Inside Facebook: the Facebook Book

If you don’t want to spam invites to your friends, you can just find registered friends. Have any of you seen a similar implementation of an address book lookup? I think this is clever and unique, and makes sense only because FB has the scale that your friends might reasonably already be on.

Of course, the next page invites you to spam your friends, so I did 28 more, from gmail this time.

Fred Stuzman predicts a loss of relevance. I’m more optimistic. Facebook still is the best closed college network, and their brand in that market should be strong enough to persist, since that is the truth. Marketing books teach that diluting your brand horizontally is dangerous - 4 flavors of coke sell less together than just the original brand. But FB is preserving it’s original product, and marketing a different product to segments who couldn’t consume their original flavor. Coca Cola sales of vending machine tea in Japan don’t hurt soft drink sales - the make a larger variety of people come to the vending machine.

Before IPO / aquisition, FB needs to establish that they are not just a niche player. And this will speed adoption of closed work networks as well.

Facebook dropped its exclusive niche officially today, and encourages us to invite all of our friends, now that we can.  I just spammed like 100 friends with the yahoo import tool as “Facebook opened to everyone today, so just letting you know, in case you were interested.  I like FB, for reasons noted in my book at fbbook.com.  You may find it useful.  I won’t spam you again about joining a social network, unless I start one someday ”.  I’ll comment below later with the uptake.

There’s so much to say about this.  Someone could write a whole chapter about it.  What do you think?

Do you miss exclusivity?  Are your friends biting?  Are the new privacy controls enough, and do you use them?

The facebook web api is starting to see legitimate use, as FBListings.com demonstrates. The site is restricted only to Facebook users, for posting and viewing classified ads. They claim 1000 unique facebook visitors, so check ‘em out. The postings are still sparse, but that is because you haven’t gone over there yet.

The site still needs work, because it is just the kind of informal student created site FB was expecting to encourage. For example, it doesn’t support double byte characters, and the site navigation could be improved. But classifieds are so clearly a necessary service, so perfect for the facebook community. Go use ‘em.

In fact, I think I should go create a better classifieds site, right now! Just kidding. But why don’t you? There are already 3 different competing google map mashups on the FB API products page. The barrier for entry is so low, fblistings better develop mass quickly!

On the other hand, if fblistings started becoming huge, facebook.com would immediately know, and why wouldn’t facebook just create it’s own included service? After all, the uncorrectable lack of integration with flyers is just odd and the main barrier to success for fblistings is that it is not a core feature of the facebook, and therefore has trouble getting critical mass. Would facebook buy the site, when it could probably replace it with a few weeks of development, and when integration would be even more work?

Classifieds are such an obvious core product that sales executives wondered aloud, even a year ago, why facebook doesn’t already have one. Right around that time, building one was one of my responsponsibilies, as one of the projects I discuss in my book.

I hope facebook values its API community enough to not diss, discard and disregard their work. Perhaps facebook should let community members know what products are in their own pipeline to avoid encouraging redundant, wasted work.

The FB blog leads with Bob Trahan introducing his Friend Game. He and I thought of this independently the same time, but he actually did it, and made it much better than I ever could have.

The game is a fun way to learn something about your friends; you are challenged to identify which friend has a specific phrase in their profile.

He first mentioned it to engineers after the first “hackathon”, a tradition where FB engineers share the friendly challenge to develop a cool feature in one night, around their official tasks. Another awesome thing that came out of that hackathon was the NCAA March madness feature (which wasn’t finished that night of course, but had a promissing start), which

• was played by something like a quarter of a million people
• had 10s of millions of pageviews
• garnered very a lucrative sponsorship, which led to following larger ad deals
• was built by 2-3 engineers in 6-8 weeks.

If this game also takes off, I’d expect to see some competive component to it, to structure play. It’s been out 2 days, and there are zero searchable references to it in blogs or articles. It would be great if the algorithm could choose sematically important or salient facts. My idea for it had group play, as well as an early injection of “feed” as “which of your friends” just did/said/joined/etc “this”, as a way of catching the latest news in a fun way.

Zuck writes from atop the feed: “From reading a lot of your messages, it seems like some of you want more separation. […] We like hearing from you. Please send us your thoughts on how we can make this work for you.”

Excellent.

An early engineer at the Facebook summarizes the experience, from what hiring was like, to what’s on the bathroom wall. Salty at times. Funny at times. Definitely worth the read. -Andre Stechert

read more | digg story

Facebook is expected to soon announce that everyone will be able to sign up for facebook. Zuck’s first (and second and third) company priority is Growth, because along with stickiness (how often and how much an average user is on the site, a metric where facebook rules), growth decides which social network will be relevant.

Facebook can’t grow fast enough since it has saturated it’s eligible, core demographic. This plan has been in the works for over a year, with the questions revolving around how to track fraud and group people meaningfully.
The uninformed will holler again about privacy, but they should go complain instead to myspace, which as noted in my book, opens up all user information to just about everyone. Facebook will likely not change how college networks work. It may allow unvalidated friends to accept invitations, but would almost certainly track the referral/registration history, to be able to prune away bad branches of the invitation tree.

As a closed network, Facebook has gained success by modeling real life networks, towards which multiply.com is also narrowing its focus. Real life networks have a large geographic component, and they naturally include friends outside of school or work associations. However, I also have many people here in my geography who are not my friends, and who I don’t want to share in my information. As the book describes in detail, people closeness categories or some other meaningful way of sorting my “real friends” away from everyone in artificially bloated networks is increasingly necessary. I do not know that Facebook has a planned solution for this problem.

Stutzman notes “for Facebook users, the symbolic nature of the change from exclusive to non-exclusive could be viewed as strongly negative. […] With the new Facebook, there is no longer a notion of exclusivity - Facebook is just another SNS, albeit with a exclusive model that can now be mass-appropriated by competitors.”

Forbes coverage notes that Facebook does not benefit from comparisons with Myspace, and given networks effect and the large fraction of Facebook users who are on both sites, could be severely hurt by losing it’s exclusive, safe, tight, community feel.

Michael at Yale notes that facebook has redefined “friendship”, so that people find themselves accumulating connections, without maintaining real deep friendships, at least not on the site.

Friend proliferation seems inevitable; we can’t say no to someone’s friendship. Yet it breaks our focus, or ability to connect with our friends in a way that has lasting meaning.

I ignore 95% of feed but I like it! I hope everyone else also can use it to uncover the missed diamonds from their real friends, rather than letting it draw them into trivia. Future versions will no doubt automatically filter better for me, in ways I list in the book.

The feed dashboard today leads with a Mea Culpa apology from Zuck. The tone is what will please most people: appreciative and responsive. People asked for privacy settings and a way to turn it off - and that’s what they received.

The tone is also typical. Starting with a direct and humble “We really messed this one up.”, it continues into a justice defense saying “when I made Facebook two years ago my goal was to help people understand what was going on in their world a little better”. He shows his good intention, and also competance by immediately correcting the problems.

Facebook’s value IS the community, so I’d glad he’s taking the effort to keep us happy, unlike Friendster. Zuck always admits mistakes and continues to learn.

Fortunately, this will also greatly improve the product, because good citizens will choose to set their privacy setting to not spam trivia. I’ve just unchecked the 5 that I thought would be uninteresting to my friends.
Unfortunately (for the annoyed), this doesn’t go all the way to allowing people to exclude themselves from Feed, or turn off publication of (even trivial) edits to their profiles.
The areas that feed does publish:

• Things you add to your profile
• Photos you upload or are tagged in
• Notes you write or are tagged in
• Groups you join or create
• Events you create or attend
• Networks you’ve joined
• Status updates

Notice that you can’t change your privacy to hide joining groups or networks, writing a note, status updates, or photo uploads. I repeat simply that one should only show things on their profile that they want everyone to see.

Friends, as a concept, will also be changed for the better by Feed. Users are encouraged only to have real friends, since they will be opening up so much information to them. On the other hand, since there are so many “non-real” friendships in the system, the immediate utility of Facebook is reduced, until people adjust their behavior.

Simplifying Friend clutter is a major theme towards the end of the Facebook Book. I propose that since people don’t like to un-friend anyone, we should have categories of friends, starting with real friends (for whom feed is designed) and not-real-friends (for whom i don’t want a feed).

On Zuck’s profile, “about me” has consistently read: “i make things that increase information flow between people.”

Information makes relationships. Ever since in May ‘05, when he tapped his long time great friend D’Angelo to start it, not even the death of a key engineer in a freak mountain biking accident could derail it. People want to know important information about their close friends, right?

Most people must think, only real friends would have been motivated enough to look so carefully for changes on my profile - now feed makes my changes obvious. Whatever information you have out there, someday, someone will make it easy to view. That’s not bad or scary - it is reality. Manage your information in your favor - Jenn Sterger pulled down a modeling opportunity with Maxim. Or keep your information private.

So why the anger?

• no facebook attempts to prepare or collaboratively engage their users. ebay made similar clumsy moves before coopting their biggest critics into an advisory board.
• before it took effort to stalk. now it is easy. now it is the default. well, welcome to online friendships, convenient in every way.

The facebook anti-feed petition is up to 86K, but slowing down, despite being widely linked and broadly known. So hundreds of thousands of people are understanding their facebook privacy situation for the first time, and realizing this is their responsiblity and not facebook’s. A large fraction of facebook users are also on myspace, where anyone can see absolutely anything they post, and third party sites are redistributing this crawled information in any hot, sexy way they want. Read my book, and understand throughly that anything you post anywhere online, is effectively public - so you’d better be happy if people look at it.

A separate major is issue is the quality of the information stream: see page 69 of the book.