So The Great Facebook URL Rush of 2009 is over, and in the end, my Personal Brand remains intact: facebook.com/jaredwsmith. We now return to your regularly scheduled geekery, already in progress.

In some ways, this reflects a major shift in how people use and interact with Facebook. The area where you enter status updates has been made into a more ambiguous “publisher” which will post status updates, notes, photos, and the like. It’s very FriendFeed-esque in this regard. A lot’s been made of a comparison to Twitter, but I think FriendFeed is a far more effective analogy because of the range of items you can share (regardless of linking, a tweet is a tweet is a tweet — 140 characters, no more, no less). But as Facebook always likes to do, they’ve watered it down and made it weird in some ways. Facebook was pretty straightforward to use because a status update was a status update, a photo post was a photo post, and the like. It’s all been melded together now, and that’s going to take a lot of time for a lot of folks to get used to.

The biggest problem with the publisher, though, is how inconsistently it’s rolled out throughout the site. At first glance, it seems as if Facebook is making a landmark shift towards Twitter-like functionality in its status updates by moving away from third-person updates (such as “Jared is fabbing tacos”):

The new Facebook publisher for the homepage and profile pages.

Dive into the Friends pages, though, and you get the same ol’ third-person status updater:

The old-school status updater on the Friends page (Status Updates sub-tab). Huh?

Facebook is basically making for high school relationship drama here by sending many mixed signals. I, for one, would prefer that they commit one way or the other — if, indeed, they want their status updates to be more Twitter-like, I’ll gladly oblige them by re-bridging my full Twitter feed, because it would make sense to do so. (In January, I argued that third-person status updates make Twitter-to-Facebook prohibitive.) Right now, the implementation is confusing. Facebook for so many years has forced the third-person format and to suddenly apply so much ambiguity to it by leaving it in some places (including the iPhone and BlackBerry apps) and changing it in others is a real head-scratcher.

One thing that is somewhat cool but watered down in ways only Facebook can is how “Likes” are now used to populate the “Highlights” pane on the right — which is, of course, headlined by an advertisement. You wouldn’t notice it was an ad except for the “sponsored” text underneath, though. If Facebook wants to borrow properly from FriendFeed, they should have likes and comments promote things within the stream and keep it in my view rather than relegating it to the right side. I still can’t keep track of what I “like,” so it’s ineffective as a tool to reference things later (something unheralded about FriendFeed likes).

My big takeaway from this? Facebook’s innovating less and less. I don’t know how else to put it, but there it is. Smaller, nimbler startups have outfoxed Facebook, and they’re now trying to play catchup and bring those features over to its own walled garden. For the first time in really a long time, the social Web has shifted and Facebook didn’t lead the charge. Things like photo tagging, News Feed, and the like pushed Facebook to the bleeding edge and forced change all across the social media spectrum (look how many sites have News Feed-like features now, such as Last.fm and, for that matter, MySpace). Now, Facebook is retooling itself to be more of a Twitter/FriendFeed equivalent amongst friends. Certainly more people put their eyes on Facebook than Twitter and FriendFeed probably see in a week, but they are no longer setting the agenda (at least right now). That could have major implications down the road as Facebook could easily be a gateway to services like Twitter and FriendFeed. While Facebook does indeed have a great deal of users, nothing is too big to fail; and things begin to falter when they stop innovating. Swing on down to the Chamber of Irrelevance and ask Netscape about that one — or Friendster, for that matter. The Internet Explorer team is quickly learning what this feeling is like, and I suspect that if you fast forward a year, and you might be asking MySpace the same thing. On the Internet, it’s always the smaller and nimbler creature that eventually wins out; and I’m beginning to wonder if Facebook’s hitting that apex. Time will tell.

I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but over the last couple months, I’ve more narrowly focused the blog on social media topics. There’s a lot about Facebook. There’s a cubic crapton about Twitter, all intermingled with some Brightkite, FriendFeed, and identi.ca. Sure, I’ve written about the Super Bowl, but I’ve kept the topics pretty narrowly focused. This is a side effect of my using Twitter; items that I might have posted as “asides” here often end up there because of its sheer convenience. Another thing I’ve discovered: FriendFeed is a stellar way to micro-blog, especially if I need more than 140 characters. It can offer instant feedback and viral promotion via “likes,” and the conversation there is tough to top right now. It’s not just using different services, either. Two of my big topics here of late have been Serious Business show notes and weather, and I’ve shifted both these items off to their own sites in order to let them flourish.

So where does that leave the ol’ homestead? Scrambling to adjust, and reacquire its voice.

I offer a confession: I’ve never been happy with my blog’s voice. I’ve tried different formats over the years; rapid-fire blogging, wall-to-wall weather coverage, daily roundups of newsy items — but I’ve never found anything that’s fit. One constant has remained (until recently) — it was eclectic. That eclectic nature led to chatter over the years that my blog needs to “focus” so that it can be somewhat predictable and be authoritative on something. It’s the classic struggle between being good at a number of things or being really good at a couple things. I’m willing to give anything a try, so I did — and you know, it’s kind of sucked the fun out of it. I realized that I sounded like a broken record when I went back through my recent posts several times over when I was making tweaks to my archives yesterday; and, well, that’s not me. Now, I’m not saying that I don’t enjoy writing about social media topics or that I’m going to quit writing about them; no, I’m a big fan of those technologies and I’ll continue to write about them, because they are very much relevant in the world according to Jared Smith. What I am saying is that there is obviously much more to the world according to Jared Smith than Twitter and Facebook. I’m a big fan of the Xark! approach to blogging: There are no unrelated topics. I used to be really good about this, but Twitter and other technologies are like the tall blonde walking outside with her food at Panera (where I’m writing this): They’ve stolen my attention. And, thus, there’s a lot of writing about Twitter on the blog, but all the details about my travels, trials, tribulations, etc. remain in Twitter and don’t find their way here. And that’s a shame — there’s a lot that deserves documentation beyond 140 characters.

So, I did a few things yesterday (aside from making the archives more accessible): First, I made the asides simpler and a lot easier to look at (in my mind). That’s one thing that I think I’m finally happy with that I haven’t been since I introduced the site. So, because I don’t consider them an eyesore, I’ll use those asides a bit more. The second thing is, knowing my habits, I’ve been working to expand integration of my FriendFeed. I’ve moved it from the sidebar to the blog’s homepage underneath the recent entries. I know it’s a bit buried there; there’s a chance I may eschew the Twitter homepage widget in favor of the FriendFeed widget. Time will tell.

For now, though, it’s an awful nice day out. Time to do a little living.

Over the past few days, we have received a lot of good feedback about the new terms we posted two weeks ago. Because of this response, we have decided to return to our previous Terms of Use while we resolve the issues that people have raised.

It’s the prudent thing for Facebook to do while they weigh the ramifications of the terms. Kudos to them for recognizing a mistake and taking steps to fix it.

Certainly, it’s another round of Facebook Fail because these changes simply need to be communicated more clearly. This is a company that routinely finds itself in damage control mode about once every four months, whether it be design changes, Beacon, or now this TOS change. Certainly we’ve seen that Facebook has not completely learned its lesson in good communications with its user base; this in turn leads to a reputation of being kind of shady (which was really cemented with the Beacon incident). Facebook’s also the poster child for “walled garden” — thus, something like this will (rightfully) raise the ire of folks who care deeply about the ownership over their own data.

So, content creators are left with a tough call: Spend time and money on self-hosting — including the technical requirements, promotional materials, and the time getting content into their own system, or use a platform like Facebook to publish faster, with all the technical handiwork in place, but with the understanding that in return for these services that the content creator is likely to surrender some of their rights and have to play by the service’s rules. The best strategy for a content creator is a hybrid: Use Facebook to draw people to their content hosted off-site.

Why would anybody do anything resembling serious business besides promotion on Facebook directly, anyway? If one is serious about content creation, they always host the good stuff within their own domain, knowing full well that the copyright statement on the bottom reads “Facebook” and not their name. Facebook has been so clear that they use the data submitted to their site in a variety of ways. For example, have you seen Lexicon? It searches an index of Facebook walls to track the frequency of a term throughout the social network. Here’s a hint: They weren’t really interested in investing a lot of time in building a tool that could track how many times someone said “thunder” on a Facebook wall simply for an engineer’s pleasure and amusement. Really, this should come as a surprise to nobody who’s serious about the ownership of their content. Call it a case of blind idealism, but I’d like to think that people who are dead serious about their content do due diligence before they start spreading it in new locations. And if they don’t, maybe this is a call to bring some of that practice back? Tough to say. There’s a lesson to be learned here, though: There’s no such thing as a free lunch. It’s all give and take; for the convenience and access to the vast Facebook network, there’s a sacrifice involved. Do I like the level of sacrifice? I’m not a fan of it, and I suspect most businesses won’t be, either. But that’s how it is on any service, not just Facebook. These issues have to be considered carefully in this cloud computing boom time.

To their credit, Facebook is taking feedback about the changes. They don’t have to do this, but they are, and that’s a sign that they’re at the very least trying to listen and allay concerns. It’s a good PR move — now, the question is, will they follow through? On issues of privacy and openness, history’s shown that they have been extremely attentive to concerns and acted on them. I have a feeling the TOS will see another tweak before it’s over — stay tuned.

Update: Here’s an absolutely damning comparison of Facebook’s TOS versus Google, Yahoo, LinkedIn, YouTube, and Twitter. (Hat tip to @mashable.)

Then a funny thing happened; I started using Twitter as a microblog, with more frequent updates than pithy status messages on Facebook. I also thought the connector’s “is twittering” — a limitation of Facebook status then was that it was required to start with the word “is” — was kind of lame as well. So, I decided to stop synchronizing Facebook status with Twitter status and let the two run their course.

However, more and more Facebook friends started populating their Facebook status with their tweets, even though they may send many, many tweets a day (as I do). I got to thinking about perhaps reuniting the two; after all, I still have maybe 10% of my friends using Twitter, which means a majority of my friends are missing out on my wit. ;) I’d been tossing this idea around for a few weeks when the other day I ran across this provocatively titled Inquistr article by Duncan Riley. In the article, Riley notes that his response rate on Facebook has been more substantial than he ever thought possible. That was it; the one that pushed me over the edge, in essence.

So, Monday, the experiment resumed: I re-linked my Twitter and Facebook statuses. And the response? I’ve seen some decent response rates. But the mess? Oh, the mess. It speaks for itself:

First, that’s a lot of status updates. In my deliberation of whether to relink, I’ve said that Facebook is a “slower” service, as it’s not intended to be something that one would run in the background as a real-time application (though the function is available). It’s something people check and then generally head away from. Services like Twitter or FriendFeed, though, are predicated on the idea of near-real-time interaction. Thus, bombarding Facebook with Twitter updates — generally, any update not intended as a reply to another Twitter user is published in the News Feed — doesn’t really fit with how I perceive the service. Additionally, “Jared I can’t help but wonder…” does NOT make grammatical sense. Facebook’s status system intends to maintain the integrity of a complete sentence in its updates, and doing less really looks funny. (Thus, as crazy as it sounds, Plurk’s structured status updates make far more sense for synchronizing to Facebook.) Certainly, I could start my Twitter status updates as incomplete sentences, but that’s not how I construct messages on that service. This is one of those “irreconcilable differences” that my writer self is struggling with. Finally, people not used to the noise could be tempted to un-friend me (much as I’ve sustained many unfollows on Twitter over the last year because of my verbose nature).

However, I can’t argue that there’s been results. Some tweets have touched off some neat conversation, and the goal of getting those tweets out to those people who may never read them did indeed work. Indeed, it’s a double-edged sword.

In a perfect world, Twitter’s Facebook app would give me the option to insert tweets into the News Feed on its own without changing my Facebook status. I do want Facebook people, after all, to have easy access to my Twitter updates as they’re a huge part of my online presence. In lieu of Twitter-specific News Feed items, I’d like to at least free the box holding my Twitter status from the Boxes tab and place it prominently on my Wall tab. Unfortunately for months I’ve gotten this failure message when I’ve tried to do that (and yes, I have reported it). This has to be fixed. I am very judicious about what displays on my Wall tab, and Twitter status I consider too important of an item to be confined to a Boxes tab that nobody but the most bored will click.

In the end, I’ve decided to once again separate Twitter and Facebook. Links to my Twitter profile are pervasive throughout my profile if they want to get at it. My Twitter timeline is also available, with comments and “likes,” on my FriendFeed tab. The clutter and spamminess of the whole thing just did not sit well with me and how I use the service, and thus it’s best to keep this separated for at least a while longer, in my mind. Here’s hoping that some of the alternatives I’ve laid out can come to fruition, as I feel very uneasy keeping these services in silos. Of course, these are purely my perceptions. Some of you out there won’t care about grammatical correctness or News Feed overload. What’s been your experience? Why have you — or have you not — linked your Twitter to Facebook?

Update: Andra Watkins does a great job explaining the benefits of synchronizing status. She makes some great points, especially when noting that people can, in fact, turn down noise from specific folks in the News Feed. (I forgot about this feature, as I generally like to have everything there.)

I’ve been preparing for the restart of classes this week, and I got to thinking about an old Facebook feature that I found incredibly useful for scouting out who was in what class of mine: Courses.

Back in the good ol’ days when Facebook was a students-only kind of thing, there was a Courses feature that, true to what one may expect, let you put in what classes you’re taking (including the section). Once you entered that information, you could then click on the course or specific section and see who else entered the same information. It was cool for getting a general idea of who’d be in my classes; maybe I’d have a friend in a class I wasn’t aware of. It was also an incredibly useful tool for finding folks for notes and other things in situations where I had to miss and maybe didn’t know folks yet. People were usually really, really cool about those messages (I was, when I received them) and helping out where the need arose.

Then, a couple funny things happened: Facebook went mainstream, and opened up the Facebook API. That combination effectively nixed the Courses feature. Unlike features like Photos and Videos and such, Facebook never officially reimplemented Courses, leaving it to the community to implement it. And implement it, it did — there’s like a bajillion different apps now to manage courses. I’m giving Courses 2.0 by Cramster.com a shot, which I actually have four friends using. However, it took work to hunt down and find the application, authorize it to steal my soul, and then start throwing courses in. The older Courses feature was built-in; thus, more students were actually likely to use it, as it required less work to get going. This is not to say that apps like Courses 2.0 aren’t nice, though; it displays a graphical breakout of my schedule, allows the input of ISBN numbers for textbooks, and is compatible with the new Facebook format by permitting the addition of a tab (which I have done). Again, though, I had to seek it out — something I know a lot of students just won’t do.

It’s for this reason that I suspect there could once again be a market for a closed social network for college students. Facebook’s original tools for managing academic as well as social relationships were actually quite useful, and it’s a shame that they’ve been farmed out, and as a result, become less useful and, unfortunately, siloed.

If you’re using one of these apps for academic networking, which one are you (and your friends) using?

Facebook is publicly beta testing a drastic redesign of their site to try to allay a lot of complaints that the site has become extremely cluttered with applications (oh, has it ever). While reactions seem mixed, I think this new design has a potential to be a real winner. I, personally, can’t go back to the old look now.

Diving In

If you have Facebook, you should be able to get into the beta by logging in at http://www.new.facebook.com. While the login page (at least the last time I saw it) looks like the old design, upon logging in you’ll be greeted with a wider layout and a rearranged menu. The new Facebook menu works to eliminate the left sidebar throughout the site, providing room in the revamped profile. While the Facebook logo still takes you home, you’ll find that instead of your profile, the menu will show your name there. The Friends option still works as you’d expect, letting you see status updates, recently updated folks, all your friends, and advanced searches with friend lists; the Applications menu is where the application list that was formerly in the sidebar moved to. It lists recently used applications so you can get to them a bit quicker, too. Facebook Messaging doesn’t seem to be much different right now; that could change between now and the official launch.

The Home Page

Structurally, the home page hasn’t changed much. Along the top of the page, there are new links to change status or post notes or media. The News Feed is a bit wider now with the elimination of the left sidebar, while requests, status updates, birthdays, etc. remain in the right sidebar along with the addition of a Bookmarks feature which seems to be a list of the top applications you access (you can rearrange this, much like you were able to do on the old site). Otherwise, the basic concept of this page has not changed much.

Profiles — The Big, Huge, Gigantic Change (For The Better!)

Profiles are a completely different story. The focus of this redesign was to revamp the profile pages. Facebook profiles have been overrun, MySpace-style, with applications since the Facebook Platform launched last year. After many iterations, this is the path Facebook is headed. Note the tabs running across the top; these tabs are actually customizable, depending on the applications you have installed.

The biggest change with Profiles, and the one is that is going to throw everybody right off course, is that the new Wall is a combination of the traditional Facebook wall with the user’s Mini-Feed. I have to say, and I’ve seen this observation scattered elsewhere too — this is very, VERY FriendFeedy. I find the new interface more conducive to conversation, believe it or not. With that in mind, I can see a whole lot of college students who have used Facebook for years becoming extremely confused at this new setup. Wall filters are available; one can click “Posts by User” to get roughly the equivalent of the old Mini-Feed, while “Posts By Others” shows a more traditional wall view. This is a gutsy call by Facebook; I’m not sure how well it’ll play with the masses. I, personally, like it — I think it’s very conducive to sharing and creating content on Facebook — but I suspect I’ll be in the minority here.

In addition to status updates — which are extremely Twittery, by the way (“What are you doing right now?”) — there’s a small block just below the profile picture where you can write a small block of text; basically it is intended as a quick description of you. (Instead, I use it for a Thunder in Paradise quote, because that’s how I roll.) In the blue box directly beneath the synopsis box, you can choose to display quick information, such as your networks, your relationship status, birthday, websites, etc. The Friends listing is more customizable; you can show up to 12 friends, and Facebook lets you pick “Top Friends” as well…very MySpacey of them, and I’m not sure I agree with it. Applications such as Notes, Photos, etc. can dot the left sidebar beneath the friends list; you can add and remove a limited number of apps here (though I’m having trouble getting a few apps over to it *cough*twitter*cough* right now; I’ll chalk this up to being a beta). You’ll find that most of your Facebook apps have moved to the “Boxes” tab.

You’ll also find that your more detailed information has moved to the “Info” tab. This is where the traditional Facebook information lives; your groups and pages are also listed here. This view is the only one to share a sidebar with the Wall view; after you dive into other apps, such as Photos, that left sidebar will disappear. This seems somewhat jarring at first; though it’s fair to say that previous iterations of Facebook didn’t include profile information directly on Photos, etc. either.

Smith’s Final Thoughts

Facebook has no choice but to be as open as possible with the deployment of this new design. Facebook users are among the toughest to satisfy I think I have ever seen in my several years of using it; you’d think college students would be more adaptable to change, but they’re definitely not when it comes to Facebook (at least not right away). To Facebook’s credit, they’ve been open with the idea from the getgo, starting a Facebook Profiles Preview group early on in the process and asking for feedback at multiple rounds of development. Now that I’m able to get my hands on their work, I’ve been impressed. There are bugs to squash, sure, but as I said before, I can’t go back to the old look. This design is a major improvement, matures the product substantially, and reflects Facebook’s commitment to running a tight ship but still giving ample customization opportunity. Will it make me increase my usage of the site? Not sure. I have a lot of issues with their stance on data portability and other things; I also think sites such as FriendFeed have beaten Facebook at their own game in the activity aggregation department. However, I think the changes have been desperately needed, and the countless number of Facebook addicts will eventually warm to the new look anyway.