Facebook

Changing the way Facebook handles the Beacon system was inevitable based in user concern. While they are trying to calm the waters with this change, they still need to take a few more steps. At the very least they need to provide a page of companies using the Beacon system and let Facebook users choose who they want to share data with. This is what Facebook has chosen to do:

Users must click on “OK” in a new initial notification on their Facebook home page before the first Beacon story is published to their friends from each participating site. We recognize that users need to clearly understand Beacon before they first have a story published, and we will continue to refine this approach to give users choice.

What I find amazing is as of this writing nothing is on the Official Facebook blog. All I’ve found are reports from bloggers who follow technology and Facebook. Why is that? Why hasn’t Facebook just come out and publicly said they have made changes to Beacon? What I know is they have made an effort to improve the service and give their users more control over how and what is used.

I still think Facebook rocks. I think the entire social network platform has many positive advantages. I also think its great the community can come together and police itself. These are the types of issues that should be taken serious by community builders.

Do you think Facebook went far enough? Is the Beacon system too personal?

I really don’t like this Project Beacon from Facebook. Even though I spend time developing applications that use services like Facebook, this one is personal. Take for instance these entries from the main user feed in Facebook:

While I appreciate the ability to advertisers to make connections with customers and their social networks, people have to be concerned with the amount and type of data being pushed around. The problem will be people not understanding or forgetting they can turn this feature off in Facebook.

Take for instance the example in the image above. What if the purchase made on Fandango was a gift for my wife, who is also a Facebook user and a friend of mine. Have I just ruined it without realizing? I think so.

I don’t really care if advertisers and Facebook have figured out a way to create a viral buying process, I do care about the exposure its creates. Learn more about Beacon and how to keep yourself from being unnecessarily exposed here.

The guys over at Lonely CEO pointed to a blog post of mine where it mentions I’m a Utah Facebook Developer. First, as I’ve said before, there was a reason I mentioned I develop Facebook applications and I live in Utah. But second, it is extremely important people know what community you live and work in. Do I expect being from Utah will make a difference, perhaps not, but I am trying to help build a community and I want people to know where I am. Does a company in New York or Florida care I’m in Utah, probably not, but companies in Utah care, and so its important they know I’m here.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is building a network is very important to a successful business. You may have killer technology but if you are unable to find the right investors it will be a short lived venture. Utah has a growing tech community. There are a number of companies who look for skilled workers with various new media and social media backgrounds. Are they finding you?

The truth is, as my friends at the Lonely CEO say, you can build software anywhere. So what we really need to do is market our services as Social Software or Community Software Developers. If your focus is on Facebook, or MySpace, or any number of other platforms, people that need your services will be searching for it under those terms, so its important search engines find you there. But I think it’s equally important companies in your own backyard know you’re there and are capable of fulfilling their needs.

So whether its important or not I’ll continue to make sure my neighbors know I develop Social and Community Software and consult on other new media technology, and I’m right here in Utah.

Joyent has announced a new hosting service specifically targeting Facebook applications. Facebook doesn’t host third party applications, that’s up to the responsibility of the application developer. If an application becomes popular that can really put a strain on the applications server and the developers pocket book. Joyent, a start up web hosting and on demand computing services provider based in California, will be offering developers a place to host their Facebook applications for free. Yes, you read that right, free. Read the whole article on GigaOM here.

On the surface it appears to be a boon for developers, a fiber connection between the Joyent and Facebook data centers should improve the speed which applications load. According to statistics in the GigaOM post, most Facebook applications have less than 10,000 users. While that sounds like a significant amount that shouldn’t put too heavy a load on most web servers. Once you get above that, traditional web hosting services just can’t handle the amount of traffic and the applications starts timing out.

A couple of things developers will still need to do. 1) write tighter applications, because no matter how fast the backbone, poorly written code will timeout. 2) You may need to upgrade to Joyent’s higher tier services, which is what they are betting on and the reason they justify providing a free service.

Amazon EC2 and S3 is an alternative to look at if your Facebook application is already beating up your current web server. The price is very reasonable and the service is very reliable.

The Joyent service hasn’t officially been announced, supposedly that happens tomorrow. I would hope that’s when we get to see what the limitations of the free service are. Tune in tomorrow for more information.

Facebook recently launched a new feature to their fairly closed site called Pages. Everyone is hung up on the advertising part of pages. But, a savvy networker can create a page as an external profile. Unless you are a Facebook member you really can’t see much. But now with a Page you can create something everyone can see. Let’s try it out:

As you can see from the image above, when you try and access my Facebook profile you just get a login page. Not real cool but that’s how it is. Now, if you create a Page in your Facebook account you can have some public information exposed including a picture and some summary information:

The area in red to the right is where I think Facebook should allow for additional content. When you are logged into Facebook there are several sections of details.

The bottom area in red is where you are able to provide some type of summary information. A web site link, a description, a mission statement and product information. You could however set your page up to provide links to several of your web sites, a little about you and maybe what you do for a living.

This isn’t a perfect solution but at least someone can see who you are without actually being a member. There is one draw back to this though, no vanity URL, mine looks like this, http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=6351869262, and I’m not sure how search engine friendly that is. You could do some type of domain forwarding like profile.digitalthom.com and point to this page but it seems like a lot of work.

Here is a link to iJustine’s Facebook page. Here is her blog post about it.

Oh, and what would be really cool, is to put an invitation to join Facebook on your profile page. You really can’t get the full experience unless you’re a member. And being a member of Facebook isn’t a bad thing.