Tag: facebook

A graphic of the privacy settings available in Facebook.

To be fair, privacy and settings are parts of the product that I’m sure are underfunded. They don’t drive any growth or revenue, so they probably just have a very basic and cluttery framework.

The big question is whether or not they can take the next step without really addressing these types of issues. I think they probably can — while many people gripe, the number of people willing to kill their Facebook accounts over difficult settings is likely pretty small. That’s clearly where Facebook is putting their money and resources right now.

Borne from a hackathon project, Facebook’s engineering team is now throwing their PHP through their new HipHop framework, which effectively transforms the easy-to-write PHP they’ve always used into much faster C++.

This is pretty huge for a site like Facebook — it allows for the productivity of writing in a scripting language (PHP may not be quite as productive as Ruby or Python, but it’s miles better than Java), with the speed of a compiled language.

After all, for a site that relies on users viewing many dozens of pages per day, largely while procrastinating, speed is user experience priority number one.

A fairly wide-ranging conversation with a Facebook employee about infrastructure, privacy, security, and culture. A lot has changed since the beginning, and none of this should be terribly surprising.

When I visited the new Facebook HQ a few months ago, the receptionist shared a couple stories of people trying to force their way in there, so there’s an element of physical security that is becoming increasingly important around there.

Anil Dash predicts the outcome of the days following the forthcoming rush on Facebook usernames:

June 13, 12:45am: TechCrunch discovers that one of its writers can’t get his preferred spelling for his name, and notices that registrations in the system are running a bit slow. A Twitter search reveals four other people discussing the same problems, and one person that can’t get to the feature at all. The phrase “The Facebook Username debacle” is first used, and becomes the preferred sobriquet for the feature forevermore. 70% of commenters mention that “Facebook Username” can be abbreviated “FU”, and each thinks he is the first to think of it.

Almost certain to happen.

Quoth TheAge from Australia:

Ninety-four per cent of the nearly 800,000 Facebook users who have voted in a poll on the site said they do not like the changes rolled out in the past two weeks.

Let’s see what these folks are saying in a few weeks. For all that’s wrong with Facebook, and there are certainly more than a handful, I’m glad they have the stones to know when to listen to the masses, and when to pursue their product vision.

An interesting prediction from David Recordon:

My prediction is that by the end of the year Facebook will become the most open social network on the social web. I believe that not only have they now found business value in doing so, but also truly believe that the next phase of their mission, “to give people the power to share and make the world more open and connected” requires that they do so. This means that anyone building a business based on the notion that Facebook will remain a walled garden and won’t adapt - as was true with traditional media when blogging came about - will have their world turned upside down this year.

Let’s hope so.