As we noted just earlier today, Facebook have released an API for the newsfeed making it possible to essentially recreate your Facebook news stream elsewhere. Personally (as a geek), I’m delighted. Deep down however, for the average user, I’m concerned.
See, the news is likely to generate a mass of new interest from geeks and web enthusiasts, many of whom had hoped access to their personal streams would be available outside of Facebook. This of course is wonderful for Facebook and wonderful for other tech heads like me too.
For non-geeks however, the news (once they find out about it) is likely to confuse and quite possibly scare. Most non-geeks simply won’t be aware of the fact that their updates, which include media, are actually going to available to users outside of Facebook.com. Most non-geeks aren’t even aware of the fact that they can customize their Facebook privacy levels to a tilt, and even if they are, they’re unlikely to know how to do so.
The Difference
There’s an enormous difference between Facebook and Twitter which Facebook appears yet to realise, or has simply forgotten. Facebook stores an incredible amount of information from peoples daily lives, including media, personal and contact information. Whenever any of this changes, it appears on your friends news streams BY DEFAULT. Pardon the capitals, but the point needs stressing, Facebook members need to therefore realise that virtually everything they put on Facebook is now going to be made available outside of Facebook, destroying this private network of sharing they have all come to expect and appreciate.
Irrespective of this fundamental difference, this new step sees Facebook continue to attempt to replicate Twitter functionality, making it very easy for private content to be viewed outside of Facebook.com itself.
I am aware, that Facebook limits the amount of time developers can cache stream data for 24 hours, I don’t however believe that limits the potential for developers and users alike to abuse.
“If there was ever a question that FB was abandoning the carefully guarded, gated-community model, I guess there isn’t anymore.” Summed up perfectly via a friend on Friendfeed.
I predict a backlash.
The focus of and value of this “twitter like feed” is on inbound links to Facebook.
The value of this is to drive more traffic back into Facebook rather then to the various sites that currently are enjoying the attention via Twitter links.
All the outbound links created in a Twitter by users, or automatically fed to Twitter via auto generation have value. Facebook is simply trying to find a way to replicate that and drive the traffic those links generate BACK into Facebook.
The items users create in Facebiij won’t be available, the links TO those items will be. Users who have set their security settings properly should have nothing to fear from the inbound links to the content they’ve created INSIDE of Facebook.
The real conversation should be around educating users on the value of setting appropriate privacy settings to control just how much information they make available to friends vs. the general Facebook/internet population.
The whole ‘what am I doing’ on facebook made me inactivate my account. For me, Twitter and my blog are enough for now.
I’m not a fan of Facebook. This is largely due to it’s privacy issues, regardless of the fact that you can customize privacy levels. Facebook users think that Twitter is the same thing, but are clearly wrong and do not understand the model.
Once upon a time, I would log into my Facebook account and be gently nudged by my home page, reminded that I am something. “Peter is…”, What Peter is, of course, would depend on my level of tolerance for updating the incessant little question “what are you doing?”. Still, it almost always left me thinking that I should inform all my friends on things that matter to me, like…
“Peter is …a douchebag”, or
“Peter is …afraid of clowns”, or
“Peter is …currently trapped in his basement (send help)”.
And if, on the off chance, I didn’t feel like bothering my friends with a half baked and useless attempt at wit, I could always just add a period to my status, in the spirit of the Dalai Lama, thereby basking in a sea of public, pseudo-Buddhist profundity…
“Harley is.” Clever, huh.
Eventually Facebook figured out that there are only so many things we are actually “doing”, and they mercifully allowed us all to delete the “is…” portion of said cute little status updates. Never again would we get those awful ice cream headaches from having to think so hard. From that day forward we could all become far more creatively challenged, letting friends know things like
“Carol …brakes for unicorns” or
“Mickey …hates cheese whiz” or
“Bob …has upgraded to 2.0 with many new features”
Recently however, I – like so many others – logged on to my beloved Facebook account to find that everything I had loved about the site was replaced with a big fat pile of steaming… errr… I mean “streaming” dog crap. Instead of the oh so cute “what are you doing?” question, I now see an annoyingly persistent, Nazi style interrogation being poked into my eyes like tiny needles. It’s located in just the perfect spot on my computer screen to consistently prod me into reassuring my friends of just exactly “what’s on my mind?”.
“What’s on your mind?” That question alone reminds me of those incessant, ubiquitous people who always seemed to find exactly the wrong moment, a moment when I am enjoying some small, brief respite from an otherwise chaotic and crappy day, to ask “Yo, Is something wrong? Are you OK?”
So it would seem that Facebook no longer wants to know what I am doing, but how I feel about what I am doing… this very second. And this, all in the spirit of joining in some thoroughly annoying, wannabe clever, life sucking, “real time” conversation that my own personal peanut gallery has already started last Friday at 3am.
Of course we have been told by the powers that be to “get used to it” because this is such a wonderfully insightful upgrade to Facebook, to which we just haven’t become accustomed. Yep. Truly groundbreaking stuff guys (not). Let’s face it, without this new Twitter rip off, err… I mean “upgrade”, I’d never have found out that someone on my friends list has a cat that apparently barks. Now normally I would have just glanced at his occasional status update, at my leisure, to be reassured that he obviously…
“is …still a bed wetting idiot”.
That his cat barks makes his existence no more or less endearing to me, it just makes me want to immediately log off before I’m caught up in the now ongoing “real time” discussion about Feline Identity Crisis Syndrome – with a kid I used to beat up every recess in grade school, and 20 of his closest idiot friends.
I can just imagine that, in the continuing spirit of fixing something that was never broken, the next Facebook upgrade will inevitably force me to answer this question … “What’s your Mastercard number and credit limit?”
Facebook. fails. period.
I have said this so many times. Even though Facebook came first, I believe with the massive amount of publicity and success Twitter has received, Facebook is in panic mode. I think they are worried that Twitter is taking their thunder away from them. By implementing what Twitter uses is their way of keeping up with the competition.
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My Facebook Page isn't update my Twitter if I use Ping.fm to update my page's status. The setting is right but no anything stream to my Twitter. I use Ping.fm to update all of my social media. If I try to update from my Facebook Page http://www.facebook.com/pages/MossackAnme/10176… directly, it's fine, but the problem is, Facebook Page is not send my update from Ping.fm apps to Twitter http://twitter.com/MossackAnme . Why?
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