Facebook Status Update About Pancakes Clears Suspect
A 19-year-old New York City robbery suspect was exonerated thanks to his Facebook page. The Facebook page contained a status update that was posted 1 minute before the robbery occurred. The man asked his girlfriend about the location of his pancakes in the update. Facebook status can be updated from anywhere (and by anyone with access to the account) but police say the update was made by the suspect at a computer at his father's apartment. The AP says the case is thought to the first where defense lawyers have used Facebook to establish a person's innocence.
The Onion Covers Parents Facebook Stalking Their College-Aged Kids
The Onion has a pretty hilarious video about how parents can use Facebook and Twitter to keep tabs on their children. The helicopter parent in this video is quite obsessed with monitoring her son's Facebook and Twitter activity. Like any good Onion story there is some truth to it.
AllFacebook.com reports that Michael Jackson is now the most popular person on Facebook.
This morning the Michael Jackson fan page officially surpassed Barack Obama, to become the most popular page on Facebook. Over the past week, Michael Jackson’s page has grown from 80,000 fans to over 6.4 million, generating the largest response on a Facebook page ever. The page has continued to grow at a rate of around 20 fans per second and even quicker during peak traffic hours.
Michael Jackson's Facebook page now has over 7 million fans. It was 6.4 million yesterday but he's added many more fans today probably because of the memorial service today in Los Angeles. Twitter's most followed person is Ashton Kutcher, who has garnered over 2.6 million followers.
It will probably be the short, moving speech by Michael Jackson's daughter Paris that ends up being the most memorable part of the the memorial service. Paris made some emotional comments at the service about how much she loved her father. It may be a while before Paris gets a Facebook page or joins any social network. She's only 11.
Final Facebook Username Registration Date Approaching
The June 28th data for registering Facebook Usernames for their Facebook Pages is approaching. There was an earlier date but only pages with 1,000 fans that had been registered prior to May 31st could get one.
I tried to secure a name for my Page but Facebook said the Page was not eligible. What are the requirements?
Your Facebook Page must meet two requirements: it must have been live on Facebook prior to the May 31, 2009 cut-off date and have had a minimum 1,000 fans at that time.
This limitation is temporary. All Pages created after May 31, 2009 or that had less than 1,000 fans on that day will be eligible to claim usernames on Sunday, June 28, 2009.
PC World has more details about Facebook usernames here.
Facebook's system is not as open as Twitter's is. They have been trying to change so they are more useful for updates but it isn't as easy and fluid to use as Twitter is. Registering with Facebook also requires a great deal more information than registering with Twitter. Even so Facebook has a big enough audience that company's should make sure they register the names of their brands.
Fast Companyreports that MySpace is cutting 30% of its workforce, about 400 jobs.
The MySpace layoffs were rumored for weeks beforehand; the top management was reshuffled in April when News Corp., MySpace's parent company, replaced founder and CEO Chris DeWolfe with former Facebook exec Owen Van Natta, and the Web was rife with murmurs of an imminent retooling of the rest of the office.
Just one year ago MySpace was dominating Facebook in the U.S., pulling in 73.7 million users per month in May 2008 to Facebook's 36 million. While Facebook had surpassed MySpace in global unique visitors the previous month, MySpace's vast advantage in the U.S. still gave the site clout with advertisers.
MySpace has fallen behind Facebook in the social network race. They still have plenty of visitors to interest advertisers so it is probably the weak economy - not losing to Facebook - that has forced the company to cut jobs and reduce costs.
Burger King is helping to downsize friends on Facebook. AdWeek explains how the fast food giant is offering a coupon for people who eliminate ten of their Facebook friends. Facebook users sometimes complain that they end up with too many friends on the social network website. The Whopper Sacrifice application was the brainchild of an agency named Crispin Porter + Bogusky.
Burger King wants to help consumers do something about it.
The fast-food chain has released the Whopper Sacrifice application on Facebook. The app rewards people with a coupon for BK's signature burger when they cull 10 friends. Each time a friend is excommunicated, the application sends a notification to the banished party via Facebook's news feed explaining that the user's love for the unlucky soul is less than his or her zeal for the Whopper.
The effort crafted by Crispin Porter + Bogusky came about after agency creative staffers confronted the too-many-friends scenario themselves on Facebook.
According to Whopper Sacrifice website over 40,000 friends have been deleted so far in the quest for free fast food. Whopper Sacrifice is much better than Burger King's last viral idea - the meat scented perfume. (via Reuters)
Facebook was a traffic monster over the holidays. The BBC reports that Hitwise says Facebook accounted for one in every 22 online visits on Christmas Day. They were the second most popular website after Google on Christmas Day.
Robin Goad from Hitwise said a lot of that extra traffic was down to people using social networking sites get in touch with friends and family over the holidays instead of more traditional phone calls or cards.
He said: "Christmas is always a busy time for social networking sites, but the increase this year was higher than expected.
"After the boom of these sites in the last couple of years growth is now slowing down.
"But these figures prove they're becoming central to people for keeping in touch with loved ones."
Perhaps, Facebook is becoming somewhat of an alternative to electronic greeting cards. They probably won't be able to sustain the traffic intensity as the holidays fade away.
The tweet counter from popacular.com has passed the one billion mark. That's a lot of tweets in a relatively short amount of time.
As a comparison Mashable notes that Facebook recently said they now host over 10 billion photos which is over three times more than Flickr's recent 3 billionth photo claim. Photos are not the same as tweets but it does show that Facebook is huge. Now that Facebook has had status updates for a while it will be interesting to see which one gets bigger.
Screenwriter Aaron Sorkin has written hit tv shows and films including The West Wing and Charlie Wilson's War. Now Sorkin plans to write a movie about the founders of Facebook. The BBC reports that Sorkin had never even used Facebook so he had to join to figure it out.
"This is me," he insisted. "I don't know how I can prove that but feel free to test me."
The 47-year-old admitted he did not really understand Facebook, or "how I'm going to write the movie", so was relying on fans to help him.
"I honestly don't know how this works, which is why I'm here," Sorkin said.
"If anyone has any questions, I'd be happy to answer them as best I can. If anyone has any comments, I'm glad to listen."
Before signing off, Sorkin joked: "I feel about this introduction the way I felt about Sophie's Choice - It could have been funnier."
Since joining Facebook, the writer has been responding to questions and comments from fans, leading to some further revelations about the forthcoming film.
Sorkin also has a Facebook group here. It is hard to see how a movie about Facebook could be anywhere near as interesting as the complex and important subject matter covered in films like Charlie Wilson's War but that doesn't mean it couldn't be entertaining. However, it seems like there should really be a movie about MySpace's Tom instead - at least the CIA once raided his home. Valleywag posted a poll about who should play Facebook's Mark Zuckerberg.
Mom and Dad Still May Want to Be Your Facebook Friend
Some journalists are apparently finding it hard to interview Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg. Maybe it is because they aren't geeky enough. Or, maybe some journalists just don't get Facebook or maybe there is nothing to get. Maybe Facebook is just another social network like the thousands of others out there. It just happens to be more popular. What journalists need to do sometimes is recycle old questions and old stories like this one from the Washington Post. Just because we have heard all the questions before doesn't mean they aren't still relevant. Let us recycle all the questions from MySpace's past and apply them to Facebook. Are parents joining to follow their kids? What is Facebook doing about predators? Are young people flocking away from Facebook to join other social networks?
The Washington Post got us started by bringing back the parents following their children on the social network story.
Parents are apparently tired of the mystery and so many are trying to find out what their kids are up to on Facebook. The Washington Postreports that some teens and young adults are shocked to find their mom or dad trying to "friend" them on Facebook. Some are even finding their Mom or Dad friending their friends.
Across the country, Facebook users are contemplating similar questions when they log onto their accounts. More and more moms and dads are signing onto Facebook to keep up with their offspring. Not only are they friending (or attempting to friend) their sons and daughters, they're friending their sons' and daughters' friends.
Some, like Matt, take the requests in stride. He ultimately friended his dad. Others are less sanguine, voicing their dismay via online groups that decry parental intrusion and offer tips on how to screen out mom and dad. ("Just go onto their computers and delete their accounts." "Just don't add them as a friend or any1 that is a co-worker with ur parents duh.") Even parenting experts are getting involved, offering their own tips on proper Facebook etiquette.
"I do not know if this has happened to anybody, but this morning I log on to Facebook and I have a new friend request!" wrote 19-year-old Mike Yeamans, a sophomore at James Madison University, on one of several "No Parents on Facebook" groups that have popped up on the site. "I am excited to make a new friend so I click on the link. I could not believe what I saw. My father! This is an outrage!"
Some might argue that this means Facebook has jumped the shark. They might be right. If someday in the near future young people start complaining that their parents are following them on Twitter it could mean that many twittering teens are about to relocate. However, these same types of stories popped up a couple years ago with parents becoming the MySpace friends of their children. We've seen this all before. We've even seen this story before with Facebook and parents. Last June the New York Times ran a story called "omg my mom joined facebook!!" Today, MySpace is still going strong although one could argue that some of the younger people have gone elsewhere. Facebook seems to be holding onto its young users. Most 20-somethings can probably deal with the idea of parents on Facebook but parental intrusion might discourage some of the younger Facebook users who just aren't interested in having their parents as Facebook friends.
Facebook Anthem Viral Suggests Some Are Getting Bored of Facebook
This amusing video (hat tip allfacebook) called the Facebook Anthem suggests that at least some Facebook users are growing tired of certain aspects of Facebook. The viral video - which sounds very similar to this viral video - blames the more gimmicky side of Facebook for the boredom - the applications, pop quizzes, fortune cookies, status updates, sticky notes, virtual gifts, superpoke, iq tests, etc. In the end Facebook is primarily a communication tool and all the add-on features may be annoying to some Facebook users. Some people are probably also tired of viral videos like Facebook Anthem. Both Facebook and viral videos are likely to continue to remain popular at least for the near future - maybe even until 2013.
Will Young People Still Care About Facebook in 2013?
There are some stories here, here, here and here that the traffic to Facebook might be falling or plateauing in the U.S. and/or in the UK. Webware notes that it was never going to be possible for Facebook to sustain its explosive 200,000 new members per day growth forever.
It's inevitable that the explosive expansion that Facebook experienced in 2007 can't possibly go on forever. And since no hot new destination has popped up to potentially suck away Facebook traffic, the obvious conclusion is to blame it on social-networking fatigue. Facebook, one could say, is a trend and users have simply grown tired of it.
The argument makes sense. For many there was an initial novelty to keeping in touch with faraway friends and classmates, wasting time at the office with games and other developer-created applications, and voyeuristically sifting through online photo albums all on a single destination site. Me, I've grown tired of the Scrabulous gaming application on Facebook--it's way more fun to play word games in person.
But an apparent leveling in traffic doesn't equal mass account deletion. "Coolness factor" always fades; now it's up to Facebook to prove it can stay relevant and useful in its post-expansion era. Remember when instant-messaging client adoption was soaring and people were IMing each other just for the heck of it? We're all still IMing, but it's no longer a novelty, it's a utility. ("Utility," by the way, appears to be one of Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg's favorite words.)
Robert Scoble thinks Facebook is not doomed but it is really too early to know for sure. What we really need to know is how many active members there are at MySpace, Facebook or Bebo. Will users of these sites dump them for another service or for privacy as they get older? Facebook isn't so over dude today but what about five years from now. Five years ago who would have believed young people would stop using email? Will today's Webkinz-using grade school students really want Facebook accounts when they reach high school and college age or will they seek out new destinations of their own that people in their 30s and 40s don't get? There is no real way to answer that question until a few years have passed but there have been many warnings against building a service that primarily targets the very young. If the next generation doesn't want Facebook then as big as Facebook has become they could still end up being beaten by Classmates.com or slowly become as uninteresting as GeoCities.
Facebook first took a beating when its Beacon service was ruining Christmas by broadcasting information about gifts Facebook users had just purchased to all of their Facebook friends. But this was just scratching the surface of larger invasion of privacy issues with Beacon. We blogged earlier that Facebook's Beacon remained a problem because it was continuing to gather information about Facebook users even after they provided a way for people to keep details about their purchases from hitting Facebook's news stream. Beacon was a pretty clever name for Facebook's invasive new feature. A Beacon sounds kind, helpful and friendly. Something more sinister like the Eye of Facebook might have been a better name for Facebook's feature that gathers packets of information about you as you surf the web and sends them back to Facebook with no additional benefit to you whatsoever. Facebook is trying to use Beacon - it's all seeing eye - as a way to see much more of what you do on the Internet while still retaining its "walled garden" business model.
Here are some of the more recent stories on Facebook's Beacon.
The CA Security Advisor Research Blog provides evidence that Facebook continues tracking users who opt out as well as users that aren't even logged in to Facebook.
The New York Times Bits blog says Coca-Cola has decided not to use Beacon for now. Coca-Cola says they were told it was an opt-in service. This has many wondering whether Facebook lied to its advertisers.
Scott Karp says Facebook acted like it had a monopoly and treated its users like "'brainless meat for the grinder' - kind of like TV networks did when they force fed us 3-4 for minutes of mind-numbing commercials."
A Webomatica post contains a list of some of the companies that are possibly using Beacon. The post also lists some methods for blocking the Beacon while still keeping your Facebook account.
Even deleting your Facebook account may not help -- it may not be easy to do either.
Bubblegeneration writes that some of the pressure for Facebook to monetize is coming from investors. "There's another side to this story as well. I'm not sure how much pressure Facebook is getting from investors to "monetize". I'd wager that it's a great deal indeed."
Meanwhile, Facebook tried unsuccessfully to get some documents about Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerburg removed from the 02138mag.com website. There's some juicy irony there with Facebook trying to have information removed from the Internet while they are blocking their users from removing information.
Between the Lines: "Some people make the case that most Facebook users don't care about the privacy issues, but a company that claims to be user-centric but blatantly makes decisions that are by far in the best interest of advertisers eventually is broadly painted as a untrustworthy. A lack of character rots a company (or country) from the inside out, and there are plenty of competitors ready to ascend the mountain."
Update: Paid Content says Overstock.com and Travelocity are also not using Facebook Beacon: "Overstock.com suspended the Beacon program on Nov. 21, and as of Friday, hadn't reinstated it, according to Mediapost. Also Travelocity, although touted by Facebook as a launch advertiser, was troubled enough by the program that it had not started using it as of Thursday."
One Way to Completely Opt-out of Beacon: Delete Your Account
We blogged earlier about Facebook's annoying Beacon. Facebook's Beacon was instantly broadcasting information about Facebook users' online purchases without first getting the users' permission to do so. Facebook ruined some people's holiday gift surprises in the process. In response to numerous complaints the social network giant has now modified the way the Beacon news stream functions. Beacon "news items" will now sit waiting on Facebook users' profiles until they are approved or denied. This at least provides a way for Facebook users to stop information about online purchases and other web activities from being instantly broadcasted to all of their Facebook friends.
Unfortunately, it doesn't really solve the larger issue with Beacon which is that Beacon is aggregating its users online shopping activity. Is there any benefit to consumers in having Facebook compile all this data? The only benefit appears to be to Facebook which will be able to build a constantly improving model of each Facebook user's shopping behavior. Facebook seems to think they deserve to gather this information about their users simply because they provide them with a free online social networking profile. Facebook is going to really struggle as a company going forward if the only method they have for making money is to violate more and more of their users' privacy while providing no additional benefit to the users. Facebook is refusing to provide a way to completely opt-out of Beacon so the only way users can get away from Facebook's invasive new service is to delete their account.
Facebook's Beacon Shines Annoying Light on Consumer Purchases
Facebook's supposedly innovative new advertising feature called Beacon is quickly turning into a disaster for the popular social network. The feature annoys users and ruins the holiday experience by broadcasting Facebook users' recent product purchases such as books, movies, apparel and other gifts. The federal government might be disturbingly interested in people's book purchases but consumers don't necessarily want information about the goods and services they have just purchased broadcasted for everyone to see. Another problem with Facebook's Beacon is that they made the service opt-out instead of opt-in. Facebook users are forced to turn the Beacon off at every single online retailer that is connected to Facebook Beacon. Facebook apparently fixed a "glitch" that made the opt-out switch nearly impossible to find but the problem remains because the problem is Beacon itself.
The Beacon problem is turning into a big PR disaster for Facebook. Moveon.org is speaking out against Facebook's Beacon. New articles are being written daily about how Facebook is ruining Christmas and Hanukkah. Here's a sample of some of the recent headlines.
That's not the kind of PR any kind of company wants especially this time of year. The negative publicity is mounting so quickly that Facebook may soon be forced to admit failure and turn off the Beacon - darkening its unwanted bright spotlight on consumer purchases. This is the information age and a vast wealth of information is available but not every information source should be broadcasted. Would you want a public stream of your American Express purchases? Your tax returns? Your doctor visits? Social media does not have to be synonymous with "no privacy" - some information streams should not be turned on. Facebook should at the very least make it opt-in - check this box to annoy your Facebook friends with information about all of your online purchases.
The June 28th data for registering 
Fast Company 
Facebook was a traffic monster over the holidays. The BBC 
Screenwriter 
Facebook's supposedly innovative new advertising feature called 
