Facebook Mirror

 Time Magazine writer Anita Hamilton has just written an article titled, ”Suffering From Facebook Fatigue?”  She talks about the use of applications, such as lil green patch, that may be useful to some, end up annoying most due to the amount of invites and notifications they send to users and their friends.  She writes:

I wasn’t merely skeptical — I was annoyed. But I didn’t want to be a killjoy — and I love plants — so I went ahead and clicked “Accept.”  That is the moment I became part of Facebook’s fastest-growing problem: application overload, a.k.a. Facebook fatigue. Like thousands of users before me, I started spamming my friends with requests to grow Green Patches of their own. 

It seems that with the restrictions Facebook has implemented on developers, they need to spam their users in order to achieve the virality they once had.  However, it’s a catch22 because the reason Facebook had to implement these restrictions was due to the fact that the developers were abusing the virality.

Add a comment | Applications

Facebook has recently settled some legal issues with the founders of ConnectU.  However it seems now Aaron Greenspan (a Harvard alum and former friend of Mark Zuckerberg) is also having some legal difficulty with Facebook.  In short, Aaron is writing a book titled “Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era” where he claims to have coined the “facebook” name for a social networking site houseSYSTEM he was creating at the time.  He wanted to use facebook in his writings, however Facebook’s lawyers are saying it would infringe upon their trademark.  Aaron has now filed a claim to cancel facebook’s trademark of the name.  Below is the first page (courtesy of Allfacebook.com).

First ConnectU, now Aaron Greenspan, it’s beginning to look like open season on Facebook, and everyone is going to try to cash in.

Add a comment | Business

You can now import stories from Flickr, Picasa, Yelp, and del.icio.us into your mini-feed.  It looks like Facebook is now trying to compete with Twitter to integrate non facebook sites, into the facebook platform.  Harry Wang (..seriously) writes on the Facebook Blog:

The option to import stories from other sites can be found via the small “Import” link at the top of your Mini-Feed. Only a few sites—Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us—are available for importing at the moment, but we’ll be adding Digg and other sites in the near future. These stories will look just like any other Mini-Feed stories, and will hopefully increase your ability to share information with the people you care about.

Perhaps we will soon be allowed to integrate Twitter into the mini-feed?  This way, we can all be a bit more confused.

Add a comment | Profiles

The updated Facebook profiles were supposed to be here in April, but it looks as though Facebook will be holding off until the late Spring.  The primary reason?  To ensure that developers are happy with the new layout and can update their applications accordingly.  Pete Bratch gave an update on the Facebook blog:

Some other things we want to communicate. The new profile design will be released later this spring. We’re still iterating on the design, making sure we get it right.

Add a comment | FB Platform, Profiles

Ticketmaster’s fan page is currently the 5th most visited fan page on Facebook with 156,000+ fans.  However, thanks to a recent post made by Chris Carrara of eastvillageidiot.com, it looks like the majority of those “fans” are in fact fake.  Chris writes:

These other “fans” looked a little strange. None of them have pictures in their profiles. And honestly, Tom Jones? It’s not unusual to have the name of a famous pop star, I guess, but that name seems a little generic. None of these people are in my network (or any network, for that matter), so since I can’t look at their profiles, I decided to view their friends.  Huh. That’s a strange coincidence. All of them are “fans” of Ticketmaster, yet none of them have any friends. This seems suspicious.

It seems silly that Ticketmaster would do something like this.   One user commented that this may have been done in order to take advantage of a special promotion that Ticketmaster was offering a few months back.  Regardless, it still serves the same purpose for Ticketmaster at the end of the day.

Add a comment | Applications, Business

Vishu Gupta of facebook this morning (early morning) made an announcement that facebook will be releasing a cross-application API.  In Vishu’s words “This API will help applications focus on their core functionality by taking on some work that, while important, is not central to the application’s mission. […] With the permissions API, an application can authorize another application to call certain API methods on its behalf.”  The API is still in beta form, but the overall concept has been received well by developers.  It will be interesting to see how this progresses. 

Add a comment | Applications

As most of you know Facebook recently rolled out their chat application to a few limited networks.  According to the writers over at 20bits.com the new chat supports emoticons.  Pictured above are the emoticons (minus the bunny and arrow) that are supported by the chat app.  You can visit 20bits.com for a detailed explanation of exactly how the emoticons were discovered.

In case you can’t determine what the last one is, its a picture of Chris Putnam, an engineer for facebook.

Add a comment | Applications

Facebook chat was released on a few networks this past Sunday on a few “choice” networks.  They include Harvard, Stanford, Middlebury, University of Chicago, Berkeley, Brown, Dartmouth and MIT.  Justin Smith of Inside Facebook has a nice write up of the chat application.  Unfortunately, not everyone is as supportive of the new chat application.  The Harvard Crimson wrote an article stating the chat application received mixed reviews.  I think I like this quote the best from that article:

The prospect of another reason to stay logged on to Facebook disturbed one student user.“Facebook is going to ruin my life,” Brandon T. Perkovich ’11 said.

Add a comment | Applications