Facebook Timeline and Open Graph was released on F8 this week. The return of Timeline is a nice and well anticipated one. Back in 2007 there was a similar function to timeline where you could see a persons activity and information placed on a timeline. This was nice as you could show your previous relationships, work places and other such static data in a way that makes sense.

What is added to this new version is the ability to post interactions with others and apps on the timeline. Also, there are many, quite significant user interaction improvements and design features to it. However, the functionality is nothing new.

Facebook Timeline

The new Facebook timeline will probably give Facebook an opportunity to introduce and reintroduce some products in their marketing portfolio.

• Gifts make sense now that we can create birthday celebration boxes into which gifts, happy birthday wishes and other celebration information such as parties (events), images and other such related material can be stored. The new timeline will surely make way for a new “custom gifts” app where I can create objects I can give to my friends on their birthdays. Facebook will surely make business out of this and offer solutions to their business partners. With 800 million users and an average of 2.3 birthdays per day, a 1 dollar gift can make a lot of revenue for Facebook over a year.
• Promoted timeline box will probably also be included in the offering. Brands can easily fill the void where we do not have words to describe who we are in a group of people. Apple says we care about design and being different. Nike communicates that we are sporty. Pepsi communicates that we are rebels. I am sure Facebook will create a format for promoted timeline boxes where we grow our relationships and show loyalty to our favorite brands.

Open Graph – Facebook Verbs

The Open Graph on the other hand is something which has clear implications on how we treat the web. This is probably one of the most important releases Facebook has ever made. Not only because it makes possible for people to actually express what they are doing rather than saying whether or not they like a thing. No, it also improves the web as it standardizes verbs in a format that makes it able for our applications to understand them and thus interrelate them with each other.

When I make a search today I am unable to do a search such as “books that my friends like” or “books that several of my friends have read that I haven’t read”. We rather have to do a search that focuses on the category of the book or perhaps the title. By opening for a more semantically interrelated web, we can move beyond this and create applications that can truly answer questions we ask.

As a business solution, you know I have wanted a way to use Facebook for agent affiliate for a long time. You know. I plan a trip, an agent markets themselves against people who are planning a trip. They give me a dynamic offer that gets cheaper the more friends I get to buy the same deal. Everyone pays for themselves. Perfect. I no longer have to be the one collecting and never being paid the accurate amount as the social group organizer. This would be a great way for Facebook to earn more advertising money, but also earn CPO money such as Deals was intended to. I have elaborated a bit more on this in my post – what should Mark D’Arcy do on his first day at facebook.

Traditionally, there has been something magic with a coupon. Just like a wink of an eye, it communicates a two way relationship between buyer and seller that “hell yeah, we’re loyal to each other“. It is in some way romantic exchange between John and prostitute, when the pimp isn’t looking.

“Oh, wait, I have a coupon for that…“, “Oh, do you now…“, “It is just here in my purse, hold on one sec…“, “Gold memeber, I see… welcome back mrs. Andersson…“, some coupons more embarrassing than others. Hotels had a successful rebranding of the coupons, calling them vouchers. Some even put their coupons into cards, calling them reward programs. *sigh*… The evolution of the coupon is as fascinating as it is sentimentally draining. A deal is always a deal and it touches my heart whenever I see a well phrased offer.

Of late, coupons have started to move into the digital space. Well, coupons have been there for a long time, but not the kind of coupons that you bring into an offline store and hand of in an intimate moment with the cashier. No. As the mobile web expands, these new types of digital coupons have started to overwhelm our lives to a greater extent than the ol’paperback.

On the horizon there are about a million competitors trying to battle it out in being the sole distributor of these digital coupons. Although I believe neither of them are employing a long term successful strategy, I still think that they are the two who will give it a run for the money. Naturally I’m talking about Facebook Deals and Groupon.

#1. The setup of a deal

Facebook Deals is still only available in Atlanta, Dallas, Austin, San Diego and San Fransisco which is a great weakness. Neither Groupon or Facebook Deals allows you to post a deal on your own. Groupon wants to review your deal and contact you “shortly” and provides a silly little non-optimized web form for you to fill in your business story in.

Facebook doesn’t let you fill in any form at all. They simply state that they are currently working with “…aDealio, Gilt City, HomeRun, kgb deals, OpenTable, Plum District, PopSugar City, ReachLocal, Tippr, viagogo, and zozi…“.

According to me, these strategies seem extremely costly and I don’t understand why there isn’t a way to just fill in my offer and then let it sliiiiide through the Internets like a hot piece of cheese on a… hmm… you get what I’m getting at.

#2 Deal display

Here is something both have got quite nicely right. Both of them make a big fuzz about the count down, they both clearly show what you save and they both show the price you pay. The only difference in call to action is that Facebook Deals uses “Buy for $XX” meanwhile Groupon simply uses “Buy” plus the prize to the left of the buy button.

Groupon deal display

Facebook Deals deal display

Naturally, Facebook Deals is superior in the ways you can share a deal. The only thing missing is probably to share it in a text to someone’s mobile or to “people nearby”. Ie. if I am using a deal and want to share it with my friends who happen to be in the same mall as me, or have checked-in close buy, then I should be able to send them a push notification through the mobile.

Groupon however has a functionality that I believe Facebook Deals really should focus on getting as well – Buy it for a friend. As I have written previously, Facebook Deals would be a great tool for group purchases. Ie. if a friend has a birthday, my buddies and I should be able to run a pot of money where everyone could give as much or as little as he or she wants to the pool. As the amount of money grows, more deals become available.

I really don’t understand why Facebook has this already. They used to have it in their digital gifts store in the early days. You remember, when you could buy “megaphone time” and “digital badges” to your friends profile pages. Ha ha… I remember my boss invested a shit load of money into enabling a customized gifts store on our page when I worked at a “large fashion company”… Although the guy was one of the most daring digital personalities I have met in the corporate world, and if we would have just had a bit tinier egos, we would have made a perfect team, that decision was ludicrous.

However, back to the comparison. Groupon has got it right. Gifts is big business online, and they are taking full advantage of that.

#3. Buying a deal

I must say that I prefer Facebook Deals two step approach in the jQuery looking pop-in, over Groupon’s one step check-out. I suppose it has to do with preference in some way, however, the golf balls don’t feel as tasty when I can no longer see them which might impose a slight hesitation when I complete my purchase.

One of the rules of improving conversion rate is to maintain scent. Ie. The user seller should confirm that the user is still on the right track on claiming the purchase they first entered to complete. The scent is built through the use of consistent colors, call to action, price levels, discounts, buttons, and images throughout the complete check out process. If they change too much, a user gets confused and might think that the vendor is trying to fool them or that they have ended up in the wrong place and thus do not complete the purchase. One of the greatest lessons in conversion rate optimization I’ve ever learnt is that customers are stupid and they know it. Thus, they expect to do it the wrong way and try to find every excuse to blame stupidity in not completing the purchase. Thus, over confirm their every step along the process. (don’t misinterpret me there please…)

Groupon check-out

Facebook Deals two step check-out

Step 1

Step 2

Why Facebook Deals and Groupon both will fail

The technology of creating a digital coupon is becoming increasingly available at very affordable prices. In fact, it is free to create many digital coupons already. Distributors of QR-codes and other such solutions have made it extremely simple to adopt the new technology and thus the cost is very limited.

Neither Facebook Deals or Groupon takes on a strategy where they become the distributor of existing deals, but they create unique deals on their platform. Although Facebook has noted they are trying to make their deals more social, I suspect they will focus on the sharing of existing deals, rather than the submission of social deals, ie. an offer that I find interesting to my friends, or an existing offer in a store that needs to be digitalized in order to reach its complete audience.

As a customer I want to walk around town and get ALL available deals in one device. I don’t want to flip around between native apps to try and find what might interest me. Here is a great void in the industry, one I think Google will eventually fill with its superior insight in user search preferences and geo location/maps.

Facebook can still steal this void in front of the noses of the others if they make it possible for me to post my best deals onto my wall. Ie. the deals I find are good offers. That way they will create a natural place for deals in the sharing space. Ie. (loads of the ie.s now…) Users are more likely to look at the deals purchased by businesses if it is mixed amongst the deals friends have posted, or if they are in the same format on the wall.

Facebook just hired Mark D’Arcy to work on creative advertising solutions for partners. Boy is he needed. This is my open letter to him and what I wish Facebook would do the coming years, starting with today.

I know it might be a lot to ask of a person who has just started at Facebook, but seriously, I think you just hit the jackpot in terms of jobs. I jealous, almost to the point of envious of your situation. I am a soulful dude though and so I really want to be of help, if I can.

There are a lot of things missing with regard to revenue streams on Facebook. This is my take on some of the additions Facebook should look into.

#1. Real social shopping

I have previously written by social shopping and how it could be implemented on Facebook. To that collaborative solution I would like to add a ranking. Some sort of toplist based on likes that would help the users select their products on the basis of other things than price. Those things might be likes, reviews, connections and degrees of separation and time to consumption meaning how long it would take for the product to become available for consumption to the person who wants to purchase it.

Facebook can do this as you own all the data needed to support it. Except for perhaps retail prices. However, the thought of shopping collectively gives a strong enough incentive for business to offer that parameter to the Facebook framework. This would not only increase basket value, but it would also give Facebook a reason to charge based on that value.

Shopping is really all about a co-ordination problem between demand and supply. Facebook has the ability to solve many instances of these co-ordination problems. By making it easier to shop online, more people would do so, and thus it would be more profitable for companies.

Think of it this way. There is always a super-person – a worker – in each group or sub-group. This worker performs tasks for the rest of the group that they later enjoy collectively today. By enabling and making it easier for the worker to actually do their work in the group social structure, you will make them switch technology from phone to let’s say – web. Facebook groups and events show this clearly. You have one person with an idea and the strength to do something about it, they create a movement and their friends come join the party.

In the case of social shopping, think of it as a collaborative effort, much like GroupOn. On Facebook this would work in two directions. First you would create a functionality for the workers where they can create a proposition. This proposition might be “Buy a bike” or more logically for this thought experiment “Buy a trip to Mallorca on the dates 4th to 15th January”. They can then invite all their friends. Different companies can then bit for different levels of engagement. For each user that joins, the price goes down as you solve sales co-ordination costs for the sales agents. At the same time, influential people, or just the worker of a group of 4 families does not have to make the big payment and then ask the rest for the cash which is a common problem in today’s real world of buying trips for groups.

Each and everyone buys in with their own wallet. Even people not going to the location with you can join your group until you reach a marginal revenue of the last bidder that is the lowest they can take for that volume.

For the travel industry, and many other industries, this would be awesome as upsales could be co-ordinated to a group that had already begun socializing. Naturally, the creator of the group would get their trip for free after a certain amount of paying participants.

Inverted, you can do this for birthdays. If a person has a birthday, they can create their Facebook wish list. Companies can list their products under each category or product type in the wish list. Friends can then buy in with a small stake and the person can then see more products become available as the money pile grows.

There are a million applications to this, but that is that for social shopping. Facebook would earn a cut out of every transaction to the system, much like the credit cards deal with their stuff today. In the future Facebook could probably charge for larger agent accounts and pay influential people to attract business through the Facebook platform.

#2. Application Store

Please setup an application store. This will both increase the quality of applications as well as create business for Facebook. It worked for Apple… hehe… You could however do it with an Amazon twist where you show people how many degrees of separation they are from someone using the application, or even how far away they are from the developers. You could include ratings from friends only, or ratings from people with simliar interests as you.

Purchasing applications on Facebook will be a lot more fun than buying apps for the iPhone. It will be a collective effort with easy sharing capabilities. Launch campaigns of new apps can be setup like treasure hunts where people who are first to find and share an app release x amount of Facebook credits. Naturally you can integrate this into the advertising program. Easy product to buy, functional and great product to use. The Facebook way in other words.

#3. Enhanced photo album & public profile

I know you might not want to go here, but there is a big business in giving people cool tools for their portfolio. I wish that we could see this functionality on LinkedIn, but for professionals it would be great to just see it somewhere. CEO’s and important people that are afraid of sharing their stuff should rather than limit access, be given the possibility to pay a micro sum every month in order to be able to pimp their outside look of their profile.

I’m thinking carousel photo albums, nice video displays, easy integration to websites, enhanced resume with logo-injections for companies listed in the company directory of Facebook (yeah.. you should put something on the platform and charge companies to claim their business).

Ie. you should give people the possibility to have a public, professional profile, and one they use when collaborating and chatting with their friends.

All in all

I want to welcome you to Facebook and hope you create great stuff for us concept developers, viral marketers and most importantly users of Facebook.

Facebook Deals were introduced just a few months ago and is yet to be rolled out in many countries. There aren’t any real cases to be spoken of, but the potential of connecting the online to the offline makes Deals important enough to not look away from. This article will discuss some of this potential.

Yes, there are several other applications and implications to using Deals, but these are the two most prominent areas of usage I see on the horizon. Please feel free to build on the examples given below in your own blog.

But first, let’s start with a word or two about Facebook places

Without Facebook Places, the deals setting wouldn’t be possible. Basically, Facebook has allowed for users to check in to “real places” offline, and thus connecting the digital world to the physical one.

Facebook has the belief that we as humans have more fun when we experience things in a social setting. The purpose of a check in then becomes to tell your friends where you are and thus opening your decision of movement to online interaction. To many people this behavior appears as completely pointless, however, considering the growth of foursquare and gowalla, I would pretty much consider it a behavior we as humans deem necessary in our aim to socialize.

Facebook Deals

There are basically two situations where you would want to have a look at Deals. You have a brand and you want to drive traffic to resellers or you are a local business and want to reward loyalty to your store.

Brand working with resellers

The best, but probably the most difficult way to work with Facebook Deals is to try and drive traffic to your local resellers.

Today you have no control of how they place your product in their shelf. They basically either strike a “deal” with a supplier or adjust their shelf placements according to how people buy. Deals is a great way to give your followers a chance to find stores that serve your product and give them an upsale offer if they do.

The difficulty lies within actually getting the local reseller on your side and actually allowing for you to display you coupon on their venue. If you are early in adopting this strategy, I am sure they will probably not bother about it, but if you wait, I am sure they will have found their own deals that will pull traffic to their store and you’ve lost the opportunity.

Local businesses rewarding loyalty

The more logical way of using deals will be for small business to reward loyalty. As you can track the frequency your user checks in at your venue, you can also release loyalty rewards that only occur after the person has checked in to your place enough times.

In order to get new traffic and not only reward the in store traffic that you already have, I would recommend that you combine your loyalty offer with a small offer for first time check ins. “All that comes gets, if you stay you get more.” Seems simple enough to understand, right?

What does Facebook want with this format?

I believe that Facebook is looking to further expand the Facebook framework into other areas than online, and as a result, digitalizing “real things” in our surroundings. The vast amount of data available on Facebook, due to their integration with other websites, and because of the constant news feeds, Facebook will be able to use the Deals data to predict sales patterns. When do people buy? What do they get? At what frequency do they do it? This will not be on an aggregate level, but rather on an individual level which means that you as a brand will be able to know, not only who your social influencers are, but also who of them brings in the buck.

You might be one of those companies with inexhaustible marketing funds, but most of you aren’t. This probably do mean that you are looking for ways to get your word on the tip of tongues without having to spend a fortune on it. This post helps you with a few techniques on how to make this happen on Facebook.

Structure of your Facebook updates

If you are in the need to get engagement on your updates on Facebook, you should really split your posts into three categories.

1. News
2. Resources
3. Opinions

In order not to get boring you need to mix these three different kind of updates. If you do it successfully, you will experience a real organic growth of your Facebook presence. There is a format that I will use for this exercise called the statement + narrowed question-format. It works very well in combination with links and images/videos.

#1. Sharing News on Facebook

You are probably feeling the heat of modern internet pace. You’re wondering how the hell you can keep up with all the news and how you are supposed to produce all the quality insights other people are sharing online. Well, this might not come as news to you, but you don’t have too.

Sharing news news

All you need to do is to share the latest news. Regardless if you wrote it or not. What you have to share though is your thoughts on it. To me it sounds like a cliche, but seriously, so few of you are sharing other things than what you are the producers off, that I feel like this needs some repetition. Unless you want to turn your marketing department into a media production department you need to find people who already are and start sharing their stuff.

The good thing with sharing news, is that you do not really have to care about the origin of them. You can simply state that this was released by the source and IF (important disclaimer) they are correct, it would have a certain impact on something which is of relevance for you.

So basically, when you construct your news update based on what someone else has written. All you need to focus on is 1. how is this relevant to you and 2. how do you convey this relevance to your followers. The actual production you can leave to someone else. The purpose of this exercise is to make you the source for news within your vertical and Facebook offers a great and interactive format for this to take place, namely the updates.

Sharing product news

Product news are something different in itself. There are about 40% of your followers who expect to get deals and offers/coupons from following you. Now that Facebook has removed the “pre-approval” process on campaigns, you are free to give your followers coupons and offers in the news feed.

The best way to do this is to do it within a news format. In order to make a product into news you have to set it in the frame of urgency. You can do this by making it a Facebook event or by simply uploading the coupon with a set end date to it. The end date should then be used as a reason to communicate the same offer several times.

7 days left

3 days left

24 hours to go

1 hour to go

If you are a bit less aggressive you should try to build it into a more social context such that you create a viral concept around your news story by adding a limiting question to the end of it. “Feature offer this week: [offer], available until Sunday 7th of August. What [product category] color should we choose for our next promotion?” By narrowing the question you add to the posted coupon or similar, you are attracting engagement from your fans based on the simplicity of the question. It is easy to say what your favorite color is, but it is difficult to know what products you have.

Always add a color, a taste or something to the questions you post with your news. This makes it very easy for a lot of people to respond. When they do so, they will share their interaction on the walls of their friends. “Name name has commented on xx” will be the update which with some consideration in used copy for your titles, will draw the attention of the person reading it.

#2. Sharing Resources on Facebook

Resources are a bit different than news in the sense that they do not need the sense of urgency that news do in order to be attractive. Resources are generally something you have created on your website or on an external hub such as YouTube, SlideShare or Flickr.

In order to attract clicks you need to make your resource of discussion or dialogue. There are a couple of tactics I usually use when I want to make a resource into a matter of debate. The best one is not finishing it and then crowd sourcing the solution. Thus giving the power users the option to become co-author of whatever resource I have just created. Then I contribute them by adding their name and a link to their online entity in the header or in the bottom of the resource page.

Another way of making your resources debatable, is by following the same pattern as for the above stated tactic for sharing product news.

A third way is to ask people to translate the resource into their local language. Naturally giving them credit with a link on the “local versions of”-page.

A fourth way is to offer more data and ask people to write their own version of the data on their blogs and post it to the threaded discussion. This might be the least attractive one as you are moving the sources for knowledge onto other places than your owned presence. If you do this, make sure you collect all the more important posts on an appendix page to your original resource so that you continue to own the discussion and be the hub of ALL the knowledge within your vertical.

#3. Sharing your Opinions on Facebook

When you share your opinions on Facebook you really should pay notice to the statement + narrowed question format that I offered above. Let’s say you need to comment on a sensitive issue. Please make the comment or statement, but do not, for all that it is worth, leave the debate open. Close the debate that follows with a very specific and narrowing question.

Let’s say you have been caught with polluting the environment with some sensitive chemical. Let’s say this has leaked to the press and you are being battered by bloggers and press. You make your standard post to your Facebook wall about your investigation into the topic. For most of you, this is probably the worst thing in the world as you will get battered there too. This is being shared between users, just as any other post you do that involves discussion. You seriously do not want to make this the first impression.

So, what you should do is to narrow the mindset of the readers. Eg. “We are investigating the matter leaked into press the other day. If you find any good sources of where we can find information, please post them here.”

By being seemingly transparent, you have also narrowed the frame in which people will most likely write their responses. This does not show weakness, but gives you some time frame in which you can maneuver into a better position to then strike them with “We have been overwhelmed by the response we’ve received and are working day and night to handle the influx of e-mails, posts and bla bla bla…”, thus giving you some more time.

So, that’s for controversy.

When you state your more positive opinions, you should use the limiting format to actually expand the discussion. Perhaps offer two sets of opinions by posting something such as “We are releasing a red and blue version of the product x. Which one do you think will be the big hit?”

This will hopefully induce some kind of animosity between users. This in turn, will make your post spread virally between users that engage. You can then move in as the big diplomat if the discussion gets out of hand and say something like “No need to get physical here. We’re releasing both colors. May the best wo-/man win”.

As Facebook announced on the 10th of February this year, they are depreciating the use of FBML starting tomorrow. This means that all of your created welcome landing pages you are yet to deploy in the FBML-application will not be possible from tomorrow (11th of March) onwards.

Existing FBML-boxes do still work

We do not know for how long, but the existing FBML-boxes will work tomorrow as well, but you do good in keeping an eye on the development roadmap at a regular basis to see announcements on when FBML will be completely removed. You might also see this as a great time to start talking to your clients about that you need to rebuild as Facebook has made this update.

What’s the alternative to FBML-welcome pages

In the same post they write about the new types of Facebook iframes that they will be using from now on. It is actually really much better than the old version as you have a lot more freedom now to create webbapps with a wider range of functionality.

I will try to get better at posting tutorials again and my first will be an update to the iframe post I wrote a while back.

WRITING IN PROGRESS: As I was writing this blog post, Facebook pulled back their New Facebook Pages and replaced them with the old ones. I will keep you updated on the changes as I find them. We’ve currently got something looking like an “inbetween the new and old design page” where the Tabs are back:

And now they released the update that this was a mistakenly published prototype. I wish it wasn’t.

My first question was: “Where the heck did the Edit page button go”? I was calmed quite fast when I looked in the top right corner and found it there. Nice, the new Facebook Pages are here!

#1 Login as page on Facebook

This is huge. You can now login as the pages you Admin. You can easily change between the accounts you are managing and thus be yourself as well as be the page. Essentially, what this does is that it allows pages to take a more active and social role on Facebook as they can interact with the other users.

If you are not logged in as a page, then you see your own profiles updates and you can browse the network as though you are yourself. But if you are logged in as a page, then you will from now on browse Facebook as a page. Get the updates as a page, and be able to friend people as a page. You will not yet be able to message people, but you will be able to write on their walls as the page.

1. Notifications when logged in as a Facebook page

2. Switching between accounts

#2 You need to treat a Facebook Page like a friend now

I was resetting my privacy settings earlier today and sorting the different friends I have into new groups as I am preparing to open most of my account public. Amongst my friends were all the pages, which were not there before.

This is an interesting move by Facebook, but I suggest you have a look at your privacy settings and set all pages you add in a single group that you give specific or limited access to your page.

Earlier today page admins took a beating, probably as a result of the changes being implemented. However, I see the final outcome as the most important. Being able to login and move around as a page gives page owners a lot more freedom to interact and thus also a better service to those who like the page.

#3 No more Facebook page tabs

There are probably a lot of new features to be rolled out in the coming days, but the most evident change is that of the tabs. There are no more tabs on the Facebook pages. Nice! No one ever clicked the tabs anyhow and you had to employ some kind of re-publishing strategy for them in order for them to make sense. This is a great change.

#4 New Facebook Page left hand navigation

Instead, Facebook is working with a new left hand navigation. If I may remind you… TOLD YOU SO!! This is great when you want to make it easier for your users to visit yours and others applications. You can much easier build connections to your own website and drive promotional activities. The navigational structure makes a lot more sense this way.

For example, if you want to add a top navigation to your application pages, it doesn’t look f-ed up any more.

How do I change the order of the Facebook page navigation options to the left?

1. Well, simply click the more button

2. Then the edit button

3. Then wait for a couple of seconds and then you can drag and drop the options or delete them in any way that you want.

You still cannot change the order of the Wall and Info “tab” but I hope they really change that for the future or give an easy way to integrate the wall onto every page of your app.

I have received a lot of questions about account verification lately. So I thought I’d write a blog post about it. Facebook has employed account verification from the beginning of its existence. It started out with the .edu e-mail address and has later turned into more sophisticated methods of account verifications.

Although there has been great progress, the early problems of account verification still persist and there are several accounts that are unable to verify their legitimacy. In 2007 Niket Biswas, a member of the Facebook developer team enlightened this problem and gave some suggested solutions in the Facebook forum.

How do I verify my Facebook user account?

The simplest way since then has been to go to the page for confirming your telephone number at http://facebook.com/confirmphone.php. Another way has been to add your credit card to your profile by buying some ads.

Of late, Facebook has tried to hunt down all existing spam accounts on the platform and thus users who might already have verified their account in one way or another have been asked to verify them again. This is probably due to some kind of behavior they omit on the platform.

How do I verify my Facebook Developer account?

The same thing holds for Facebook Developer accounts. You basically have two ways of verifying your account.

• Either verify your phone number
• Or verify by entering your credit card

If you cannot verify your account by any of these methods you are simply screwed. You will not be able to develop on the platform according to the current Facebook permissions for account Verification.

If you continue experiencing difficulties when working with Facebook development and verification, please put your question in this post and I will try to get the answer for you.

//Jesper –> I was drunk when I wrote this, but I had 67 pending questions about the same thing in my inbox, so I felt it was the most important thing to do right now…

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Perhaps I’ve just missed it, but I have been really busy all day, so I’ll write about it although you probably already read it somewhere else.

I found some neat and new privacy settings on Facebook. The new feature allows you to better control how people who aren’t already connected to you, see your information and what they are allowed to do. This is a great step for professional profiles that you create for yourself and for your employees working with your Facebook presence for example. This blog post aims at just quickly running them through and showing you they exist.

You find them by clicking your Account button, top right, and selecting Privacy settings.

On the very top of the two selections there is a new option to set the privacy settings for Connecting on Facebook. Click the “View settings” link to move onto the options.

Connecting on Facebook Privacy settings

As you can see from the options in the image below you are now able to hide the “send a friend request” button, you can disappear from Facebook searches (this option has been available previously as well). You can virtually remove any chance of finding you except for removing the Poke button. That’s probably the only way people can contact you if you’ve set all others to None!

So… I guess this is yet another step to prepare for the new messages system whilst giving you more control over whether or not your profile is visible in Google and Facebook search engines.

But the normal Facebook privacy settings have also changed

I found another change whilst moping around the privacy settings. They have added the possibility to set different privacy settings for different albums you have published. This is also an excellent addition to what was there before. You find it by clicking the “Customize settings” link at the bottom of your privacy settings overview.

Then looking in the first grouping of privacy settings to find the “Edit album privacy” at the bottom of the first stack and clicking the link “Edit album privacy”.

And then finally setting the different privacy level you desire on each album.

Play around and have fun

//Jesper

To sum it all up, Facebook is truly trying their best to make all of your profile and activities, and interests and everything that you do on the platform truly social. They are not holding back anymore. All that you do, you do with someone. This is excellent.

The new Facebook profile Features

• Profile begins with a quick summary of who you are
• Give a more complete picture of how you spend your time
• Showcase the things you care about most and connect with friends who share the same interests
• Relationships with close friends can be just as important as family
• Visit a friend’s profile and see all the things you share in common

To see what it means and to make it your own, follow this link.

Privacy settings

Let’s take the most important stuff first. As far as I can tell, the old privacy settings still hold although I got a bit worried there for a while….

Features

1. New display of who a person is in short

At the very top of your page there is a summary of you:

2. New messaging buttons top right

Top right you see the Poke and the Chat/send message (whether or not user is offline) buttons:

3. Better ads visibility

Wider and nicer ad space to the right which puts your ads in a much better light than before:

4. New sharing method

First post and then comment on links you share. I guess this is in order for them to thread discussions about the same resources better. Wouldn’t be surprised if they add “common” discussions about shared resources and “discussions about your links on Facebook” to advertisers shortly. I am almost 100% that this will be integrated into the “insights” section.

1. Post the link

2. Post your comment

3. Share to wall

5. New and neat display/addition of your top likes and interests

Really neat addition of likes and interests which enables you to showcase your interests better. I sure as hell hope they connect this to social commerce shortly. It most definitively seems like it.

6. Adding what you like to do and with who you like to do it

7. Add projects to your work experience

This will be excellent in the long run as you will be able to extract full profiles and candidates for your recruitment processes.

8. Seeing Christian Hernandez status updates

I just love it how I can stalk Christian Hernandez from Facebook UK without him accepting my friend request. I get all his updates although when I look at his profile I am not allowed to see his wall.

9. New sorting of friends

Go to your profile. Then click friends and you will see this display. Much easier to work with if you are looking for a specific person than the old thing.

10. Adding Featured Relationships

Right, so this is how you do the highlighted relationship thingy.

1. Go to relationships under edit profile

2. Click create new list or Add existing list on the bottom of the page

3. Give your list a name and select the list members

11. The relationship box

A box has been created on the right hand side of a profile you visit where you can see all the stuff that you are connected to that person through.

12. Where the heck did the Facebook profile tabs go?

Well they went out to the left of your profile just underneath your profile picture.