International Law

Inside Facebook reports three important Facebook updates that are expected to launch in the first quarter of 2008:

1) Friend Lists Privacy Controls

A few weeks ago, Facebook took the first step toward enabling more efficient friend management with the release of Friend Lists. However, as was noted at the time, the killer feature of Friend Lists ? Privacy Controls ? was nowhere to be found. The good news is Facebook is working on this, and will allow users to control visibility for their profile, photos, and apps using Friend Lists soon.

2) Facebook in New Languages

It has been known for a while that Facebook is working on translating the site into a few new key languages. However, beyond this initial step, Facebook is planning an aggressive ?crowdsourcing? approach to translate the site into dozens (if not hundreds) of languages around the world by harnessing the collective volunteer power of its user base. Soon, Facebook will launch a ?Translations? app (which we saw briefly a couple weeks ago) whereby users can enter translations for every Facebook menu, button, and copy item. (To all Facebook users in Turkey: Facebook will be available in Turkish soon!!)

3) Blasting Messages to Groups With More Than 1,000 Members

Facebook marketers have been banging their head on the wall for a long time because of Facebook?s cap on the size of groups you?re allowed to blast messages to. This has caused many to migrate their group members to Pages, or even other websites, in order to enjoy more robust group communication tools. However, Facebook will soon be removing this ceiling, meaning Groups will become a more viable option for many grassroots marketers and large communities.

Read more here.  These three get progressively worse - I'm really excited and looking forward to the Friends List Privacy Controls, and new languages are cool but don't really impact me in any way, but blasting messages sounds like a way to invite annoying message spam.

ReadWriteWeb also has this interesting announcement from Facebook:

Sick of Facebook application overload?  Feeling like you're on Myspace all over again?  The Facebook team has heard your cries and announced tonight that they will soon release a new service that allows users to move all but their favorite apps to an "extended profile" section.

I think a lot of users are going to appreciate this.  I'm not so sure about app developers. 

Rodney Rumford writes at FB app review blog FaceReviews that this will make the app developers' world a whole lot more competitive, since many apps spread largely through discovery by one friend on the profile page of another. It was via Rodney that I found this news.

So app developers are unlikely to be happy about this.  Perhaps demotion of your app is better than having it be deleted? 

Read more here.

On a different - but still Facebook related - note a study has apparently found Facebook topped the list of "slow and inaccessible" social networks:

On Thursday, Web site-monitoring firm WatchMouse released the results of a study about the performance of 104 social-media sites--social networks, blogging communities, bookmarking sites, and the like--and boldly deemed them to be overall "slow and inaccessible."

WatchMouse used its "Site Performance Index" (SPI) methodology to track the reliability and load time of the sites in question; this figure is computed by calculating the time needed to call up a site's home page and applying a penalty for each failed request. Lower is better: an SPI of 500 is considered good, whereas the Utrecht, Netherlands-based WatchMouse considers over 1,500 to be indicative of "a seriously negative user experience."

According to the study, social networks in general are not particularly reliable: 51 of the 104 sites surveyed came up with SPIs of 1,500 or more, and only six small social networks were awarded with SPIs under 500 (Faceparty, Tagged, ASmallWorld, Flirtomatic, Rummble, and StudiVZ). At the top of WatchMouse's blacklist was Facebook, which it assigned a whopping 6,629 SPI. That was the worst ranking out of any of the sites surveyed--even microblogging service Twitter, whose frequent downtime has become a punchline of sorts. (WatchMouse assigned an SPI of 1,467 to Twitter.)

Read more here (from CNET News.com).