I want to talk about how Facebook has replaced our personal public branding (especially for the individuals, more for the companies in a later post) and how people are benefiting from it and how some people are losing out.

To explain this, I want to talk about 2 stories.

1. Facebook Usernames : Have you gotten yours yet? If not, you missed the maddest digital namespace gold rush one can ever witness, it happened last Friday. Facebook announced couple of days back they are going to be assigning Usernames to their users. You may wonder how they have been working without one so far? Well, they do have user numbers so far, and an email address is used for authentication. Now, this username would appear in the url(A prominent digital real estate). Something very very important - because not only Google would index that url and store it forever into the future but this would be an one stop shop for everyone else on the net to get any information about you.

500,000 people registered for their name in the first 15 mins of opening the gates. Over the weekend over 6 million got their names. That's just mind boggling numbers. I believe over a period of time Facebook has grown from "I-know-these-people" to "This-is-how-I-Brand-myself" system. Having 1000's of friends is no longer cool. But what you have in common with them and what you do differently from them is cool. Taking those millions (often annoying) tests, quizzes is not just killing time but defining and stating who we are with respect to those results that these Quizzes produce.

Facebook has grown from a bunch of PHP files to a huge Platform, a eco-system where 3rd party developers can add in their creativity and build applications for the user base of FB. This means, a million ways I can differentiate and make myself unique and branded in my own style. All this would be done under your account of Facebook. Pretty soon - FB would be the standard profile you would be giving out to people (The fine grained settings of who sees what - would keep on growing).

I am more convinced about this because I observed a shift with two services I use with respect to FB.

Flickr: Long time ago, I created a Flickr account. I have about 15GB of pictures, most of them should never see the light of the day! But I was under the impression that I should load up all my pics onto my Flickr(pro) account and believed that "they will come". Well, I got tired of uploading them half way through and my picture gallery hallways were lonely and haunting. This was even before FB was around. Then came along FB. People started to add their pictures to it. Now it becomes interesting because you can tag people in it and sometimes if you have really old pictures, you can embarrass them too. Jokes aside, what this did was - I filtered out my pics (not all 15,289 pics need to be on Internet) and I put out pics which are meaningful and somehow enables participation of my friends. Along the way what I am also doing is - I building a public self-image.

Twitter: Twitter, as you all know is the bomb diggity of anything that has ever been invented. Or that's what we are told. I think twitter is a very un-disciplined system. You have many followers, but they are not invested, may be interested but not committed to you. Usually the Twitter stream gets updated pretty fast and it's hard to keep track. So, over a period of time followers develop 'follower forgetfulness' - which basically means I follow about 4000 people and I don't really care what they do. And as for the leaders on Twitter, they wouldn't stop with their thoughtful posts but they would post before, during & after they have been to a restroom. This leads to 'Twitter Clutter'.

Enter Facebook. What Facebook provided to Twitter is "Context". Under FB's aegis it was relayed to my friends rather than my mindless million followers. This helped me to further my message to my group of friends. To brand myself with certain thinking.

Don't get me wrong about Flickr & Twitter. I love both these services, I just think as more and more FB becomes successful at being our Digital Home - Flickr is predominantly going to be used as a photo backup system and Twitter will predominantly be used as 'News' relayed in real time system. Imagine what happened in the case of Iran elections. Because of Twitter we know a lot about what happened in Iran in real time. And as time progresses it might end up being used a lot by news agencies, marketing agencies, celebrities, tech celebrities etc. I know a lot of people who use Twitter to relay their company's message and FB to relay what they personally think.

So, anyhow how all this is connected to Facebook name madness? Because, like I mentioned it's going to be indexed and linked on major search engines. These usernames will become your visiting cards, persona, branding machine. As for me, I did my share in participating in this madness. At 9:20PM I sneaked out from a bunch of friends visiting us, having a heated debate about Spirituality and registered my name. I am reborn from fb/644977146 to fb/akbarpasha. My new self-branded digital home. People with common names & who delayed were disappointed.

2. Facebook Laggards: I am pretty sure many of us have at least 1 friend who defies Facebook gravity, who refuses to join Facebook and calls it a waste of time. I am very much embarrassed to say that my best friend is one of those guys. Because he is not connected to anyone of our classmates, he is completely out of touch with our group of friends. The only friends he know or keeps in touch are the ones in his iPhone - that's limited by his talk time & available minutes.

Facebook Laggards are missing out on their digital branding. It's not just about keeping in touch anymore. There is more to it. My friend doesn't participate in what's happening in our little FB world. He doesn't know how and what our buddies think now 10 years later after we left our MBA school. Many have moved onto do pretty cool things, but my friend is not aware of any of it. He lives in a digital desert. His imagination limited by his phone book. What more can I say? He moved to Alabama, became a hardcore conservative (Republican!) and is a fan of O'Reilly show. Gasp.

But as time progressed - I kinda became his window to our Facebook world. Everyone sends a message to me about him and I get back to them about him. I sort of turned myself into his branding manager.

So, if you have any friends who are refusing to join Facebook on the basis of not being part of the herd mentality - please tell them that it's more than just address book with pretty pictures. It's the future digital brand, a identity.

Just when you thought social networking had permeated virtually every aspect of our busy lives (personal and professional), an unexpected function for these social networking sites is discovered  - disaster situations.

Researchers have found that sites like Facebook and Twitter have become critical in disaster situations like major fires and school shootings. 

As ABC 7 News reports, emergency managers are actually being encouraged to utilize these sites as vital tools for speedy information exchange. While the article refers to federal agencies in Denver, CO, organizations like FEMA all across the country have added social networking as a method for communicating important details at the first sign of an emergency or dangerous occurrence.

It is impressive that sites like Facebook that were once used day-to-day for lighthearted, small-talk type messaging have now evolved into news-breaking, crucial tools for enabling rescue in perilous situations. 

Roll back the clock ten years. Imagine you wanted to know what what going on with one of your friends who lives far away. You'd call them or send an email. Maybe one of your other friends would relate a story. Most likely you wouldn't find yourself in the next aisle of the supermarket eavesdropping on a conversation. Something very similar is happening on Facebook and other social networks tonight.

As I have been doing for several weeks now, I will check my facebook page tonight to find conversations between my friends posted on their "walls". Unlike email, or even the relatively quiet conversation in a supermarket, these conversations are shouted at me. Big chunks of text call out to me and invite me to click to the "wall-to-wall" page for these two friends where I can read the entire conversation in reverse chronological order. It's clear these conversations are not explicitly intended for me to obvserve. There is no indication to the participants that I'm listening, unlike when I might walk up to two people talking at a party.

One theory holds that these are people entirely new to social networking and don't realize their conversation is out in the open. Facebook makes it easy to click to a friend's profile and start typing away. I have watched these conversations unfold rapidfire, exactly like you'd see in IM. Perhaps these people will realize they want more privacy and these conversations will disappear into IM or email.

My hope is that I'm seeing the beginning of people sharing their lives more openly. It's certainly entertaining me and making me feel closer to my friends. 

Facebook and MySpace are the two leading platforms for the social Web. Increasingly, marketers are finding they need to be there because so many of us spend our free time there. We go there to get information about our friends, and so it follows that these platforms ought to make it easy for us to contribute. It's easy to update your status all day, and it's easy to upload photos. It's not so easy to wrote long, thoughtful pieces--what we might think of as the traditional blog post.

MySpace provides the more mature platform. Each account has something called a blog. Blog posts have titles, bodies and threaded comments. I guess they have some "advanced" interface for posting to your blog, but it doesn't run on Firefox 3 and/or Ubuntu. The plain text interface is fine, but there really isn't much excuse for not providing a full HTML editor. There are free libraries for providing this functionality. Wordpress and Drupal do this very well.

Asking for a posted time and date is dubious. I can see writing a post to be made live ahead of time. Writing a post for January 1, 2006 seems like nonsense. Categories are good. Giving me a closed set of categories is too limiting. Folksonomies work. MySpace should support them.

MySpace asks you to tell your readers what music you're listening to (yeah, I might listen to music while I write), what book you're reading, what DVD you're watching or what video game you're playing (I can't do any of these while writing a blog post). They also ask you to note your mood. This is the spot to hack a folksonomy, but none of this seems very well thought out.

Given that I blog here on Clear Night Sky and on my own site (www.leonatkinson.com), I would much rather have content flow from those sources into my MySpace page. There is no such option. There is an option for flowing posts outward. It's standard to include a tag in the HTML header to indicate to your browser that a feed of the posts exists. It's also customary to present a small, orange icon to the RSS feed. MySpace provides a textual link only. Regardless, you can subscribe to this link and get the public posts in yoru preferred feed reader. (Mine is Google Reader). There are a few MySpace bloggers that I follow. Output was sketchy for a while, but it's been fast and reliable for many months.

Allow me to qualify that last statement. It's reliable when reading in Reader. It's entirely unreliable when it comes to flowing into Facebook, which does support importing "notes" from an RSS feed. I can only conclude that between MySpace and Facebook, one or both of them has created this problem. Perhaps this is a way to make the other platform seem bad.

Facebook prefers to call their blogging platform "notes". There's a title and a body. You can attach photos. And you can list the people you mentioned in the note. There's no way to apply tags, or note your mood. Most importantly, the editor is plain text with the option to apply styles if you know HTML. 

I do like that Facebook allows me to import notes automatically from an RSS feed. I don't like that I can choose one--and only one--feed. Many of us blog in multiple places. There is technical solution to this. I could aggregate the feeds from my two blogs. Google Reader can do this for me, but I should not have to work around Facebook's limitation. It seems to be tied a decision to offer a set of import points (Digg, Flickr, Delicious) which treats "blog" as a parallel. I can only assume this is due to lack of imagination at Facebook.

It's common for a blog aiming to make someone money to truncate the posts in the feed, which forces readers to click through and look at ads to finish reading the post. I'm sure that's why MySpace mangles their feeds, too. It's a cheap trick they don't need to play. Facebook does not seem to offer a feed of notes, so the situation is even worse.

For anyone who wants to blog while also getting their thoughts into Facebook and MySpace where their friends will find them, I suggest creating a blog for free on Wordpress. Set the feed to import into Facebook. On MySpace, find the "RSS Reader" app. This creates a separate box on your profile page that lists your blog posts. If you want to take a step up, get a low end Web account ($5/month) and run a copy of Wordpress yourself. That will allow you to use the MySpace Crossposter plugin for Wordpress which sends your posts directly into MySpace.