The History of Facebook: Part 2

• January 2008 — Facebook begins offering multiple languages as it expands internationally. The site enlists members to install the Translation application, enabling them to translate words on Facebook from English to their native languages. Using a crowdsourcing technique (see bit.ly/cpyFhG for more information), Facebook invites other translators to vote on the quality of a particular translation by giving it a thumbs up or thumbs down.
• February 2008 — Facebook encroaches more onto MySpace’s turf by launching its new music section for bands, in partnership with iTunes. Just like MySpace, the new section lets bands offer streamed music, photos and music videos to fans as well as selling tickets and merchandise through a deal with the Music Today service.
• April 2008 — Facebook begins partnering with other social sites to pull external data into profile pages, displaying a user’s activity from places such as photo-sharing site Flickr and review site Yelp.
• April 2008 — Facebook Chat released. Members can instant-message each other while on the site.

• May, 2008 — Facebook Connect is announced and is generally available at year end. Members can use their Facebook identities on sites across the Web, including profile photos, photos, friends, groups, events, and other information. This comes after the site banned famous blogger Robert Scoble[1] when he imported his Facebook contact list to online address book site Plaxo. Connect eventually grows into the Open Graph initiative.
• September 2008 — Facebook begins migrating all users to a new version of the site.
• December 2008 — The Supreme Court of the Australian Capital Territory rules that Facebook is a valid way to serve court notices to defendants.[2] New Zealand quickly follows suit.

• June 2009 — Facebook introduces a Usernames feature, which enables members to create simpler URLs for their profiles such as www.facebook.com/MichaelJEllsworth. Some people pick funny or impenetrable usernames, such as:
• facebook.com/Bachelor
• facebook.com/marryme
• facebook.com/center.of.universe (sadly, no longer even the center of Facebook)
• facebook.com/nerdy (our personal favorite)[3]

• August 2009 — Facebook acquires FriendFeed,[4] a site that aggregates members’ posts from almost 60 social media services into a single news feed. At the same time, Facebook debuts real-time search, not only enabling members to search all of Facebook, but also search their own stream of friends, including photos, status updates and such over the last 30 days. Industry pundits view these moves as a direct threat to Twitter, the king of real-time social media.
• August 2009 — Facebook debuts HuffPost Social News, a collaboration with the Huffington Post Website which enables users to create their own personalized social networking-like news page on the Huffington Post itself.
• Late 2009 — After opening some member information up to search engines in 2007, Facebook changes privacy settings again so Facebook public profiles can be indexed by search engines. In July 2010, security consultant Ron Bowes copies the names and profile URLs of 171 million Facebook accounts from publicly-available information and uploads the data as a 2.8GB file, allowing anyone to download it.
• April 2010 — Facebook replaces the Share on Facebook feature with a Like button, and renames its Fan pages, Like pages or just simply Facebook Pages. It also introduces a Recommend button. The buttons appear initially on sites such as NYTimes.com, IMDb, CNN.com, TIME.com, NHL.com, and ABC.com
• April 2010 — Facebook introduces the Activity Feed plug-in. Website owners can embed a stream on their pages that displays personalized content from Facebook members when they like or share content on the site. If a member is logged into Facebook when they visit the third party site, the plug-in highlights content from their friends. If they’re not logged in to Facebook, the activity feed shows recommendations from the third party site, and gives the user the option to log in to Facebook.
• April 2010 — Facebook launches their Graph API.[5] This enables other sites to personalize a Facebook member’s experience, as long as the member is logged in to Facebook. See the Pandora example in our Creating Social Media Connection post for more about how this works.
• June 2010 — Facebook launches Live Stream Box, which enables any Website to embed a live, interactive box on their pages for members to connect, share, and post updates in real-time as they witness an event online. This puts Facebook in the center of online events, games, or any Website where masses of people view — and want to comment on — the same Webpage.

Next up: The History of Facebook: Part 3

Setting Up Facebook

“Communities already exist.
Instead, think about how you can help
that community do what it wants to do.”

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook

Talk to the average adult about Facebook and you’re likely to hear it dismissed as a place for the kids. Yes, that was its beginning — as a way for college students to find out who was that cute guy or gal on the quad. But today the site is much, much more.

You may know the lore: In early 2004, Harvard sophomore Mark Zuckerberg started — or stole the idea for, as subsequent lawsuits by the Winklevii have alleged — Facebook in his dorm room. Like a lot of origin stories this one’s not 100 percent true. And neither is the movie, The Social Network,[1] by the way.

In fact, what Zuckerberg originally created was called Facemash, and, rather than mimicking a trad­itional face book — a printed pamphlet with pictures and names of students — the site was basically a knockoff of the then-popular picture-rating site, Hot or Not.[2] Instead of asking visitors to rate the hotness of a single portrait, Facemash’s innovation was displaying two pictures side by side, and asking users to rate the hotter person.

Actually, there was one more innovation: Zuckerberg got the pictures by hacking into Harvard’s dorm ID photo database. Harvard shut down the wildly popular site within days, and, in a harbinger of things to come, charged Zuckerberg with violating students’ privacy. The college threatened to expel Zuck­erberg, but eventually dropped charges.

After putting up another unrelated site later that semester,[3] Zuckerberg released thefacebook.com in February, 2004 as an online face book. The domain name used today — facebook.com — was not used until it was purchased for $200,000 from the Aboutface Corporation in May 2005.

Figure 56 — Thefacebook.com’s 2004 Main Page[4]

Originally encompassing only Harvard, within three months, thefacebook’s membership expand­ed to other colleges in the Boston area, the Ivy League, and, in 2005, to other colleges and uni­versities and even high schools. During the early years, a potential member had to have an educational email address (one ending in .edu) to join the site, effectively keeping the old folks out. But many (like your humble correspondent) found a loophole — using an alumni email address — and it became popular for parents to log into the community to see what their kids were up to.

So what’s the real story here? That a smart college sophomore first rips off a popular photo site, then takes a standard college staple — the face book — digital, quits school, moves to Silicon Valley in mid-2005 with no car, no house, no job; lands $12.7 million in venture capital; a year later turns down a $1 billion offer from Yahoo; a year after that sells a 1.6 percent share to Microsoft for $240 million (valuing Facebook at $15 billion); and, in July 2010, his site surmounts the half-a-billion member mark, making it the largest social network by a very substantial margin.

It’s enough to make your head spin.

When we started training on social media in 2008, we heard a common refrain from business people: Facebook is for kids. I don’t think there’s any need for us to be there.

Today, an Edison Research/Arbitron study[5] found that nearly a quarter of social network users indicated that Facebook is the social site that most influences their buying decisions. No other site or service was named by more than 1% of the sample, and 72% indicated that no one social site or service influenced their buying decisions the most.

[1] The Social Network movie: bit.ly/9fCwlA

[2] Hot or Not: bit.ly/bbLRH7

[3] This is a great story in its own right. Zuckerberg was behind in his studies due to his work on the Web. He needed to be able to discuss 500 images from the Augustan period for his art history final. Up against the deadline, Zuckerberg built a Website featuring the images and a place for comments. Then he invited his fellow class members to share their notes on the images, like a digital study group. Not only did he do well, Zuckerberg claims so did the rest of his classmates. This is not only a slick Tom Sawyer move, but a great example of the power of social media. This story and other great info about the start of Facebook can be found in a 2007 Fast Company article: bit.ly/bEkRUn

[4] See Facebook pages through the ages: bit.ly/a3bd60

[5] Edison Research and Arbitron The Social Habit II: Internet and Multimedia Study 2011: slidesha.re/oZ9JJB

• Don’t be Boring and Don’t be Obnoxious – ‘Nuff said. However, what other people find to be boring and obnoxious will vary. Widely.
• Don’t be a Showoff – See previous. Always posting about how great you or your organization is can turn people off.
• Don’t use Poor Grammar or Spelling – Seems pretty obvious.
• Don’t Get too Personal – There’s a fine line here. Of course, we encourage you to Be a Person, but the minutia of your life is likely not that interesting to the majority of your followers. Be careful what you share.
• Don’t Forget that a Tweet is Forever – and Google is your permanent record. Watch what you say.
• Don’t Monopolize a Conversation – Just like IRL (In Real Life) those who talk all the time are tiresome and boring.
• Don’t Reply to Every Single Tweet You Receive – This point is similar to the preceding. Over-replying will make you look needy, over-anxious, and as if you are a tweetbot.
• Don’t Over-Tweet – Don’t tweet more than, say, ten times a day, or more than five times an hour. Try to find a balance between staying engaged and being obnoxious and spammy.
• Don’t Brag – about how many people follow you; about your Twitter rankings; about your Twitter milestones (This is my 1,000^th tweet!).
• Don’t Retweet without Giving Credit to the original Tweep – that makes you a tweetcreep.
• Don’t ask “Please Retweet” on All or Even a Majority of your Posts – Save this type of request only for important posts. It gets annoying otherwise.
  
• Don’t Ignore a Genuine Direct Message – Many people have automated replies to those who follow them or for other purposes. It’s OK to ignore or respond to these as you wish. But if someone sends you a pertinent DM, failing to acknowledge it can harm a budding relationship.
• Don’t Include Hashtags in Every Post – This can be seen as a pathetic bid for attention. However, including hashtags can expand your followers, so be judicious.
• Don’t be a Twitter-Stalker – While it can be perfectly appropriate to jump into the middle of a public conversation between two or more people on Twitter, jumping into the same person’s conversation constantly can get more than a little creepy.
• Don’t Take an Unfollow Personally – and don’t report on your Unfollows; Don’t announce who you’re Unfollowing; Don’t tweet your rules for following and Unfollowing; Don’t threaten to Unfollow your followers. Nobody cares.

There are lots and lots of free sites that provide tools for using Twitter. Here’s a very short list of useful Twitter applications that may interest you. There are many, many more out there. Just Google what you want to do with Twitter, and you’ll find some.

• Twitalyzer — analysis of your Twitter habits
• Future Tweets — schedule your Twitter posts
• Monitter — Twitter filtering, live streaming
• Tweetgrid — Like Monitter
• TweetBeep — free Twitter alerts by email
• Tweetizen — filter the daily influx of tweets

• Go for the Numbers — Unlike some other social media sites, Twitter really is all about the number of followers you have. Go for numbers. You need to have lots of followers. You never know who will find you that customer or partner.
• Follow Your Followers — Twitter etiquette is that you automatically follow everyone who follows you. Not all agree with this, and we’re among them. We were once followed by some randy girls from Australia who wanted us to view their Webcam feed. Didn’t follow back.
• Follow Your Followers’ Followers — If you want to build your numbers, consider following people your followers follow.
• Create a Follow Policy — Do you follow everyone back, or only those who meet your criteria? Do you use the number of followers the person has as a determinant? Most importantly, would following this person reflect badly on you, due to the types of people they follow and the messages they tweet? Many people, for example, don’t follow tweeps who follow more people than they are followed by.
• Create Goals and Metrics — Like all social media, you should have a goal for using Twitter, and a way to measure how you’re doing against that goal. The goal could be number of followers, status of your followers, or the number of retweets you get. You can determine this latter by using services — such as Retweerank[1] — that show how many times you’ve been retweeted.
• Be Interesting — The most important Twitter Do is, of course, to make interesting tweets. We think perhaps we’ve stressed this enough.
• Share the Love — Promote other people many times for each tweet promoting you or your enterprise. As on other platforms, your Twitter followers will tune you out if all you talk about is yourself. Also, reply directly, and publicly, to other people (tweet begins with the user’s handle — @somebody). It shows you’re engaged in the community.
• Create Lists — Twitter allows you to create lists to which you can add your followers. It’s easier for you to catch up with those in the list, plus, users are notified that they are part of your list, and are more likely to check you out because of this.
• Keep it Shorter — Limit your tweets to 120 characters to leave space for others to retweet you and add their comments.
• Monitor Twitter — You should monitor what people are saying about you by searching periodically for your Twitter handle and organization name, by watching @ replies, and by setting up automated alerts.
• Tweet at the Right Time — It’s not enough just to create fascinating tweets. You need to pick the right time to tweet. In general, the best time to tweet to reach the largest North American audience is between 1 and 2 pm Pacific time. That’s when the most people are active on Twitter. If you want to reach an international audience, 9 am Pacific time hits several major break times in people’s days: arriving at work on the West Coast, lunchtime on the East Coast, and the end of the business day in London. If these aren’t convenient times for you, consider using a tweet scheduler like SocialOomph[2] or others.
• Put a Share Button on Your Website — Make it easy to for your site visitors to share what they find on your Website by adding a Share on Twitter button. There are a number of free services that you can easily add to your site to accomplish this. One we like is called AddThis.[3] If you are permitted to use persistent cookies (ask your Webmaster), AddThis can also give you sophisticated tracking metrics about your visitors.

[1] Retweetrank: bit.ly/9A5I4k

[2] SocialOomph: bit.ly/cnbUCz

[3] AddThis: bit.ly/9K30P4

We briefly touched on replying via Twitter — start your tweet with @ and the user’s handle. Twitter automatically fills this in for you if you use the Website.

We’d like you to think before you reply, because by default, Twitter doesn’t include the content of the message you’re replying to. You should always remember when replying that your reply will be a public tweet, but without any context, nobody else will have any idea what you’re talking about, like this actual tweet: “@puppydog: Maybe in Montana!!! LOL.” That may be OK with you, but if your entire twitter stream is comprised of incomprehensible non sequitur replies to your tweeps, who’s going to want to follow you?

Be sensitive to others who may be reading your stream when replying, and if it really is nobody’s bus­iness what you’re saying, make the tweet a direct message (known as a DM) by placing a D as the first character. Be sure to use a D and not a DM. If DM is the first characters of a message, the message is a normal, public tweet.

You are not likely to have a personal relationship with all of your followers. You may follow them back because they seem interesting, or because you’d like to get more followers. Thus you need to be careful about clicking on links from DMs. There have been many spam and phishing attempts via DM, so be aware that the URL in the tweet — especially a shortened URL — could go to a malware site.

If you’re not quite sure what we were saying in the last paragraph, here are some definitions:

• Spam — delicious pork product
• Phishing — messages pretending to be from a trusted source that try to get your account info
• Malware — viruses, spyware, keystroke loggers — any type of program with a bad intent

Twitter will help you see where you’ll be taken if you click on a shortened link. Simply mouse over the link and up will pop a little balloon with the full URL.

Promote Yourself: Get Retweeted

[1] Glow-in-the-dark pigs! bit.ly/d1anvL

[2] Dan Schwabel’s list: bit.ly/aJ1dOO

Power Tool: WeFollow and Other Twitter Directories

On WeFollow,[1] you can register yourself and assign three keywords to your Twitter account. People who search on WeFollow can then see you in their search results based on the keywords. WeFollow also ranks registrants by influence. Here’s a recent example:

Figure 53 — Example from WeFollow

The top person in this list, aplusk, is celebrity Ashton Kutcher, famous for challenging CNN to a race to 1 million followers. If you go to his profile, you’ll see a new addition to Twitter’s features: the Verified Account.

Here’s what Twitter says about this new feature, which is very handy for celebrities, and others who might get impersonated on Twitter:

Any account with a Verified Badge is a Verified Account. Twitter uses this to establish authenticity of well known accounts so users can trust that a legitimate source is authoring their Tweets.

Twitter now only verifies accounts of celebrities, their advertisers, and other prominent people. At one time they did allow the rest of us to request verification but no longer.

The following table lists some of the more popular niche and general Twitter directories that you might want to consider adding your account to. These directories can be a powerful way to attract new followers.[2]

Table 7 — Twitter Directories