Itai Boublil

Changes

You are probably tired of me ranting about Facebook by now, but this topic is so dear to me (I don’t like it when a corporation acts as if it owns its clients) that I had to share with you one more “episode” from the Facebook vs The Users saga (I promise to “slow down” with the Facebook posts :)

I mentioned a new competitor to Facebook in my previous articles, one that will force Facebook to change its policy (it’s already happening), so I decided to share with you a video that introduces this young group of entrepreneurs and their ambitious goal to present an alternative to Facebook.  The name of the project is Project Diaspora.

Click the picture below to watch the video:.

Facebook

Earlier today I posted an article about Facebook, criticizing the new Privacy Settings (or lack of Privacy I should write) they recently forced on their users. You can read the article here, but briefly I suggested that Facebook might get into what I called a “Social Media Black Hole”.

In addition, I suggested that the timing is right for a new competitor to enter the social media arena, and challenge Facebook with a service that offers better privacy settings.

A few hours after I posted the article, three things happened that might actually helped vindicate my argument:

1. There was an article published in the NY-Times about a new group of “nerds” that are working on the same “new company” I suggested in my article.
2. Facebook called for an All Hands Down Meeting On Privacy” today at 4PM Pacific time.
3. When I opened my privacy settings page on Facebook today I saw this (Click image to view):

Facebook Privacy

I just thought that all these events were just one big coincidence, maybe, but more importantly it shows that Facebook might have realized its mistakes, and is planning to change them before it is too late.

Any thoughts?

Facebook, An Empire Destined To Fall

I never hid the fact that I enjoy using Facebook. In fact, I am active on Facebook more than I am active on any other social media service, including Twitter.

However, despite my likeness to using Facebook I am very disturbed and disappointed by Facebook’s latest privacy changes. They practically do not exist, and it takes a facebook guru to keep track with all the changes, and make sure my account is (somewhat) private.

I know at least one person who decided to abandon Facebook in order to “save” his privacy. It sounds funny, “saving your privacy”, but it is exactly what is happening with Facebook in case you did not notice.

This is how I see it: if I need to check the security/privacy settings every time I log on to Facebook just to make sure my personal data is not being used by a third party website, or worst, marketing companies, there is obviously something wrong with Facebook’s approach to my privacy.

Unfortunately, I do not see it changing anytime soon, or, and I dare to say, ever! Facebook is after our information, and there is no sign of it slowing down.

The way to look at it, there are a two factors that might force Facebook to change its new “Go Social, Open Graph” approach:

1. They start losing lots of users (just like my friend) who have had it with the new policy.
2. A competitor will rise and offer a facebook like service + guaranteed privacy policy.

The latter scenario is very much depended on the former scenario and vice versa, i.e., Facebook will start losing users when a new competitor will enter the social media arena, and a new competitor that offers new improved privacy settings can rise only if Facebook loses users because of its new social privacy.

I will leave you with this message: The Social Media world is very unforgiving. This means that Facebook might enter a ” Social Media Black Hole”, which is exactly what happened to services such as My Space. True, Facebook is “strong” enough to pull itself out of the “Black Hole”, but at what cost? It will be at the cost of losing many of its users during the process, and more importantly  losing their trust!

History taught us that all Empires are destined to fall at some point, is this the beginning of Facebook’s fall?

UPDATE: Shortly after posting this post, I read an interesting article that vindicated what I just wrote. You can find it here.

Facebook Is Acting A Bit Evil

Facebook announced this week about a few major changes to their social media service.  I am still a novice to most of these changes (too many of them), but one change in particular grabbed my attention and that is the “What your friends can share about you through applications and website” privacy feature.

According to the description, your friends on Facebook, who visit a Facebook-enhanced application or website, will be able to share “certain” (read: ALL information, unless you change it) information about you to make the experience more social (this is, btw, Facebook’s new approach to their service. They want to be more “social”).
In other words, your personal information can be shared by your friends without you knowing about it, and without your permission. These are the guide steps to reverse this on your Facebook profile page:

Step 1
Go to Privacy Setting and click Application and Websites.

Privacy Settings (Click Image)

Step 2
Click the “What your friends can share about you” Edit Setting widget. .

Applications and Websites (Click Image)

Step 3:
Uncheck what ever information you are not willing to change. I unchecked almost all of them, with the exception of work, education, website, and notes.

What your friends can share (Click Image)

Facebook played an unfair move with their decision to become “more social”. There is a fine line between going more Social, and exposing your information to other corporations, like Microsoft, Yelps, Docs.com, and of course thousands of applications.

What are  your thoughts about this move? Do you think Facebook’s move is ethical?

Google Chrome is my favorite browser for many reasons. One of the main reason, though, is the ability to install Chrome Extensions that can make the experience of using the internet to a fun (and addicting) experience.

There are thousands of extensions available on the Chrome Extensions website, and many of them are worth mentioning. Today, however, I am only going to cover one extension that really turned my Gmail into a Social Media central command. The extension is named “Gmail Facebook Integration”, and can be found by clicking here.

This extension will allow you to see friends notifications and newsfeed updates by simply staying in your Gmail Inbox (see photo below, or click here to see full photo). Furthermore, it will allow you to update your Facebook statues and share links on your wall without, again, leaving your Inbox. With Google Buzz, Facebook and Twitter already in my Inbox, I now have total control over my Social Media channels (well, some of them). The extension is fairly easy to install. Once you download it, all you have to do is allow it to connect to your Facebook, and viola! You have Facebook in your Gmail (Note: it will only work if you are using Google Chrome as your browser).

I want to mention that the Extension is not perfect, and there are many Facebook features it does not support yet. But, for the purpose of checking newsfeed updates, commenting on friends status updates, and updating your status it actually does very well.

Click the image blow to see the full description:

Gmail Facebook Integration

Social Media Hub

Facebook has completed a series of changes to its service in the past several months. The last of these changes was completed a few days ago and calls for a special attention simply because Facebook had just redefined its role in the Social Media sphere.

People I spoke to in the past 3 three days did not like (an understatement) the new design. The opinions vary from person to person, but mainly they tend to focus on the design, or the look if you will.

To be perfectly fair, design is something that is very subjective. One person’s favorite design is another person least favorite design. With this in mind, trying to analyze a business that is a content/search/social media based business by sheerly focusing on design is like trying to rank a Blog by its sheer look and not its content. It is simply the wrong way.

I tried, therefore, to put things in order and share with you my view on Facebook’s new design. Also in this post, where I think Facebook is heading in 2010, and how Facebook is turning into the biggest Social Media Hub.

This is how it translates from a Social Media perspective:

• We now have the ability to Bookmark applications. You can bookmark your favorite applications using the “Add Bookmark” button in an application, this will allow a one-click access to your bookmarked applications from the left-hand menu. This to me sounds as if Facebook is trying to create a Delicious Bookmark service.

• The left column gives a very RSS feed like feeling. Notifications, news, and updates  seem to appear live. The dashboard is surfacing the most recent application activity and your friends’ activity, which to me resembles a RSS feed feature.

• The new Email approach is very welcomed in my opinion. I really found the process of opening private messages on Facebook tedious. I do have to admit that the new email system reminds me very much a Gmail mobile experience. I want to dare and say that Facebook is heading toward taking a slice of the Email market, and to be honest I think they have a great advantage if they decide to do so. In the future, I will not be surprised if your new Facebook email address would look like this: Username@facebook.com. Hmm, did anyone say Email Marketing? This will open a great debate in the Inbound Marketing community.

• Another proof that Facebook is turning into a Social Media Hub is their plan to upgrade its photo service. Upload photos, and creating new albums on Facebook is also a tedious process. This process is coming to an end, and soon we will all experience a new way to share and upload photos to our Facebook account (installing a plug-in is required). I am not going to go into details, but it is very much similar to the Flickr service

• The Chat application had also received an upgrade, and a big one too. By shifting it to the left side column, Facebook is saying that they want us to pay attention to it. What you see is a list of some of your online friends in the left-hand menu. This list is not comprehensive, but includes people who you communicate with frequently. I think Facebook has bigger plans than we actually think. I will not be surprised to see in the near future some sort of a Mobile interaction, the same one we saw in Google Voice, and  Skype.

The list goes on and on, but suffice it to say that Facebook is slowly shifting itself to become the biggest Social Media Hub in the Online sphere, or at least is trying to, and it will be interesting to see how things will develop in the year 2010.

What do you think? Do you think Facebook can become to Social Media what Google is to Search?

Facebook Friend Lists

You finally managed to reach your goal of more than a 300 friends on Facebook, but now you are facing a dilemma: How do you manage to track all these friends?

Fortunately there is a solution. Facebook lets you divide all of your friends into small segments, or ‘lists’ (e.g. Family, Best friends, College friends, childhood friends, etc), which you can use to track specific news feed of your friends. For example, I created  lists for my Family, Best Friends, childhood friends, work friends, marketing groups,  Military Friends, and others. This way I can click on each list and get specific information about different people. From a marketing point of view this can help  businesses gather specific information about different segments of their market, but this post is not about marketing, thus I will not cover it today.

These are the steps to go about it:

1. Log on to your profile
2. Click on Friends on the top menu
3. Click ‘All Connections’ on the top left menu
4. Click ‘Create New List’
5. Type name of your desired list (e.g. family, work friends)
6. Select the friends to include in that list
7. Repeat for other lists.

This is a great way to keep track on all of your friends. If you have too many friends, more than 1000 let’s say, then you can create sub lists as well. For example: Best friends; super best friends; Best friends I can trust; etc

Go ahead and create your lists, and then make it a habit to follow it so next time you will not forget your friends birthday.

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