allfacebook - the unofficial facebook blog

In the last week or so, Facebook gave its users the ability to edit basic profile information from within their own profiles, making users’ profiles even more accessible as a basic Facebook “control panel.”

Currently, only personal information is handled this way. Editing fields show up fairly quickly, and saved changes appear on the profile in seconds. It’s interesting that Facebook doesn’t even add a Save button to the mix; it fits in perfectly, however, with the site’s uncluttered design.

Is this a groundbreaking feature on Facebook? Not really. But it goes to show that Facebook is not slacking off on the job: they’re constantly tweaking their site design to make it more intuitive for their users.

(A similar little tweak, albeit one that has been around for a while, is this: hover your mouse over the “more” link for your applications, and it will expand your menu without a click. Click outside the box, and it will vanish again. Not extremely useful, but still a neat little bit.)

As you probably already know, Facebook has some limits set on groups within Facebook. Baratunde Thurston has covered the issues that he ran into. The last company that I was working at used Facebook groups as a way to keep in touch with their members that had profiles on Facebook. This is a great tool for generating leads as well as organizing events, but if you try to surpass 1000 (or 550 in Baratunde’s case), you are going to run up against a wall.

Suddenly you are blocked from messaging your group. Doesn’t this make the group practically useless at this point? One purpose of the group is a sign of affiliation. The other purpose is to message those that have opted-in to receive messages. The main reason for the shut down of Facebook messaging was the Brody Ruckus incident that took place late last year.

Since then, Facebook has remained one of the best sites for maintaining connections with others but it has not been useful for generating groups. I have a feeling that this problem will be resolved when Facebook opens up their API to include groups. At that point someone will develop the “Opt-in Groups” application that enables users to enter their email address and receive messages from admins. Is this really the best option though? Do you think Facebook should ban messaging for groups with over 1000 users?

Oh snap! Seriously, is there really any question about who developed Facebook? Apparently Aaron J. Greenspan (not Alan Greenspan in case you were confused) says that he came up with the original idea for Facebook. Aaron developed “FaceNet” which leveraged a web service called the houseSYSTEM. Well guess what? I developed a social network also and launched it around the same time of Facebook.

At the time, Frusic, a social network for friends and musicians, was more robust than any of these systems. Unfortunately, since then the system has stopped working efficiently but the site still remains as a tribute to my past failure. You don’t see me crying to the New York Times about how Facebook stole my idea. Well, I didn’t go to Harvard and I have absolutely no connection to Mark Zuckerberg so I’m not quite sure how to pull the connection.

Back around 2004 everyone was building social networks. Mashable has documented the continuation of that trend. I have been hired by a number of startups since then that all want to be the next Facebook or popular social network. While there is still the potential for developing niche social networks, becoming the next Facebook is going to be extremely challenging. For all those that think they came up with an idea similar to Facebook before it was launched: congratulations! Unfortunately you didn’t have the same luck or resources that Mark Zuckerberg had at the time. Oh and by the way: I was one of the founders of Google. Just thought you should know.

The past three months have been exciting. Entrepreneurs, developers, investors and Facebook users have all experienced the changing dynamic resulting from the launch of Facebook’s platform. Three days after the launch of the platform, this blog was born. There have been some amazing things that have come about. Facebook is now the leader in social networking and has everyone trying to catch up.

3,267 applications have launched so far. The majority of users have used at least one application. The top 46 applications have over 1 million users and the most popular application, Top Friends, has over 13 million users! This is only the beginning but it has been one hell of a ride. Many are trying to figure out if any useful applications will come about. When will the food fight end?

Many advertising networks have launched to cater to the developers as well as advertisers. Many of these companies are taking significant risks as they try to convince others that this form of advertising is effective. They aren’t the only people taking significant risks. Thousands of entrepreneurs have taken to this new opportunity and are running full speed ahead. It is truly an exciting time and I look forward to the future.

Yesterday there was a lot of buzz on the web about Facebook being banned from workplaces. Apparently close to 50 percent of all businesses have banned the site. Supposedly in the U.K. more than 70 percent of businesses have banned Facebook and similar social networks. This seems like an extremely high number of businesses.

Only one of the places that I have worked in the past three years banned access to social sites. Now that my job surrounds Facebook, I certainly am not banned. My guess is that most of the readers to this blog have not been banned at work either. Although maybe this is where people come when they can’t get on Facebook. Are you allowed to access Facebook from work?

You probably saw the article yesterday outlining how Facebook will cost the Australian economy around $6 billion this year alone due to wasted productivity. Out of curiosity, how much time do you spend on Facebook? I of course spend most of my day on Facebook but it is pretty much my job at this point. I would guess that readers of this blog spend more time on Facebook than the average user. Perhaps I’m wrong. In addition to stating how much time you are spending, perhaps you can specify how much productivity you think Facebook has caused you to waste.

According to Alexa, it appears as if Facebook is the most trafficked site in all of Canada. This is definitely not right. As Mike Arrington pointed out yesterday morning, Alexa has been having some problems with their statistics. Apparently they think that YouTube now receives more traffic than Google. Well, according to this screen shot, that’s not the only site that’s bigger. Alexa is going to need to do some serious updates to their algorithm if they plan on keeping any sort of reliability. Alexa has always had skewed data but this is pretty bad when you can’t even track the biggest applications. Big props to Facebook though for being so popular. This may just be a sign of a demographic shift in Facebook users. There are now simply more users that have an Alexa toolbar and use Facebook. So what is the demographic that uses the toolbar anyways?

I was having lunch today with my friend Benoit who had a horrible thing happen to him. His Facebook account was shut down. Facebook sent him an email saying that he had two accounts (which he did but one was deactivated) and then proceeded to block him from logging in. If this happened to me it would be practically catastrophic. I now perform a large chunk of my business activities via Facebook.

It’s pretty crazy how rapidly Facebook has become a mission critical communication tool for me even though their message searching features are non-existent. If Facebook improves their messaging usability to be closer to Gmail I would probably end up performing the majority of my communication via Facebook. I’ve read around the blogosphere a number of other individuals that had their accounts temporarily blocked or completely shut down.

The real problem is that Facebook is almost as strict as the infamously protective ASmallWorld.com which will banish you to the big world without notice. It is extremely difficult to get your account back from Facebook and instead have to start rebuilding your account under a new email address. That can be extremely annoying. Have you had that experience?

Robert Scoble is bragging about his Facebook friends. Apparently he has over 4,600 friends as of now. I have a tenth of that and have enough trouble keeping in touch with them. I wonder how many friends actually message him. I tried messaging Scoble the other day but got no response. He must have some effective filtering methods just as he does for reading his 2,000 blogs posts a day. How many friends is too many friends? How many friends do you have? I remember reading somewhere that you should be particular with the friends that you add on Facebook. Do you agree?

This morning I tried accessing my Facebook profile and it didn’t seem to load. I received the screen that you see above. Recently, I have been receiving an increasing number of emails from my readers who are having problems with logging in to Facebook. Many of these issues came from people in the United Kingdom but today I can’t access my profile. Everything else seems to be working fine. It looks like Facebook is having some serious growing pains. I remember MySpace having serious outages when they began experiencing exponential growth. Looks like Facebook may just be experiencing the same thing. What sort of reliability do you think is acceptable for social networks? Should they be up all the time?

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