On Thursday morning I’m doing a free webcast for Safari Books Online (moderated by OReilly’s Laurel Ackerman) in which I’m going to go into further detail than I have before on how to get started building Facebook apps.  I’ll take you from start to finish, focusing this time on more hands-on coding, and less introduction and together we’ll build a Facebook app from scratch.  I haven’t figured the time yet, but if we have time, I’ll also show you how in just 3 steps you can integrate a simple Facebook login into your own website and apply the same principles we went over with the Facebook on your own website through Facebook Connect.

I’m going to stick to HTML, FBML, and Javascript for this session – if you have a knowledge of just HTML and Javascript you should be able to follow along pretty well, so this should work well for both the new programmer wanting to get their hands wet, and the experienced programmer just getting started in the Facebook platform environment.  These sessions I normally charge businesses and organizations hundreds per student so this is a unique opportunity for you to come learn on a budget (free)!

You can register for the webcast here – it starts at 10am PST this Thursday (tomorrow!).  Each participant will get a free 45 day registration to Safari Books online’s huge library of tech books, and 10 lucky participants will also win a free autographed copy of my book on Facebook development, FBML Essentials.  Also, I’m starting a thread on my Facebook Page that I’d love to hear your questions and suggestions on what you’d like to hear in the session.  You can comment on that here.

I’m looking forward to sharing what I know with all of you – please hurry and register before it’s too late!

According to Twitter’s Team list, Brian Sutorius, who, according to his Facebook profile, was previously on Facebook’s Platform Policy team, is now Twitter’s newest API Support team member.  After the loss of Alex Payne moving to more operational roles, and Chad Etzel, who was on a contract basis with the team, Sutorius joins the likes of Ryan Sarver and Doug Williams in the Support role.  Twitter’s API Support team are in charge of managing the Twitter development mailing list and ensuring the Twitter API is managed properly.

Sutorius worked since July of 2007 on Facebook’s Platform Policy team, the team at Facebook in charge of enforcing policy infringements on Facebook’s developer platform.  The team ensures applications are following policy, not storing information more than 24 hours, aren’t serving deceptive ads, etc.  Now it would appear he could be doing similar things on a team working to shore up its own platform policy agreement.  Brian was there when Facebook grew through their own policy changes – Facebook Platform was launched around May of 2007.

It’s exciting to see Twitter bringing more veteran talent into their team.  With the previous hire of Josh Elman, Facebook’s former Platform Manager, and now Brian Sutorius, Twitter is solidifying its effort to innovate and bring Twitter closer to Facebook as a competitor.  As I said earlier, it’s these types of hires that are making me more excited about Twitter.  We’ll see if they live up to the people they’re hiring and keep things moving forward.

Among the things Robert Scoble is good at he is definitely good at getting us bloggers talking.  Today he shared on Posterous (which I am subscribed and read in Google Reader) his reasons for not using Google Reader any more.  Robert was the one that got me into Google Reader in the first place, so coming from him, this is a bold statement.  He has some points though – I’d like to put this in a different view.  Google Reader is Google’s Walled Garden.  There is no public search.  There is no public access to comments.  There is no public access to seeing what Robert is liking or commenting on or how he is interacting with the site.  The only thing public are the shares.  I have to be following you for you to be able to comment on, view comments, or like my shares.  There is no way to make those comments or likes public.  In a social web, that’s unacceptable.

Let’s first contrast that with Facebook.  Facebook, the original “walled garden” at least allows those you are friends with to comment and see your comments and likes.  The relationship is mutual.  Not only that, but you have granularity in who sees what you post, and therefore who can comment on it.  Of course Facebook could still do better in this as well.

Now look at Twitter, supposedly the most open environment of all Social environments (if you don’t count MySpace).  With Twitter I can respond to anyone.  Anyone can see my response.  I can retweet, and anyone can see my retweet.  I can even create an entire list of people and anyone can see that list of people.  Conversely, Twitter doesn’t provide the openness of granularity to allow people to be private as they choose (yes, I define that as openness as well), so even it fails to an extent.

What Scoble is having problems with I think is the fact that his content, his comments,and his likes are encapsulated in this walled garden in Google Reader.  Even his shares are pretty hard to find – he has to share the URL for you to have access to them.  I think all this lends to a poor User Interface, and a very “unsocial” experience.  It’s very hard to share things beyond just the articles in Google Reader.

My suggestion would be, assuming Google Reader wants to be a more social experience: open up more.  Make it easier to find peoples’ shares.  Make it easier for people to comment on my feeds.  Make it easier for people to like my feeds.  Give us an API to those comments and likes.  Get rid of duplicate content (okay, that’s just an unrelated pet-peeve).  At the same time maintain the openness of granularity to enable privacy should people choose.  The default should be openness though.  Google is not and never was a Walled Garden.  Google Reader shouldn’t be either.

At the same time you can follow me on Google Reader here.

I’ve been rambling on Twitter, FriendFeed and Facebook tonight about the differences in how Facebook, Twitter, and FriendFeed’s founders participate in each community.  Look at Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Fan Page.  Notice how he basically talks at the community?  I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a comment by him with his followers (perhaps part of the reason why it’s so difficult to manage Fan Pages right now).  Now look at Ev Williams and Biz Stone’s Twitter profiles.  You’ll notice a little more participation, but mostly with their inner circles and occasional outreaches to the community.  Now go read Paul Buchheit and Bret Taylor’s FriendFeed profiles.  Notice that they’re very actively involved in the conversation, responding in their own threads to people they barely know, participating in others’ conversations, etc.  I think if you look at the profiles of other employees in each of the three organizations you’ll see a similar trend.  Why is it that the community where the founders and employees participate the most is the smallest community with the lowest growth rate?

I’ve been contemplating this tonight.  FriendFeed, as a whole has one of the tightest communities of all.  For those that participate actively in the site, we quickly come to know each other – it’s the place where everybody knows your name.  That’s why Scoble, and Louis Gray, and myself are so passionate about it.  It is a great place to go meet new people, find more information, and grow with a community that cares and knows you.  I asked the question why Facebook and even Twitter don’t see this as an opportunity to win a new audience, much of which feels a bit betrayed by the sale of FriendFeed to Facebook, and many who have never done much venturing outside the network to new places. It seems like an opportunity to me – after all, when Facebook bought FriendFeed, they bought the technology, not the community.  The community is something that has to be earned, not bought.

Yet, at the same time I wonder if it really matters.  With Facebook and Twitter’s immense growth, do they really need to be paying attention to the small FriendFeed community?  FriendFeed has great technology, and great talent that built that technology, now working for Facebook (one who just left).  Can the community be won in other ways?  I think it can, and it goes back to the first paragraph above – look at the numbers compared to participation.  I argue a community’s growth is not relative to the participation of its founders, but rather the technology’s capability to build community even further.  It’s the technology that trumps community any day because it creates and enables that community.  Technology that empowers individuals to create their own communities wins any day, and trumps founder participation hands down.

Gasp!  You say – you mean I don’t have to participate to build a community?  No, that’s not what I’m saying.  If you’re a user of the tools, you definitely must be participating, nurturing, and sharing for your community to grow.  What I’m saying though is that no matter who the founders are and whether they participate in your personal community or not, you’re going to take your community to the places that enable you to nurter, build, and grow a community the best.  That’s why Facebook grew the fastest.  That’s why people use Twitter.  It’s also why FriendFeed was the smallest, yet had a great acquisition of some very talented individuals who know how to build this type of technology.

Let’s look at the technologies:

Facebook

Facebook not only enables you to share status updates with your friends, but enables you to share photos, videos, notes, links, and more, all in an integrated environment.  You have privacy controls to which you can control how public the information you share with your friends is.  This encourages a native environment where family and close friends can communicate and share with each other, focusing on each individual’s roots to build community out of.  You have lists that you can organize these individuals and filter their updates in your news stream.

At the same time Facebook provides Fan Pages, indexable by Google, for which you can subscribe, or “fan”, similar to the way you would do on the other networks.  This is your public, more anonymous persona, something I think each individual needs as well.  This enables you to share with the rest of the world what you’re doing, and build community and share through that means.

Then you have the API.  Not only as an entrepreneur, developer, or community builder do I have access to create applications that create and nurture community within the Facebook environment, but Facebook has also given me the technology and tools to do that on my own website, all with the community I’m working to build on Facebook itself.  It enables me to do that with my own community, and enable them to bring their communities into my own.

The richness of that experience is what makes Facebook so big, and is the reason for its growth.  That has nothing to do with its founders or their participation.  I’m not sure they need to participate so long as they keep building technology that further enables individual communities on the network.

Twitter

Twitter baffles me at times, but I think I understand it.  Twitter’s openness and focus on such a simple thing, status updates, is what has made it grow so big.  Users can do whatever they want with the network.  They can use it to update their friends with what they’re doing, respond, and grow a community through open communication.

Twitter also encourages the initiation of conversation.  You post something on Twitter, link to somewhere else, and the communication continues elsewhere.  Some times that filters back to Twitter.  Some times the entire communication happens on Twitter.

Twitter’s API is as open as it can be.  It’s fairly limited as compared to Facebook’s, but has enabled many people to bring their communities on Twitter back to their own brand and vice-versa to further grow community.

The problem with Twitter as compared to Facebook is that it is only status updates.  You can respond, reply, and even retweet items you read, but it all centers around those status updates.  There’s not much more depth than that, limiting the type and size of community one can build on the network.  Yet at the same time the openness and lack of rules around users and its developer platform has enabled people to do things they would not normally be able to do with a community on Facebook.  That’s why they’ve continued to grow and are the size (and hype) they are right now.

At the same time because they’re not quite the enablers of community in regards to their technology which Facebook is, I think their Founders and employees need to participate and get involved a little more.  The technology still doesn’t quite sustain the building of community the way Facebook’s does.

FriendFeed

I could probably argue FriendFeed has better technology that encourages and enables community building better than Twitter’s.  The problem with FriendFeed is that almost all the technology found in FriendFeed keeps getting gobbled up by Twitter and Facebook.  There’s not much new to it, and now that they’ve been bought by Facebook, that doesn’t appear to need to fully compete – it would just be an additional complement to the community-building offerings Facebook offers.

Beforehand FriendFeed was doing a good job keeping up, and perhaps could have even caught up to at least Twitter.  Its growth was even starting to show that before they were acquired.  Yet their founders still participated, as did the other employees of the company.  Why is this?  It was possible because the community was smaller – the founders were simply growing with the community, and the community was and is still a tight-knit community of people that knew each other.

I think as FriendFeed continued to build technology that enabled others to build community and relationships, that participation would have slowly evolved to each of the founders’ own close communities.  They would not have needed to participate for the community to grow.

Conclusion

So what do we make of all this?  I think the moral here is that entrepreneurs need to focus more on building technologies that encourage and enable community.  When you’re writing code or having others write it is it enabling people to build relationships?  Is it enabling people to share with others?  How much so?

The Facebook/Twitter or even Google or Microsoft or Apple battle isn’t over yet – in the end it will be the one that best enables their users through technology to build their own communities and communicate better with each other.  The better competitors will master this.  There will be other entrants.  It’s not the participation of a community’s founders that determines its success.  It’s the technology of the company which creates community that does.  In that regard, technology trumps community, hands down.

No, it’s not lists.  Facebook has already had those for over a year now (of which we featured in I’m on Facebook–Now What??? when it first came out).  What has me excited is the hiring of a new employee today.  Josh Elman, previously the Platform Program Manager for Facebook and former Senior Product Manager at LinkedIn, today joined Twitter as the 3rd Product manager hired at the growing company.  What has me excited?  He knows platforms and he truly understands the vision of Facebook – this is a huge hit on Facebook and huge win for Twitter.  This is a guy with serious experience, something that has had me concerned in the past for Twitter.

I mentioned before any idea to the contrary that Twitter is trying to be like Facebook is a lie.  The fact is Twitter has to be like Facebook to compete and grow.  The only other option Twitter has is to sell, and we know they’re not looking to do that.  What better than hiring top talent directly from the competitor you’re trying to be like?  Josh Elman was one of Facebook’s best – he was there when Facebook went profitable.  He knows this stuff.

As a developer on the Facebook platform, I’ve had the opportunity to work with Josh, as have many other developers.  He was one of our primary points of contact, and after writing FBML Essentials, Dave Morin, the man in charge of Facebook’s Connect platform, immediately introduced me to Josh for reference and we have kept in contact since.  I was always amazed at his vision for things, and his friendly attitude towards the developers working on the platform. He did a lot for Facebook.  I was really sad to see him go.

Now I get to turn to Twitter and see what he will do there.  Josh Elman is one of the single biggest hires for Twitter in a long time, and I can’t wait to see what happens.  With him at the helm of Product Manager, will we see Twitter grow profitable?  Will we see a stronger developer platform product? Will we see more Facebook-like features?  What weaknesses will Twitter seek out?

I’m finally excited about something again at Twitter.  Josh is a great addition and I can’t wait to see what happens.

You asked for it, you got it.  My FBFoundations Wordpress plugin for Facebook Connect was built to provide you the basic building blocks to create your own Facebook Connect-compatible blog.  The idea being you add the foundations, and then plugin developers can add their own compatible plugins on top of that with little to no additional effort.  The first version was a little rough – it required you to have a popup login button the first 3 times a user visited your site (unless they logged in), wasn’t very compatible with 3rd-party comment systems like Disqus, and required some additional effort.  It was a pain for me as well.

Today I’m releasing a new version, version 0.4, which has the following updates:

• The popup login is now optional, and off by default
• There is a new Facebook login button that appears in the sidebar if the user is not logged in.  This is in addition to the one above the comments box.
• You no longer have to have a specific div with an id of “#commentform” to load the login button for your users
• Better support for jquery – since jquery’s built into the latest versions of Wordpress, I now load that instead.
• Meta support! Now, any blog that implements the FBFoundations plugin will automatically have the correct meta tags to properly format Facebook shares back to Facebook.  On each single post, the post’s title and excerpt are loaded correctly in the share to Facebook.  If the post has an image, the first image of the post appears with the share as well, instead of forcing you to surf through an endless list of images.  It just works.

In addition to the above features, you get the existing features which include:

• Pre-loading of Facebook Javascript client libraries
• XFBML support out of the box – you should now be able to include XFBML anywhere in your blog, in blog posts, etc.
• Automatic authentication and authorization of Facebook users

Now your job is to go create something.  Once you install this on your blog you now have a virtual playground for which you can start using the Facebook APIs via Javascript or PHP.  You can add some XFBML and do a friend invite form, for example, or maybe replace your comments with an fb:comments XFBML tag.  Or maybe you want to get more advanced and start loading some friends via the API and friends.getAppUsers.  I’m now going to go and have some fun with my FBShare plugin.

For more information, be sure to check out the official FB Foundations post (which I’m going to update with this post).  The download with all the updates mentioned here is version 0.4.  You can download it by clicking or copying this link.

Please let me know in the comments if you have any suggestions, bugs, or improvements.  I also welcome any patches – this is 100% GPL’d code!

Here’s the link again: http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/fbfoundations-facebook-connect-plugin.zip

Today Facebook launched a nifty little tool enabling website owners and bloggers to allow their users to better share and track their content on Facebook.  The new tool provides a piece of HTML and javascript that renders a little “Share” button.  When clicked, the post is tracked by Facebook, the number of shares is shown, and via an API comments, likes, shares, and more can be tracked across all of Facebook for items shared via that button.  Today I’m going to add to that by providing a Wordpress plugin.

The FB Share Button Wordpress plugin renders the Facebook share button of your choice on your blog.  Via admin settings in Wordpress you can choose which Share button you would like to display, where you want to display it, and even provide the language for the link.  The plugin is based on the same Easy Retweet plugin by Sudar which you see on this blog.

To install, just download this link, untar and ungzip into your Wordpress plugins directory.  Activate the plugin, adjust your settings to display where you like (or you can manually add it to your template or posts – see the readme), and it will display for every post you write on your blog.  You can even turn it on or off per blog post.

I’m also working to make this FBFoundations compatible so it will load as an optional XFBML tag if you like – expect that in a future revision.  Now Wordpress bloggers everywhere have the capability to enable and track Facebook sharing on their blog.  You can download it here:

http://downloads.wordpress.org/plugin/facebook-fb-share-wordpress-plugin.zip

Stay tuned though – in the next revision I’m hoping to add Facebook API support so you can track and read the number of shares, comments, likes across all of Facebook from your Wordpress admin.  That will all fit in with the FB Foundations plugin I wrote earlier.

Ev Williams was quoted recently saying, “The world is big enough for both Facebook and Twitter”, almost as though we were supposed to think Twitter wasn’t trying to be a competitor.  Don’t be fooled though, Twitter’s recent lists feature is just one step towards providing the privacy controls Facebook itself is known for.  Before we know it you will be able to decide which lists you want to share Tweets with, photo services will be integrated, video, groups, messaging, and more, and Twitter will be head-to-head with the features Facebook currently provides.  Twitter wants to go head-to-head with Facebook.  There’s no doubt in my mind that’s what Twitter is trying to do – it’s what they have to do in order to continue growing.  While Facebook’s weakness is the lack of full openness, Twitter has the greater weakness of lack of control or privacy.  Without more than just public status updates their sign ups and traffic will plateau and the service will dwindle and lose value.

Yet, with each update to Twitter comes increased pressure to Facebook to become more open and more public.  Just today, in response to Twitter’s partnerships with Bing and Google, Facebook also shared that it was opening up its own public status updates to be indexed by search engines.  Don’t forget that Facebook already has an ad deal with Microsoft, along with investment.

Facebook’s Lack of Openness is an Illusion

Despite the criticism against Facebook for not being open don’t be fooled.  Not only is your data capable of being open, but you get to control what is, and what isn’t open at the same time.  As of today all your status updates set to go to “Everyone” (check your privacy settings) can now be indexed by search engines.  Expect this to also open up on Facebook itself, along with Facebook’s own search.  Facebook wants to be open – its users have to choose to be open first though.

Facebook’s recent hiring of David Recordon (note that the linked article is by Chris Messina, also a leader in Open Standards technology) is a testament to this I think.  Recordon was one of the leading proponents to open standards and data portability before joining Facebook, and he has been put in charge of just that at Facebook.  With this hire, Facebook has just become a leader in this space.  Notice Facebook’s adoption of the ActivityStrea.ms standard, and open sourcing of the Tornado framework acquired from FriendFeed.  Add to that the many other open technologies you can find on their developers site – Facebook is not a follower in this space!  Where is Twitter’s Open Source tools page?

Facebook Fan Pages

Let’s add to that Facebook Fan Pages.  Each and every Fan Page is indexable by Google.  While better integration with personal profiles is still necessary, this is an excellent way to share news and information in the same manner you do Twitter, and build a community at the same time.  Each post is threaded so you can build a conversation with your community.  Each comment, “Fanning”, and post to the Page gets posted to a user’s friends as well, further encouraging conversation and discussion.  This is far from what Twitter offers, and all this is done in a very open fashion – you don’t have to be on Facebook to read the contents of a Fan Page.

I just started building my own Fan Page community (send “fan stay” to 32665 (FBOOK) on your phone), and am already seeing greater interaction there the more I spend using it.  The potential is very strong in a very open, and much stronger environment than Twitter.

Facebook’s Terms of Service are Open Too

Now, let’s talk Terms.  Earlier this year Facebook instituted a new policy stating that any changes to the Terms of Service will be put up to the users.  If enough users disagree, it gets put up for vote by the users.  If a majority of those users vote for the changes, they get put in place.  If not, they don’t.  The current terms are established in such a manner.

Consumerist has a great overview of what these terms changes were.  To summarize, you own your content, and give Facebook the right to distribute that content (this is so they can share it with your friends legally) so long as you are a member of Facebook.  HOWEVER, the minute you quit the site, the terms state that your information at that point is removed, with exception to the photos, videos, etc. that have already been loaded into your friends’ streams.  This is so the stream remains in tact.  There’s termination here.

Let’s contrast that with Twitter, whose terms have no termination and are just as strong, if not stronger.  With Twitter, when you leave the site your content can remain.  There is nothing in Twitter’s terms stating that they have to remove your content when you leave.  You give Twitter that license to your content forever.  Where’s the outcry about that?  Yet Facebook had huge outcry over not having such termination in their agreement.  Facebook has remained open and ahead of Twitter even in this regard.

Facebook’s Acquisition of FriendFeed

I think this is the crown jewel we have yet to see.  We know the FriendFeed team is working on Facebook as we speak.  We also know FriendFeed.com is not going away.  Will Facebook have FriendFeed-like real-time features?  Will FriendFeed see more Facebook integration?  The one weakness of Facebook is the lack of an easy way for those that want to be public by default (which is dangerous) to be public, while integrating that information with the user profile and other integrated parts of Facebook.  Search still lacks a public interface.  There’s no API to it.  Facebook’s stream is still not real-time while Twitter’s and FriendFeeds are.

The FriendFeed team has the potential to change this.  I predict a real-time Facebook in the near future, with integrated public interfaces and search enabling users to share the content they want to share with the world.  The cool thing is Twitter has already exposed their cards with Lists.  Funny thing is Facebook has had lists for over a year now, and you can even filter searches with those lists!  Twitter doesn’t have that.  The only benefit Twitter’s lists give is the ability to see who other people are subscribing to and subscribe to the same.  I don’t see that as being that hard of a problem to tackle for Facebook.  They’ve seen Twitter’s cards and no one has seen Facebook’s.  Imagine the ability to put Fan Pages into public lists, for instance – I think that would be pretty cool, and pretty easy to implement.  Imagine Facebook’s own privacy controls, including the “public option” available for Lists as well as users and Pages.  It’s also important to note that FriendFeed also had lists before Twitter did.  The combination of both FriendFeed’s and Facebook’s teams means they are the true experts on lists.  I can’t wait to see what they do next.

My Point

So what’s my point?  My point is stop drinking the Twitter Kool-Aid!  Yeah, it has its place – I’m NOT saying get off Twitter, but it’s nowhere near as powerful as what Facebook already offers.  I want to see more news people and early adopters like Scoble and Louis Gray and Steve Rubel using Facebook and Facebook lists to provide content and news.  I want to see more people sharing and discussing content in my own Facebook feeds.  I want to see more people utilizing privacy controls, not available in Twitter, to segregate the content they share, reducing the noise.  Spend some time in Facebook – learn what you can and can’t do with it.  Try to build a community there and see how effective it is, utilizing all these tools at once.

Facebook is not losing this war.  With 10 million fans a day and growing on Facebook Pages alone, 300-350 million users and growing, a much more powerful API and developer ecosystem, Twitter doesn’t even make a dent in what Facebook is doing.  It’s about time we start giving credit where credit is due.  Twitter launching lists is about as effective in fighting Facebook as this video of Ben Parr is in fighting Chad Vader :

Image courtesy LDS.org

I had the opportunity today to sit and listen to Mari Smith’s BlogWorld Expo talk today, “Facebook & Twitter Fortunes: How To Strategically Grow Your Business Using the Top Two Online Social Networks”. I have been on a panel with her before and even spoke for one of her online webinars, but had not yet had the chance to see her in person yet.  Such a meeting was a pleasure, as that actually ended up being the focus of her presentation – relationships.

The power of Facebook, Twitter, and other social networking sites is in how you use them to build real-life relationships with others.  Facebook itself does this superbly (Twitter is getting there, and can still be used for such if done right).  Mari spoke about that connection, stating that “more than content, people are looking for connection”.  She had a great quote stating that “if Content is King, Connection is Queen”.  The “Pied Piper of Facebook” (and arguable one of the nicest and most genuine people I’ve ever met) knows her stuff, and if you can use these social networks effectively to do this for a brand or business, you will see the most success.

Mari stated that the most powerful part of Facebook was Facebook Pages.  She shared that you can encourage people to fan your Facebook Page simply by sending “fan yourpageusername” to “fbook” (32665) on your mobile phone.  She uses this in her presentations to encourage people following her presentation to also fan her and mentioned it’s a great strategy to build a fan base.  I realized I really need to do this more often as well (my fan page is “stay” on Facebook).

While I do agree with her that Facebook Pages are a powerful aspect of Facebook I do disagree slightly that it is the most powerful aspect of the Social Networking site.  I think if more marketers, product managers, entrepreneurs, and businesses spent a little more time learning what they can do with a little knowledge of HTML, JavaScript, and access to HTML files somewhere they can begin to integrate Facebook right on their own site, bringing a user and their Facebook friends into a person’s own brand.  If you ask me this is the most powerful component of Facebook and more people need to learn it.  Facebook Connect is Facebook’s “Building Blocks” contributed to the Building Block Web I spoke of earlier.

I love Mari’s focus on connection and relationships in her presentation.  She also talked about opening up a little, sharing how she shared some of the details of her recent divorce and by opening up she was able to connect with people better.  She stated that the new social media marketing methodology is moving from “controlling our image” to “being ourselves”, something radically different from the way it used to be, and these tools are enabling us to do this!  She stated that the tools are making people go from “hard to reach” to “available everywhere”.  How true that is.

Unfortunately I was only able to stay for half of Mari’s session, but I quickly was reminded how much Mari knows her stuff.  If you want to meet someone on Twitter or Facebook who is genuine, will build a real relationship with you, and help you learn how to make money off of these tools at the same time in a rational manner that is not a “get rich quick scheme”, Mari is the person to follow.  You can follow her on Twitter at http://twitter.com/marismith or on Facebook, http://facebook.com/marismith.

Okay, the last post was a little technical.  I’m going to try it from a different perspective.  Here’s the real news, and maybe I misunderstood the entire purpose of the new API (although the benefits I stated would be useful to me).  Facebook just made it possible, for some applications (although details are still vague), for users to block all child applications of the parent application.  So now instead of having to block every single quiz you see, you can now block the parent application and you’ll never have to see another quiz from your friends again.  Rejoice!  From the Wiki post:

“Occasionally, parent applications generate so many child applications that users are unable to effectively control the volume of stories – which is why the ability to hide all quiz applications is one our top user requests. As a result, we are experimenting with giving users the ability to hide all the children of a parent application, for only those applications where there is a significant, demonstrated user demand for such a function.”

This means potentially you, the user, have the ability now to hide those pesky Quiz and other similar applications.  Facebook has been vague on what applications they will apply to (and I expect they won’t tell), but it would seem that some users will start seeing this soon.  I, for one, am rejoicing.