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?

Jason Calacanis is at it again. I knew he was self-absorbed when he wrote his linkbait rules back in April, but this just confirms it. Jason has been inundated with friend requests, friend detail requests and a number of application requests. Poor guy! Boo hoo, I’m so popular that I have 150 friend requests. I’m sure he cries himself to sleep at night with all of the pain that he experiences from so many friend requests that he doesn’t have the 2 seconds to click “Confirm Friend Request.” I agree with him that the neck-biting, movie tagging, skype calling and all the other application invitations are getting a bit absurd but deal with it! Seriously, does Facebook really decrease your ability to enjoy life? The solution to Facebook overload? Walk away from the computer. As soon as I finish up this post I’m going to try it myself … at least for a few hours. Although I guess I can browse Facebook from my blackberry but I’m going to avoid that for the time being. Jason: get your head out of your bum! The time it took to write that post could have been spent doing something more productive, such as watching one of those Netflix movies that you have sitting around or eating some Chinese food so you can get a real fortune cookie!

After reading an interesting post the other day about how to use Facebook professionally, I thought I would have a little fun and put a twist on the professional aspect of Facebook. Given that your social and professional lives can end up on Facebook, I figured why not show what you probably shouldn’t be doing on Facebook. If you are using Facebook you may have seen or experienced some of the items that I cover in this post. Trust me, these are things that you shouldn’t be doing.

Message Contacts When You Don’t Know Them
So you have now come to realize that there are some great contacts on Facebook. Why not start leveraging these contacts whenever you have the opportunity, right? If you want to use Facebook unprofessionally, get out there and start messaging people that you have never even met. That’s always a great way to form lasting relationships. The world is yours for the taking so get out there and leverage all those relationships that you’ve never created.

Post Photos of those “Good Times” You Had
So you had a little to much fun one night. If you don’t have memories of it I’m sure one of your great friends will be there to capture it on camera. Call up your friends and tell them to post all those pictures from when you and your friends went out and had a blast. Make sure that they tag you in the photo so all of your contacts can see the evidence. This is a great way for you to get hired. When your potential employer sees the photos, no worries! Everyone has a wild side, right?

Randomly add friends
Go browse for attractive people and send them messages like “Nice butt baby!” Then proceed to add them as a friend. Next find people with similar interests and send them a friend request without ever having spoken to them or sending them a message. Some say that, “The quality of your Facebook experience will be based on the quality of the people in your network.” Boy are they wrong. Get out there, browse through people at random and start adding them as friends. This is a competition to see who is the most popular. So get to it!

Put 100 Applications on Your Profile
Consider this: your friends load up your profile with the intention of writing on your wall. Instead of just scrolling down real quick, they spend the next hour scrolling through all of the applications you have placed on your profile. With each application you think to yourself about how this will force your friends to spend more time on your profile. Don’t be selective in your application selection, just start adding. There are over 2000 applications so there has to be at least 100 that you can add to your profile. Don’t think about it, just do it. It will make your profile look more pretty and user friendly.

Set Your Security Settings to a Minimum
You are an amazing person, so let the whole world know about it. Rather than allowing only your friends to view your profile, let everyone see in. While you’re at it, also make sure to place your home address, phone number and any other personally identifiable information that you can come up with. This will make it easier for others to get in contact with you. Isn’t it great when a random person knocks on your door and says “Surpise, I saw you on Facebook so I thought I’d stop by!”

If you follow the 5 steps that I have outlined above, you will be on your way to using Facebook unprofessionally. Seriously, there is nothing wrong with letting the whole world know that you’re amazing and want to be their friend! Be wild, be popular, be transparent. This is the place to let your personal life out into the open! Party time!

While browsing through YouTube last night, I came across a couple of videos about an application being offered at Facebotonline.com. The goal of the application is to automate all of your Facebook activities. As I previously discussed, Facebook can be effectively used as a marketing tool. I personally have used Facebook to market my blog and other applications with resounding success. The only thing though is that you cannot spam Facebook. They will quickly give you a temporary ban and if you continue to spam they will block you completely. Facebotonline.com claims that they can do the following:

• Add hundreds to even thousands of Facebook friends!
• Broadcast Event Invitations to all of your friends in your network!
• Send messages to any Facebook user!
• Send a note to all your friends at once!
• Use Facebot with MULTIPLE Facebook accounts! (I guess they want you to become the super spammer)
• Automatically save and store each of your Facebook account’s messages, comments and bulletins! (Doesn’t Facebook already do this?)
• Post a comment to all your friends walls at once.
• Import and export friend ID’s to work with over and over! (Why do I want to import and export my friend’s IDs?!?)

The bottom line is this: if you are looking to perform effective Facebook marketing, Facebotonline.com is not the way to go about it. I can guarantee you that trying to use the application as a tool for marketing will have you banned by Facebook in no time. If you are looking for real Facebook marketing advice, give me a call or shoot me an email and I’ll help you out. You can learn enough about Facebook by reading through the almost 300 posts on this site. You don’t need an application to go do your work for you automatically. There are ways to go about generating buzz on the site but I’ll refrain from covering that in this post.

A new marketplace for widgets and applications has just launched. WebAppSale is the one stop shop for posting your widget or application for sale. Currently there are only 2 widgets posted on the site. Will this site work? Hard to say but I doubt it. The main reason that I don’t think this will work is that any application or widget that grows a large user base is going to be acquired by a larger company without them posting it for sale. The amazing thing about the new widget environment is that within a matter of weeks of launching an application on Facebook you can tell whether or not you have any shot of success. Previously, web companies would spend months or years developing an application only to have it fail to gain any traction. Thanks to the viral component of Facebook, your application will make or break it within a matter of days or weeks. You can then call it quits or move right on to the next thing. It’s a hit or miss environment. Conversely, if you want to set up hundreds of applications that only have a couple hundred users, you could package all of your applications and sell them as a whole. I am fairly skeptical about this new site. I think the market is a self-selecting one and any application that gains a solid user base will start receiving offers whether or not they publicly announce their application for sale. What do you think?

This morning I woke up to an interesting email:

Hi,

A Facebook user reported that your application Bush Countdown Clock violates out Terms of Use. The user reporting it selected Inappropriate or pornographic content as the violation. This person also said:

“This is anti-American and ridiculous!”

Please investigate this issue.

Thanks,
The Facebook Team

If my Bush Countdown clock is not patriotic, then I don’t want to be American. Patriotism is freedom of speech. There is nothing more patriotic than questioning and challenging the system. While I don’t want to go off into a political tirade, I wanted to share the letter with you all. Hopefully Facebook doesn’t remove the application!

Hey Facebook! Fix your application directory. There have been over 150 applications added since the beginning of this past weekend and I can’t view any of them! If you click on the “Newest” tab all that is displayed is “Getting results…” but no results ever display. Hurry up and fix this so I can continue to evangelize your product and immortalize the application developers (maybe this is a little dramatic, but hey)!

Thanks!

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