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5 Features You’ll Like in the New Facebook Design

Posted on September 9, 2008 by jessestay

I track the Facebook Forums pretty regularly to make sure I’m getting all the info I need, and that I’m able to help on particular issues as I have time to help. One common thread I’ve seen throughout the last week is the continued complaints about the new Facebook design and how people don’t want to be forced into change. I was among the complainers myself at one point, but as Facebook has improved the site since they first allowed people to opt into the new design, I have really grown to like the new features Facebook provides. Here are 5 of my favorite features:

1. The Live Feed

Just about a week ago, Facebook launched a completely live Feed, that automatically refreshes with every update of every friend in your friends list. As new updates come through, you can comment and interact with the items that post to the feed, encouraging much more interactivity between friends. Facebook could definitely improve this more by opening up the Feed to third parties as Twitter, Identi.ca, or FriendFeed do, but it’s a step in the right direction, and Facebook allows you to peek into the lives of those you associate with much better than Twitter or FriendFeed do.

2. Feed Filtering

Also a recent update to the new design, users can display only the top stories, only the status updates, only the photos, or only the posted items of their friends. In addition, users can filter by only posts from applications they have added. This also includes Pages, Groups, and Events. Or, you can pick a specific Friends List (You are organizing your friends into Friends lists, right?) and filter by only those friends within a particular list. This makes sorting through all the information much better to only find the information you are looking for. Me, I like the firehose and I generally turn to the live feed.

3. Facebook for the iPhone

One thing the new design has enabled is a better architecture for handling better design on mobile devices such as the iPhone. The new Facebook iPhone app enables you to very easily set your status, browse what your friends are up to, post and browse through photos, look up a friend’s cell phone number, and more. Better yet, there’s an even better version in the works that is said to do things like allow tagging of individuals in photos right on the iPhone.

4. Application Tabs

If the developers of your favorite apps are savvy, they can enable their application to be added as a tab to your Facebook profile. This enables your friends to have an additional, even more expanded view of you when they browse your profile. For instance, if someone visits my profile, they can view all the songs I like via the iLike tab on my profile, or look at which of my friends are also family members of mine. This could also be a useful area for a resume, or any other useful information you want to share about yourself. Check with the developers of your favorite apps to learn if they provide this functionality or not.

5. Pages are no longer cluttered with Applications

Perhaps my favorite part of the new design is that it is much cleaner than the previous design. There is much more order and structure to it all. Now, the majority of your application boxes are saved to the “Boxes” tab, with the exception of a few that have adopted to the new design. You can always move an application out of the Boxes tab by clicking on the edit pencil icon and selecting “move to wall tab”. However, it appears Facebook is trying to give users more choice in this – now you can choose much easier and better ways of organizing your profile so others can learn what you want them to know about you.

The new design is definitely a big change, but I think as people spend some time in it they will find that it is actually an improvement, and will allow for even greater control and flexibility than it used to be. I suggest you give it a chance, play around with it and respond below with your own favorite features!

The "Community WordPress Facebook Plugin" – Why You Should Contribute

Posted on September 3, 2008 by jessestay

There are rumors that Facebook has been working on their own WordPress plugin for Facebook. This is troubling for those of us developers that are developing for Facebook Connect, as it shows that Facebook could in one sweep, wipe any developer writing for the Facebook Connect platform out without any advanced notice. It only appeared that in the past, this type of thing only happened on the Facebook website itself, as Facebook has a right to, but I’ve seen it myself with my own development on Facebook Connect today.

Fair enough. I like competition, although I’d love this to be a community effort. So, since we know Facebook is working on their own WordPress plugin for Facebook, and we know Facebook isn’t willing to divulge their code yet. Since I’ve already devoted 20 or so of my own hours to the exact same project with no knowledge from Facebook, and am just now learning that Facebook was working on this behind the scenes incognito with no involvement from the community, I’d like to release my own plugin to the public, under the GPL v2.0 today, in the hopes the public can help with development and further building of this plugin, as a community, not just under Facebook’s roof.

It’s very troubling to see Facebook develop on external apps outside of Facebook like this – it only shows that Facebook is not afraid to encroach on other developers’ projects and that any one of us is at risk of having a useful project, our time and effort (I had no intentions on making money from this), wiped out in an instant. Sure, Facebook has every right to compete, but the least courtesy of notifying developers it already knows would be competition. With such a WordPress plugin this also encroaches on Six Apart’s announced integration with Facebook Connect, and puts Facebook in direct competition with Six Apart instead of making it Automattic’s problem.

It’s my sincere hope that Facebook decides not to continue such projects internally, but instead contributes to existing projects if they must do so. Facebook should in no way be competing with the developers that use their platform without warning, or risk us not being willing to contribute such things in the future. Let’s work together on this Facebook – how about a “we need help” board, or an “internal projects” board so we can know what you’re working on in advance. In this way we can work with you instead of parallel to you and hours spent doing so won’t be wasted. Or how about a little nudge to people like Six Apart saying, “we may just have to compete with you on this in the future” so their own time isn’t wasted with the integration.

Why should I keep building external web apps that integrate and send users to Facebook if Facebook is just going to replace my web apps in the end anyway?

So, I’m going to release my code here right now in hopes we can make this a community project – it requires you to set up your own app for your blog under the Facebook Developers site (just set your callback URL to your own website’s URL), and you must take your application key and enter it into the admin section. Only developers of the Facebook app itself can login through Facebook Connect until Facebook launches (one more advantage Facebook has over us developers – they know when they are launching, and therefore know how much time they have to develop these things, another reason to leave it to us developers in order to keep it fair). To install on your blog after doing so, just unzip the folder in your plugins folder, and activate your plugin under the plugins section in WordPress. After that, any Facebook user will be able to leave comments, under their own authentication, Facebook avatar, and name without having to re-enter it each time. We’ll be integrating this more in the future – if you can help please let me know! My project is a community project, not owned by Facebook, completely owned by me and you for the benefit of the community.

You can download it here.

You can see it in action on my test site, http://socialmediacast.staynalive.com – check out the Hello World post to see the existing comments. Note you will not be able to log in to Facebook Connect on that site because you are not a developer on the app for that site.

Now, I know I ranted a bit – it’s late, but I hope this makes some sort of sense. Am I out of line here? Should I just scrap my code completely and let Facebook do this? Is it a wise move for Facebook to keep making external apps like this that integrate with Facebook? What’s the best way for Facebook to approach this? I welcome your comments below.

Facebook Puts on Its Chain Mail

Posted on August 25, 2008 by jessestay

With all the recent talk of spam and viruses lately it appears Facebook has truly hit mainstream. You know when the spammers have hit there is truly value in a service. Today I noticed a new trend on Facebook, previously only known to the likes of Snail Mail and E-mail itself, the chain letter. It wasn’t in the form of an application or even a bot of some sort as you would expect on the service. Surprisingly, it was hand-written by who-knows-who and had somehow made it around to my wife’s cousin, who sent it to me. Subsequently, several of my other friends seem to have got it, because I received it from a few others as well.

The letter goes like this:

“Subject: ATTENTION ALL FACEBOOK MEMBERS August 20 at 8:13pmReply Attention all Facebook members.Facebook is recently becoming very overpopulated,There have been many members complaining that Facebookis becoming very slow.Record shows that the reason isthat there are too many non-active Facebook membersAnd on the other side too many new Facebook members.We will be sending this messages around to see if theMembers are active or not,If you’re active please sendto 15 other users using Copy+Paste to show that you are activeThose who do not send this message within 2 weeks,The user will be deleted without hesitation to create more space,If Facebook is still overpopulated we kindly ask for donations but until then send this message to all your friends and make sure you sendthis message to show me that your active and not deleted. Founder of FacebookMark Zuckerber”

It is sent via the traditional Facebook mail, which the API has no access. I asked my wife’s cousin if they sent it, and indeed, they actually did forward it to 15 of their friends as the e-mail directs. Therefore it appears this one, amazingly, is being spread, manually, from person to person on Facebook.

Now, I’m probably preaching to the choir here on my blog, as I sincerely hope none of you would fall for this. Typically, anything that says, “forward to x number of your friends” is not for real and you should report it or mark it as spam immediately. “Mark Zuckerber” is not going to know you forwarded it to all your friends, and Facebook is not tracking this mail in anyway. Your account will not be deleted.

This seems to go back to the days of the Microsoft lottery e-mail hoax that basically said if you forward to all (or any number of) your friends, you get entered for the chance to win a million dollars (or similar amount of money). Supposedly in this e-mail Bill Gates was able to track the e-mails you sent and they were using this to track the number of e-mails that went out.

This does beg the question though – how do normal users of Facebook know for 100% clarity that a message comes directly from Facebook, if they ever need to send something to their users? Is there an “official” method for distributing such messages? Thus far I’m only aware of various blogs on the Facebook site to announce this information.

Now, when people compare Mark Zuckerberg to Bill Gates, I’m not quite sure this is the way he wants to be portrayed. In such a controlled environment as Facebook, do messages like this have any excuse?

Have you seen anything similar? Share your stories here. You’ll find me on Facebook at http://jessestay.socialtoo.com.

Facebook Rumors, Religion, and the LDS Faith

Posted on August 21, 2008 by jessestay

It all started with this post today. A supposed “employee ‘close to the deal'” told blogger, Zach Klein (who doesn’t seem to allow comments on his blog) that The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints’ Family History division had made an unsolicited bid to purchase Facebook. Nothing else – no other background, no other resources to confirm the deal. Soon after, ValleyWag, the first to the scene and first large blog to publish anything about it, was blogging rumors they are well known for spreading. Soon after, Venturebeat and the Industry Standard were blogging about it, quoting Brady Brim-DeForest, who ironically was claiming this as news, not a rumor at all – I’m unaware of where he got it, but his news broke after Valleywag’s. TheInquisitr, while I’m sure had no ill-intentions, even made fun of the manner with some very radical and somewhat inaccurate claims that I know have offended some members of the LDS Faith that read the blog. The blogosphere seems to be a mess today in regards to regard for religion, faith, and respect for one another’s belief. It appears the LDS Church has become the punch-line of the blogosphere’s Jokes and I’m getting really tired of it.

Now, let’s talk about rumors. The blogosphere is known for spreading rumors – I’ve hated them from the get-go, but let’s face it, it’s a part of many blogs out there, and it may not be going away any time soon. (I think I could do an entire post about rumors in and of itself) I expect an occasional rumor about Microsoft trying to buy Yahoo, or Facebook employees leaving the company because they are mad with Executives, or even a crazy one like the iPhone 2.0 coming with 2 cameras and iChat video support. Frankly, I never share those (well, rarely), but they are fun to read because, well, they’re funny. But rumors like an entire Faith buying a huge company like Facebook are ridiculous, unfounded, and frankly offensive to me that anyone would take such a rumor seriously when the Faith is my own. It’s a religion, people – tell me one reason a religious Faith would need a social network like Facebook to further its mission. Do you seriously believe any religion would be so stupid as to try this? People would leave Facebook in droves if that were to happen, and a network like Facebook has no good way of building up the members of the Faith itself. The claim is absolutely ridiculous, and I can’t believe established bloggers are taking this serious enough to share with others! There seems to be a serious lack of understanding between the blogosphere and the LDS Faith and I’d like to figure out a way to put an end to it.

Let’s go back to earlier this year. You may remember my “Shame on You TechCrunch” post I wrote awhile back, calling out the writers at CrunchGear for an extremely biased, and very misunderstood and inconsiderate interview of Penn Juliette, in which he claimed Mormons had “magic underwear” (as a Mormon, I affirm to you, that my underwear is not magic), and went on to encourage him as he talked about how easy religious women were, degrading women at the same time. While I still will not read CrunchGear because of that, I have lifted my boycott of TechCrunch (just because there is no way to avoid it – I also did not know Arrington at all at the time), but as you can see, there is a blatent misunderstanding of the LDS Faith in the blogosphere. CrunchGear still stands by their article and has refused to make any statement to the contrary.

Now, to give credit to those that have blogged about this today, Eric Eldon (of VentureBeat) does have a great point in that the LDS Church does actively invest in stock to retain and increase the value of its members donations through Tithing, and Facebook employees are selling stock. Like Louis Gray, I too give 10% of my wages in the form of Tithing to the Church, and I sincerely hope they invest it wisely and don’t just waste it away. I know their investments are wise though, and even the “widow’s mite” is considered and cared for. The Church itself never publishes these investments and it would be impossible to know if some are in Facebook or some are in Microsoft or some are in Google. They take these donations as sacred, and every effort is taken to maintain the sacredness of those donations. However, an outright acquisition of Facebook would be proposterous and completely out of line with the Church’s history.

Every one of these bloggers could have done a simple Tweet in fact, and quickly gotten a response from Mormons on how ridiculous the claims are. Or they could have shot Louis Gray, or me, or Matt Asay, or Phil Windley, or other Mormon bloggers an e-mail asking us if the claims were true. It took me about 5-10 minutes to send an e-mail to the LDS church and get a response back (which, btw, said the claims are not true and unfounded), and in fact, the LDS Church CIO is even on Twitter – an e-mail or even simple dm to him may have done the trick.

Now, I’m not necessarily trying to call out these specific bloggers, but rather point out the problem in general – I respect most of them in fact and really enjoy their regular blog posts. I’m just trying to make a shoutout to the blogosphere that we’re here if you have questions! Let’s start an open dialogue about the Mormon Faith – do you have questions? We’d really like to answer them before you assume and blog inaccuracies in the first place. Please, don’t hesitate to contact me, Louis Gray, or any other Mormon blogger if you have any hestitancy before posting an article. It’s time we put an end to this nonsense, once and for all.

Secret Crush Worm Resurfaces

Posted on August 11, 2008 by jessestay

TechCrunch and several other publications recently blogged about new worms surfacing that target Facebook through various means. Some are sent via e-mail with links to malicious videos, while others link directly to phishing sites that look just like Facebook and take the username and password of those thinking they are logging into Facebook. I’ve noticed the recent come-back of one I blogged about 5 months ago called the “Secret Crush” worm – I’ve received 3 wall posts just today from this, along with one or two from the recently announced phishing worms. I can’t help but wonder if the two are related.

The “Secret Crush” worm seems to log into unsuspecting users’ accounts, send wall posts to their friends, and even some times, as was the case with my Aunt 5 months ago, change the user’s status as well. All posts seem to link back to a blogspot-hosted site that tries to get more information from the user to find out who their “secret crush” is. Google seems to be removing these almost as fast as they are being put up though.

In the case of all the recent worms, it goes without saying that having a strong password is very important – if you have been hit by any of these worms, change your password and notify Facebook, immediately! In addition, the following pointers should help prevent you from being infected:

Make sure your password is strong!

As mentioned, always make sure your password is strong, and don’t use the same password on Facebook and other Social Networks as you do elsewhere on the internet. This will prevent you from having more than just your social identity stolen.

Never, ever, click on links in e-mails, even from Facebook, unless you’re 100% sure where they are going to.

Don’t just look at the web address you see in the e-mail, but rather mouse-over the link and see where your browser says it’s going to go to. Even then, when in doubt, copy the url and paste it into your browser – if your e-mail client supports javascript for some reason it can still deceive you.

Always be sure you’re on the site you’re supposed to be on before you enter your log in information after clicking on a link from an e-mail.

This is how many of these worms get you – they link to a site that looks and feels like Facebook (or other site), but instead have linked you to something like Faceinbook.com that is collecting your information. Once they have access to that they have access to everything in your Facebook profile.

Make sure you have Spyware and Anti-virus software installed!

Facebook is not immune to Anti-virus software. There is actually a well-known spyware application called “Secret Crush”, and there’s probably a very likely case these two are related. If you are infected with Spyware or a virus there is an easy opportunity for these apps to steal your login information as you log into these sites.

Just as with your PC, it is your responsibility to ensure yourself, your computer, and now with social networks, your friends, are protected from viruses, spam, and spyware. You now have a social responsibility to ensure this doesn’t get spread to your friends on these networks.

Have you been infected? What is it that you think caused the infection? Please share with us in the comments below and on FriendFeed.

The Internationalization of Media

Posted on August 11, 2008 by jessestay

I love the Olympics. It’s a time of competition, a time of pride, generally a time of peace, a time of celebration, and very much a time of new technology and media. I’m noticing something this year however and frankly, as an American it’s a little scary. Ironically, it has nothing to do with the athletes – it’s the lack of competition between American media and their international competitors.

It was a post by Robert Scoble on FriendFeed and the ensuing comments in fact, along with several other posts I’ve seen around the internet, that got me thinking about this. Scoble mentioned, “I hate NBC. They aren’t putting the Olympics on live. That really sucks.” Patricia Anderson responded, “How can you not agree with this? Hey, Robert, do you have access to CBC? I’ve been liking their coverage.” Phillip Jeffrey responded, “I’m watching CBC in Canada. http://www.cbc.ca/olympics Do you think it would be any different if another network was covering the Olympics in the States?” It appears the Canadian Broadcast Company is getting some serious attention this time around now that it is easier to access their broadcasts internationally, and they’re out-doing NBC in their own game by broadcasting some of the games live. NBC had better pay attention.

I’m noticing as I’m now on the internet much more than I am on the TV that I am getting the news about Olympic events way before I am able to see them on TV. It kind of spoils the fun of the Olympics to tell you the truth. I don’t blame the online news agencies giving me the news as it happens though – that’s what news is all about, and what I want! I’m blaming the companies like NBC that won’t give me the coverage I want as it happens. They have succumbed to the merits of their advertisers to try and sell content at the time that makes their advertisers most money, when, in reality they are ignoring the potential worldwide audience they could be obtaining through means such as the internet. The issue here is, they are only targeting American advertisers!

With services such as Identi.ca, Twitter, Facebook, and FriendFeed, the audiences in America that traditionally watch the Olympics on NBC are now getting updates real-time, some from people actually there, and this news is beating NBC and making their viewers want more live coverage. Viewers are no longer getting this information from NBC.

NBC traditionally has had no competition for the Olympics – it has traditionally been just one media company in the USA that could broadcast the Olympics. However, I can now go online and find many things, real-time, with absolutely no issue finding the access I need. NBC now has competition world-wide and I certainly hope they realize this soon. They’re missing a huge advertising opportunity here that I don’t think they have considered.

In the past, media companies in the USA were built from small town to small town until larger companies would buy them out and build a conglomerate out of those smaller subsidiaries. I’m afraid that’s changing though as we become a more worldwide audience and can talk to each other, worldwide, much easier, and this shift will move from small town to small town, to instead country to country. The large US media companies need to be thinking International now as they grow or this rich, free speech system we have in America right now could be beat by competitors worldwide. This is an issue we should all have concern for.

Are there international efforts you are seeing that have been successful amongst media companies? Is this lack of international competition something we should fear? Let’s chat in the comments below and on FriendFeed!