Facebook Watcher

End of the month; a brief summary of Facebook stories in the month of August:

I know, I know. Facebook has 100 million users, but it still trails MySpace, which claimed it owned at least 110 million “active” users throughout the world.

I am a big fan of Facebook, and believed that it will not close users’ accounts simply because it is overpopulated. To strengthening your belief in Facebook, you need to subscribe to this Facebook Security page. All those chain letters are hoax. We know Facebook will fix it, just like they fixed the worm attack recently. Meanwhile, you can join and donate to this cause, i.e. Stop Facebook Chain Letters if you want to.

If you never heard of Facebook Connect, it is a new big thing. There will be a talk on this Facebook Connect in September next month. A talk purposely for developers. I wish I’ll get a Live Coverage of it, hopefully.

Several days earlier, we heard that Mark Zuckerberg & company (Facebook) sued StudiVZ, but now the story become like this “Facebook wanted to buy this Facebook clone in Germany” instead of suing it. According to the International Herald Tribune, Facebook is actually attempts in talk with this StudiVZ about a possibly acquisition.

A former StudiVZ executive said Facebook had been negotiating for months to try to buy StudiVZ, “Facebook may have the superior technology, but it doesn’t have the users in Germany,” said this executive, who insisted on anonymity because the talks were confidential. “That is what Facebook wants with StudiVZ.”

As of present, this is hard to predict which approach might be more profitable for Facebook, sue over or buy it for long-term success, but it is the size of the user base of StudiVZ that attracted Facebook. StudiVZ has more than 12.2 million users in Germany in June, compared to 1.2 million German users of Facebook.de, the Facebook Germany.

At the same time, the challenge for Facebook in buying StudiVZ is that Facebook did not meet the asking price of the existing owner of StudiVZ, the Holtzbrinck Gruppe, based in Stuttgart, which reported paid €85 million, or $134 million in January 2007 in order to acquire StudiVZ.

Plan for the acquisition was far from clear, it is due to the fact that StudiVZ is in “the enviable position of not having to sell,” a former StudiVZ executive said. “This lawsuit is an attempt to encourage Holtzbrinck to sell StudiVZ.”

A friend asked me before what one should act when she just join Facebook? My simple answer is that don’t simply add fake Facebook friend to your inner circle as well as join the fake group. Of course, there are many fake profiles that one can’t easily differentiated in Facebook, as I also wrote a post entitled, “Profiting from fake profiles” last month.

But for the fake group, I think I found the answer which I hope I won’t make a mistake. My simple conclusion for a Facebook group is: Good admin is good group. It’s a rare exception where good Facebook group don’t accompany good admin(s), or it’s even a rare exception where a Facebook group don’t have any admin(s).

Last week, I found that a Facebook group which have no admins. There is a statement appeared on the Group, i.e. There are no admins left in this group! Beware of this kind of groups, that’s because one good admin will not simply build a Facebook group and then leave the group, before she has properly introduced another Facebook member to take over the admin jobs.

Somebody has created ten Facebook fake profiles and is trying to make a profit from selling these fake profiles on eBay. These profiles are said to have a minimum 200 friends each. In January this year, CNet reported that 43% of Facebook messages are spam, now I wonder how many of the Facebook profiles are fake?

via [AdRANTs]

Update: I checked out the eBay link, it showed “This listing (260249755056) has been removed or is no longer available.“

I tried to log-on to Facebook, but unfortunately it is down. A big question is, why does Facebook is down, and what’s the problem that cause the “Error?” I like to figure out what is going on behind the scenes at Facebook. To me, Facebook is not what I read from some China blogs, that Facebook Chinese translation name is “非死不可,” sure going to die in China. Will the history repeat of itself in China? That most of the well-known U.S. Internet startups can’t make it in China. I like Facebook very much, this down incident give me a reason to think about what this world would be like without Facebook.

Aha, I tried and tried again to log-on to Facebook, I see a small notification icon appeared and disappeared for a second. I had a new friend accepted my friend request, whom he/she is?

Facebook has rolled out some of the new updates to its users’ profile pages. Two changes I noticed are the mini-feeds and the new feature of adding friend to your Facebook. From now on, mini-feeds is no longer can be collapsed based on one’s preference. It was not merely a tiny column appeared on user’s profile page; it was served as a permanent box for all your stories/history of what you’ve done on Facebook, albeit with stories are restricted to a list of ten (10) maximum to be shown.

Users are allowed to remove any stories that they do not want to show, but not advised to try to remove the whole mini-feeds, as told by Facebook.

Meanwhile, when you adding your friends to your Facebook, the add friend box now featured an advanced friending capability, by directly adding your new friend to a new Friend List. This save you time and effort in categorize your friends into different list after your friends accepted your Facebook friends request.

In addition, one of the Facebook’s high-profile features such as “People You May Know” reflected Facebook’s well known prowess in recommendation technology. Justin Smith of Inside Facebook said that there was a new tab called “Apps You May Like,” however, I still only see my first tab in the Application Directory remained as “Recently Popular.” I’m not sure this new application recommendation feature is only available to the U.S. users, as all the bloggers announced this news are from the U.S.

Facebook has quietly released a new search feature for users. Now whenever users type a letter onto their profiles’ search bar, a small dialog box will prompt out and show all their friends, groups, or applications that match those keywords. See the picture below.

Facebook plans to unveil a new redesign of profile page to its nearly 70 million members. The new profile page will incorporate features that make a member’s profile more cleaner, simpler, and ultimately less cluttered. According to Facebook blog, this new changes in profile pages are coming soon.

From the preview of this new profile page, you’ll find that the new redesign is all about tabs. User’s information will be organized into a better layout, instead of the previous one single long page. There will be few tabs allowed: personal information, news feeds, photos, applications, etc. On the top of the profile page, you’ll see that there’s three different tabs, Wall, where you can post a wall message, About, contains personal information or data such as address, history and Photos, a place where you can browse and upload photos to the profile.

At first glance, another changes will be the organization of the sidebar. At now, Notes and video are slotted into the left hand side, but under the new redesign of profile page, they are in the right hand side, and carefully notice the mini-feed, the new changes will only display five stories, not the ten (10) stories as we getting used to. One thing for sure, those members who created a long one page profile page can no longer view their profile pages in the same way again.

Consider the new redesign of profile page demands the input of feedback from the Facebook users, Facebook plans to introduce changes slowly, allowing a selected group of testers to use it in June next month before making it available to all of its members later. Meanwhile, Web developers that created third-party applications for Facebook will be given chances to step into sandbox and play with the new design this week.

Microsoft Chief Executive Steve Ballmer has opened a profile on Facebook, but if you want to add him as your friends, you’ll not sure which one is his real profile. Today Reuters provides a hint in an article entitled, “The real Steve Ballmer has a golfclub on Facebook.”

“If you actually look there’s about 10 Steve Ballmers and I’m only one of them,” Ballmer told reporters on Thursday.

“I’m the one who actually has a picture that looks like me on it and I’ll tell you a hint — I’m hitting a golf ball. That’s the real Steve Ballmer.”

Facebook has announced that its chat service is now available to all of its users. This service is crucial, as its current Inbox and Wall, where your friends posted messages on the space of your profile can’t really appeal to some rabid users. In fact, this chat service was launched incrementally, as some testers have the opportunities to use it before it is fully goes live. However, it isn’t perfect yet, as Facebook promised that they’ll gradually improve this newly global launched service.

For Facebook users, every one of you will see a small tiny chat bar to be appeared at the bottom right hand side of your profile when you first log-in.