The results they are gathering will give them new insights into game theory, that little corner of mathematics where games and economics collide, and which can be found behind everything from corporate bargaining to the 1950s arms race.
11 images Gallery: Fan Favorite Dungeons & Dragons Adventures
Game theory essentially tells scientists what kind of biases people have and what they might do when their fate is determined by the choices of others. It can be useful in business, eg. when plotting a take-over, or politics, eg. figuring out which party wields the most power.
Microsoft’s Facebook game, called Project Waterloo, was designed by researchers at the company’s research lab in Cambridge, U.K., famed for its specialty in artificial intelligence and developing the initial technology behind the Xbox Kinect.
It’s a strategic battle game, similar to Risk, for two players who each start off with 100 troops. They must then allocate their soldiers among five battlefields and fight each other. The player who has won the most battles, and sussed out the other player the best, wins.
The free game was designed by programmer Mike Armstrong, and its creators, who include researchers Yoham Bachrach, 32, and Pushmeet Kohli, 29, hope they can eventually establish a Facebook Game Theory Lab. With more games they’ll carry out more experiments watching how thousands of people interact with their friends and strangers.
It’s a breakthrough process for the researchers, who in previous game theory experiments could only study about 35 people — the maximum number that could fit in their lab. Now they can reach many more. About a week ago, Project Waterloo already had 1,500 users, having been online for roughly a week.
“Imagine a lab experiment with 1,000 of people,” says Bachrach. “We can’t even fit 100 people in a single room in the lab. Here we’ve reached out to thousands of people. It’s a much bigger data set.”
“The studies in the past have been done on human subjects in a very restricted setting, mostly students from Harvard and MIT,” says Kohli, who did a PhD at Oxford and was introduced to game theory research by Bachrach, a specialist in artificial intelligence. “Because Facebook is so ubiquitous, we can really see the behavior across the world.”
The data they are collecting is “completely anonymous,” and doesn’t include age or gender, with the focus being more on the moves users make.
“Our hope is we are able to show a proof of concept,” says Kohli. “To see how people at large can play these games, that would entice other researchers to adopt this platform.”
martedì 25 ottobre 2011
What Would Make Facebook Games Great?
Whenever someone I know mentions Facebook games in front of someone else, a few lines of conversation transpire, during which they agree to agree to that Facebook games are not cool.
Maybe this means I hang out with a lot of people who love going to the theater, or else would rather play Left 4 Dead 2. In short, it might mean that Facebook games are neither high art nor high games. Re: the latter distinction, I'm sure if you mention Facebook games in a Gamestop, the manager pulls a shotgun out from under the register and racks it. (I am too scared to test this theory (absolutely no journalistic integrity).)
What's wrong with Facebook games? I Googled "I hate Facebook games", and I ended up here.
What Would Make Facebook Games Great?"I Hate Facebook Games." is the title of a Facebook community. A discussion thread on the wall begins with the post "They are boring games", a sentiment which is not punctuated.
"I Hate Facebook Games Likes This", it says beneath the post. "Farmville is not a game," says the chap who purports Facebook games "are boring games". "It is a big series of events."
"Even Harvest Moon on SNES was 1000x better than this..." says the next poster.
Outside of this page, I simply cannot find a more concise, potent summary of the public's general dislike of Facebook games.
Part of the art of criticism is trying to be positive, so I did a Google search for "Top Facebook Games", just to get a good idea of what the public likes. I stumbled onto a list. Of the games on that list I am familiar with, I can say I hate the majority of them.
For the record, none of my real-life in-person friends will admit to enjoying Facebook games. Some of my on-Facebook friends play the games. Still, it stands that I have never knowingly spoken to a person who is stone-cold financially addicted to Farmville or Cityville.
Facebook games are invariably free to play. "Free to play" is a clever little phrase which masks the idea that they are possibly not free to enjoy. Facebook games are "monetized". "Monetize" is a word that didn't exist so prominently in business until recently, until businessmen got the idea to offer people a free experience and then connive a way to get the users to pay anyway. They do this by constructing brain-labyrinths ("engagement wheels") through scary dark tricks of math and psychology. The games aren't about being fun—they're about keeping the player there.
What Would Make Facebook Games Great?When you look into the numbers, you find that somewhere around five percent of Facebook game players ever spend any money at all on the games. Some of the users spend $10,000 on a single game. The average amount of money a user spends is $1.70, though most users spend nothing. I am one of those "most users".
I have analyzed social games and concluded that the "best" thing about Facebook games is that they are making serious money for some people.
So, the "monetization" system that has emerged is a "good" one because it "works", though it only works on "less than five percent" of users. So, even the psychomathematiconomists employed in making social games could agree with me when I say it is a scientific fact that social games could be better.
In the interest of my chosen science— lolology—I will henceforth tackle, in the tried format of a "top ten" list, the following elephant-sized question: What would make Facebook games great?
1. Drive re-engagement and improve discovery!
I've always thought that Facebook games would be better if they drove re-engagement and improved discovery. Duh. That's what we all think, right?
"Drive re-engagement" means that a lot of people dip their toes into the game and then stop almost immediately. To drive re-engagement, you'd have to make a game people want to play a little bit longer before giving up—and then devise viral wall-posts persuasive enough to get those players to actually play the game again.
"Improve discovery" means that they should devise viral wall-posts persuasive enough to get people who have never played the game to dip their toes into the game.
You know what—we might not even need the rest of the items on the list. If you were going to make Facebook games "better", those are really only the two things you need to do!
Wow—and look at this! I just Googled "how to make Facebook games better", and it turns up an Official Facebook Blog post in which the only two suggestions for making Facebook games "better" are "drive re-engagement" and "improve discovery". I guess "better" isn't as subjective a word as we thought.
Looks like the mathematicians win again!
2. Right mouse click
Right now, every Facebook game uses just the left mouse button. As they all use Java, or Flash, or whatever the brainiacs are calling the latest computer-thing, the right click is hard-wired to open up some kind of voodoo window to change some kind of web-browser settings.
Well, these Facebook-game-makers are smart people. They're so smart, they managed to get tens of millions of people to pay literally billions of dollars for stuff that isn't even real. If they were able to do that, they can probably figure out how to make a game where you can right-click on some stuff.
Imagine if, in addition to left click, you had a right click. That would literally be twice the options. Remember the Nintendo Entertainment System? The controller had two buttons—A and B. The Super Nintendo added X and Y. Now try telling me that Metroid is better than Super Metroid. Super Farmville would be so much better than Farmville.
3. Make a better art style than Zynga
I'm not going to talk smack about Zynga, I swear. For today, let's not talk about how their games are the electronic equivalent of an unraveled coat-hanger, their collective customers the consumer equivalent of an old Buick in a supermarket parking lot. Let's not even throw around phrases like "computer-engineered pharmaceuticals" or "the ghostification of modern society". Let's be nice. Let's admit that maybe we only think we dislike them, because at the end of the day, they're just a group of people who found something that worked and then made enough money to give Uncle Scrooge's Money Bin penis-envy.
What Would Make Facebook Games Great?Today, let's stick to the facts.
The fact is the characters in Zynga games look like something you'd see in a coloring book used for the part of the therapy where the child is encouraged to show the therapist which things in this barnyard scene he wishes were purple. I feel a little bit older than I probably really am whenever I look at Zynga game characters. When I see them, I am filled with a semi-intense desire to see them suffer. I am a perfectly normal person, so I imagine this is a perfectly normal reaction (also, that no one else reading this has ever worn a pair of new socks more than twice).
The worst part about the Zynga art style is that we live in a world of copycats, copytigers, and copypanthers. Also, the predominant method of thinking among marketers is that if something is popular, every single tiny element of it is greatly responsible for its popularity. So we see similar munchkin bobbleheads popping up in every other Facebook game.
I know we're not going to get triple-A graphics in these things anytime soon, because they need to run in a browser and they need to perform well on everyone's computer for maximum accessibility, et cetera, et cetera. I'm just saying to at least try to make your darn 2D look good. They say "it takes money to make money", and you want to make money, right? I mean, that's why you're making these games. Hire someone famous. Make the characters look like the Powerpuff Girls, or like the Scott Pilgrim comics. Or, make a post-apocalyptic farming simulator with characters who are a precise cross between Scott Pilgrim and Marcus Fenix. Just get those cold, weird ventriloquist-dummy grins off my e-lawn.
4. Be politer about the virality!
Every! God! Darn! Time! Someone auto-posts a social game update on my Facebook wall, it's just full! Of! Exclamation points!
"Hey! I'm having fun in Some Facebook Game!"
"If you joined me we could have more fun! Click here!"
"If you click here you'll get a reward!"
For god's sake! Video games! Stop yelling at me!
Take a lesson from The Nigerian Spanish-Prisoner Spam-Robot, people: set all your soulless ItGetsTheMoney.virus programs to "Dear Friend,".
5. Make some action games!
Of course, the idea of Facebook games is that literally 97% of the world's population has a Facebook account, and that if you get one dollar from each of those people you can literally buy an entire planet and a rocketship to take you there. In order to get that one dollar from every pocket in the world, your game, of course, needs to be this hyper-simplistic thing where everything is beautiful, nothing hurts, no one ever wins, and no one ever loses.
Well, you know what people like? They like Fruit Ninja. What kind of psychopath doesn't like Fruit Ninja? I'll tell you who: I had an uncle once who probably wouldn't have liked Fruit Ninja, if he'd lived long enough to see it.
Full size
Fruit Ninja makes money—a modest amount of money (maybe only enough to choke a horse (as opposed to a rhino))—because sometimes Genuinely Cool People get Facebook Credits in their Christmas stockings, and what else are they going to use them on? You play Fruit Ninja because you love cutting fruit, and the fruit loves being cut. You want to get better at it. Numbers go up—you love them going up, and they love going up.
Fruit Ninja and Bejeweled are games that fit on Facebook. They are The Modern Tetris, in that they're as they're simpler and faster-paced—and I'm not being snippy.
When we say "social games", we are usually talking about games that will, following an accidental click on the wrong button, impersonate you, threatening suicide if your friends don't visit your farm Right The Fuck Now.
However, Fruit Ninja is just as much of a social game—and not because it's on Facebook. It's "social" because you're compelled to share your score with your friends. Any game you play with people is "social", I say—though the scientists behind these things would pressure me to point out that "social games" usually require the act of socializing to directly enhance the game experience.
How about this: in Farmville, it costs more money to plant strawberries than it does to plant peanuts (I think), though the act of planting them is committed with the same action: point, and click. In The Sims Social, there's a quest where you have to "Send Libelous Emails", and that's done the exact same way as cooking nachos in a microwave or watching television or having sex in the shower: you point, and you click. Why can't it be, like, you point at something, you click, and then there's a tiny little skill-game?
The web is crawling with little one-click games.
Here, I just opened the first game I saw on Flixel.org, and though it's not very good, it's at least more fun than Farmville, and its controls don't even require a single click. Why can't we have a little something like that every time we go to pick our strawberries, where your minimum score is always guaranteed, even if you fail, and optimal performance gives you a bonus?
6. Let people actually play with their friends.
Every Facebook game developer I've talked to this year has promised me, in a low voice, swallowing that last bite of hors d'oeuvre and wiping his hands on his thighs, that "Our game will actually feature synchronous play." The game never comes out. The next time I hear from the guy, it's via a Facebook message his mom is sending through his account: they have finally found the car.
Facebook games aren't about actually hanging out with your friends—they're about your friends being your neighbors. You can go over to your friends' houses and . . . look at all the stuff they have. That's about it. It's all just a kind of flimsy ghost story: in The Sims Social, you might be in your friend's house playing guitar in his bedroom while he is taking a shower, and at the exact same time, he might be in your house making waffles in the kitchen while you sit on a Dunkin' Donuts lawn chair outside. Games are, in general, liars. Social games are pathological liars.
How about a game where players can actually play together? Or how about this? A Facebook game where players have their own home, and they also have a town. They share this town with all of their Facebook friends who are playing the game. In that town, they form circles with their friends, and they build something together—a pyramid or a giant robot or something. I mean, Minecraft is something people like, right? I'm going to stop before I basically hand someone else a billion dollars. If you don't hear from me in a month, it's because I got a job at Zynga.
7. Add real conflict between users
For a while, I was working with a medium-sized company that had developed one of those (now-many) tools for aggregating statistical data based on your Facebook friends—telling you who likes more of the same things you do than your other friends do, et cetera. They wanted me to "gamify" that data. I devised a thing that would spit out phrases like "Stephen Totilo is The Best Facebooker Among All His Friends! Challenge him!"
It was cute and weird, though it probably wouldn't have worked, firstly because it was insincere (behind its design specifications was a Cow-Clicker-ish smirk, a betting dare that "jerks will love this"). Secondly, it wouldn't have worked because—and this is the fascinating part: people in general just don't want to "win" when it means beating their friends. Backing up that statement would require me to blow your minds, and that wouldn't be nice (you might not all be wearing Protective Hats), so let's move along.
What Would Make Facebook Games Great?One key to Facebook's success is that it never explicitly tells its users they're better or worse than any other users. Rather, they leave it up to individual users to judge: "Leigh Alexander sure gets a lot more comments and likes on her posts than I do," one might muse. This translates smoothly into Farmville or Cityville or Whathaveyouville: The Sims Social doesn't post on your wall saying, "Fuck you—Amanda Glasser's house sure is cooler than yours." (Mostly it wouldn't do this because my house is objectively cooler than hers.)
Instead, games let the player decide for him or herself when they're not doing as well as their friends: the player visits his friend's constructed environment and thinks, "Wow—he's put a lot of work into this." This leads to a Manufactured Inferiority Complex. That's been the driving force of marketing ("You need this stupid thing now!") since the day the first caveman invented the wheel, the club, the hammer, and marketing (it was a productive day).
The psychologists and mathematicians and police have all sat down in a brain-tank and had a deep think about it, and the conclusion is that it's A Huge Financial Gamble to make a Facebook game that players can win (because: then they'll stop playing), and an Astronomical Financial Gamble to make a Facebook game that a player can beat his friends at.
Still: we need more competitive multiplayer Facebook games. How about you make it possible to lose marginal amounts of in-game assets to other players as a result of consensual multiplayer duels?
Let's make a Facebook game as tightly designed as Magic: The Gathering.
Seriously: Magic: The Gathering is a brilliant thing, and it's basically already a Facebook game. It's a card game that encourages collection via small payments (booster packs). It's designed from the ground up so that its math and rules are infinitely expandable.
Let's make it so that players can lose "cards" or "units" to friends who beat them in duels. Make it so that you get a free "card" (or two, or three) every day, and that you can pay a tiny fee- $0.10?—for an additional card. Maybe each "card" would only be usable a certain number of times: the "monster" the card spawns can be spawned and killed a set number of times before the card is destroyed.
There you go. Let's see something like that. (Not that I would want to play something that resembled Magic: The Gathering, because I'm so cool. (Ladies, call me; I swear my only obsessive hobbies involve writing 16,000-word reviews of video games in the first person.))
8. Just put Diablo on there already.
Full size
Somebody could just rip off Diablo—very tenaciously, with fair math—and there you have it. Players are allowed five lives a day. They can pay $0.25 for each additional life. Corpses stay where they fell for six hours. There you go: Zynga: The Arcade Game. Item drops include seeds or whatever—you can plant a little farm in your hub town.
$0.25 a life wouldn't be as lucrative as Zynga's ingenious "energy" mechanic, though hey—it would probably allow for a better game.
9. Let's think about board games!
Zynga's Words With Friends does drag in a heck-ton of money. It's a "Scrabble" clone. You may know this game as "the only game your hip big sister has on her iPhone". It's incredibly addictive and fascinating thanks to its chess-in-a-bottle-style asynchronous play. Hey, guys, let's think of more board-game-y games. Let's get Rampart on Facebook, at least. Or Risk! Scrabble is cool. Now rip off some more cool stuff and Facebook it.
10. At least make The Sims Social as fun as Animal Crossing
What Would Make Facebook Games Great?The Sims Social is creepy. It's a love letter from a computer virus. I don't want to play a game about sitting around at home and buying IKEA furniture. That's fucked up. You might as well make a game about washing dishes or brushing your teeth. If you're going to make a game about the yayness of having your own place, give it some personality. Animal Crossing did that. Someone should try that on Facebook. It's not rocket science (just computer programming).
Maybe this means I hang out with a lot of people who love going to the theater, or else would rather play Left 4 Dead 2. In short, it might mean that Facebook games are neither high art nor high games. Re: the latter distinction, I'm sure if you mention Facebook games in a Gamestop, the manager pulls a shotgun out from under the register and racks it. (I am too scared to test this theory (absolutely no journalistic integrity).)
What's wrong with Facebook games? I Googled "I hate Facebook games", and I ended up here.
What Would Make Facebook Games Great?"I Hate Facebook Games." is the title of a Facebook community. A discussion thread on the wall begins with the post "They are boring games", a sentiment which is not punctuated.
"I Hate Facebook Games Likes This", it says beneath the post. "Farmville is not a game," says the chap who purports Facebook games "are boring games". "It is a big series of events."
"Even Harvest Moon on SNES was 1000x better than this..." says the next poster.
Outside of this page, I simply cannot find a more concise, potent summary of the public's general dislike of Facebook games.
Part of the art of criticism is trying to be positive, so I did a Google search for "Top Facebook Games", just to get a good idea of what the public likes. I stumbled onto a list. Of the games on that list I am familiar with, I can say I hate the majority of them.
For the record, none of my real-life in-person friends will admit to enjoying Facebook games. Some of my on-Facebook friends play the games. Still, it stands that I have never knowingly spoken to a person who is stone-cold financially addicted to Farmville or Cityville.
Facebook games are invariably free to play. "Free to play" is a clever little phrase which masks the idea that they are possibly not free to enjoy. Facebook games are "monetized". "Monetize" is a word that didn't exist so prominently in business until recently, until businessmen got the idea to offer people a free experience and then connive a way to get the users to pay anyway. They do this by constructing brain-labyrinths ("engagement wheels") through scary dark tricks of math and psychology. The games aren't about being fun—they're about keeping the player there.
What Would Make Facebook Games Great?When you look into the numbers, you find that somewhere around five percent of Facebook game players ever spend any money at all on the games. Some of the users spend $10,000 on a single game. The average amount of money a user spends is $1.70, though most users spend nothing. I am one of those "most users".
I have analyzed social games and concluded that the "best" thing about Facebook games is that they are making serious money for some people.
So, the "monetization" system that has emerged is a "good" one because it "works", though it only works on "less than five percent" of users. So, even the psychomathematiconomists employed in making social games could agree with me when I say it is a scientific fact that social games could be better.
In the interest of my chosen science— lolology—I will henceforth tackle, in the tried format of a "top ten" list, the following elephant-sized question: What would make Facebook games great?
1. Drive re-engagement and improve discovery!
I've always thought that Facebook games would be better if they drove re-engagement and improved discovery. Duh. That's what we all think, right?
"Drive re-engagement" means that a lot of people dip their toes into the game and then stop almost immediately. To drive re-engagement, you'd have to make a game people want to play a little bit longer before giving up—and then devise viral wall-posts persuasive enough to get those players to actually play the game again.
"Improve discovery" means that they should devise viral wall-posts persuasive enough to get people who have never played the game to dip their toes into the game.
You know what—we might not even need the rest of the items on the list. If you were going to make Facebook games "better", those are really only the two things you need to do!
Wow—and look at this! I just Googled "how to make Facebook games better", and it turns up an Official Facebook Blog post in which the only two suggestions for making Facebook games "better" are "drive re-engagement" and "improve discovery". I guess "better" isn't as subjective a word as we thought.
Looks like the mathematicians win again!
2. Right mouse click
Right now, every Facebook game uses just the left mouse button. As they all use Java, or Flash, or whatever the brainiacs are calling the latest computer-thing, the right click is hard-wired to open up some kind of voodoo window to change some kind of web-browser settings.
Well, these Facebook-game-makers are smart people. They're so smart, they managed to get tens of millions of people to pay literally billions of dollars for stuff that isn't even real. If they were able to do that, they can probably figure out how to make a game where you can right-click on some stuff.
Imagine if, in addition to left click, you had a right click. That would literally be twice the options. Remember the Nintendo Entertainment System? The controller had two buttons—A and B. The Super Nintendo added X and Y. Now try telling me that Metroid is better than Super Metroid. Super Farmville would be so much better than Farmville.
3. Make a better art style than Zynga
I'm not going to talk smack about Zynga, I swear. For today, let's not talk about how their games are the electronic equivalent of an unraveled coat-hanger, their collective customers the consumer equivalent of an old Buick in a supermarket parking lot. Let's not even throw around phrases like "computer-engineered pharmaceuticals" or "the ghostification of modern society". Let's be nice. Let's admit that maybe we only think we dislike them, because at the end of the day, they're just a group of people who found something that worked and then made enough money to give Uncle Scrooge's Money Bin penis-envy.
What Would Make Facebook Games Great?Today, let's stick to the facts.
The fact is the characters in Zynga games look like something you'd see in a coloring book used for the part of the therapy where the child is encouraged to show the therapist which things in this barnyard scene he wishes were purple. I feel a little bit older than I probably really am whenever I look at Zynga game characters. When I see them, I am filled with a semi-intense desire to see them suffer. I am a perfectly normal person, so I imagine this is a perfectly normal reaction (also, that no one else reading this has ever worn a pair of new socks more than twice).
The worst part about the Zynga art style is that we live in a world of copycats, copytigers, and copypanthers. Also, the predominant method of thinking among marketers is that if something is popular, every single tiny element of it is greatly responsible for its popularity. So we see similar munchkin bobbleheads popping up in every other Facebook game.
I know we're not going to get triple-A graphics in these things anytime soon, because they need to run in a browser and they need to perform well on everyone's computer for maximum accessibility, et cetera, et cetera. I'm just saying to at least try to make your darn 2D look good. They say "it takes money to make money", and you want to make money, right? I mean, that's why you're making these games. Hire someone famous. Make the characters look like the Powerpuff Girls, or like the Scott Pilgrim comics. Or, make a post-apocalyptic farming simulator with characters who are a precise cross between Scott Pilgrim and Marcus Fenix. Just get those cold, weird ventriloquist-dummy grins off my e-lawn.
4. Be politer about the virality!
Every! God! Darn! Time! Someone auto-posts a social game update on my Facebook wall, it's just full! Of! Exclamation points!
"Hey! I'm having fun in Some Facebook Game!"
"If you joined me we could have more fun! Click here!"
"If you click here you'll get a reward!"
For god's sake! Video games! Stop yelling at me!
Take a lesson from The Nigerian Spanish-Prisoner Spam-Robot, people: set all your soulless ItGetsTheMoney.virus programs to "Dear Friend,".
5. Make some action games!
Of course, the idea of Facebook games is that literally 97% of the world's population has a Facebook account, and that if you get one dollar from each of those people you can literally buy an entire planet and a rocketship to take you there. In order to get that one dollar from every pocket in the world, your game, of course, needs to be this hyper-simplistic thing where everything is beautiful, nothing hurts, no one ever wins, and no one ever loses.
Well, you know what people like? They like Fruit Ninja. What kind of psychopath doesn't like Fruit Ninja? I'll tell you who: I had an uncle once who probably wouldn't have liked Fruit Ninja, if he'd lived long enough to see it.
Full size
Fruit Ninja makes money—a modest amount of money (maybe only enough to choke a horse (as opposed to a rhino))—because sometimes Genuinely Cool People get Facebook Credits in their Christmas stockings, and what else are they going to use them on? You play Fruit Ninja because you love cutting fruit, and the fruit loves being cut. You want to get better at it. Numbers go up—you love them going up, and they love going up.
Fruit Ninja and Bejeweled are games that fit on Facebook. They are The Modern Tetris, in that they're as they're simpler and faster-paced—and I'm not being snippy.
When we say "social games", we are usually talking about games that will, following an accidental click on the wrong button, impersonate you, threatening suicide if your friends don't visit your farm Right The Fuck Now.
However, Fruit Ninja is just as much of a social game—and not because it's on Facebook. It's "social" because you're compelled to share your score with your friends. Any game you play with people is "social", I say—though the scientists behind these things would pressure me to point out that "social games" usually require the act of socializing to directly enhance the game experience.
How about this: in Farmville, it costs more money to plant strawberries than it does to plant peanuts (I think), though the act of planting them is committed with the same action: point, and click. In The Sims Social, there's a quest where you have to "Send Libelous Emails", and that's done the exact same way as cooking nachos in a microwave or watching television or having sex in the shower: you point, and you click. Why can't it be, like, you point at something, you click, and then there's a tiny little skill-game?
The web is crawling with little one-click games.
Here, I just opened the first game I saw on Flixel.org, and though it's not very good, it's at least more fun than Farmville, and its controls don't even require a single click. Why can't we have a little something like that every time we go to pick our strawberries, where your minimum score is always guaranteed, even if you fail, and optimal performance gives you a bonus?
6. Let people actually play with their friends.
Every Facebook game developer I've talked to this year has promised me, in a low voice, swallowing that last bite of hors d'oeuvre and wiping his hands on his thighs, that "Our game will actually feature synchronous play." The game never comes out. The next time I hear from the guy, it's via a Facebook message his mom is sending through his account: they have finally found the car.
Facebook games aren't about actually hanging out with your friends—they're about your friends being your neighbors. You can go over to your friends' houses and . . . look at all the stuff they have. That's about it. It's all just a kind of flimsy ghost story: in The Sims Social, you might be in your friend's house playing guitar in his bedroom while he is taking a shower, and at the exact same time, he might be in your house making waffles in the kitchen while you sit on a Dunkin' Donuts lawn chair outside. Games are, in general, liars. Social games are pathological liars.
How about a game where players can actually play together? Or how about this? A Facebook game where players have their own home, and they also have a town. They share this town with all of their Facebook friends who are playing the game. In that town, they form circles with their friends, and they build something together—a pyramid or a giant robot or something. I mean, Minecraft is something people like, right? I'm going to stop before I basically hand someone else a billion dollars. If you don't hear from me in a month, it's because I got a job at Zynga.
7. Add real conflict between users
For a while, I was working with a medium-sized company that had developed one of those (now-many) tools for aggregating statistical data based on your Facebook friends—telling you who likes more of the same things you do than your other friends do, et cetera. They wanted me to "gamify" that data. I devised a thing that would spit out phrases like "Stephen Totilo is The Best Facebooker Among All His Friends! Challenge him!"
It was cute and weird, though it probably wouldn't have worked, firstly because it was insincere (behind its design specifications was a Cow-Clicker-ish smirk, a betting dare that "jerks will love this"). Secondly, it wouldn't have worked because—and this is the fascinating part: people in general just don't want to "win" when it means beating their friends. Backing up that statement would require me to blow your minds, and that wouldn't be nice (you might not all be wearing Protective Hats), so let's move along.
What Would Make Facebook Games Great?One key to Facebook's success is that it never explicitly tells its users they're better or worse than any other users. Rather, they leave it up to individual users to judge: "Leigh Alexander sure gets a lot more comments and likes on her posts than I do," one might muse. This translates smoothly into Farmville or Cityville or Whathaveyouville: The Sims Social doesn't post on your wall saying, "Fuck you—Amanda Glasser's house sure is cooler than yours." (Mostly it wouldn't do this because my house is objectively cooler than hers.)
Instead, games let the player decide for him or herself when they're not doing as well as their friends: the player visits his friend's constructed environment and thinks, "Wow—he's put a lot of work into this." This leads to a Manufactured Inferiority Complex. That's been the driving force of marketing ("You need this stupid thing now!") since the day the first caveman invented the wheel, the club, the hammer, and marketing (it was a productive day).
The psychologists and mathematicians and police have all sat down in a brain-tank and had a deep think about it, and the conclusion is that it's A Huge Financial Gamble to make a Facebook game that players can win (because: then they'll stop playing), and an Astronomical Financial Gamble to make a Facebook game that a player can beat his friends at.
Still: we need more competitive multiplayer Facebook games. How about you make it possible to lose marginal amounts of in-game assets to other players as a result of consensual multiplayer duels?
Let's make a Facebook game as tightly designed as Magic: The Gathering.
Seriously: Magic: The Gathering is a brilliant thing, and it's basically already a Facebook game. It's a card game that encourages collection via small payments (booster packs). It's designed from the ground up so that its math and rules are infinitely expandable.
Let's make it so that players can lose "cards" or "units" to friends who beat them in duels. Make it so that you get a free "card" (or two, or three) every day, and that you can pay a tiny fee- $0.10?—for an additional card. Maybe each "card" would only be usable a certain number of times: the "monster" the card spawns can be spawned and killed a set number of times before the card is destroyed.
There you go. Let's see something like that. (Not that I would want to play something that resembled Magic: The Gathering, because I'm so cool. (Ladies, call me; I swear my only obsessive hobbies involve writing 16,000-word reviews of video games in the first person.))
8. Just put Diablo on there already.
Full size
Somebody could just rip off Diablo—very tenaciously, with fair math—and there you have it. Players are allowed five lives a day. They can pay $0.25 for each additional life. Corpses stay where they fell for six hours. There you go: Zynga: The Arcade Game. Item drops include seeds or whatever—you can plant a little farm in your hub town.
$0.25 a life wouldn't be as lucrative as Zynga's ingenious "energy" mechanic, though hey—it would probably allow for a better game.
9. Let's think about board games!
Zynga's Words With Friends does drag in a heck-ton of money. It's a "Scrabble" clone. You may know this game as "the only game your hip big sister has on her iPhone". It's incredibly addictive and fascinating thanks to its chess-in-a-bottle-style asynchronous play. Hey, guys, let's think of more board-game-y games. Let's get Rampart on Facebook, at least. Or Risk! Scrabble is cool. Now rip off some more cool stuff and Facebook it.
10. At least make The Sims Social as fun as Animal Crossing
What Would Make Facebook Games Great?The Sims Social is creepy. It's a love letter from a computer virus. I don't want to play a game about sitting around at home and buying IKEA furniture. That's fucked up. You might as well make a game about washing dishes or brushing your teeth. If you're going to make a game about the yayness of having your own place, give it some personality. Animal Crossing did that. Someone should try that on Facebook. It's not rocket science (just computer programming).
Heroes game for Facebook
Four years after the founding of Zynga, social game makers are still breaking ground on new titles and venture capitalists are giving them money. The hope is that the social game revolution is still in its beginning stages and that any group of talented game developers can steal a march on the industry leaders with a little bit of creativity.
Woodland Heroes is a story-based strategy battle game where cute and not-so-cute animals battle each other. I’ve tried it out and the game has an original approach to strategy and it works well in the asynchronous, or one turn at a time, style. As with Angry Birds, you can toss stuff via catapults and cannon at the enemy, but the game is played from an isometric, or slightly askew overhead view.
It is just one of many Facebook games. In spite of the presence of big rivals such as Zynga and Electronic Arts, Row Sham Bow’s founders believe they can succeed by targeting an under-served niche within the Facebook gaming market. And this isn’t a pure shot in the dark; Row Sham Bow’s founders spent many years at Electronic Arts sports game studio in Florida.
The company was started by Philip Holt, chief executive and former EA manager, and Nick Gonzales, chief technology officer and former EA Sports software architect. They’ve hired a number of former EA, Disney, and Cartoon Network employees. Their aim is to take their console experience and break into free-to-play games, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods.
“We feel like we have the opportunity to take a lot more creative risk,” Holt said in an interview. “I feel like we’ve seen more creativity in this part of the industry in the last two years than we have seen in the last 15 years in consoles.”
Observers such as Facebook’s game partnership chief Sean Ryan have noted that there are plenty of game genres that haven’t been popularized on Facebook yet.
Holt said his company looked for funding on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., but found that investors weren’t interested in funding a faraway company that hasn’t proven itself yet. So The company raised $3.5 million in funding from Intersouth Partners, a venture firm in Durham, N.C. The company was founded in March and it was funded in April. Six months later, it has its first game ready for Facebook. The company has 23 employees and contractors.
Woodland Heroes has intricate two-dimensional art with a cartoon style that goes over well on social networks such as Facebook, which draw a more mainstream game audience than the hardcore gamers on the consoles. The company believes its target market is males and females ages 13 to 24.
The player has to defend the forest from an invasion of bears and other creatures. Players lead woodland creatures to freedom and discover the truth behind the disappearance of the hero’s father. The game pits the heroic creatures against the King Bear and his army of evil forest predators. The adventure takes place across 56 locations in six distinct regions, from lush lowland forests to swampy and barren bogs. You have to use strategy to take out your enemies and race them to find the best weapons on the map.
The game starts with a couple of easy levels that are accompanied by a tutorial that teaches you how to play the game. You shoot live pigs at the bears via catapults, always trying to locate the bears’ secret weapon before they locate your own forces.
“We felt like the games in the social market were a little lacking in game play,” Holt said. “We were disappointed and felt we could do better.”
He said the current games are “souless,” or not very fun, even though they are carefully tested and based on detailed analytics.
“We wanted to make the game fun and have consequences for getting things wrong,” Holt said. “We want the player to make decisions that matter. We want an emotional connection to characters in the game and the story. We want people to be attracted to the game because of its core mechanic.”
Woodland Heroes is a story-based strategy battle game where cute and not-so-cute animals battle each other. I’ve tried it out and the game has an original approach to strategy and it works well in the asynchronous, or one turn at a time, style. As with Angry Birds, you can toss stuff via catapults and cannon at the enemy, but the game is played from an isometric, or slightly askew overhead view.
It is just one of many Facebook games. In spite of the presence of big rivals such as Zynga and Electronic Arts, Row Sham Bow’s founders believe they can succeed by targeting an under-served niche within the Facebook gaming market. And this isn’t a pure shot in the dark; Row Sham Bow’s founders spent many years at Electronic Arts sports game studio in Florida.
The company was started by Philip Holt, chief executive and former EA manager, and Nick Gonzales, chief technology officer and former EA Sports software architect. They’ve hired a number of former EA, Disney, and Cartoon Network employees. Their aim is to take their console experience and break into free-to-play games, where users play for free and pay real money for virtual goods.
“We feel like we have the opportunity to take a lot more creative risk,” Holt said in an interview. “I feel like we’ve seen more creativity in this part of the industry in the last two years than we have seen in the last 15 years in consoles.”
Observers such as Facebook’s game partnership chief Sean Ryan have noted that there are plenty of game genres that haven’t been popularized on Facebook yet.
Holt said his company looked for funding on Sand Hill Road in Menlo Park, Calif., but found that investors weren’t interested in funding a faraway company that hasn’t proven itself yet. So The company raised $3.5 million in funding from Intersouth Partners, a venture firm in Durham, N.C. The company was founded in March and it was funded in April. Six months later, it has its first game ready for Facebook. The company has 23 employees and contractors.
Woodland Heroes has intricate two-dimensional art with a cartoon style that goes over well on social networks such as Facebook, which draw a more mainstream game audience than the hardcore gamers on the consoles. The company believes its target market is males and females ages 13 to 24.
The player has to defend the forest from an invasion of bears and other creatures. Players lead woodland creatures to freedom and discover the truth behind the disappearance of the hero’s father. The game pits the heroic creatures against the King Bear and his army of evil forest predators. The adventure takes place across 56 locations in six distinct regions, from lush lowland forests to swampy and barren bogs. You have to use strategy to take out your enemies and race them to find the best weapons on the map.
The game starts with a couple of easy levels that are accompanied by a tutorial that teaches you how to play the game. You shoot live pigs at the bears via catapults, always trying to locate the bears’ secret weapon before they locate your own forces.
“We felt like the games in the social market were a little lacking in game play,” Holt said. “We were disappointed and felt we could do better.”
He said the current games are “souless,” or not very fun, even though they are carefully tested and based on detailed analytics.
“We wanted to make the game fun and have consequences for getting things wrong,” Holt said. “We want the player to make decisions that matter. We want an emotional connection to characters in the game and the story. We want people to be attracted to the game because of its core mechanic.”
Adventure World: Indiana Jones Meets Facebook
Adventure World–a game bringing the Indiana Jones franchise to Facebook–plays like traditional Facebook games like Farmville. Big bright graphics and simple game play make this a game that is accessible to any user. You play quests, where you are seeking specific artifacts and fight Indy’s nemesis (SNAKES!). Friends can give you supplies and ease the energy cost of doing quests, which matters a lot because the energy cost is why I don’t like this game.
Every thing you do costs you energy. Picking up a vase? That’ll be some energy. Killing a snake? Energy. What happens when you run out of energy? Oh, you’re just done. Unless, of course, you want to buy some more, for real money.
Energy will regenerate, but each energy point takes eight minutes to recharge. Simple math tells you that for a basic quest, if you have, say, 24 energy points, you can do maybe 12 actions. And then it will be nearly three and a half hours before you have full energy again.
The quests have time restrictions as well. You have a certain number of hours from the time you start a quest to the time you finish the quest. Don’t finish in time? Oh, you can add time. Again, using real money. This makes me nuts. I’m the kind of girl that likes to game. Nothing is worse than being settled in for a gaming session and then having to stop because of something stupid like energy. It’s a false barrier to game playing.
If you can get past the energy wall, the game is fun to play. You have multi-part quests, you have plenty of quests to work on, and you get to build up and customize your base camp, which is great for people who love the personalized aspects of Farmville, Cafe World, or other traditional Facebook games.
Every thing you do costs you energy. Picking up a vase? That’ll be some energy. Killing a snake? Energy. What happens when you run out of energy? Oh, you’re just done. Unless, of course, you want to buy some more, for real money.
Energy will regenerate, but each energy point takes eight minutes to recharge. Simple math tells you that for a basic quest, if you have, say, 24 energy points, you can do maybe 12 actions. And then it will be nearly three and a half hours before you have full energy again.
The quests have time restrictions as well. You have a certain number of hours from the time you start a quest to the time you finish the quest. Don’t finish in time? Oh, you can add time. Again, using real money. This makes me nuts. I’m the kind of girl that likes to game. Nothing is worse than being settled in for a gaming session and then having to stop because of something stupid like energy. It’s a false barrier to game playing.
If you can get past the energy wall, the game is fun to play. You have multi-part quests, you have plenty of quests to work on, and you get to build up and customize your base camp, which is great for people who love the personalized aspects of Farmville, Cafe World, or other traditional Facebook games.
lunedì 24 ottobre 2011
The Unreasonable Freak-Out Over Facebook's Claim That Some Of Your Personal Data Is Its Intellectual Property
A group based in Austria that calls itself Europe v. Facebook, has been waging a campaign to get Facebook to reveal everything it knows about its users. Its biggest weapon in this campaign is an EU law that requires companies to provide people reports with all of the personal information they have on that person. I went through one female Facebooker’s 800+page report last month, and told you about the juiciest parts. But Europe v. Facebook is still thirsty, and says Facebook is withholding some juice!
When group founder Max Schrems got his lengthy report, he noted that it was missing some information, such as his biometrical faceprint (a facial recognition tool that Facebook uses to identify people in photos) and his “likes.” Facebook sent Schrems a letter explaining that the data it withheld was a “trade secret or intellectual property” [pdf].
That has led to a series of angry reports, like this one from TechDirt, lambasting Facebook for claiming that OUR data is FACEBOOK’s intellectual property. While it’s always fun to write angry posts about how Facebook is destroying life as we know it and turning us into its Farmville-playing, photo-clicking, status-update-obsessed slaves, I think these recent stories are off-base in their analysis.
For one, as mentioned, I read through one of those Facebook reports and it revealed a lot of data. It turned this woman’s four years on Facebook into an epic of a length that rivals War and Peace, providing a history of everyone who had ever poked her instead of a history of Russia. If the report had been any longer, I’d accuse Facebook of “pulling a law firm” –that is, overwhelming a party during discovery by sending them massive amounts of documents in response to a request, to make it nearly impossible to find the needle in the haystack.
If Facebook chooses to hold back information like the biometric faceprint — which Facebook calls a “tag suggest” — that makes sense to me. That’s a request not for personal information, but for the technology that has been built on top of that personal information. It should be sufficient instead for Facebook to say that it has or does not have a faceprint for a given user.
I asked Facebook about its rationale for withholding this data.
“Facebook provided Mr. Schrems and his group with all of the information required in response to their request,” says spokesman Barry Schnitt via e-mail. “Their request included requests for information on a range of other things that are not personal information, including Facebook’s proprietary fraud protection measures, and ‘any other analytical procedure that Facebook runs’. This is clearly not personal data, and Irish data protection law rightly places some valuable and reasonable limits on the data that has to be provided.”
We all love transparency. I was, for example, a big fan of the little hacking tool that shows users who Facebook thinks they’re most interested in. But a law that gives people the right to know what a company knows about them shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a law that requires Facebook to reveal how its technology — as applied to each individual’s personal data — works.
Schrem’s request would mean that Facebook would need to shed light on the algorithms it uses to populate your news feed, suggest friends to you, and determine whether a log-in looks suspicious. While I would love to see that — assuming I could make sense of the code — I imagine so would spammers, engineers from competing companies and hackers wanting to break into accounts.
When group founder Max Schrems got his lengthy report, he noted that it was missing some information, such as his biometrical faceprint (a facial recognition tool that Facebook uses to identify people in photos) and his “likes.” Facebook sent Schrems a letter explaining that the data it withheld was a “trade secret or intellectual property” [pdf].
That has led to a series of angry reports, like this one from TechDirt, lambasting Facebook for claiming that OUR data is FACEBOOK’s intellectual property. While it’s always fun to write angry posts about how Facebook is destroying life as we know it and turning us into its Farmville-playing, photo-clicking, status-update-obsessed slaves, I think these recent stories are off-base in their analysis.
For one, as mentioned, I read through one of those Facebook reports and it revealed a lot of data. It turned this woman’s four years on Facebook into an epic of a length that rivals War and Peace, providing a history of everyone who had ever poked her instead of a history of Russia. If the report had been any longer, I’d accuse Facebook of “pulling a law firm” –that is, overwhelming a party during discovery by sending them massive amounts of documents in response to a request, to make it nearly impossible to find the needle in the haystack.
If Facebook chooses to hold back information like the biometric faceprint — which Facebook calls a “tag suggest” — that makes sense to me. That’s a request not for personal information, but for the technology that has been built on top of that personal information. It should be sufficient instead for Facebook to say that it has or does not have a faceprint for a given user.
I asked Facebook about its rationale for withholding this data.
“Facebook provided Mr. Schrems and his group with all of the information required in response to their request,” says spokesman Barry Schnitt via e-mail. “Their request included requests for information on a range of other things that are not personal information, including Facebook’s proprietary fraud protection measures, and ‘any other analytical procedure that Facebook runs’. This is clearly not personal data, and Irish data protection law rightly places some valuable and reasonable limits on the data that has to be provided.”
We all love transparency. I was, for example, a big fan of the little hacking tool that shows users who Facebook thinks they’re most interested in. But a law that gives people the right to know what a company knows about them shouldn’t be misinterpreted as a law that requires Facebook to reveal how its technology — as applied to each individual’s personal data — works.
Schrem’s request would mean that Facebook would need to shed light on the algorithms it uses to populate your news feed, suggest friends to you, and determine whether a log-in looks suspicious. While I would love to see that — assuming I could make sense of the code — I imagine so would spammers, engineers from competing companies and hackers wanting to break into accounts.
Will the New Facebook Lead to Information Overload?
Soren Gordhamer is the organizer of the Wisdom 2.0 Conferences, which brings together staff from Google, Facebook, Twitter and Zynga along with Zen teachers and others to explore living with awareness and wisdom in our modern age. You can follow him at @SorenG on Twitter.
If you’ve been spending much time on the new Facebook, you’ve likely been asking, “Do I really care that my friend just listened to Lady Gaga on Spotify? Is this worth my attention?”
Facebook, of course, is insisting that you do care.
SEE ALSO: 10 Facebook Timeline Designs That Will Blow You Away [PICS]
We have moved into a new era of sharing. With it comes the opportunity to better know the interests and activities of friends and family on a moment-to-moment basis. At the same time, so much utterly overwhelming information has the possibility to destroy the beauty of the platform.
Possibly at no other time has the question, “Just what is the purpose of social media?” been more relevant.
From the Intentional to the Automatic
With new Facebook we are seeing a shift from the Intentional (“Wow, this is an awesome song. I’d really like to share it with my friends.”) to the Automatic (Many of your actions, such as listening to a song, are posted without your direction.). Don’t take this shift lightly; it’s potentially a game changer, though in what direction is uncertain.
The Ticker streams our friends’ activities in our face like never before. This activity will surely expand as automatic posting applications multiply. Facebook is anticipating that more of such content will encourage more engagement, but is it a big risk?
The Balance Between Relevant and Irrelevant Content
The potential danger is that there will be too much information to make the site useful. It sets up an increasing flood of content, making it more difficult than ever to find what is relevant. The shift forces more people to ask, “How much of my own time do I want to spend reading about the activities of someone else’s life?”
Reports show that more and more people are feeling overwhelmed by technology, and a recent National Sleep Foundation study found that a whopping 63% of Americans say their sleep needs are not being met during the week. We may be increasingly connected, but that does not mean that our quality of life necessarily improves.
It’s not likely we will see a mass exodus from Facebook in the coming months, but people will need to spend more time and effort weeding through irrelevant information. The service may increasingly tax our attention and patience.
Why Facebook Has Never Been Free
It’s important to realize that there is a cost to social sites like Facebook. Recent posts rumored that Facebook planned to charge users for maintaining accounts. Others countered that Facebook would always be free. However, Facebook has never been free, at least, not since it began displaying ads. We pay for Facebook with our attention.
Even though most of us try to avoid the ads that appear on the side, we don’t. If we were all masters at ignoring ads, businesses would stop displaying them.
I have nothing against an ad-supported site, but the quality of content needs to be high enough to outweigh the intrusion of advertisements (which seems to be increasing). My time is worth it.
The New Era: A Question of Attention
Our handheld devices allow sharing in ways few of us could have imagined five years ago. In less than 15 seconds, we can upload a mobile photo to all our online friends. This is both a blessing and a curse, and poses enormous challenges that the social media of today must address.
I’m guessing you, like me, find yourself asking, “Just how much information about that high school acquaintance do I really need?” Of all the things we can dedicate attention to – exercising, spending time with our children or family, reading a book – why spend it on social media? What purpose does it serve?
In a broad stroke, the answer is that it must strengthen, not decrease, the quality of our lives. Therefore, simply increasing the quantity of information about our friends is not the answer. In the short term, pageviews may increase as people try to keep up with the increased content, but inevitably there is only so much time and attention we can spare. The question of relevancy will become evermore important.
So, while there may be no financial cost in spending time with social media, in many ways we pay with something far more valuable: our attention. How we dedicate attention is essentially how we choose to spend the limited heartbeats of our lives. This is a lesson the social networks of our time would benefit from.
If you’ve been spending much time on the new Facebook, you’ve likely been asking, “Do I really care that my friend just listened to Lady Gaga on Spotify? Is this worth my attention?”
Facebook, of course, is insisting that you do care.
SEE ALSO: 10 Facebook Timeline Designs That Will Blow You Away [PICS]
We have moved into a new era of sharing. With it comes the opportunity to better know the interests and activities of friends and family on a moment-to-moment basis. At the same time, so much utterly overwhelming information has the possibility to destroy the beauty of the platform.
Possibly at no other time has the question, “Just what is the purpose of social media?” been more relevant.
From the Intentional to the Automatic
With new Facebook we are seeing a shift from the Intentional (“Wow, this is an awesome song. I’d really like to share it with my friends.”) to the Automatic (Many of your actions, such as listening to a song, are posted without your direction.). Don’t take this shift lightly; it’s potentially a game changer, though in what direction is uncertain.
The Ticker streams our friends’ activities in our face like never before. This activity will surely expand as automatic posting applications multiply. Facebook is anticipating that more of such content will encourage more engagement, but is it a big risk?
The Balance Between Relevant and Irrelevant Content
The potential danger is that there will be too much information to make the site useful. It sets up an increasing flood of content, making it more difficult than ever to find what is relevant. The shift forces more people to ask, “How much of my own time do I want to spend reading about the activities of someone else’s life?”
Reports show that more and more people are feeling overwhelmed by technology, and a recent National Sleep Foundation study found that a whopping 63% of Americans say their sleep needs are not being met during the week. We may be increasingly connected, but that does not mean that our quality of life necessarily improves.
It’s not likely we will see a mass exodus from Facebook in the coming months, but people will need to spend more time and effort weeding through irrelevant information. The service may increasingly tax our attention and patience.
Why Facebook Has Never Been Free
It’s important to realize that there is a cost to social sites like Facebook. Recent posts rumored that Facebook planned to charge users for maintaining accounts. Others countered that Facebook would always be free. However, Facebook has never been free, at least, not since it began displaying ads. We pay for Facebook with our attention.
Even though most of us try to avoid the ads that appear on the side, we don’t. If we were all masters at ignoring ads, businesses would stop displaying them.
I have nothing against an ad-supported site, but the quality of content needs to be high enough to outweigh the intrusion of advertisements (which seems to be increasing). My time is worth it.
The New Era: A Question of Attention
Our handheld devices allow sharing in ways few of us could have imagined five years ago. In less than 15 seconds, we can upload a mobile photo to all our online friends. This is both a blessing and a curse, and poses enormous challenges that the social media of today must address.
I’m guessing you, like me, find yourself asking, “Just how much information about that high school acquaintance do I really need?” Of all the things we can dedicate attention to – exercising, spending time with our children or family, reading a book – why spend it on social media? What purpose does it serve?
In a broad stroke, the answer is that it must strengthen, not decrease, the quality of our lives. Therefore, simply increasing the quantity of information about our friends is not the answer. In the short term, pageviews may increase as people try to keep up with the increased content, but inevitably there is only so much time and attention we can spare. The question of relevancy will become evermore important.
So, while there may be no financial cost in spending time with social media, in many ways we pay with something far more valuable: our attention. How we dedicate attention is essentially how we choose to spend the limited heartbeats of our lives. This is a lesson the social networks of our time would benefit from.
domenica 23 ottobre 2011
How to Hide Questions on Facebook
The Facebook Questions application allows you to ask questions that your Facebook friends will try to answer. Use the Questions application to find the answer to a specific question, or to survey other members about their likes and views. For example, you might want to pose a general question asking people to name favorite movies or television shows. Because Questions is a Facebook application rather than a third-party application, there is no way to hide all posts and updates automatically. The only way to hide Questions on Facebook is to remove each individual post or update that appears in your homepage news feed.
Instructions
1
Log into your Facebook account.
2
Scroll through the news feed on your Facebook homepage to identify the Facebook Questions posts and updates that you want to hide.
3
Hover your mouse pointer over the "x" that appears next to the Questions activity update or post.
4
Click the "x" icon when the "Remove" button appears. This removes the Questions item from your Facebook homepage news feed. Repeat this process for each Question post or update that you want to hide.
Instructions
1
Log into your Facebook account.
2
Scroll through the news feed on your Facebook homepage to identify the Facebook Questions posts and updates that you want to hide.
3
Hover your mouse pointer over the "x" that appears next to the Questions activity update or post.
4
Click the "x" icon when the "Remove" button appears. This removes the Questions item from your Facebook homepage news feed. Repeat this process for each Question post or update that you want to hide.
How to Have a Successful Facebook Brand Page
Learn how to have a successful Facebook brand page to optimize your use of Facebook's social features as a means of growing your brand. Several characteristics define successful Facebook brand pages, including but not limited to the number of fans they have and the content to which page owners link those fans. Use other social media outlets to encourage others to "Like" the page, since it isn't necessary to become "Friends" as it is if you used a traditional Facebook profile to promote your brand.
Instructions
1
Click the "Invite Friends" like on the right side of the page frequently to invite Facebook friends to become fans of your page. Choose "All" at the top of the "Invite" window to select all friends' names for the invite, then choose "Invite" to send invitations for friends to become fans. The more fans your page has, the more reach your brand and message have.
2
Use other social networks like Twitter or LinkedIn to promote the page. Paste a link to the page in a Twitter tweet or a LinkedIn network update. Include a small blurb explaining what the page is about and inviting anyone who reads it to become a fan. You need only have a Facebook account to become a fan of a page; prospective fans need not be your Facebook friends.
3
Post high-quality, relevant content frequently to keep fans engaged and clicking through to your website. Additionally, posting quality content creates a positive word-of-mouth reputation for your page. Existing fans do promotional work on your behalf.
4
Upload photos to the page frequently to keep fans interested. Include relevant hyperlinks in the descriptions of images to encourage fans to click through to your website. For example, if you post a picture of a product your brand sells, include a link to a site where fans are able to buy it.
5
Send out updates whenever you receive notifications of new fans, using fans' names whenever possible. Making new fans feel personally recognized engages them with your page and increases the chances of them interacting with your brand.
Instructions
1
Click the "Invite Friends" like on the right side of the page frequently to invite Facebook friends to become fans of your page. Choose "All" at the top of the "Invite" window to select all friends' names for the invite, then choose "Invite" to send invitations for friends to become fans. The more fans your page has, the more reach your brand and message have.
2
Use other social networks like Twitter or LinkedIn to promote the page. Paste a link to the page in a Twitter tweet or a LinkedIn network update. Include a small blurb explaining what the page is about and inviting anyone who reads it to become a fan. You need only have a Facebook account to become a fan of a page; prospective fans need not be your Facebook friends.
3
Post high-quality, relevant content frequently to keep fans engaged and clicking through to your website. Additionally, posting quality content creates a positive word-of-mouth reputation for your page. Existing fans do promotional work on your behalf.
4
Upload photos to the page frequently to keep fans interested. Include relevant hyperlinks in the descriptions of images to encourage fans to click through to your website. For example, if you post a picture of a product your brand sells, include a link to a site where fans are able to buy it.
5
Send out updates whenever you receive notifications of new fans, using fans' names whenever possible. Making new fans feel personally recognized engages them with your page and increases the chances of them interacting with your brand.
How to Post Something on Your Wall to Another in Facebook Read more: How to Post Something on Your Wall to Another in Facebook
Posts that appear on your Facebook wall are not visible to your friends unless the original poster opted to make the message visible to the public. If you want to share something from your wall with another person on your friends list, you can use the tools that Facebook has provided. You can share images, links and videos from your wall to other friends, but you cannot share text status updates.
Instructions
1
Click "Share" in the list of options below the post on your wall.
2
Choose the option to share the post on another friend's wall by clicking the drop-down at the top of the dialog box.
3
Type the name of your friend in the input field and click the name when it appears in the drop-down box. Click "Share" to post to your friend's wall.
Instructions
1
Click "Share" in the list of options below the post on your wall.
2
Choose the option to share the post on another friend's wall by clicking the drop-down at the top of the dialog box.
3
Type the name of your friend in the input field and click the name when it appears in the drop-down box. Click "Share" to post to your friend's wall.
Gale Directory of Company Histories: Facebook, Inc.
Incorporated: 2004 as Facebook, Inc.
NAIC: 513390 Other Telecommunications; 519130 Internet Publishing and Broadcasting and Web Search Portals; 541890 Other Services Related to Advertising
Facebook, Inc., runs a leading social networking web site, Facebook.com. Initially launched by undergraduates at Harvard University for college students, the site was soon expanded to include alumni in the corporate world as well as high school students. Membership was opened to anyone with a valid e-mail address in 2006. Facebook seeks to emulate real-life connections by structuring networks around schools, corporations, and geographic regions. A user's full profile information is available only to other users who are somehow connected. The resulting "social graph" is what makes Facebook a billion-dollar idea; the company has turned down acquisition offers worth at least $800 million. A news feed feature, controversial at first, allows sponsors to push ads to highly targeted audiences in ways never before possible. The value of online connections that imitate those in real life is also reflected in classified advertising and peer-to-peer lending services. Global searches of all registered users are not possible, limiting the possibilities for SPAM and other abuses.
Crimson Origins
Facebook began in 2004 as a kind of online directory for undergraduates at Harvard University. Mark Zuckerberg, the son of a dentist, was the driving force behind the company and served as its CEO. He was joined by his Harvard roommate, Dustin Maskovitz, as vice president of engineering, and former schoolmate Adam D'Angelo as chief technology officer. (A handful of other students sued Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing their idea; the case took years to work through the courts.)
Facebook was not Zuckerberg's first attempt to aggregate student information. In a scene reminiscent of War Games, Zuckerberg had earlier hacked into the university's computers. Instead of changing his grades, he downloaded pictures of undergraduates for his own "Hot or Not" style web site called Facemash, which invited browsers to rate the photos on their relative attractiveness. Instant notoriety followed, and Harvard pulled the plug on the site within hours, according to Fast Company.
After being censured for purloining images from the student records, Zuckerberg set up a site that allowed the students themselves to upload their photos and personal information. Called thefacebook.com, it debuted on February 4, 2004, and proved instantly popular. Within months, other colleges were being included, and advertising money began to trickle in.
Facebook was registered as a Delaware corporation in July 2004. Zuckerberg had just finished his sophomore year and was a still a teenager. According to Fast Company, while staying in Palo Alto on summer vacation, Zuckerberg met Napster cofounder Sean Parker, who introduced him to Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal. Thiel became an early investor in Facebook. Zuckerberg decided to take some time off from his studies to grow the new enterprise. Facebook exceeded one million users by the end of the year. It was, noted Fast Company, being run from rented rooms with open source (MySQL) software.
A Unique Model
According to the Economist, Zuckerberg saw himself as a kind of cartographer of human relationships. Facebook users communicating with each other could see how they were connected through other users, resulting in a "social graph." Part of Facebook's appeal was its exclusivity, although the budding enterprise soon grew beyond the Ivy League. To register with it, early users needed to provide an e-mail address with the ".edu" suffix designated for the world of academia.
Facebook later broadened its membership to include high school students and employees of certain large corporations. The aim was to allow recent alumni to maintain their connections and open the doors to the next generation. These changes seemed to go over well; the college age users understood wanting to remain on the site, which most used on a daily basis, after graduation, and many had younger relatives still in high school.
Embracing Web 2.0
Facebook added new features to stay relevant in the Web 2.0 world, the generation of interactive web sites designed to make it easy for users to share video, music, and other multimedia content. By the end of 2006, Facebook had worked out a program that allowed Facebook users easily to share links to videos and articles in the online publications of numerous new and old media companies. Facebook then invited hundreds of developers to write programs to enhance the web site. Within a month, a dozen of the applications had attracted a million users or more.
Not all the company's innovations were well received at first. One new feature introduced on September 5, 2006, caused a public relations debacle. This was a news feed that automatically registered changes on users' profiles and disseminated these tidbits to their friends. Although this involved only information that was freely available within individuals' networks, many protested the automatic gathering and distribution as too invasive. Programmers worked around the clock to strengthen privacy controls related to news feed items. A couple of months later, some paid advertising links were added into the feeds.
A Billion-Dollar-Plus Idea
Zuckerberg lined up $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners in the spring of 2005, according to a profile of the founder in Fast Company. Another round of funding in the spring of 2006 added another $25 million. Social networks were the latest hot commodity for tech investors. Friendster had reportedly turned down a 2002 buyout offer from Google, only to watch others steal the spotlight. In 2005, News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million; YouTube went to Google in late 2006 in a $1.5 billion deal.
Fast-growing Facebook was reckoned to be the second largest social networking site, although it had less than one-tenth the user base of MySpace's 100 million. In the summer of 2006, Yahoo! Inc. reportedly offered between $800 million and $1 billion to acquire Facebook. Media giant Viacom, Inc., had made an earlier bid worth $750 million. However, Zuckerberg, said to control 30 percent of shares, stubbornly refused to sell, believing the best was yet to come and likely expecting to fare better when the time came for an initial public offering. Others close to the company supported his optimistic assessment.
Facebook had already signed a five-year deal for Microsoft Corp. to supply banner advertising, a deal possibly worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Just as MySpace had overshadowed Friendster, in 2006 Facebook appeared to be outpacing MySpace's rate of growth. Nevertheless, a slew of potential competitors continued to emerge, each tailored to audiences ranging from teenagers to Wall Street traders.
Opening the Gates
Originally reserved for college students, Facebook widened its membership in stages. In September 2005, it allowed members to invite high school students into their networks. Several months later it opened the rolls to those with e-mail accounts at large employers of recent graduates. In September 2006, shortly after the news feed fiasco, Facebook opened membership to anyone with a legitimate e-mail address. With a measure of exclusivity removed, some observers wondered what would differentiate it from MySpace, the giant of social networking sites. Zuckerberg defended the move by pointing out that individual members still had control over who had access to their personal information. New members outside of institutions such as corporations or colleges were grouped into 500 regional networks.
The Value of Connections
Lending Club Corporation introduced a peer-to-peer lending service for Facebook in May 2007. It allowed members to request loans and fund others' requests. Around the same time, it began offering free classified advertising. Their value was enhanced by the site's built-in network of connections; members placing ads could decide whether they would be limited to close friends or entire networks. The value was obvious to anyone leery of conducting business with strangers.
By 2007, Facebook had more than 20 million registered users. There were a couple of hundred employees and revenues were said to be in the neighborhood of $100 million for the year. Though the privately owned company was tight-lipped about finances, hints in the media strongly suggested it was turning a profit.
Facebook ranked as the sixth or seventh largest social networking site. It was on top in some key metrics, according to comScore Media Metrix statistics quoted in Fast Company. It led the country in photo sharing, a capability at the heart of the Web 2.0 challenge. In 2007 the company signed up with Comcast to produce a webcast called the "Facebook Diaries," based on video contributed by users. Opening membership to the general public swelled the membership rolls and shifted the demographics away from the college age crowd. Interestingly, more than one-quarter of users were outside the United States.
Principal Competitors
MySpace Inc.; United Online, Inc.; YouTube, Inc.; Yahoo! Inc.; Google Inc.; craigslist, inc.; Friendster, Inc.
Further Reading
"Bidding for Facebook Continues; May Go It Alone," Online Reporter, September 23, 2006, pp. 10-11.
"Book Value; Face Value," Economist, July 21, 2007, p. 66.
Delaney, Kevin J., Rebecca Buckman, and Robert A. Guth, "Facebook, Riding a Web Trend, Flirts with Big-Money Deal," Wall Street Journal, Eastern ed., September 21, 2006, p. 1A.
Dempsey, John, "Comcast Has a New 'Face,'" Daily Variety, February 7, 2007, p. 5.
"Facebook Founder Apologizes in Privacy Flap," InternetWeek, September 8, 2006.
"Facebook Platform Ramps Up with 65 Developer Partners and 85 Applications for Facebook," Wireless News, May 25, 2007.
"Facebook Shares Share Link," Online Reporter, November 4, 2006, pp. 19, 22.
Fox, Justin, "You're Among Friends," Time, July 16, 2007, p. 57.
Hansell, Saul, "Site Previously for Students Will Be Opened to Others," New York Times, September 12, 2006, p. C8.
Klaasen, Abbey, "This 23-Year-Old Has Google Sweating; Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Offers Something Search Doesn't--Distribution," Advertising Age, July 9, 2007, p. 1.
Lacy, Sara, "Facebook Learns from Its Fumble," Business Week Online, September 8, 2006.
------, "Facebook: Opening the Doors Wider," Business Week Online, September 12, 2006.
Levy, Steven, "Facebook Grows Up," Time, August 20, 2007.
Liedtke, Michael, "Build or Sell? Top-Dollar Sales Pose Dilemma for Internet Entrepreneurs," Grand Rapids Press, March 3, 2007, p. B6.
McArthur, Keith, "For Big Brands, a Different Kind of Face Time," Globe & Mail (Toronto), April 28, 2007, p. B3.
McGirt, Ellen, "Hacker. Dropout. CEO," Fast Company, May 2007, p. 74.
Morrissey, Brian, "Facebook Gives New Face to Online Ads," Brandweek, October 2, 2006, p. 11.
------, "Microsoft to Place Ads on Facebook," Adweek Online, August 23, 2006.
Rosenbush, Steve, "Facebook's Changing Fortunes," Business Week Online, November 1, 2006.
Sorkin, Andrew Ross, "The Dress Code Is Relaxed, but the Courting Is Intense," New York Times, November 10, 2006, p. C6.
Stone, Brad, "Facebook to Offer Free Classified Ads Online," New York Times, May 11, 2007, p. C3.
Vara, Vauhini, "Facebook Gets Help from Its Friends," Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2007, p. B1.
Warren, Jamin, and Vara Vauhini, "New Facebook Features Have Members in an Uproar," Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2006, p. B1.
Wolfe, Daniel, "Facebook Adds P-to-P Loans to Networking Site," American Banker, May 29, 2007, p. 17.
— Frederick C. Ingram
NAIC: 513390 Other Telecommunications; 519130 Internet Publishing and Broadcasting and Web Search Portals; 541890 Other Services Related to Advertising
Facebook, Inc., runs a leading social networking web site, Facebook.com. Initially launched by undergraduates at Harvard University for college students, the site was soon expanded to include alumni in the corporate world as well as high school students. Membership was opened to anyone with a valid e-mail address in 2006. Facebook seeks to emulate real-life connections by structuring networks around schools, corporations, and geographic regions. A user's full profile information is available only to other users who are somehow connected. The resulting "social graph" is what makes Facebook a billion-dollar idea; the company has turned down acquisition offers worth at least $800 million. A news feed feature, controversial at first, allows sponsors to push ads to highly targeted audiences in ways never before possible. The value of online connections that imitate those in real life is also reflected in classified advertising and peer-to-peer lending services. Global searches of all registered users are not possible, limiting the possibilities for SPAM and other abuses.
Crimson Origins
Facebook began in 2004 as a kind of online directory for undergraduates at Harvard University. Mark Zuckerberg, the son of a dentist, was the driving force behind the company and served as its CEO. He was joined by his Harvard roommate, Dustin Maskovitz, as vice president of engineering, and former schoolmate Adam D'Angelo as chief technology officer. (A handful of other students sued Zuckerberg for allegedly stealing their idea; the case took years to work through the courts.)
Facebook was not Zuckerberg's first attempt to aggregate student information. In a scene reminiscent of War Games, Zuckerberg had earlier hacked into the university's computers. Instead of changing his grades, he downloaded pictures of undergraduates for his own "Hot or Not" style web site called Facemash, which invited browsers to rate the photos on their relative attractiveness. Instant notoriety followed, and Harvard pulled the plug on the site within hours, according to Fast Company.
After being censured for purloining images from the student records, Zuckerberg set up a site that allowed the students themselves to upload their photos and personal information. Called thefacebook.com, it debuted on February 4, 2004, and proved instantly popular. Within months, other colleges were being included, and advertising money began to trickle in.
Facebook was registered as a Delaware corporation in July 2004. Zuckerberg had just finished his sophomore year and was a still a teenager. According to Fast Company, while staying in Palo Alto on summer vacation, Zuckerberg met Napster cofounder Sean Parker, who introduced him to Peter Thiel, the founder of PayPal. Thiel became an early investor in Facebook. Zuckerberg decided to take some time off from his studies to grow the new enterprise. Facebook exceeded one million users by the end of the year. It was, noted Fast Company, being run from rented rooms with open source (MySQL) software.
A Unique Model
According to the Economist, Zuckerberg saw himself as a kind of cartographer of human relationships. Facebook users communicating with each other could see how they were connected through other users, resulting in a "social graph." Part of Facebook's appeal was its exclusivity, although the budding enterprise soon grew beyond the Ivy League. To register with it, early users needed to provide an e-mail address with the ".edu" suffix designated for the world of academia.
Facebook later broadened its membership to include high school students and employees of certain large corporations. The aim was to allow recent alumni to maintain their connections and open the doors to the next generation. These changes seemed to go over well; the college age users understood wanting to remain on the site, which most used on a daily basis, after graduation, and many had younger relatives still in high school.
Embracing Web 2.0
Facebook added new features to stay relevant in the Web 2.0 world, the generation of interactive web sites designed to make it easy for users to share video, music, and other multimedia content. By the end of 2006, Facebook had worked out a program that allowed Facebook users easily to share links to videos and articles in the online publications of numerous new and old media companies. Facebook then invited hundreds of developers to write programs to enhance the web site. Within a month, a dozen of the applications had attracted a million users or more.
Not all the company's innovations were well received at first. One new feature introduced on September 5, 2006, caused a public relations debacle. This was a news feed that automatically registered changes on users' profiles and disseminated these tidbits to their friends. Although this involved only information that was freely available within individuals' networks, many protested the automatic gathering and distribution as too invasive. Programmers worked around the clock to strengthen privacy controls related to news feed items. A couple of months later, some paid advertising links were added into the feeds.
A Billion-Dollar-Plus Idea
Zuckerberg lined up $12.7 million in venture capital from Accel Partners in the spring of 2005, according to a profile of the founder in Fast Company. Another round of funding in the spring of 2006 added another $25 million. Social networks were the latest hot commodity for tech investors. Friendster had reportedly turned down a 2002 buyout offer from Google, only to watch others steal the spotlight. In 2005, News Corp. bought MySpace for $580 million; YouTube went to Google in late 2006 in a $1.5 billion deal.
Fast-growing Facebook was reckoned to be the second largest social networking site, although it had less than one-tenth the user base of MySpace's 100 million. In the summer of 2006, Yahoo! Inc. reportedly offered between $800 million and $1 billion to acquire Facebook. Media giant Viacom, Inc., had made an earlier bid worth $750 million. However, Zuckerberg, said to control 30 percent of shares, stubbornly refused to sell, believing the best was yet to come and likely expecting to fare better when the time came for an initial public offering. Others close to the company supported his optimistic assessment.
Facebook had already signed a five-year deal for Microsoft Corp. to supply banner advertising, a deal possibly worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year. Just as MySpace had overshadowed Friendster, in 2006 Facebook appeared to be outpacing MySpace's rate of growth. Nevertheless, a slew of potential competitors continued to emerge, each tailored to audiences ranging from teenagers to Wall Street traders.
Opening the Gates
Originally reserved for college students, Facebook widened its membership in stages. In September 2005, it allowed members to invite high school students into their networks. Several months later it opened the rolls to those with e-mail accounts at large employers of recent graduates. In September 2006, shortly after the news feed fiasco, Facebook opened membership to anyone with a legitimate e-mail address. With a measure of exclusivity removed, some observers wondered what would differentiate it from MySpace, the giant of social networking sites. Zuckerberg defended the move by pointing out that individual members still had control over who had access to their personal information. New members outside of institutions such as corporations or colleges were grouped into 500 regional networks.
The Value of Connections
Lending Club Corporation introduced a peer-to-peer lending service for Facebook in May 2007. It allowed members to request loans and fund others' requests. Around the same time, it began offering free classified advertising. Their value was enhanced by the site's built-in network of connections; members placing ads could decide whether they would be limited to close friends or entire networks. The value was obvious to anyone leery of conducting business with strangers.
By 2007, Facebook had more than 20 million registered users. There were a couple of hundred employees and revenues were said to be in the neighborhood of $100 million for the year. Though the privately owned company was tight-lipped about finances, hints in the media strongly suggested it was turning a profit.
Facebook ranked as the sixth or seventh largest social networking site. It was on top in some key metrics, according to comScore Media Metrix statistics quoted in Fast Company. It led the country in photo sharing, a capability at the heart of the Web 2.0 challenge. In 2007 the company signed up with Comcast to produce a webcast called the "Facebook Diaries," based on video contributed by users. Opening membership to the general public swelled the membership rolls and shifted the demographics away from the college age crowd. Interestingly, more than one-quarter of users were outside the United States.
Principal Competitors
MySpace Inc.; United Online, Inc.; YouTube, Inc.; Yahoo! Inc.; Google Inc.; craigslist, inc.; Friendster, Inc.
Further Reading
"Bidding for Facebook Continues; May Go It Alone," Online Reporter, September 23, 2006, pp. 10-11.
"Book Value; Face Value," Economist, July 21, 2007, p. 66.
Delaney, Kevin J., Rebecca Buckman, and Robert A. Guth, "Facebook, Riding a Web Trend, Flirts with Big-Money Deal," Wall Street Journal, Eastern ed., September 21, 2006, p. 1A.
Dempsey, John, "Comcast Has a New 'Face,'" Daily Variety, February 7, 2007, p. 5.
"Facebook Founder Apologizes in Privacy Flap," InternetWeek, September 8, 2006.
"Facebook Platform Ramps Up with 65 Developer Partners and 85 Applications for Facebook," Wireless News, May 25, 2007.
"Facebook Shares Share Link," Online Reporter, November 4, 2006, pp. 19, 22.
Fox, Justin, "You're Among Friends," Time, July 16, 2007, p. 57.
Hansell, Saul, "Site Previously for Students Will Be Opened to Others," New York Times, September 12, 2006, p. C8.
Klaasen, Abbey, "This 23-Year-Old Has Google Sweating; Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook Offers Something Search Doesn't--Distribution," Advertising Age, July 9, 2007, p. 1.
Lacy, Sara, "Facebook Learns from Its Fumble," Business Week Online, September 8, 2006.
------, "Facebook: Opening the Doors Wider," Business Week Online, September 12, 2006.
Levy, Steven, "Facebook Grows Up," Time, August 20, 2007.
Liedtke, Michael, "Build or Sell? Top-Dollar Sales Pose Dilemma for Internet Entrepreneurs," Grand Rapids Press, March 3, 2007, p. B6.
McArthur, Keith, "For Big Brands, a Different Kind of Face Time," Globe & Mail (Toronto), April 28, 2007, p. B3.
McGirt, Ellen, "Hacker. Dropout. CEO," Fast Company, May 2007, p. 74.
Morrissey, Brian, "Facebook Gives New Face to Online Ads," Brandweek, October 2, 2006, p. 11.
------, "Microsoft to Place Ads on Facebook," Adweek Online, August 23, 2006.
Rosenbush, Steve, "Facebook's Changing Fortunes," Business Week Online, November 1, 2006.
Sorkin, Andrew Ross, "The Dress Code Is Relaxed, but the Courting Is Intense," New York Times, November 10, 2006, p. C6.
Stone, Brad, "Facebook to Offer Free Classified Ads Online," New York Times, May 11, 2007, p. C3.
Vara, Vauhini, "Facebook Gets Help from Its Friends," Wall Street Journal, June 22, 2007, p. B1.
Warren, Jamin, and Vara Vauhini, "New Facebook Features Have Members in an Uproar," Wall Street Journal, September 7, 2006, p. B1.
Wolfe, Daniel, "Facebook Adds P-to-P Loans to Networking Site," American Banker, May 29, 2007, p. 17.
— Frederick C. Ingram
How to Close Facebook Wall for Certain People Read more: How to Close Facebook Wall for Certain People
Your Facebook wall displays the posts and links added to your profile by both you and your confirmed friends. By default, Facebook assumes that you want your friends to have access to this information and allows anyone on your friend list to see your wall. To restrict your wall more strictly than the "Friends Only" setting, customize your wall privacy settings so that the wall is hidden from specific people.
Instructions
1
Go to the "Account" link in the top right corner of any Facebook screen and choose "Privacy Preferences" from the drop-down menu.
2
Click on the "Customize settings" link in the "Sharing on Facebook" section of the Privacy Preferences menu.
3
Click on the icon next to "Posts by me" and choose "Customize" from the drop-down menu. Enter the names of the people from whom you want to hide your wall posts in the "Hide this from" field. Click "Save Setting" to update your privacy settings.
4
Scroll down to the "Things others share" section and click on the icon next to "Can see wall posts by friends." Choose "Customize" from the menu and enter the names of people from whom you want to hide others' posts in the "Hide this from" field. Click the "Save Setting" button.
Instructions
1
Go to the "Account" link in the top right corner of any Facebook screen and choose "Privacy Preferences" from the drop-down menu.
2
Click on the "Customize settings" link in the "Sharing on Facebook" section of the Privacy Preferences menu.
3
Click on the icon next to "Posts by me" and choose "Customize" from the drop-down menu. Enter the names of the people from whom you want to hide your wall posts in the "Hide this from" field. Click "Save Setting" to update your privacy settings.
4
Scroll down to the "Things others share" section and click on the icon next to "Can see wall posts by friends." Choose "Customize" from the menu and enter the names of people from whom you want to hide others' posts in the "Hide this from" field. Click the "Save Setting" button.
sabato 22 ottobre 2011
How to Make the Facebook Comment Code Width Smaller Read more: How to Make the Facebook Comment Code Width Smaller
The Facebook Comments box is a social plug-in that webmasters add to websites or blogs to allow Facebook users to comment on the site. When a Facebook user comments on the website, Facebook also publishes this as an activity post on the user's Facebook profile page and homepage news feed. Webmasters add Facebook Comments to each Web page by including a snippet of JavaScript code. By default, the width of the Facebook Comments box is set to span the entire width of the page element in which it is included. To shorten the width of the Facebook Comments box, modify the JavaScript code
Instructions
1
Launch your usual HyperText Markup Language editor, website design software or a plain text editor tool, such as Microsoft WordPad or Notepad.
2
Open the Web page that includes the Facebook Comments box that you want to modify.
3
Scroll to the position of the Facebook Comments code on the page. The code snippet starts with:
4
Find the "
5
Type or paste "width="x"" immediately after "comments" in the first set of brackets. This adds a width attribute to the code. Replace "x" with your preferred width value in screen pixels. For a Facebook Comments box with a width of 300 screen pixels, the final code should look like this:
6
Save the Web page and upload it to your website's host server.
Instructions
1
Launch your usual HyperText Markup Language editor, website design software or a plain text editor tool, such as Microsoft WordPad or Notepad.
2
Open the Web page that includes the Facebook Comments box that you want to modify.
3
Scroll to the position of the Facebook Comments code on the page. The code snippet starts with:
4
Find the "
5
Type or paste "width="x"" immediately after "comments" in the first set of brackets. This adds a width attribute to the code. Replace "x" with your preferred width value in screen pixels. For a Facebook Comments box with a width of 300 screen pixels, the final code should look like this:
6
Save the Web page and upload it to your website's host server.
Facebook Safety Issues
In most cases, an individual’s Facebook friend list consists of people they know in the “real world”. However, at times, there are people that simply have similar interests that you have met once and never seen again. In cases such as these, remember that when you are broadcasting your personal life and information across the social networking world, everyone who is on your friend list is watching. Sure, the website is great for networking and staying in touch with distant friends, but there have been cases of job-loss, lost relationships, and stalking through Facebook. By understanding what is actually occurring when you post anything, and using some common sense, you can ensure that your Facebook experience and that of your children is positive and harmless.
The Danger of Pictures
When your child has a Facebook page, there may be some individuals prowling that you want nowhere near them. Studies have shown that 25% of all teenagers post sexually explicit photographs on social networking sites. This creates a danger that could lead to horrible consequences. There are predators that seek out pages exactly like these and look to create a relationship based on their fantasies. This is a very dangerous position for a young teen.
Information Can Be Dangerous
There have been plenty of cases that exhibit how information can be detrimental to a child’s safety. Posting simple and innocent things like which school they attend can give a sexual predator all the information they need to pursue your child. Keeping their profile private and limiting the personal information that they post can help eliminate some of these threats. Sure, they’re going to be excited about going to the movies with their friends, but posting this information BEFORE they go can be dangerous. Posting the details after can offer a bit safer alternative.
Anyone Can be Anyone Else
On websites like Facebook, there are certain dangers that cannot be avoided. Anyone can upload pictures, falsify information, and create a profile stating that they’re someone else. This technique is used by many pedophiles when attempting to lure potential victims into a “friendship”. How do they do it? It’s simple, actually, which makes it so dangerous. They will create a profile that gives them the disguise of a pre-teen with similar interests to your child. From that point, they will converse with them, and in many cases, nurture a long term relationship before ever revealing their intentions. Explaining this to your children can help immensely.
Facebook offers hundreds of millions of users the ability to stay in touch with friends, express themselves, and at times, make new friends. However, for children, making new friends through a social networking site is simply too dangerous. Having a conversation with your children regarding the dangers of social networking can eliminate much of this risk, but staying diligent will be the only way to gain peace of mind. Create a profile and join your child’s “friend list”. From there, you can monitor their activity to ensure that their experience is a safe one.
The Danger of Pictures
When your child has a Facebook page, there may be some individuals prowling that you want nowhere near them. Studies have shown that 25% of all teenagers post sexually explicit photographs on social networking sites. This creates a danger that could lead to horrible consequences. There are predators that seek out pages exactly like these and look to create a relationship based on their fantasies. This is a very dangerous position for a young teen.
Information Can Be Dangerous
There have been plenty of cases that exhibit how information can be detrimental to a child’s safety. Posting simple and innocent things like which school they attend can give a sexual predator all the information they need to pursue your child. Keeping their profile private and limiting the personal information that they post can help eliminate some of these threats. Sure, they’re going to be excited about going to the movies with their friends, but posting this information BEFORE they go can be dangerous. Posting the details after can offer a bit safer alternative.
Anyone Can be Anyone Else
On websites like Facebook, there are certain dangers that cannot be avoided. Anyone can upload pictures, falsify information, and create a profile stating that they’re someone else. This technique is used by many pedophiles when attempting to lure potential victims into a “friendship”. How do they do it? It’s simple, actually, which makes it so dangerous. They will create a profile that gives them the disguise of a pre-teen with similar interests to your child. From that point, they will converse with them, and in many cases, nurture a long term relationship before ever revealing their intentions. Explaining this to your children can help immensely.
Facebook offers hundreds of millions of users the ability to stay in touch with friends, express themselves, and at times, make new friends. However, for children, making new friends through a social networking site is simply too dangerous. Having a conversation with your children regarding the dangers of social networking can eliminate much of this risk, but staying diligent will be the only way to gain peace of mind. Create a profile and join your child’s “friend list”. From there, you can monitor their activity to ensure that their experience is a safe one.
Facebook Privacy Settings
From protecting your identity to ensuring the safety of your children, there are several privacy settings that Facebook uses to help keep private information private. However, it should be mentioned that if you want to keep things REALLY private, simply don’t upload it to the internet, regardless of how safe a website claims to be. But, understandably so, in the modern world this is becoming increasingly difficult and good luck keeping your children off of Facebook completely without a fight. So, when you know that your child will be using Facebook for socialization, there are some key points that every parent should understand about the website.
Become a User
Many parents have found it helpful to become a Facebook user, if even in a casual sense. Once you understand the basics behind the creation of a profile, the security options available, and the general workings of the website, you’ll have some insight when considering the privacy of your children and their personal information. Take note that at the bottom of every Facebook page there is a “Privacy” tab that will re-direct you to the privacy features involved in the site’s design.
Limited Visibility is a Must
When you are considering all of the information that an online predator may use against your children, think about what is viewable even when the profile is listed as private. Sometimes, a picture and a name is all that is needed, but when a listing of “networks” is given, that could give them just enough insight to send a message and pose as a potential “friend”. The best advice in handling this threat is to turn EVERYTHING off on your child’s profile and work backwards from that point.
Stay Up to Date
Staying up to date on the changes being made to Facebook’s Privacy Settings can help you utilize them to your advantage. Depending on the privacy settings, however, may not give you the comfort you seek, and there’s nothing wrong with having your child simply omit information like their school from their profile. Their friends know who they are, and honestly, that’s enough.
Facebook offers quite a bit to teens and many can navigate the website better than anyone. However, they need to be informed of the dangers involved. Predators masquerading as teens are quite a threat online. If they are not taken seriously, they can be entrenched in a child’s life before anyone realizes what’s happened.
Have conversations with your children about online safety and explore the Facebook Privacy settings on your own. Read them and if anything is unclear, read them again. There are many tools that will hide important information, but nothing is certain. The best remedy is simply not posting this sensitive information online at all, and keeping the profile for contact with people that you and your children already know. As a parent, creating a profile offers a wealth of benefits, so don’t shy away from the site. Learn its capabilities, understand its dangers, and then relay this information to your children.
Become a User
Many parents have found it helpful to become a Facebook user, if even in a casual sense. Once you understand the basics behind the creation of a profile, the security options available, and the general workings of the website, you’ll have some insight when considering the privacy of your children and their personal information. Take note that at the bottom of every Facebook page there is a “Privacy” tab that will re-direct you to the privacy features involved in the site’s design.
Limited Visibility is a Must
When you are considering all of the information that an online predator may use against your children, think about what is viewable even when the profile is listed as private. Sometimes, a picture and a name is all that is needed, but when a listing of “networks” is given, that could give them just enough insight to send a message and pose as a potential “friend”. The best advice in handling this threat is to turn EVERYTHING off on your child’s profile and work backwards from that point.
Stay Up to Date
Staying up to date on the changes being made to Facebook’s Privacy Settings can help you utilize them to your advantage. Depending on the privacy settings, however, may not give you the comfort you seek, and there’s nothing wrong with having your child simply omit information like their school from their profile. Their friends know who they are, and honestly, that’s enough.
Facebook offers quite a bit to teens and many can navigate the website better than anyone. However, they need to be informed of the dangers involved. Predators masquerading as teens are quite a threat online. If they are not taken seriously, they can be entrenched in a child’s life before anyone realizes what’s happened.
Have conversations with your children about online safety and explore the Facebook Privacy settings on your own. Read them and if anything is unclear, read them again. There are many tools that will hide important information, but nothing is certain. The best remedy is simply not posting this sensitive information online at all, and keeping the profile for contact with people that you and your children already know. As a parent, creating a profile offers a wealth of benefits, so don’t shy away from the site. Learn its capabilities, understand its dangers, and then relay this information to your children.
Internet Safety : Facebook 101 For Parents
Facebook is a network that allows you to connect with friends, share photos, videos, and information about yourself with people from the various areas of your life, such as school, work, religion, etc. Many people compare Facebook to MySpace, however, Facebook is the more grown-up version and more secure version of MySpace.
As a parent, the Internet can be a scary thing, and not knowing what your child is doing on the Internet is a bad idea. So, the following is an explanation of the things you can do on Facebook, and as a parent, what you need to know about these various features.
Upload photos: On Facebook you can upload photos so that your friends can view them. This is a nice feature, and a great way to share your life with those who live far away. So, as a parent you want to know that while Facebook does have terms and conditions that prohibit pornographic or really explicit material to be uploaded, this does not mean that it does not happen. So, you will want to make sure that your child is only uploading appropriate photos, and not viewing inappropriate photos others have uploaded. You will also want to help protect them by making sure they do not upload any photos that are going to give away where they can be found; there are Internet predators out there.
Publish notes: On Facebook you can publish notes about yourself, about others, preferences, etc. You will want to make sure that your child does not publish too personal of information. You will also want to have access to your child’s network of friends so that you can see if inappropriate notes are being published.
Get the latest news from your friends: On Facebook there is a feature that can help you see which of your friends have upcoming birthdays, and check out the videos, articles, links and other items your friends are sharing with you. So as a parent, you will want to make sure that the things being shared are appropriate material, and that your child is not sharing things that they should not share.
Post videos on your profile: Facebook allows you to put links to YouTube videos on your profile. This means your child, through Facebook has access to millions of YouTube videos, and they are going to be viewing other people’s videos. As a parent this is important because your child could be clicking links to explicit videos (although there is a policy against that); in addition, they could get viruses, etc.
Tag your friends: This is a feature that allows you to tag when your friends are in one of your pictures, notes, etc. Then when you post something that shows a friend it will also be on their profile on Facebook. You can upload photos and notes from your mobile phone. When you tag your friends in photos, the photos show up in their profiles.
Use privacy settings to control who sees your info: One of things you should know as a parent is that your child can use privacy controls that allow only people in their network to view their profile. They can also limit what some people see. So, you may set up your own profile in order to be able to view your child’s, but they can block you from seeing what they do not want to have you see. One of the huge benefits of Facebook over MySpace is that only your friends and people in your networks can see your profile. Also, you have complete control over the information you post to the site, who sees it, who doesn’t, and you can even set certain pass codes, etc. to allow people to see your information, photos, etc. You can block individuals you don’t want knowing you exist on Facebook, and you can create a Limited Profile to hide certain parts of your profile from specific friends. As a parent, this is hugely important.
The profile: Facebook basically has a home page where you see the activity of your friends, and any activity that came on your profile while you were offline. Then you have a profile page where you have information about yourself like your favorite books, music, movies, etc. Your profile contains your personal info and recent activity. As a parent you will want to watch what information your child posts on their profile.
As a parent, the Internet can be a scary thing, and not knowing what your child is doing on the Internet is a bad idea. So, the following is an explanation of the things you can do on Facebook, and as a parent, what you need to know about these various features.
Upload photos: On Facebook you can upload photos so that your friends can view them. This is a nice feature, and a great way to share your life with those who live far away. So, as a parent you want to know that while Facebook does have terms and conditions that prohibit pornographic or really explicit material to be uploaded, this does not mean that it does not happen. So, you will want to make sure that your child is only uploading appropriate photos, and not viewing inappropriate photos others have uploaded. You will also want to help protect them by making sure they do not upload any photos that are going to give away where they can be found; there are Internet predators out there.
Publish notes: On Facebook you can publish notes about yourself, about others, preferences, etc. You will want to make sure that your child does not publish too personal of information. You will also want to have access to your child’s network of friends so that you can see if inappropriate notes are being published.
Get the latest news from your friends: On Facebook there is a feature that can help you see which of your friends have upcoming birthdays, and check out the videos, articles, links and other items your friends are sharing with you. So as a parent, you will want to make sure that the things being shared are appropriate material, and that your child is not sharing things that they should not share.
Post videos on your profile: Facebook allows you to put links to YouTube videos on your profile. This means your child, through Facebook has access to millions of YouTube videos, and they are going to be viewing other people’s videos. As a parent this is important because your child could be clicking links to explicit videos (although there is a policy against that); in addition, they could get viruses, etc.
Tag your friends: This is a feature that allows you to tag when your friends are in one of your pictures, notes, etc. Then when you post something that shows a friend it will also be on their profile on Facebook. You can upload photos and notes from your mobile phone. When you tag your friends in photos, the photos show up in their profiles.
Use privacy settings to control who sees your info: One of things you should know as a parent is that your child can use privacy controls that allow only people in their network to view their profile. They can also limit what some people see. So, you may set up your own profile in order to be able to view your child’s, but they can block you from seeing what they do not want to have you see. One of the huge benefits of Facebook over MySpace is that only your friends and people in your networks can see your profile. Also, you have complete control over the information you post to the site, who sees it, who doesn’t, and you can even set certain pass codes, etc. to allow people to see your information, photos, etc. You can block individuals you don’t want knowing you exist on Facebook, and you can create a Limited Profile to hide certain parts of your profile from specific friends. As a parent, this is hugely important.
The profile: Facebook basically has a home page where you see the activity of your friends, and any activity that came on your profile while you were offline. Then you have a profile page where you have information about yourself like your favorite books, music, movies, etc. Your profile contains your personal info and recent activity. As a parent you will want to watch what information your child posts on their profile.
MSc Strategy, Innovation
Facebook engineer Gregg Stefancik denied that the company tracked users in a comment on Cubrilovic's blog post. Stefancik said that Facebook alters — but does not delete — cookies when users log out. But he says Facebook does that as a safety measure and does not use the cookies to track users or sell their personal information.
In a statement, Facebook said the logged-out cookies are used to identify spammers and phishers and detect when an unauthorized person is trying to access a user's account, among other things.
Tim Whitlock, chief technology officer and co-founder of Brandfeed, a company that helps promote brands, said users should think through the consequences of sharing personal information on Facebook.
"Most people understand that sites like Facebook are free to use for a reason. It's not because Mark Zuckerberg loves you, it's because Facebook and its peers make money from your data and from your eyeballs," Whitlock wrote. "We need to start thinking beyond what our data is currently used for … and wonder what else the information we hand over today might be used for tomorrow."
In a statement, Facebook said the logged-out cookies are used to identify spammers and phishers and detect when an unauthorized person is trying to access a user's account, among other things.
Tim Whitlock, chief technology officer and co-founder of Brandfeed, a company that helps promote brands, said users should think through the consequences of sharing personal information on Facebook.
"Most people understand that sites like Facebook are free to use for a reason. It's not because Mark Zuckerberg loves you, it's because Facebook and its peers make money from your data and from your eyeballs," Whitlock wrote. "We need to start thinking beyond what our data is currently used for … and wonder what else the information we hand over today might be used for tomorrow."
New Facebook information sharing features cause privacy concerns
Facebook unveiled last week services that make it easier for its 800 million users to share more information about themselves and their lives online. The social networking service showed off a dramatic redesign of users' profiles, a timeline that charts in chronological order all the information users have shared in the past. Facebook also said that third-party applications would — with users' consent — automatically share every action users take, such as the songs they listen to or the videos they watch.
Privacy watchdogs are urging the Federal Trade Commission to look into the new features that they say push users to share more than they may feel comfortable sharing.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the watchdog group Electronic Privacy Information Center, which has criticized Facebook in the past, said he was sending a letter to the FTC pressing his organization's concerns, which he says the agency has so far failed to address.
"It's getting really difficult to evaluate the changes that Facebook makes, and I say that as a privacy professional. I can't imagine what the typical user goes through," Rotenberg said. "Users might opt in to what Facebook is planning to do, but Facebook never gives users that option. It just marches forward and users have to go along."
Facebook did not respond to a request for comment. An agency spokeswoman declined to say if the FTC is investigating Facebook. The FTC does not discuss investigations unless the subject of an inquiry discloses the investigation, she said.
Privacy watchdogs aren't the only ones who say Facebook is stripping away its users' privacy. Writer Ben Barr of technology blog Mashable in a blog post said, "We're at the point of no return."
"Facebook's passive sharing will change how we live our lives. More and more, the things we do in real life will end up as Facebook posts," Parr wrote. "And while we may be consoled by the fact that most of this stuff is being posted just to our friends, it only takes one friend to share that information with his or her friends to start a viral chain."
Facebook says it gives users the ability to control the privacy of their personal information. And it has taken recent steps to give users even greater control.
But it continues to be dogged by privacy concerns as it taps users' information to better target advertising. Advertising sales make up most of the income for Facebook, which is preparing for a highly anticipated initial public offering next year.
With Internet companies gathering huge volumes of personal information, lawmakers and regulators in the U.S. and Europe have stepped up scrutiny.
In March, Google settled with the FTC, which had accused the Internet search giant of engaging in deceptive practices with the rollout of the social networking service called Buzz. Google agreed to put in place a privacy program and to be audited by a third party every other year. Over the summer Google launched another social networking service, Google+, which is seen as a credible competitor to Facebook.
Privacy watchdogs are urging the Federal Trade Commission to look into the new features that they say push users to share more than they may feel comfortable sharing.
Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the watchdog group Electronic Privacy Information Center, which has criticized Facebook in the past, said he was sending a letter to the FTC pressing his organization's concerns, which he says the agency has so far failed to address.
"It's getting really difficult to evaluate the changes that Facebook makes, and I say that as a privacy professional. I can't imagine what the typical user goes through," Rotenberg said. "Users might opt in to what Facebook is planning to do, but Facebook never gives users that option. It just marches forward and users have to go along."
Facebook did not respond to a request for comment. An agency spokeswoman declined to say if the FTC is investigating Facebook. The FTC does not discuss investigations unless the subject of an inquiry discloses the investigation, she said.
Privacy watchdogs aren't the only ones who say Facebook is stripping away its users' privacy. Writer Ben Barr of technology blog Mashable in a blog post said, "We're at the point of no return."
"Facebook's passive sharing will change how we live our lives. More and more, the things we do in real life will end up as Facebook posts," Parr wrote. "And while we may be consoled by the fact that most of this stuff is being posted just to our friends, it only takes one friend to share that information with his or her friends to start a viral chain."
Facebook says it gives users the ability to control the privacy of their personal information. And it has taken recent steps to give users even greater control.
But it continues to be dogged by privacy concerns as it taps users' information to better target advertising. Advertising sales make up most of the income for Facebook, which is preparing for a highly anticipated initial public offering next year.
With Internet companies gathering huge volumes of personal information, lawmakers and regulators in the U.S. and Europe have stepped up scrutiny.
In March, Google settled with the FTC, which had accused the Internet search giant of engaging in deceptive practices with the rollout of the social networking service called Buzz. Google agreed to put in place a privacy program and to be audited by a third party every other year. Over the summer Google launched another social networking service, Google+, which is seen as a credible competitor to Facebook.
TechEncyclopedia: Facebook
The most popular social networking site. Founded in 2004 by Mark Zuckerberg, the site is free and derives revenue from ads. The name comes from the paper document with names and faces issued to college freshmen to help them get acquainted with each other. Using the search facilities, members can locate other Facebook members and "friend" them by sending them an invitation, or they can invite people to join Facebook (see Faceslam). Facebook offers instant messaging and photo sharing, and Facebook's e-mail is the only messaging system many students ever use.
The "Wall" is the area on Facebook where members post comments as well as receive postings from friends (see Facebook Wall).
Profiles, Pages and Groups
There are three types of representation on Facebook. Individuals create a Facebook "Profile," which is normally a two-way interaction with friends. Businesses create a Facebook "Page" to promote products and brands. Also called a "Fan Page," all members are accepted as fans, and although comments can be posted by them, a Page is primarily a one-way broadcast from the business. In addition, Facebook provides demographic statistics about usage. See Facebook Like.
The third presence is a Facebook "Group," and any community of people may create one. Group administrators may accept all members or reject requests based on the Group's criteria.
Explosive Growth
Initially targeting Harvard students, Facebook was later opened to other universities and then high schools. In 2006, it allowed everyone to join and added a News Feed feature that would broadcast changes in members' pages to all Facebook users identified in their network of friends. It turned Facebook into a personalized social news service that by 2010 had 500 million members.
Facebook Platform
In 2007, Facebook introduced its application platform to developers. By 2010, more than a half million applications were available for business, education and entertainment. Games have been the most popular, and Facebook Credits were created to provide virtual money to spend while playing. See Facebook Platform.
Beacon Social Ads
In late 2007, Facebook introduced its Beacon social advertising program, which tracks Facebook users who visit advertisers' sites. Ads are then targeted to others indicating that their friend has purchased a product, rented a video or signed up for a service. The system was launched as opt-out in the beginning but later changed to opt-in. See social networking site, social advertising, opt-in and opt-out.
The "Wall" is the area on Facebook where members post comments as well as receive postings from friends (see Facebook Wall).
Profiles, Pages and Groups
There are three types of representation on Facebook. Individuals create a Facebook "Profile," which is normally a two-way interaction with friends. Businesses create a Facebook "Page" to promote products and brands. Also called a "Fan Page," all members are accepted as fans, and although comments can be posted by them, a Page is primarily a one-way broadcast from the business. In addition, Facebook provides demographic statistics about usage. See Facebook Like.
The third presence is a Facebook "Group," and any community of people may create one. Group administrators may accept all members or reject requests based on the Group's criteria.
Explosive Growth
Initially targeting Harvard students, Facebook was later opened to other universities and then high schools. In 2006, it allowed everyone to join and added a News Feed feature that would broadcast changes in members' pages to all Facebook users identified in their network of friends. It turned Facebook into a personalized social news service that by 2010 had 500 million members.
Facebook Platform
In 2007, Facebook introduced its application platform to developers. By 2010, more than a half million applications were available for business, education and entertainment. Games have been the most popular, and Facebook Credits were created to provide virtual money to spend while playing. See Facebook Platform.
Beacon Social Ads
In late 2007, Facebook introduced its Beacon social advertising program, which tracks Facebook users who visit advertisers' sites. Ads are then targeted to others indicating that their friend has purchased a product, rented a video or signed up for a service. The system was launched as opt-out in the beginning but later changed to opt-in. See social networking site, social advertising, opt-in and opt-out.
How to Get the Code of My Facebook Group ID Read more: How to Get the Code of My Facebook Group ID
The Facebook Groups feature gives everyone the ability to create a virtual "club" of friends on the site. You can start a Group based on a particular interest, cause, social group, relationship or association. As well as having a name, a Group also has a unique numerical ID that identifies its location on the Facebook domain. You can share your Group link with anyone, but what they see will depend on the privacy settings for that Group.
Instructions
1
Sign in to your Facebook account. Make sure you are on the "Home" page.
2
Look on the left side of the page to find your Groups list. Your Groups have a yellow icon with silhouettes next to their names. Click the Group's name. If you do not see the Group you are looking for, click "See All" below the list.
3
Look in your Web browser's URL bar to see the Group's Web address. The browser's URL bar is the long white bar located above the browsing area and the toolbar. Click the text with the mouse to select it and press "CTRL+C" to copy the URL to the clipboard. You can also right-click the Group link in the Groups list and click "Copy Link Location."
4
Create a message in Facebook Messages, Chat or anywhere you want to share your Group link. Press "CTRL+V" to paste the link.
Instructions
1
Sign in to your Facebook account. Make sure you are on the "Home" page.
2
Look on the left side of the page to find your Groups list. Your Groups have a yellow icon with silhouettes next to their names. Click the Group's name. If you do not see the Group you are looking for, click "See All" below the list.
3
Look in your Web browser's URL bar to see the Group's Web address. The browser's URL bar is the long white bar located above the browsing area and the toolbar. Click the text with the mouse to select it and press "CTRL+C" to copy the URL to the clipboard. You can also right-click the Group link in the Groups list and click "Copy Link Location."
4
Create a message in Facebook Messages, Chat or anywhere you want to share your Group link. Press "CTRL+V" to paste the link.
How to Disable Facebook Emails From Groups
If you are a member of only a few Facebook groups and want to keep up-to-date with what occurs in those groups, opting to receive emails from the groups can be helpful. If, however, you are a member of many groups, the groups are active or your friends frequently add you to groups or adjust groups you are in, these emails can become an annoyance. If you find this to be true, do not leave the groups just to get out of the emails. Instead, disable Facebook emails from groups.
Instructions
Administrative Group Notifications
1
Click the "Account" link at the top right of any page on Facebook, and then select "Account Settings" from the drop-down menu.
2
Click the "Notifications" option that appears in the left panel of the Account Settings page.
3
Click "Groups" in the "All Notifications" section. This displays a list of options for when to receive emails from groups.
4
Remove the checks from all the boxes in this section.
5
Click the blue "Save Changes" button to save your changes and stop receiving group administrative emails.
Individual Notifications
1
Navigate to the Facebook group from which you no longer wish to receive email notifications.
2
Click the "Edit Settings" button at the top of the group page.
3
Remove the check from the box beside "Also send an email to: [your email address]."
4
Click the "Save Settings" button to save this change.
Instructions
Administrative Group Notifications
1
Click the "Account" link at the top right of any page on Facebook, and then select "Account Settings" from the drop-down menu.
2
Click the "Notifications" option that appears in the left panel of the Account Settings page.
3
Click "Groups" in the "All Notifications" section. This displays a list of options for when to receive emails from groups.
4
Remove the checks from all the boxes in this section.
5
Click the blue "Save Changes" button to save your changes and stop receiving group administrative emails.
Individual Notifications
1
Navigate to the Facebook group from which you no longer wish to receive email notifications.
2
Click the "Edit Settings" button at the top of the group page.
3
Remove the check from the box beside "Also send an email to: [your email address]."
4
Click the "Save Settings" button to save this change.
venerdì 21 ottobre 2011
Facebook Privacy
If you are into social networking, Facebook is a website where you can get in touch with families and friends even if they are at the other side of the globe. You can easily search for your friends so you would get to exchange messages and share photos in an instant. Usually, Facebook users update their status often so that others will know their feelings and the latest happenings about them. Whenever there is an update on their account, their friends will immediately see it just like a news feed. Because of this, many Facebook users were concerned about their privacy since there is a free access to their information.
Some people said that Facebook can be a great tool for stalking. Even without exerting effort, you can see all the news feeds about your Facebook contacts as soon as you log in your own account. While others are glad to have this feature as it allows them to stay updated with their family and friends, other users think that the news feeds are just giving away so much details about them.
If you are a Facebook user and you don't want most of your information to be seen by your contacts, you can always control your privacy settings. Limit the people who can view your profile, photos, and you can even choose which part of your Facebook profile is viewable. You can choose which part of your profile can be viewed by your family and which details are viewable by your friends.
Recently, Facebook announced that search engines can gain access in a member's profile. But the user has the option whether they would like their names to appear or not by changing their privacy settings.
Thanks to the power of the Intenet, we are now living in a smaller world. There are now different forms of communications so you could get in touch with your friends and families effortlessly. It is just up to you how much information you would like to share and how much you would like to keep as a private detail.
Some people said that Facebook can be a great tool for stalking. Even without exerting effort, you can see all the news feeds about your Facebook contacts as soon as you log in your own account. While others are glad to have this feature as it allows them to stay updated with their family and friends, other users think that the news feeds are just giving away so much details about them.
If you are a Facebook user and you don't want most of your information to be seen by your contacts, you can always control your privacy settings. Limit the people who can view your profile, photos, and you can even choose which part of your Facebook profile is viewable. You can choose which part of your profile can be viewed by your family and which details are viewable by your friends.
Recently, Facebook announced that search engines can gain access in a member's profile. But the user has the option whether they would like their names to appear or not by changing their privacy settings.
Thanks to the power of the Intenet, we are now living in a smaller world. There are now different forms of communications so you could get in touch with your friends and families effortlessly. It is just up to you how much information you would like to share and how much you would like to keep as a private detail.
AnswerNote: Facebook
Facebook ( www.facebook.com) is an online social networking directory that connects people with friends and others who work, study and live around them. People use Facebook to keep up with friends, upload an unlimited number of photos, share links and videos, and learn more about the people they meet.
Created and launched in February 2004 by Harvard students Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, the site began as a network strictly for Harvard University. Two months later, the site expanded to include other Ivy League schools. After that, the college network slowly grew and by the end of 2004, Facebook had registered more than one million users.
Now open to anyone with a valid email address, the site includes members' pictures, biographies, interests and messages, and members can browse freely through open profiles. Members may choose their personal levels of security to prevent strangers from accessing their personal information.
The platform enables anyone, anywhere, to build complete applications that members can choose to use. Applications range from photo sharing to graffiti walls and everything in between.
Created and launched in February 2004 by Harvard students Mark Zuckerberg, Eduardo Saverin, Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes, the site began as a network strictly for Harvard University. Two months later, the site expanded to include other Ivy League schools. After that, the college network slowly grew and by the end of 2004, Facebook had registered more than one million users.
Now open to anyone with a valid email address, the site includes members' pictures, biographies, interests and messages, and members can browse freely through open profiles. Members may choose their personal levels of security to prevent strangers from accessing their personal information.
The platform enables anyone, anywhere, to build complete applications that members can choose to use. Applications range from photo sharing to graffiti walls and everything in between.
How to Make Bold Words on Facebook Message Read more: How to Make Bold Words on Facebook Message
One of the features of Facebook Message is the ability to insert bold text into the chat window. By entering a special code immediately before and after inputting text, you can instruct the Facebook Message application to bold text within a chat conversation. Bolding text allows you to emphasize a point or call attention to specific text within the conversation. Bolding text is a unique feature of the Facebook Message application, and other applications within Facebook do not have the same ability to bold text.
Instructions
1
Go to the Facebook.com home page and log in.
2
Click the "Chat" tab, located at the bottom-right of the Facebook window.
3
Select the Facebook friend with whom you want to open a Facebook Message chat window.
4
Type a message and surround the text you want to appear in bold with asterisk symbols. For example, enter "I want to *bold this text*" in the chat window.
Instructions
1
Go to the Facebook.com home page and log in.
2
Click the "Chat" tab, located at the bottom-right of the Facebook window.
3
Select the Facebook friend with whom you want to open a Facebook Message chat window.
4
Type a message and surround the text you want to appear in bold with asterisk symbols. For example, enter "I want to *bold this text*" in the chat window.
Unblock Facebook info
Because of the popularity of online community websites, it made a rush of employees, faculties, and alike to access these websites even if they are at school or at work. As a result, they become less productive. This is not good for their work performance and of course, not good for the company whom they are working for. The company loses a huge amount of revenue every time an employee or two are being incompetent and less productive in what they do. To address this matter, companies thought they have to do something. They hired computer experts to create something that would block the websites in their networks including Facebook and Myspace.
Because of the latest niche markets, the changing technology is nothing new. Technology today rapidly grows in order to make solutions to little glitches or problems in the trend. If you want to know important steps and relevant guidelines that would allow you to unblock a certain website, simply visit the website of your favorite search engine. In Google, for example, you can type in the keywords unblock facebook. Once you prompt these words in the search box and click Search or key in Enter, you will be surprise to see how many results would appear with two simple words. There are numerous websites that could help you resolve the current web problem that you are having while you are at your office, at school, and even at your home. The quickest and the simplest thing to do is to download a software that would help you in your current dilemma. It can unblock the online community websites that you want to access in a matter of minutes. Taking a minute of your time to do this little research can go a long way. It actually does not matter whether you got a software that can be downloaded for free or you are willing to charge your credit card with this software that could unblock the website. All that matters is that it really works!
If you go for the software that would require you to pay a small fee, you would probably want something that has frequent updates. These software updates can guarantee you that you can still use it efficiently as time pass by. The process of updating the software would never end. This is because as more and more people are learning how to unblock facebook or ant other website, programmers would find ways how to bring the block once again. As a result, there would always be a struggle between those who want to block and those who want to unblock. And because of this, new strategies must be formed with proxies or proxy servers daily. The most important thing here is that you should know how to stay on top of the struggle.
The Facebook Proxy can let you access the website of the famous online community even if it is already blocked in your company or school’s network. There is no need to install an unblocking software of any sort. The concept of Facebook Proxy does not require you to buy any kind of software either. You can access the website of Facebook by bypassing the block that is placed on the internet browser every time you key in the URL of the site. It avoids the block while at the same time keeping it in place so that you can log in to your Facebook account without getting caught. As the Facebook Proxy uses a different server, your identity will be left unknown. Thus, the person in charge of placing the block in your school or office would not actually know that it is you who did it.
Because of the several different options that are available for unblocking a website, sometimes it can be really useless to block it especially if your employees or students are very much determined. A simple keyword and a click of a button is all it takes to get the solutions that you have for this website blocking problem. This is not only available for the users and fanatics of Facebook. They can also do the same if they want to access other online community websites. Technology changes so fast. And because of these innovations everyone can gain access to the website of their choice, a big thanks to search engines. Make use of what the World Wide Web has to offer. An hour or two spent on researching would allow you to know the latest unblocking techniques. So by the time you can’t refuse the urge to open your Facebook account and see who gave you a message or comment for that day, try using the strategies mentioned in this article or research a new one that will simply work for you.
Because of the latest niche markets, the changing technology is nothing new. Technology today rapidly grows in order to make solutions to little glitches or problems in the trend. If you want to know important steps and relevant guidelines that would allow you to unblock a certain website, simply visit the website of your favorite search engine. In Google, for example, you can type in the keywords unblock facebook. Once you prompt these words in the search box and click Search or key in Enter, you will be surprise to see how many results would appear with two simple words. There are numerous websites that could help you resolve the current web problem that you are having while you are at your office, at school, and even at your home. The quickest and the simplest thing to do is to download a software that would help you in your current dilemma. It can unblock the online community websites that you want to access in a matter of minutes. Taking a minute of your time to do this little research can go a long way. It actually does not matter whether you got a software that can be downloaded for free or you are willing to charge your credit card with this software that could unblock the website. All that matters is that it really works!
If you go for the software that would require you to pay a small fee, you would probably want something that has frequent updates. These software updates can guarantee you that you can still use it efficiently as time pass by. The process of updating the software would never end. This is because as more and more people are learning how to unblock facebook or ant other website, programmers would find ways how to bring the block once again. As a result, there would always be a struggle between those who want to block and those who want to unblock. And because of this, new strategies must be formed with proxies or proxy servers daily. The most important thing here is that you should know how to stay on top of the struggle.
The Facebook Proxy can let you access the website of the famous online community even if it is already blocked in your company or school’s network. There is no need to install an unblocking software of any sort. The concept of Facebook Proxy does not require you to buy any kind of software either. You can access the website of Facebook by bypassing the block that is placed on the internet browser every time you key in the URL of the site. It avoids the block while at the same time keeping it in place so that you can log in to your Facebook account without getting caught. As the Facebook Proxy uses a different server, your identity will be left unknown. Thus, the person in charge of placing the block in your school or office would not actually know that it is you who did it.
Because of the several different options that are available for unblocking a website, sometimes it can be really useless to block it especially if your employees or students are very much determined. A simple keyword and a click of a button is all it takes to get the solutions that you have for this website blocking problem. This is not only available for the users and fanatics of Facebook. They can also do the same if they want to access other online community websites. Technology changes so fast. And because of these innovations everyone can gain access to the website of their choice, a big thanks to search engines. Make use of what the World Wide Web has to offer. An hour or two spent on researching would allow you to know the latest unblocking techniques. So by the time you can’t refuse the urge to open your Facebook account and see who gave you a message or comment for that day, try using the strategies mentioned in this article or research a new one that will simply work for you.
giovedì 20 ottobre 2011
mySAP Security
If you want to make this strategy work efficiently, you must create an alias or a pen name. You may only face a problem if in case the website that you want to access would ask you specific details such as the school e-mail address or you company e-mail address. In case you encounter such, try to look for another alternative. You may try creating a different e-mail or getting a new one. Whenever you put this strategy into action, nobody can trace what you have been doing in the World Wide Web. Moreover, this strategy also gives the users a better security by protecting its privacy whenever they use any of the online community websites in the internet.
Browse the World Wide Web and see for yourself how many websites give relevant details about the Facebook Proxy. However, it can be quite difficult if you are looking for ways on how to have alternative identities. If you want another option, you may try changing the IP address of your computer so that you can protect your privacy as well as your identity whenever you visit any social networking sites on the internet. There are also various blogs that can help you with your research. These are the blogs that are dedicated to inform the public about privacy and security. The only way that could help you in this situation is by doing an intensive research. Do not rush. Take your time asking and browsing what other people who are in a situation like yours is doing. In this way, you can compare what works and what can be done easily. You will be surprised to know that you are already on the right track (and on the right website) with the help of these proxies.
Browse the World Wide Web and see for yourself how many websites give relevant details about the Facebook Proxy. However, it can be quite difficult if you are looking for ways on how to have alternative identities. If you want another option, you may try changing the IP address of your computer so that you can protect your privacy as well as your identity whenever you visit any social networking sites on the internet. There are also various blogs that can help you with your research. These are the blogs that are dedicated to inform the public about privacy and security. The only way that could help you in this situation is by doing an intensive research. Do not rush. Take your time asking and browsing what other people who are in a situation like yours is doing. In this way, you can compare what works and what can be done easily. You will be surprised to know that you are already on the right track (and on the right website) with the help of these proxies.
Marketing on Facebook
Marketing yourself or your business through Facebook is no longer a shocking practice. In fact, many people are doing it and even more are planning on doing it everyday. Facebook is an online social community and the term "social community" rings the bell for those who are into marketing. With an online social community, you can display your profile to all the other members of Facebook. It’s a page that will showcase who you are and therefore, you could put this into good use. There are many ways that you can use Facebook for marketing yourself or your business. Let's discuss this one by one and start off discussing about advertising.
For advertising, you can try some of these advertising opportunities with Facebook and you will surely get good response:
You can sponsor your own Facebook group. Buy a group link on Facebook and put ad contents on its message boards and other pages. When your Facebook group is very interesting, many people would want to join in and participate. This way, you'd get good hits for your ads. If you don’t have an interesting group though, you wouldn’t get many members joining in and eventually it would be inactive.
There are Facebook Groups that you can use to target your audience. People join groups because they feel like they belong there and they can discuss about a specific topic. This is a great way to advertise yourself or your business as well and it's especially useful because you have a targeted audience.
You can use the Facebook AceBucks to your advantage. It's a great way to advertise by making your own surveys or games there that you can use as a promotion tool. The more people answering the surveys or playing games, the more exposure you get.
If you are great in developing applications, you can make your own Facebook application and sell it. If your application is really good, an interested party would want to buy it from you and you earn big bucks!
You can buy your own adspace on Facebook. There are over 40 million Facebook members and it keeps on growing. If you post an ad on Facebook, you will surely get lots of hits and you can increase your business through this.
Each account has their own profile page. Use yours to your advantage. You can post your company's logo as a picture and add information about your company to your Facebook account. You can create a personal account and advertise yourself there or you can create an account for your company. There is no limitation really and you get to market yourself or your business this way with ease.
You can post your URL through your Facebook Badge. It is customizable so you can post your link there so your Facebook friends can quickly see your site's URL through your Badge.
Utilize the Facebook FunWall. It's like a bulletin where you could post just about anything and send it to all your Facebook friends. You can post there about what you want to offer or what you want to buy and everyone on your friends’ list will be notified.
You can use your profile page on Facebook as your own website as well. How? There are so many applications that you can use and you can use each one to advertise yourself or your company. With your profile, you could tell a lot about your company and about your services to all the viewers. You can add your contact numbers there and other important information that you would include on a regular website. A Facebook page won’t cost you a thing. No hosting and no domain cost for you!
Also, there are several Facebook applications and add-ons that you can use for your marketing strategy. Here are just some of these applications and add-ons that you can try.
Facebook Social ads are like a News Feed that reaches to your friends and their friends and their friends' friends and so on. It can be targeted to the right people. The ads can be viewed by your friends and even their friends too. By having a Facebook Social ads, all you need to do is to write an add, make it very creative and interesting then you choose the crowd that you want the ad to be advertised to. You buy these ads through CPC or CPM just like any ads such as Google Ads. You will get a demographic of your ads through the Facebook Insights so you’ll know how many people have viewed your ads.
Facebook Beacon is another nice application for marketing your business. You can use this to connect your company's site to your customer's Facebook profiles. It's easy and usually, if your customers are happy with your products or services, they'd be happy to add your link to their profile as well as include details such as what they bought from you and such.
Ether is a great application to add to your Facebook page. This allows viewers to call you through your Facebook page. You'd be charged by the call every time someone calls you through Ether.
If you are in search of employees, you can use Facebook for this as well. There is the Jobster application that you can add to your Facebook profile so everyone who wishes to join your company can click this and apply directly through your Facebook profile.
Facebook is growing at an amazing rate and many people are already using it to their advantage by marketing their company or even themselves through the site. You must make sure you know what Facebook can offer you and invest on ads and other marketing tools when you already know what you can get from it. There are free ways to advertise on Facebook as well and you can reach as many people as you have added on your Friends list. Facebook is a great online community and just like any other community you must treat it with respect so that everyone else would respect you and be interested in you and your services. Use it wisely and know when to advertise and don't overdo it.
If you can use Facebook, you can also use other social networking site to market your company or yourself. They have different utilizations but they all can be used for marketing. With all the hype about social networking, it's no wonder why it's becoming very effective for marketing. Everybody wants to join a social networking site. The more popular the site, the more people get interests in it, especially business people who wants to use the site's popularity to their advantage. Don’t be left behind and make use of your Facebook account to gain more company exposure and revenues.
For advertising, you can try some of these advertising opportunities with Facebook and you will surely get good response:
You can sponsor your own Facebook group. Buy a group link on Facebook and put ad contents on its message boards and other pages. When your Facebook group is very interesting, many people would want to join in and participate. This way, you'd get good hits for your ads. If you don’t have an interesting group though, you wouldn’t get many members joining in and eventually it would be inactive.
There are Facebook Groups that you can use to target your audience. People join groups because they feel like they belong there and they can discuss about a specific topic. This is a great way to advertise yourself or your business as well and it's especially useful because you have a targeted audience.
You can use the Facebook AceBucks to your advantage. It's a great way to advertise by making your own surveys or games there that you can use as a promotion tool. The more people answering the surveys or playing games, the more exposure you get.
If you are great in developing applications, you can make your own Facebook application and sell it. If your application is really good, an interested party would want to buy it from you and you earn big bucks!
You can buy your own adspace on Facebook. There are over 40 million Facebook members and it keeps on growing. If you post an ad on Facebook, you will surely get lots of hits and you can increase your business through this.
Each account has their own profile page. Use yours to your advantage. You can post your company's logo as a picture and add information about your company to your Facebook account. You can create a personal account and advertise yourself there or you can create an account for your company. There is no limitation really and you get to market yourself or your business this way with ease.
You can post your URL through your Facebook Badge. It is customizable so you can post your link there so your Facebook friends can quickly see your site's URL through your Badge.
Utilize the Facebook FunWall. It's like a bulletin where you could post just about anything and send it to all your Facebook friends. You can post there about what you want to offer or what you want to buy and everyone on your friends’ list will be notified.
You can use your profile page on Facebook as your own website as well. How? There are so many applications that you can use and you can use each one to advertise yourself or your company. With your profile, you could tell a lot about your company and about your services to all the viewers. You can add your contact numbers there and other important information that you would include on a regular website. A Facebook page won’t cost you a thing. No hosting and no domain cost for you!
Also, there are several Facebook applications and add-ons that you can use for your marketing strategy. Here are just some of these applications and add-ons that you can try.
Facebook Social ads are like a News Feed that reaches to your friends and their friends and their friends' friends and so on. It can be targeted to the right people. The ads can be viewed by your friends and even their friends too. By having a Facebook Social ads, all you need to do is to write an add, make it very creative and interesting then you choose the crowd that you want the ad to be advertised to. You buy these ads through CPC or CPM just like any ads such as Google Ads. You will get a demographic of your ads through the Facebook Insights so you’ll know how many people have viewed your ads.
Facebook Beacon is another nice application for marketing your business. You can use this to connect your company's site to your customer's Facebook profiles. It's easy and usually, if your customers are happy with your products or services, they'd be happy to add your link to their profile as well as include details such as what they bought from you and such.
Ether is a great application to add to your Facebook page. This allows viewers to call you through your Facebook page. You'd be charged by the call every time someone calls you through Ether.
If you are in search of employees, you can use Facebook for this as well. There is the Jobster application that you can add to your Facebook profile so everyone who wishes to join your company can click this and apply directly through your Facebook profile.
Facebook is growing at an amazing rate and many people are already using it to their advantage by marketing their company or even themselves through the site. You must make sure you know what Facebook can offer you and invest on ads and other marketing tools when you already know what you can get from it. There are free ways to advertise on Facebook as well and you can reach as many people as you have added on your Friends list. Facebook is a great online community and just like any other community you must treat it with respect so that everyone else would respect you and be interested in you and your services. Use it wisely and know when to advertise and don't overdo it.
If you can use Facebook, you can also use other social networking site to market your company or yourself. They have different utilizations but they all can be used for marketing. With all the hype about social networking, it's no wonder why it's becoming very effective for marketing. Everybody wants to join a social networking site. The more popular the site, the more people get interests in it, especially business people who wants to use the site's popularity to their advantage. Don’t be left behind and make use of your Facebook account to gain more company exposure and revenues.
Facebook also have several fun addons
Facebook Video Poker lets you play your favorite casino game of video poker right at your own Facebook home page. It’s fun but it can be boring to those who ain't interested in poker.
Facebook Pokey! Is a very fun application for all the dog lovers out there. Here you can feed and play with your Pokey dog. There are several dog breeds to choose from and you can pick your background for your Pokey dog as well. If you are being charitable, you can feed the other hungry Pokey dogs as well and you'd get bone rewards for feeding those poor little virtual puppies.
Facebook Gifts is a great application to give virtual gifts to your friends. Touch their hearts by giving virtual gifts. You may be far away but it’s no reason not to give a special gift to your friends, right?
Make a Baby is a fun application that is somewhat similar to Pokey! Here you can make a virtual baby and play and feed your virtual baby to make it happy!
Chuck Norris is a fun application that lets you add different "facts" about Chuck Norris. Don't know why they are picking on Chuck Norris but, all in all this is a funny game.
Fridge Magnet is a fun application that lets your friends rearrange the magnets on your fridge. You can definitely have a great laugh out of this. Who knows what your friends want to leave on your fridge! Let's just hope they won’t reveal your secrets through your Fridge Magnet!
Are you a fan of glitters? You can try the Glitter Text application. With the Glitter Text application you can add texts in glitters. Your profiles would look really nice. Guess it’s more appropriate to all ladies than it would be to guys. But, of course guys can also use this application to liven up their profiles.
Hot or Not is a fun application and it would be great if you were given the Hot nod from other facebook users but it would be embarrassing to receive several Not nods from Facebook users. It’s barbaric but who says fun can’t be barbaric?
LOLcat is a nice application for cat lovers. Would you want a virtual kitty?
Virtual iPhone is for obsessed iPhone fanatics who unfortunately can’t have their very own iPhone. Enjoy your virtual iPhone as if it’s real. Explore it so you can brag to your friends about its different features as if you really have one.
Enjoy playing Blackjack with your Facebook accounts as well. It’s pretty basic, very simple game that you can enjoy while browsing over your friends.
Want to play chess? You can enjoy playing chess against your Facebook friends by adding this fun application.
Play Pacman on your Facebook account. It's a classic arcade game that is never boring.
Play Street Fighter the Facebook way. No, you won't play with the real street fighter characters but rather, Stick Fighter characters would be just as good. Enjoy your Stick Fighter application and share it with your friends.
Facebook Vampires is fun because you can turn your friends into really ugly and scary-looking vampires! How would you want to turn your friends into? Scary vampires or hot and poshy vampires? Up to you!
Facebook Web Sudoku gives you daily puzzles so you won't play with the same Sudoku puzzle again and again. It's fun and very challenging.
Zombies! Turn your friends into zombies by biting them. This is a fun application that is a must-have. Turn your friends into zombies and walk the Earth!
Last.fm Music is a popular application for Facebook and other similar sites. You can create your own music playlist and share it with everyone who views your profile.
Have fun chatting with your Facebook friends through the My Chatroom application. Add a chatroom to your profile and everyone who wish to chat with you can just open your profile and chat on! It’s fun especially if there are lots of you logging in.
Tired of chatting and want to voice chat? You can add SkypeMe and enjoy the Skype functionality straight from your Facebook account.
You can also share your current mood to your facebook friends as well. It's already a part of your Facebook account and you don't need to add this one anymore. It lets your friends know what type of mood you have. You can use emoticons for this.
The list can just go on and on and there are many websites offering different Facebook applications that you can try. Enjoy logging in to your Facebook accounts by adding your favorite addons, tools, plugins or application. It’s fun and very relaxing.
Facebook Pokey! Is a very fun application for all the dog lovers out there. Here you can feed and play with your Pokey dog. There are several dog breeds to choose from and you can pick your background for your Pokey dog as well. If you are being charitable, you can feed the other hungry Pokey dogs as well and you'd get bone rewards for feeding those poor little virtual puppies.
Facebook Gifts is a great application to give virtual gifts to your friends. Touch their hearts by giving virtual gifts. You may be far away but it’s no reason not to give a special gift to your friends, right?
Make a Baby is a fun application that is somewhat similar to Pokey! Here you can make a virtual baby and play and feed your virtual baby to make it happy!
Chuck Norris is a fun application that lets you add different "facts" about Chuck Norris. Don't know why they are picking on Chuck Norris but, all in all this is a funny game.
Fridge Magnet is a fun application that lets your friends rearrange the magnets on your fridge. You can definitely have a great laugh out of this. Who knows what your friends want to leave on your fridge! Let's just hope they won’t reveal your secrets through your Fridge Magnet!
Are you a fan of glitters? You can try the Glitter Text application. With the Glitter Text application you can add texts in glitters. Your profiles would look really nice. Guess it’s more appropriate to all ladies than it would be to guys. But, of course guys can also use this application to liven up their profiles.
Hot or Not is a fun application and it would be great if you were given the Hot nod from other facebook users but it would be embarrassing to receive several Not nods from Facebook users. It’s barbaric but who says fun can’t be barbaric?
LOLcat is a nice application for cat lovers. Would you want a virtual kitty?
Virtual iPhone is for obsessed iPhone fanatics who unfortunately can’t have their very own iPhone. Enjoy your virtual iPhone as if it’s real. Explore it so you can brag to your friends about its different features as if you really have one.
Enjoy playing Blackjack with your Facebook accounts as well. It’s pretty basic, very simple game that you can enjoy while browsing over your friends.
Want to play chess? You can enjoy playing chess against your Facebook friends by adding this fun application.
Play Pacman on your Facebook account. It's a classic arcade game that is never boring.
Play Street Fighter the Facebook way. No, you won't play with the real street fighter characters but rather, Stick Fighter characters would be just as good. Enjoy your Stick Fighter application and share it with your friends.
Facebook Vampires is fun because you can turn your friends into really ugly and scary-looking vampires! How would you want to turn your friends into? Scary vampires or hot and poshy vampires? Up to you!
Facebook Web Sudoku gives you daily puzzles so you won't play with the same Sudoku puzzle again and again. It's fun and very challenging.
Zombies! Turn your friends into zombies by biting them. This is a fun application that is a must-have. Turn your friends into zombies and walk the Earth!
Last.fm Music is a popular application for Facebook and other similar sites. You can create your own music playlist and share it with everyone who views your profile.
Have fun chatting with your Facebook friends through the My Chatroom application. Add a chatroom to your profile and everyone who wish to chat with you can just open your profile and chat on! It’s fun especially if there are lots of you logging in.
Tired of chatting and want to voice chat? You can add SkypeMe and enjoy the Skype functionality straight from your Facebook account.
You can also share your current mood to your facebook friends as well. It's already a part of your Facebook account and you don't need to add this one anymore. It lets your friends know what type of mood you have. You can use emoticons for this.
The list can just go on and on and there are many websites offering different Facebook applications that you can try. Enjoy logging in to your Facebook accounts by adding your favorite addons, tools, plugins or application. It’s fun and very relaxing.
Google+ traffic drops 60 percent?
Even after Google+ dropped its invite-only system and opened itself to a curious public, its traffic fell by more than 60 percent after an initial surge of 1,200 percent.
Chitika Insights, the research arm of online ad service Chitika, found that Google+ increased its user base, but the effect was only temporary. They "took a look at Google+ before and after it went public to see if the social network was living up to the hype." In terms of page views, the site spiked when it went public, and then went down again.
Before Google+ went public in mid-September, it had already intrigued 25 million users, and rabid trackers said the numbers are more like 43 million by now. The uptick in traffic following the opening of the site seemed to indicate that Google+ had just gained more lives.
Live Poll
Are you active on Google+?
YES. I like it better than Facebook and I'm here to stay.
YES. I like it, but I'm still on Facebook most of the time.
NO. I'm not on it. I've accepted that Facebook rules the world.
NO. I'm not on any social media site.
View Results
"It would appear that although high levels of publicity were able to draw new traffic to Google+, few of them saw reason to stay," said Chitka, in its report released Friday.
Chitika asks the question many of us might: "Given the huge amount of publicity and resources Google+ has received, why hasn’t the social network taken off?"
They believe they have a few answers:
We believe there are two driving reasons for this lack of interest:
The supply of users for social media sites is limited. To survive you must stand out and provide a service that others do not.
Features unique to your site must be just that – unique and difficult to duplicate – if they are not, the competitive advantage quickly disappears.
And Chitika Insights isn't very optimistic about the future of Google+:
Perhaps if Google can accelerate their current pace of innovation on their social network offering, Google+ could becoming a competitive alternative to its arch-rival, Facebook. Otherwise, given Facebook’s clout and reputation of rapid innovation, Google+ might just be left in the dust.
Its researchers came to a similar conclusion in August, after analyzing data from the end of July:
Chitika Insights
Graph of Google+ traffic in July
Since its launch, Google+ has undergone a surge in use, peaking at .007% of total web traffic on July 20th – a massive increase of users over a relatively short amount of time. Predictions began to be thrown around that, if Google+ were to continue this rate of growth, it would only be a short while before Facebook was overshadowed by Google. However, this was not the case – Google+ experienced a 34% erosion of its traffic from July 20th to July 31st. These results are in stark contrast to an earlier Insights study which indicated a 300% increase in the interest for Google+ from July 3rd to July 11th.
But at least that analysis had some upnotes to it: "If Google continues to integrate Google+ across its vast mix of services, remedies some of its issues and bugs, and opens its borders to public use, perhaps Google+ will resume its upwards trend of growth."
Chitika Insights, the research arm of online ad service Chitika, found that Google+ increased its user base, but the effect was only temporary. They "took a look at Google+ before and after it went public to see if the social network was living up to the hype." In terms of page views, the site spiked when it went public, and then went down again.
Before Google+ went public in mid-September, it had already intrigued 25 million users, and rabid trackers said the numbers are more like 43 million by now. The uptick in traffic following the opening of the site seemed to indicate that Google+ had just gained more lives.
Live Poll
Are you active on Google+?
YES. I like it better than Facebook and I'm here to stay.
YES. I like it, but I'm still on Facebook most of the time.
NO. I'm not on it. I've accepted that Facebook rules the world.
NO. I'm not on any social media site.
View Results
"It would appear that although high levels of publicity were able to draw new traffic to Google+, few of them saw reason to stay," said Chitka, in its report released Friday.
Chitika asks the question many of us might: "Given the huge amount of publicity and resources Google+ has received, why hasn’t the social network taken off?"
They believe they have a few answers:
We believe there are two driving reasons for this lack of interest:
The supply of users for social media sites is limited. To survive you must stand out and provide a service that others do not.
Features unique to your site must be just that – unique and difficult to duplicate – if they are not, the competitive advantage quickly disappears.
And Chitika Insights isn't very optimistic about the future of Google+:
Perhaps if Google can accelerate their current pace of innovation on their social network offering, Google+ could becoming a competitive alternative to its arch-rival, Facebook. Otherwise, given Facebook’s clout and reputation of rapid innovation, Google+ might just be left in the dust.
Its researchers came to a similar conclusion in August, after analyzing data from the end of July:
Chitika Insights
Graph of Google+ traffic in July
Since its launch, Google+ has undergone a surge in use, peaking at .007% of total web traffic on July 20th – a massive increase of users over a relatively short amount of time. Predictions began to be thrown around that, if Google+ were to continue this rate of growth, it would only be a short while before Facebook was overshadowed by Google. However, this was not the case – Google+ experienced a 34% erosion of its traffic from July 20th to July 31st. These results are in stark contrast to an earlier Insights study which indicated a 300% increase in the interest for Google+ from July 3rd to July 11th.
But at least that analysis had some upnotes to it: "If Google continues to integrate Google+ across its vast mix of services, remedies some of its issues and bugs, and opens its borders to public use, perhaps Google+ will resume its upwards trend of growth."
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