Facebook Tricks

Facebook has been the buzz word in recent times. Well, almost all the social networking sites are getting world’s attention. We are enjoying this wonderful phase web 2.0 and we keep on trying our hands on cool tips and tricks to enhance our web experience. Here i come with some facebook tips and tricks.

See all your friend’s pictures in a tiles format

Login into Facebook and in your facebook sidebar click on the my friends link you will see a drop down box next to show, now hover or rollover your mouse and then click on one of the dashed lines (–). You will see a page full of al the profile pictures of all your facebook friends. The profile photos will be shown in a tiled format. It really looks cool try it.

See creator’s profile

Creator in a facebook community is the first profile created in your community. Generally you can’t search for his profile. But by using this cool facebook trick you can do it, just follow some simple steps. Goto your profile page and look at your id in the url in the address bar of your web browser. The first few numbers represent your school ID, so if you change the rest of the numbers to zero and the last number to one. It will show you the first person or the first profile created from your school, college or work place. This profile is known as “Creator’s” profile. This trick is not much of use, but just in case.

Give wooden look to facebook

This greasemonkey javascript will give your facebook pages an antiquated and wooden look. So, don’t just get stick to old boring design, keep trying out new ones. Facebook wooden look

Automatic Facebook login

Aren’t you fed up of keep on logging into facebook everytime you want to check new messages. This cool greasemonkey javascript will keep you logged into facebook as long as the password is stored in your firefox web browser. Automatic facebook login

Remove annoying Facebook applications

Clean out all those annoying applications people add. This javascript will remove all those crappy applications from any facebook profile you are viewing. The profile were never so cleaner before Facebook applications cleaner

So, that’s all with facebook tips and tricks for today, just stay tuned, you will see many more tricks and hacks shortly.

Facebook Beacon: Time to Start Asking Questions

This afternoon, Peter Kafka proposed how to solve the Facebook Beacon issue. In order to solve a problem, you first need to assume that a problem exists. I for one, think that there is somewhat of a problem that exists. The problem is not Facebook Beacon though. The real issue is privacy. The web has forced upon us a new system in which you can be completely transparent or completely closed off. Fortunately there are some areas that reside in between but that area is for those that understand the tools they are using and have some common sense.

Ultimately, I have no idea how the Facebook Beacon situation is going to end up but what I do know is that Facebook is at the forefront of testing the limits of individuals’ privacy. This is a delicate issue and I’m starting to believe that it may in fact be a dangerous one. At what point do we really say enough is enough? Ultimately we have the ability to turn off the computer, put down the video camera or turn off any other technology that can be used to monitor ourselves. The issue becomes blurry though when it comes to those that don’t understand the technology that they are using.

If my mom goes and makes a purchase at Amazon.com and her purchase, is there a guarantee that it won’t show up in my newsfeed? Currently there isn’t. There is also the chance that my mom didn’t choose to not have the purchase displayed. While Chris Kelly, Facebook’s Chief Privacy Officer, says that a box appears after individuals make a purchase, that box can disappear. I have already spoken with a number of individuals who have made purchases and the box didn’t show up (or at least they didn’t see it). If you make a purchase, don’t see the Facebook alert notification and suddenly your friends are notified, is that acceptable?

This accidental problem is going to be one that Facebook will be forced to resolve whether they like it or not. Peter Kafka suggests making the entire system opt-in. I’m not quite sure that will work but I’m also not sure what will. We are witnessing a test of individuals’ privacy limits and there are a few people that (as I have interpreted) are telling others to basically sit down and shut up. This will blow over they say.

While I don’t necessarily think that Facebook’s Beacon program is the ultimate test of individual privacy, I do believe that we are rapidly moving in a direction where some of us need to stand up and ask where the line will be drawn. While I will not suggest where that line falls in this post, we do need to figure it out. Otherwise we will sit down and watch someone else make that decision for us, the same way we so frequently (in this country at least) allow others to make major decisions that we aren’t happy with. The implications of a lack of privacy are significant and slightly frightening.

For Facebook Beacon, I think the question is: does this really makes our life better? Facebook in general has made most of our lives better. We all love connecting. Developers have enjoyed developing. Now marketers can enjoy marketing … in a pretty controversial way. Is this something that you want? Ultimately, the users can decide.

Is Facebook Really Censoring Search When It Suits Them?

Earlier this month I wrote a blog post showing that a search for presidential candidate “Ron Paul” in Facebook Groups yields zero results. Facebook blamed the problem on a bug (unofficially, via comments by employees to that post), which was later corrected.

But a new issue may be harder to explain. On Tuesday, scores of mainstream press organizations (see WSJ, NYT, LATimes, CNET, AP, etc.). and bloggers reported on a privacy issue around part of Facebook’s new advertising platform.

MoveOn.org was leading the charge, and created a petition to demand Facebook not disclose personal information about a user without their explicit consent.

But now a side story is developing around the issue that relates to search censoring, again, at Facebook. Naturally all the press on the issue led people to go to Facebook to find the group MoveOn set up to organize their opposition to Facebook’s current privacy policy on this issue.

The group, which now has over 12,000 members, could not be located via search. Yesterday a search in Facebook Groups for “Privacy” began to return an error message saying “search is currently unavailable” (see image to right). But at the same time, searches for any other term yielded normal results.

Later search began working again, but the MoveOn Group was not included in the results even though it clearly had the term “privacy” in the title. A filtered search yielded seventeen results, but only sixteen could be viewed. The MoveOn group was likely the seventeenth, unseen result. See bottom image below.

MoveOn contacted Facebook to complain, and the search is now working. Facebook has not responded to a request for comment sent yesterday on why this may have happened, although we are in the middle of the Thanksgiving holiday.

MoveOn’s Adam Green, who alerted us of the issue, had this to say:

Facebook has the potential to revolutionize how we communicate with each other and organize around issues together in a 21st century democracy. But to succeed, they need the trust of their users. That trust will be undercut if they continue to put the wish lists of corporate advertisers ahead of the privacy interests of their users. It would also be undercut if it turned out our group was intentionally hidden from Facebook users — as opposed to it being an accident.

We’ll see if Facebook responds at all, and if they blame this on a bug as well.

BREAKING: Facebook Forum Hacked!

Allfacebook received an email today from Boris Silver, the developer behind the Total Sports Fan application, regarding a hacked forum. Although Total Sports Fan is a third party app, the forum functionality is actually part of Facebook, indicating a breach within Facebook itself. The hacked forum contained the same repeated, incoherent message as posted by various users:

“Congratulations Mickey you found out that nobody likes us… but US. You’re such a smart person. By the way, all we need is us… we don’t need fan support from other people. Can you give me one reason that Buckeye Nation needs other people than ourselves?? Who the fuck else is there… besides us??? Exactly.
O-H

I-O…………… bitches.

P.S. check the rankings again for me, see if we’re still the team listed next to ”

This isn’t the first time Facebook security has been questioned. As we reported back in August, a “security breach” exposed Facebook’s source code to a number of users. Some have even speculated that this leak may have been an inside job. As of 6pm EST, this hack has not yet been resolved. We’ll keep you posted on any new developments.

Facebook's Future

I was fortunate to have been asked by the ECPA to make two presentations at the PubU conference in Chicago earlier this week. My first was a session on web communities in publishing and the other was a keynote on blogging. I wish I could have stayed for the entire conference. HarperCollins CEO Jane Friedman's keynote the night before mine was very inspiring, especially when she spoke of the various technology initiatives they have underway (e.g., their widgets and content digitization). PubU is an excellent conference and one you should consider attending in the future, btw.

There's one slide in my web communities presentation that still sticks with me. It's an excerpt from this article about Facebook in the November issue of Wired magazine. The article talks about CEO Mark Zuckerberg's vision of Facebook's future. I put the slide on the screen and asked everyone to read it and give it some consideration. Here's what it said:

Imagine if, every time you logged on, you weren't greeted by NYTimes.com or even a Google News like aggregator, but a collection of headlines and blog postings, written or handpicked by your closest friends and relatives. Instead of information spreading hub-and-spoke like from major media outlets, it would flow to consumers the way it does at a dinner party, through people they know and trust. The result, Zuckerberg says, is that "it may no longer be optimal to have a few big media companies in the center controlling the flow of information."

How true. I encouraged everyone in the room to go tinker with Facebook. Some see Facebook as a fad, this year's MySpace. I don't buy that logic. Zuckerberg made a key strategic decision earlier this year to open Facebook up to third-party application developers. Sure, most apps today are silly time-wasters. It won't be that way forever though. This platform has the potential to be enormous.

I also asked everyone in the room to check and see whether their company is doing anything on Facebook. You ought to ask the same question in your company.

Is Facebook For Games?

When the Facebook platform first launched, many people in the blogosphere claimed that Facebook would soon emerge as the social operating system. While that still may occur, some even suggested that Facebook would eventually have highly useful applications that would contribute to productivity. Whether it be enterprise applications or less robust applications such as Zoho, a number of bloggers expressed the future expansion of Facebook into the workplace.

While Facebook has indeed entered the workplace, it’s not for the benefit of employers necessarily. If you take a look at the Zoho Office application on Facebook, there were only 39 active daily users yesterday. A far cry from the close to 60,000 users playing the Attack! application. So what do Facebook users want to do when they are logged into the site? They either want to check out what their friends are doing or socialize.

If you take a look at the most popular applications on Facebook currently, all of them appear to be for entertainment purposes. If you speak with the majority of Facebook application development shops, the most successful applications that they are building are ones that are meant to entertain users. There are also a few useful applications but the majority of those applications revolve around socializing nonetheless. Do you think Facebook will eventually become the web operating system or will it remain as a site that is for socializing and games?

Sex on Facebook

For most people, Facebook means keeping in touch with your friends. For others it means keeping in touch with your family and professional contacts as well. According to the Turskish Daily News, Facebook has also turned into a place for finding people for sexual encounters. Given that the writer of the article is based in Turkey, they received many more results with groups, events and profiles with explicit content. It appears that within my networks, Facebook has done a relatively good job with filtering out explicit content.

According to the article, fake profiles were created using avatars of naked women and male genitalia. The author and others set up fake profiles and immediately made 32 contacts in one night. There are also a number of sex party events that have been set up on the site. Is Facebook trying to avoid having their site used for such things? Not really. There is actually a category of events called “Erotic Party.” I’m not sure how that can be misinterpreted to mean anything but sex parties.

Given that a large percentage of the users in the U.S. are still college students, all of the events under that category when I searched were simply jokes. Well, I at least got the impression that they are but then again, I didn’t show up to any of the events. Semra Pelek notes that “Turkey’s network of pornography groups on Facebook has numerous sub-groups like, ‘asking/trying/having sex on camera,’ ‘I want to have sex,’ ‘I am married but available,’ ‘for hysteric women’ or even ‘divorcees.’”

As noted in the article, most of the sex related groups and events are outside of the U.S. As the international population on Facebook grows, they are going to have a difficult time filtering out explicit content. Will Facebook soon emerge as the next MySpace? Will the site turn into a place for discussing and organizing “mature” topics and events?

Microsoft’s Facebook Stake

Did Microsoft make a good move investing in Facebook? The answer is definitely yes.

The $240 million price Microsoft paid for a 1.6 percent stake in Facebook values the 3.5 year old company at $15 billion.

This is a small amount of money for Microsoft and gives the Redmond-based company access to Facebook’s 35 million registered users. According to Quantcast the social networking site has 25 million unique visitors per month. This is a staggering number and shows that more and more people are using Facebook as their Internet launch point. In a way this site is the new AOL and Microsoft could now have some very premium real estate to run ads on.

So let’s explore why this deal makes sense for Microsoft. The company has a small ad network meaning relatively few advertisers and publishers compared to Google. I don’t have exact figures but these facts are certainly undisputed by anyone familiar with the matter.

Microsoft is doing everything it can to increase the size of this network relative to Google but this is almost impossible to do.

The only logical way to rapidly accelerate the size of your advertising network is to have oceanfront property that advertisers stand in line to access.

In short this deal could be a fantastic way for Microsoft to get access to the premium ad inventory of tomorrow.

Is their a downside to this deal and more involvement between these two companies? Yes. We all know that social networking users are fickle and members might switch to another social networking company if Facebook overdoes it with ads.

The company has to be very careful as it rolls out its revenue generating strategy.

For Facebook, this deal means they have access to virtually unlimited capital and resources. Furthermore, Facebook becomes the “cool” internet poster child at Microsoft. There cannot be a more enviable position for the company to be in.

Disclosure: The author is a shareholder in Microsoft and Google

Microsoft/Facebook Analysis

I recently wrote that the investment in Facebook by Microsoft is a great win for the Redmond-based software company. John Dvorak sees it differently. Mr. Dvorak is one of the best tech writers I know and I have been reading his work for decades. His recent article on how the Microsoft/Facebook deal makes no sense has some valid points to it.

For example the quality of Facebook users may not be so good and users are fickle – moving from social network to social network.

Dvorak also points out the service can’t get much bigger.

So here is my counter-argument. I believe the service can get bigger. I recently signed up as a new user on Facebook and ever since, I have been getting barraged by others to become Facebook friends. I am noticing many of my early adopter colleagues are on the service. This leads me to think many others in business world will be joining soon as well.

In addition, I have been getting invites to join Facebook groups, download add-ons, etc. The service is getting m ore viral and stickier.

To be honest, I have little time to deal with the service but the invites keep coming. It seems the people I know think this service is really useful and they seem to be very active on it.

So there is the potential that the service will continue to grow – penetrating the business market. I suppose it also has potential to grow outside the US.

In addition, Microsoft is a strong player online but they have little street cred as an internet company. Everyone thinks Google when they think internet. The YouTube and DoubleClick acquisitions associate Google with the internet that much more. Now, for the first time, Microsoft has the potential to be part of something new and cool online.

In fact I believe this deal can help the company can gain cool mindshare… They become an internet player once again.

What is this worth? Can you put a price tag on it? I don’t know really but from a valuation standpoint it could have serious ramifications. Becoming a relevant internet company again could bring the Internet investors back into the stock.

So let’ say John is right and I am wrong. Microsoft invested what they consider to be pocket change into this company. If the relationship goes forward and Facebook hits its targets, Microsoft can invest more. If not, they can reevaluate.

Either way, it is a small price to pay for big potential and what I call ocean-front advertising property. Time will tell how this all plays out.

Facebook to Compete with Digg

Some of the more popular sites to go to when voting on technology news are digg and Techmeme. Digg actually allows you to vote on more than just tech news and both are great places to go when you are looking for news put together by a large community of users.

Having said that, these sites may be vulnerable to competition as there are rumors that the social networking sites want a piece of the user-driven news aggregation market as well.

To set the record straight, there are lots of companies out there looking to compete with a site like digg but few have made much of a dent so far.

Perhaps the biggest threat would be Facebook, as the social networking behemoth has just so many active users. In case you are wondering just how popular Facebook is, you should know the company’s site has about 24 million unique US visitors each month and is ranked in the top 22 out of all websites – according to Quantcast. This compares with 12 million unique US visitors for digg.

An in fact according to Valleywag who has the scoop, Facebook is looking to get into this market.

If you think about it, a tougher competitor to digg and techmeme could be Google News if they choose to allow users to vote on content.

So will Facebook decimate these other user-generated news sites? Probably not as it will not be a pure-play news aggregator. It is possible that Facebook’s entry into the space will make user-generated news sites even more popular and the result could be digg and others will receive even more traffic.

Time will tell of course and one wonders if this news will alter the digg valuation as the company is rumored to be going through a sale process at the moment.

Getting back to social networks… These services seem to be on a tear lately adding new services. For example the recent announcement regarding MySpace/Skype integration drives this point home even more.

The Skype news is a single example of application integration. There are a slew of developers building applications on top of the Facebook platform. My personal experience shows just how true this is as almost daily I get an invite from my friends on Facebook to download one application or another.

On one level I find the rise of social networks very funny. Why? Well when the web first became popular, AOL was the internet for so many users. Generally speaking our parents were the last to stop using AOL as a central internet portal.

Remember convincing your mother and/or father that AOL was a crutch and you didn’t need it to surf the web or have an e-mail account?

The funny thing is that social networking sites are like the AOL for our children. They are an encapsulating experience which one might call AOL on steroids. It just goes to show you how cyclical ideas are in the computer space. We refer to a site like Facebook as a Web 2.0 site but it really isn’t anything more than an AOL experience with some fancy new features.

Facebook - The Complete Biography

An in-depth profile of Facebook, written by Mashable contributor Sid Yadav and edited by Pete Cashmore. Image credit: Bryan Veloso.

Facebook is the second largest social network on the web, behind only MySpace in terms of traffic. Primarily focused on high school to college students, Facebook has been gaining market share, and more significantly a supportive user base. Since their launch in February 2004, they’ve been able to obtain over 8 million users in the U.S. alone and expand worldwide to 7 other English-speaking countries, with more to follow. A growing phenomenon, let’s discover Facebook.

The Facebook Phenomenon

First, let’s start by looking into Facebook in a broad spectrum - as the network, the phenomenon, the company, and its brand.

History

Originally called thefacebook, Facebook was founded by former-Harvard student Mark Zuckerberg (while at Harvard) who ran it as one of his hobby projects with some financial help from Eduardo Saverin. Within months, Facebook and its core idea spread across the dorm rooms of Harvard where it was very well received. Soon enough, it was extended to Stanford and Yale where, like Harvard, it was widely endorsed.

Before he knew it, Mark Zuckerberg was joined by two other fellow Harvard-students - Dustin Moskovitz and Chris Hughes - to help him grow the site to the next level. Only months later when it was officially a national student network phenomenon, Zuckerberg and Moskovitz dropped out of Harvard to pursue their dreams and run Facebook full time. In August 2005, thefacebook was officially called Facebook and the domain facebook.com was purchased for a reported $200,000.

Availability

Unlike its competitors MySpace, Friendster, Xanga, hi5, Bebo, and others, Facebook isn’t available to everyone — which explains its relatively low user count. Currently, users must be members of one of the 30,000+ recognized schools, colleges, universities, organizations, and companies within the U.S, Canada, and other English-speaking nations. This generally involves having a valid e-mail ID with the associated institution.

Surveys & Studies

A large number of surveys and studies have been conducted around Facebook - some with interesting results. For instance, according to an internal September 2005 survey, approximately 85% of the students in the supported colleges had a Facebook account, with 60% of them logging in daily. A survey conducted by Student Monitor revealed Facebook was the most “in” thing after the iPod and tying with beer, and comScore Media Metrix discovered users spend approximately 20 minutes everyday on Facebook. Another 2005 survey said 90% of all undergraduates in the U.S. use either Facebook or MySpace regularly, and a detailed questionnaire analysis by Chris Roberts revealed that 76.2% never click on its ads. Perhaps the most amazing statistic of all may be that Facebook is the 7th most trafficked site in the U.S.

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Business & Funding

Given the situation other social networks on the web are facing, Facebook is in a good position financially. While it hasn’t managed to get acquired like its rival MySpace (despite some rumors about an $800m deal with Viacom), it’s been quite lucky in most aspects. For its initial funding, it received $500,000 from Peter Theil, co-founder of PayPal. A few months later, it was also able to get $13 million from Accel Partners, who are also investors in 15 other Web 2.0 startups, and $25 million from Greylock Partners, making their overall venture equal to approximately $40 million.

For users, Facebook’s core service is completely free and ad-supported. In fact, in August 2006 Facebook signed a three year deal with Microsoft to provide and sell ads on their site in return for a revenue split. The deal followed an announcement from Facebook’s direct competitor MySpace who signed a similar deal with Google. The youthful demographic that both the services attract is highly prized amongst advertisers and should return a good amount of revenue for both the services to stay alive - and profit. Another deal which made news in July was Facebook’s agreement with Apple to give away 10 million free iTunes samplers to Facebook users. A deal has also been signed to provide Facebook credit cards.

Lawsuits & Concerns

In its early days, Facebook faced an extremely threatening lawsuit from ConnectU, a very similar social network which - like Facebook - shares its roots back to Harvard, and as a result almost got shutdown. The founders of ConnectU alleged that Facebook’s founder Mark Zuckerberg stole source code while he was in their employment. Zuckerberg denied the allegation and the lawsuit was dismissed.

Facebook has also been host to other issues and concerns, especially in the privacy sector where its privacy policy states “Facebook also collects information about you from other sources, such as newspapers and instant messaging services. This information is gathered regardless of your use of the Web Site.” Another theory is that Facebook could also be a data-gathering project or if not, used extensively for these purposes. Facebook’s policy also states that it “may share your information with third parties, including responsible companies with which we have a relationship.”

The Service

Now, let’s look into Facebook - the service itself, and some of its features, highlights, and the things that got Facebook where it is today.

Facebook Profiles

As Facebook has evolved, so have its profile pages - new fields have been added and users can share more information than before.

A typical Facebook profile consists of a number of different sections, including Information, Status, Friends, Friends in Other Networks, Photos, Notes, Groups, and The Wall. Most of the sections are self-explanatory but some are specific to Facebook.

Facebook Photos

With over 1.5 million photos uploaded daily, one of Facebook’s most popular features has been the ability to upload photos. Users can upload unlimited photos from their cell phone or through its Java-based web interface. Facebook is one of the few services to offer an unlimited quota with their only restriction being a 60-photos-per-album limit - this is much appreciated by Facebook’s college demographic.

The process of uploading photos is very simple. Users create albums which they can assign limitations to (e.g. visible to my friends only) and upload photos within them. The album is then put into their profile, and other users with right credentials have the ability to see and comment on them. Facebook also gives the feature to share the photos with a simple web link or send them via AIM or by e-mail. What’s more, users can also order prints online through a simple integrated interface.

Facebook Groups

Just like every other social network, Facebook has something called ‘groups.’ Users can create new ones or join and participate in existing ones. This is also displayed in their profile and is a good indication of hobbies and interests a person might have.

There are two kind of groups, a normal group and a secret group, which isn’t shown on the profile. A normal group is just like any other, but users can also create and invite others into secret groups. These can be used for collaborating on university projects, and provide a way to have closed discussions. About 80% of the groups are ‘fun-related’ and companies can even sponsor groups - as is the case with, for example, the Apple users group.

Facebook Events

Another Facebook success is their ‘events’ feature, which provides the ability to organize, be part of, and plan for events. This feature has been extremely successful when it comes to organizing parties.

Along with organizing and joining events, users can also invite and recommend others to an event. This feature, however, has raised some controversy as it is generally the start of underage drinking and dry campus violations. Colleges and universities use the feature to catch planning of such events before hand and investigate those that are over. In any case, it’s one of the most popular features of the service and even beats some of the competing products made specifically for this purpose.

Facebook Developers

As of August 2006, Facebook has offered a free Developers API called Facebook Developers. This essentially gives anyone access to Facebook’s internals and lets programmers create widgets, mashups, tools and projects based around Facebook.

This is an important feature for Facebook since it makes it the first major social network to give access to its API. Although it is limited to 100,000 requests a day, it’s more than enough for a decent web app to come through. What’s more, a selection of applications have already been created. FaceBank is a promising tool which lets you ‘keep track of depts and shared expenses with friends.’ Another interesting application is lickuacious which lets you ‘rank your friends by wall popularity.’ The Wall, of course, is Facebook’s comments feature.

Facebook Notes

Facebook’s most recent addition launched in late August. The service is called Facebook Notes, and allows users to write a Facebook blog. All notes are displayed in the user’s profile, and other members can add comments.

Notes possesses an important feature, which is the ability to import and syndicate an external blog, although unlike Technorati, doesn’t allow you to claim one only to yourself (e.g. it’s possible to claim the New York Times syndication feed easily in one’s Notes). The service allows HTML to be included in the posts, although JavaScript and Flash are disabled. You can attach photos and also post via cell phone by sending your notes to notes@facebook.com. Another interesting feature is tagging - tagging a post with a username will automatically send it to that specific user. The Notes feature has been well received.

The Future

Facebook is a massively successful social networking service that grew to prominence in virtually no time. It’s not hard to see why: its features and tools are highly appealing, and Facebook users are extremely well networked in real life. Rumors of an acquisition continue to circulate, with some estimates putting the price in the billions of dollars. In the short term, however, Facebook plans to go it alone, continuing to build out one of the world’s most successful social networks.

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Mark Zuckerberg’s Facebook Profile

Uploading to Facebook Photos

Facebook Groups

Facebook Events

Facebook Notes

Facebook Developers

Facebook Fatigue

A few months ago I found myself lunching in midtown Manhattan at the Mario Battali of Greek Food: Anthos (pass if you’re an Atkinser, as a life without the Anthos olive bread and desert melange is a life unlived).

I was enjoying the sumptous fare with a former colleague who has gone on to great and interesting things. I am Gen X; she, Gen Y. Thus she has, over the years, done me the kindly service of acting as my digital sherpa, leading me to all things webby, un-analog, and au courant.

“You’ve got to get on Facebook,” she urged me.

And so I did. And I am.

The things is—though I’m loath to admit it—I still kind of don’t get it. I thought Facebook would help me with my work. But so far it’s only creating more work.

It has also created something of a social media deluge in my inbox. “I’ve added you as a friend on StumbleUpon,” went one recent missive.” Beckoned another, “Join Kiva.org!” Then came the onslaught from Facebookers themselves: “Join the Campaign to lose the mandatory “is” from status updates!”

So far all the social-media come-ons are amounting to more digital clutter. A giant time suck.

Is it just me? Help!

Is Facebook the next Netscape?

Marc Andreessen’s Ning team has put together a screencast and screenshots of OpenSocial in action. He notes that the examples are a little light on social functionality at this point, but they are working on getting user’s friends information and ctivities feed into the applications.

For those of you who were asleep for the last 15 years, Andreessen was the cofounder of Netscape (Mosaic) at the tender age of 23. He has a good idea of what the latest prince of Silicon Valley, Facebook’s 23-year-old Mark Zuckerberg, is going through.

Like Zuckerberg and his now famous Adidas flipflops , Andreessen has been barefoot, as in his Time cover portrait from 1996 barefoot.

The well funded Netscape had its nemesis Microsoft (Internet Explorer), and lost the browser war. All was not lost. Netscape, which also sold servers and had popular Web sites, was sold to AOL in 1999 for $4.2 billion in a stock swap, and Microsoft was subsequently spanked for abuse of monopoly power. In addition to Ning, Andreessen went on to found a Web hosting company, Loudcloud, which was partly sold to EDS and morphed into Opsware, which was recently acquired by HP for $1.6 billion.

Facebook now has the powerful (and less overtly predatory than Microsoft) Google (OpenSocial) staring it in the face, and ironically Microsoft as an ally. Google, of course says that it is not out to crush Facebook, but to expand the utility of the Web and social software with open APIs. It’s more like Google is in a position to bend Facebook, or others in Web space, to its will with its APIs, breaking down the walls around Facebook’ social graph.

The set up and Netscape’s fade out are not likely how it will turn out for Facebook and Zuckerberg. At this point, there is no Internet Explorer equivalent competing with Facebook for members. Facebook is well funded, with an influx of $240 million from Microsoft, and so far has made very smart and calculated moves. But, the chessboard is becoming more complicated and the next moves will require far more than saying ‘we will do what users want us to do.’ Google, in particular, has figured out that a more open version of Microsoft’s embrace and extend model for evolving its pervasive platform is a way to create a more level playing field, which tilts in its favor.

Facebook: More Popular Than Porn

When I wrote last week's column comparing the social-networking sites MySpace and Facebook, I included a line after my signature stating that I had only 124 friends on Facebook, and urged readers to add me as their friends. As of today I have 261 new Facebook friends, the majority of which are Generation Y college students.

I turned to Hitwise data to find out more about them. By examining which websites social-network users visit after logging into their profiles, we can gain a bit of insight into how sites like Facebook fit into their members' daily online lives. The data showed that after other social networks, the most clicked-on category of sites was search engines, with 11.6% of all downstream visits. Web-based email services were next with 8.5%. Blogs came in third in popularity at 6.1%, claiming more than four times the number of visits to traditional news sites, which logged 1.5% of downstream visits.

Perhaps a more interesting — and more accurate — way to figure out where college students are going online is to assess which of the 172 web categories tracked by Hitwise get the most hits from 18- to 24-year-olds. Here's a shocker: Porn is not No. 1. I've actually been puzzled by the decrease in visits to the Adult Entertainment category over the last two years. Visits to porn sites have dropped from 16.9% of all site visits in the U.S. in October 2005 to 11.9% as of last week, a 33% decline. Currently, for web users over the age of 25, Adult Entertainment still ranks high in popularity, coming in second, after search engines. Not so for 18- to 24-year-olds, for whom social networks rank first, followed by search engines, then web-based e-mail — with porn sites lagging behind in fourth. If you chart the rate of visits to social-networking sites against those to adult sites over the last two years, there appears to be a strong negative correlation (i.e., visits to social networks go up as visits to adult sites go down). It's a leap to say there's a real correlation there, but if there is one, then I'd bet it has everything to do with Gen Y's changing habits: they're too busy chatting with friends to look at online skin. Imagine.

This reshaped online landscape leaves me feeling old and out of the loop. It seems that social-networking sites have not only usurped porn in popularity, but they've also gobbled up time Gen Yers used to spend on traditional e-mail and IM. When you can reach all of your friends through Facebook or MySpace, there's little reason to spend time in your old-school inbox. So, if social networking is becoming e-mail 2.0, then perhaps Microsoft's recent $240 million dollar payout for such a small stake in Facebook isn't that ridiculous.

The reality is that Facebook isn't just for kids. Last week — and this was a highlight — my dad, who just turned 75, added me as a friend on Facebook. I considered sending him a virtual beer to celebrate the occasion, but I didn't think either of us would see the point. Back in my day, we drank beers out of bottles and cans — we didn't have these new-fangled virtual beers. But, then again, I think that's something I probably still have in common with the younger generation, something I don't need Hitwise data to back up: the love of a good old-fashioned beer.

Let the messages roll in.

Bill Tancer is general manger of global research at Hitwise