Introducing the New Profile
blog.facebook.com
blog.facebook.com
You sign up for the new profile and your friends are going to see you did. If several of your friends do it, you're going to see that a number of them did. This is bound to be at least somewhat convincing, given that you trust your friends more than the faceless evil of Facebook Corp, and therefore it might be worth doing, and your curiosity will be piqued.
Given Facebook's history with negative feedback around new features, this seems to me like the most brilliant part of the entire new profile - and it's very subtle, too.
Are you saying it's opt-in only for everyone? My friend got the new profile automatically, though I did not. I see that I can choose to get it manually, but the FAQ also says you cannot revert.
Perhaps I've misunderstood your comment. I would be really impressed if the feature had total viral deployment (i.e. opt-in only for everyone), and if it allowed you to change back to the old profile at will.
Allowing you to change back to your old profile at will wouldn't be a very feasible move, I'd imagine. You want to move your userbase over to the new code as soon as possible so you can start iterating on that for everyone, without worrying about maintaining two versions.
I agree. It would be a real headache. That's why I would have been really impressed if they did it. Or rather, I would have been really impressed if they found a way to do it that wasn't a headache. :)
"Nine women can't make a baby in one month"
The saying here is essentially akin to too many cooks spoil the broth. Put it this way: 1 brick layer can lay 9ft of brick in 9 days (no factuality here). If you're building a wall you can only go one row at a time. 2/3 brick layers will speed up the process. However 9 brick layers won't produce a 9ft tall brick wall in 9 days because 6 brick layers will be sat on their arses drinking coffee.
9 brick layers can produce 9 9ft walls in 9 days, but won't be producing a 9ft wall in a day 9 days continuously working as a team.
The statement doesn't preclude that work can be produced efficiently, for example you could easily have 4 brick layers build 4 9ft walls - AKA a house - in 9 days.
The aim is to find your fundamental limit and work with it. If you need a baby every month, sure plan ahead and you could have a baby monthly starting in 9 months, if you can account for that 9 month waiting period. You will never get a baby in 1 month with a team of 9 women and only 1 of them being pregnant.
One of my biggest takeaways from doing that for a couple years is how dramatically productivity can swing based on factors like the texture of the project, the clarity of the goal, the freedom of the TL to make judgment calls without needing to get approval from a BA, morale, the quality of the spec (note that quality != length), etc.
No reason a small dedicated team cannot build large products with reasonable deadlines and a balanced lifestyle. Though, in the interest of full disclosure, in my opinion 50 hours a week is fully balanced and a team can run at 50 hours pretty consistently without ill effects if they WANT to and are HAPPY with their mission and job.
"Mary is an abused spouse, beaten inches from death once upon a time by her abusive husband. She has since left him and moved to another city entirely, in hiding."
Nothing in the system should allow any information about Mary to leak out. Not pictures of her, not her updates, not her level of participation in the site even. Your tagging is broken if you allow her to be tagged or captions to point her out.
Keeping things locked-down goes against both precedent that Facebook itself has set and the easy way to get more pageviews. There is probably a market for such a locked-down social network for people in witness protection or secret agents, but I don't think Facebook is very interested in the space.
Facebook wants to be around for a long time. Facebook wants people to get value out of their site. This isn't a get-rich-quick scheme where the objective is to strip-mine their users. A necessary condition for Facebook making any money is that people enjoy their service. If they don't implement it, it's because they don't think it'd be valuable to enough people to be worth the opportunity cost of having people implement it, not because they think it would hurt ad revenue.
It seems to be a popular sentiment that any ad-supported company hates their users, and I don't get it. It's true for spam but it isn't true for companies that want to be around for more than a year.
Look at Angry Birds, why would they even want to sell paid apps anymore with the amount of revenue they can earn from advertising within the game?
Giving people control over when they are tagged is really the issue here (and is why my comment was posted in response to that).
I think the guiding principle for Mary, or any user, should be that she doesn't type anything into a web browser that she doesn't want publically known and tied to her real-life identity.
When a change to a system adds a frill for a large group at the cost of making it more dangerous for a small group, glibly responding that the small group should just not use the system is inadequate.
[0] The force was calibrated to protect a typical adult male who was not seatbelted. Which would be fine if not for the HUGE negative side effect.
That was Eric Schmidt's answer a while back too, but I'm not sure it's adequate anymore.
As PG has remarked, more and more of the tools we use to interact with the world are becoming software (and as all software is increasingly web-enabled & socialized, that's often indistinguishable from "typing it into a browser" for purposes of this discussion.)
We're essentially telling people who have very legitimate reasons for wanting to protect their privacy that their other option is to become a Luddite hermit. Is that really the best we can do?
It's a tough question to answer as an entrepreneur, because it probably is a much smaller opportunity, and by definition doesn't enjoy the same viral loops - - but I wish it's one that we as an industry would spend more time on.
Not exactly. We're telling people that they're not going to have privacy, period. We're assuming that privacy is dead. You might think it's still something that can be salvaged, but lots of people assume that the world is moving to less privacy whatever we do. Which is why we should be education people from the start that, whether we like it or not, anything they type into a computer is basically public.
I especially like Scoble's thoughts on this. He says, rightly I believe, that anything that is a copy-paste away from becoming public, isn't really private at all. He also had the fun adventure of having many private emails being made public as part of lawsuits against Microsoft.
Also, you might want to read about The Transparent Society: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Transparent_Society.
The only way to stop this now is if they allow you to block all pictures you're tagged in from the public (they pretty much do allow that now, except it just takes the tag off, not the actual picture).
Facebook really shouldn't be waiting until they're brought up as defendants in a wrongful death/battery suit before ferreting out these last bits of stupid over sharing.
If you think about your request a little more, you'll see that it's not plausible. There's a reason why people who really need to hide (e.g. witness protection) may have to change their names, cut off old connections, etc.
This is not the case with twitter, as you pointed out, but for facebook, it is.
Account->Privacy Settings->Customize->Pick whatever you want to customize and you can choose who to share it with.
Not to mention without going into customizations, you can just choose a "blanket" level which can be that only friends can ever see anything about you.
I understand what you're saying, but I really can't imagine this makes any kind of sense to implement. They aren't your pictures, after all, and other people have a right (probably even a legal right) to those pictures.
Facebook seems to partially agree with me on this, as it allows you to not show the tagged pics on your profile page currently with a setting. I mean, "Those arent' your tags, after all, and other people have a right to those tags".
User x has opted out of being tagged in photos. You will not be able to tag them.
And/or:
User x has requested that people don't post photos of them on Facebook. Please take this under advisement before posting such photos. You might want to ask their permission first.
I can see a situation where eventually the idea of not having a Facebook account is in itself something unusual, in which case they might need to refine the policy, but I suspect that currently, it boils down to "don't use Facebook, don't use Twitter".
The control are there and they're not that hard to find (IMO of course). Is your problem that they're not there, or that they're not easy to use?
If so, where?
I love how that looks. They put all the useful information into a nice bit-sized block, yum... all that's missing now is the guy's SSN.
They are not joking around when they meant that they wanted to make the world more social. Because of this change my dad realized where the Poke Button was located. Go dad.... If you remembered the boxes' (Top Friends ,Gift Boxes etc) removal a while back you would see that (at least to me) the current change made sense. Now the focus really is in the interaction with the user (info,photos and wall are packed in the top middle) and their interests not the "glitz and glamour"
Now the real item that needs /that I hope it is not really a need.. I cannot tell Facebook what they can and cannot do/ to be addressed is the 10% of friends option ( this has been discussed in other formats 10 friends,8 friends ..etc). The everyday user does not interact with all of their "Friends". If you can force me to choose only 10 or so of my real friends to interact with ..those that I mail,sms,send messages, actually see outside ... that would be great.
If you could even couple notifications with Facebook Chat on your phone ... FBM (FaceBook Messenger) /BBM/ . Just an alternate reality thought.
There's gotta be at least one Facebook engineer lurking on this post. If so, how about a fix? :)
This is brilliant. It's good ole Facebook with Twitter + LinkedIn + MySpace. Executed brilliantly!
Overall, I think the Twitter-like feature updates have been numerous and obvious.
If you admin a fan page, you can now see instant info on each post, including number of impressions and percent of feedback..
"174 Impressions Raw number of times this story has been seen on your Wall and in the News Feed of your Fans · 0.57% Feedback"
Facebook is now going to be able to sell super targeting techniques to marketers. Google relied on machines to do this, Facebook just asked its users to do the same;needless to say its a master stroke :).
It also seems like the order of the photos is somewhat randomized when I go to view all of my photos (as opposed to being reverse chronological order). Weird.
Give it 3 months before LinkedIn follow suit. fb Keeps morphing ideas into new realities. I have never seen short cycle iterations at this level ever before. They make it extremely difficult for a new player in this space to ever keep up with the level of innovation and change facebook has baked into their culture.
The facebook of last month is too dull and less-relevant than the facebook of next month. Well done, and I salute Zuck for not selling out in the tech world as so many others have.
> I like the additional structured data. Even if I had time to figure out how to structure my Facebook data the way you've done it with this release, it doesn't help much because my friends would have to pick apart the structure. It's a framework where you can expect certain things to be in certain places, like Ruby on Rails.
I was annoyed when they made everyone convert interests to links to pages, but it adds more edges to the graph, and graphs between entities (starting with people) has always been a big part of Facebook.
>You can now highlight the friends who are important to you, such as your family, best friends or teammates.
Cue increased drama in 3...2...1...