Starting tonight, any Facebook Public Profile Page (that’s Page with a capital “P”) with over 100 subscribers has the opportunity to select its own vanity URL.  While it hasn’t had the hype from the blogosphere that we saw from the previous private Profile vanity URLs, it does seem to be having a large effect, as Facebook has slowed down tonight, even more than when the private Profile vanities were released.  Get yours now while you can - you can reserve yours for both your Public Pages and private Profiles via the http://facebook.com/username link.  Please comment below if you want some help reaching the 100 fan limit!

As with any and all of my social network profiles, please don’t hesitate to friend me!  My most active profiles are listed over on the upper-right of this blog, but if you Google “Jesse Stay” you can find just about everywhere I belong.  Tonight I was able to reserve short URLs for my most active Pages - please become a fan or friend me!:

My personal Facebook Profile: http://jessestay.socialtoo.com

My public Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/socialdeveloper

SocialToo’s public Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/socialtoo

I’m on Facebook–Now What??? (my first book)’s public Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/fbbook

FBML Essential (my second book)’s public Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/fbmlessentials

We’re Baptist’s public Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/baptists

We’re Catholic’s public Facebook Page: http://facebook.com/catholicsocial

Don’t forget to join SocialToo (my service) to get your own personalized vanity URL.  yourusername.socialtoo.com will redirect to your Facebook profile, and we’ll track statistics for everyone that clicks on your URL.  It’s the only URL you’ll ever need to hand out to others.  Oh, and see the above URLs? Expect a solution for those soon as well.  Sign up for yours at http://socialtoo.com.

We’re just hours away from the launch of Facebook vanity URLs. Many have complained at the preferential treatment given to some influentials and bloggers to get the names they want. After asking, I was offered my first and last name, but Facebook refused to give me and other bloggers the names we would have preferred. I turned them down - I’m pretty sure my full name will be available (and if not there are legal ramifications if the person does not have my name).  In my case I was hoping for “Jesse” since I’m currently using that on Twitter. After all, Loic got his first name.

It would appear there may be reason for that. I’m noticing in just the past few hours Facebook employees seem to be coming out from the woodwork and snagging up the remaining first names available as fast as they can.  It would appear others are noticing, too. For instance, “Jesse”, just in the past 2 hours or so is now occupied by Facebook employee, Jesse Dwyer. What’s odd is that in the last few hours there was even an account called “God” on Facebook. While it seemed to break the 5 character rule, it would appear Facebook has corrected and removed the account. I wish I had a screenshot (although I do have witness of at least one other Twitter user that saw it).

With Facebook employees being given preferential treatment, will there even be reason to try and get the names we want? It would appear that, to get the “official” names we want we have to work for Facebook. In the meantime I’ll be using my SocialToo Vanity URL - at least I get analytics from that. (really, check it out - we just launched it today!)

I’ll be on live tonight to cover it at http://ustream.tv/channel/thesocialgeek. We’ll see if we can get others to join in with us.

I’ve been invited to do 2 WebCasts in the next 2 weeks that I think you might be interested in.  As always I’ll try to post my slides on SlideShare if it makes sense to do so.  I really like an interactive presentation so most of the time my slides don’t make sense.

The first is for the Marketers in the Audience.  It’s about gaining Business value from Facebook, and I’ll discuss how to give your business legs using the Social Network.  I’ll cover how to create an effective Facebook Page for your business, when and how to use your personal Facebook Profile for networking, do’s and don’ts on the network, advertising, the tools you need, and more.  That Webinar is hosted by Marketing Coalition, and is $149 per individual, and $129 per individuals in groups of at least 3.  You can register here.  The Webinar takes place on Thursday at 1:30PM EST.

The second WebCast is free, and hosted by Safari Books Online.  It will target developers new to Facebook development, and in it I’ll cover the basics of what you need to get started in Facebook Development.  We did this last year and I think everyone really enjoyed it that attended.  The first people that register get a free Autographed copy of my book, FBML Essentials, and everyone else gets a free 45-day account on Safari Books Online to read FBML Essentials.  Did I mention how much I love O’Reilly?  You can register here.  My slides from the last one of these I did are up on SlideShare.

There will be a Q&A after each session, so come with your questions and I’ll do my best to answer!

Facebook lately has been very good at providing regular and frequent updates to its service.  So much that it has often come under the gun for updating too much to the detriment of its user experience.  I have been last to critique them on this however, as I think it’s a good thing to be listening to your users like they have, releasing early, and releasing often as users give feedback towards the experience.  I think it’s a major reason Facebook is still growing and still surviving despite Social Network users being the type to easily get bored of new technology.  There have been several launches recently which, IMO have been very loud and powerful in the way they were announced and the affect they would have on users.  You probably read about them because they were talked about on almost every major Tech blog when they were announced.  There’s still one major problem though - myself and numerous other users still haven’t received these features.

Let’s start with the launch of  one, as a heavy FriendFeed user and strong advocate of real-time updates, hits near and dear to my heart.  The Facebook stream live updates were announced over 3 weeks ago, claiming to provide you with a live update of new posts in your stream when they appeared.  A simple click on the link should make those messages appear.  While not completely real-time, it’s a step forward, and something I’ve been really looking forward to for over 3 weeks.  You can see my profile, after over an hour of not refreshing on Safari here - note there is no link with new updates:

Here’s how it should look, according to Facebook:

It should also be noted this looks the same if leaving Firefox stagnant, or running on Windows, or any other machine or browser.  This isn’t an OS or browser issue it would appear - it looks as though Facebook’s deployment routines simply haven’t gotten to my user account.  It would appear I’m not alone in this either.  Asking about this on Twitter about a week ago I got numerous responses from other Twitter and Facebook users who also were not yet seeing this in their stream.  A Facebook employee even kindly suggested I was supposed to be receiving this.  I responded saying I wasn’t, but still have not received any feedback in return from Facebook.

It would appear that’s not the only thing that is having trouble rolling out lately though.  Over a week ago, Luke Shepard, a developer at Facebook, announced a very welcome feature launching Facebook into a much more open era.  The feature enables users to link their Facebook accounts to their Gmail accounts and other OpenID providers, making Facebook an official OpenID provider.  Also, according to Shepard, users would be able to register for Facebook by simply entering their Gmail credentials.  ”Now, users can register for Facebook using their Gmail accounts. This is a quicker, more streamlined way for new users to register for the site, find their friends, and start exploring,” he said.

The problem is that I still don’t see a way to do this on Facebook.  I can link my Facebook account with various OpenID providers and even Gmail, but that’s only if I have an existing account.  However, there is no option when I log into Facebook, or when I try to register with Facebook to login or register with my Gmail credentials or other OpenID credentials as he says.  Am I just the last person on their deployment list? I know I’m not the only one because this was pointed out by someone else with the same question.  If I can link my OpenID profile with my Facebook profile, but can’t login or register with it, what good is this announcement?

It would appear something seems broken in the Facebook deployment process.  Either it’s just really slow, or not all users are getting the updates they’re supposed to be getting.  Or are we getting these announcements just to get the marketing spin machine going?  It would appear that this blogger is not on that list if it is the case!  Regardless, I’d really love to have the updates we were promised!

If you’re seeing the same issues, let it be known in the comments.  You can follow me on Facebook at http://jessestay.socialtoo.com.

A few weeks back I was interviewed by our Local Fox station, Fox 13 KSTU about Facebook.  I was interviewed by Arikka Von, Katy Carlyle, Nicole Hunter, and Nineveh Dinha about topics such as why you should join Facebook, Facebook Privacy, Security, and even Strategy on Facebook.  The series ran all last week (now all my neighbors are wanting me to give them a class on Facebook), and I think serve as a great resource for anyone wanting to learn the basics of what Facebook can do for them.

For those wondering when I’m on Facebook–Now What??? will get a new edition, rest assured Jason (my co-author) and I are definitely talking about that, and hopefully sooner than later we will be able to begin working on that.  We also have something else in the works (again if I can just get time to get my part done) that I think will hold you through in the meantime.  Until we get any of that together, these videos by Fox 13 Utah serve as a great resource.  Thanks a lot to the entire Fox 13 team for giving me the opportunity to share!  I especially like the one showing you how to set your Facebook Privacy settings. Nineveh’s strategy segment was also very useful I thought (If you’re going to be running against Senator Bob Bennett this election, call me - I’d love to help you out!):

Facebook Fundamentals

Facebook Etiquette

Facebook Security and Privacy

Facebook Strategy

Rob Diana recently did a post suggesting Facebook, rather than Twitter, was the real goldmine for data.  I, as I’ve inferred before on LouisGray.com, wholeheartedly agree with that notion, and in fact, Facebook is already showing the potential for this with their Lexicon product.  While not yet as public as Twitter search, right now anyone can see top trending keywords and topics, very similar to Twitter search, via the URL http://facebook.com/lexicon.  Better yet, Facebook has revealed where they are going with it via their new version of the trends tool at http://facebook.com/lexicon/new.

From the new Lexicon you can pick any trending topic, see the number of users talking about those topics on a given timeline.  Facebook goes further though, providing demographic data.  For instance, for the term, “baseball”, you can find out how many females vs. males are talking about baseball.  Under a Demographics category, you can also break it down by age, or country.

Associations

In addition to demographical information, you can pull out various statistics about what people are saying about a particular topic.  Under the “Associations” category, you can get a graphical breakdown of what the most popular word associations with the topic are.  Popular associations for the word, “baseball” were “high school”, “college”, “coach”, to name a few.

Sentiment

I found this one quite interesting.  Facebook has found some way to determine the sentiment of users when mentioning various search terms.  For instance, for “baseball”, you can determine the percentage of users speaking positively of baseball, and the percentage of users speaking negatively.  They go further though, allowing you to compare the sentiment of one search term over another.

Pulse

Facebook will also do some biographical checking for you as well.  It looks at each search term, and will determine what other common keywords are in users’ profiles related to those search terms, and what words are most popular when users are mentioning the term.  For “baseball”, users tended to have words such as “sports”, “music”, “football”, and “reading”, revealing a little information about those fanatical about baseball.

Geography

Lastly, users can see how a particular search term fares geographically.  ”baseball” is very popular in California.  Facebook provides a map, color-coding based on percent of users talking about the particular term.  I can’t help but wonder if all search results are biased towards California however since that is one of the most populous states in terms of Facebook use.

The Potential for Facebook vs. Twitter

I think Facebook has shown through this Lexicon that they have the potential to be much more useful than Twitter in terms of search and data mining potential.  Because Facebook has more detailed profile data, and a significantly larger user base to read from, the potentials for useful data are so much greater, and are already proving so via this Lexicon.  If Facebook starts to provide APIs around this search data, along with the publicly available user status updates and profile data, they will be a very serious force to reckon with, that I think, regardless of the mass funding Twitter has, will be extremely tough to compete with.

If you’re currently writing apps for Twitter, you should sincerely consider starting to learn Facebook.

One of my strongest expertise is developing web apps that utilize Social APIs and technologies.  My website, SocialToo is built all around these.  I’ve written a book on the subject, and reviewed others.  I’ve blogged about it, and written many apps myself, and consulted for many others.  I wrote one of the first howtos on Facebook Connect development, and wrote the very first Facebook Connect Wordpress plugin.

However, I’ve realized that I’m not sharing that much.  I have presentations I’ve shared via Slideshare, but those just don’t do it justice.  I’d like to share more here on this blog, do a few geeky howtos for the developers and coders out there, and hopefully help a few of you out.  I’m not quite sure where to start though.

So my question for you is, what would you like me to talk about?  What would you like to learn?  It can be any Social Network API, really.  If I don’t know it yet I’ll go learn it and share it with you.  I’d like to help you learn what you don’t already know though.  I figure I’m pretty good at this stuff, so I may as well share it.  So, what would you like me to talk about?  Trust me, it will be much more interesting if you tell me, than if I just guess myself.  How can I help you?

Image courtesy Cory Doctorow

I was interviewed on our local radio station, KSL News Radio (1160 AM and 102.7 FM) about Facebook etiquette recently, and the article aired today. I get asked frequently how you can separate your professional and personal life on Facebook. Paul Nelson (@paulthereporter on Twitter) was kind enough to take a video of me showing how to do this. Here’s the Howto, and keep in mind that you can also do this for individual photo albums and videos as well:

If you want to hear the audio interview you can listen here:

With the new Facebook home page design, the visibility of all my updates is making other people aware that I import my Google Reader, Delicious, and other activity into Facebook. It is one of my most frequent questions asked in the messages I get on Facebook. For this reason I thought I’d share how I do it. Believe it or not, no app install is required for this - it’s built right into Facebook.

Services Available

First of all, the services you can import into your Facebook wall feed:

• Yelp
• Photobucket
• Flickr
• Digg
• Picasa
• Delicious
• Google Reader
• Youtube
• Stumbleupon
• Last.fm
• Pandora
• Hulu
• Blog/RSS - you may choose one blog to import (in addition to any note imports)

Start by choosing which of those you belong to and use, and which you would like to share with your friends. Now to set it up.

Set Up

Set up is easy.  Click on the “Profile” link in the top nav bar.  Then, under the “Write Something” publisher box, on the right, there is a “Settings” link. Click on that, and you’ll now see a list of sites you can import.  In the list of sites, just click on the one you want to import, and follow the instructions.  Click “import”, and you’re done!  If you ever want to edit or remove your settings, just click on any of the services and you can change any of the settings you want.

Importing the other sites you frequent can be a great, viral way to initiate discussion amongst your friends and family.  It can also be a great way to bring more exposure to your brand or business if the articles and links on the sites you share belong to your business, and others can always re-share on their profiles, so it is viral as well.  So there you have it - you too can import these sites into your own profile.

Beginning of February I announced my 8 late predictions that I thought would happen in 2009. One of those, which I actually mentioned originally last year, was that Facebook would launch a developer platform for the iPhone. Such a prediction was hinted at last year by Facebook, was supposed to launch end of last year, and it would appear that this morning it came true. As of this morning, Facebook announced they are releasing Facebook Connect for the iPhone, and announced several of the first apps using it.

The platform integrates with the iPhone XCode platform and provides libraries that make integration of Facebook into any iPhone app easy. (Here’s where I get geeky, so beware) Per the documentation, the basics are that developers simply include the libraries in this manner:

#import “FBConnect/FBConnect.h”

Following that, the basic component of the app is the session object. To create a session object, you just need to provide code similar to this:

session = [FBSession sessionForApplication:myApiKey secret:myApiSecret delegate:self];

Following that, you’ll want a basic login button you can provide to users that authenticates the user and connects with the session object. To display the login button, use code like this:

FBLoginButton* button = [[[FBLoginButton alloc] init] autorelease];
[self.view addSubview:button];

Once the user is logged in, the session object should have the session key from Facebook, and you can make normal Facebook API calls from there. From there, you can get the session key and the session secret and send them back to your servers for processing, or make simple calls back to Facebook directly from the iPhone app using the provided libraries. Facebook provides this sample code as an example on how to do it from the iPhone:

- (void)getUserName {
NSString* fql = @”select name from user where uid == 1234″;
NSDictionary* params = [NSDictionary dictionaryWithObject:fql forKey:@"query"];
[[FBRequest requestWithDelegate:self] call:@”facebook.fql.query” params:params];
}

- (void)request:(FBRequest*)request didLoad:(id)result {
NSArray* users = result;
NSDictionary* user = [users objectAtIndex:0];
NSString* name = [user objectForKey:@"name"];
NSLog(@”Query returned %@”, name);
}

It would appear that 2009 is right on track, and I can’t wait to see what more Facebook has in store for us with the recent launch of their new design, new focuses, and more. This alone may be enough to get me even further into iPhone app development as the iPhone finally has the potential to become much more “Social”.