Facebook Talk

The video below is a teaser trailer for an upcoming Facebook Documentary centering on what happens when crazy people get on Facebook and start issuing fatwa’s against their sister’s boyfriends. Or something like that.

I like this guy already. This is somebody I could hang out with. What? There’s a bounty on my head? People are trying to kill me? Sweet, this is gonna make a bitchin’ story. Let’s make a movie out of it!

It does seem to center on a pretty big issue, which is the majority of people not thinking about the photos they place on Facebook. I’ve written about this ad nauseum though and there’s not much more I can say. It’s gotten to the point now where I hear about somebody who had their lives disrupted due to something they did on Facebook and all I think is really? This is news to people still? It’d be like people getting shocked and amazed if they heard that somebody had their arm chewed off after sticking it into a shark’s mouth.

The only thing I worry about this movie is that we’ll probably never see a picture of the chick that started this whole thing, which is a downright sad. How are we, as the viewing audience, supposed to pick a side if we don’t know how hot the chick was in the first place? Oh crap, I better shut up, I don’t need to add to my own collection of people out to kill me.

One of the downsides to running a Facebook related side is that I get A LOT of e-mails from people wanting Facebook tech support. If I’ve ever run into the problem myself, I’ll take the time to help them out. Most often though it’s a problem that I’ve never encountered, so I let people know they need to contact Facebook instead of me. Then you get a small amount of people who don’t quite understand my “I don’t work for Facebook” and keep e-mailing me over and over. I’m almost tempted to post their e-mails here on the site because usually they’re pretty funny for reasons that shouldn’t be, but I digress.

That said, I’ve gotten many, many e-mails from people lately saying they’ve signed up for the English version of Facebook, clicked the confirmation link in their e-mail, and then been redirected to a French version of Facebook. After around the 9 millionth similar e-mail I received, I started copying and pasting a reply telling people to log out and select their correct language from Facebook’s main screen. Yet I’ve started getting replies back from people saying they’re unable to do this. If anybody else has had this happen to them and found a solution to it, please feel free to leave a comment here for all those lost souls out there who want to user Facebook, but who don’t speak anything but poorly typed English!

Want to win a smooth and quick $100? Then the SMUG $100 Facebook Hacker Challenge is just up your alley. Although if you’re such a good hacker, why aren’t you just breaking into people’s bank accounts and stealing way more than $100? Huh? HUH?

The premise behind this challenge is that some guy said that Facebook is secure enough for most businesses to discuss shop without having to worry about what they were saying being seen by outside people. Long story short, he decided to put some money on his beliefs and created a secret group on Facebook. Anybody who can gain access to it will win $100. If you can upload a picture to the group, then you’ll get $200.

Frankly, I think it’s just a great publicity event. Promise some money if people can do something you’re confident is impossible, let a ton of other sites write about it and link back to you, and sit back and relax. I can do the same thing though. I’ll give $1 million dollars to anybody who can figure out the number I’m thinking of between 1 and 78 gazillion. See, it’s that easy.

Then rock on, because you now can block Beacon from sending any stories to your profile. In fact, to his credit, Zuckerberg just posted his thoughts and apologies on the clusterfuck that has been Beacon:

About a month ago, we released a new feature called Beacon to try to help people share information with their friends about things they do on the web. We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it. While I am disappointed with our mistakes, we appreciate all the feedback we have received from our users. I’d like to discuss what we have learned and how we have improved Beacon.

When we first thought of Beacon, our goal was to build a simple product to let people share information across sites with their friends. It had to be lightweight so it wouldn’t get in people’s way as they browsed the web, but also clear enough so people would be able to easily control what they shared. We were excited about Beacon because we believe a lot of information people want to share isn’t on Facebook, and if we found the right balance, Beacon would give people an easy and controlled way to share more of that information with their friends.

But we missed the right balance. At first we tried to make it very lightweight so people wouldn’t have to touch it for it to work. The problem with our initial approach of making it an opt-out system instead of opt-in was that if someone forgot to decline to share something, Beacon still went ahead and shared it with their friends. It took us too long after people started contacting us to change the product so that users had to explicitly approve what they wanted to share. Instead of acting quickly, we took too long to decide on the right solution. I’m not proud of the way we’ve handled this situation and I know we can do better.

Facebook has succeeded so far in part because it gives people control over what and how they share information. This is what makes Facebook a good utility, and in order to be a good feature, Beacon also needs to do the same. People need to be able to explicitly choose what they share, and they need to be able to turn Beacon off completely if they don’t want to use it.

This has been the philosophy behind our recent changes. Last week we changed Beacon to be an opt-in system, and today we’re releasing a privacy control to turn off Beacon completely. You can find it here. If you select that you don’t want to share some Beacon actions or if you turn off Beacon, then Facebook won’t store those actions even when partners send them to Facebook.

On behalf of everyone working at Facebook, I want to thank you for your feedback on Beacon over the past several weeks and hope that this new privacy control addresses any remaining issues we’ve heard about from you.

Thanks for taking the time to read this.

Mark

Yeah, Beacon sucked, I think we all agree about this. And for a while there, Facebook seemed as if they didn’t care. But you have to respect a man who can stand up and say, “Look, I screwed up. I’m sorry. This is what I’m going to do to fix the problem.” Major props to Mark from the Facebook Talk team.

Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, Beacon

So Facebook’s new ad feature Beacon is already pissing a few people off. Well I for one am shocked. No wait. Not shocked. I meant to say, “duh.”

It shouldn’t really surprise you that some people out there don’t enjoy it when their purchase and web browsing history are displayed for all their friends to see on Facebook. I can understand why Facebook would want to do such a thing, but there needs to be a way for people to opt out of this service if they want to. If you listen to Facebook, they say there is. But Nate over at IdeaShower.com would disagree. Basically, using a plugin for Firefox that lets him know whenever information is sent to a third party via his browser, he was able to catch Facebook gathering information about him and the game he had just played, despite clicking on the “no thanks” option of sharing that information with Facebook.

There are similar complaints and worries about Beacon all over the Internet, which a simple Google search will show you. If Facebook doesn’t do something fast, they could be stuck in the middle of a public relations nightmare.

Facebook, Beacon, Firefox

I just read on ValleyWag that Facebook is testing out a new feature where Facebook employees can vote on news feed items, thus marking what they feel is the most relevant or pointless. As you can see from the picture above, users will have the option to either “plus” or “minus” a news story, thus in effect “teaching” Facebook what you find interesting and what you find boring.

As it stands now, Facebook doesn’t learn much from users when it comes to how we read our news feed. Facebook only has a vague sense of what we read based on the settings that we input for our feed. But even still, how many of you actually read and click on every single news feed item you get on your Facebook home page? If you’re anything like me, you probably click on one or two things, at best. But, like I argued before, this new step is a way for Facebook to really learn what I, and you and everybody else, care to read about. Once this goes live, I will go crazy as I minus every single damn news item that has to do with my friend’s adding applications and if Facebook actually takes my votes into consideration, they’ll finally stop showing me those news items. It’s win-win for both of us, as I’m no longer pained by having to read about them every day and Facebook finally “learns” something else about me, which it can then somehow profit on.

Which leads to my next point, which is how this new feature will go perfectly with the new ads feature that Facebook recently debuted. Think about it. If you constantly tell Facebook that you are interested in when your friends add travel photos, then Facebook will gladly take that information and show you a few more adds for Travelocity than for Nike or Coke. With 50+ million members, this translates into much higher ad results, leading to happier advertisers and more money.

And finally, as I suggested in the title, this is a direct move toward the Digg style of content filtering, where instead of letting the computer decide what you should see and what you shouldn’t, the users are allowed to pick what gets the most attention at the top. It’ll be interesting to see if Facebook users adopt this new feature when it’s released or if it’ll just be another one of the “cool” features that Facebook has rolled out to little fanfare recently.

Facebook, digg, news feed

Just in case you were a bit more curious about the new Facebook ad system, here’s a good article from the AP that I just read on CNN that might answer a few more of your questions. I’ll write more of an opinion piece on the ads sometime in the near future, but suffice to say: I don’t like them. At all.

NEW YORK (AP) — Facebook has unveiled plans to target advertisements by injecting them into its members’ conversations, and now the popular online hangout must persuade its users to embrace the initiative.

Facebook is giving users some control over whether to share information on their buying habits and other online activities with friends. For the program announced Tuesday to work, enough users must actually say “yes” so advertisers can show users their pitches in the guise of friends’ endorsements.

David Hallerman, a senior analyst at the research group eMarketer, warned that users might not be as receptive to ads when they are communicating with friends on Facebook as they might when they are reading articles elsewhere in a more relaxed, consuming state.

“Facebook is everyone’s darling today,” he said. “If there is a perceptual problem as a safe place for communications, then will it be 2009’s darling?”

Facebook’s announcement follows by two weeks Facebook Inc.’s deal to sell a 1.6 percent stake to Microsoft Corp. for $240 million, valuing Facebook at $15 billion. Microsoft also broadened a marketing relationship that began last year. The ad program announced Tuesday was unrelated to either deal with Microsoft.

In announcing the initiative, Palo Alto, California-based Facebook has begun transforming itself from an online hangout into an online business district. Companies can now create their own pages on Facebook for free and tailor their pitches to the activities of users’ friends.

For example, if a friend has booked a vacation on Travelocity, the online travel agency will be able to display the friend’s photo as part of a “social ad” to entice the user to buy flights and hotel stays. Advertisers can similarly have their pitches appear when friends review restaurants and buy books or DVDs.

Companies can even embed coding Facebook calls “Beacon” on outside sites such as eBay Inc., enabling a Facebook user who lists an item for auction, for example, to generate alert messages for Facebook friends, who may then check out the item.

“People influence people,” said Facebook Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who founded the company three years ago. “Nothing influences a person more than a recommendation from a trusted friend.”

Although the friend can control what is shared, the user will have fewer choices over whether to receive ads, which would be marked “sponsored.”

As Web companies look to boost advertising revenue by offering to target ads based on users’ hobbies, interests and behavior, Facebook’s move could change the tone of the site and revive privacy complaints it faced last year. Facebook will rely on information in users’ profiles and on friends’ online activity to determine what ads might appeal to users.

Key will be how Facebook tells users about the program. Facebook described the changes in a blog posting, but not prominently when users logged on Wednesday morning.

“Some people may find it creepy,” said Deborah Pierce, executive director of the San Francisco-based group Privacy Activism. “They are trying to find some ways to monetize this and keep the lights on. If the disclosure is up front, yeah, I think this is a reasonable thing for them to do.”

Facebook has long prided itself on guarding its users’ privacy, but the walls have gradually lowered. A feature allowing users to track changes their friends make to profiles backfired when many users denounced it as stalking and threatened protests. Facebook quickly apologized and agreed to let users turn off the feature.

Facebook promises no information that could identify individual will be disclosed to advertisers. And Chris Kelly, the company’s chief privacy officer, said users can complain again if they find the new targeting program intrusive.

Privacy concerns aside, many Facebook members may be reluctant to endorse an advertiser for fear of alienating friends who had bad experiences with the same company, said Chris Winfield, who runs 10e20, an online marketing specialist.

“They are relying a lot on their users to make this happen, and that’s going to be tricky,” Winfield said.

Zuckerberg said marketers must respond to the changing nature of communication.

“Pushing your message out to people is no longer good enough,” Zuckerberg told about 200 advertising-industry executives, many already in New York for the ad:tech conference. “You have to get your message out to the conversations.”

Search companies like Google Inc. have generated a lot of revenue from text-based ads targeted to a user’s search terms. Those have been good at fulfilling demand — users often are already looking for a car or a travel package when searching and seeing those ads.

Zuckerberg said Facebook planned to go after the bigger opportunities in generating demand — something Google and other sites are also trying to do through display and other brand promotions. Seeing a friend buy a product or praise a band, he said, are good ways to generate demand.

Coca-Cola Co., General Motors Corp.’s Saturn and Sony Corp.’s Sony Pictures are among leading brands contributing to the more than 100,000 company pages launching on Facebook.

The key difference between companies’ pages and individuals’ is that businesses won’t have access to individuals’ profiles the same way their friends do, even when users formally declare themselves “fans” of a company.

Facebook’s announcement came a day after MySpace said it would expand its targeting program to include more categories and more advertisers. MySpace lets companies create profile pages but doesn’t have Facebook’s system of alerts and adjacent social ads.

Zuckerberg told reporters he wasn’t worried users would consider Facebook too commercial. He said regular ads would stand out more because targeted ads can be better integrated with conversations users are already having with one another.

Facebook, CNN, Facebook Ads