Have you been in Facebook lately and noticed how quickly comments appeared from other people on a status update? Did you almost feel like they were updating in “real-time”?

I had personally experienced on some highly-commented updates and now we know why… Facebook rolled out “Live Commenting” to all users over the past weeks.

The Facebook blog post goes into some of the gory details, which I personally find fascinating but I know others may not. It also has some fascinating stats:

every minute, we serve over 100 million pieces of content that may receive comments. In that same minute, users submit around 650,000 comments that need to get routed to the correct viewers.

From a user perspective, this continues the blending within Facebook of “asynchronous” communication, where you post something and wait for responses, with “synchronous” communication that is more real-time like Facebook Chat can be.

Status updates are becoming more like IM chats/conversations… and from Facebook’s point-of-view, that’s great because it undoubtedly means people will stay in Facebook even longer. If you comment and then see another comment come in, you’ll stay to read… and potentially reply… and do it again…

It’s all about the eyeballs… and keeping people there.

Well… and “enabling better communication” between Facebook users, of course…. which leads to people staying there.

Facebook continues to be evolving in fascinating directions… this is yet another step.

What do you think? Have you noticed this new change?

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Is Facebook reneging on our ability to “claim” community pages? Back on December 1, I wrote about how you could “claim” a community page on Facebook, after seeing an article B.L. Ochman wrote in Ad Age. But here’s the thing…

Facebook has NOT contacted several of us who “claimed” pages.

Facebook hasn’t contacted me in the month since I claimed a page… and according to others who have left comments on my original post, they haven’t been contacted either.

And further…

Facebook has REMOVED the option to claim a page.

The bottom of the community page used to look like this (my emphasis added):

Today, with yet another Facebook user interface change, those options are over on the left sidebar… but look what is missing:

So what’s the deal, Facebook?

Will we who are responsible for online marketing for companies ever have the ability to claim the Community Pages, as you said we would? Or are you yanking that ability?

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It is apparently not enough for Facebook that they are so many people’s main portal to the Internet… their most-used site… etc. They seem to also want to be the home page in your browser, too! At least, that’s what this bar tells me that now appears on top of Facebook when I go to the site:

If you can’t read the image text, it says:

Drag this to your home button to see what’s happening with friends as soon as you open your browser.

Translation: Do you really need to view any other site than Facebook?

Smart move on Facebook’s part… encourage people to make Facebook their home page so that whenever they open a new window, odds are that they’ll be sucked into what’s happening in Facebook rather than doing whatever else they were going to do.

All Facebook, all the time…

Needless to say, I haven’t personally made this change. I like my home page as it is (Google Search). But the war for the eyeballs will continue…

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Is Facebook about to give us more control over our Facebook Pages? Including the ability to get “notifications” of when there is new content on our pages? For a few minutes today, I had this capability!

Alerted by a tweet from fellow New Hampshire-ite Leslie Poston, I flipped over to Facebook and discovered that there was now a “Switch Accounts…” menu option as seen in the image on the right.

When you click on that menu choice, you are taken to a new box where you can login as one of your pages.

Here is what my list looked like:

All of those are Facebook Pages where I have administrative access. I pressed the “Login” button next to “Voxeo” and was immediately taken to that Facebook page … in a new view that showed me ONLY that page!

Now, here is what is so HUGE about this:

Click on the notification icon… and HERE IS ALL THE ACTIVITY ON YOUR PAGE!

We’ve never had an easy way to do this before… we always had to scan down the page to see what was new. Very cool!

Clicking on the “facebook” logo in the upper left brings you back to your page…

And just as I was about to test out replying to people from the “Page” login and posting new updates… all of a sudden Facebook froze on me … and I was looking at my regular personal wall again! Up in the “Account” drop-down menu, the “Switch Accounts” choice had disappeared…

Was this an “Oops, didn’t mean to do that” by Facebook? A feature preview that escaped too early?

Whatever it was … I WANT THAT FEATURE!

When will you roll this out Facebook? We want it NOW!

UPDATE: TheNextWeb has a post up indicating that Facebook released some (now-removed) prototypes.

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This post – How the Redesigned Profile’s Recently Tagged Photos Panel Can Be Abused – should be read by anyone using Facebook.

Shortly after Bryan Person pointed me to the article, I took 5 minutes to create 5 images using Skitch on my Mac and upload them to Facebook. During the upload, I “tagged” myself in the images. The result is that when you go look at my Facebook profile those five images are (at the moment) what you see across the top of my profile:

I then looked at Bryan’s Facebook Profile, which showed the five most recent pictures in which he was tagged:

With Bryan’s permission (we were chatting on Facebook), I then simply went to each of my “photos” and tagged them as having Bryan in the “photo”. The result was that now visitors to Bryan’s profile get to see MY images and message:

Here’s the thing:

I DID NOT NEED TO ASK BRYAN’S PERMISSION.

I just simply had to go and tag him in those “photos” that I uploaded.

That’s it.

The other aspect of this is that:

Those images will stay on Bryan’s profile until either:
1) I remove the tags;
2) Bryan removes the tags; or
3) someone else tags Bryan in new pictures.

Your profile page displays the five most recent photos in which you were tagged.

Now, Facebook has long had this ability for users to “tag” their friends in photos (without their permission), but photos were NOT as prominently displayed on your profile. Sure, that picture of you from 1975 that you were tagged in might show up on your Wall or in your “Photos” area, but that was it… a few people might notice it, but probably not many… and when you then went and removed the tagging they would disappear.

Now it is front and center at the top of your Facebook Profile… for all to see.

Stand by for all sorts of pranks…

And… are you an advocate for a cause? Why not tag your friends in some “photos” so that your cause shows up on all their profiles?

Of course, if you do this too much, those friends may very well “un-friend” you… but until they do that there isn’t anything they can do to prevent this display. Facebook does not have any way to “opt in” to being tagged. You have to remove the tag on each photo after you have been tagged.

As a Facebook user, I do find it annoying that my main presence on Facebook is not under my control. I would like my profile to be a place where I specify the information that I want others to see. Sure, you don’t necessarily look at other people’s profiles all that often… but when I send a friend request, the recipient probably will look… and I’d like them to see what I want.. versus what Facebook wants.

However, this is the proprietary walled garden of Facebook… and if you want to be inside the walls, you have to abide by their rules… which are basically that they can do anything they want and change how info about you is displayed on their whim.

Welcome to our brave new world…

P.S. Should you try this yourself, the trick is to tag yourself in the images in the reverse order, i.e. you tag yourself in the last image first, then in the 2nd-to-last, etc.

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Kudos to Facebook for their effort today in encouraging people to vote in today’s US election! Opening a Facebook window today, it was hard to miss the encouragement to vote:

After I voted this morning and clicked the “I Voted” button in Facebook, I had the opportunity to post that to my Wall along with a message (which of course I did):

And now whenever I go back to my browser and look at Facebook again, there is that box at the top of my NewsFeed counting away the number of Facebook users who have pressed that button… approaching 4 million users when I took the screenshot…

… and passing by the 4 million mark in the time it took me to write this post.

All in all it’s very cool to see!

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Last week, I gained some fascinating insight into the power of Facebook for local organizing in response to a need. As some of you may know, my wife was injured last Wednesday when she was hit by a car while out walking. She’s doing much better now and our 17-month-old daughter seems so far completely unharmed. We’re extremely thankful.

What was fascinating to me, though, was the role that Facebook played in the response to the accident.

When my wife called me to let me know what had happened, I was 3,000 miles away in Los Angeles getting ready to go out for a run before a long day at the ITEXPO conference/trade show speaking on a panel, meeting with analysts and recording some video interviews. There was obviously not much I could do from 3,000 miles away beyond try to reach a couple of people on the phone to see if they could help.

But what I did do was post a status update on Facebook.

What happened next was what we in the security community would refer to as a “denial-of-service attack” on our phone line… our home phone started ringing and pretty much didn’t stop the entire day. (And the “DoS” aspect is that we do not have call-waiting, so new callers got a busy signal for most of the day.) Our truly wonderful friends and family in the greater Keene, NH, area reached out to my wife with so many offers of help and support… it was incredibly humbling and VERY much appreciated. Email messages and Facebook messages poured in… to the point that there was simply no way my wife could even begin to answer them all. The word spread from Facebook out through email and phone to other channels, as well, letting people know at our daughter’s school, for instance.

As someone remote it was extremely reassuring to me to see the comments on my status updates, to see the posts on my wife’s Facebook wall/updates and to see the messages coming in. As I rearranged my schedule and spent most of the day on planes flying home, those messages certainly gave me a sense of reassurance that even though I personally could not be there to help, others were there to help.

It was a powerful personal reminder of the power of a connected community – and an interesting view into using a global tool like Facebook for local action in your community.

And yes, we’ve had tools for building online communities for 30+ years now…. BBSs, email lists, online services (think CompuServe), web forums… and a hundred other forms. Facebook is only the latest major player in the well-worn space… and 5 years from now maybe we’ll still be on Facebook or maybe we’ll have migrated to something else.

There is power there, though… the power of bringing people together – and so easily distributing news and information. Much more to write on this, methinks…

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Dear Facebook,

Can you please help us out here?  You see, we’ve come to understand that so much of the conversation these days is happening within the pretty walls of your garden. We like it.  We write there. We play there. We post photos. All is happy.

Some of us have even created Facebook “Pages” for various parts of our lives.  We’ve created Pages for our businesses or employers, schools, churches, community groups, bands, bars, blogs, causes, projects and pretty much anything else we want to promote.  I’ve done it myself for a book I wrote and also maintain my employer’s Page (Voxeo).

Here’s the problem.  There are certain <expletives deleted> unethical people who believe that they have a right to fill up your Facebook Page with links to whatever products or services they are paid to shill.  So they find your Facebook Page and leave posts on your Wall or add them as Links.

They are slimy spammers – and their garbage pollutes our Page and detracts from the conversations we want to have.

Sure, we as “Page administrators” can remove the postings to our Page, BUT WE HAVE TO KNOW ABOUT THEM FIRST!

This is the crux of the problem.  After all this time, you still don’t provide any way for us to know when someone has posted something to our Page.  Sure, you give us a weekly email summary of the activity on our pages… but that doesn’t really help us know what has been posted.

We have to keep going to back to each Page and checking now and then to make sure spammers aren’t polluting our page!

But what I don’t get, dear Facebook, is why this is so hard to do… I mean, you send email notifications for practically everything else that goes on within your pretty walls!  Most of my personal email inbox these days seems to be filled up with various notifications of who commented on what and who wrote on my wall and who sent me this and who did what to whom…

In fact, I can even get all those notifications by text message and receive them “in the moment” on my mobile phone.

So you are already notifying-us-to-death, Facebook… but why can’t you give us the one notification that we as content creators within your walls really need?   I mean, part of the point of Pages seems to be so that we’ll buy ads to promote our pages and get more “Likers” (side note: what the heck was wrong with “Fans”? It was so much easier to say).

So if we’re creating pages to then create ads to then give you MONEY, wouldn’t it make sense to help us out a bit?

Just send us yet another notification or text message whenever someone posts something new to our Pages.  Can it really be that hard for you to do?

Thanks for listening (or not),

Dan

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