text message. While you there isn’t currently reply functionality built in as there is with Twitter, this is one step toward total Twitter functionality.

My guess is that we will see full blown Twitter functionality built into Facebook in the near future. The reality is that Twitter has yet to cross into the mainstream but the benefit of using Twitter is unquestionable. That’s why Facebook should take the same service and bring it to the masses overnight. I already have friends replying to my status updates on my wall. We are only steps away from them replying via my feed and via their own status.

While I’m not quite sure how Facebook can quickly duplicate Twitter functionality in their site without breaking the status updates and letting people use statuses as two-way communication, I think that the people at Facebook can quickly figure out a solution. Would you stop using Twitter in exchange for Facebook? Do you think Facebook can bring
Twitter functionality to the masses?

Update
I think I may have jumped the gun on this one. It appears that you could always update via SMS.

Earlier today, Facebook held an open house event for the press to discuss the upcoming profile changes and what people can expect. The purpose of the event is clear: begin getting people used to the concept that there will be significant changes to user profiles and the site as a whole and that they should be prepared. The most concerned party through all of this has been developers. They want to know if their virality will be dented further and how big of changes they are going to need to make.

Unfortunately the profile wasn’t finalized in time for today. While screenshots were provided to the media, there was no guarantee that the profiles would remain the same. As I wrote last night, the new navigation appears to be highly simplified. In the coming days, developers will be able to begin testing their applications under the new profile design. I have a feeling that many developers will be disappointed while a few will be ecstatic thanks to the new opportunity provided by application tabs.

The multiple ways that applications can be displayed now makes displaying content within profiles a more complex process. While it was initially extremely easy to integrate applications into profiles, it is clear that the times are changing. Facebook is clearly dedicated to making sure that developers know what changes will be taking place but that still doesn’t hide the fact that many developers are clearly anxious.

Browse through the Facebook developer forums and you can read about many of the developers concerns. The new designs are expected to go live in the next “few weeks” and a testing environment will be set up for developers will be set up later this week or next. What do you think of the changing designs? Will they help you stay glued to Facebook?

Facebook has been improving upon their new profile design since the beginning of the year. I showed screenshots of one of the new design elements and Facebook has posted other photos on the Facebook profile previews page. When I saw the images that I posted last night, the first thing that I thought to myself is that Facebook is creating a social toolbar that theoretically can be used anywhere on the web while browsing.

If you abstract this a little further, in theory you could have social tags that you use within any design to display social content about a user. On my blog I can put all of my social data by using tags and a simple javascript library that would parse those tags when the page loads (or a wordpress plugin, etc) and it will retrieve that data from Facebook. How did I that data get approved to be displayed on my website? Simple, it used the Facebook Connect service which is soon to launch.

Additionally, data can be displayed dynamically based on the type of visitor that comes to the website. If they are a Facebook user and one of my friends they will see one contact email address, whereas another visitor would see a different email which I use for public purposes. I came to this conclusion because after reading the Facebook profile preview feedback, I’ve realized that not all the users will ever be happy. Is it possible to have one profile design that works for everybody in the world? No way!

There are two options for Facebook: let people customize the design of their profiles or let people extend their profiles to other websites. My guess is that it will be the latter. While I want to own my social data, the reality is that I’m still going to need a single control panel to access and modify that data and determine who has access to that data. If Facebook truly believes that the whole world will fit into their simple profile design, they are honestly fooling themselves.

Have you seen the new profile designs? Do you think Facebook intends for everybody to use the new profile designs or will people be able to make custom layouts outside of Facebook using the data they enetered?

Facebook has highly simplified their new design down to a single bar. The left navigation is gone and advertisements will be displayed on the right hand side of the site. The new design looks pretty bare but there are no screenshots of what the other pages will look like. Putting ads on the right hand side doesn’t sound like the best idea to me. Traditional web design rules state that users typically look to the top and left hand side of the page before anything else. This could vary across cultures though.

I’m not quite sure about Facebook’s decision to make the new design this simple. The new design appears to look like a header that could work across any site and be built into a user’s browser. Perhaps that’s Facebook’s intention. I’m excited to see what other designs Facebook has up their sleeve. What are your thoughts on the new design? Do you think it’s too simple? Are there any changes that you think would work?

The latest statistics in from Nielsen have showed a decrease in traffic for Facebook U.S. users month to month. According to Adam Ostrow, this most recent Nielsen numbers show a 10 percent month-to-month decline in traffic for Facebook. Compete.com statistics have also shown a 4.2 percent decline month over month. Does this mean the end for Facebook? Definitely not. Just yesterday, Jemima Kiss reported that U.K. statistics have showed continued growth for Facebook last month.

A quick look at Alexa’s most recent graph shows continued growth for Facebook but that’s probably thanks to continued international expansion. So are U.S. users getting tired of using the social network site? Possibly. Growth for both MySpace and Facebook has been stagnant in the U.S. for the past six months. While the absolute user base has continued to grow, the active users for the site has remained constant.

While Facebook has wanted to grow the site domestically to the point where they have the most number of active users for any social network site, it appears that they are having a tough time facing MySpace. Have you found yourself using Facebook less frequently as of late?

Want to test out your applications before Facebook pushes their new updates live? Last night Facebook posted the following update to the Facebook Platform Status Feed:

We’ve gone ahead and staged www.beta.facebook.com with the code we’re planning on pushing out to the full web tier tomorrow (Tuesday) evening. We’re hoping this gives our developers a good stretch of time to test their applications against the release candidate and report any problems.

Go ahead and check out www.beta.facebook.com, and feel free to report any bugs using the Platform Bug Tracker.

This will be extremely useful for developers that were used to waiting to see if platform updates will destroy their application when pushed live. While most applications typically remain intact after Facebook’s weekly updates, a number of developers regularly complain about certain features no longer working. Hopefully Facebook decides to use the new beta service for the Facebook profile update which they will be holding an open house for this week at their Palo Alto offices.

When Facebook released their pages service at the end of last year, they hoped that small businesses would take advantage of the new service. Facebook Pages is tightly integrated into their SocialAds offering and the only way to promote these pages is through “organic” viral channels and paid advertising. Unfortunately for Facebook the numbers don’t stack up and the company is increasingly looking like a media company, something that I’ve noticed since the platform launched almost one year ago.

Jesse Farmer has done some research to figured out what sort of distribution there is among pages and fans of those pages on Facebook. While not positive news for Facebook, the results were not surprising. Musicians and TV Shows accounted for 65 percent of all pages. These two categories also account for approximately 10 percent of the fans. Where were the rest of the fans? Aside from TV Shows and musicians, there were fans of films, politicians, actors, comedians, sports teams and sports players.

Where did small businesses show up in this data? Not among the top, I’ll say that much. The problem with Facebook is that it’s too expensive for small businesses to see an effective return on investment when launching campaigns. While you can create a page on Facebook for a local restaurant, it’s typically difficult to promote it. The other problem? People aren’t searching for local businesses.

Barack Obama is the most popular page on Facebook by a landslide with over 844,000 supporters. Apple, Victoria Secret, Nutella and H&M are the top consumer products on the site. Additionally, out of 190,365 pages there are only 7,000 pages with over 1,000 fans. That means we have already seen a substantial long tail developed among facebook pages. If you are hoping to obtain a substantial number of users, you better have a large brand name or a budget to spend on promoting your page.

Want to become successful with your Facebook promotions? Focus on media, entertainment and sports and you are headed in the right direction.