From the category archives:

Facebook

Facebook Introduces Friend Lists In Chat

by Jason Wilk on May 11, 2009

Facebook today launched Friend List, a useful way to organize and filter your chats on Facebook. Maybe you want to be online with your best friends but offline with your work colleagues. With Friend Lists, you can group friends to more easily share with and view information from specific sets of people. You already can use them to filter your home page, send Inbox messages and manage privacy settings. From the bottom right corner of your browser, go online with Chat and choose which lists you’d like to include in the Chat pane. You can use your existing lists or create new lists directly from Chat.
To create a new list, select the “Friend Lists” menu on the Chat pane, enter a new list name, and drag the names of people you want to include into the list. You can exclude lists from Chat by unchecking them in the “Friend Lists” menu. If you don’t want your friends grouped in Chat at all, you can simply uncheck all the Friend Lists, and you’ll then see your friends listed alphabetically.
Facebook finally getting a little more efficient in the chat space. Now they need to work on better placement for the chat box so it doesn’t continue to interfere with that 160×600 ad placement on the right.

by Jason Wilk on April 30, 2009

According to the New York Post, Facebook has just held informal exploratory meetings with Providence Equity Partners, General Atlantic, Bain Capital, Kohlberg Kravis Roberts and others. The article cites Facebook to be looking for fresh capital at a $5 to $6 billion valuation, however no one is willing to shell out for more than a $2 billion to $3 billion range. (Wauters, TC)

People familiar with the matter, are claiming Facebook’s attempt to raise additional capital is creating quite a stir among existing investors, which includes Accel Partners, Greylock Partners, Meritech Capital Partners, Microsoft and Peter Thiel. Microsoft feeling it the most, jumping in at a $15B valuation with a quarter million dollar investment, that in this state may have earned them about 8% of the company. People like Thiel say it’s time to start making money off of the user base, which at this point is causing the company harm it’s so large (200+ million now)

Facebook may not have a lot of choice when it comes to what valuation they will take money. The company is burning through at leat $20 million a month in cash and cannot stop their unbelievably quick (but unmonetizable) growth internationally. If things keep going the way they are, Facebook could be out of money by 2011. Time to start charging?

by Jason Wilk on March 31, 2009

Looks like things are actually moving forward with a film based on the early days at Facebook. Insiders at FB say that executives have been warning former employees not to talk to people involved with the making of the movie. Facebooker has already told the movie’s team that it was unwilling to cooperate in the event that the film was based on a salacious new tell-all book about Facebook.
The man behind the movie is West Wing creator Aaron Sorkin and is reportedly based on a book by Bringing Down the House author Ben Mezrich, who is known for scandalous stories circa elite universities. Sounds like a good match for Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, who as we all know founded the concept for FB with some Harvard friends whom he later snatched the code from. The film will obviously not be portraying the Zuck in a good light.

by Jason Wilk on March 25, 2009

Facebook says it will tweak its homepage in the coming weeks in direct response to user backlash over recent designs changes. The social network caved to customer feedback, since millions of users chimed in favoring the old Facebook 93%.
Chris Cox, Facebook Director of Product, posted a lengthy blog post Tuesday explaining features that are being looked into for reverting back to the previous design. The most changes will be seen in the users’ streams, which will finally get live updating and friend list filters. Thinks like pictures in the news stream will be fixed as they have been taking up more than 60% of the entire homepage on some circumstances.
“Redesigns are generally hard to manage, in part because change is always hard and in part because we may miss improvements that any individual user may like to see,” said Chris Cox in his blog post. This is a surprising change coming from Facebook, who decided to ignore user feedback when they changed the design this past September. The poll responses were identical, 93% preferred the previous Facebook when the design was changed. Now everyone loves it, go figure….

by Jason Wilk on March 23, 2009

As if Facebook already wasn’t the crowd favorite at the moment due to layout changes. After today, they really won’t be. I went on my Facebook this morning to post one of my usual stories, accompanied by a link. As soon as I did so, a Security Check popped up asking me to input a CAPTCHA code. Talk about the antithesis of copying Twitter, the popular micr0-blogging service wouldn’t dare ask me to verify whether or not I’m trying to spam their ecosystem, let alone my own personal network that I’ve been building for nearly 6 years. Is this what our relationship has come to Facebook? Does this mean that users syndicating their updates from Twitter to Facebook will now be blocked if accompanied bya URL? Our current poll shows users prefer the Old Facebook layout to the New one by 93%. I wonder what it will go to now?