DISQUS

Thanks for highlighting our work with Sharing Mayo Clinic. We have had patient stories on our Web site for several years, and those have been quite popular, but giving patients the opportunity to tell their stories in their own words will be even more powerful.

Thanks for your endorsement, Carmen. It's great to see that many of the folks you have listed are already among those I follow. Nice to have a specialized list like this, and appreciate Carmen's honorable mention.

Thanks for the link, Philip. I'm glad you're finding the information at SMUG helpful.

Thanks for calling attention to this, Anthony. I'd really like to see whether anyone can break into this group. If no one can, it will give everyone a lot more confidence that they can hold conversations in Facebook that are at least as confidential as what gets sent back and forth by email.

And if someone CAN break in to this group, it will be worth the $100 to keep people from putting REALLY valuable or confidential information in secret Facebook groups.

I obviously think they won't be able to do it, but let's find out.

This IS great. If I'm giddy, it's just because it's getting late. But I had noticed this on my Blackberry today, and wondered whether it was a global change. This makes FB messaging MUCH more useful.

Thanks for the shout out, Jake.

Robert - I think I have a solution for you, and how you can get an unlimited number of friends.

I wrote about it here: http://leeaase.wordpress.com/2007/09/15/congres...

Scroll all the way to the bottom to see how you can beat the friend limits.

I did send a note to Peninsula's PR department asking for a copy of the study. Haven't received a response.

Excellent post, and great figures. These studies always pump the figures to get headlines, and climb on the latest hot trend like Facebook. The bad thing is BBC doesn't post the study so people can evaluate for themselves. Or did they even see the study? They just take Peninsula's word for it that they were conservative in calculations.

Concerns are way overblown. I think it will actually fuel faster growth in Facebook as people run across listings in Google, but can’t contact the person without signing up for an account. If Facebook is growing by 1.2 million people a week now, it will be 1.7 million a week by October 15.

Concerns are way overblown. I think it will actually fuel faster growth in Facebook as people run across listings in Google, but can't contact the person without signing up for an account. If Facebook is growing by 1.2 million people a week now, it will be 1.7 million a week by October 15.

Hi Nick - Absolutely. This definitely needs to happen, especially since Facebook aims to reflect "the social graph." The reality of our social relationships is we have real friends, family, acquaintances and professional colleagues. We have different information we want to share with each category.

I've written several posts about how to work around the one-class friend system, and the limited profile helps to some degree. But they all introduce friction into a system that otherwise is simple and smooth. I think I have a successful way to do it, but eventually Facebook is going to come up with the simple friend class management.

I would settle for two classes: personal and professional.

I saw they now have a book exchange application, which is nice. But I agree that multiple classes of friends would be the LInkedIn killer. It probably will take a lot of work to do this, but it definitely should be the priority as Facebook aims at the more adult user base.

Thanks for the link. This certainly isn't the be-all and end-all tool for crisis management, but I think it should be part of the arsenal. If Facebook groups are going to be created around any major public event, like the restaurant rats you mention, it would be better to have some "ownership" of the conversation, so at least you can get your side of the story told.

For other things, like natural disasters, it might make sense to have all of your crisis team belong to a secret group to they can be instantly messaged (particularly if they have the Facebook mobile app, which sends them a text message alerting them to new content.)

Facebook is just a tool...a really cool tool...and we should think creatively about how we can use it to accomplish organizational goals.

Oh, yeah, and it's fund to connnect with people, too!

I agree with you Robert. Facebook is the digital Rolodex. Did some people have hundreds of names in their analog Rolodexes back in the 80s? Sure. Were there some people they never called? Of course. When you accept friend requests, that gives you contact information that may be helpful in the future. It's just like when you exchange business cards at a networking dinner; you may not get to have a meaningful conversation with a person, but if the need to get in touch arises in the future, you have the contact info.

And Ilya's comment about being out of Facebook's target demo is soooo 2006. Facebook has 90 percent of the college kids, but is adding over a million users a week in the 25-49 group.