Earlier today, TechCrunch filmed a video (via mobile device) that shows a demo of how Facebook’s future chat application will work.  There will be an option on the bottom right of a given Facebook page to pull up a buddy list to discover which buddies are currently logged on.  Any user will be able to message their buddies through the chat application.  The presenter narrating in the video is Peter Deng, product manager of Facebook Chat.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gWYMJWpWQhs[/youtube]

Before Facebook launches the chat application, it may be subject to change.  The Chat application is expected to fully roll out in the next few weeks.  But in the meantime, the social network plans to introduce an increase in more advanced privacy controls tonight.  The privacy controls include restricting specific fields of your profile.  This is different than a limited profile.

A limited profile is when you restrict specific people from viewing entire areas of your profile. For example, I filled out personal information on Facebook like a paragraph abuot me and my favorite music and movies for my friends to see.  But I don’t want my friends, Fabio or Joe Schmoe to see it.  First, I would have to select personal information to be not viewable for anyone in my limited profile.  And then I would have to put Fabio and Joe as people who are only allowed to view my limited profile.  But if I wanted Fabio to be able to see my favorite music, but not know what my favorites movies were, this was not possible.  These new advanced security features make that possible.

This security improvements do not seem like the most exciting, but it definitely beats MySpace’s security abilities.  And that is something that I think Facebook has in common with their biggest investor, Microsoft Corp.  Both companies prioritize the privacy of their users.

Facebook, the $15 billion social network is supposedly tinkering around with an instant messaging service within their platform.  If this isn’t a challenge to Google and AOL, I don’t know what is.  Google’s social network, Orkut has a feature to connect Google Talk within the social network as well.  And now that AOL owns Bebo, it won’t be long until AIM is integrated into that social network as well.

TechCrunch also pointed out that this will not be good for the instant messaging applications built around Facebook such as Social.IM.  Facebook already has a wall, a message system, a poking system, and thousands of applications to probe a reaction from your friends.  Will an instant messaging system make a huge impact?  I doubt it.

Yahoo! Messenger, AOL Instant Messenger, Windows Live Messenger, and Google Talk are the oligopoly players in the messaging space.  Taking these players on is definitely a David and Goliath situation.  But if there’s anything I learned while writing about Web 2.0 companies is not to underestimate the underdog.  Perhaps Facebook has a steady slingshot.

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=eC3BhBIz8zA[/youtube]
[Video credit: Jon Zmilky@ SXSW conference]

There are very few people that can keep the audience engaged during interviews. Based on the videos I’ve seen, I’d say Bill Gates, Eric Schmidt, and Mark Zuckerberg are mediocre at carrying themselves based on charisma. They all lack energy and passion. Steve Jobs is good at it only when there is something good to say about the company such as the release of the iPhone, Apple TV, and new iPod lines. Now that Apple doesn’t have much to talk about, Jobs is staying out of the limelight.

Steve Ballmer is an exceptional speaker. Even when Guy Kawasaki* was throwing all sorts of tough questions and grilling the hell out of Ballmer, the Microsoft CEO used humor as a tactic and was full of energy. But then Ballmer also backed up and answered all of the questions thoroughly and intellectually. Below is Ballmer’s interview:
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ar_r2kE9Ej4[/youtube]
[Video Credit: CDernbach]
[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wftxoo77toA[/youtube]
[Video Credit: CharlesP2009]

*Kawasaki is a really good interviewer by the way, but laughed entirely way too much and that was kind of distracting.  I do not think AllTop was the not one of his brightest ideas either. Sure it only costed 10 G’s to launch, but it’s a complete rip-off of popurl.

Based on user feedback, the Facebook user interface is changing in April.  This will affect the view of applications integrated into profiles, Photos, the Facebook wall, the Mini feeds, etc.  This announcement was made by Peter Bratach on the Facebook Developers blog.  Below are a couple of screen shots of the new, upcoming profile look and feel.

The wall and profile size will be expanded.  The navigation of the profile will include tabbed browsing.  The Wall tab will have the wall and mini-feed.  Facebook is combining these Wall and Mini-Feed in the Wall tab because:
“While the Wall and Mini-Feed may seem like two totally separate things, both can contribute towards telling a more complete story. The idea behind combining the Wall and Mini-Feed is to put all of the most important information in the same place, so users don’t have to constantly search around to keep up with their friends,” wrote Bratach.

The Platform API will change and there will be new FBML tags for developers creating applications on Facebook.

[Information Source: Mashable]

“Sheryl understands Facebook’s goal of connecting everyone in the world and is passionate about building a business that will enable us to realize this mission.”
-Facebook Founder, Mark Zuckerberg

Facebook announced that they have hired Sheryl Sandberg, a former VP of Global Online Sales & Operations at Google, as their new COO.  Sandberg will manage marketing, HR, and other business development at Facebook.

“I have learned so much during my time at Google, and I’ve loved working with the people there,” stated Sandberg. “I am thrilled to have this opportunity.”  Facebook unleashed a German version of their site over the last few months and is opening up a French version soon.

Sandberg used to be the US Treasury Secretary’s Chief of Staff before starting with Google 6 years ago.  Sandberg will start at Facebook on March 24.

Facebook poached other Google executives recently.  From Google, Facebook hired:
1. Gideon Yu, former YouTube CFO
2. Benjamin Ling, former eCommerce Product Lead and
3. Justin Rosenstein, GDrive developer

Managing talent has become increasing challenging at Google as other start-ups are providing higher better incentives.   Google’s hiring practices have been questioned recently according to Valleywag as well.

What is interesting is that I’m not seeing Facebook poaching executives from Microsoft.  I’m wondering if there is some sort of agreement between Microsoft and Facebook that prevents this.  Especially after Microsoft plugged in $240 million into Facebook for 1.6% ownership.

Back in November of 2005, I had contacted Facebook about running an ad for a startup I was working with. Kevin Colleran, Facebook’s first sales exec, sent me this PowerPoint slideshow. I ran into it when clearing out my inbox today. Some of you may enjoy this.

facebook-overview-102505.ppt

Many users complain that when they try to deactivate their account on Facebook, their information remains lurking on the site.  Recently, Facebook made it clear that they are making it easier to permanently delete their account with all of their information too. 

This whole time there was a method to completely deleting an account, but it wasn’t apparent how to do so.  If users wanted to remove their account entirely, they were required to email Facebook staff.  The social network stated that they will be soon adding a button that simply says to delete the account.

“We’re always working to improve the user experience,” stated Katie Geminder, Director for User Experience and Design at Facebook.   “We are measuring the effects of the change we made yesterday, and if we think more needs to be done to improve the user experience for deleting an account, we’ll test different implementations and measure them accordingly [Source: NY Times].”

Facebook users have a tendency to deactivate and then reactivate for numerous reasons.  I’ve heard cases where college students get too distracted on Facebook and their grades slip so they deactivate temporarily.  According to Geminder, the number of users that reactivate their accounts on a given day are half the number that deactivate.   Hence the users that deactivate accounts want their information to remain in place just in case which is a positive thing. 

How to permanently delete your Facebook account is a group that started on Facebook in response to the inability to quit permanently.  The group was started by Swedish user, Magnus Wallin.  “A ‘form’ sounds like you have to explain yourself. A regular delete button would be preferable, in my opinion,” stated Wallin.  This group has 7,600 users+ and is growing rapidly. 

Good move for the social network.  Giving users what they want as they come to consensuses seems to be Facebook’s forté.

Note: I just logged into Facebook and tried searching for a way to delete my account, but I’m not seeing anything yet.  I’ll update this post with a screen shot when I see something.

Last month, I wrote about Facebook using their users to translate their pages. Then users vote on the best translations of the site to determine whether it will be used into a translated version of the site. Facebook users successfully translated the site into French, German, and Spanish. The Spanish version is officially rolled out now.

Users can set their language on Facebook to be in Spanish and users visiting from Latin America will be redirected to a Spanish-translated page. Facebook has 2.8 million users in Latin America and Spain as of right now [Source: TechCrunch]. Facebook’s approach to site translation and message-tailoring is different from MySpace’s approach: open offices in locations where they want to open translated versions. However, Facebook did open an office in London to capture more market-share around Europe.

Another reason why Facebook may be introducing new languages is to counter companies abroad from opening up exact clones of the social network, like StudiVZ. StudiVZ was a site that looked almost exactly like Facebook but was written in German.

Today AllThingsD answered a question that so many tech industry folks must have been wondering: How does Facebook spend all that money?  The 60 Minutes feature of Facebook answered part of it, create a sustainable work environment that resembles a college dorm.

Yesterday afternoon, Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg revealed what is happening with Facebook revenues and funding.

Here are some of the figures that were presented during Zuckerberg’s financial session combined with figures that are already known.

Facebook Revenue (2007): $150 million
Facebook Revenue (2008) Projections: $300-$350 million
Capital Expenditures for 2008: $200 million for costs such as servers
# of employees current: 450
# of employees for 2008: 1,000
Projected EBITDA (earnings before interest, taxes, depreciation, and amortization) for 2008: $50 million
Cash Flow (EBITDA - Capital Expenditures) for 2008: -$150 million
Investment in Facebook: $300 million
Company Valuation: $15 billion

Although it is not known what the cost of the Silicon Valley office or London office is, Alley Insider discovered that Facebook’s stealth NYC office on Fifth Ave. runs about $29,000 per month.

Information Sources:
[1] Techmeme
[2] AllThingsD

Loomia Inc. put together an application on Facebook that shares the news stories that users have read on certain publications, most notably, The Wall Street Journal.  The application is supposed to display what other friends and groups read the same articles that another user has.  This is a great concept, but the application is still somewhat buggy.

Below is a screen shot of what the application looks like on my Facebook profile page.

In the above screen shot, I have not read any of listed stories, but it still shows up anyway.  Referring to the above screenshot, the application is supposed to show how many friends, groups, and people in my network have read those same stories.  Those links are all broken.  But when you click on “Click to see more popular articles,” a new page will load and the application appears to be running better there.  See below the below screen shot:

I clicked on the groups link for the MySpace related article and found that the article was popular among 4 groups that I’m a part of on Facebook.  So the application is doing something right, but I’d like to see it populate the articles I read so I can show it off in my profile page.  Not have random articles appear.

Other partners involved with the SeenThis? application includes NBC Universal and CNET.  NBC wants to have this app track what users are watching on their site and having the application show the users’ friends what he or she watched.  I think this is a better use of the application especially since the user is opting in. 

What would a social network be without an incubator to power the applications that are instant viral hits within their online communities? Facebook has it so MySpace is HAD to get it. Just like how MySpace had widgets first, so Facebook HAD to get it. And I won’t be surprised if Bebo and Friendster quickly respond by setting up their own shops as well. The name of the company that MySpace is setting up is tentatively going to be called Slingshot Labs according to The New York Times.

Facebook’s incubator had $10 million in size powered by the social network, Accel Partners, and Founders Fund.  They started this fund in September 2007 to encourage give developers an incentive to create rich applications to give Facebook more appeal and possibly make additional revenue for themselves.

Josh Berman (MySpace COO) and Colin Digiaro (Senior VP of International Corporate Development) may be the ones heading the incubator.  Amit Kapur (VP of Business Development) may step up as the MySpace COO to fill in for Berman [source: TechCrunch].

While the two incubators may become hyper-competitive against each other,  they both give a good enough of a reason to quickly develop widgets.  What might be interesting scenario is if both companies want to fund the same company because the company created a successful widget for both MySpace and Facebook.  Who would they choose?  MySpace has mainstream clout, but Facebook is growing at a faster pace than MySpace.  Would it be more prestigious to receive funding from Slingshot or fbFund?

What does Wikipedia and Facebook have in common? They both are depending on the community to translate their web sites into different languages. This is a more unorthodox approach than Rupert Murdoch’s social network, MySpace.com. MySpace hires translators and opens offices abroad. This may be a frugal thing for a $15 billion valued company, but it could actually be a clever scheme. Maybe this is their way of making multilingual users feel empowered. I know if I truly knew how to read or write another language flawlessly, I would spend some time contributing.

So far, Facebook users have created a Spanish, German, and French supported version of the social network. The alternative language platform for the social network is built using the Translation application available on Facebook. After adding the application, a user is asked to translate various phrases and users that can read the language vote on the most accurate translation.

Before Facebook got the chance support the German language, StudiVZ a clone of the social network beat them to the punch.  StudiVZ looks almost exactly like Facebook, but is written completely in the German language.

Another social network, Livemocha is promoting their users to be multilingual by offering free online courses and networking resources for different languages.  Livemocha raised $6 million in funding earlier this month.

Although Friendster has not been asking users to translate their social network, they have created a Simplified Chinese Language Group to build a Chinese speaking community on Friendster.  This is to get feedback for their newly translated Chinese site.

Three German brothers, Alex, Oliver, and Marc Samwer agreed to invest $10-$15 million in Facebook today.  The Samwer brothers previously started Alando.de, an auction website that was acquired by eBay.  Since starting their own investments, the brothers invested in LinkedIn Corp. and StudiVZ (a Facebook replica).  The investment are based upon Facebook’s $15 billion valuation.

The deal is not official yet and may not actually happen.  The three will invest through financial vehicle, European Founders Fund.  Microsoft Corp. recently invested $240 million in Facebook and Li-Ka Shing, a Hong Kong billionaire invested $60 million.

Its interesting to see Facebook accepting investments from multiple sources across California, Seattle, Hong Kong, and Germany.  With this funding, Facebook would have raised nearly or more $350 million.  MySpace, the more mainstream social network was acquired by $580 million.  What Facebook is planning to do with all this money and such a high valuation is anybody’s guess.  But I can certainly guess that whenever Facebook is ready to go public, major financial firms will be ready to help broker the deal.

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Facebook is good at hyping up a feature, then hiding behind privacy controls after user revolts.  News feeds, Facebook Applications, and Beacon are the biggest examples.  Personally, I thought that when Facebook Applications first came out, I thought it was a bad idea.  Because I thought Facebook would look too similar to MySpace.  But then I saw how much of a financial ecosystem was created around Facebook Applications and how entrepreneurism was promoted through the development of the Applications.  As a user myself, I started to embrace the Applications.

I was surprised to see that a couple of days ago, Julie Zhuo stated that there will be upcoming changes to user profiles:

We will soon be launching a “profile clean-up” tool. Similar to how your computer’s desktop will remind you to get rid of unused icons, this tool will give users the option to move extra profile boxes to an “extended portion” of their profile. Users can choose to move these boxes; we will recommend that they keep the Friends Box, Mini-Feed, Wall, Basic and Personal Information as well as the top 12 application boxes they have added. At the bottom of the profile will then be a link to “Show Extended Profile”. Any user will be able to expand the profile at any point in time to see all the applications a user has added to their profile.

When I look at a Facebook profile and see how long the scrollbar is, I make sure to scope out the whole thing, just to make sure I did not miss out on anything interesting.  If I see that there is an Show Extended Profile option, I would not bother clicking it because if its not on the main profile page, its not important.  The people that add these Applications are not fools.  They should know how to remove them if they don’t like them.  You just hit the X and Remove the Application.  Its as simple as closing a window on Windows.

And this could be a turnoff for Application developers.  And we all know that Facebook’s biggest investor, Microsoft feels about developers, developers, developers.

Facebook has a knack for taking crap from the blogosphere every time something happens that a few users disapprove of. Users have complained about the news feed, Beacon, the “is” in the status message, and most recently: Robert Scoble being banned.

In the case of Scoble’s reinstatement, it is interesting because he is a high profile blogger that violated Facebook’s terms of services. Robert Scoble essentially attempted to scrub the data from Facebook and import it into Plaxo. Loren Feldman of 1938 Media expressed his sentiments below:

Below is the letter that Facebook sent to Scoble:

Hi Robert,

Facebook’s Terms of Use broadly prohibits the running of automated scripts on the site because they can be used to commit malicious attacks, send spam, and generally try to undermine the integrity of the site. When our systems detect these types of scripts, they immediately disable the account of the user responsible as a preventative measure. This is what happened in your case – your automated script was exhibiting the same behavior as other malicious scripts that we have blocked before so your account was disabled.

Our standard process for handling cases when an account is disabled for security violations is to allow a user to appeal and remedy the situation. This is the process we have followed here. Since you contacted us and have agreed not to run the script again, we have reactivated your account. You should now be able to log in with your normal email and password. In the future, please refrain from running these types of scripts again.

Thanks,

Jerry
User Operations
Facebook

Prior to Scoble’s ban, two Facebook groups were created related to the issue. One advocated Scoble’s account be returned to normal. The other was to keep him banned. Personally, I think it was a good move for Facebook to save face by reinstating Scoble, but it showed that they can be pressured by the media.

What are your thoughts?