Facebook Talk

Finally. Finally, finally, finally! It seems that Facebook woke up this morning, looked around, and realized that a few things on their site seriously sucked. One glaring area of sucktitude was the inability to ignore all application invites with just the click on a button - but that’s now a thing of the past! And I for one couldn’t be happier, as I’ve been ranting and raving about the application spam for months now. Kudos to Facebook, though, for finally stepping up to the plate and creating a seemingly small and insignificant feature that I promise many people will love and appreciate.

Now if Facebook would just update their privacy settings and stop telling me all about the applications my friends add!

I also bet this guy is sincerely happy about the new feature.

Facebook, application, ignore

Facebook recently launched a nifty little feature that I missed until they wrote about it on their own Facebook blog. Basically, as the photo on the right shows, you can take any photo in which you’ve been tagged and instantly crop it and set it as your profile picture. So when you’re tagged in a batch of party photos by your friends and you see a great looking photo of yourself smushed in between two random people you don’t ever remember meeting, no worries! Instead of saving the photo to your hard drive, opening up an image editing software program and cropping the photo, then reuploading the photo to Facebook, you can just point and click and viola!

I know quite a few people who will be putting this feature to good use, myself included. I seem to change my profile picture weekly and frankly, I don’t have the best computer on the block. Every time I have to open up Photoshop to crop another photo, it slows my computer down for a few hours and leaves me frustrated and annoyed. Now, thanks to Facebook, I can constantly change my profile image AND still have plenty of time leftover to procrastinate by stalking all of my friends. It’s win-win for everybody!

Facebook

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

In case you hadn’t heard (and trust me, within a few days, you will have…) Facebook has come out and released what some think is a bombshell in the form of Facebook Ads. Now some of you might be thinking, “Doesn’t Facebook already offer ads by placing those stupid Facebook Flyers on every page?” Well, yeah, but this is much more than that and something which I predicted long ago.

Basically, advertisers have three different avenues to pursue when they sign up for Facebook Ads.

Social Ads: Ads which are targeted using the profile data of Facebook members.
Beacon: Ad widgets that advertisers can put on their own sites. Thus, Facebook members can use the widgets to spread the word about a product via their own personal feed.
Insight: Detailed profile information that is sent to Facebook advertisers, telling them who and when people are clicking their ads.

You can read more about the new Facebook Ads in Facebook’s Press Release, but suffice to say, this is just another new way for companies to shill their products to you. Basically, like I mentioned earlier, this is a way for Facebook and companies to use the information in your profile to judge what kind of products you’d actually be interested in and then send ads for those products to you. Now on the surface, some might cringe at the idea of targeted ads and personal information being used in them, but targeted ads have been around for a while. Anybody with Gmail knows that if they log into their account and read an e-mail, the Google Ads will usually have something to do with the text in your letter.

And when you think about this from the other side of the coin, how many times have you complained when you saw an ad you weren’t interested in. No offense to parents, but I’m not in the market for diapers or baby formula. So why should I have to see ads for those? At the same time, Facebook knows I love The Simpsons and there might easily be a new DVD or book out about that that I might not otherwise had heard about unless it were for targeted ads.

As of now, there are 12 large brands and companies that you’ll most likely be seeing the most of until more join. They are: Partners joining the stage at a launch event in New York for Facebook Ads included senior executives from Blockbuster, CBS, Chase, The Coca-Cola Company, Sony Pictures, Verizon, CondéNet (Epicurious.com and flip.com), Crest Whitestrips, Dove Cream Oils, Herbal Essences, The New York Times Co., and Saturn.

Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve spent way too much time reading and typing about Facebook for now. The Australian beach is calling me and I think I have a beer or two with my name on it. Until I get home stateside to write about this more, you can read a pretty cool analysis of the newly launched Facebook and Myspace ads campaigns here.

Facebook, Ads, Facebook Ads

GET THIS! You can now e-mail your friends! Directly from Facebook. EVEN IF THEY AREN’T ON FACEBOOK ALREADY! Next Facebook will allow us to chat together with our friends in real time! Like we’re in the same room! They can call it something crazy, like a chat room! Oh, man, that’d be so freaking awesome!

This isn’t 1996. So I can e-mail my non-Facebook friends. Big deal. I can already do that from a little place I like to call Gmail. It’s awesome. You should check it out, Facebook. I’m getting the feeling that Facebook is starting to run out new “features” just for the hell of it, even if they aren’t really that “new” or “useful” and instead are “pointless.”

Sorry, I “got” a “little” carried away “”" back there”there. Using quotes can be a little addictive. Almost as much as rolling out pointless, new features. ZING!

Facebook, gmail

Look, Facebook, I love you. I really do. Without you, I don’t know what I’d do to replace the current 23 hours a day I spend surfing around on you. But for the love of all things Holy, stop adding little “features” without giving me the ability to shut them off. I still get 90 invites a day to play Scrabalicious, which sounds about as fun as letting a pack of wild wolves eat my limbs off. I don’t need “easier” access to my applications. Most of them I hardly use once a week. Yet now Facebook allows us to load ample amounts of little icons on our profile - for free! What? You don’t want those icons on your profile? Well too bad, you must be a terrorist.

What happened to us, Facebook? We used to get along so well. You were like my very own website with benefits. I could log on for a few hours, surf around from profile to profile, and not once did you nag me while I got what I wanted. But then you started to look at our relationship a little more seriously than I wished. You started going out of your way to try and impress me, getting a few new features and letting me do way more things with you than you previously ever let me do. Yet the end result is now you’re getting a little bloated and turning into an old Myspace, while younger websites are starting to waltz into my life every day.

Facbeook

I love the new Facebook Applications feature. LOVE IT. Any time I can load a website that has fortune cookies, wall pokes, music, videos, and what somebody’s third favorite book is, I’m a happy man.

But Facebook needs to implement one function. The ability to turn off all future Application invites. I’ve already turned down about 20 this week and I swear, I’m getting the same ones over and over by different friends. Facebook already allows the ability to block other certain types of invites, like events, so this wouldn’t be all that difficult. A little extra code here and there and I won’t have to decline adding the Twitter application to my profile anymore!

So come on Facebook! Let’s see this happen.

Facebook, Applications