Facebook Is Designing an iPad/Kindle Tablet Device

I'm speculating wildly here, but play along.


Push Pop Press makes interactive ebooks. Their ebooks are more app or self-contained website than ebook, really, but it seems that this sort of convergence of web and book is one possible direction for the written word and its various formats.

The About page for the site has announced that Facebook has acquired Push Pop Press.

This can only mean that Facebook plans to join Apple, Amazon, Google, BarnesandNoble.com, Kobo, Sony, Motorola, and the rest of the technologized world in offering some device that lets you read ebooks!

If this seems like a leap, just think about what that device might look like: it would be a walled garden device designed to funnel all your Facebook-enable social network channels into one device. It would play Facebook video, have a built-in web browser (FaceFox?), and have a store where users could buy licensed music, movies, and ebooks through Facebook's App Store... or FTunes? Fbookstore?

Brand it how you will, Facebook's IPO will launch it into the socially enabled content retail business.

News for Nerds Roundup: Who's using Twitter? Facebook?

In this mostly uninteresting article, the NYT says:"Almost everyone under 35 uses social networks, but the growth of these
networks over the last year has come from older adults, according to a
report from Forrester Research issued Tuesday. Use of social networking
by people aged 35 to 54 grew 60 percent in the last year."

The NYT cites Forrester Research's new ($500!) study:"Social technologies continue to grow substantially in 2009. Now more
than four in five US online adults use social media at least once a
month, and half participate in social networks like Facebook. While
young people continue to march toward almost universal adoption of
social applications, the most rapid growth occurred among consumers 35
and older. This means the time to build social marketing applications is
now. Interactive marketers should influence social network chatter,
master social communication, and develop social assets - even if their
customers are older."

Federal Trade Commission to Regulate Blogs, Twitter

Soon, Bloggers Must Give Full Disclosure
New York Times

"The F.T.C. said that beginning on Dec. 1, bloggers who review products must disclose any connection with advertisers, including, in most cases, the receipt of free products and whether or not they were paid in any way by advertisers, as occurs frequently. The new rules also take aim at celebrities, who will now need to disclose any ties to companies, should they promote products on a talk show or on Twitter. A second major change, which was not aimed specifically at bloggers or social media, was to eliminate the ability of advertisers to gush about results that differ from what is typical — for instance, from a weight loss supplement."

"“If a product is provided to bloggers, the F.T.C. will consider that, in most cases, to be a material connection even if the advertiser has no control over the content of the blogs," said a lobbyist."

What this means for marketers:

• Nothing at all! The burden seems to be entirely on bloggers.
• Bloggers may clam up initially. Though the regulation will apply to all bloggers, as with any other federal regulation, enforcement will be isolated to highly trafficked blogs and to those instances in which a blog reader reports an infringement or sues. Like all social networks, blogging caters to niches. Few blogs are so big that they will come into the FTC's radar. I think we can expect business as usual for the majority of blogs that cater to niche readerships.
  

What this means for bloggers:

• The burden is on bloggers, not publicists, to disclose that they received a product for free. But how? Will bloggers be required to disclose on every post? Can a blog post a disclosure disclaimer on its About page and consider itself compliant?
  
• This article does not refer to a value minimum for disclosure. All free products require disclosure.
  
• What about products reviewed and then returned to the manufacturer?
• This new regulation says that bloggers must disclose to readers when they receive a free product or payment to review a product. What about when a marketer provides both free samples to a blogger and also advertises on that blog? Is it possible to separate editorial from advertising when just one person manages both efforts?
• What will happen to spamblogs, blogs which republish product descriptions in order to capture search engine results and earn money through retail affiliate programs? Spamblogs have no "person" running them, but they use the blog platform to earn a buck.

This regulation is win-neutral-lose. Consumers should benefit from full disclosure about possible conflicts of interest. Unscrupulous manufacturers, the ones paying bloggers to review their products favorably, will lose an unethical way to advertise. The majority of manufacturers should benefit in the long run from more trust with consumers.

Many bloggers will lose big, especially the ones accepting payments. This regulation will put some blogs out of business, but given the seemingly endless supply of them, this seems like a small loss to society.

For the idea of blogging, this regulation is a big win. While many bloggers will lose income, this regulation represents a return--at least idealistically--to the spiritual roots of the blog.

Update March 25, 2010: the FTC's announcement and the FTC's actual guidelines (pdf).

News for Nerds Update

Your Facebook profile photo might appear in a "Fakebook ad", luring your friends.

A reporter reviews Baltimore's new WiMax network: "WiMax delivers speeds much faster than many DSL circuits, rivaling many cable modems. I often clock downloads at 6 megabits per second (equivalent to basic cable service in many areas) and uploads at faster than 1 megabit per second."

Twitter explains itself to unhip business owners using language like "best practices" and "highly relevant" and offering "case studies".

FCC questions Apple and AT&T on removal of Google Voice apps from the iPhone app store.

Why Fight the Internet Turf War?

One of my favorite news sources, nytimes.com, just ran a story about online identity: Keeping True Identity Becomes a Battle Online.

The article suggests that both individuals and companies are struggling to defend their intellectual property and branding on fast-growing, trendy internet sites like Facebook and Twitter.

Celebrity interviewees and corporations complain that site users are registering their personal or trademarked names as usernames. It seems that we're back to the cyber-squatting of the 1990s. Cyber-squatting got media attention back then, but the battles were largely resolved in intellectual property lawsuits. Courts decided that just because you registered "McDonalds.com" first didn't mean that you were its rightful owner. It turns out that 1 billion served trumps first-served.

So what's different today? Back then, domain names were treated like a public good and became de facto regulated by courts. Today, web services like Facebook and Twitter do not regard their services as a public good. Nor should they: these are privately-owned, for-profit companies. This is why Facebook allows any individual to register their username as a URL (i.e. facebook.com/davetrendler) but requires brands to have at least 1,000 friends before allowing a custom URL (i.e. facebook.com/cocacola).

According to the Times article, "To some, the rules of this new game are frustratingly hazy. Facebook has invited trademark holders and celebrities who find their names are taken to fill out a complaint form on the site. It says it will resolve disputes on a case-by-case basis.".

Riiight. A complaint form: that sounds promising. If you're familiar with Facebook's track record, you know that the company is scarily self-centered and fanatically ambitious.

So unless you've got the resources to devote a staff member to staking your claim in every new web service (Ning.com, Tumblr.com, Friendfeed.com), what's a person, brand, or person/brand to do?

1. Be your own cyber-squatter: suck it up and register your username on all the trendy new sites. Registration for most web services these days takes about 60 seconds.
2. Hire a marketing firm to manage your online brand. If you're big enough to fear a cyber-squatter, you're big enough to hire someone to register usernames for you.
   
3. Create a good website you control. Sure, Facebook, Wordpress, and Twitter can compensate for a sucky website, but a decent website is fairly inexpensive these days. If you aren't willing to mash up enough free web services to cobble together a functional, interactive website, drop a few hours or a few grand on a website that runs itself and doesn't suck.
4. Some brands lose relevance on web services. The web is becoming increasingly personal and niche. Some consumers are happy to poke their Facebook friends with Starbucks Frappucinos, but most people sign up for web services for more personal reasons. Brands should parse content into pieces appropriate to the media. For example, instead of tweeting as "@espn", tweet as "@espnhockey". Niche-ify your brand, especially if you're a niche brand!
   
5. Usernames are disposable. So you were late to the party and didn't snag "@pepsi". Who wants to follow Pepsi on Twitter? How is "@pepsi" useful on a micro-blogging site? Use web services to meet a specific goal, like "@trypepsifree" or "@pepsiandmentos". Build a campaign around the quirks of a web service, like Burger King's Whopper Sacrifice.
   
6. Don't sweat over a flash in the pan. Web services are notoriously short-lived. Who spends time on MySpace anymore? Or Second Life? Private equity investors love to talk about "hockey stick growth", when user registrations suddenly skyrocket, but how many web services take a nosedive six months later? Brands are better served focusing on longer-term branding, like a decent website and a solid online advertising plan.

Make Facebook Worthwhile by Being a Jerk

The day my wife joined Facebook, she described the experience as a never-ending high school reunion that you don't have to actually attend. You catch a glimpse of what long-lost acquaintances have done with themselves without the risk of awkward conversation.

By design, Facebook is a many-tentacled thing. The website makes money selling ads; it's goal is to keep large numbers of people on the site for a long time. Facebook achieves this in several ways:

1. We like thinking we have lots of friends.
2. Our friends are good at keeping our attention.
3. Facebook is terribly user unfriendly.

When you first join Facebook, you search for the names of your friends. This first wave of friends is likely worthy of the meaning of the word. You send each person an invite to become one of your Facebook friends. Facebook then goes to work figuring out who your friends are. Its database takes advantage of our tendency to belong to overlapping circles of friends and begins suggesting common denominators as "people you may know". These suggestions appear every time you log in to Facebook. Every time you navigate to a new page within Facebook, the suggestions rotate to new possible friends.

There is a happy thrill to unearthing long lost friends and enemies—and of adding to your burgeoning friend count. This diabolically clever combination of technology and human nature has cultivated a Facebook etiquette that you become friends with everyone who requests your friendship. And soon the average user is up to 100 friends. In this way, there is no one you know on Facebook with whom you are not friends.

The benefit of Facebook is that it offers new ways to stay in touch with more people than ever before possible. Let's be realistic: how many of those friends are really friends?

Facebook's most prominent feature is the "news feed" which is a list of all the "status updates" of everyone in your friend network. A status update answers the question, "What are you doing right now?". Typical updates are often inane—and because the average user has 100 friends, Facebook's most prominent quality is that it is riddled with inanity.

In this way, Facebook may be redefining what it means to be "in touch". Does knowing what you had for breakfast make me a better friend? Can social networks bring people closer together? As with any other way of relating, it all depends on the quality of effort put into the relationship. "I'm eating a donut." is unlikely to strengthen the bonds of friendship stretched hundreds or thousands of miles.

Many of the self-publishing formats on the web (this blog included) are a one-way street: the publisher produces a personal message that few people care about. At least Facebook makes this self-publishing a little more relevant; your readers might actually have an interest in your message.

This leads to Facebook tenet # 1: Only "friend" people who are actually your friends. Ignore invites from everyone else.

Sure, you might bruise a few egos (this is self-publishing, after all), but clogging up your Facebook account with chaff will make the Facebook experience worse for you and for them. Look at it this way: by avoiding worthless "I'm eating a donut." updates from people you haven't talked to in a decade, you're spending more time actually staying in touch with the people you care about.

In fact, this tenet may be the most important. Facebook is rife with opportunities for distraction. Not only are friends notified within Facebook about status updates, profile updates, photo updates, etc., most users receive email notifications (though this feature can be turned off).

The site allows third-party software developers to create "applications" designed to entertain, advertise, or glean information about you. An application may be a trivia contest, a coupon, an online greeting card, etc. Relatedly, users can become "fans" of businesses that have set up commercial Facebook accounts. Every time one of your friends participates in an application or becomes a fan of a business, you will hear about it somehow, often through your "news feed" and in an email notification from Facebook. Suddenly your friends have made you a tool of the marketing gimmicks they have fallen for. Your friends force you to read ads. It's diabolical.

On Facebook, choosing your friends wisely is critical.

Why I Hate Facebook

Facebook is now rivalling Google for total time spent on the web. Users have long worried about Google and privacy. I've read Google terms of service and privacy policy, and I'm willing to sacrifice some privacy in order to take advantage of Google's cutting edge IT. It amazes me, though, that people are willing to give up both privacy and intellectual property to use Facebook. Obviously, they have no idea what they've gotten themselves into.

Most people sign up for web services without reading the Terms of Service or Privacy Policy. Facebook is the one name-brand web service for which users should definitely read both. Here they are:
http://www.facebook.com/policy.php
http://www.facebook.com/terms.php

If you're on or considering using Facebook, you should read them right now, or at least read the digest below.

1. Facebook's layout is a disaster
Creating a Facebook account is a snap. Logging onto Facebook is a piece of cake. Finding friends takes no time at all, partly because Facebook will find them for you. Intentionally finding a feature, however, is terribly difficult. Facebook is a navigational nightmare.

From a business perspective, Facebook's main goal is to keep you happily thrashing about the site so you are continually viewing its advertisements. Retail stores pioneered this strategy back in the '60s and grocery stores and casinos have got it mastered: the longer you're in the store, the more you're likely to spend. To keep you in the store longer, grocery stores try to achieve a balance of confusability and usability. Casinos have abandoned all veneer of customer friendliness—they all but lock you in.

2. Facebook owns your content
Facebook can do anything it wants with anything you have posted on the site, including your photos, music, video, messages, etc. including selling it to others.

3. Facebook Applications are allowed to have different terms of service and privacy policies from those of Facebook (and those differences are nearly invisible)
Applications you enable may have terms of use and privacy policies different from those of Facebook. Facebook does not screen application developers or check that their applications do not misuse your content or violate your privacy.

4. "Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags) in order to provide you with more useful information and a more personalized experience."

5. If you invite a friend to join Facebook, Facebook can keep your friend's information on file. This information includes, at a minimum, that friend's email or IM contact information.

6. Facebook can "supplement" your profile using other sources
"Facebook may also collect information about you from other sources, such as newspapers, blogs, instant messaging services, Facebook platform developers, and other users of the Facebook service through the operation of the service (e.g., photo tags)...to supplement your profile. Where such information is used, we generally allow you to specify in your privacy settings that you do not want this to be done or to take other actions that limit the connection of this information to your profile (e.g., removing photo tag links)."

7. Facebook may use information in your profile
"Facebook may use information in your profile without identifying you as an individual to third parties."

8. Facebook owns and can sell everything but your name.
Combining these terms, Facebook can sell everything but the name you registered in your profile. They can sell your entire profile, all the content you have on the site, and any information they've gathered about you from any source.

9. Facebook can share everything everything you post on Facebook without telling you.
"We do not provide contact information to third party marketers without your permission. We share your information with third parties only in limited circumstances where we believe such sharing is 1) reasonably necessary to offer the service, 2) legally required or, 3) permitted by you."

So Facebook does not provide contact information to third party marketers, but Facebook can make the call to share your information with third parties whenever they want. I.e. "Reasonably necessary to offer the service" in marketing-speak means "if you want to keep using Facebook, we have to stay in business by making a profit selling your info".

"...we may share account or other information when we believe it is necessary to comply with law, to protect our interests or property, to prevent fraud or other illegal activity perpetrated through the Facebook service or using the Facebook name, or to prevent imminent bodily harm. This may include sharing information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies." Facebook can share your information with other companies, lawyers, agents or government agencies to protect its interests or property. That's not a particularly assertive privacy standard.

What to do?

You can opt-out of some of these conditions at http://www.facebook.com/privacy/, though opting-out of information sharing through Applications requires removing many of applications that make Facebook functional (like causes, events, gifts, groups, mycalendar, notes, photos, posted items, video, and more).

So users should explore these 10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know.

This February, Facebook made what some are calling a "digital land grab", revising language in its terms of service that stated quite clearly that Facebook would own a user's content forever, even after they deleted their Facebook account. Here's the coverage of that controversy:

2/16/09:
New York Times: Facebook’s Users Ask Who Owns Information
Mark Zuckerberg's mea culpa, On Facebook, People Own and Control Their Information

2/17/09:
Webware: Facebook polls users on service terms update
Webware: EPIC readying federal complaint over Facebook privacy policy

2/18/09:
New York Times: Facebook Withdraws Changes in Data Use

This was not Facebook's only public revolt. Where Google's slogan is "Don't Be Evil.", this February's debacle was Facebook's third attempt to be evil. The last six paragraphs of this New York Times overview of Facebook explains.

A little bit relatedly (look out, California):
Facebook Chief Privacy Officer Chris Kelly To Run For California Attorney General

This blog post is my opinion and reflects the facts about Facebook during the time I researched them over winter 2008-2009.

A Great Excuse to Dump 10 Facebook Friends?

Burger King is giving overzealous Facebook frienders a way to dump some unnecessary online weight in exchange for a little real-life weight. If you drop 10 Facebook friends, Burger King will give you a free Whopper as part of its "Whopper Sacrifice" promotion.

Considering the average Facebook user has 100 friends, there is no doubt untapped demand for such an excuse. CNET's Webware blog has tips for when and when not to befriend. Perhaps a little hindsight is in order?

As of this posting, 101,978 friends have been thrown to the fire. That's a lot of Whoppers!

Do it for the beef!

UPDATE 1/30: The "Whopper Sacrifice" raises questions about how to unfriend people, when to do it, and how to do it quietly.

Facebook Will Soon Waste More Time Than Google

TechCrunch has unearthed some interesting statistics on Facebook usage. If you have even a little bit of professional interest in Facebook, you should check out the stats TechCrunch highlights.

After you pick your jaw off the floor and work it back into its sockets, please remember that Facebook is designed to waste time, while Google is designed to save it. I have a conspiracy theory that Facebook's user interface is intentionally confusing in an attempt to keep users thrashing about the site. But more on that later...

Facebook Attracts Narcissists

The web has a long and sordid history of enabling narcissism.

From cheesy personal pages on Angelfire to blogging to Twitter's "what are you doing right now?' and its implied "and who cares?", the web is the world's most giant repository of useless personal content that nobody cares about (this blog included).

And now there's some scientific proof of the vanity of the web: "Shocking research: Narcissists drawn to Facebook".

Facebook: To Befriend or Not To Befriend?

Webware identifies five common Facebook friend request scenarios and how to react to them in an article, "Five types of Facebook trolls and what to do with them".

One interesting call: ignore people who are hitting you up with friend requests on more than one social network.

I just lost my wife to Facebook

Surely my wife can say the same about my half dozen websites, this blog, and all the online news sources I read daily, but now it appears that turn-about is fair play: I've lost her to Facebook.

She signed up one hour ago, and has since run down the laptop battery completely. She's barely glanced up to watch the Olympics; her first break from NBC since opening ceremonies. She keeps exclaiming to long-lost classmates, "XYZ, you can be my friend!".

I'm not on Facebook, so watching her reactions has been somewhat fascinating. Obviously, "Facebook" draws its inspiration from the class yearbook and the class reunion: you get to see what your acquaintances and enemies look like now.

Slightly disturbing to me, though it doesn't bother my wife, is seeing how many of our friends are on Facebook already. It feels a little like a class reunion I wasn't invited to or a club that I'm not a part of. Are all our friends happily chatting away online while I'm busy polishing my resume on LinkedIn? I'm not sure which is more lame.

Just now, my wife: "Now I have two friends! This is just like junior high - I just want so much for everyone to be my friend!"