DISQUS

WordPress moves toward implicitly driven content discovery. Way cool! :-)

Just as a point of fact, Honesty Box doesn't allow you to leave an anonymous note on someone's wall. It only allows private, anonymous notes to the user who has installed the application.

Also, the allegations that Honesty Box somehow "causes" cyberbullying are utterly bogus. Cyberbullying was a problem before Honesty Box came along and it will be a problem until people can get children to stop being cruel to one another, no small feat.

Technology doesn't bully people, people bully people.

When the News Feed first launched to much controversy, I remember people saying, "just click the little 'x' in the mini feed" to keep things out of the News Feed. Now that we know the 'x' only keeps things from showing up in the Mini Feed, that makes anything fair game for the News Feed. What's more, we'll never know if it shows up or not, and who sees it.

That makes me MUCH less likely to do things inside of Facebook.

Happy Friday, Nick. You're clearly in need of a weekend. :razz:

In all seriousness, I do see some cultural issues with poking, even within American culture. When I get poked by random guys I don't know, I can find myself pretty grossed out.

Our Jason Preston had the same problem yesterday. Apparently it's pretty widespread.

Thanks for the link love, Nick. :-)

I don't disagree with your assessment that Zuckerberg is green, or that he has a lot to learn. I can't speak for him, but I'm pretty sure he wouldn't even disagree with you.

That said, I think he's earned his chance to learn on the job. He built Facebook from a dorm room project to the defining tool of this period in the Web's growth.

I doubt that Zuckerberg was ever prepared for the kind of visibility he now faces, at least not at this point in his life. But like all of us, he's doing the best he can. And I think he's earned the right to keep working on it.

It seems to me that Facebook should appoint a privacy ombudsman to advocate on the users' behalf and communicate with them about important changes. It would go a long way to put people at ease.

The problem wasn't Lacy, it's Facebook and the way they choose to do their PR. They keep themselves at a profound distance from the community. I doubt they would have let anyone other than "his" reporter interview him.

Wouldn't it be fantastic if our lives were so easily categorized? Yes, it's possible to rank the priority with which we treat individuals in our lives with some level of accuracy. But life is more random than that. You never know who is going to turn out to be important in the long run.

That's because - as John Battelle writes - Google doesn't do community all that well.

Isn't that sort of what all the features on Facebook do? They're just deprecated versions of fully fleshed-out applications you can find elsewhere on the Web?

The problem with Facebook isn't that they launch features that make users feel creeped out. It's that they don't explain, beta, or discuss them with users first.

When they planned their new layout, they went to the user base with a giant group and encouraged people to make comments and suggestions. When the new menus launched, people generally enjoyed using them.

Unfortunately, they didn't do the same thing with their new advertising features.

I don't understand it. They have the greatest online community building tool ever, with complete control over the experience of over 50,000 million community members and they still can't use that tool to ask the user base how they'd feel about something?

I'm a Facebook enthusiast, to be sure. But I find this whole initiative mind-boggling.

You mark yourself as single, male and interested in technology, you get adult ads.

You mark yourself as single, female and interested in technology and you get ads for weight loss products...

Sites that share revenue with top video producers are so much cooler. It's kind of a Catch-22 when you want to do something cool on video. My "Leave Iraq Alone" video -- which was a spoof of the infamous Chris Crocker episode -- wouldn't have done nearly as well on YouTube if I hadn't posted it as a video response to Crocker.

But I would have actually made money -- not much, but enough for a couple of lattes -- if I'd gotten the same number of videos on a site that actually shares revenue.

T'would be really nice if YouTube did something like that.

That said, I think YouTube is incredibly cool for leveraging their most passionate users to help them make the site even better. If Facebook did this, nobody would ever catch up to them in the quest for social network dominance.

Oh lord! You guys are ridiculous. Both updates make absolutely perfect sense. Facebook is saying, "use the mini feed well and judiciously, but don't overwhelm users."

Isn't that the best practice anyway? If it isn't, it should be.

Perhaps I just have impeccable judgment when it comes to which applications to install, but I've never encountered an application that publishes stuff I didn't actually DO in my mini-feed.

I've seen applications publish too much content and overwhelm my mini-feed though. Until now "hide action" was the only way to take care of that. I'm glad that FB is providing more granular options for what gets into the mini feed.

Valleywag is a rag, we all know it. I'm not entirely certain why you're giving them such credence.

Do we have ANY evidence that this woman's profile was changed?

This is very interesting, but I see some potential drawbacks, which I post about here:

http://webcommunityforum.com/2007/10/facebook-a...

I couldn't agree more with DCG! Sex offenders, regardless of past wrongs, are people too. Anyone who is free from prison and complying with their parole has paid a debt to society and may now attempt to resume a normal life.

France seems to be the lone holdout for mind-blowing numbers.

What about Germany? I remember reading in a ComScore report that FB's penetration inside Germany. According to the report:

The site experienced 422% growth in Europe and attracted 7.6 million U.K. visitors in July compared to 177,000 German visitors in the same period – a reach of 1.2 percent of the entire German social networking community.

Maybe I'm just being naïve here. But it seems to me that these ex-con sex offenders have paid their debts to society.

Yes, protecting kids online is really important, but is there some law that I'm not aware of that denies registered sex offenders the right to use online social networks?

If they're harassing kids, that's one thing, but some of these people may be just going about their business and trying to lead normal, healthy lives. Do they really need to be stigmatized further if they're not doing anything wrong? Have we completely lost touch with the precept of "innocent until proven guilty?"

And keep in mind that some "sex offenders" were just 19 year-olds who had sex with their 17 year-old significant other. Do folks like that really deserve to be punished for the rest of their lives?

Nick O'Neill raised a really interesting point on this topic. He pointed out that the developers are stealing Google's trademark and that many users will assume that the app was developed by Google.

The problem here is that you're giving access to your gmail to a third party. Do you really think that's wise?

Why in God's name would you EVER put your home address on a public forum? Anywhere? EVER? Especially if you're a "young woman?" That's just plain *effing* stupid.

Facebook's privacy settings are great when they're configured appropriately. But I remember reading somewhere that fewer than 15% of users actually make any changes to the default privacy settings, even when they join a regional network.

I like Rafael's point about keeping your profile private to regional networks you join. I think FB should implement that standard very quickly. It should be an easy fix.

We'll have to see, but with the social overlay that Google is putting into place on its other services, this might just do the trick.

My question is, how is FriendFeed different from Tumblr?