75% of Facebook users are giggly and poke; 25% are serious and import bookmarks

Facebook users fall into two categories: giggly and serious. Facebook user experience could be better if Facebook took this dichotomy into account. Ignoring the difference pushes apps to be giggly and serious users to be unhappy.

Giggly 75% like pokes, quizzes, pic forwarding, fun games, selling friends, glitter on profiles. They express themselves through style and interact with friends using the mouse.

Serious 25% like bookmark import, utility apps, discussions. They express themselves with text and pictures containing them and interact with friends using the keyboard.

Because you’re reading this, and made this far, you’re serious. (Giggly users tend to not read much at all, certainly not blobs of text, and quite certainly not my blog.) Let me tell you a few things about the giggly majority and propose how to make Facebook better for both giggly and serious users.

Giggly users are

• younger
• less educated
• lower-income
• less likely to have credit cards
• far less likely employed
• more suburban and rural
• more frequently female.

Giggly users love to have fun with their friends, love to chit-chat and giggle, forward things easily and without a second thought. Giggly users generally don’t review applications because it requires typing. They don’t visit the about pages much. The prototypical giggly user is a female teenager who might later go to a party school to major in English.

You’re far more familiar with the serious users. Serious users are Harvard students, Silicon Valley types who use Facebook for professional networking, young professionals, etc. Serious users vote in primaries, care about privacy, understand the importance of financial planning, and are somewhat hesitant about the exposure of personal information by social networks. Serious users dislike the apps, infrequently use them, but write many of the reviews. Their notion of fun on Facebook is Scrabulous. Serious users are a bit boring. They make up for it by extreme sports and odd personal styles. The prototypical serious users are you and I. (Facebook employees and shareholders are also serious Facebook users.)

Problems:

1. Giggly users send a bunch of giggly communication to the serious users, for whom it’s annoying noise that drowns the signal from serious friends
2. Giggly users want more self-expression tools, which Facebook won’t create because of concern about serious users, who will hate them and cry “MySpace”

Solution: Have each user and each app self-elect into giggly or serious categories and treat them differently.

API calls returning list of friends, friend selectors, etc., should, by default, only return giggly friends for giggly apps and serious friends for serious apps. There should be a way to override this with some difficulty and user involvement.

Giggly users should be given tools to create different backgrounds for their profiles with different text colors and an option to play music on load. The default text color for giggly users should be pink, on a purple background with starbursts. Facebook should partner with RockYou to enable displaying the profile owner’s name in her favorite style of glitter, and a larger font. Latest photo album should start playing as a slide show on load. Applications should be given hooks into these extra self-expression tools, allowing iLike to set the song to play on load, etc. Self-expression should reign supreme.

Serious users should continue to see profiles of any users, including giggly, as they do today, minus the app boxes. Utility and uniformity should be emphasized.

The division of the app ecosystem will be particularly valuable. Giggly users will continue to have their silly apps, but the silly apps will stop bothering the serious users.

This will create an opening for serious and useful apps, now squeezed out of the ecosystem by the higher virality of the silly apps. This will allow engaging and useful apps to flourish in the subset of Facebook users whom Facebook clearly values the most, who are far more valuable for monetization, without spoiling the fun the giggling girls are having over in the other corner of Facebook.

It is in the apps’ interests to be classified correctly, therefore self-classification will be sufficient. The division will reduce Facebook’s need to police the apps, because serious apps will treat serious users more in line with their expectations and giggly users are more tolerant of highly viral tactics.

The 75% and 25% numbers are my approximations, based on polls about the Beacon program and forced invites, on the demographics, review of statistics, and a great dose of guess. The dichotomy is not firm, and the numbers may not be exactly 75/25. There is, however, a giggly majority and a serious minority, there’s greater conversion to inviting among the giggly users, there’s Facebook’s desire to be a social utility and thus to appeal to the serious minority, and there’s the problem of higher virality of the silly apps on Facebook, combined with the desire to have serious apps.

There are two ways in which Facebook would enable engaging useful apps:

1. change the distribution model from viral to directory and
2. segregate the users into groups.

Directory-based distribution would be bad news as it would replace competition with arbitrary choice, reducing the overall quality of apps. I believe Facebook understands this, as they have resisted this route thus far.

Segregation of users and apps into groups is the next natural choice, and I do not believe it has been explored. The minimum useful number of groups is two, and two groups might well be sufficient.

Facebook already has good data that separates the giggly users from the serious ones. I expect that serious users have been far more likely to change their privacy settings from the defaults. Why not start from there?

Update, July 24, 2008: Facebook has made a choice.  Apps will no longer compete on a level playing field.  Instead, Facebook will separate them into three tiers of preference.  The replacement of competition with arbitrary choice by Facebook employees will obviously lower the overall quality, except as perceived by the particular employees making the choice.  Yet it’s Facebook’s platform and their choice how to run it.

10 useful Facebook apps

Most Facebook apps are giggly.  But serious apps exist even today when they cannot spread.

A comment on my earlier post 75% of Facebook users are giggly and poke; 25% are serious and import bookmarks asks if there are, indeed, any serious Facebook apps.  Here are some of the serious apps that I have installed:

1. Analytic Polls — opinion comparison/sharing.
2. Antlook — news.  Personalized recommendations from AI.
3. Causes — charity.  The only popular serious Facebook app.
4. Dopplr — business travel.  Tells when contacts are in the same place as you.
5. Feedheads — tool for importing Google Reader shared items and RSS in general.
6. Mento — bookmarking tool that tells you when friends click. Firefox extension that takes screenshots.
7. Neighborhoods — meet your neighbors on Facebook.  I’ve become friends with two great people this way.
8. PayPal — fundraising.
9. SeenThis — news.  All WSJ content for free.
10. Truemors — tips and rumours.

You’ll notice that no-one uses these excellent apps, with the exception of Causes.  Because serious apps are not used, developers have no incentive to create more.  If my proposal were implemented, there would be more, and better, serious apps.

But before then, you can still enjoy these apps that developers made against their best interest and judgment.

Rubik in facebook

<embed src="http://static.oologymax.com/game/48/www/rubik.swf" width="600" height="400">

 

 

Flock 2.5

Joe Hewitt magic for Facebook + iPhone= connect

Our Shout Out to Flock’s Facebook and Twitter Users…

At Flock, we love to hear from you. We want to make sure that Flock continues to help you discover, enjoy and share the relationships and content you’re passionate about. So while you’ve been talking, we’ve been listening. The result is a new version of Flock that reflects the new ways you want to use your favorite social browser along with two of your favorite networks—Twitter and Facebook.

The new version that we’re releasing today lets you keep your finger on the pulse of your social networks, yet it gives you the freedom to explore online without having to click back and forth between websites, tabs, applications and content. And now, Flock is the only browser that let’s you take Facebook Chat with you wherever you go on the Web. You can also drag and drop photos, videos, links and text into your chats, making everything simple, social and fun.

Flock 2.5 makes sharing and discovering content fast and easy. You just drag and drop URLs, photos, videos, text or other things you find on the web to a friend’s Twitter, Facebook, MySpace or other profile in Flock’s People Sidebar and it’s instantly shared. And now Flock comes with Twitter Search right in MyWorld, so you can keep up to date on all the topics you’re most interested in and save them in the best place possible, your Flock browser.

<p>Flock 2.5 - Twitter from Flockstar on Vimeo.</p>

Last but not least is FlockCast, an effortless way to share information across your social networks. With FlockCast, you can broadcast anything from blog posts and picture uploads to Tweets and MySpace status updates directly to your Facebook profile. And when you share a URL in a Twitter message, Flock automatically shortens the URL.

<p>Flock 2.5 - FlockCast from Flockstar on Vimeo.</p>

clearly, this new version of Flock is for those of you that are Twitter and Facebook fans. Our Facebook users have grown over 80% since the beginning of 2009! And, on Twitter, we are proud and appreciative of in the great things you’re writing about Flock across the Twittersphere… (check out #flock). Flock’s popularity has been almost entirely driven by the generous recommendations coming from each of you (we just passed 7.5 million downloads). We’re extremely grateful for your support and hope that you’ll  keep spreading the word. And now we’re giving you the opportunity to earn the recognition and rewards you deserve by telling your friends about Flock on Facebook at http://www.flock.com/refer

Top 5 Funniest Fake Facebook Pages

With over 250 million users, Facebook is a social networking behemoth. The site is host to thousands of celebrity fan pages and has been taking steps to make these more appealing to self-promoters.

On Saturday Bill Gates revealed that he’s not a Facebook user, and many other famous names are notably absent from the site. Which leads us to wonder…what might those pages look like? Fortunately, some of the web’s most creative minds had the exact same thought, and below we bring you the very best fake Facebookpages.

 

1. Barack Obama’s News Feed: First 100 Days (Slate)

 

2. Hitler’s Facebook (Banterist)

 

3. Steve Jobs’ Facebook (PC World)

 

4. The Facebook of Genesis (College Humor)

 

5. Satan’s Facebook (PC World)

 

ARTICLE POSTED by Pete Cashmore

 

 

 

 

Crowdsourcing Delivers Personalized Innovation

The new dimension of innovation is about having customer as an integral part of the system. Firms can no longer afford to stay separate from customers and still come up with great innovations. The success of social media websites (like Facebook) is frequently attributed to engaging customers in the creation of new innovations - also referred to as crowdsourcing.

The topic of innovation is multi-dimensional, which no firm in the globe can afford to ignore today. Being innovative is necessary to stay competitive in the business. The new age of innovation has a lot to do with making the customer an integral part of the innovation system by engaging and involving them with the product or service that the firm is working on.

This is all the more true with consumer-targeted social networking sites like Facebook, where the users drive how the product should look. The customer-centric innovation started off with creating and opening up a software development kit (SDK) for anyone to create and host their applications. 

Want to get a real experience with what we are talking about? Just login to your Facebook or Orkut profile and click on the "applications" link. You will see an array of cool stuff in the form of quizzes, music, games, etc. Who do you think has developed them? Do you think Facebook or Orkut has enough employees to develop thousands of these applications? Definitely not!

It is done by enthusiastic folks around the globe with decent web programming knowledge. They downloaded the SDK, developed the app and hosted it all for free. The buck doesn't stop there. After it gets uploaded, the importance of these applications is decided by other users. As more folks add a particular application to their profile, its rating goes up. If the application is not interesting enough for the community, it gets automatically pushed down the stack. From the user's perspective, they can choose and install applications of interest to them, thereby 'personalizing' their profile. This is the real power of crowdsourcing - consumers as creators.

According to Wikipedia, crowdsourcing is a neologism for the act of taking a task traditionally performed by an employee or contractor, and outsourcing it to an undefined, generally large group of people or community in the form of an open call. In the context of social networking, the crowdsourcing goes beyond outsourcing, where users become voluntary creators to benefit of the community.

By democratizing their SDK, firms like Facebook benefit greatly by harnessing the innovative ability of anybody in the world. This breadth of innovation is impossible to groom and sustain within the confines of the firm's employees. Also, the cost of making such innovation happen inside the organization is extremely high compared to crowdsourcing.

On a larger scale, the idea of crowdsourcing has been harnessed by Apple (iPhone) and Google (Android) - these firms designed a monetization model allowing developers to host their applications and quote a price. When users download the developer's application a portion of payment goes to the developer. 

In his recent work on 'New age of Innovation', renowned management thinker C.K.Prahalad calls this phenomenon as 'N = 1 R = G'. In order to provide one unique user experience (N = 1) firms need to leverage resources (R) globally (G). It is mainly because every consumer has his unique preferences when using a product, which cannot be satisfied by the firm hiring more people. This new school of thought is much different from the previous generation of technology products where every feature was developed by the firm in a closed development environment. In this new age, the role of the firm is to create a platform and leave it open for consumers to create the applications they want. 

So, next time you are set out to innovate something, ask yourself: 'Am I involving my customers in the process?'

Facebook Relents, Lets You Change Your Username

I got www.facebook.com/sswathi.naidu, but now i changed to-----> www.facebook.com/swathidharshananaidu 

Last month, Facebook finally announced that they would allow users to pick out custom usernames for use in vanity URLs that read www.facebook.com/username. At the time, users were advised to "choose wisely" because the username they selected would be stuck with them for life. That didn't stop some Facebook users from picking out names were clearly meant as jokes, though, including the guy who decided to go with "rickroll" and the other fellow who just kept pressing the letter "a." We're not sure if those folks are now having regrets about their choices, but if so, they'll be happy to know they now have the option to select a username yet again. But only once, says Facebook.

It appears that Facebook has quietly launched a new option in the settings area called "username" where you have the option to change your Facebook username. To find this option, go to "Settings" at the top-right of the Facebook page and then click on "Account Settings." The second option from the top is "Username." Press "Change" to enter in your new username and then click "Confirm" when you're ready to set it.

Since there's no official announcement from Facebook at this time, it's hard to know why they've decided to give users another chance to pick their names. Maybe they took pity on folks like this guy whose "friends" pranked him by selecting an...errr...rather interesting username for him. Or perhaps they just saw the ridiculous choices people were making and realized that these people probably had no idea that what they were creating would be permanent...as in etched in stone on the internet forever and ever. Or maybe they simply took pity on the moms and dads and grandparents joining Facebook who now had to all of a sudden discover that their kids weren't as clean-cut and innocent as they once thought.

But for whatever reason, those regretting their username choice now have the opportunity for a "do-over." But Facebook warns, "Choose your new username carefully. You can only change your username once." We're not sure if we believe them this time.

Thanks to FBHive for this tip.

 

Help, Facebook’s Hacking Me!

 

 

thank u: Jesse E.Farmer

BBC’s technology program, Click, is claiming to have “exposed a security flaw in the social networking site Facebook which could compromise privacy.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/7376738.stm

ReadWriteWeb, without a trace of humor, followed on with an article called Facebook Hacked Again. Yes, the title of the post was that sensationalist.

Fortunately for we Facebook users the BBC and ReadWriteWeb show a fundamental misunderstanding of what is happening, how applications can purportedly “steal” user information, and then proceed to scare us by obfuscating the possible solutions.

The BBC’s Mistakes

Since the BBC’s report is all video, here’s a screen capture and a transcript of the voice-over that accompanies it.

 

And the transcript:

We managed to write a very simple application which steals a user’s personal Facebook details, and those of all their friends, without their knowledge.

 

Their report bothers me first as an engineer because the BBC talks as if this is some sort of sophisticated attack. Just look at the screen capture.

That’s right — unless you’re elite enough to be sitting in room lit like a rave working with two MacBook Pros there’s just no way you’d be able to pull this shit off. Leave it to us, kid, we’re professionals.

Snark aside, here’s what’s happening. In the summer of 2006 Facebook opened up their REST API to third-party websites. Yes, this actually pre-dates the platform, which launched less than a year ago in May of 2007.

Among other things the API permits people to grant external websites permission to access a user’s data. Since the launch of the Facebook platform most application exist on Facebook, but the API remains the same.

When you try to log into or add an application here’s an example of what you’d see. I’ve highlighted some relevant parts.

 

So the BBC’s claim that application can access a user’s data “without their knowledge” is dubious at best. Sure, it’s likely that the user will bypass all that text and go right for the big blue button, but the BBC report makes it sounds like applications are doing something sneaky.

Sorry, folks, but it’s right there: Allow this application to know who I am and access my information. Check.

Imagine this exposé instead. “BBC Uncovers Fatal Flaw in Valet Parking System,” in which our intrepid reporter poses as a valet and drives off with someone’s car. It’s so easy, and there’s nothing stopping them!

But we trust valets not to do it because the valet will get fired and the police will arrest him. And it’s the same on Facebook. In fact, Facebook requires developers adhere to its Terms of Use which explicitly forbids such uses of user information. Of course using this data for identity theft is more than just a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use, it’s a violation of the law.

Exaggerated Dangers

The BBC mentions the above Terms of Use clause in passing, but then states quickly that your information is at risk if even only one of your friends installs an application. Yikes! Is that true?

Well, yes and no. Yes, under certain configurations applications can get information about a user’s friends even if those friends haven’t installed the application. But you’re nowhere near as helpless as the BBC makes you seem.

Here is a screenshot of Facebook’s Application Privacy page:

 

Notice the text above the field of options.

The following settings apply only to Facebook Platform applications to which you have not already granted access or explicitly restricted. For these applications, the information you select will be available to friends and other users who can already see your information on Facebook

 

The BBC and ReadWriteWeb are a day late and a dollar short. Not only is it against Facebook’s rules to “steal” user data in this way, but Facebook actually provides mechanisms that allow users to secure their data. I, personally, don’t let applications I haven’t installed see more than my Facebook photo. They can’t get my name, date of birth, location — any of that.

To summarize, the BBC and ReadWriteWeb didn’t really uncover anything except a way to abuse a feature intentionally built into the Facebook platform in a way that Facebook anticipated two years ago. What they claim is technically accurate but the dangers are grossly exaggerated.

There are at least four levels of protection.

1. Facebook forbids developers from storing user data in their Terms of Use.
2. Facebook provides mechanisms for me to hide data from applications I have installed directly.
3. For application that I haven’t installed but my friends have installed, I have full control over what they can and cannot see on Facebook’s Application Privacy page.
4. Above all this, there is the law. Identity theft is illegal and using something like Facebook to steal personal data probably only increases the risks. If I were looking to steal someone’s identity I’d rather just look through their garbage, personally.

 

This is not a hack and Facebook has controls for dealing with this on both the developer side and user side. Don’t buy into the BBC’s and RWW’s sensationalism. Please.