Facebook is in the process of launching the redesigned version of user profiles. They are also focused on a number of other initiatives including Facebook Connect which is one of the sources of the data portability discussion over the past few days. One thing I’ve been wondering about a lot more frequently is why doesn’t Facebook take features from other sites that are finding success? One example would be integrating Twitter functionality into Facebook statuses.

On a regular basis I have people post replies to my statuses on my Facebook wall. While the reply occasionally ends up in other peoples’ newsfeeds, it doesn’t allow for a continuing dialogue that can be tracked. If Facebook statuses had Twitter functionality, Twitter would have an overnight competitor that could instantly crush their growth. As of now, Facebook has simply enabled Twitter to update statuses via the Twitter application but honestly, Facebook should update it.

Another thing missing is FriendFeed style communication in the newsfeed. Justin Smith suggests that there should be FriendFeed style dialog in the profile mini-feed. I would argue that it should also be added to the newsfeed in general. Enabling discussion around various newsfeed items would also help guage the popularity of each item.

While Facebook is focused on building a valuable platform for developers and a simple to user interface that can be understood internationally, I don’t think Facebook is innovating in areas that they could easily improve. The Facebook messaging system is always a source of criticism since it is impossible to sort or search through. While there have been rumors circulating that Facebook is testing out search within their messaging, I have yet to find any screenshots of it in action.

As Fred Wilson pointed out this weekend, “Social web services need not fear data portability. They need to fear others providing a better experience.” There are better experiences happening elsewhere on the web. Facebook needs to hurry up an integrate some of those experiences back into their site.

Robert Scoble has posted an interesting yet somewhat off the wall post suggesting that once Microsoft acquires Yahoo’s search technology, they will then acquire Facebook for $15 to $20 billion. The acquisition of Facebook has already been discussed among a number of people previously but Robert’s rationale seems a little bit ludicrous.

Why does Robert thing that Microsoft will buy Facebook? Simply because Google can’t currently crawl through Facebook’s website. Facebook can then use Yahoo’s search technology to search within Facebook once it has both groups under its control. While the combined forces makes sense, this is an old way of thinking.

Robert suggests that “we will never get an open Web back if these two deals happen.” Are we really going to turn back the clocks and pursue an AOL walled-garden strategy? It has been proven that this model fails and people end up going elsewhere on the web. Why would it suddenly work this time?

Robert’s apparent conclusion is that search is the killer feature missing from Facebook and once it has it, there is no need to open up. Noticing that Robert’s post was made after 4 AM, I think he may have stayed up a little too late while planning Microsoft’s world domination.

Last week Facebook said that they would no longer support Google Friend Connect. Apparently there were a number of disputes between Google and Facebook behind the scenes but publicly Facebook claims that they won’t support Google Friend Connect due to privacy concerns. The reality is that it’s business strategy. Ultimately the new Google Friend Connect service acts as an intermediary between social networks and external social applications that reside on third-party websites.

It’s a great notion but the reality is that is reduces the ability of Facebook to track what is taking place on external sites. Tracking the applications on third-party websites is one of the most import features of Facebook Connect. Additionally, applications can update the Facebook newsfeed in turn helping those applications promote external websites. Facebook’s support of Google’s new standard will prevent information from being tracked via the Facebook newsfeed.

While it’s in the user’s best interest to be able to export their friends to other sites, it’s not in Facebook’s best interest to let you do that without them knowing. Why? Well if you go and use your data to participate in other activities around the web, Facebook isn’t able to keep track and in turn their newsfeed can be accurately updated. Is all information about your social interactions going to travel through Facebook?

Not necessarily but as Friend Wilson pointed out yesterday, it’s not the data, “it’s the flow of the data through the service.” If Facebook opens up to Google Friend Connect, it means that social activities will take place on the web under the approval of Facebook but without Facebook’s knowledge of what’s happening. We surely can’t have that happening!

Sure, people have figured out ways to export Facebook’s friend data but it requires a hack and is not technically allowed under Facebook’s terms of service. If you can figure out a way to get that data from Facebook, great! Facebook doesn’t want to openly let other people use data provided by its users to have interactions not under their control.

It’s an ironic position. Facebook opened up their platform and gave developers an almost equal opportunity to compete for user attention. They are about to do this for applications residing on third-party websites as well. In my opinion, Facebook’s concerned that opening up the data completely will somehow reduce their valuation. What I’ve come to realize over the weekend is that it doesn’t. We live in the attention economy and even if Facebook completely opens up, they will still have our attention.

That’s because as Fred Wilson puts it, “provides an incredibly valuable service.” The challenge that Facebook faces is one that many other sites (such as Twitter) face. How do we effectively monetize attention? The television used to place ads in between our television shows but that won’t work in an on demand world. I can’t believe I’m saying this but Facebook may turn out to be the emperor with no clothes.

Facebook has created one of the most valuable communication platforms on the web (outside of their horrific messaging system). This has led them to become one of the leading sites on the web globally. They still face the problem that many other web-based social services face: how do you monetize social? Earlier this weekend I argued that data portability kills social network sites. The reality is that it doesn’t, it just strips of those sites clothes.

That’s the only reason Facebook isn’t going to jump in and embrace total data portability. Would you strip naked for the world to see if you didn’t have to?

Back in November I asked if Facebook is evil. At the time, the post was referencing Beacon which was eventually killed. For argument’s sake Facebook returned back to being good as it applies to Facebook Beacon. It appears now that the discussion has resurfaced as it applies to competition. Umair Haque states Facebook is “hell-bent not on changing the world, but on dominating it: on playing the cheesy, lame, thoroughly obsolete games of competitive strategy.”

First, I just want to say that a post complaining about competitive strategy on a Harvard blog is pretty ironic in itself. Second, I just want to say that Umair is horribly unfair for singling out Facebook. Facebook is in the process of opening up their platform. They were the first to open an internal platform and they will be the first to open up externally. There is no way in hell that Umair can expect any business to just completely open up overnight as it inherently goes against their own business practices.

Opening up businesses will not take place overnight. Right now the discussion about it is what’s valuable. Is Facebook evil for not opening up completely and letting you take your data with you (in theory completely removing it from their site)? I don’t think so. This is all part of the process, so suggesting that Facebook is evil for not playing under Google’s terms of engagement as Umair does is absolutely ridiculous. We are moving forward, not backward and singling out the one company that helped start this movement probably won’t help things progress.

Last week I had the opportunity to speak with Chris Cunningham of AppsSavvy. AppsSavvy is a company based out of New York which focuses on building monetization opportunities for social application developers and building custom branded experiences for companies. They do this by connecting brands with the application developers that have the proper demographics to match up with the client’s campaign.

Read more at the Social Times.

Yesterday afternoon Valleywag got the scoop on a beer pong game that was supposed to go down between the Facebook and CollegeHumor companies. Unfortunately the game was called off at the last minute. Caroline McCarthy alluded to the idea that there are good odds that the ex-Googler Elliot Schrage may have been at fault since given that he leads the public-relations team which called off the event.

Typically I try to stray from gossip on this blog but this one was hard to resist (as was the Facebook prom post the other day). It was probably a good call by the P.R. team given that beer pong isn’t the best activity to promote a rapidly growing startup. It also appears as though the College Humor team was prepared to take full advantage of the game. Thanks to Valleywag who got the image below which is a shot of the ping pong balls that the CollegeHumor team has prepared for the big game.

Facebook is definitely growing up thanks to their upper management. Fun and games are fine but playing drinking games as a sponsored company event is probably not the best of ideas. Perhaps there will be an unofficial off the record version of the game that ends up going down. Caroline McCarthy makes a great statement pertaining the decision to call off the game:

Google and Amazon.com executives can get away with showing up at the Nevada counterculture fest Burning Man, but Facebook still has a “college kid” reputation to outgrow.

Then again, this is a beer pong game that is now rumored to be canceled. I’m going to give up on any further analysis: it’s beer pong.

While originally announced as a partner with Google Friend Conenct, Facebook has decided to leave the team. It appeared as though Google and Facebook were going to work together but it now appears that Facebook is smarter than that. Working together means playing by Google’s rules and Facebook isn’t really open to that. Charlie Cheever has posted about the change in decision:

We’re excited that our industry partners are taking greater steps toward openness and enabling users to share their information around the web. We hope, though, that we can collectively find a model that allows users to share data while protecting the privacy of our users’ data and ensuring that the user is always in control.

In the past, when we found applications passing user data to another party (for instance, to ad networks for the purpose of targeting), we suspended those applications and worked with those developers to ensure they respect user privacy. Now that Google has launched Friend Connect, we’ve had a chance to evaluate the technology. We’ve found that it redistributes user information from Facebook to other developers without users’ knowledge, which doesn’t respect the privacy standards our users have come to expect and is a violation of our Terms of Service.

It appears as though Facebook got cold feet and is blaming it on Google’s lack of respect for privacy. While they can be part of a broader movement, Facebook will not be part of Google’s Friend Connect as Google tried to initially imply in their press releases regarding their new service.

This was bound to happen eventually. When Facebook launched fan pages, a lot of users jumped at the opportunity to create fan pages for large brands. Whether television shows or clothing brands, it was technically against the terms of service and now users are having their pages taken down and the brands are having the pages transferred to internal accounts. Two people have provided examples of their pages being taken down in the past day and one of those individuals had their account disabled by Facebook.

Sam Huleatt created a page for Ralph Lauren and then received the letter which I’ve included below. Since creating the page Sam obtained 589 new fans but didn’t send out any notification blasts to the user. Facebook was notified and terminated Sam’s account. Ralph Lauren on the other hand played it smart and decided to reward Sam with a $200 gift certificate. This is really smart of Ralph Lauren and something that I suggest other companies mimic. Don’t punish the users, simply contact them and they will most likely be happy to turn over the Facebook Page.

At a recent event in D.C., Andy Carvin of NPR told a similar story in which the people at NPR were trying to figure out how to go about having a Facebook page created by a random user transfered over to people internal to NPR. The result was that Andy simply contacted the user and the person gladly handed it over after people at NPR after failing to receive a response from a separate inquiry by the user on the official NPR website.

Peter Corbett created a page for Under Armour and wrote a post about it on his blog stating,

If you’re a brand manager for any of the above, just drop me a line and I’ll coordinate with Facebook to hand you over control of the page. This exercise was not built in order to squat on these pages permanently and it would be silly to delete them at the end of this as the fan base would be disbanded by that action doing more harm than good in my opinion.

The end result? Under Amour sent Peter a bag of free Under Armour gear. These are all examples of companies that get it. Unfortunately for Sam, his account has since been terminated. My guess is that Sam’s account will soon be reinstated but the people who are making an effort to set up branded pages for another company are typically fans and not squatters. Reach out to your fans and you will have a fan for life!

Facebook on the other hand may want to reconsider their policy of automatically banning users who created branded pages that are not their own brand. A simple warning would probably be sufficient. While this policy isn’t a best practice for repeat offenders, it definitely makes sense for somebody who only set up a couple of branded pages.

Letter from Ralph Lauren

Over a week ago I wrote about Facebook launching their service in 3 new languages. Over the past 24 hours I have received countless emails notifying me of the news yet again. I’m not quite sure why Facebook waited so long to make a press announcement. Additionally, Facebook hasn’t even included all of the languages that they’ve added in their announcement.

Over the coming weeks Facebook will announce a number of new languages as they finish the translation process with the Facebook translations application. If you are in another country and use another language as your primary language then it’s time to get excited! Facebook is also in the process of launching a new profile design which makes it easier for users to communicate effectively no matter what language they are using.

As Facebook expands internationally, maintaining a clean interface while providing a multi-lingual platform is extremely challenging. Facebook has emphasized their dedication to building a highly efficient communication platform.

If you hadn’t been paying attention to international news, Myanmar is bordering on a humanitarian crisis. This is the result of a cyclone which swept through the impoverished nation and the government’s decision to prevent aid workers from entering the country. Western journalists are also being prevented from entering the country. The result? Images are sneaking their way on to Facebook. According to ABC News, “Relief workers and survivors inside Myanmar, formerly Burma, are sending e-mail updates and photos to friends and contacts outside the country to be posted on Facebook.”

Fortunately for the people in the country some relief materials are being accepted from the UN and INGOs but much more is needed. I have previously written about the global impact of Facebook and social networks and their ability to connect people worldwide. The brunt of my prior post was that Facebook has focused on developing a platform which is effective for hosting political (and non-political) discussion.

The people that are currently sending out information via phone, email and instant messaging are risking 10 to 15 years in prison, torture and the well-being of their families. Myanmar is also well known for the protests led by monks against the Junta which resulted in a backlash of violence and the deaths of thousands of citizens. Facebook has been used as the platform for people to spread the message out about what is going on inside the territory.

One group you can currently view and join is called “Support the Relief Efforts for Burma (Myanmar) Cyclone Disaster Victims“. Our hopes and prayers are with the people of Myanmar. Unfortunately the pictures can only help tell the story of tragedy, but hopefully enough of a movement can be created to bring about change.

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