Facebook Talk

I recently found a pretty good post about how Facebook-style sites have gradually reduced the amount of time we invest into making meaningful relationships in exchange for dramatically increasing the amount of time we spend on trivial matters that we interpret as important or worthwhile, like posting on our friend’s wall or looking for an old highschool buddy you used to skip 4th period with. I can’t say I completely disagree with such a notion, as I tend to assume that if I poke somebody or message them on Facebook, I’ve fulfilled my daily quota of keeping in touch.

In one sense, it’s a blessing, because honestly how many of your friends on Facebook would you call and keep in touch with every day? I know my list wouldn’t be all that long. But at the same time, I do know that I haven’t talked to a few of my really close friends in a while and Facebook is certainly part of the blame. Is anybody else going to take a look at their recent wall comments and maybe give one or two of them an actual telephone call? I know I am.

Facebook

I recently read a post on Scobleizer ranting about Facebook’s 5,000 friends limit and it had the following quote:

First, a “friend” in Facebook is NOT a “real friend.” (Let’s define “real friend” for now as someone who you’d invite over to your house for dinner). In social networking software a “friend” is someone you want in your social network. Period. Nothing more. The fact that people assume that you should only have “real friends” in your social network is just plain wrong.

I actually found that quote on Web Community Forum, where the same basic argument was being made: Facebook is for social networking, first and foremost. And yet I was kind of shocked. People actually use Facebook in this manner? As a social network first and a way to keep in touch with real life friends second?

For me and almost all of my friends, we are the exact opposite. If I don’t know a person in Real Life, they don’t get to be my Facebook friend. It’s as simple as that. Facebook’s first primary was and still is to keep people in touch with each other. But I fully believe that the majority of Facebook users look at Facebook as a means to stay in touch with Real Life friends, not to make business contacts or even to make new friends via a social network.

Scoble goes on to argue that Facebook’s friends limit is akin to only being able to view 5,000 videos on YouTube or see 5,000 photos on Flickr. Sorry, but those are just poor analogies. How many people upload pirated clips of The Colbert Report or funny home movies to YouTube with the hopes of only their friends seeing it? Not many, because they probably don’t care who is watching the video along with them because it’s not personal! But with Facebook, if my friends are writing on my wall and I’m uploading photos of my trip to Asia last month, I really don’t want anybody and everybody seeing it. Why? Well, because it’s personal stuff that I only want my friends and family members (if that!) seeing.

Think of it this way. How many people have you met in Real Life that you initially met on Facebook? I feel extremely confident in guessing that many of you would put the number below three. I know I haven’t met that many people on there who have become instant “BFFs!!11oneone!” What about the fact that Facebook doesn’t allow you to look at people’s profiles unless you are already friends with them or are in their regional network? What other “social network” site does that? Not many, if any. I point all of these out only to illustrate that while there are a few people out there, mainly people on the net, who see Facebook as an endless rainbow of possibilities, you can’t forget the mass majority of people who look at it as nothing more than a way to keep in touch with folks.

Take my case for instance. The aformentioned Web Community Forum had this to say on their site:

I never thought of it replacing my Address Book. Is that what people are using it for?

Yep! I have my home address and phone number on my Facebook profile. Sorry kiddos, but I don’t want people knowing that information unless I actually know them. And many of my friends keep the same information on their profile, which eliminates the need to keep an address book around or even a contact list in my Gmail account. Everybody I know keeps their Facebook information up-to-date to the point where if I have a phone number for somebody stored in my cell phone and I see another number for them on Facebook, I’ll call the Facebook number first.

Nobody I know wastes their time with Facebook groups anymore. They’re pointless. And while I do have a few friends who love the Facebook Applications, most of my friends simply added a few and forgot all about them. For us, Facebook is a place to keep in touch with old high school and college buddies after we scatter across the country to different colleges and then later across the globe to different jobs. E-mail and AIM have become obsolete in my ring of friends and replaced by pokes and wall messages. This is a key fact that rings true for most people on Facebook.

Yes, I can understand how some people would want more than 5,000 friends if they didn’t hold the same views as myself. But frankly, how many social contacts can you really have? Imagine if you had 5K friends right now. Don’t you think that somewhere in there would be at least a few people spamming you? Do we really need people getting their profiles up to 50K friends just so they can sell their account on E-bay to a spammer or heck, spam us ourselves with their “new and awesome website!” or whatever other venture they’re tied into? Sure, some people might hate the 5k friends limit, but to say that it has no purpose is simply shortsighted. And to say that more people than just a small handful are being hurt by this simply shows how out of touch you are with the average Facebook user.

And besides, there’s always Myspace if you don’t like it

The always brilliant Ze Frank has a new song dedicated to social networks, kinda. If you ever watched The Show last year, then you should both love it and appreciate what he’s trying to get at. And if you have no idea what’s going on here, then here’s a cookie.

Ze Frank, Facebook

Well, kinda, at least according to Ro Choy. He works over at RockYou.com and during a lecture he gave recently, he mentioned that one of the main tactics he has seen work for successful applications is to employ notification spam. You know, that stuff I’ve been raving against for a while now? Yeah, turns out Facebook doesn’t really seem to care about it.

Supposedly, when you add an application, the creator can then run a script that lasts for a few days. What does it do? Oh, it just sends out invitations to all your friends without you actually sending them. So your friends see that you’ve send them an invitation, get pissed at you for sending them yet another one, and meanwhile you’re sitting at home having no idea what’s going on behind your back.

Choy claims that you have about a seven to ten day span where Facebook turns a blind eye towards this tactic. After the period is up, an application runs the risk of being labeled for what it truly is, spam, if it continues to employ such covert acts. The fact that Facebook allows this seven to ten day window to even exist is beyond me. But now that it’s public knowledge that this little loophole is out there, certainly you’d expect Facebook to close it, no? We can only hope.

One of the better solutions to this problem that I’ve heard recently is to set a time limit for all invitations sent out. Basically, the idea would be that if you sent me an invitation, a silent counter would automatically start the next time I logged into Facebook. After two or ten or even twenty-four hours, if I’ve ignored the invitation, it’s automatically deleted.

Personally, I love this idea. It would be easy to implement on Facebook’s end, I wouldn’t have to physically delete every invitation I get, and you would still be able to send out as many zombie bites as you.

Everybody wins. But most importantly, I win.

If you have a long lunch break and want to read a little bit more about what I was talking about in the post below, then go read this post over at Search Engine Land. The post does a great job of showing how sometimes certain search engines can get inside of Facebook and start broadcasting to the world what you’re up to over there.

Well not really, but from all the whining this guy is doing over having his Facebook account closed, you’d think Mark Zuckerberg personally came over to his house last and killed his dog. Don’t get me wrong, I love Facebook just as much as the next (normal) guy. But does that mean I’d freak over my account being closed? Na, probably not.

How about an example. During my senior year in college, I lived in Australia for 6 months or so. While there, my Internet connection was extremelly fickle over what sites it would and wouldn’t load, to the point where I didn’t get on Facebook for at least half a year. And yet here I am, alive and well, in the flesh! I lived! In fact, it was nice to get away from Facebook - and the Internet, for that matter - for a while. Refreshing, some might say.

So here’s my question to y’all. Think about the last time you went an extended period of time without logging into your Facebook account. How long did it last for? And be honest, it was a little bit nice, wasn’t it?

Facebook

You may have already heard that some of Facebook’s source code was leaked over the weekend. I didn’t really pay much attention to the “riveting” news as I’m not a geek. The only thing I see when I look at all those random numbers and letters is wasted potential. Somewhere out there, Facebook is employing a team of computer geeks who could instead be living in their mom’s basement and finding cracks and serials to expensive software. I guess what I’m saying is I need a new Norton Anti-virus activation code, damnit!

Anyways, a representative from Facebook later confirmed the code leak in an e-mail.

“A small fraction of the code that displays Facebook web pages was exposed to a small number of users due to a single misconfigured web server that was fixed immediately. It was not a security breach and did not compromise user data in any way. Because the code that was released only powers the Facebook user interface, it offers no useful insight into the inner workings of Facebook. The reprinting of this code violates several laws and we ask that people not distribute it further.”

Hahahahaha, good luck with that last sentence.

[via TechCrunch]

Facebook, source code, nerds