DISQUS

Nick, I've found a slight privacy flaw in Facebook's Groups feature.

Find a Group with only one member (probably the creator) but whose profile you do not have access to.

The Related Groups box will show you a selection of their groups, which you're not supposed to know!

Not the worst privacy breach, although that depends which groups you've joined...

Nick,

I agree that it's slightly unfortunate for Zuckerberg that he dismissed the semantic web just moments before a major announcement about it, but I really don't think Yahoo are trying to out-open Facebook as much as they are trying to out-open Google.

Given that links between web pages formed the basis of Google's rise, it is quite extraordinary that they are not the ones to be be making this announcement concerning the 'next generation' of those links.

You're certainly right that social networks will contribute an important part of the semantic web, but the technical challenges lie with the search engines. Yahoo's lead makes it valuable for sites like Facebook to adopt the semantic web, and they will do so easily when the search engines make meaning out of semantic web markup.

Dan

PS. Glad that Facebook recognised your important contribution to their ecosystem when they invited you to interview MZ.

Agreed - I didn't even see a double word score.

I agree with Sebastian. The distribution of an app is really a side-effect of the most important part of a social platform - that is the ability to interact with my ready-made connections within the app. For example, a stand-alone game is not making use of the social platform until it lets me compare my score with others', or challenge them in some other form. Of couse, using such features implicity distributes the app by making friends aware of it, but that was not the primary aim.

Furthermore, I think we should really be talking about 'social distribution'. To me (and I accept others have different definitions), viral distribution is when the main function of the app inherently spreads itself - such as a vampire bite on a friend, or Nicknaming someone, each in the form of an invite. An app that just has a separate invite function is leveraging the social graph to spread itself, but I would not call that viral. Just my thoughts!

Javier Olivan from Facebook spoke about the Translations app this evening at the London FB garage.

Interesting points were that (evidently from the app), Translations has "deeper hooks" into Facebook than a standard app - i.e. you couldn't build this yourself. But if you want to 'crowdsource' translation of your own app, they are planning to make this possible through Facebook's native Translations app. It's all about a level playing field for apps, you see.

They don't have any real ideas about how that will work for now - nor do they know how they'll cope with languages that use non-Roman characters at this stage.

But I think we have a promise from Javier!

Back in the days when the streets were safe and the police were doing their job, I remember the data protection laws being enforced much more strictly.

There was a Church Organ society in the village, and a handful of old folk with nothing better to do used to turn up and study the organ at the church every so often, and perhaps polish the keyboard. And maybe once a year, the vicar would send out a newsletter to all the members.

Anyway, the laws state that any organisation holding computer data concerning individuals must register with the data protection registrar. No-one ever found out which disgruntled member of the society reported the village church for failing to comply. The vicar was fined a whopping 75 pounds!

I've read a couple of blog posts over the last few days indicating that Twitter is using TinyURL's API - and discussing whether Twitter should just make their own URL-shortener rather than relying on an outside service.

But I don't see why they need a URL-shortener at all (one that acts as a forwarder, anyway). Why can't the API just accept links directly without it counting towards the 140-character limit? Or they can charge us 20 characters per link if they insist; and display URLs as "http://www.socialtimes.com/2008..." or just as hyperlinks around words if possible.

I 'get' the 140-char limit, but having us worry about how to enter URLs, and whether or not the forwarding will work - not to mention our recipients having no idea where the link is going... Well, I think the whole thing is an unecessary limitation!

That is an extraordinarily random selection of websites!

Thanks all for your kind words and helpful suggestions!

As I just Twittered, my concerted effort to try Twitter is off to a bad start because I'm without my phone charger for a few days. I'm under self-imposed limits on phone usage...

Dan pleased to see this.

Agreed, this is big for the web. But slightly dangerous territory for Facebook.

They would love for their Platform standard to become dominant on the social web, compared to any rival standard receiving that honour. Ideally, they'd prefer their competitors to be too lazy to think about catching up.

If the platform no longer sets Facebook apart - because all sites share the same standard - then at least they can make a business selling the technology behind it. But one open source effort later and the claim that competitors need to pay to use FBML will be about as convincing as trying to copyright the alphabet.

And the suggestion that Facebook might go all the way and open up their social graph would surely make the Facebook social graph dominant - but as you said in your State of Facebook post, their data is extremely valuable. It would be risky to set it free...

Matt, if you haven't been following every single word Nick has written - unlikely, I know - he was referring to his previous article:

http://www.allfacebook.com/2007/12/zuckerberg-s...

It seemed perfectly believable, but did leave us wondering what the rest of the Facebook staff might be thinking...

Perhaps project Beacon updated her status?

Agreed, 'smart brands' will happily allow evangelists to build their marketing conversations for them.

But the brands aren't in charge here. Customer-evangelists are unlikely to pour any money into Facebook's other marketing offerings such as SocialAds; and the control panel for Pages is clearly designed to encourage the Page creator to see Pages as just one option in a suite of marketing tools. And the others cost money!

While the idealism of connecting brands to their evangelists (for free) is a more natural evolution of the social network, it is easy to see why it doesn't fit in Facebook's 'monetization phase'.

Deleting unofficial-looking Pages at random is likely to cause problems - especially when many companies make their initial foray into Facebook using semi-professional third parties.

Nor would they use the slang phrase "ya doin", I would hope...

Some comparisons have been drawn between the anti-Beacon campaign and the furore over the introduction of News Feed. Maybe this one will blow over too, but Facebook is entering a dangerous phase in its growth path.

News Feed was a genuine attempt to improve the user experience.

The motivation for Beacon is different - it is part of a drive for monetization.

We can't expect the site 'for free', and ultimately that drive will be good for both the company and its users. However, there are many ways to keep the company's interests more closely aligned with its users'.

Most obviously, short of an opt-out default, the first Beacon purchase could be kept 'in holding' until the user approves it in Facebook, at which point they can choose to: (1) give advance approval for all future Beacons or (2) elect to consider them all from 'holding' on a case-by-case basis - each time being tempted to give blanket approval.

Moreover, what am I registering a dislike towards? I have a friend who continually joins inane groups such as '10 reasons boys smell' that I really don't need to know about.

So, if I click 'remove' whenever I see such an announcement, will Facebook be smart enough to realise that it's just her groups I don't want to know about, or will it think I don't want to know about groups for anyone?

I guess I chose the direction of my API 'experiment' to highlight my message about the real strengths of Facebook. As you have demonstrated over the last 15 years, there are ways around articifical technological barriers if the commercial incentives are strong enough. It will be incredibly deflating for Facebook if, after inventing the 'next generation web platform' (if that's what it turns out to be), they see bigger companies steal the initiative. However excited us tech-heads have become over the platform (and Facebook feels the same), users enjoy Facebook for reasons that have nothing to do with which API they happen to use!

To really tear down these walls, lets get an OpenSocial app running in my OpenSocket for Facebook, but appearing in Orkut courtesy of your Facebook Porting Technology...