allfacebook - the unofficial facebook blog

Last weekend I was at SocialDevCamp in Baltimore and came across one individual who continuously read AllFacebook but did not read the Social Times. If he had read it, he didn’t realize that he was reading it. If you’ve been reading this site for a while, you probably have noticed that the volume of posts has decreased somewhat. In reality, I’m posting the same but over at the Social Times. So if you haven’t added the Social Times to one of your regular sites, here are ten reasons you should start reading it:

1. There is more to this world then Facebook - I know it’s shocking that I, a Facebook fanboy, would say that there’s more to this world then Facebook. The reality is that the web is becoming increasingly social. It will continue to transform and every 6 months we will see large announcements that continue to move this space forward.
2. Breaking news - While I may not be breaking news with the regularity of Mike Arrington who likes to hold his sources hostage, I do work my own sources and try to provide insight into what is taking place in the industry.
3. More editorial insight - I read somewhere around 1,000 articles every day specifically about the social web. I know less than 10 people that do this specifically on this topic and it’s their job to try and break news stories. Through my experience in agencies, startups and through continuous communication with industry leaders, I’ll keep you up to date on what’s going on and why it matters to your business.
4. Events - Not only do I and others write over at the Social Times, we also host events. We are in the midst of planning some large industry events in the coming months so you should visit the site or subscribe to the feed to keep up to date on the events taking place around the country.
5. Timely information - While I don’t break every story, I will be there to provide insight as soon as the story breaks. I will also provide follow-up commentary to let you know what’s going on.
6. No bullshit - You can read a ton of blogs that will tell you about theory and extrapolate on ideas that are way to deep for most people to understand. That’s why most of those ideas never materialize. I digest sometimes complex ideas and make it understandable for the average Joe. If I think people are wrong, I’ll let you know. While the truth isn’t always pretty, at least it’s the truth. That’s what I’ll give you.
7. Interactive - If you post a comment on any of my posts, I typically respond to questions in a matter of minutes. If you don’t get a response you can always email me and I’ll respond.
8. Conference coverage - There are industry events practically every week. Often times I’m out at them trying to cover it for the readers. If you didn’t get to make it to the conference, there is a good chance we did and have coverage of it on the site.
9. Podcasts - Not only am I blogging over at the Social Times but I’m also interviewing people in the industry to find out what’s really going on. The podcasts make it easy to stay up to date on the people that shape this industry.
10. It’s me! - If you’ve been reading me for a while, you probably know that I have integrity and I bust my ass. If I’m wrong, I’ll tell you I’m wrong. My job is to get you the information you care about in a timely manner and make sure it’s comprehensible. Occasionally it isn’t (since I sometimes write at 3 A.M.) but I can guarantee you that I’m always writing. I want to help out my readers. If you want to get news that caters to the readers, you need to check out the Social Times!

If you made it through the list and still haven’t subscribed, you better go subscribe to the Social Times now! I haven’t stopped writing, I’m just writing elsewhere. Go check out the Social Times and if you have any questions or comments please don’t hesitate to contact me!

In response to Nick’s article on crappy apps, I have to say that while I agree that their are a ton of crappy apps, I don’t think it’s a problem. Personally my entire interest in this whole phenomenon comes from my long-standing belief in the productive power of openness — open source, open access, open communication, open flexibility, etc.

I think it’s amazing that it’s so easy that it’s so easy to get into this market. It means that anybody with a good idea can get involved. It’s like blogs. Some suck, but that’s okay, because the tools for the best blogs to rise to the top are in place via digg, stumbleupon and the like. The mistake on Facebook’s part in the ease at which the first apps, which were huge, can instantly popularize their new, even crappier apps.

One great way for the good apps to rise to the top is one that anybody reading this knows well, and thats by reading a quality blog that will find and review good apps.

In that spirit, I found a very cool app called Mix Maker. The application allows you to share copyrighted music with your friends. The trick is, you can stream a mix you make, and friends can add to it. Nobody can download the music, so that should take care of the legal issues, but they can stream and listen on facebook.

- Jonathan Kleiman runs the law blog LegalIntellects.com

Do people even know about the Facebook toolbar for Firefox? I’ve had it installed for quite some time now, and I only realized its unpopularity when some friends came over and were baffled. The toolbar is amazing, and has totally changed how Facebook impacts my life. It can be found at http://developers.facebook.com/toolbar.

The toolbar has all of the features you’d expect. It tells you when you receive a new message and lets you access different parts of the site easily with the click of a button. It also makes it very easy to share the page you’re at on your profile, and you can search Facebook at any time from the top of your browser. It’s very simple and very intuitive.

My favourite feature of the toolbar is that it has msn-like popups that notify you instantly of your friends’ status updates and of new messages or notifications received. I’ve come to like this feature the most because it allows me to find out about what my friends are up to instantaneously. It really lets me be more active with Facebook and to keep up to date with my friends’ activities on the site.

I have a feeling that some people will find the pop-ups a little annoying or intrusive, but they can be turned off and you can limit what you receive notifications about. It’s definitely worth checking out.

Posted by Jonathan Kleiman

Last night I was browsing the web and came upon a post advertising mass Facebook friend adding. I had to check it out because God knows that I want 10,000 friends on Facebook that I don’t even know. Well you are actually limited to 5,000 friends on Facebook currently but I definitely don’t want to load up on people that I have no relation to whatsoever. The software is called “Facebook Friend Adder” but for some reason the audio on the site calls it “Facebook Friend Bomber.”

Anybody that decided it would be a good idea to end a product name with “Friend Bomber” probably doesn’t deserve to make many sales. As such, I thought I would protect my readers from making the poor decision of purchasing this product. Soon enough, this application will be blocked and will no longer be functional. While increasing the number of friends you have on Facebook can be useful for promotional purposes, using this software to do so is a horrible idea.

Oh and in case you were wondering you can now purchase this product and send out “Mass Facebook Amber Alerts.” Is this person serious? This is the biggest waste of money I have ever seen. Disagree? Be sure to let me know about it in the comments!

Yesterday I highlighted a platform “bug” that was the result of a poorly designed script. Last night, Facebook posted an update to the platform status feed:

The current update on the requests/invites is that it looks like the requests that were sent out over the course of the day on Monday are lost. We are working on recovering requests that were sent out up until Sunday, those should hopefully be recovered after tonight’s push.

Well guys, it looks like we’ve slipped up a little and have lost millions of application requests. Sorry! As if the errors weren’t enough, the platform went down last night from about 12 AM until about 2 AM Pacific Standard Time causing trouble for thousands of Facebook developers and their applications. While it’s understandable that most changes are pushed at night during the lowest traffic time, Facebook should have a better testing environment to have developers that can test changes during peak hours.  If Facebook already has a good testing environment, they should use it!

Last night I had a number of developers contact me to get across how significant a snafoo this was. Most of these people have their entire businesses built on the Facebook platform and generate their revenue from traffic coming to their applications. For applications that have millions of users, tens of thousands if not hundreds of thousands of requests could have been deleted. That has a significant impact on those applications’ traffic. Was you application affected by this mishap?

There have always been scammers on eBay trying to get money from uninformed buyers. This problem will always exist in any economy. Facebook is obviously a hot topic currently and there is also a fair amount of money being made by a few individuals. Wherever there is money being made, individuals will try to find a way to exploit that. There are two auctions on eBay currently that stood out to me. One of them appears to be a complete joke. Want to get into the business of developing Facebook applications? For $10,000, the eBay user “app_creations” will sell you the Appa Nation website. Here is the auction description:

Appa Nation, a fully functional website for selling Social Network Applications. FACEBOOK has taken the world by storm when it opened up its social network to allow users to develop their own Applications and PROFIT from them! Now you can build Applications for others and tap into FACEBOOK’s over 50million members and growing. Also be the first site ready to develope Applications on all the different Social Networks when they follow in the footsteps of FACEBOOK!

Appa Nation has already been registered with all major search engines and is ready to go! Try it, do a search for Appanation on Google right now!

Aren’t able to program Applications yourself? Hire out programmers! Outsourcing low-cost programming has never been easier, whether using students, part-timers, or even outsourcing to India! Its all done virtually from the comfort of your own home. With the price of a standard Application ranging from $5,000.00 for something simple to $50,000 for a more complicated app, the site could pay for itself in a month. Then its all profit!

Hosting is not included with the site. Purchaser’s will have to host the site themselves or work with seller who will help in setting up low-cost hosting through a third party (avg fee: $30 per month).

I saw this auction and started laughing immediately. This has to be a joke! We will give you a fully functioning website for only $10,000! It sounds like an offer out of the early 90s. I surely hope that nobody bids on this auction. Another auction is offering passive income from something they programmed in about 5 minutes. They took Facebook’s sample application code and repurposed it to display an image on your profile. Real creative! Here is their application description:

Quickly and easily update the image on user’s profiles from anywhere in the world.

No Programming Skill Required.

Please note that this app is for you to set up customized for your own niche, it does not have any users.

Monetize It For Your Niche

• The app is fully customisable to suit your niche with no programming knowledge required.
• The app is written in easy to understand code with comments on almost every line. This is the perfect platform on which to build a far more complex app.
• A database module can be included on request at no extra cost. This records the details of every user in your own database. It is usually left out for simplicity’s sake as Facebook records app statistics anyway.
• The application includes an easy way to show advertising to the user once they have finished adding it to their profile. When your app is growing by 10,000 users a day this is a valuable source of income.

Easy Step-By-Step Guide
The eBooks include a comprehensive illustrated guide on how to set up your app as well as some basics of PHP programming should you wish to develop your app further. Included also is a guide to advertising your app with highly targeted Facebook Ads as well as links, leads and advice on how to sell your app’s own advertising space.

New Viral Marketing
Facebook apps are very easy to sell on and the more users who have installed your app the more the app is worth. As your users will all be interested in your niche you can offer highly targeted advertising at a premium or use your app to promote your own business.

High Resale Value
If you want to see for yourself how much Facebook apps are sold for go to the Facebook Developer’s Forum.
Many go for more than $1,000 after being online for only a few weeks!

Pick a Niche, Any Niche
Shown in the pictures here the app is customized for surfers but other niches could include horse riding, model aeroplane, figurines, travel destinations, specific pets, gardening etc…there are thousands of possibilities yet to be developed by anyone else on Facebook.

This second auction is encouraging buyers to come up with a great idea and go create it on Facebook. All you need to do is pay this seller $50 for them to tell you to do it. I’ll tell you to do it for free but if you want to pay me $100 to tell you the same thing, send me an email and I’ll give you my mailing address where you can send the check. These auctions are pretty ridiculous.

Anne Zelenka has a great post in which she gives thanks for Facebook for helping people to become more connected. I just wanted to say thanks to all of you for returning to my blog on a regular basis and I also owe thank to Facebook for making this blog possible. The past six months have been amazing and I’m sure the next six will be even better with the launch of Social Times.

Thanks to the new digital world that we live in I can stay connected with more people and build more relationships quicker than ever before. I wish you all a happy Thanksgiving!

If there’s anyone who gets the concept of an API, it’s Oren Michels of Mashery. At app-camp the other weekend, I heard him extol the virtues of opening up your web site to the world. “Facebook Platform,” he explained as part of his warm-up act, “has a reverse API“. You open up your API, to a particular specification, and Facebook agrees to host the data and the experience that you’ve opened up to them. “Yeah, yeah, that’s just semantics,” I thought - because I didn’t think.

Later on, I felt conscious that everyone was wondering what I was doing sitting in this small but crowded gathering, so I thought I’d get involved. Relieved that I didn’t need to apply for an API key to access his interaction points (ears), I asked him if any customers whose websites he has helped open up have come to discover that their API undermined their business model or revenue streams.

Not to Oren’s knowledge, no. If you have a web site in the first place, it’s because you think your presentation layer is your secret sauce. And in fact you should be looking to source other APIs through your web site. [Now here it comes…] “Well, that’s what Facebook did, right?!”

It’s true - they had a beautiful website, an all-knowing algorithm that tells you only what you need to hear… So they create the platform; now we can build the applications that are too numerous (or useless) for Facebook to bother developing themselves.

This invaluable exchange with Oren was back in my mind following the recent announcements about OpenSocial. It occurred to me that we don’t even need to wait for Zuckerberg to surrender: as a pre-release partner in OpenSocial, I used my API key to develop a Facebook app code-named OpenSocket that implements an OpenSocial container within Facebook. It’s a bit like running a DOS command prompt within Windows, but as a means for me to tinker around with both APIs, the concept was interesting enough to see what I could get up and running.

And, at three o’clock in the morning, there it was: Visual Bookshelf for OpenSocial running inside Facebook. Everything’s gone full-circle! Life is complete.

Facebook - the guys who showed us the future - reduced to being just a container in the words of Google. Back in your box! Doing what you always did best: presentation. The shopping mall where we hang out with our friends even when the shops are closed.

Of course, my app doesn’t really work properly. And I wasn’t really trusted as a pre-release partner - hell, I’d have broken the internet or something.

But listen, Facebook: there’s always a place for you at this party. If I could choose where to access OpenSocial apps, and choose where to pick up an intelligent digest of my friends’ activity, I know where I’d rather stay.

[Dan Lester is a backseat driver in the Facebook revolution. He advises the social media strategies of non-profits and multinationals alike. His consistent number one piece of advice is to seek advice from someone better than him. Stay away.]

A funny thing happened this morning when I was walking to pick up a coffee. A man jumped out from behind a lamppost and shouted “Oi! Look here you single 28-year old white male who sits around all day watching Star Wars”. It is quite common for strangers to call out abuse based on my somewhat geeky appearance, but on this occasion the manager of my local Blockbuster hadn’t even noticed my sandals and out-of-fashion t-shirt. As he demonstrated the latest Luke Skywalker Anniversary Box Set, he explained that he was trying out a new Facebook product that reveals to advertisers anywhere on the planet my likes and dislikes according to my Facebook profile.

The idea that Facebook could follow us around the entire web, flogging our intimate details to advertisers as we go, is likely to cause uproar on a scale unseen since the early days of News Feed. And then we’ll all settle back down and go on with life as usual. After all, relevant ads are good for us. Untargeted banner ads give you headaches.

They say you can call something revolutionary if it changes your behaviour. When I first received a friend request from a family member I logged straight out of Facebook, cleared my cookies, and even considered taking refuge in a fake Orkut account. Since then, I’ve calmed down, done the decent - but difficult - thing and allowed brothers, sisters, and cousins to peek at the intimate secrets of my life that I trust only Facebook itself to understand completely.

I long-ago gave up scanning my wall posts for indiscrete comments from friends that I wouldn’t want Dad to hear about. And do you know what? Just maybe my relationship with my family is stronger because Facebook has shared aspects of my personality that I find difficult to explain face-to-face. My brother says not to worry about the pictures of me drunk and wearing a skirt - apparently he too had a great time at college. And my sister reassures me that it’s OK these days for people to have alternative sexual preferences (actually, I must have ticked that box by accident, but it’s interesting to note she wasn’t surprised).

The truth is that sharing my vital stats with advertisers is nothing compared to sharing my profile with those closest to me.

Now I just need to fill out a few more movies, interests, and activities in my profile. I’ve already bought enough Star Wars clutter to last me a lifetime.

Over the weekend, I questioned if applications were Facebook’s version of spam. Last night, I was browsing around Facebook and came upon the ad that you see on the left. The ad is for the opportunity to “Work at Home and Make $200+ per Day.” Not a bad offer although it doesn’t seem to pertain to the picture that is directly to the right of the job description. The person posting the advertisement had also posted links on the Washington, D.C. network wall. Her profile was interesting as well (I have posted a screenshot below).

So, it looks like an number of more aggressive spam techniques are now being used on Facebook. The real question is if they are sending spam messages. I haven’t received any spam messages yet, have you? Do you think Facebook will experience the same fate as MySpace, who experienced severe spam problems?

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