18 months ago the iPad was first released and everyone since then has been waiting for the official iPad app to be released. Well- it’s finally here! I have to admit, using your fingers with gestures to browse Facebook is just plain fun. I recorded a walkthrough video of the Facebook iPad app to show you just how it works. You can download the Facebook iPad app in the App Store or here (there is also a new version if the iPhone app out as well).

I don’t need to cite any statistics or show you fancy bar graphs to prove to you a lot of people use Facebook (over 500 million and growing, OK, that one slipped). Many users have wondered why there isn’t a “Dislike” button? In fact, there’s even a FB page with 3 million protesting this.

I think Facebook should never create a “Dislike” button. Ever.

It’s in their best interest not to. Here’s why:

Lots of people use Facebook every day. Many check it several times a day. Facebook allows us to stay connected to people and businesses we choose. The layout, interface, design and tools- Facebook sets the “stage” for the interactions to happen (between real people). Think about it …if you logged into Facebook and didn’t have any friends, the website would be blank. Thus, the developers and designers at Facebook hold a lot of influence in how these interactions are facilitated. The tools they create enable us. It connects us. It allows us to social network easily without constraints to time, physical location and space. This is what makes Facebook great. It’s designed well and constantly being updated.

OK, so what’s my point?

My point is, if you were able to click a “Dislike” button for things your friends were posting, it would empower users with the ability to express hate …easily. Too easily. It’s only 1-click. Imagine uploading a picture of yourself, or dog, or family, or writing a status update in which you were sharing good news about yourself. Seeing negative counts/feedback from your friends telling you they “Dislike” something could have significant implications for the emotions and feelings people associate with their experience using Facebook. Processing this type of sentiment is a lot for one’s self-esteem. If someone continual received “Dislikes”, the negative feelings could and would be associated and indirectly displaced to the website, Facebook. Furthermore, why would anyone want to continue to use a tool that makes it so easily to spread negativity about things people are sharing? Just imagine the types of pictures, video, content and status updates people would create just to get people to click the “Dislike” button.

More-so, the advent of the “Dislike” feature would inject a sense of fear, hesitation, or worry in people’s heads that what they’re sharing/posting could be easily returned with negative feedback from their friends and family.

So amiright? Who’s with me?

Or am I wrong?

Do you think there needs to be a “Dislike” button?
(please click “Like” on this blog post if you agree there shouldn’t be a “Dislike” button!)
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Do you spend too much time on Facebook? Wish there was a way to avoid the addictive time-suck of endlessly looking at photos, status updates, and funny cat videos people are posting? (yikes, I sound like an infomercial don’t I?)

I believe 15-minutes is all you need to catch-up on everything that’s going on with your friends on Facebook. What is the secret? Two words…

Friend Lists.

If you take the time to setup and configure personalized Friend Lists, your daily dose of Facebook will be forever easier (and you can thank me later ). You’ll find yourself spending less time sorting through the mess of friends, fan pages and co-workers that junk up your FB homepage Newsfeed. Friend Lists make it greatly easier to consume Facebook.

What is a Friend List? It’s simple. It is a customized list in which you choose how to sort and customize. You can have up to 100 Friend Lists with a maximum of 1,000 people per lists. As an example, I’ve taken a screenshot of my lists setup for my account (see image below on the right).

Once you setup these lists, you’re able to quickly digest a TON of information in a few minutes about specific types of friends just by clicking the filters on the left. Here are some of my favorite lists I use:

“Bloggers/Influencers”
I created this list to segment people who have influence online (in my opinion). These friends are typically content creators and publish frequently. They have a huge following and community online. For me, it’s nice to have them in 1 bucket for consumption to see what they’re publishing.

“Favorite Fan Pages”
This is a great way to pull-out and segment Fan Pages so you just get updates from all the Fan Pages you really care about (since we’re all guilty of clicking “like” to more companies and businesses than we actually want to follow).

“Kansas City Fan Pages”
I find this useful and relevant based on when I’m in the mode of “looking for something to do in my city”. Particularly, I find myself looking at this on Thursday and Fridays when making weekend plans.

“Circle of Trust”
This is where I start first everyday. It is a small group of about 30′ish people who I really care to read their status updates and posts. If I only have 5-minutes to check Facebook because I’m busy, this is the only Friend List I look at.

I also have these lists which I use:

“Family”
“Work”
“People I Don’t Know”
“High School Friends”
“Phi Delta Theta”
“Online/Internet Friends”
“Clients”

iPhone App

Friend Lists will appear on your iPhone as well! (comes in handy when you only have a few minutes to catch-up via mobile). Just tap the button in the top right. The FB app will pull-in and display all your Friend Lists. How cool is that!?

Send a Message to Friend Lists

You can send messages to all the people you’ve put in a Friend List. This is extremely helpful, because essentially it’s a way to create “groups” for Facebook messaging. Note: the maximum number of recipients you can send is 20, so you will not be able to send a message to any Friend List that contains over 20 people. When you send a message to a Friend List, the message will show all the recipients’ names, but the title of your Friend List will never be visible to other members of Facebook (incase you’ve got them categorized as “people that annoy me” ) .

Send Event and Group Invites with Friend Lists

On any Group or Event page, you can type in any Friend List name and they all will be invited. Another great “group” feature to send to multiple people easily.

Now go get started! I promise, once you take the time to setup Friend Lists, your life on Facebook will be changed for the better (dramatic yes, but I speak the truth …promise!)

Here is how you create a friend list:

Click “Friends” on the left menu. Then click the “Create New List” button (top right).

1. Type the name of your list and press enter.
2. Add friends to the list by typing their names into the “Add to List” field or by clicking them from the list.
3. Select “Create List” to save your changes (*this is important, it’s easy to forget to click save*)

Still confused? Facebook has an entire FAQ help section you can reference.

BONUS TIP: I’ve really been digging a website called www.itstrending.com which tells you the videos, images, and news that’s being shared the most on Facebook. Check it out.

Hopefully this walk-through helps you! If you’ve got other Facebook time-saver times, share them with me in the comments. Do you use Friend Lists already? What categories are you using for your friends?
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If you follow me on Twitter you may have seen my updates recently about launching a Facebook fan page feature for Hallmark. I’m really proud of the team that put this project together and wanted to share this with you.

At the beginning of 2010, the company I work for (Digital Evolution Group) led the design, development of the website to celebrate Hallmark’s 100 Year birthday. On the website, we created a feature called Share Your Hallmark Moment, that allows users to share with others the meaningful moments in which Hallmark helped. Fast-forward to this month, we just launched this same feature on the Hallmark Facebook page. You should check it out.

Personally, it’s been fun working with the Facebook platform in the past couple of months (the recent updates certainly keep things interesting). There is some pretty fun Facebook projects I’m working on for clients right now, that I’ll be sharing with you soon!

I came across an article that declared, “…your brain can’t handle all 5,000 of your Facebook friends, humans’ brains are capable of managing a maximum of only 150 friendships.” It’s an interesting study revelation right? I think so. However, I want to point out the benefit of using a technology like Facebook.

Even if 150 friendships is all the ‘ol noggin can hold, I don’t think that means you have to limit the social circle of friends you have. This doesn’t mean you should start deleting friends and limiting who you’re connected with online. One of the benefits of social media is while we might be physically limited in managing the number of friends we have in our head, using tools like Facebook, we can stay ambiently connected to everyone else. Furthermore, as situations are relevant and of interest to us, we can then choose to interact with friends.

This notion, is what’s called “ambient intimacy“, I’ve discussed before on my blog. Ambient intimacy is about being able to keep in touch with people with a level of regularity and intimacy that you wouldn’t usually have access to, because time and space conspire to make it impossible.

For example:

• Facebook helps me see what my friends are thinking, doing, projects they’re working on and what they did this weekend.

• Twitter tells me what websites to check out and the opinions people have about news and current events.

• Flickr lets me see the latest family photos or pics from a recent trip. And it also shows me their latest haircut.

• Friendfeed tells me their activity stream of my friends online, what they’re looking at, what they’re reading and videos they’ve favorited on YouTube.

So while, yes Robin Dunbar, the professor of Anthropology at Oxford is probably right, 150 friends is the max for your brain, utilizing tools like Facebook and Twitter allows you to “feel closer to people we care for but in whose lives we’re not able to participate as closely as we’d like. Knowing these details creates intimacy (via @leisa).

And the best part about all this is …we don’t have to store it in that ‘ol noggin resting between our shoulders. After all, I have a hard enough time remembering to pick up my dry cleaning.
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I believe Facebook at the ‘flip of a switch’ can position itself to be a strong competitor to Twitter.

The power of a users’ status update on Facebook is strong — it’s not only been amplified in terms of prominence and attention on the website redesign, but more importantly it has socially been habitual by users to be updated frequently.

If you think about the fact that Twitter is now mainstream and people not entrenched into the tech industry (like my sister and my Starbucks barista) are now being introduced accepting this concept of real-time status updates wherever they go (a.k.a microblogging). Right now, this socialization or concept of receiving real-time updates is being facilitated by Twitter, it’s a “learning curve” for the masses (much like FB Newsfeed was when it was first introduced).

That said, I believe that if Facebook waits for Twitter to go through it’s life cycle of popularity — when ready they could activate the sending of status updates to Facebook users’ phones. Right now, users are required to complete the complex task of editing your ‘mobile’ settings and manually adding specifically whom you’d like to receive status updates directly to your phone.

Imagine if when you added a new friend you were prompted with “Would you like to receive mobile status updates from this person?” Or, what if, in the Newsfeed, next to users’ status updates, an icon appeared that instantly added them to your preferred mobile updates list when clicked?

technical rendering drawing done by Ramsey

While I understand Twitter is much more robust in terms of how it can be used, I’m wondering if this is in the works for Facebook? I would be a BIG fan of this feature. My social graph is much more trusted on Facebook. This is because I’m a huge proponent of keeping your Facebook social graph “clean”.

My point is; Twitter might be doing a great service to Facebook- which is socializing the real-time status update concept to the masses — and ultimately Facebook can add-in feature sets reminiscent (if not identical) to Twitter when they want to. The question is, how long should they wait to add it in? Or should they even do it?
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I was shocked not surprised when the big ruckus was made regarding Facebook and this data ownership debate. Facebook announced a revision to its terms of service. In short, it stated:

Users can no longer delete their data, nor will Facebook remove your data it when cancel your account (pictures, text, video).

I won’t go into a long rant about it, instead I’d offer two thoughts:

1. The conversations we’re not hearing behind closed doors are likely the real story here. Facebook needs to make money. People love Facebook because we continue to get value from it. There’s endless ideas out there in how the data could be used. FB is likely putting themselves in a position to slowly utilize that data (likely in different ways, within FB.com and outside FB.com). Is it right to do? Maybe, maybe not. But they need to make money, somehow. The internal project timelines they have for 2009 for features or AD strategies are likely influencing their changes they need to make to the TOS.
2. What’s also surprising to consider is the strong expectation that in regards to your data ownership on Facebook. If you think about how closely guard privacy to our banking and healthcare information — when did Facebook move up in people’s minds to this expected level of privacy?

I’ll side with Scoble on this one — I personally go through an internal “check” process in my head when I type, click, upload or send anything: this is the Internet, I realize I have little to no control over what happens. Anyone can use my content or data if they’d like. I’m ok with that. There’s great things about the internet that are built on ‘stealing’ content. Take for example geocoded photos that appear in Google Earth or on Photosynth. In my opinion there’s an implied T.O.S. you’re agreeing to by using the Internet in general. If you’re worried that your content and data is so valuable or personal — then you should likely be using other mediums or thinking twice about using Facebook to distribute it.
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Burger King recently launched and shortly had to shut down an insane, creative, brilliant Facebook Application called “Whopper Sacrifice“. This marketing idea was simple: delete 10 of your friends on Facebook and you get a free Whopper. Your News Feed also lists all of the friends you’ve deleted so everyone knows who you “sacrificed” for just a free burger.

While this Facebook App doesn’t put any cash into the pockets of Burger King, the PR and viral potential alone is worth the cost of paying for the free Whoppers, I’m almost sure of it.

I tried it out for myself.

While the app was really “heavy” in regards to it’s usage of Flash, overall it was well executed. I also found most of my friends (who have extremely short attention spans) didn’t actually add the App to their account, but a lot talked about it or heard of it’s existence from at least one person.

Sadly, FB shut it down as it violates a privacy policy, which is “notifying people when a user removes a friend”. Although, 233,906 friends were removed by 82,771 people in less than a week before it was removed.

I did take screen-grabs when I shamelessly reluctantly removed 10 of my friends from Facebook.  …if you’re on the list, uh — sorry. I really wanted a free Whopper

I enjoy watching the video interviews Robert Scoble does for FastCompany.TV — why? It’s not so much for him, but for the REAL people in the industry he gets to discuss their website, product or just about the industry. What I really enjoy hearing and seeing is the “how” other people communicate at different companies. I take mental notes of what they do effectively and what can I adopt in my own style of communication. Communication is everything no matter what industry you are in — but having a “polish” to your presentation always is important.

I wanted to point out after watching an interview Scoble did with the lead product manager at Facebook, Mark Slee, what the rationale behind the new Facebook and it’s new user interface.

You can watch the 20-minute interview like I did… or just read the next couple of paragraphs for my “short and sweet” version.

When the News Feed was orginally launched — it’s objective was to share activity of your friends and what they were doing on Facebook. While it took a while for mass adoption, eventually people realized it truly was a valuable industry changing feature that not only saved time by bringing forward updates of all your friends — but it also help engage users to contribute more so their content would appear in their friends’ News Feeds. It was a brilliant move.

So what’s new in the new Facebook?

Feeds.

The focus of the entire redesign is on feeds. As you can see in my highly technical drawing below (spent a grand total of 4 minutes on it) the main difference is that feeds have now been pulled as the main focus for users profiles. While the old site had a “mini-feed” section, it also contained static areas like “personal information” and “favorite music” which never changed. On the new Facebook the feed is the ONLY item on the initial profile page. Furthermore, feeds are sortable on the homepage by filters; News Feed, Status Updates, Photos, Posted Items and Live Feed.

What does this mean? If users want their profiles to be populated with content — they MUST interact on Facebook. They must post photos, video, write on people’s walls, comment, etc.

If you think about it — this is a big shift. No longer does maintaining the list of your favorite movies and music artists suffice. Creating content is the new focus. Sharing is the new focus. The new Facebook makes sharing easy to do and rewards users with prominence if they do it. Much like the initial launch of News Feed, I think it will take time for mass adoption — but I do believe it’s big step in the user interface that rewards it’s users with value in investing time on the site.

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