Not sure why everyone is labelling this as Facebook’s Vanity URLs… the only change is it will be like Twitter for a second but there will be a hang of a lot more peeps trying to make sure they get their name registered for themselves.  Basically Facebook provided us with the following image of what your Facebook Profile link currently looks like and what it will look like once you have registered it:

So hopefully I’ll have either ‘DanBaileyUK’ or maybe I’ll just go for ‘DanBailey’ or ‘DanielBailey’ – will see, what would you prefer for my Facebook Profile URL?

As of Saturday 12:01am EDT June 13th you’ll be greeted with this when you login

Now I’m sure peeps in the USA are definitely not going to go out this Friday night and stay in to make sure they get the right names, us here in South Africa will be lucky enough to wake up on Saturday morning and just click click and BOOM we have our own VANITY url from Facebook to go together with our Twitter URL plus others… (BE CAREFUL – once you have selected your name you won’t be able to change it, so don’t be stupid!)

I’ve started getting quite tired with updates on the bottom right hand corner, I open Facebook and bam there is this little red number on the bottom right corner indicating how many new updates I have. Usually these are from people writing on my wall/photos or confirming friendship requests so I’m normally pretty excited as its something some interaction.

But now Facebook App developers are allowed to also raise these alerts even if you don’t have the App installed which is pretty irritating, I don’t care if someone knows a secret about me or has a crush on me… of course they probably do but I don’t need to know about it!

So, I was quite happy this evening when I noticed a little caption underneath the notice with the message ‘report spam’ and I thought “Wow, Facebook was quick to pick up on this and do something about it” so I clicked away happy that these people would get into trouble. And DAM the very next screen was a permission screen asking for my permission to install the App… and I had just clicked ‘report spam!!!’

Facebook Spam

What the hell! Come on Facebook surely you can put a stop to this spam we’re getting!

So, just logged into Facebook this afternoon and was greeted with a lonely ‘1′ in my inbox so I clicked on it interested to see who was writing to me and saw that it was a group message – warning signs go off in my head when I see group messages and then only one link in the message to ‘fbstarter.com’ – I left it alone.

Then checking on some other sites I see people are getting this around the world and TechCrunch even wrote an article on it, read here. 

Basically want happens is that you click on the link and it loads it but it loads a site that isn’t Facebook but looks exactly like the Facebook login, if you happen to enter your details there you’d better go quickly to the proper Facebook site and login and change your password quickly as all your friends have probably been spammed already!

These type of attacks on Social Media sites is definitely becoming more and more popular!

Earlier this week Gmail crashed for half a day and caused quite an uproar as personal and business accounts couldn’t be accessed. Now if we compare the Twitter Trends over the last couple of days against the same time as the inauguration of Obama happened. Interesting stuff:

Something else that is interesting is that their is now a Google account on Twitter, does this mean that Google does not intent to acquire Twitter or is merely testing it out. Either way it would have helped if Google had the account on Monday to let us know whats happening with Gmail as a blog post about it took quite a while to come up.

Facebook offered $500million for Twitter last year… wonder how much its valued at now especially after it received another round of funding at $35million. There is a lot of talk that this could be the next ‘google’.

Facebook, just the word is been used everything to suddenly make everything online hip and cool or at least that is what the big corporates are thinking as they slowly wake up to the Web 2.0 social scene.

And in order to appear that they are with it they are starting to try make everything work with Facebook and especially with your mobile phone. Apparently Nokia and Facebook are in heavy talks with creating more interactivity between Nokia users and Facebook.

Nokia has to face the decision to we try use our vast user base and create our own social network or do we jump on board with Facebook?

I certainly don’t think they should create another new social network and that they should use Facebook like Apple and Blackberry are doing. Soon when going through your contacts on your phone you’ll be able to see who is online etc. and start a chat with them – I like that idea.

BUT and for me this is a big BUT:

Is Facebook going to be the new Microsoft?

And this question is with reference to how Microsoft was so ‘cool’ back in the early nineties and started to bundle everything together and eventually got slapped with law suits and paid millions and millions in fines.

If I was from My Space or Orkut I would be upset and cry FOWL when all these cellphones start coming out working so closely with Facebook. This time it won’t be Facebook/Microsoft that could get fined but rather the cellular companies like Nokia and Apple.

If they don’t give their users the option of selecting which Social Engine they would like to connect to when using their phone it could be seen as creating a monopoly for Facebook. If I was Facebook I would be pushing hard to strike up these deals with the phone companies as fast as possible.

Wow, talk about timing – both were released yesterday almost at the same time even. For once I think Google was out done a bit as Facebook was a bit more organised having allowed some big websites to implement and test the features way before its release so that on the day sites like TechCrunch had already implemented Facebook Connect.

I’ve been playing around with a both and here is a quick early summary:

Google Friend Connect is very very easy to implement and adds nice structure to quickly have a login system that works pretty well and allow users to write on a wall or make reviews but it stops about there. For it to be so simple its gone and created widgets to just implement and so for me even though it only took me 30min to implement it is not enough…

Facebook Connect now here is something powerful… just go look at TechCrunch and see how nicely it works! The 2 things that make this the better option for me are:
1) the posting to your Facebook wall of your activities outside of Facebook
2) the ability to see what your friends have done on the website when browsing it, makes it a lot more trustworthy when you see your friends have been using it.

I will be following this up some more after I’ve used both a bit more.

This morning when logging into Facebook via Google Chrome I received a warning notice indicating that the social network site maybe a phishing site.

I was a bit sceptical at first and tried to login again but received the message again, I then clicked ‘proceed’ and was logged in. I get no error message when I use Firefox but according to an article on Techcrunch the problem also occurs in Firefox. The domain name that is causing the problem is ‘http://fbcdn.net’ which is registered by Facebook.

Have been a few reports of it happening in Safari also, seems like it may be something to do with the roll out of Facebook connect.

Twitter is a buzz with this

Yesterday while trying to do some work I was listening to 5fm Radio and DJ Fresh’s show which I do enjoy. During they show they started talking about the old Simba packet design and how Simba just changed it back in the early ’90s. Fresh was complaining about the fact that Simba did not consult him in their change and their design choice…. Now a major company like Simba back then was not going to go out and consult the average Joe as Fresh would have been back in the ’90s.

They also spoke about products that were discontinued for some unknown reason back then and how they would like it back.

Now, we fast forward to the present day and look at major companies changing things and what happens when they do:

1) Facebook changes their profile design and has millions of people join groups complaining about the change

2) Yahoo makes changes and adds in a centralised profile page and has countless complaints pouring in while they are still only testing it.

3) Google makes changes to the iGoogle page and thousands of people start complaining, one chap was even quoted as saying:

How can I be rid of this ugly piece of crap?” asked one forum user about the iGoogle overhaul. “Google has decided to unilaterally change the layout of my page. If I can’t find a hack or a Greasemonkey script to undo this, good-bye Google, hello Yahoo!

Will Google, Yahoo or Facebook bring back the old designs? I don’t think so, the only difference now from 15 years ago is that we can make our voices heard. It now depends if the big boys decide to listen to us or not…

So recently some stats was released on the numbers of people on Facebook and the fastest growing countries etc, SA is very close to crossing the 1 million mark and I reckon if you had to include the Saffas living in London and elsewhere we would easily be over the 1million mark.

It was quite strange to see that in the 3rd quarter Facebook’s traffic decreased by 1% in SA…. strange. I’ve been working with Facebook Apps quite a bit and have a wishlist app out now that works off the MyKindaPrices database and allows users to create a wishlist and their friends to view it and book items to buy. Now, people often talk about Facebook been the next Operating System but in order for it to work they would need servers in every country cause at the moment the way it works is as follows:

1) You’re logged into Facebook
2) You click onto the MyKindaPrices App
3) Request is sent from your pc to Facebook servers in the US, they in turn send request to our servers in Joburg which starts returning the data via the Facebook servers in the USA which in turn the relays it to your PC here in SA.

That is quite a bit of a round about and it not the quickest way to do things, Facebook obviously needs to make it secure and this is the only way.

Microsoft just launched Microsoft Live Search on Facebook, now as Facebook has 135million users this could improve their search market share if everyone runs 10 searches a month on it… but I would still prefer localised search results, maybe they should use Google for that!

Just to update everyone in case you didn’t know – Google and Yahoo have put their deal on hold while they wait for the authorities to OK the deal. They were planning to just go ahead with things.

Google has teamed up with HTC to launch the HTC Dream powered by Google Android, this will be launched next week. This comes just after Google released Google Chrome beta to the public.

Now there has always been big talk that Google will eventually challenge Microsoft in terms of their operating system and with the launch of Google Chrome this is starting to become a reality.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Dream will have a large touch screen, a swivel-out keypad and a trackball for navigation. The Dream will also feature a built-in 3 mega pixel camera, a music player and purpose-built access to Google services like Gmail, Maps, and Search.

In the late ’90s Microsoft was the dominant operating system and the browser wars were just starting. So been the dominant player and already controlling the operating system on the greater majority of PCs they made Internet Explorer the default browser on all the Windows PCs. So now users would have to go and specifically find and download Netscape if they wanted a different option…

Microsoft was eventually taken to court and fined millions and millions of dollars for this anti-competitive behaviour.

When Google first started it was just a search engine and relied on operating systems and browsers to bring it to the masses. But now they have launched their own web browser and mobile operating system, will Android be adapted to run a PC? We will wait and see.

In the mean time I see history repeating itself as it always does – Google will be operating on all mobile devices (PC and mobile) and having the default search engine as Google, email as GMAIL, instant messenger as GTALK etc etc. Google how ever has already learnt a bit from looking back at history and with Google Chrome you get to select your default browser…

Will they get fined like Microsoft did? I think it depends on how anti-competitive it becomes, if they keep making APIs like they currently do and allow some greater flexibility then maybe it will be ok.

The one factor that is now also becoming a reality is Facebook with many people saying that they will also become the operating system of the future. Now many people may look at Facebook now and not think its possible, but it definitely is not a grasp at thin air.

In 2 years time – Open source operating systems like Linux could be the norm (depending on how secure they are from viruses as the hacking community is still focused on creating viruses for Microsoft PCs and not open source) with Firefox or Chrome as your browser, MS Office as your Word and Spreadsheet software and Facebook your main focus point when going online with all websites and software interacting with it. The internet in 5 years time is too much to try predict right now but its defintely going to have a merging of all devices, and expect internet on your TV very soon.