Facebook slims down

Facebook is testing out a pared-down “Lite” version in an aggressive move to attract more content-sharing. It comes a day after the company launched a real-time search and bought FriendFeed, showing that the company is incredibly focused on moving into the real-time space. The service is in beta testing and invites were sent to specific users. (The photo comes from Twitter and was spotted TechCrunch.)

The Lite version also emulates a bit of Twitter’s spartan look. If Facebook wants to be a social search engine, it can’t let Twitter dominate shared content. It has to be dead-simple for users to share videos, blog posts and comments. Then the company has to collect as much data as possible so that when you do searches, the results highlight timely and relevant activity from your friends and others in the social network.

Here’s Facebook’s comment:

We are currently testing a simplified alternative to Facebook.com that loads a specific set of features quickly and efficiently. Similar to the Facebook experience you get on your mobile phones, Facebook “Lite” is a fast-loading, simplified version of Facebook that enables people to make comments, accept Friend requests, write on people’s Walls, and look at photos and Status updates.  We are currently testing Facebook Lite in countries where we are seeing lots of new users coming to Facebook for the first time and are looking to start off with a more simple experience.

This evening, the test was temporarily exposed to a larger set of users by mistake.  We have not opened up access to lite.facebook.com to all users at this time.  People who are not part of the test and are trying to access “Lite” will be directed to Facebook.com as usual.

This is a good move: about a year or two ago, I started using the site less frequently because the privacy controls were overwhelming; sharing photos and links was fairly slow compared to other services I was using. If Facebook Lite works out, it may encourage other users to move sharing activity back to Facebook.

Source: VentureBeat

Facebook Acquires FriendFeed

Facebook has acquired FriendFeed, we’ve learned. We’re gathering details now.

At this point details on the acquisition are still very sparse, but it’s clearly a good match. Over the last year or so, Facebook has “borrowed” quite a few features that FriendFeed popularized, including the ‘Like’ feature and an emphasis on real-time news updates.

Obviously Facebook has already built out some of FriendFeed’s functionality so there is some overlap, but there are still numerous ways FriendFeed beats out Facebook’s News Feed setup. One of these is the way stories are ‘floated’ to the top as new users comment on them. And FriendFeed’s system is truly real-time, unlike Facebook’s feed which users have to manually refresh.

But the biggest win here for Facebook is the FriendFeed team, which includes an all-star cast of ex-Googlers. Perhaps best known of these is Paul Buchheit, who is responsible for creating Gmail, pioneering some of Google’s early (and incredibly lucrative) advertising products, and coining Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto. Other ex-Googler co-founders include Bret Taylor, Jim Norris, and Sanjeev Singh.

And so begins the next step in Facebook’s assault on Twitter.

Update: Be sure to check out our interview with Facebook VP Products Chris Cox and FriendFeed co-founder Bret Taylor, where they share their thoughts on the future of FriendFeed and its integration into Facebook.

Update:
FriendFeed has just posted a note to their blog confirming the announcement. FriendFeed’s Bret Taylor writes that the site will continue operating for the time being, but that the company is still “figuring out its longer-term plans for the product”. Likewise, the API will continue to function for the time being.

Update 2 :: Facebook has just issued the following press release:

PALO ALTO, CALIF.—August 10, 2009—Facebook today announced that it has agreed to acquire FriendFeed, the innovative service for sharing online. As part of the agreement, all FriendFeed employees will join Facebook and FriendFeed’s four founders will hold senior roles on Facebook’s engineering and product teams.

“Facebook and FriendFeed share a common vision of giving people tools to share and connect with their friends,” said Bret Taylor, a FriendFeed co-founder and, previously, the group product manager who launched Google Maps. “We can’t wait to join the team and bring many of the innovations we’ve developed at FriendFeed to Facebook’s 250 million users around the world.”

“As we spent time with Mark and his leadership team, we were impressed by the open, creative culture they’ve built and their desire to have us contribute to it,” said Paul Buchheit, another FriendFeed co-founder. Buchheit, the Google engineer behind Gmail and the originator of Google’s “Don’t be evil” motto, added, “It was immediately obvious to us how passionate Facebook’s engineers are about creating simple, ground-breaking ways for people to share, and we are extremely excited to join such a like-minded group.”

Taylor and Buchheit founded FriendFeed along with Jim Norris and Sanjeev Singh in October 2007 after all four played key roles at Google for products like Gmail and Google Maps. At FriendFeed, they’ve brought together a world-class team of engineers and designers.

“Since I first tried FriendFeed, I’ve admired their team for creating such a simple and elegant service for people to share information,” said Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook founder and CEO. “As this shows, our culture continues to make Facebook a place where the best engineers come to build things quickly that lots of people will use.”

FriendFeed is based in Mountain View, Calif. and has 12 employees. FriendFeed.com will continue to operate normally for the time being as the teams determine the longer term plans for the product.

Financial terms of the acquisition were not released.

Source: TechCrunch

Facebook and Think Computer have settled a dispute over whether the former actually owns the term “facebook.”

Under the settlement announced late Friday, Think has agreed to abandon its efforts to get the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office to cancel the trademark issued to Facebook in 2006.

The story behind the dispute between Think and Facebook is a long, convoluted one. But according to the joint statement, Think founder Aaron Greenspan attended Harvard with Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg earlier this decade. In 2003, Think released HouseSystem, a Web-based student portal that included a section called “The Universal Face Book” or “The Face Book.” At launch, the statement said, HouseSystem didn’t include member profiles because of security concerns. Think added profiles after Zuckerberg launched Facebook in 2004, the statement said.

“Aaron and I studied together at Harvard and I’ve always admired his entrepreneurial spirit and love of building things,” Zuckerberg said in the statement. “I appreciate his hard work and innovation that led to building houseSYSTEM, including the Universal Face Book feature. At school, I was even a member of houseSYSTEM. We are pleased that we’ve been able to amicably resolve our differences.”

Greenspan likewise offered courtesies in the statement. “I am glad that my contributions have been recognized by Facebook. Mark has built a tremendous company at Facebook, and I wish them continued success in the future,” he said.

Greenspan, who wrote a self-published book called “Authoritas: One Student’s Harvard Admissions and the Founding of the Facebook Era,” had contended that the terms “facebook” and “face book” were generic terms that couldn’t be trademarked. He wasn’t seeking the trademarks himself but wanted them invalidated because of problems advertising his book with Google AdWords. Greenspan has also claimed ownership for the idea behind Facebook.

The amount of the settlement was not released. But last summer, one-time Harvard rival ConnectU settled a dispute with Facebook over whether Zuckerberg stole ConnectU’s code and business plans for a social network. That lawsuit, which was particularly messy, apparently was settled for $65 million in cash and Facebook stock.

Facebook originally was started as a social-networking site solely for Harvard students. It is now one of the most popular social-networking sites in the world.

News of the latest settlement comes on the heels of the announcement that a Facebook tell-all book will hit store shelves in July.

In related news about Facebook’s corporate side, The Wall Street Journal cites unnamed sources who say Russian investment group Digital Sky Technologies wants to invest $200 million in the company “at a $10 billion valuation for the company’s preferred stock.”

Source: CNET News

Facebook stopped a phishing attack on Thursday, its second day in a row of dealing with a worm on the site that lures people to a fake Facebook page and prompts them to log in.

Unsuspecting Facebook users get a message from a friend urging them to “check this out” and including a link to a Web page that appears to be a Facebook log-in page, but it is a fake site that steals their information when they type in their username and password. The worm also sends a copy of the message to the infected Facebook member’s contacts.

In the latest attack, the Web address was “FBStarter.com.” In Wednesday’s attack, the address was “BAction.net.”

The attacks were stopped within a few hours in each case, said Facebook spokesman Barry Schnitt. He said it was too early to say whether the two phishing attacks are related. “We are investigating,” Schnitt said.

Once Facebook learns of a phishing attack, either by members notifying the company or employees noticing that a URL is being distributed to a lot of people, the company deletes the URL from members’ pages, blocks fresh postings, and removes the redirect to the URL that appears in e-mail messages, Schnitt said.

Facebook also goes in and resets the passwords of member accounts that had been used to distribute the spam, he said.

The company also alerts anti-fraud partner MarkMonitor, which passes the phishing URL on to the major browsers to block it and contacts ISPs to take the site down, according to Schnitt.

To protect against phishing scams, Facebook users should make sure that the URL they are visiting says “www.facebook.com.” If it doesn’t use that domain it’s likely to be spam. Also, members that are already logged in to Facebook will not be asked to log in again.

“People should have a healthy dose of suspicion, and ask themselves ‘why did I get logged out?’” Schnitt said. “If something looks a little strange you should check the address bar.”

Facebook users who think they have been affected by the scam should change their passwords and review their Facebook stream for any unauthorized changes. If they use their Facebook password for other sites, they should change those passwords as well.

And if they are using their Facebook authentication to log in to any other sites, they should check for any unauthorized changes on those sites.

Source: CNN

As we speculated this weekend, Facebook has opened up its activity stream through a new API for developers. Now any developer can create new applications incorporating the real-time stream. One of the first apps to take advantage of this new API is Seesmic Desktop, A Twitter client which is now adding your Facebook feed through this API (something Tweetdeck already did in the past through other more restrictive means). Facebook has also created its own desktop notification client to demonstrate what can be built with the API.

I just got off the phone with Ethan Beard, Facebook’s director of platform marketing, who tells me that the entire feed will be available through a single API call. A developer could recreate the entire Facebook home page if he wanted to or take parts of the feed and remix it to make something more interesting. For starters, I’d expect most Twitter clients to add the Facebook stream as an additional option. On Tweetdeck, for instance, you can read your activity stream, but you cannot respond in-line. The new Facebook Stream API is two-way, so it would allow developers to build apps which allow for that two-way communication inside the app.

This is a big deal. It potentially puts Facebook side by side with Twitter in all of these desktop and mobile client applications where a lot of the real-time conversation is happening and lets it compete head-to-head with Twitter. Whichever conversation stream is more interesting will prevail.

But beyond the arms race with Twitter, the stream API will open up teh possibility for many new applications both within Facebook and outside its walls. An obvious one would be better filtering options for your activity stream. It would be simple to create an app that shows you the most liked or most commented on items in your stream, for example. Or now that stream can be plugged into various social search engines to give you socialized results. Hell, if I could just search my own activity stream, I’d consider that a giant leap forward.

Source: TechCrunch

Facebook plans to announce at a developer event Monday that it will open up user-contributed information to third-party developers, according to a report Sunday in The Wall Street Journal.

The move would allow developers to build applications and services that–with users’ permission–access user videos, photos, notes, and comments. The move would be a significant change for the social-networking site, which had previously retained tight control over the site and how developers interact with it.

To allow developers to take advantage of the free feature, Facebook users would have to give the companies access to their data, and users’ privacy settings would extend to new services built, according to the report.

Allowing developers to track shared data would be another salvo in its assault on micro-blogging site Twitter, which allows third-party developers to build applications and services on top of its service.

The move seems a continuation of APIs (application programming interfaces) Facebook launched in February that let developers access content and methods for sharing in Facebook apps including Status, Notes, Links, and Video.

Of course, all this hinges on persuading Facebook’s 200 million users to share their personal data, a topic that ruffled some feathers in February. Facebook users threatened to revolt after the company announced changes to its terms of service that had meant that its license on user content–a longstanding but little-publicized claim to an “irrevocable, perpetual, non-exclusive, transferable, fully paid, worldwide license” for promotional efforts–would no longer expire if a member deleted his or her Facebook account.

But facing a rebellion from thousands of users and a possible federal complaint from the Electronic Privacy Information Center, the social-networking service returned to its previous terms.

Source: CNET News

Facebook has a thing for moms.

The last two times I’ve attended a Facebook event – both the unveiling of its redesign and its announcement of Connect on the iPhone – Facebook employees emphasized how excited they were about the fact that their mothers had recently joined the social network. The milestone is a symbolic one, indicating that Facebook is expanding beyond historically internet-savvy generations to include an older user-base, namely folks who use their computers primarily for basic tasks like Email and photography but have largely stayed out of the social-media craze. Yes, there are plenty of older tech-savvy computer users, but this is hardly the norm.

Facebook is clearly trying to bridge this gap, and it’s making significant progress. But it still has a long way to go.

Thing is, I really don’t think Facebook is that user-friendly for people who are trying out social networks for the first time. In fact, with its plethora of granular privacy settings and the somewhat foreign concept of ‘Networks’, Facebook can be downright baffling for new users. I’ve been using the site for years and I still have trouble configuring privacy settings for various photo albums and Friend Lists. The settings are all there, somewhere, they’re just confusing. Homepage redesigns and somewhat frivolous new features aren’t really helping the matter.

Facebook’s default privacy settings aren’t exactly geared towards novices, either. Creating a new photo album lists the default sharing option as “Everyone”. It’s trivial to change, but how many people simply click ‘next’ and share their photos with the world without really meaning to? And new accounts are set by default to share their information with everyone else on their network, which works out to quite a few people if you happen to join a regional network (which Facebook suggests during the signup process).

What Facebook really needs is a ’safe mode’. Something that caters to the the kind of person who may occasionally lend a few thousand dollars to a Nigerian princess, or who sends out chain-letters that originated in 2002 to dozens of friends at time. Many of these people are quite intelligent. They just haven’t grown up with the constant threat of scams and phishers. And they’ve been told so many times not to adjust a program’s settings (for fear of doing something wrong), that they’re afraid to explore the site and figure out the privacy settings for themselves.

A ‘Safe Mode’ could take any number of forms, from a profile with stricter default privacy settings to a Clippy-like virtual helper (hopefully with fewer annoying tendencies than Microsoft Office’s old sidekick). Just something that makes the site a little easier to use for those people who aren’t really sure what they’re doing.

Source: TechCrunch – by Jason Kincaid

When Facebook signed up its 100 millionth member last August, its employees spread out in two parks in Palo Alto, Calif., for a huge barbecue. Sometime this week, this 5-year-old start-up, born in a dorm room at Harvard, expects to register its 200 millionth user.

That staggering growth rate–doubling in size in just eight months–suggests Facebook is rapidly becoming the Web’s dominant social ecosystem and an essential personal and business networking tool in much of the wired world.

Yet Facebook executives say they aren’t planning to observe their latest milestone in any significant way. It is, perhaps, a poor time to celebrate. The company that has given users new ways to connect and speak truth to power now often finds itself as the target of that formidable grass-roots firepower–most recently over controversial changes it made to users’ home pages.

As Facebook expands, it’s also struggling to match the momentum of hot new start-ups like Twitter, the microblogging service, while managing the expectations of young, tech-savvy early adopters, attracting mainstream moms and dads, and justifying its hype-carbonated valuation.

By any measure, Facebook’s growth is a great accomplishment. The crew of Mark Zuckerberg, the company’s 24-year-old co-founder and chief executive, is signing up nearly a million new members a day, and now more than 70 percent of the service’s members live overseas, in countries like Italy, the Czech Republic, and Indonesia. Facebook’s ranks in those countries swelled last year after the company offered its site in their languages.

All of this mojo puts Facebook on a par with other groundbreaking–and wildly popular–Internet services like free e-mail, Google, the online calling network Skype and e-commerce sites like eBay. But Facebook promises to change how we communicate even more fundamentally, in part by digitally mapping and linking peripatetic people across space and time, allowing them to publicly share myriad and often very personal elements of their lives.

Unlike search engines, which ably track prominent Internet presences, Facebook reconnects regular folks with old friends and strengthens their bonds with new pals–even if the glue is nothing more than embarrassing old pictures or memories of their second-grade teacher.

Facebook can also help rebuild families. Karen Haber, a mother of two living outside Tel Aviv, logs onto Facebook each night after she puts the children to bed. She searches for her family’s various surnames, looking for relatives from the once-vast Bachenheimer clan of northern Germany, which fractured during the Holocaust and then dispersed around the globe.

Among the three dozen or so connections she has made on Facebook over the last year are a fifth cousin who is a clinical social worker in Woodstock, N.Y.; a fourth cousin running an eyeglasses store in Zurich; and another fifth cousin, living in Hong Kong selling diamonds. Now she shares memories, photographs, and updates with them.

“I was never into genealogy and now suddenly I have this tool that helps me find the descendants of people that my grandparents knew, people who share the same truth I do,” Haber says. “I’m using Facebook and trying to unite this family.”

Facebook has also become a vehicle for broad-based activism–like the people who organized on the site last year and mobilized 12 million people to march in protests around the globe against practices of the FARC rebels in Colombia.

Discussing Facebook’s connective tissue, Zuckerberg recalls the story of Claus Drachmann, a schoolteacher in northern Denmark who became a Facebook friend of Anders Fogh Rasmussen, Denmark’s prime minister. Drachmann subsequently invited Rasmussen to speak to his class of special-needs children; the prime minister obliged last fall.

Zuckerberg says the story illustrates Facebook’s power to cut through arbitrary social barriers. “This represents a generational shift in technology,” he says. “To me, what is interesting was that it was possible for a regular person to reach the prime minister and that that interaction happened.”

As Facebook has matured, so has Zuckerberg. He has recently traded his disheveled, unassuming image for an ever-present tie and making visits to media outfits like “The Oprah Winfrey Show.” And he says Facebook’s most important metrics are not its membership but the percentage of the wired world that uses the site and the amount of information–photographs, news articles and status updates–zipping across its servers.

Facebook’s mission, he says, is to be used by everyone in the world to share information seamlessly. “Two hundred million in a world of six billion is tiny,” he says. “It’s a cool milestone. It’s great that we reached that, especially in such a short amount of time. But there is so much more to do.”

Redesign revolt
As Facebook stampedes along, it still has to get out of its own way to soothe the injured feelings of users like Liz Rabban.

Rabban, 40, a real estate agent and the mother of two from Livingston, N.J., joined the site in November 2007, quickly amassing 250 friends and spending hours on the site each day.

But these days, she spends less time on the site and posts caustic comments about Facebook’s new design, which turns a majority of every user’s home page into a long “stream” of recent, often trivial, Twitter-like updates from friends.

“The changes just feel very juvenile,” Rabban says. “It’s just not addressing the needs of my generation and my peers. In my circle, everyone is pretty devastated about it.”

Rabban is not alone. More than two and a half million dissenters have joined a group on Facebook’s own site called “Millions Against Facebook’s New Layout and Terms of Service.” Others are lambasting the changes in their own status updates, which are now, ironically, distributed much more visibly to all of their Facebook friends.

The changes, Facebook executives say, are intended to make the act of sharing–not just information about themselves but what people are doing now–easier, faster and more urgent. Chris Cox, 26, Facebook’s director of products and a confidant of Zuckerberg, envisions users announcing where they are going to lunch as they leave their computers so friends can see the updates and join them.

“That is the kind of thing that is not meaningful when it is announced 40 minutes later,” he says.

The simmering conflict over the design change speaks to the challenges of pleasing 200 million users, many of whom feel pride of ownership because they helped to build the site with free labor and very personal contributions.

“They have a strange problem,” says S. Shyam Sundar, co-director of the Media Effects Research Laboratory at Pennsylvania State University, of Facebook’s quandary. “This is a technology that has inherently generated community, and it has gotten to the point where members of that community feel not only vested but empowered to challenge the company.”

Those tensions boiled up previously, when Facebook announced the intrusive Beacon advertising system in 2007, and again when Facebook introduced new service terms earlier this year, which appeared to give the company broad commercial control over the content people uploaded to the site.

Facebook responded to protests over the second move by promising users a vote in how the site would be governed.

But while Facebook is willing to give users a voice, it doesn’t necessarily want to listen.

Users are widely opposed to terms that grant Facebook the right to license, copy, and disseminate members’ content worldwide. But Facebook says it has to ignore those objections to protect itself against lawsuits from users who might blame the company if they later regret having shared some piece of information with their friends. (Other Web sites have similar stipulations.)

While Facebook addressed the feedback on its unpopular design changes last week–partly by saying it would give users more control over the stream of updates that appear on their pages–it also said members’ pages would soon become even busier and more dynamic, updating automatically instead of requiring users to refresh their browsers to see new posts.

That’s a change that may irk users like Rabban, who don’t like how busy their pages have become. Facebook executives counter that it will help users share more information, and that they will eventually come to appreciate it, just as they have with previous changes that were initially jarring.

“It’s not a democracy,” Cox says of his company’s relationship with users. “We are here to build an Internet medium for communicating and we think we have enough perspective to do that and be caretakers of that vision.”

Worlds collide

People, of course, sometimes like to keep secrets and maintain separate social realms–or at least a modicum of their privacy. But Facebook, at almost 200 million members, is a force that reinvents and tears at such boundaries. Teachers are yoked together with students, parents with their children, employers with their employees.

Uniting disparate groups on a single Internet service runs counter to 50 years of research by sociologists into what is known as “homophily” –the tendency of individuals to associate only with like-minded people of similar age and ethnicity.

Facebook’s huge growth is creating inevitable collisions as the whole notion of “friend” takes on a highly elastic meaning. When the Philadelphia Eagles allowed the star safety Brian Dawkins to leave for the Denver Broncos earlier this month, Dan Leone, a gate chief at Lincoln Financial Field, the Eagles’ stadium, expressed his disappointment by referring to the situation with an obscenity on his Facebook status update.

Leone’s boss, who was his Facebook friend, forwarded the update to an Eagles guest services manager, who fired him. The team has since refused to reconsider the matter, despite Leone’s deep remorse and his star turn on countless radio talk shows across the country to discuss the situation.

“If you know your boss is online, or anyone close to your boss is online, don’t be making comments that can be detrimental to your employment,” Leone advises.

Facebook is trying to teach members to use privacy settings to manage their network so they can speak discreetly only to certain friends, like co-workers or family members, as opposed to other “friends” like bosses or professional colleagues. But most Facebook users haven’t taken advantage of the privacy settings; the company estimates that only 20 percent of its members use them.

Other problems are trickier, especially among true friends and family members. How, for example, can Facebook remain a place for teenagers to share what they did on Saturday night when it is also the place where their parents are swapping investment tips with old friends?

In the six weeks since Rich Hall, a 52-year-old theater manager in Mount Carroll, Ill., joined Facebook, he has reconnected with more than 400 friends and acquaintances, including former high school friends, his auto mechanic and former buddies from his days as a stock car driver.

In the course of his new half-hour-a-day Facebook habit, Hall also “friended” the 60 high school students he is directing in a school play, so he could coordinate rehearsal times. That led some of them to deny his request because, as he says they told him, their parents “found it creepy.” Along the way, Hall also found photographs of his 19-year-old son on the site, drinking beer at a Friday night bonfire.

“He denied it and said he wasn’t there,” Hall says. “I said, ‘Let’s go to this page together and look at these photos.’ Of course he did it. There are no secrets anymore.”

Dwindling secrets, and prying eyes, are at the heart of the Facebook conundrum. While offering an efficient and far-reaching way for people to bond, the site has also eroded sometimes natural barriers.

“People usually spend a lot of time trying to be separate–parents and children are a good example,” says Danah Boyd, a social scientist who has studied social networks and now works in the research department of Microsoft, which has invested in Facebook. “You are already seeing young people sitting there thinking, ‘Why am I hanging out with my mother who is reminiscing with her high school mates?’ You are seeing some reticence with young people that wasn’t there two years ago.”

For their part, Facebook executives say they are less interested in being cool than in being a useful place where anyone can go to share elements of their lives.

“The people who started the company weren’t cool. I’m not cool,” Cox says. “If you look at the people who work here, it’s much more nerdy and curious than cool.

“Cool only lasts for so long, but being useful is something that applies to everyone.”

What about profit?

Zuckerberg hopes that being ubiquitous and useful translates to the bottom line.

Though Facebook is privately held and doesn’t publicly disclose its earnings, various press and analysts’ estimates of its 2008 revenues span from $250 million to $400 million. That range may not be enough to cover the company’s escalating expenses, and it hardly justifies some of the atmospheric valuations that have been placed on the start-up, including the $15 billion that Microsoft assigned to the company when it invested in it in 2007.

Facebook’s financial challenges aren’t unique. Popular free e-mail services like Hotmail from Microsoft and Gmail from Google have little in the way of profits to show for their vast audiences, aside from a few text ads that people rarely click on. Instant messaging networks like Microsoft Messenger and AIM from American Online are similarly popular but have never been hyperprofitable, for the simple reason that people do not want intrusive ads inserted into personal conversations.

Facebook’s approach is to invite advertisers to join in the conversation. New “engagement” ads ask users to become fans of products and companies–sometimes with the promise of discounts. If a person gives in, that commercial allegiance is then broadcast to all of the person’s friends on the site.

A new kind of engagement ad, now being tested, will invite people to vote–”what’s your favorite color M&M?” for example–and brands will pay every time a Facebook member participates.

“We are trying to provide the antidote for the consumer rebellion against interruptive advertising,” says Sheryl Sandberg, Facebook’s chief operating officer and Zuckerberg’s business consigliere.

Sandberg, who ran Google’s highly successful advertising initiatives before leaving the search giant to join Facebook, said her company’s revenue was growing despite a brutal downturn that is hurting other kinds of online advertising. She also puts one rumor to rest, saying the company is not considering charging members for any aspect of its service.

“We’re pretty pleased with the overall trajectory,” she says. “Our conversations with big advertisers have broadened in scope and we also have more people asking about how they can work with us.” Facebook recently introduced advertising tools to let companies focus on users based on the language they use on the site and their geographic location. So, for example, an advertiser can now tailor a message to the Latino community in Los Angeles or French speakers in Montreal.

Despite the gloom permeating much of the advertising world, and the formidable challenges facing the site, some advertisers say they glimpse the future in Facebook’s brand of interactive advertising.

“Our clients all want to see if they can make this work,” says Al Cadena, the interactive account director at Threshold Interactive in Los Angeles, which represents companies like Nestle, Honda, and Sony. “Advertising used to be a one-way communication from advertiser to consumer, but now people want to have a dialogue. And Facebook is becoming the default way to do that, not only in the States but really for the whole world.”

Internet evangelists say that when a technology diffuses into society, as Facebook appears to be doing, it has achieved “critical mass.” The sheer presence of all their friends, family, and colleagues on Facebook creates potent ties between users and the site–ties that are hard to break even when people want to break them.

Many who have tried to free themselves of their daily Facebook habit and leave the site, like Kerry Docherty, a student at Pepperdine University’s law school, speak of a powerful gravitational pull and an undercurrent of peer pressure that eventually brings them back.

“People gave me a hard time for leaving Facebook,” says Docherty, who quit at the end of 2007 but then rejoined six months later. “Everyone has a love-hate relationship with it. They wanted me to be wasting my time on it just like they were wasting their time on it.”

Source: CNET News – By Brad Stone: The New York Times

It wouldn’t be at all surprising if Facebook’s response to the bad vibes elicited its latest redesign were straight out of the 1970 comic war movie “Kelly’s Heroes.” To wit, we give you just one of the refrains from Donald Sutherland’s tanker/proto-hippie character, Oddball:

Why don’t you knock it off with them negative waves…Why don’t you say something righteous and hopeful for a change?

Hopeful, positive comments from Facebook users have been awfully hard to come by in recent days since the powerhouse social-networking site pushed out a redesign that seems inspired, at least in part, by the up-and-coming Twitter service. To pick just one newly voiced opinion from the company’s “Vote on the new Facebook layout” app, which seems in keeping with consensus among the 624,665 comments there so far: “this one is really confusing… the home page look like every one is kinda takin to you!!!!! the previous one was really nice… would feel better if it was changed to the previous version…”

The negativity has continued into the weekend, fueled in part by a Valleywag item alleging that Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg sent an e-mail to employees suggesting that it’s folly for a disruptive company to listen to its customers.

Writes Dare Obasanjo, using the Gawker post as a starting point:

When your application becomes an integral part of your customers lives and identities, it is almost expected that they protest any major changes to the user experience. The problem is that you may eventually become jaded about negative feedback because you assume that for the most part the protests are simply people’s natural resistance to change…

Somewhere along the line, it seems the folks at Facebook didn’t internalize this fundamental difference in the social context that differentiates user to user relationships on Twitter versus Facebook. This to me is a big mistake.

But some folks are trying to find a silver lining.

Over at VentureBeat, Eric Eldon and MG Siegler offer an in-depth appraisal of the redesign, and lay out their share of criticism–including paying more attention to how users might might react:

From here, Facebook needs to figure out what might be worth bringing back from the old feed, like items about your friends making new friends, events, profile picture changes, etc.

Perhaps most importantly though, Facebook needs to do a better job easing users into this redesign. If it wants people to do their own filtering using lists, it needs to make sure they know how. That’s why above the feed filters, there should be two options: One to show you the news feed after the redesign, and one “legacy feed” below to show you just the core Facebook elements that were previously in the news feed prior to the redesign. In effect, this would be the “training” mechanism described above, and again, is critical before the real flood of information starts coming in through Facebook Connect.

Implementation issues aside, Eldon and Siegler write, “the overall idea behind it is the right one.” Beyond that, they say,

Facebook should listen to its users in some regards – but if every company only listened to its users, there would be no innovation. If the changes made are ultimately for the better, as Facebook clearly believes, then it needs to suck it up and get through this growing pain. And so do its users.

High-profile blogger Robert Scoble definitely seems to be in the tough-love camp when it comes to users’ gripes:

Anyway, all those who are saying the new design sucks should NOT be listened to. Yeah, I know a lot of people are going to get mad at me for saying that. After all, how can a blogger say to not listen to the masses? Easy: I’ve seen the advice the masses are giving and most of it isn’t very good for Facebook’s business interests…

Zuckerberg is not listening to you because you don’t get how Facebook is going to make billions.

We’ve reached out to the folks at Facebook for comment on the purported Zuckerberg missive and, just in general, for how they’re reacting to users’ boos. No response yet, but we’ll let you know if we do hear anything back on this first springtime Sunday afternoon.

Source: CNET News – by Jonathan Skillings