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?

Productivity across the country has soared 100% in the past half hour. That’s because nobody can currently use Facebook. I actually have to do real work now! Facebook is performing some upgrades. My guess is that these are nothing spectacular just the addition of servers and such. It’s kind of ridiculous that in this day in age Facebook needs to take down their entire site in order to perform upgrades. Maybe Facebook is preparing to release a new platform which protects all users from STDs and cancer. That would be pretty revolutionary. Unfortunately, I doubt that this is the case. Honestly I doubt there is anything major taking place except from the fact that they have had to take down the servers. That’s definitely one downside of having your business built on someone else’s platform. When they decide to go down, your business goes down. For now, it’s time for me to go try out some work related activities like reading email and other things that I have been avoiding.

Update
Given that even the Facebook page that says they are getting an upgrade is loading slowly suggest that there may be another issue at hand. I read a blog post this morning stating that Facebook was being hacked. Anybody know anything about this? Sounds like a denial of service attack. Although maybe I’m reading into this too much and you would expect that they have protection against DOS attacks.

Update 2
According to another blog, Facebook was down at 1:50 AM PST this morning and the Facebook wikipedia entry read the following:
“IT WAS RECENTLY HACKED BY CHRIS DOHERTY ON TUESDAY 31ST JULY. MANY PEOPLE HAVE BEEN AFFECTED, ESPECIALLY THOSE IN THE UK. CHRIS DOHERTY PROCLAIMED, ‘NOW PEOPLE MAY SEE THAT I AM THE TRUE CREATOR!’”

Update 3 – 2:30 PM EST
The site is back up. Not sure if we’ll ever know what happened!

Final Update
Facebook released the following statement:

This morning, we temporarily took down the Facebook site to fix a bug we identified earlier today. This was not the result of a security breach. Specifically, the bug caused some third party proxy servers to cache otherwise inaccessible content. The result was that an isolated group of users could see some pages that were not intended for them. The site has now been restored and we apologize for any inconvenience this may have caused.

Last week, Facebook posted the following news announcement:

Developers – Now is the time to build education applications on Facebook Platform! Facebook will be phasing out its Courses feature in early August, and we wanted to make sure you were the first to know.

Collaboration services and applications are a big part of the world of Education. Especially on college campuses, where we first found our roots. Many of you have probably used some kind of collaboration software as a part of your courses. Our courses application was a great way to connect with new friends, and find your classmates. But, we think Facebook Developers can create even more robust ways to create, connect, and collaborate around teaching and learning in the classroom.

This is a great business opportunity, with vast distribution potential, and a great way to fundamentally affect an important part of the lives of students worldwide.

Rather than trying to drive creativity within their company, Facebook has decided to look elsewhere for creative input. Additionally, they would like someone else to build some of their applications. Here’s my translation of Facebook’s announcement: “Hi developers! Let us let you in on a secret: we are removing the courses feature on our site. First, go develop the same application if you want to grab a few thousand users that miss the feature. Second, go and build us an application similar to Blackboard. We have enough to currently worry about, so do us a favor and go build us the app. Oh … one other thing … we have told all the other developers about this opportunity so you might want to hurry up if you are going to seize the moment!”

I understand Facebook wanting to increase their feature set, but do you find it a little odd that they are now trying to guide what applications developers build? Perhaps this is their way of saying that they will purchase any company that builds a robust enough educational application. I think this means something completely different: Facebook has their hands tied. While I won’t hypothesize about what exactly Facebook is building, they are definitely up to something big. There has been the opportunity to improve upon Facebook’s educational features since the platform launched, so why have they decided to announce this now? Maybe I’m reading into this too much. Any ideas?

That shouldn’t really come as a surprise. It’s a good thing that much of my job already revolves around Facebook otherwise I would be in trouble. According to the Telegraph, over 70 percent of businesses in the U.K. have blocked Facebook from within their company. You know you are going to become a powerful brand when companies start banning you from the workplace. Could you imagine if they banned Google from work? That wouldn’t happen though since Google is where I find all my answers. Conversely, banning Facebook could become a problem if Facebook becomes my primary center of communication. A large percentage of my interactions already take place on Facebook now and I have a feeling that this will increase over the coming months. Om Malik suggests that all this Facebook interaction which has resulted in Facebook fatigue can be prevented.  By simply accepting friend requests from people that are in your cell phone, you can limit the amount of interaction on Facebook. I have to agree with Om but at this point my Facebook account has almost become as tainted as my email account. Perhaps it is time to heed Om’s advice and become more selective. How open are you in accepting friend requests?