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Nine By Blue founder Vanessa Fox is author of the critically acclaimed Marketing in the Age of Google: Your Online Strategy IS Your Business, which has been called the “search marketing bible” by technology leaders. Be sure to pick up your copy today.
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June 27, 2007
Facebook is apparently the next big thing, even though it’s not exactly new or next, but it is a thing so at least the hype is partially accurate. My feelings towards Facebook are the same as my feelings towards most social networking sites. I want to like it, I mostly like it. I want a way to stay connected and my laziness combined with my inability to be offline make social networking seem like it should be perfect. But I don’t entirely like it. It’s like walking the shores of Lake Michigan when what you really want is the Pacific ocean. Close, but still not quite right.
But I have been attempting to use Facebook (although I have been doing an exceptionally poor job of it) and I have a few questions.
1. What if I don’t have a college email address?
Can I really just not tell you where I went to school? I need an email address? Are you purposely telling those of us who went to college before the days of email that we’re too old to use the site?
2. Seriously, how do you find your friends exactly?
Possibly I haven’t done a good job of figuring this out, but shouldn’t it be easy? I type a name into the search box and I get thousands of people with that name. And I can try to filter by network, but it doesn’t look all that simple. Can’t I just type some keywords about the person, like where they live and where they work? Maybe their favorite movie or type of donut?
3. What the hell is poking?
Just there to make me feel unhip, right?
4. We hooked up?
There’s nothing wrong with “we hooked up” as a concept, but the options on how you met someone leave a little to be desired. I feel as though there are some major categories missing. Where’s “met at the supermarket, looking at spring vegetables”? And Facebook, I will let you in on a little secret. I have been admitting that I’ve met many of my friends online for years. And most of the people on Facebook are also online and are using Facebook to talk to their friends online. So, they are likely OK with admitting they’ve sometimes met this way. In fact, I could use a whole subsection of “met online” options. You probably want options other than only “that craigslist casual encounters section”, but “on a forum”, “through blogging”, and “on [fill in the blank] social networking site” are a good start.
Mostly I want to just be able to type in whatever I want, but there’s not a text field available to me. Possibly once I choose “met randomly” I can add details? But that makes no sense as it makes all my friendships look like haphazard collisions when I was wandering around drunk one night. And maybe some of my friendships starting out that way (I have been to a lot of search conferences, after all), but not all of them.
5. Can’t you partner up with Flickr?
I get it. It’s cool that you can tag your pictures with people’s names and then they get notified when someone comments. But I am keeping track of too many things already. I can’t deal with storing my pictures in multiple locations. Can’t I just upload my Flickr feed and have some handy API for mapping my Facebook friends to my Flickr permissions and tags? I see that there are now a bunch of add-on apps for Flickr. But which one (if any) does what I want?
6. Why do you keep showing me random things?
For instance, it looks like I can see events from anyone in my network. My network is Seattle. It doesn’t help me much to go to an events page where I see events from everyone in Seattle. It may briefly make me feel popular until I realize I’m not actually invited to any of these things. I’m looking at the first event listed for me. It’s called “my birthday dinner”. However, it appears to be missing the person who set up the event so I can’t even tell whose birthday I’m missing. I suppose there may be some value in posting public events for your network. Like maybe if you’re in a band and you want to let everyone in Seattle know where you’re playing. The implementation could just use a little more thought. I’m also shown “6 of 55,656 people” in my network. Maybe this all would be more useful if I had a network other than this giant city full of people with whom the only thing I have in common is, well, the giant city.
Maybe if I used the APIs and add-ons and things, I could get Facebook to do exactly what I wanted. But I don’t want to build a social networking site. I just want to use one. Is that so much to ask?
I’m not Facebook (duh), but I’ll take a stab at these anyway. Plus, you commented on my blog and I’d feel guilt-ridden if I didn’t return the favor.
1) I don’t remember being forced to supply a college email address, but I remember them asking for one. I don’t think it’s actually required, is it?
2) I did two things: a) joined a bunch of SEO/SEM groups and walked the member list, adding everyone I recognized as a friend; and b) I imported my email/address book contacts and sent friend invites to the ones who are already on Facebook. For “B”, click the little arrow next to FRIENDS at the top, then choose “Invite Friends.” There’ll be a link on the right of that page letting you import contacts.
3) No clue. Never been poked. Never poked. I don’t know if I should be proud of that. Or not.
4) Amen to that….. but I think you can add details on some of the options after you click one.
5) That would be cool, but Yahoo would prolly have to buy FB first. Just get on with it, Yahoo!
6) The network thing is pretty useless the way they have it now. No arguments here.
(I’ll make sure you get a Mariners invite next time, Vanessa….)
Well, it lets me add my college to my profile, but then it has this message:
“Note: Want to see more people from Pacific? Use your Pacific email address to join the Pacific school network. Click here to join.”
and if click on that ever-so-descriptive anchor text, I’m prompted to enter the school’s address to join the network. Same thing for job. Which makes the networking aspect a bit more limited than say, Linkedin. On Linkedin, you can add your schools and previous jobs and then see people from them. With Facebook, it looks like you can only belong to the network of your current job and well, your previous school if you have an email address.
That’s right, now I remember how they do it — and the same thing happens when you join a geo-network. I split time between Seattle and Tri-Cities, but could only choose one network to join.
Maybe a fear of network spammers? It’s goofy, whatever the reason.
1) Lots of colleges provide alumni email addresses. Maybe that will work?
5) Try the feed my face thingie (http://www.geero.net/feedmyface/). You tag your flickr photos in a special way, and then it uploads those photos to facebook. Inelegant, in that you then have two copies of the same photo. But at least the photos are parked in the photos part of facebook, and people can then identify themselves in them.
If you think ‘poke’ is confusing, try installing the ‘superpoke’ application. Then not only can you poke, but also cuddle, headbutt, throw a sheep at, buy a beer for, and a whole bunch of other stuff. I’ve been having fun interacting with the SEOmoz crew – particularly throwing sheep at Jane
Wow. I have never had to register on someone’s wordpress site before to leave a comment. That’s seems like a big hoop to jump through.
Anyway, you hit the nail on the head with this one. I agreed with 1 through 5. I don’t have a college e-mail address. I couldn’t find friends without sorting through lists of names. Myspace is better at that I think. Poking is weird. They need better options for saying how you know someone. I was annoyed at the compatibility with Flickr and I don’t want to upload all my pictures twice. They do need a better Flickr application, but for now I am using Flickr photos. There may be a better one but this one lets you choose which photos to share on your profile page and I guess people that click on you can view your Flickr library.
Yeah, I’m totally with you on number 1. I was like college email? Dude, when I went to college, we didn’t have email. Then I felt bad for being so old. Still, I’m strong, because we used to walk eight miles in the snow to go to college and when we got there, we had classes outside.
And here’s number 7 — WTF with not being able to add multiple people at one time. Now that I’m actually on the damn thing and getting friends, it would be nice to add several of them at the same time. Life is too short.
Joining Facebook is a great way to find out which Facebook users are embedding my images! Yay! I haven’t found much other use for it, though.
Then again, until I read your post, I didn’t know there was a difference between mentioning my schools/workplaces/insitutions in my profile vs joining “networks”. There, now I have joined my workplace network. Thus do I further blur the line between my work and my social life.
Great insight…I have been fighting the urge jump on the facebook train! I think you just convinced me.
I’ll stick with my linkedin page, which I do enjoy reconnecting with past colleagues and friends.
Vanessa – “linkin” w/me.
michael.buonomo@gmail.com
I have my 14 year old daughter interning this summer and she is our social media guru. Will ask her how it all works….
I think you need to be a teenager to be effective on most of the social media sites.
I lack the patience and the right frame of mind to do a good job at it.
I never “poked” (I even don’t know what is! )
I find my friends in the groups that others users made.
And yes, the line “we met at Facebook” is missing
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I am pretty positive that you no longer need a college email to register on the website.
Also, regarding your other questions simple answer is: The various things you find annoying about Facebook, are the same things that many facebook members really love about the site. After using Facebook for a long time now, I am soooo anti-myspace its not even funny.
You can actually invite a ton of people at a time.
Click on the Friends menu at top then Invite or Find. They’re currently mildly evil, and encouraging folks to give their gmail usernames and passwords so they can help find/invite (though only with your permission) your gmail-based friends. But I’m chatting with one of my Facebook-employed friends to help them make this less-evil (e.g., using our authorization/authentication API).
When you poke someone (as I understand it), you can then see their profile for 1 week. So, if you think that you know someone but aren’t sure, poke them and then you can check the full profile to see if they are who you think they are.
One thing that would make finding your friend so much easier from the 100′s with similar names would simply be to allow you to enlarge their profile picture from the size of a postage stamp…Or only make friends with people with weird names in future.
Thanks for saving me the hassle of dealing with FB. Ugh.
And “poked” and “hooked up”? Hmmm. After reading Lonesome Dove, I don’t know that I’d want to be “poked” and hooked up sounds, well, yeah . . . .
Vanessa,
Facebook rocks. You can select your primary network. For example, I’m on the Allstate network and the Philadelphia network, but it makes more sense to set my primary as the Allstate network since I know more of them. As for “poking”…
Its like Vanessa Fox Nude, it may sound sexual, but its really not, maybe.
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