Will Facebook be bigger than Google?

April 25th, 2010 |

Since F8 there’s been a lot of people ‘in the know’ jumping up and down about how amazing Facebook is and how it’s going to take over the world. By bringing the ‘social web’ together (which basically involves letting people put a ‘Like’ button and a few new meta tags on their website) they aim to have a presence on as many web pages on as many web sites in as many countries as possible.

That’s a huge ambition for a company that, so far, haven’t been able to get their own web site to work properly.


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Smaller developers on Facebook: How do you survive?

February 12th, 2010 |

In June 2008 we were approached by what was to come a very large Social Gaming company with a view to buying us out. The numbers were big and there was huge temptation to take the money and run… it gave us a lot to think about.

At the time we didn’t class ourselves as a ‘startup’ but this last week has raised a lot of questions in my head again. With Zynga taking over Serious Business and rumours circulating about Microsoft lining up a $200m acquisition of CrowdStar the question is raised as to what’s a good strategy for Facebook development companies.


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Facebook: News Feed Limit set to 250 People.

February 11th, 2010 |

It seems that Facebook are now choosing which 250 friends people are most interested in and only posting those people to the News Feed. This limit has been imposed recently and needs to be manually reset for people to be able to see all of their friends again. Strange I know, but there’s an easy fix:

1. Go to your Facebook home page
2. Scroll down to the bottom of the News Feed and you’ll see the ‘Edit Options’ link on the right hand side. Click it.
3. A popup will appear with a ‘Number of friends’ text box. Update that to 9999 and click ‘Save’.

Whether this limit remains in place permanently is hard to say, but what’s even more worrying is that it seems to include pages that you’re a Fan of… which means that resetting your limit is even more important.

Facebook Email Marketing

February 10th, 2010 |

March 1st 2010 is what we, as developers, have been referring to as N-Day. The date that Facebook are to remove what is probably the most viral part of the whole platform.

Notifications.

The little messages that appeared in the bottom right hand side of your screen (now the top left) telling you that ‘Anna from Bognor want to get to know you better’ or that ‘Mike has just petted your puppy’ will no longer be there. Whenever I’ve mentioned this to a friend the simple question was ‘Why?’, to which I answer (and this is a white lie) ‘No idea’.


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Facebook Redesign: What’s all the fuss about?

February 9th, 2010 |

As everyone should know by now, Facebook recently launched an update to the homepage layout. How this will affect the virality of Applications remains to be seen but so far everything seems to be fairly consistent – we’ve noticed a 2-3% drop, but that’s nothing compared to what usually happens when Facebook post a major update.


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