Facebook: People You Might Know

I will admit, I am not a huge Facebook fan, nor do I tend to use it a lot.  I get some event invites on it, but unlike others I only tend to stop by every once in a while to check out my profile and see what is happening.

Today I logged in because I had received an invite to a Social Media Club event coming up in April.  In the left column of my Home page I saw something I had not seen before.  This does not mean it hasnt been there … just that I probably missed it.  Anyway there is a section that presents you with people you may know.

I must admit, I find this incredibly useful.  It does some sort of processing and looks into your current friends and aggregates people that more than one of your friends are friends with.  It seems to me to be very similar to the Linkedin feature that connects you with connections of your connections, expanding your network.

 Right away, I probably added a dozen people that I know locally, but had not "found" them on Facebook as of yet.  There are not a lot of features on Facebook that have made me stop and actually use it straight away, but this is one of them.  Good job Mark and gang

Facebook, Maybe You Could Delete Some of the Presdidential Candidates ?

I was a little surprised to into the debates tonight and see Facebook so prominently displayed as a sponsor of the debates. Apparently there is a Facebook application where people can weigh in about the debates, etc. Frankly it seems to me that Facebook doesn’t exactly seem to adhere to completely democratic values in its own business practices, so it seems a bit ironic.

Here is my question, I was curious if Facebook, as it seems to do with some popular users :), could go ahead and delete some of the candidates ….
No such luck I assume.

Hello Facebook, I Would Like My Data Back …

So we are all quite aware by now of the Scoble vs Facebook incident today.  I don’t really want to weigh in on that so much, it’s a beaten horse by now.  But it did get me to thinking quite a bit about the data portability issue, or lack thereof.

I like to think of our time on these social networking sites, like Facebook, as an investment.  We are investing our time whether we realize it or not.  And for that investment, we usually expect, or at least hope for, a return.  We spend countless hours, or minutes in some cases, friending others, joining groups, adding to discussions, and so on.  Why are we doing it?  For some it may be just for fun, but for others there is most likely an underlying reason.  We are networking, building relationships to use for some reason or another.

So here is what I think a lot of us are missing.  Whether you like him or not, agree with him or not, he is an example for us all.  He invested a lot of his efforts into building his network.  What did he get for it ?  When the corporate sponsor of that network has authority to take it all away at the drop of a hat, he got nothing.  He actually lost his investment.  It is not like we are investing in stocks.  If that were the case, if we had to walk away with nothing, we would understand it, we took the risk.  Building a social network should not be considered “taking a risk”.  Many of us are trying to use these social networks as tools to build and grow a business and the Rolodex has been yanked right out from underneath us.  So I guess that why data portability will become such a hot topic here in the very near future.

I work hard for my $$ and each week it goes in the bank, at least momentarily before the girls get to it, and at anytime I can go and take it to another bank …. seems like I should be able to do that with my network as well.

Got My First Facebook Spam Email Today

Well I guess it was bound to happen to me and today it finally did. I checked my email this morning and found I had a new Facebook message. Here it is :

Shellie sent you a message.

Subject: hey, cool name. i’m Shellie

“hi there Jimmy, how’s it going? i wanted to chat with you, but they don’t have that here, whatever. if you’d like to, you can check out my other profile at http://snipurl.com/1sjvz my username’s spicygrl. just don’t mind my pics lol. umma anyway, hope to talk to you soon!”

The snipurl takes you to a site called Friend Jungle. I can only imagine what type of jungle it may be.

Needless to say, I have not been a huge fan of Facebook for a variety of reasons, but now I am even less so. This is the kind of crap I got on MySpace. Now that it has followed me to Facebook, I think we have crested the peak, so to speak. Facebook may be on the downturn of their 15 minute of fame. A lot of us went there to use it as a networking tool and establish professional relationships. This type of spam does not do a lot to help us meet our goals and expectations.

Merry Christmas Facebook

Wow Facebook had itself quite a little holiday. After gorging myself on leftover turkey, I was perusing through the meager feeds that made their way into Google Reader today and came across two interesting headlines.

The first was from Ryan Block, of Engadget, titled “Oh, so that’s why Facebook Beacon is so evil” where he was venting a little frustration at how he finally actualy “saw” why people have been so up in arms about Beacon. In his words:

Kind of a duh moment because I followed the whole Beacon controversy and all, but I’ve never used Facebook enough to notice how much of a completely seamless, fantastically engineered, and revolting invasion of privacy Beacon is. I also didn’t realize they’re referring to these Beacon snippets as “stories,” which is a really finessed way of phrasing the reality of the “feature”: information about my personal life that I never explicitly gave you or your partners permission to share or syndicate.

Pretty strong words.

The I saw this one from DavidNYC over at DailyKos titled “Deleting My Bleeping Account, Facebook !“. David was expressing his utter frustration at the difficulty involved in trying to delete his Facebook account. He also says that the main reason he was deleting his account was also Beacon.

As I say above, Facebook’s Beacon service was the key reason for wanting to delete my social networking accounts. The fact that this issue has even got MoveOn up in arms tells you it’s for real. So I suppose it should come as no surprise that the worst offender both hides information on how to delete your account and makes you jump through numerous hoops (some possibly bogus) to actually delete it. (I’m aware that Facebook now claims to offer a universal opt-out, but the company’s constantly shifting stories and Beacon UI have not filled me with confidence.)

But he had a hell of a time getting rid of his account. He actually had to Google and found through that means he needed to email the Facebook support. They had instructions for “Deactivating” your account, not Deleting it.

Deactivation is not deletion - it merely puts your account in limbo and allows you to restore it at a later date. So if you are concerned about, say, the security of Facebook’s servers, deactivation does nothing for you.

After various emails, it took him three days to get his account deleted. He makes an interesting historical reference to a case against AOL years back for making it too hard to cancel the service

A few years ago, AOL was investigated by the NY Attorney General for making life incredibly difficult for customers who wanted to cancel their accounts. AOL was forced to clean up its act and pay a seven-figure fine. Facebook is already on the new AG’s radar, so they’d be smart to change their ways sooner rather than later.

After reading these I had even more of a feeling of the magnitude of how Beacon has affected peoples perception of Facebook. I am just recently familiar with David, but Ryan is up there in the web stratosphere with a rather large following. I will be really interested to see how this all plays out. We all know Mark Z came out with the apology and made some “changes” to the Beacon program, but will it stick. Google has made it this far in large part due to the fact that people “think” they are not evil. I am not sure we can say the same about Facebook.

Facebook Embraces Groups

Nick O’Neill has a post over at allfacebook about Facebooks announcement of the ability to create and maintain groups of your friends. He has labeled it the “LinkedIn Killer”

I for one am happy to see this. I have written a couple of posts recently, one about which service gives a better return on our investment and another on how we could improve Twitter . One argument I had in choosing Twitter over Facebook was the fact that Facebook was a little too spread out. I have to go to a lot of places to get a little done. And my one holiday wish for Twitter was groups. I think Facebook has take a step in the right direction. Having different groups that you can send messages to independently is a great feature. You could combine different Facebook groups into a particular group you define and have the ability to message the entire lot of them. Nick also had a great point about business contacts, or for that matter any group you want to pool together.

Our time these days is so torn between all these outlets, we have little time to address individual messages and send them out. I would LOVE to see this feature in Twitter and think it would be a killer feature for their platform, but in the mean time good on Facebook for this “small” yet significant step to a better social platform.