In a really transparent link-baiting, page-view inflating scheme, eweek.com is running a slide-show-ish “editorial” feature titled, “Should Facebook be Banned from Work?” (I hate doing it, but as a service to you, dear reader, here’s the link.)

Obviously, I think it would be ridiculous to ban Facebook from work. I prefer to ban from work employees who aren’t productive and responsible. If employees are productive, they’ll discover how to use anything productive that Facebook enables — and learn how to manage the noise.

What I’d rather see banned from work are editorial features that make the reader click through 12 pages (or more, if you count the ads popping up along the way). The “page-view” metric is the reason publishers do this, but it’s a nightmare user experience and I’m sure any analysis of site traffic would show that people rarely click through more than 2-3 pages. On this one, I didn’t get past the second frame.

Also what I’d like to see banned (and I thought it was) are the types of embedded-in-editorial link-ads that appear on the eWeek website. The type that send Paul Conley over the edge.

For anyone the least bit “web-savvy,” eWeek is a much bigger time waste than Facebook.

Hey, when you were 23 working at your first job after college, I bet you also Zuck’d up once or twice. Of course, it may have been easier for you as your first job wasn’t running a company backed by lots of well-known, high-powered investors who would like the next round of investors to all hold hands and leap up to a $15 billion valuation. So, I bet when you were 23 working at your first job, you didn’t have investors slap your wrist and make you write an apology note and tack it up on the bulletin board? See, it’s harder than you think being a 23-year-old multi-billionaire (on paper, at least).

I apologize for such a lay-up, but when I saw that Henry Blodget (the poster-weasel of Bubble 1.0) was handing out reputation-management advice to Mark Zuckerberg (who, granted, needs such advice this week), I first was struck by the irony of the post.

Quote:

“…after an over-hyped product launch, misleading claims about how the product worked, a user backlash, and a detailed magazine article raising some icky issues about his personal ethics, a consensus is emerging that Zuckerberg is, well, a weasel. (Albeit a fabulously wealthy and talented one.)

Upon reflection, however, I’m sure Henry Blodget — the human being, not the symbolic poster-weasel — was likely humbled and enlightened greatly by the de-weaseling he went through when the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission banned him from the securities industry for life. While I’ve blogged before about the irony of Henry Blodget’s current commentary, I must admit that on this topic, he’s in a unique position to hand-out advice.

He knows how far the fall can be when people stop believing your hype — and worse, when you start thinking that just because you say something, it’s the truth.

Bonus links:

The white-coat gang at Hammock Labs are playing with Facebook pages. If you’re a Facebookian (Facebooker?) and care to play along, please “fan” Hammock or SmallBusiness.com (or both). As the lab rats have already discovered there’s no button that says, “fan,” here’s their first discovered recommendation: “Tell someone to add your page to their list of product and services — don’t tell them to “fan you.”

Also: I can assure you that no animals were harmed and no lead was used in the creation of the still rather wet-paint (and sparse) pages.

From the New York Times article about Microsoft paying $240 million for a 1.6% stake in Facebook, comes this quote from “a venture capitalist who is bullish on Facebook”:

“Facebook is based on who you really are and who your friends really are. That is who marketers really want to reach, not the fantasy you that lives on MySpace and uses a photo of a model.”

Obviously, the person who said this (who I don’t know, but with whom I share six “mutual” Facebook friends) is projecting his grown-up experience using Facebook. However, I feel certain if we polled a sample of the more-typical user of Facebook with the question, “Do you think the “you” people project on Facebook is really who they are?” they’d come a little closer to having the perception of Facebook that was recently articulated by Alice Mathias in a NY Times Op-ed piece written to debunk the notion among “its rapidly assembling adult population…that (Facebook) is a forum for genuine personal and professional connections.”

Explains Mathias:

“I’ve always thought of Facebook as online community theater. In costumes we customize in a backstage makeup room — the Edit Profile page, where we can add a few Favorite Books or touch up our About Me section — we deliver our lines on the very public stage of friends’ walls or photo albums. And because every time we join a network, post a link or make another friend it’s immediately made visible to others via the News Feed, every Facebook act is a soliloquy to our anonymous audience.

In other words, the stuff marketers really want to wrap around their brands.

In a blog post promoting a new $150 O’Reilly Radar Report on the Facebook Application Market, Tim O’Reilly made the mistake of cloaking the promo in the language of “long tail” economics. Unfortunately, O’Reilly seems to have mis-applied the currently popular interpretation of the long tail of power or demand curves.

Fortunately, long tail-meister Chris Anderson is blogging this weekend and took time to explain to Tim why he should have perhaps found another way to tout the report rather than draft off the long-tail breeze. In addition to providing O’Reilly a wonderful economics lesson, Chris also provides a couple of insightful reasons why the bottom 4,916 Facebook applications seem to be doing so poorly:

“1. The social networking on Facebook is too powerful. This is the tyranny of network effects, where viral success is the only kind and popularity snowballs into an avalanche or goes nowhere at all. That sort of herd behavior is usually a sign of an immature market.

2. Most apps are total crap. That, in turn, may say something about the whole idea of Facebook as a platform. But I’ll leave that discussion for another day.”

Perhaps you can just read those two points and skip spending the $150.

Apparently, there will soon be an upgrade to Facebook that will address one of its more obvious and serious flaws — the whole “tone deafness” to any forms of social networks that seem grown-up. According to the “In the Works” section of “What’s New” on Facebook, “(FB will soon) let you organize that long list of friends into groups so you can decide more specifically who sees what.” I interpret that to mean that Facebook has finally recognized that the “friends” you went to elementary school with and the “friends” you work with may, actually, not have anything to do with one-another. (However, I’m sure they’ll be promoting this feature as one that will allow you to keep the list of girls you dated in high school from seeing the girls you date in college.)

I can think of many other grown-up fixes they need: the “how you met” options are among the most obvious. The long-term killer item, however, is the ability to export identity information and networks. When Facebook becomes an open platform on which I can manage my identity and social networks everywhere, it becomes one of the few technologies I’d consider vital — up there with e-mail, telephones and the clapper.

(via: Nick O’Neill)

Later: The “via” source I credited, Nick O’Neill, was over-the-top in calling this feature a “Linked-in” killer. Frankly, there are features Facebook already has that will kill Linked-in if that company doesn’t respond — but, no doubt, they will respond. It is my belief that Linked-in, Google, Yahoo!, Ning, People Aggregator, et al, can all kill Facebook if they agree on a set of open standards for social networking and identity management. However, it is also my belief that Facebook can choose to “lead” rather than fight, as well. I’m a fan of Facebook, as I’m a fan of, say, Apple. However, Facebook should not pursue the “closed” model of Apple or they will end up with a small market share of cultists who, in 20 years, will still proclaim their (our) superiority over the 98% of the world who hasn’t see the light.

Technorati Tags: facebook, social networking

If the news that Microsoft is investing $300-$500 million in Facebook to acquire a 5% stake in the company sounds familiar, it may be because it sounds similar to the 2005 Google investment of $1 billion for a 5% stake in AOL. The investment will secure a boat-load of advertising inventory for Microsoft (or Google, as, according to the Wall Street Journal, Google is also interested in investing in Facebook.) The Google investment in 2005 gave AOL a $20 billion valuation. At $500 million, the rumored MS investment would give Facebook a $10 billion valuation.

This morning, during a Folio: Show panel regarding magazine company developments on the web, Ted Nadeau, general manager of CondéNet, said the Conde Nast unit is stealthily testing applications on Facebook. Nadeau said, “The (Facebook platform) capabilities are impressive and with just a couple of developers, you can grow a pretty amazing application. We are experimenting — and you may not even know it is us when you use it.”

When asked for an example of such stealth Facebook application development, Nadeau told the audience the Facebook application, “What are you wearing?” is one. Sure enough, if you look at the application, there is no mention that the application has anything to do with a multi-billion dollar media giant. Rather, it’s from “WRUW” and the developer is “Paul Wells” of Oregon. Diana Erskine, a member of the Condé Nast network, answers questions on the application discussion board.

The application has 1,722 daily active users (3% of total). Is that successful?

I guess we’ll learn one day if that WRUW gets replaced with the name, “Style.com.”

Technorati Tags: condenet, condenast

If you don’t use Twitter, skip this post. It will be even more gibberish than the gibberish found in typical posts. Other reasons to skip it: If you’re tired of hearing about Facebook, or are already tired of the buzzword, “lifestream,” even if you’ve never heard it before.

Twitter suggestion: I’m not a user of Jaiku.com, because, frankly, I’m far past the burn-out point on playing social-networking gypsy. However, I notice the service has a tab called “channels.” I’m a big fan of Twitter and one thing I like about it is the simplicity and ease-of-use, so I hesitate to suggest they start chasing features. However, as I was watching a football game last night, I thought it would be nice to have a means to join a “channel” or “group” of those posting “tweets” on the same subject. I can think of a 3rd-party API hack (see “update” below) that would come close, but it would be nice if there was a feature on Twitter that would allow that. Anyway, since they seem to be on a feature-adding binge, I thought I’d throw this one in.

Lifestream/Facebook App discovery/decision: Recently, I blogged about setting up a “lifestream,” an automated-page that catches all of the RSS feeds of things I blog, bookmark, or share online in other ways. That way, the disparate streams of information I add different places meet up in, what I call, the River of Rex (just before they flow into the Gulf of Rexico). That I now have such an aggregated (ego-grated) feed, I decided to import that feed into Facebook notes and do away with all those Facebook apps that do the same: the applications that merely import del.icio.us, twitter, flickr, etc. In doing do, I decided that nearly all the Apps I’ve added to Facebook are just there, as in, there’s no there there, so I deleted almost all of them. Except Dogface. Now that’s a mission-critical app.

General observation about how some people react to Twitter: I enjoy reading the comments whenever Techcrunch posts something about Twitter, because for some reason, Twitter really riles certain individuals in the geekosphere. For example, here’s a comment from the afore-linked Techcrunch article today: “Twitter is useless and annoying regardless of all the hype around it.” I love that, because it sounds just like some print-centric editor reacting to the Internet, starting about ten years ago. That it’s coming from the type of geeky-readers who hangout at Techcrunch is delightfully ironic. I agree, if you just “observe” Twitter for a few days, you will quickly write it off as useless and annoying. However, the site’s users are, through “playing” with it, innovating some creative, meaningful uses. I’ve blogged before about Twitter’s potential in emergency situations and how, for example, the LA Fire Department uses it. I have no idea where Twitter’s users will take it, but I have no doubt that it is far from “useless.”

Come to think of it, despite the fact I find most Facebook apps useless and annoying regardless of all of the hype around them, I have no doubt that some very useful things will come from all the hype-fueled developments.

Update: Thanks to Marshall Kirkpatrick for pointing to such a third-party work-around. I look forward to trying it out.

I like those little favicons (appicons?) they’ve added to Facebook to provide a better interface for accessing features (however, on Facebook, they call features “applications” so that independent application developers will create them for free). Recently, I’ve been removing apps quicker than adding them, however.

Remember Wal-mart’s cool social networking site about this time last year, “The Hub”? Didn’t think so. You blinked, that’s why you missed it. This year, they’re not making that mistake, again. This year, they’re going Facebook by launching “The Roommate Style Match Group.” It has the memorable URL, http://www.facebook.com/group.php?gid=2784351093. According to Reuters, “users who join the Wal-Mart group (2784351093) will be able to take a quiz to determine their decorating style and get a list of ‘recommended products’ they can buy at Wal-Mart to mesh their style with their roommate’s.”

No word on how long the Roomate Style Match Group will last. “The Hub” lasted 10 weeks before they shut down the empty hall.

Speaking of empty halls, the Wal-mart Roommate Style Match Group (2784351093) currently (10 p.m., EDT, 8/9) is busting out with a whopping 114 members. Sure, that’s before it got this great publicity on the rexblog, but I’m thinking, isn’t there more than 114 employees at their ad agency who could have seeded group 2784351093 so it wouldn’t look so lonely?

Dear agency, haven’t you ever heard of interns? You know, college interns? Interns with lots of Facebook friends who could join this group so it wouldn’t look so lonely? I hear August is a good time to get college interns to work for, say, $10 an hour. As a good college intern will have something like 500+ Facebook friends, who knows? For maybe like $1,000 you could have had a few hundred members of that group before announcing it.

I know, I know. That may have been an ethically dicey idea if word of it got out. But the way I see it, this would not be like hiring a professional photographer and reporter to pretend they are tourists crossing America and visiting Wal-marts. This would be like hiring real college students to help you figure out how to get other college students to join a Facebook group. I mean, is that a summer job, or what? Getting friends to join a Facebook group. They wouldn’t have to be anonymous or even pretend not to be interns. The interns would merely send a message to all their friends saying, “I’ve got this internship and it would really, really help me out if all of you would join the Roommate Style Match Group. Please, please do it for me. I know, I know. It’s Wal-mart. But you can un-join in a week or so after real people get on it.”

Who knows? Maybe a whole industry could spring up around paying people to spam their Facebook friends.

Speaking of members of the Wal-mart Roommate Style Match Group, I can already tell they are going to be a fun group. Already on the Group’s wall is this love-note to Wal-mart:

“I love wal-mart, thank you for helping the U.S. dollar remain strong! Small business was hurting our economy for too long! I only wish I could super-size the trade deficit along with my fries! No Job? De-valued dollar can’t cover my rising interest rates? At least I saved a nickel on a picture frame!!

That’s the kind of roommate I’d want if I was heading off to college this year.

And for the record, despite my snark, I think the Roommate Style Match Group is a creative idea and I actually do look forward to seeing if it works for them. And I don’t advocate using interns to get their friends to join a Facebook group — (unless the intern is your daughter).