I never got sucked into the MySpace phenomenon, though my girlfriend uses it religiously. When we got our Maltese, Puff, a few weeks ago, I recommended she sign up for Dogster, which is a social networking site for dogs. She signed up for Dogster on Friday. The simple sign-up process involved a question/answer format and picture upload. She had finished creating our dog’s Dogster page in just a few minutes.  

We immediately wanted to show him to the Dogster community, so we clicked on the groups tab where she found the Maltese Mommies group. She joined and invited another Maltese to be friends with our dog. I checked the site later to find that Puff had his first friend, Charlie. That’s when my addiction began– I was overwhelmed with the unexpected obsession of making my dog the most popular pup on all of Dogster!

After we had one “pup pal”, I quickly jumped on the opportunity to garner many more. I received an invitation to join another group called OnLy PuPs, which I accepted without delay. It is my unfounded belief that the more groups I join, the more pup pals Puff can get. I started shooting off invites like a madman. To my chagrin, I’ve sent out fifteen invites, but Puff only has four friends.

I really like the fact that I can tell how many people have viewed Puff’s page. I dislike that I can’t tell who has given him a bone. In fact, Puff has eight bones, but I’ve given him six of them.

Users are given ten Zealies, the Dogster currency, after joining. Users can buy more of them, or will be given twenty-five a month by signing up for Dogster Plus ($19.95/year). You can use zealies to buy stars or rosettes to give to other dogs…or your own. A rosette is basically a ribbon you would get in a first grade spelling bee. I can see how some people enjoy these, but to be frank, I could care less about them. That is, unless you all want to login to Dogster and give Puff a lot of them!

I’ve given Puff a good start, but he and I have talked, and he will take over further responsibilities for finding new friends on Dogster. Though, it’s such a great site, I will probably still help him.

Most people create applications with a particular use case in mind. Speaking from my experience, I like to meticulously plan things out by imagining exactly how users will react to and use new features. But, what a lot of people don’t realize is that intended use cases in Web 2.0 may be flipped upside down by your users. In most cases, this is a good thing.

Take the Facebook groups feature, for example. The creators probably thought that users would like to create groups for their clubs, friends, and activity partners. Groups would bring comradery to the web of weak links in a social network. As the developers left the drawing board, they probably had a very clear definition in their heads of how groups would be used.

Imagine their surprise when they found out that the most popular groups in Facebook have become rallying points for raising awareness for heavy hitting world and health issues. In fact, there is a group that has exploded to nearly half a million members in a few days called “For Every 1,000 that join this group I will donate $1 for Darfur.” This all happened organically–Facebook never requested their users to do any of this.

This isn’t only happening at Facebook. Dogster, a social networking site for dogs and dog owners, allowed users to maintain a blog. The blogs were meant to be used by owners to let other owners keep in touch about their experiences with their pets. Instead, the owners are now blogging like they are the dogs themselves! Myspace, with the launch of their music features, exploded with music artists wanting to keep their fans up to date on their latest recordings and events. In both of these cases, the users took the creative tools and expressed themselves in surprising ways.

Many companies have met this phenomenon of unforeseen use cases by leaving their system as open to expression as possible. One of the best examples is Flickr, which allows for many creative uses via tagging, albums, and an easy-to-use open API. They never stand in the way of creative uses of their site–in fact, it’s encouraged.

Social web applications should never restrict users to doing one thing one way. Freedom of expression is paramount, and organic growth rules supreme. Successful companies out their will know how to channel this to their advantage.

Today, Facebook announced that they are opening their doors to everyone. You no longer need to be part of any educational or corporate group to sign up. People can either get invited or sign up for themselves under the flattering category of “None of the Above”.

I fully expect this move to be met with extreme controversy–especially by those Facebook users who were protesting against the Mini-Feeds. I only have three words for these people: “wah wah wah!” Facebook still has, at its core, the same privacy functions as before, as Carolyn says on the Facebook blog:

This doesn’t mean that anyone can see your profile, however. Your profile is just as closed off as it ever was. Our network structure is not going away. College and work networks still require an authenticated email address to join. Only people in your networks and confirmed friends can see your profile.

As a Facebook user, I’m not worried about the sudden influx of new people. Sure, there are going to be the usual spammers and trolls which come along with any popular social networking site. But, I have my faith on Facebook’s privacy and friends system to work out the kinks. The bottom line is that I have had no privacy problems with Facebook, ever. That’s more than I can say about my friends’ experiences with MySpace.

Facebook has literally squeezed the college and high school market dry. In other words, they’ve hit the ceiling. So, the natural next step is to utilize their well-built system for a wider audience.

I for one am not afraid of the coming changes in Facebookland.

Mark Zuckerberg (founder of Facebook) has sent an open letter this morning stating that they’ve been coding non-stop in response to the privacy concerns involving the mini feeds. In the letter, he says

Somehow we missed this point with Feed and we didn’t build in the proper privacy controls right away. This was a big mistake on our part, and I’m sorry for it. But apologizing isn’t enough. I wanted to make sure we did something about it, and quickly. So we have been coding nonstop for two days to get you better privacy controls. This new privacy page will allow you to choose which types of stories go into your Mini-Feed and your friends’ News Feeds, and it also lists the type of actions Facebook will never let any other person know about.

This is a good compromise, which allows people to pick and choose which types of status elements will appear on their feed. Hopefully, this will quell all the privacy concerns.

There’s been a lot of controversy over Facebook’s new mini-feed feature, which alerts all your friends of status updates.

I’ve already written that this feature is a step in the right direction, and Michael Arrington also agrees with me. The fact is that there simply isn’t any new information being leaked, just that the information is now being aggregated in one place.

Hundred of thousands of Facebook members have joined protest groups, some of which are “Facebook feeds…make them go away!!”, “Students against Facebook News Feed”, and “Mark Zuckerberg, Bring Back Our Old Facebook!” On the other hand, there are a few groups out there in favor of the feeds, one aptly named “Students against Students against Facebook News Feed.”

Personally, I am totally in support of the Facebook feeds. Facebook takes great pains to make sure privacy is enforced, only allowing certain groups of people tied to an educational or corporate account to view profiles. We all have to remember that Facebook is a free service, and you can elect to quit the service if you’re worried about privacy. The people who are worried about the feeds are probably the ones placing too personal of information on the service in the first place.

In essence, the mini-feeds will create a more vibrant social network, allowing people to see what others are doing in near real time. I just hope that all those privacy cry babies don’t ruin this feature for the rest of us.

Facebook unvealed a major update to their interface with news feeds and mini-feeds. Personally, I’ve been waiting a long time for this feature. Instead of checking dozens of your friend’s profiles to see what’s changed, Facebook now keeps track of the changes and reports them on each profile and also aggregates the information on the front page.

Each feed is called a “story”, and there are stories for networks, relationships, photos, and other status elements. Basically, anyone can easily keep up-to-date with any changes that their friends make to their profile. At the heart of it, users can now see the trail of updates that their friends make, which is really a compelling feature not seen in many other social networks.

Ironically, even though the new features are called feeds, there are no real RSS feeds to be seen. I would surely subscribe to an RSS feed that pings me everytime any of my friends make a change.

Certainly, the new feeds will keep me more in tune with what’s happening to my friends on Facebook. But, it will also mean I won’t be aimlessly surfing around Facebook as often looking for updates, which translates to less pageviews. It will be interesting to see if Facebook’s pageviews actually get lowered because of this feature.

Finally, there is the privacy issue. The personal stories and feeds harken the image of big brother looking over your shoulder as you change your profile. But as always, only your friends can see your profile and mini-feeds. Facebook has also placed little “x” marks beside each item that you can click on to hide it from other users.

Other smaller updates include the ability to collapse each element of a profile. Slowly, but surely, more AJAX is creeping into the Facebook interface.