One of the latest types of apps that have emerged on Facebook are social news readers. These apps automatically post to your Facebook friends everything you read on the related news site. So for example, if you have installed the Washington Post Social Reader Facebook app, EVERYTHING you read on the Washington Post can appear in your facebook friends’ news feeds.

Here’s how my Washington Post reading activity showed up in Miriam’s Facebook news feed:

As viewed in Miriam's facebook news feed

Here’s how an aggregation of Miriam’s Facebook friends’ reading activity appears at the top of her news feed (how does it get to be at the top?!):

Facebook Social News Reader in Miriam's news feed

That hidden area on the right are thumbnails of Miriam’s friends next to articles they read.

Is this an example of the beauty of our online social lives, or is it an incredibly aggressive invasion of our privacy?

Social beauty

On the one hand, people get to easily share things they find interesting with their network. Instead of having to go into facebook, or use a social media management tool, to share the articles they like, the Washington Post does that for them. And isn’t that a lot of what we do on social networks?

Massive invasion of privacy

On the other hand, do you really want your Facebook friends seeing EVERYTHING you’re reading? Here are some examples of why this type of automatic sharing could work out badly:

• You’re thinking of getting divorced, and are doing research on divorce laws or recent divorce cases.
• You’re questioning your sexual orientation, and are reading up on what it means to be homosexual and come out of the closet.
• You adore Justin Bieber and read every article about him. But that is best kept under wraps, isn’t it?

This is aside from the fact that you’re also giving these Facebook apps permission to access some of your details. And yes, apps are forever, if you let them be. Answer a questionnaire once about your knowledge of Sesame Street and two years later, that app is still viewing your information (unless you remove it of course, which I explain how to do below).

Also, if you install this app, you can’t see your own posts in your profile! Only your friends can. Which means you can’t remove anything from appearing there. Read an article about how to exorcise demons? It’s in your profile forever.

Massive social chutzpah

These social facebook news readers are clearly win-win for the news sites behind them. Their content gets wider exposure, and assumedly click-throughs. Except…if you see that your friend read an article and you’re interested in reading it too, and click on the article in your facebook news feed, you aren’t taken to the article! Instead, you arrive at the app installation page where it asks you to install it:

Washington Post Social Reader Facebook app installation page

I have to install an app to read your article? You want access to my name and birthday so I can read your stuff? Buh-bye.

We’re very curious… How many people are actually installing these apps in order to see the post? Being forced to add it in order to read an article must deter many. So by strong-arming us, the Washington Post is losing a lot of potential views. Also, you can’t like or comment on these posts, which removes the social aspect of this type of activity. But at least the Washington Post gets to dip directly into many facebook profiles!

Change your settings

So facebook users, beware! Installing an app gives the app owner direct access to lots of your personal information.

If you do install one of these news sharing facebook apps, note that you can change the settings, choosing who can see your posts from it and who can’t. Here is how to do it:

1. Log in to Facebook. In the top right hand corner is a downward facing arrow. Click on it.
2. Click on Account Settings.
3. In the left-hand sidebar click on Apps.
4. Click the Edit button next to the app you want to edit.

Then you’ll see the following:

Washington Post's app settings

It is recommended to once in a while go into your facebook settings and see what apps you’ve installed and remove whatever you don’t use or don’t recognize. You’ll be surprised what’s lurking there.

These facebook apps are sneaky too

Here is the kicker of the Washington Post Social Reader app. I did not sign up for it and suddenly it was there, sharing my reading habits with my network. I seriously don’t remember ever seeing that installation screen. Maybe I clicked on something to install it, but if I did it was not made clear to me at all.

Meanwhile, I had no idea that my reading activity was being shared with others until I looked over at Miriam’s screen (I happen to be Facebook friends with her) and saw this:

What the?!

Surprise Deena!

Wow! The Washington Post and I are BFFs and I didn’t even know it!

What do you think?

So you know what we think about this app but what do you think? Have you seen different news-feed apps that work differently than what I’ve described here? Would you, or do you, use an app of this kind?

Someone recently asked a question on the Digital Eve Israel mailing list about a problem they were having with a facebook ad they were trying to create. When creating a facebook ad, you can target very specific people according to various parameters including country, age, gender, and “Likes and Interests.” Likes and Interests refers to people who have expressed interest in things either by adding them to their profile as an area of interest, or by Liking a related Page.

This person wanted to target people who liked the facebook Page of a particular chain of stores in Israel. This brand has an official Page on facebook, as well as a bunch of unofficial ones. Their official page alone has over 14,000 fans, yet when the person selected that Page under Likes and Interests in the Facebook Ad dashboard, they were told that the estimated reach was less than 20 people. I tested this out, and the results were the same, no matter what country or age group I entered (including all ages):

I was determined to get to the bottom of this, so I started running a bunch of tests. Eventually I realized the following:

If the title of a facebook Page has Hebrew in it, the Estimated Reach number is much lower than the number of fans. In fact, the number is always 20 or less – this goes for sites with 50,000 fans and up. And having English and Hebrew in the title doesn’t help. However, if a Page’s title is in English, even if the content is completely in Hebrew the Estimated Reach is in line with the number of fans of the Page.

I wanted to see if this is a problem with non-latin languages in general on facebook, so I decided to test a page with Arabic in the title: Al Jazeera Channel. The Page has over 1.2 million fans. I tested the Reach for this channel in a bunch of countries with large Arabic speaking populations: Israel, Bahrain, Saudi Arabia, United States, United Kingdom, Iraq, Jordan, Lebanon, Egypt. The Estimated Reach for those countries ranged from 20 to 180 at the most. When I added all these countries, the estimated reach maxed out at 240 people, which doesn’t really make sense.

So unless I’m missing something, which could be, it seems that Facebook Ads have a problem with Facebook Pages with titles in Hebrew or Arabic. Which makes you wonder if there are any other issues with Pages with titles that include Hebrew, Arabic, or possibly other non-latin languages like Chinese or Russian. And if that’s the case, maybe Page owners should use English titles wherever possible for now.

Facebook is rolling out some major changes to how Pages work. Some are good, some not. The good changes include the new layout of facebook Pages with the tabs on the left sidebar instead of at the top, and, starting March 11, 2011, the ability to use iframes, HTML, Javascript and CSS without the FBML App! This is going to totally change how you can develop facebook Pages! Party time!

One of the recent changes in the “not so great” category is facebook’s decision to remove the “Suggest to Friends” link on facebook Pages. Admins of a page can still access this feature in the Edit Page area, but fans cannot. So, we’ve been flooded with requests to add an Invite Friends Tab to facebook Pages.  Here are the steps for how to create the Invite Friends Tab on a facebook Page, but keep in mind that as of March 11, 2011, facebook will be deprecating the FBML App.

1. Go to  Static FBML App and click on Add to Page in the top left corner of the page. You will then see a list of your facebook pages. Click “Add to Page” to add the application.
2. FBML is now added to your page.
3. Go to the facebook Page you’re working on and click Edit Page.
4. Click on Apps.
5. Click on the FBML Apps and click on Go to App.
6. Give the Tab a title like “Suggest to Friends.”
7. Copy and Paste the below code replacing illuminea with your organization.
   Important! The action URL on line 3 of the code MUST be http://example.com and NOT http://www.example.com. No WWW welcome at this party.
   
   If you don’t follow these rules, you will get an error that says “Sorry, your request could not be processed. Please try again.”

   <fb:request-form
   method="post"
   action="http://facebook.com/illuminea"
   type="illuminea"
   invite="true"
   content="Connect with iluminea
   <fb:req-choice url=http://www.facebook.com/illuminea label='Go' /> ">
   <fb:multi-friend-selector actiontext="Invite your friends to connect with illuminea" rows="3" cols="3" showborder="true" />
   </fb:request-form>

8. Save Changes.
9. Go to Edit Page > Apps > Click on the Suggest to Friends App you created > Go to Edit Settings and click “Add” where it says Available (see screenshot).
   
10. You can see this in action on illuminea’s facebook Page.
11. When your friend receives the invitation it says “Friend has invited you to “Static FBML”. Not so pretty so for now make sure your message text is really good! I hope there will be a better solution for this.
    

Ever have that issue on Facebook? You see you’re tagged in a photo and want to join in the happy powwow going on underneath but for some reason you’re not being given the option to comment…

Logic might tell you that you should be able to comment on a photo you were tagged in but actually that is not what gives you the ability to comment. What will allow you to partake in discussions under a photograph with your lovely face in it is if you “Like” or are Facebook friends with the person or entity that posted the photo on Facebook.

So that’s what wasn’t working!

The suckiness of Facebook groups is not a new subject. But now Facebook groups have gone through one of those facelifts that leaves the person still looking like themselves, just way more freaky. So let’s take a moment to make fun of the “new and improved” Facebook group.

What are the changes?

It actually took me around a week to find out about the changes but once I found out, it was clear as day that something was fishy in Facebook land.

I woke up and found my email inbox all but flooded with messages mainly from strangers that looked something like this:

Turned out that Facebook had made the following quite anthropologically interesting change:

People can now add their Facebook friends to groups without the friend’s permission.

To be clear, in general, there is almost nothing I’d ever want to do to anyone without their permission. And now, if I ever want to invite someone to a Facebook group, I am basically “forced” to force them into the group. No more suggestions. That would just be too civil, wouldn’t it?

The new automatic settings

Wait. It gets more amusing (and then more amusing). So now this person is in a group without even being aware of it. Now to add to the pushiness, the automatic notification setting is that members of Facebook groups receive messages to their email every time someone posts or comments there. Every time.

That explained all the emails I’d received. Mind you, 99% of them were not about the group but instead attacks on the creator of the group for adding all of us without our permission. (I stood up for him, explaining that it wasn’t his fault, but Facebook’s fault. Aren’t I kind?)

As for this notifications setting, it’s very easy to change but you’ve gotta be on the ball or else it’s very annoying. You just click on “Edit Settings” in the upper right-hand corner of the page when you’re in the group, then a window pops up and you edit it as you wish.

The grand finale – I’ll never ever forgive you!

Now, ready for this? This is the other end of the new ability to add people without their permission.

If my lovely friend added me to a group and I decided I am not interested in that group, I can opt out. That makes sense. The crazy part is that this means that my possibly-well-meaning friend will never be allowed to add me to another group again. Ever!

I must say that this part of the new set-up makes me think that whoever was behind it has super unhealthy personal relationships. Because seriously, assuming I am not on bad terms with any of my Facebook friends (I hope I’d remove anyone with whom I don’t want to be communicating at all), why would I want this to be so final? I probably opted out just because the group is not of interest to me. That doesn’t mean I never want my friend to be able to recommend any group to me ever again!

This, of course, is not to mention the fact that if, to begin with, the friend was sending me a suggestion instead of a forced joining, this wouldn’t even be an issue.

This change is actually childish, though even children usually only talk like that (“I never want to play with you again!”) and then 10 minutes later they’re playing as if nothing happened.

I do wish I wasn’t married to Facebook

So, those are some of the latest changes. I read a seriously lol-ful blog post about these changes by Danny Sullivan. The title is too long to quote here (I’d have to start paying for real estate) but it’s a great story about someone (true story) who was added to some highly embarrassing group just to prove the point I’m trying to prove here (that Facebook Groups are evil, of course).

Facebook so often does things that are so unfriendly that an urge arises from deep within me to leave Facebook. And then I remember… Too bad I have close to 90 photo albums and so much other information there. (I would absolutely love to have a way to download all my info from Facebook so I have it somewhere other than there.)

So instead of wishing I could leave, I just wish that Facebook would head on down to someone else’s office, say, Google, and ask them for some tips on how to make changes that gently fall into place and make the user’s experience just that much more pleasant and fun, instead of making changes that sort of slap you in the Face and make you wish you could take the Book and slap them back.

P.S. All of this is not to mention that really Facebook should take the pluses of groups and the pluses of pages and just put them together into one. But that’s for another post.

We’re always on the lookout for interesting uses of social media by companies and organizations, and right now there are two groups on Facebook using photos as part of extensive social media campaigns. One is the Inbal Hotel, which is holding a contest whereby the person with the best photos of Jerusalem wins a night for two at the hotel (pick me, pick me!). The second is Nefesh b’Nefesh, with their “This is my Israel” photo contest. Read on to learn more about how each of these organizations is using photos and social media to engage people with their brands.

Inbal Hotel – the first in their field

Inbal Hotel Facebook photo contest

It’s easy to jump on the social media bandwagon once it’s already moving, but to be the first to get the bandwagon going in your field can feel a little daunting. As far as I know, the Inbal, a hotel in Jerusalem, is the first Israeli hotel to really go all the way, social media speaking. From their gung-ho presence “all over” Facebook and Twitter, it’s easily apparent that Ruth Waiman, the enthusiastic Executive Assistant along with Online Marketing Manager Pinny Orzach, the SEO/SEM person, have been given the OK to really give social media a try.

It really is a risk when a company decides to put a substantial amount of employee hours towards a social media presence. There could be growing pains when a conventional company puts itself out there in the world of social media. Often there is a slight image change as the company shows itself to be more hip and young through their social media presence.

You’ve got to be at least a little creative and really quite proactive to keep your social media presence alive and well. It’s not just about posting, “The chef is now cooking duck for dinner.” It’s about being cool, fun and interactive.

The Inbal Hotel’s latest photograph competition is exactly that – cool, fun and interactive. Actually, the beauty of their competition is that it isn’t about the Inbal. It’s about Jerusalem. You can enter the competition by posting up to three photographs you’ve taken of Jerusalem on their Facebook wall. At the end of October the best photograph will be chosen and the winner will get a night for two at the hotel.

When I wrote to Ruth about their latest contest, she explained:

To further boost our interactions on Facebook on both English and Hebrew walls, the photo competition was launched and has been receiving enthusiastic feedback from the outset.

Having now received close to 80 photos on the combined pages, we’ve definitely noticed an increase of fans and interactions and are hoping to involve external photography professionals for the judging due to take place early next month.

Ruth also mentioned all the events they’ve been hosting at the hotel, including the WordCamp afterparty (which we, as the WordCamp organizers, are really grateful for) at the beginning of September.

Nefesh B’Nefesh’s “This is my Israel” Campaign

Nefesh B'Nefesh This is My Israel campaign

Slightly before the Inbal’s competition commenced, Nefesh B’Nefesh (NBN), the organization that supports Jews who move to Israel, started a photo contest on their facebook page. To participate in this competition, people were requested to take a picture of themselves holding a sign that says “This is my ISRAEL” somewhere in Israel. The place where they are photographed should be one that they see as truly representing Israel for them.

Also, a fun campaign that is not about the actual organization behind the campaign, but instead about “you” and Israel.

What a wonderful use of social media to get people involved in an organization and, of course, more connected to each other and Israel.

It is currently voting time on the NBN campaign so you can go to the album and click “like” on your favourites. The winning photographer will receive a Flip video camera. Sweet.

Goals and drawbacks

The main goals of campaigns of this kind are exposure and building a certain image and relationship with your followers. As long as your campaign really is, as I said, fun, cool and interactive, and not all about you, the image and relationship aspects will probably be fine. The only problem with these types of contests is that if you want to participate in the contest, you might hesitate telling others about it since the last thing you need is more competition!

(Of course that brings up the question, why am I writing about it here if I plan on entering the Inbal contest? I suppose my blogging addiction is stronger than my “I need to win” attitude.)

Otherwise, both of these contests are a great and fun use of Facebook.

And here are my pictures

So yes, I plan to enter three of my pictures in the Inbal competition. Here are the photographs I’m considering. Which ones do you think could be winners? Help me choose! I really could use a night in a fancy hotel.

One of the perks of working in the field of social media is that you get to pretend that you’re working and learning while watching hilarious videos of a good-looking guy in a shower. You know, the Old Spice guy in the shower, the guy who used to work in shark dental care and rides lions as a hobby?

If you don’t know what I’m talking about (i.e. have been hiding under a rock etc.), Old Spice launched a campaign that combined twitter, YouTube and a bit of facebook that took the web by storm. The campaign included some planned commercials that set the stage for the manly-manliness of Old Spice Man, and then a series of real-time videos made in response to people’s tweets on twitter and comments on facebook and YouTube. Here’s the original video launched in February which attracted 19 million viewers (this video was actually shot in one shot with minimal computer graphics):

A few weeks ago Old Spice Man returned with this commercial:

What’s so great about Old Spice Man?

• Old Spice Man – actor Isaiah Mustafa is just amazing. He gets the message across perfectly.
• The writing – the lines Isaiah says are brilliant. I mean, how great is a campaign that ends with the line “silver fish hand catch”?
  
  

  I have to applaud the @oldspice writers for “Silver Fish Hand Catch” a catchphrase that will last forever.Thu Jul 15 07:48:04 via TweetDeckIain Tait
  iaintait

• Multiple channels – the campaign is coordinated across multiple social media channels, utilizing each channel’s advantages and cross posting as required. Twitter is used for direct conversation, facebook for posting videos and status updates with longer text and accompanying responses by fans; and YouTube for centralizing the video content.
• Appeals to men and women – For example, I can’t stand beer commercials which are obviously targeting men, but this campaign appealed to both sexes which is good for a product like Old Spice body wash, which men use but women often probably buy.
• Combines traditional and new media – these videos are commercials, a type of advertising that has been around for decades. But the commercials have evolved to take advantage of social media by using the medium’s potential. Creating new videos in real time is not something you can do with TV; also, the very personal style, and personalized videos (he spoke to his daughter, and helped a guy propose marriage, and even answered his own question), are very social media. But commercials are old media and we’re seeing the two come together here.
• Personalization – how fun is it to get a personal video message from Old Spice Man? Thousands sent tweets and comments his way in the hope that he would respond to them, and getting a response was like winning the lottery. In order to create these videos, marketing agency Wieder + Kennedy’s team worked at a furious pace, creating over 180 videos in 24 hours!!
• Old Spice Man is a nice guy – many attempts at creating viral media involved tricking people into believing what they were seeing is real, or being mean to others in some way. Old Spice Man is just nice, and cool. He makes us laugh. It’s a refreshing.

This campaign was a hit, with over 180 videos created, over 5.9 million views and 22,500 comments, as reported by Visible Measures. Visible Measures also reports that it is one of the fastest growing online video campaigns ever. Even once the videos have ended, people continued the trend. Reddit users created Old Spice Voicemail (with female and male versions), and some students at Bingham Young University created the a knockoff video encouraging people to study in the library.

Is this the future of social media marketing?

This is not the future of social media marketing. These guys created a groundbreaking campaign, but if companies copy this model, it will get stale. No one will enjoy this level of success because no one else can be first. Because when it comes down to it, success in social media is about creativity and originality, breaking out of the box and grabbing our attention. The next roaring success will have to be something else that’s never been done before.

References:

• Old Spice Mixes Social Media And Web Ads, Forbes.com
• Old Spice: The Archetype of a Successful Social Media Campaign, Mashable
• The making of Old Spice’s commercial: The Man Your Man Could Smell Like, Twit video with Leo Laporte
• How the Old Spice Videos Are Being Made, ReadWriteWeb
• New Spice | Study like a scholar, scholar, Harold B. Lee Library

When creating custom FBML tabs for facebook pages, it can often be helpful to use an image map. An image map is a flat image (like a jpeg or a gif) that has been coded with HTML that makes parts of the image into live hyperlinks. A custom FBML tab is a tab on a facebook page that has been coded with FBML and/or HTML to do something unique. Here’s an example of a custom tab on a facebook page on the The Wall Street Journal’s facebook page:

As you can see, the Wall Street Journal greets new visitors with a custom tab called News, which acts like a landing page.

I’m not going to get into how to create a custom tab on a facebook page here since there are tons of tutorials around the web on how to do so. What we are going to discuss here is how to put an image map in your custom fbml page.

Step 1: Get your image

First, find the image that you want to make linkable. Maybe edit it in Photoshop or some other editing program and add text. It’s recommended to underline text you plan to make linkable to make them look like links. Let’s use the following image as an example:

If you mouse over the image, you’ll see that nothing happens, and there are no links. I’m going to make the words Social Icons a link to an icon search engine, and each image will link to a similar icon online that you can download.

Step 2: Upload your image to a server somewhere

In order for your image to appear in your facebook tab, it must be hosted somewhere online. That’s the only way facebook can “call” it in to the tab – it can’t call it from your hard drive on your desktop (unless your hard-drive is a publically accessible server, which is usually not the case). Here are two great places for uploading images for free: Photobucket and Image Shack. I like Image Shack for quick and dirty image uploads since you don’t have to create an account there – it’s optional, which is helpful if you later want to remove an image or have control over your images, but not required.

So let’s use Image Shack as our example. Follow the directions to upload your image, and you will get to a page that looks like this:

We care about the field above called Direct Link (I put a green box around it). Select and copy the whole URL in that field.

Step 3: Create an image map

The image map must be created with CSS. If you use HTML it won’t work in facebook. Lucky for us, there’s a great free tool online for creating CSS image maps: Image Map Tool.

1. Go to http://image-maps.com.
2. Once you’re in the Image Map Tool, enter the image URL you copied from the Image Shack page into the field that says “From a URL”:
   
3. Click on Start Mapping Your Image. You’ll come to a page that says that your image was uploaded successfully:
   
4. Click on the link “continue to next step.” That’s where the fun begins.
5. You need to select the parts of your image that you want to make into links. Most parts of the image can be selected with the Rectangle tool, but unusual shapes can be selected with the Custom Shape tool. In our case I’m going to use the Rectangle Tool.
6. When you click on the Rectangle tool, you get this floating thing that you can move around and resize, and enter the link and link title/alt text:
   
   As you can see above, I moved the floating box thing over the words Social Icons and resized it so it covers both words. I entered a link to an icon search engine Iconfinder, and entered the alt text for the link. Next, click Save.
7. Click on the Rectangle button again and repeat this process as many times as you need until all hotspots are created. Since I want four links in this image, I repeated this process another three times.
8. Now, choose the options that you want from the sidebar under Advanced Tool Box. There are some useful and advanced options there, and I recommend you check them out, but take note of the options to Show Text Links and Allow Backlink. If you choose to show text links, text links will appear under your image with links to the places you’ve linked your image to. This could be good for usability since you’ll offer a text version of the links in addition to the image links.
   The Allow Backlink option will put a text link under your image map to the Image Map site. If you can, it’s nice to give credit to this site for creating such an awesome free tool. But if you can’t, make sure to deselect that option.
9. Now click Get Your Code. This takes you to a very confusing page with lots of text and tabs at the top. Click on the CSS Code tab at the top of the page:
   
   You will see a bunch of code. It’s basically ready to copy and paste into your FBML tab, but you need to make one change to it first. Image Map Tool adds a dotted black line that appears when you mouse over any of the links on the image, which is pretty annoying so you probably want to get rid of it. So you need to get rid of lines of code that look like this:

   a.LINKx:hover {background:transparent; border:1px dashed black; color:black;}

   The x above represents a number. The above line of code will appear as many times as links that you created in the image, and the x will be a number. So if there are three links, the above line will appear three times, and the x will be the numbers 1, 2, and 3 in each line.

10. Once that’s done, paste the code into your FBML tab and you’ve got yourself a working image map in an FBML tab!

Sources:

• Design Your Facebook Page Like a Pro – Image Maps Tutorial
• “Image Map” on the Facebook Static FBML forum

Facebook made some drastic changes to its services and features a few weeks ago. First, Fan Pages are a thing of the past. Now, there are just Pages, and you can’t become a Fan of them, but you can Like them. Ok, weird but basically just a semantic change.

Facebook also announced their new “Connections” system, which anyone who has logged into facebook since this was announced had to notice. Connections is a nasty feature that doesn’t allow you to control your profile information anymore. For example, if you want to say that one of your interests is Internet Marketing, your entry for that must link to a new automatically generated Community Page that facebook creates for Internet marketing. You can identify a Community Page by the lovely (not) logo that facebook plops in there automatically:

I’m guessing that at some point facebook will start to automatically enter images that they have deemed relevant to the content in the logo space, but in the meantime this meaningless DNA symbol is what we’ve got.

The pages automatically aggregate content related to the topic and displays it on the page. It places an emphasis on content from Wikipedia, Google Maps, posts from facebook, and content posted off of facebook. It seems to have the potential to become a pretty rich page, if we can judge from the Community Page for Jerusalem, Israel.

From what Facebook wrote in their introductory post on the subject, it seems that the goal is to help us have the things we “Like” appear in our facebook profile. They say that:

Some of you added information about yourself, such as your likes and interests, favorite books, music and movies, when you first joined Facebook. But we’ve noticed that more than three times as many of you have connected to Facebook Pages, such as those for bands, non-profits, universities or anything else you care about, as a way to express yourself. So to make it even easier to display your affiliations, we’ve improved the profile.

So Facebook is saying we’ve been more active Liking pages, than adding our likes to our profile info. So if we “Like” the page of a certain brand or entity, why wouldn’t we want that affinity to appear in our profile information, right? Well, kind of right, but here’s why their implementation of this idea doesn’t make sense:

Pages should be enough

People used to be able to easily see the Pages that we like on our Info tab on our profile. Why wasn’t that good enough? Now the Pages we like appear under Likes and Interests in an obscure link called Show other Pages:

You have to click on that to see all the Pages that person (me) has Liked, as follows:

If facebook really wanted to help us share our interests, why not prominently present the Pages we’ve liked in our Likes and Interests section? If they would do that, there’s no need for Community Pages.

Big brand discrimination

If facebook is trying to make a stronger connection between our profiles and the things we have actively Liked, why not help us link our Interests to existing Pages, rather than force us to link to their Community Pages? For example, I’d much rather have the link in the Employment section of my profile info for illuminea go to our illuminea page, rather than the useless illuminea Community Page that facebook created (see below).

And here’s what makes this even worse: if you want to enter a well-known brand or entity as part of your profile information – like Coca Cola, or 30 Rock – Facebook is helpful enough to offer up a link to those brands’ Pages! But if you’re (hypothetically) a tiny little company in Israel, fugetaboutit. Facebook helpfully creates a Community Page for your brand and ignores your existing Page cuz you’s too tiny to really know what’s good for yous.

Reputation management nightmare

In continuation of the above, if your brand is too tiny to matter, your brand now has two homes on facebook: your Page and your Community Page. Check out this example for illuminea. Here’s a screenshot of our Page that we created:

And here’s how the Community Page looks:

You have no control over the Community Page and what shows up there. I’m not just talking about avoiding negative feedback about a brand – at least complaints would be related to the brand. I’m talking about garbage showing up there.

Orli Yakuel from GO2WEB20 posted the following on facebook:

The link in that update takes you to the Orli Community Page:

What the heck is that? But it might not seem so bad. I mean, the posts are all from Orli. It’s kind of like a duplication of her facebook profile, another home for her on the web. But if you scroll down on the page you see this beauty:

And that’s not all that Orli has to face. If you do a search for her on facebook, you get this:

You’d think with a unique name like Orli Yakuel she wouldn’t have to compete for her name online. At least she appears first.

But we can’t expect to always be first: Rena Reich recently posted on the Digital Eve Israel mailing list that she knows someone whose facebook Community Page for their brand is appearing higher in search results than their own Page. Yikes.

You want privacy? On our web? Hahaha

People might have interests that they only want to share with selected people. But if your info is linked to Pages, that means you appear in the list of people who like that page:

Keep in mind that Facebook Pages you connect to are public. You can control which friends are able to see connections listed on your profile, but you may still show up on Pages you’re connected to. (Connecting to Everything You Care About, The Facebook Blog)

And you can’t not link, because if you choose not to, the interest or info won’t appear in your profile any longer:

Connecting to Pages is now the main [I think they mean “only” – MS] way to express yourself on your profile. If you didn’t connect to any of the suggestions, the sections of your profile to which those suggestions corresponded will now be empty. If you chose to not connect to Pages during the transition process, there will be the opportunity to connect to the suggested Pages later at the top of the “Info” tab on your profile, and of course, going forward, you will always be able to add new connections by Liking Pages and/or editing your profile. (Facebook Help Center)

People really seem to hate this. Here’s what one guy commented on the facebook blog:

Orwell’s 1984 is happening now!! one of the reasons i joined facebook was to connect with people I KNOW!!!! not to share private information about me to people i do not know or for facebook to remember my deleted information and make public sensitive information about me!

Let’s say that the reason facebook is doing this is that also want us to be able to network around general themes, like Internet marketing, and to do that they have offered to create Community Pages for these topics that we can all gather round. That’s a nice idea, but they shouldn’t be forcing us to link to these pages; it should be optional.

Don’t post it if you don’t want Mom to see it

Facebook has been chipping away at our privacy bit by bit over the past few years. Check out this snazzy infographic for a visualization of what information used to be private on facebook, and what is private now (almost nothing). Why is facebook doing this? Pete Cashmore from Mashable sums it up nicely in the title of a recent post:

Facebook “Likes” World Domination

Basically, Facebook is working hard to avoid the fate of other dead or dying social networks like Friendster and MySpace. They hope to do so by not only interacting with you on facebook.com, but all over the web. That’s why you can now Like pages that are off of facebook.com, for example. I think Pete sums it up well:

It’s in Facebook’s interests to lock up your social graph, and it’s in your best interests that it doesn’t [my bold]. If Twitter, Google or another player were to make your social graph portable, you wouldn’t need to store all of your information on Facebook — you could do whatever you please with it.

I’m not advocating that we all stop using facebook. But like anything in life, consumer responsibility is important here: know where you stand with facebook, and what it can and can’t do for you, and hopefully you can put good use to it. In short, use the Mom Visibility Quotient: don’t post anything on facebook (or anywhere on the web) that you wouldn’t want your mother to see, and you should be ok.

Why oh why do people still use fax machines?

We don’t have a fax machine in our office. From the beginning I decided that we would withstand the pressure and insist that people email documents to us so that we can be a mostly paperless office. Yes, I know that there are fax services that will deliver faxes to your inbox, but in that case why not just use email? And for those that think that there’s no way to get a piece of paper to someone remotely without a fax machine, I’d like to introduce you to a handy device called the scanner.

We have so many ways to communicate online today: email, facebook, twitter…there are even people talking about how communication via social networks will push out email communication. I think that’s an extreme point of view, and email’s not going anywhere, but the point is: get rid of your fax. It deserves to be in the same place as your record player, dot matrix printer, and fluorescent slouch socks (I shudder when I think of how we wore those).

And since Dilbert agrees with me, we know that what I say is Truth: