I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank all of the readers of this blog for an amazing 2008. This site has grown tremendously from when I first started it last May. After looking at my Google Analytics tonight I realized one thing: persistence is key to success. This month has been a break through month for this blog and next month will be even more incredible as I’m preparing to release a number of new things.
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Christmas Day happens to be great for online social networks, with millions of users sitting around the house playing with new gifts, showing online photos to family members and friends, or just surfing the net because there aren’t as many businesses open during this national holiday. Whatever the case may be, Facebook traffic in the UK peaked at an all time high on Christmas, 2008, just as it did last year.
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Last week we posted out top Facebook stories of 2008. This week it’s time to look ahead to 2009 and consider what the year may hold for Facebook. After an extremely successful 2008, it will be hard for Facebook to do much better than they did this year. We think there is still a lot of opportunity for the company still and below are 5 ways that we think the company will continue to innovate in 2009.
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Groups and fan pages on Facebook can be a great way to show your support for a person or a cause, but they can also breed a great deal of controversy, depending on what’s being supported. Notorious Italian mob bosses Salvatore “Toto” Riina and Bernardo Provenzano are two recognized figures that are breeding outrage and controversy as a result of fan pages that have been created on Facebook for the two criminals, according to The New York Times.

Provenzano and Riina are allegedly responsible for criminal activities in Italy, including the ordering of the assassination of Italian magistrate Giovanni Falcone in 1992. Riina is in fact serving 12 life sentences and has been in prison since 1993. Yet he is still gaining a good deal of popularity through a Facebook fan page, which now has well over 2,000 members, and Provenzano’s fan page even suggests that he should be made a saint.
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Facebook has supposedly postponed development of their payment platform but we believe they need to launch sooner rather than later. Facebook has been building an advertising supported “economy” for developers. The problem with an advertising supported economy is that developers are incentivized to build applications that “virally” reach millions of users. Developers end up being forced to work harder at gaming the Facebook platform which has become increasingly difficult.
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How much do you want your Facebook friends to know about you? Well if you are among the hyper connected crowd, you may just want to let your friends know about your exact whereabouts. That’s exactly what Brightkite’s new Facebook Connect integration lets you do. Brightkite is an extremely simple application that lets users post location-based updates. You can simply check in, post status updates, or upload images, all of which are location specific.
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Why do we care if a mother wants to show photos of herself breastfeeding on Facebook? Isn’t Facebook private enough that a user should be able to show pretty much any photo they want? Facebook doesn’t think so. After Heather Farley was told to remove a photo of her breast-feeding, she sent an email to Facebook requesting an explanation.

When Facebook didn’t respond to Farley’s email, she posted another photo and was threatened by Facebook to have her account deleted. This is when things got ugly—for Facebook, at least. Once Farley went public with her complaint against Facebook, stating that she felt bullied. So she protested. And the protest has grown to new heights in the past week, even gaining momentum with a Facebook group, according Mercury News. So what’s Facebook’s issue with breast-feeding anyway?
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Yesterday Erick Schonfeld posted that Google should buy Facebook. He admitted that it was something that probably won’t happen but asserted that Facebook and Google should partner together to integrate people search and general web search. Yes, Google has the upper hand when it comes to search but Microsoft is investing heavily in search and I would argue that their “investment” in Facebook at the ridiculous $15 billion valuation, was not an investment but merely a down payment.
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Today I noticed a small addition to user profiles: when you view your personal profile and mouse over your avatar, a link for “Change Picture” shows up. It’s such a small change that I almost decided not to write about it but how could I resist when we cover “All Facebook”? Facebook is constantly making minor adjustments and this is one of them. While you could change your profile picture before, this is an easier way to do it.

This could also be an old feature that I’m just now realizing considering that is something that frequently happens to me! The small adjustments made by Facebook clearly have a lot of effort put into them. Through extensive user testing, Facebook has been able to attract users that were previously not engaged on social networks to their site.
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Last week Kristen Nicole, the other writer of this site, temporarily lost almost 1,000 messages from her Facebook inbox. This week other users have been reporting the issue including Stefanos Kofopoulos who received multiple errors stating that “Sorry, the contents of this thread are temporarily unavailable. Please check back later.” Many users have hundreds if not thousands of messages now on Facebook and are becoming increasingly reliant on the service for daily communication.
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