Last friday night A week ago friday, at midnight hundreds of thousands of you around the world rushed to grab the vanity url (http://facebook.com/username) of your dreams. Within minutes millions of names had been snatched up, leaving many frustrated that they couldn’t be the numero uno Mike or Steve on facebook, but it also meant a lot of fake accounts were setup to snatch generic names as well.
Apparently Facebook had thought of making it an auction, or charging for names, but ultimately decided against it because of the server load issues that would have ensued. Personally I think they should have charged for fan pages to get custom urls if they are going to be used for commercial purposes, that’s only fair. Those of us that didn’t secure names for our fan pages will have to wait until the 28th when they open it up to the rest of the world (i.e. the 99% of pages with under 1000 fans).
One thing though that was really silly was all the people who snatched up names thinking they were going to be able to sell them later. The thing is these people were getting the names/keywords for personal profiles, not fan pages. Its a collosal waste to build a brand or product offering on facebook using a personal profile and not a fan page. I’ll get into the whys later, but just know that you are seriously wasting opportunity by using a personal profile account for a business.
What’s going to happen to these names like /whiskey (i REALLY wanted that one, got stuck with /drinkwhiskey instead) that were pinned to user profiles? Well ultimately its going to come down to facebook yanking them, or they go to waste. Will a secondary market arise? Sure, but only for fan pages, not for personal profiles. Those who buy great keywords with hopes of turning these minor personal profiles into commercial landing pages will be sad when they realize they’ve wasted what could be hundreds of dollars on something useless.
So my advice, create a valuable page with content on it, promote it, and then see if you can grab your desired name on June 28. If you want to give yourself a clever personal username, make it something representative of you/your personality, or better yet: protect your personal brand name.
A year or so ago, Facebook unveiled something that has radically changed the landscape of the web and social networking sites in particular. As the first major and tightly integrated social network application platform (SNAP) to hit the market, Facebook was able to shift our expectations from what we had previously expected to get from a social site to something with theoretically endless possibilities. What emerged next, I don’t think even facebook had the foresight to predict.
I have a theory, and its that facebook didn’t want or expect the platform to become what it has. They had something else entirely in mind when they built it, and the upcoming changes to the metrics/engagement rules are proof of their original mindset. Facebook didn’t want disposable apps, they wanted people to add value, real value to the platform. Facebook was looking for people to find new ways to tie in the social graph data they were offering into new and useful tools. Facebook refers to itself as a social utility, not a network, and what does a utility do? It powers things. So what does facebook want to do? Power the web through social connections and relationships.
So what does the next generation of the platform have in store for us? Well to me it seems like they have taken a long hard look at the existing app usage, proliferation, and made a decision; one that many will find unpleasant. Facebook wants us to build things that improve upon their users lives: social shopping, social search, social recommendations, and maybe social gaming. Any activity that is improved by having your friends around is one that facebook wants to be a part of. So we’ll probably see this stuff percolating into existing sites as they adapt, but more than likely people will heed this advice and start building new sites that capitalize on it. And the apps in facebook doing this will ultimately be rewarded by Facebook through promotion and more functionality.
Now bear in mind that this is all my own personal opinion, I haven’t asked any of my friends at facebook about it. It is all based on my observations, and what I would want if I was in facebook’s position. So what are you waiting for? The social revolution awaits!
So word bouncing around the echo chamber this morning is that Robert Scoble’s Facebook account was yanked last night because he was using a bot to do something with his facebook account. This bot he had developed and used is a blatant violation of the FB terms of use, so it was probably only a matter of time, so the fact that it resulted in his account being shut off doesn’t surprise me one bit.
The fact that his account with 5000 friends on it was shut off doesn’t upset me one iota. Wanna know why? Because his account is a perfect example of a unidirectional relationship, completely going against the concept of friends (disclaimer, I follow his twitter feed, but its not the same thing). The idea of a friend connection in a social network is supposed to be you agree to a two way communication exchange. Do you really think a man with 5,000 social network friends will ever pay attention to what you’re asking him seeing as you’ve likely never met him in person? So in his case you “befriend” him, and he always accepts because it means one more person he can broadcast out to.
Now I am not saying by any means he is the only person doing this, he is just the easiest to pick on since he was turning around and trying to most likely export his friend data. Note, as of the writing of this, we aren’t publicly aware of what Robert’s bot does/did.
So my plea to you 4 people who read this is to please help preserve the integrity of these social connections. Before you realize it someone is going to come around and inadvertently use you as a reference claiming you are friends on facebook or linkedIn, and it could come to bite you in the ass.
For reference, my stipulations to add someone/accept someone as a friend on Facebook are:
- Must have met in real life
- or must have had multiple email/phone conversations
- or must have 2 or more mutual friends (real life social graph preferred)
- or must be in one of my local user groups/real life social networks
- have commented on this blog
update: so Scoble came out and said it was a Plaxo scraper that he was alpha testing. They would download the images of your friends emails, and then run OCR/captcha breaking software to get the text, and then import it into your plaxo contacts/outlook.
Facebook posted late last night that they were opening up their canvas pages to search robots in an effort to make facebook more accessible to the masses who still do not have facebook accounts. This is a significant move on their part, for multiple reasons: 1. it turns on the power of millions and millions of pages of user generated content and their related search bait, and 2. it will allow for app developer’s pages to be indexed and in turn serve contextual ads on them.
Facebook has just cast its net even wider in its attempt to capture more users than myspace. I would not be surprised if we see some interesting analysis of search traffic coming into app pages soon that reflects google as an ever increasing part of app traffic.
This has some privacy implications though, and facebook is saying they will filter the data visible to people outside of facebook on a per user basis, but that could be harder to pull off than they realize.
