Comments on: You = 13 cents

You = 13 cents

parmanparman — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 12:58:40 -0800

Opening their source code to application developers, facebook won a strategic gamble. Now, these developers are making their own deals. The I am Hungry application went for just over $20,000, or around 13 cents for data of every user who signed up. But don't worry, you have a chance to bid for yourself.

By: danb

danb — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:09:44 -0800

There are really only a couple Facebook apps that I like. The ones that tie into other networks -- last.fm, Twitter, Flickr, and so on -- are nice for making your Facebook profile into a hub for online activity. (I'm sure they love that, too.) Aside from that, the only other ones I've had any interest in are Extended Info, which allows you to create your own profile fields and fill them out with HTML, and Free Gifts (or a variant thereof), which circumvents Facebook's ridiculous "Buy this meaningless icon for $1!" gimmick. Actually, one of the nicest things about Facebook apps is that you can collapse them, and it'll remember your preference for each application across everyone's profile. So if you don't want to look at Happy Hour, you only have to once, and then never again.

By: danb

danb — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:11:03 -0800

Incidentally, Facebook's rumored artist platform looks promising.

By: lumensimus

lumensimus — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:14:40 -0800

I'm surprised not to see my favorite app -- Scrabulous has become a bit of an obsession among my friends. iLike is pretty rad as well -- lots of full songs for sharing, an easy-to-use database of concert dates. If I didn't already have a ride to the Of Montreal concert on Thursday, I might have used the "I'm going" function to find one. I was initially saddened by the popularity of the "Top Friends" app (it smacks heavily of me-too Myspacery), but the beauty of Facebook's modularity is that I'm free to ignore it or any other cruftastic app making the rounds.

By: dismas

dismas — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:15:42 -0800

Facebook's apps are almost universally hideous. Damnit, I only want facebook so I can check up on the drunken shinanigans of my high school classmates. I don't care about who they're playing in scrabble.

By: Blazecock Pileon

Blazecock Pileon — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:33:29 -0800

Scrabulous is about the only app I really make any use of.

By: justkevin

justkevin — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:37:41 -0800

Facebook didn't open their source code to developers, they created an API for developers. It does seem to have paid off, though. There are now literally thousands of apps in their directory. There are even a couple good ones.

By: Gregamell

Gregamell — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:38:17 -0800

i just use the facebook profile cleaner and don't have to deal with any of that garbage

By: hupp

hupp — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:39:20 -0800

There is of course a Metafilter group on Facebook. Among the related groups identified by FB: * I Will Go Slightly Out of My Way To Step On That Crunchy-looking Leaf * When I was your age, Pluto was a planet.

By: Diskeater

Diskeater — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:40:00 -0800

I want an application that automatically ignores the invites from zombie/vampire/jedi/emo/every other application.

By: lumensimus

lumensimus — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:42:15 -0800

Consider yourself challenged, then. :)

By: Roman Graves

Roman Graves — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:44:55 -0800

Someone please explain the difference between facebook and myspace, other than the apps.

By: DaShiv

DaShiv — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:48:33 -0800

Myspace sucks.

By: lumensimus

lumensimus — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:54:47 -0800

Facebook is, at best, a much cleaner site. Profiles don't start playing horrid music as soon as they come up, and even using the new apps, you can't change profile backgrounds or font size or add animated gifs or any of that crap. It just feels more useful (by which I mean that while determined folks may write the inexplicable, they can't yet make it illegible), and can be useful should you want it to be.

By: Artw

Artw — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 13:56:40 -0800

MySpace has lots of customisation options, which revolve around inserting HTML fragments and hacking the CSS and consequentially look like ass. Also I suspect looking too closely at it would give security/XSS experts a heart attack. Facebook doesn't seem to let you customise client side code at all, but has the apps thing, which is kind of neat. Other than that, demographics - Facebook skews slightly older.

By: chunking express

chunking express — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:07:09 -0800

Facebook lets you tell advertisers and the government exactly what you like and who you know. MySpace also, but it's a lot messier.

By: justgary

justgary — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:08:41 -0800

Other than that, demographics - Facebook skews slightly older. posted by Artw More than Half of MySpace Visitors are Now Age 35 or Older, as the Site’s Demographic Composition Continues to Shift Visitors to MySpace.com and Friendster.com generally skew older, with people age 25 and older comprising 68 and 71 percent of their user bases, respectively. Not surprisingly, Facebook.com, which began as a social networking site for college students, also draws a younger audience. More than one-third (34 percent) of visitors to Facebook.com are 18-24 years old, approximately three times the representation of that age segment in the general Internet population.

By: loquacious

loquacious — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:17:23 -0800

I haven't even ever loaded the Facebook site. Ever. All I know is that it was originally a College/University-only app, and I heard it was mainly populated by "beautiful people" and/or "frat"-types. This was enough to prevent me from ever opening the page. That, and after Friendster and Myspace, I've totally soured on yet another FoaF site, including Tribes. Maybe it's time to reconsider my opinions. That, or maybe it's time for you to GET THE HELL OFF MY LAWN! Or something.

By: delmoi

delmoi — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:20:04 -0800

MySpace has lots of customisation options, which revolve around inserting HTML fragments and hacking the CSS and consequentially look like ass. Also I suspect looking too closely at it would give security/XSS experts a heart attack. Well, what myspace does is let you change the CSS, but unlike most websites that use CSS labeled divs, my space uses nested, unlabeled tables. So in CSS you have to index things by saying something like "a table inside another table inside a table row inside a cell, etc". It's really preposterous. The site is a horrid mess. Facebook is cool, and those Apps were cool for like 10 minutes, then they got pretty annoying. There are a lot of "viral" Apps that seem to try to trick you into forwarding them onto your friends with a fake message. Like "So and So wants to do X with you" and then you click OK, and all you get is an option to "X" everyone on your list, and no way to do anything else. And of course all it means is that the last person did the same thing. It's absurdly stupid, so I hardly ever accept "invites" I get on there now. I do use the "Top Friends" app which came out like a day after the release of F8 (or whatever it's called), which was sold for $60k, and subsequently fucked with to add annoying buttons, etc.

By: jcruelty

jcruelty — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:20:30 -0800

scrabulous 4 life

By: randomination

randomination — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:32:22 -0800

So, according to this list, Vibrating Hamster is worth $164,671. I'm in the wrong cocking job.

By: rollbiz

rollbiz — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:38:29 -0800

Best Facebook App Evar:= I Blue Myself

By: dreamsign

dreamsign — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:40:26 -0800

"Scrabulous" is the only thing that`s even tempted me to give in to the jonesing throng of Facebook addicts my extended social group has suddenly become. I know that aside from that one app, I would be a virtual black sheep, never updating "what I am doing" or "what I had for breakfast" or whatever the hell they do.

By: randomination

randomination — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:41:55 -0800

I beg to disagree, rollbiz. Dramatic Whitespace is the best Facebook app ever. Now, how much is that one worth?

By: athenian

athenian — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 14:53:47 -0800

Athenian is posting in Facebook thread on MeFi about having posted in the MeFi group on Facebook about what my user name on MeFi is.

By: ThePinkSuperhero

ThePinkSuperhero — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 15:48:15 -0800

More than Half of MySpace Visitors are Now Age 35 or Older, as the Site’s Demographic Composition Continues to Shift Does that include those of us who are 99, or some other ridiculously high age, on the site, as a way of keeping our true age private?

By: anazgnos

anazgnos — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 15:59:19 -0800

http://radar.oreilly.com/archives/2007/10/facebook_long_tail_report.html

By: wafaa

wafaa — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:00:52 -0800

That just makes me want to "hide" my Facebook apps. I agree with delmoi, cool for ten minutes, then, "why the fuck did I do that?"

By: danb

danb — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:33:14 -0800

I stand corrected. Dramatic Whitespace is, in fact, the best Facebook app.

By: tepidmonkey

tepidmonkey — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:38:50 -0800

Thanks for that profile cleaner, Gregamell. I didn’t realize how much I fucking hate the pointless clutter of third-party Facebook apps until I made them all disappear. Except the Scrabble one, I can see how that might be cool.

By: Brandon Blatcher

Brandon Blatcher — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:52:17 -0800

Does that include those of us who are 99, or some other ridiculously high age, on the site, as a way of keeping our true age private? You realize it's pretty transparent, right?

By: bhnyc

bhnyc — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 16:59:06 -0800

my understanding- basically facebook is college educated people and myspace is the rest (including those too young to have gone yet) here's a link on class differences between the two facebook really took off about a month ago. i think it's because of their "friend finder" that scans your email address books. most people i know moved there from myspace in the past few weeks.

By: UbuRoivas

UbuRoivas — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 17:08:22 -0800

facebook gets on with business

By: stavrosthewonderchicken

stavrosthewonderchicken — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:07:28 -0800

I haven't even ever loaded the Facebook site. Ever. Neither had I until a week or two ago, when I finally caved. I'm still not sure what to do with it other than accumulate 'friends', but that's kind of fun in an epenis++ way, I guess. I did reconnect with a few people I'd lost touch with, both online old friends and off-, so net positive. The ability to just kinda click over to their profile and leave a note for someone makes keeping a personping alive just that much easier than the (to me, because I'm old) more formal feel of actually having to write email, along with the implicit guilting them about writing back, and that's good. I think the average age of my Facebook network thingy is about 50. That's probably outlier-ish, though.

By: melissa

melissa — Tue, 09 Oct 2007 18:12:53 -0800

Not all the applications are crap. I really like the Flickr Photosets app - now there's no need to double-post my pictures. This helps my friends actually see my pictures. Most of them aren't heavy internet users (several are still on dialup) but they've all gotten Facebook accounts in the last 6-8 months. It really is helping us keep in touch, since we're all in different places. There are a lot of junk apps though - best to either ignore them, or uninstall 'em really quickly. I got an invite from someone to play Scrabulous a few months back - seeing all the love here makes me think I should have installed it in the first place! :)

By: Astro Zombie

Astro Zombie — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 00:07:41 -0800

Is this something I would have to have a face to understand?

By: triv

triv — Wed, 10 Oct 2007 06:21:51 -0800

You're ok for books then, Astro. I was hoping for a swap?