There is always plenty to discuss about Facebook as the site continues to grow rapidly. However, there are a few items of interest floating around the blogosphere currently that I wanted to highlight here.
Facebook Wants You To Get Your Family Involved
Facebook now has a landing page for users to send to their families as invitations to a group. It comes in the form of a web form with your family’s name filled out as the name of the group.
It then asks you to invite your family members who are on Facebook to participate, then gives you more places to fill in emails of family members who aren’t on Facebook.
Facebook Attracting More of the Older Crowd
Facebook has received a lot of criticism in recent weeks as it rolled out some pretty big changes in design and functionality. Such changes and criticism did not do much to slow down growth of the site however.
Lexicon and the Potential of Facebook Search
The whole real-time search discussion has been heavily focused on Twitter, and that is certainly a huge part of it, but while it has certainly been touched upon, Facebook has not received as much attention in this area.
Facebook is a huge part of the equation. It’s much larger than Twitter (at least at this point in time), and the social network’s recent shift to Twitter-like real time updates only highlights the subject even more.
Facebook’s New Strategy: Ignore Your Customers
Remember all that talk about Facebook becoming more democratic? Despite the highly publicized rhetoric, all appearances point to a Mark Zuckerberg dictatorship, relatively deaf to user complaints. While business owners have the right and responsibility to run their business as they see fit, the young CEO might want to reconsider saying one thing and doing another. It’ll just come back to bite him.
Twitter Measured Against Google, Facebook Yardsticks
Twitter turned three years old this weekend, and to hear some people tell it, the service is on a path that’ll have it taking over the world in no time. But comparisons to a sort of kinder, less articulate Stewie Griffin may be a little premature, since it turns out Twitter hasn’t measured up to two other companies.
Facebook Just Became a Better Marketing Tool
Facebook has started including updates from Pages in the news feed. While some of the pages users were already subscribed to are not showing up at this point, any they subscribe to from now on will (unless users elect not to see the messages).
Facebook was already a great marketing tool. I’ve recently discussed a number of reasons why. But this is a way for businesses to directly get their messages to interested parties.
Facebook Can Drive More Traffic Than Google
I recently discussed Twitter as a great source of traffic to sites, but the even more popular Facebook can do and is doing the same thing. In fact, reports have Facebook driving even more traffic than Google to some big-name sites.
Anything You Say On Facebook Can And Will Be Held Against You
Seems like hardly a month goes by without news about somebody’s social network profile getting them in trouble either with their school, with work, or with the court system. The two most recent cases come out of Canada, where a college student was put on probation for badmouthing a professor online, and a litigant may have to divulge information on his private Facebook account.
Noteworthy Tidbits About Facebook
There are a few interesting Facebook-related stories out there at the moment. The first comes from Inside Facebook, where Justin Smith asks "What do I do if someone has already created a Facebook Page for my brand?"