How Sticky Is Membership on Facebook? Just Try Breaking Free
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Some members discover itâs tough to erase all their information from the site.
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Over the last week, I've been writing about the disconnect between flow and rank. Paradoxically, sites that are ranked high don't always deliver a lot of hits when they link to you. On the flipside, there are some sites that are rarely on Top 100 lists, or talked about very much, that deliver substantial flow. Two of them stand out, one a veteran site, and the other a relative newcomer. 1. Daring Fireball is a thoughtful blog written by John Gruber that focuses on the Macintosh. Since I've returned to the Mac in 2005, and have been writing more about Mac issues, I've started getting links from this site, and when I do, they usually send between 1000 and 2000 readers my way. And they're generally interesting people with useful information and ideas. I follow Gruber on Twitter and have learned that he is a Phillies fan and therefore disappointed this year. His posts are interesting there too, and irreverent, which I like of course.  2. A Digg-like memetracker, news.ycombinator.com is in the same league as TechMeme, about 1000 hits for a highly ranked piece. I don't know much about the site, I'm not a regular reader, and I don't know much about the people who visit from this site.
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Plaxo, Google, and Facebook now have members in the relatively new consortium to promote social-networking interoperability. Don't expect to see immediate results any time soon, though.
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Facebook, the social-network site  that has enjoyed explosive growth in new members over the past  three months, said it plans to let users tell the rest of the  world how to find them on the site.
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Facebook wants to make the data its members enter into the social network&#39;s profiles portable, so that they can move that data to other online services if they want, the company&#39;s CEO said Wednesday.That Facebook doesn&#39;t let them do this today is &quot;a flaw in the system&quot; and something the company wants to fix, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco.&quot;It&#39;s the users&#39; data. We want to [make it portable.] That&#39;s the goal,&quot; he said during a keynote speech in which he fielded questions from moderator and conference chair John Battelle and attendees.However, when pressed to provide a timetable for when Facebook might do this, Zuckerberg refrained from making a deadline commitment. &quot;I don&#39;t know,&quot; he said.The massive response from outside developers who have built, to date, about 6,000 applications for Facebook has been &quot;incredibly humbling,&quot; he said.Because&#160;Facebook chose to open up the platform&#160;at an early stage of its development, instead of refining the program internally for several years, the company is learning as it goes along, he said.That is partly the reason why the wording on the terms of service for developers may be read as giving too much power to Facebook over the third-party applications on its platform.However, Zuckerberg said Facebook isn&#39;t interested in &quot;yanking&quot; popular applications so that it can build them itself.While Facebook has to reserve the right to build whatever application it deems core to its social network, it doesn&#39;t plan to trample on its developers and steal their thunder.&quot;It wouldn&#39;t be good for us if we did that,&quot; he said.Opened to external developers in May, the platform is seen by many as containing well-designed tools and offering developers generous revenue opportunities, despite the terms of service language that Battelle highlighted and that has concerned developers who are investing time and money in creating Facebook applications.Still, Facebook has already had to step in and curb the behavior of some applications which, designed with self-promotion features intended to spur their adoption, annoyed users with unsolicited e-mails and intrusive message displays.Zuckerberg said it may take many years for the Facebook platform to reach a level of maturity, and in the meantime, the company will work hard to continually improve and refine it.He remained tight-lipped when asked about rumors that the company is in the latter stages of securing financing from a major Internet company, like Google or Microsoft.&quot;How&#39;s the financing going?&quot; Battelle asked him. &quot;Very well. We&#39;re almost all wrapped up,&quot; Zuckerberg answered, declining further comment.Facebook will likely more than double its staff of 300 to about 700 in the coming year, growth that Zuckerberg acknowledged is intense. Many of the new hires are referred by employees, he said.Asked if Facebook is contemplating hiring an experienced CEO to run the company, as fast-growing startups often do, Zuckerberg said that the focus is on &quot;developing a really good team,&quot; in part because there aren&#39;t many seasoned CEOs experienced in social networking.Zuckerberg also suggested that the company may be developing its own advertising platform, but declined to offer details, keeping mum when asked if the ad platform will syndicate ads outside of the Facebook site, thus becoming a potential competitor to networks from Google, Yahoo and others.Asked about the investigations from some U.S. attorneys general offices into Facebook&#39;s operations and policies regarding objectionable content and the presence of sexual predators among its members, Zuckerberg said the social network gives users very granular control over what data they share, how they share it and with whom.However, he acknowledged that he&#39;s not very familiar with how the company complies with civil and criminal investigation subpoenas.Founded in 2004, Facebook&#39;s popularity has been ballooning for the past year or so. Its user ranks have increased to 47 million active users today from 12 million in December. Over half of its active members return to the site daily.Web 2.0 Summit ends Friday.&#160;
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Today's announcement from Facebook is the reason why Google announced OpenSocial last week. They must have gotten a leak from one of the companies that stood with Facebook, so they knew what was coming. They weren't scared of Facebook's technology, because they didn't respond with technology. They were scared because Facebook has a better advertising story than Google does. They are getting ready to offer some very premium web real estate that (pay attention now) Google can't compete with. And advertising is Google's bread and butter, advertising is to Google as operating systems are to Microsoft. They can't let somebody appear to be better than they are in advertising. Yet that's what Facebook is, better than Google in advertising. Here's what Facebook can do.  Let's say I bought a Wii and I like it. They can tell all my friends "Dave bought a Wii and he likes it." That's a lot more likely to result in a sale  than an intrusive ad like this one, that was displayed next to an email I sent to some friends about their New Networked Living Room. Google thinks I might want to buy Moroccan Lamps, or something called a Unique Shabby Chic (huh?) or Crate & Barrell bedroom furniture. Of course I tune that shit out, I don't even see it. It has zero impact.   Anyway, I was talking with Doc Searls a few minutes ago and he mentioned OpenSocial and I told him it was just a lot of noise meant to distract people from what Facebook was doing in advertising. He hadn't heard anything about it even though he was at a tech conference in Denver today and yesterday. I said there you go, Google's strategy worked. But to no effect, longterm, because Facebook has the momentum and Google, try as hard as they want to stop it, will not be able to, any more than Alta Vista or Infoseek were able to stop Google once they figured out that their lunch was eaten. Google will be around for a long time, I'm not saying they will go away, but Facebook will be around too. And Google will have a hard time catching up to them.  Long-term, however they both have problems because advertising is on its way to being obsolete. Facebook is just another step along the path. Advertising will get more and more targeted until it disappears, because perfectly targeted advertising is just information. And that's good!  8/3/06: "Information is welcome, advertising is offensive."
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Facebook responded this week to user complaints that it's virtually impossible to delete an account from the social-networking Web site.
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We turned off share.opml.org yesterday, for good, as far as I know. It was a good idea, but we never got it together to make it the powerhouse I wanted it to be.  Now that Google and Bloglines both have discovery mechanisms for feeds that you might like, based on what you and others like, there would only be a future for SYO if it were a thriving and growing community, and it isn't.  Normally, I'd leave a site like that running indefinitely, but this one needed its own server, and I wanted to cut my server expenses now that my S3 bill is going up, serving some very big JPEGs and generally being the back-end for a community that is growing, the people using FlickrFan. If there's a big demand to bring it back, we can -- but that's going to require cash flow to go with it. At this point, I don't think it's a good investment for me. Still diggin!
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Social networks have made fortunes setting up Web sites that allow people to post profiles and trade messages. Now, the rank and file are getting the chance to make some cash from their contacts.
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By ANICK JESDANUN, THE ASSOCIATED PRESS  NEW YORK  The operators of the online hangout Facebook wanted to help users save time by highlighting changes their friends make to their personal profile pages.
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What happens in the online world can be a freeing experience. Sometimes too freeing, so be careful out there. Commentary by Gina Lynn.
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Despite having both a Myspace and Facebook page, the only social networking site I&#8217;ve really stuck too is Twitter.com. Have you used Twitter? It&#8217;s basically a website that lets you post &#8220;tweets&#8221; or little status updates about what you&#8217;re currently doign. You can twitter from the computer or from your mobile phone. You can subscribe to [...]
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New social networking site lets users share photos, videos, and more.
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Reposted in the queue as it's impossible or at least very complicated to move it as I asked (although the post where aphrael said such thing disappeared so perhaps this is not the case after all - another minor K5 mystery).  The original discussion can be found here (read it as there are some clarifications by rusty). All right, here is the (adapted) diary. Rusty posted a comment in the diary entitled "Would you pay 10USD for K5 Life Membership?" saying that K5 will become a pay site once new user registrations will be reactivated: "I was thinking $5.00 (none / 0) (#18) by rusty on Thu Sep 06, 2007 at 04:42:15 PM CET But it would actually be charged. That plus a hash of the identifying CC info so you only get one account ever, and I think we'd either shrivel up to nothing and die, or solve the spamming and crapflooding issues. Funny that someone else is thinking about this right now. It'll probably happen before I turn new signups back on." This of course begs the question: HIBT? If so I'll bite (see some considerations under the fold).
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There is no question that the popular social networking site is taking over all aspects of our lives. As this new era dawns, it is important to keep in mind certain principles of etiquette. Firstly, Poke with caution and moderation.
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Facebook kicked off the new year with additional tweaks to its development platform as it continues to&#160;grapple with external programmers&#160;who spur adoption of their applications among Facebook members through deceitful and abusive practices.Facebook has been battling this problem since May, when it opened its social-networking site to third-party developers interested in building applications for it.Chief among the annoyances have been self-promotion features in applications such as bulk unsolicited e-mails and intrusive message displays. Although&#160;Facebook has made several changes&#160;in past months, the problems persist.On Jan. 1, a Facebook official made an official blog posting titled &quot;New Year. New Rules&quot; in which he states that some developers have been sneakily bypassing the amount of e-mail notifications applications are allowed to send.&quot;Specifically, these developers have been sending notification e-mails to users for one application with another application, in order to &#39;pool&#39; the total quota of e-mail notifications together,&quot; wrote Dave Morin, Facebook&#39;s senior platform manager.In addition, other applications have been designed to trick Facebook members into inadvertently installing other applications by placing links into e-mail messages, internal notifications and the Mini-Feed feature in member profiles.&quot;Starting today, we&#39;ll begin blocking links in Mini-Feed, Notifications, and Notification E-mails which lead to the installation of another application in the hopes that developers focus on user experience and engagement being paramount, not deceiving users for the sake of growth,&quot; Morin wrote.&#160;
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Those little devils who keep the gears turning inside the Twitter machine added a toy that's got the community sending public love missives whizzing around. You can figure it out yourself, or you can cheat and read this howto. @lovelyperson   Substitute the name of your lover in place of "lovelyperson" and you've just broadcast your love to all of TwitterLand.  While we're on the subject of Twitter, a couple of other items. 1. A must-read piece in today's NY Times, gives a clue why kids don't go for Twitter if their parents use it. No kid wants to be observed by his or her parents. Would they go for it if their parents weren't there? No one knows.  2. Conventional wisdom says you can't build a scalable distributed Twitter out of RSS. At first I accepted this, as a puzzle, then I remembered that's why we put the cloud element in there. I felt that for some applications polling would be too much. Since the cloud element has been largely ignored, most of the the apps of RSS couldn't scale to do what Twitter does. But if RSS desktop apps like NetNewsWire or FeedDemon were adapted to understand the cloud element, and if a proxy system was worked out to get through firewalls and NAT, it might just work.  3. Or you could use XMPP.