Facebook traffic down a bit
US visitors to Facebook tailed off slightly in January, with 33.9 million unique visitors , down 2 percent from 34.7 million in December 2007. Looking at the graph it’s too early to tell if it’s a blip or a trend.
Brain control headset for gamers
This story about a headset that will allow you to control computer games is fairly interesting, but I do hope that whoever’s writing the games has a better imagination than the spokesperson for the company: “If you laughed or felt happy after killing a character in a game then your virtual buddy could admonish you …
Bebo platform opens to developers
Bebo today opened their platform to the general development community. It’s based on Facebook’s own FBML and API documentation which is supposed to make porting apps very easy… I’m expecting a land grab of app clones over the next few days, but it’s fun times at least! I think it’s time to hang around on …
Facebook still in beta
The Facebook API may be great in many ways, but for stability there’s still a lot to be desired. There seems to be a slightly “gung ho” attitude to code deployment at Facebook which, although I feel some empathy with, isn’t particularly suited to a site with 50 million users. Take this recent developer update …
LinkedIn to get a newsfeed
It looks like LinkedIn has been looking at which Facebook features it can steal. LinkedIn’s newsfeed does appear to actually be news rather than friend activities, however, and tries to work out what the user might be interested in. It’s only in beta at the moment but it’ll be interesting to see if it does …
Facebook: “It’s okay to spam your friends”
“It’s okay to spam your friends” may not be the company’s official strapline, but it certainly seems to be a key part of Facebook that spamming your friends with everything you’re doing is the way to stay “in touch”. It’s a fine line to tread, however, and the recent additions to the newsfeed seem to …
Facebookster spam
Self-proclaimed Facebook development specialists Facebookster have been spamming blogs with a huge number of comments, including this one. It really isn’t a good sign for a company to be reduced to barely ethical means of marketing, especially when the Facebookster spam messages aren’t even relevant to the posts. It’s just blatant commercial spam. We need …
Facebook to become more open?
Facebook wants to make the data its members enter into the social network’s profiles portable, so that they can move that data to other online services if they want, the company’s CEO said Wednesday. It’s already possible to take some data out of Facebook for use in third party applications (but not store it), but …
The long tail of Facebook applications
This article from O’Reilly on the long tail of Facebook applications ties in with some of the comments I made on the Exponetic blog a few weeks ago comparing Web 1.0’s history with Facebook’s own progress. The key points are: Some applications are getting huge traffic The majority of applications aren’t Only 45 applications have …
In Facebook, Investing in a Theory
This article in the New York Times actually has a fairly level-headed view of the Facebook application market and how much money can be made from it. It’s quite a rare thing to find a level-headed opinion about an over-hyped subject in mainstream journalism, so quite refreshing. It also makes quite a few good points …