The Danosphere.

Just wanted to stop by and let everyone who’s reading know that I have updated FacebookExport with some changes that should fix issues users in a previous post had brought up. For one reason or another some people could only export the first (preselected) item. I changed up how I passed the options between pages and it will *hopefully* fix the problem.

If you were one of the people who was experiencing problems exporting all of the data points please give it another try. If you could drop me a comment and let me know if the problem is resolved it would be much appreciated! Thanks!

Also, I’m almost done with the newest piece of the FacebookExport toolkit- the Facebook Photo Exporter. Subscribe to my RSS feed or follow me on twitter so you can download it as soon as its posted.

You can now export your Facebook inbox, outbox, events, and status history all through FBE. I was going to just set it aside my for a while after releasing it just a few days ago but after receiving feedback from several people with requests for more data points in the export, I couldn’t resist but to roll up my sleeves and improve the tool. In addition to the new data points you can also customize the export so it only includes the information you want (a la carte if you will).

The customizable export was a nice addition, and certainly makes the tool more user friendly, but it was actually something I was forced to add just because the export was becoming so large that it was taking forever to test exporting ALL the data points EVERY time. So, a small developer aid proves to be a boon for the end user too! Anyway check it out, and if you’re one of those people using the tool to export and archive your data to your harddrive, make sure to update your FBE file with the new data points (the export format has changed slightly as well). Enjoy!

So I haven’t posted in a while. I’m sorry but sometimes life throws you curveballs and you gotta deal.

My curveball in this case has been transforming an idea I dreamt up over a year ago- The College Blog Network, into something much more mainstream. It’s a project that has taken 7months and 4 people to complete and the end is near! This post isn’t so much about what the new site- CollegeBlender, will be, but more of an outreach to my friends to help build awareness of this new brand.

We want to give college students a stage- to show off their skills. We believe there is some amazing stuff happening at the college level, from blogs to videos to music and much much more, and we think it deserves some recognition. That is what CollegeBlender is all about. I can’t speak about it too much right now but it is launching in August 2009, and you can check out the site for a few more details here. Please show support for our mission by following collegeblender on twitter and becoming a “fan” (we don’t like that term) of our page on Facebook.

The site will be live in August! At which point I will be posting the much needed updates to my code and other goings on here! On my personal blog!

Thanks again!
Dan

Oprah is now on twitter. Oh, my, gurd.

Is this a good thing or a bad thing??

Alot of my fav people over @tcbn have been getting on the Twitter train, which I highly encourage as tcbn2.0 may feature some solid twitter integration [hint]- more on that later. At first sight twitter is a strange and confusing place, and can really leave you wondering “wtf is this?”. Well, here are my tips for new users to jump right into the twittosphere instead of just walking around the edges in confusion. Oh and make sure to follow me and follow the tcbn twitter account too!

One more thing, post a link to your twitter account on your blog or website, its how I have found most the TCBN tweeps,  no one is going to find you if you don’t advertise just a lil

Facebook, the monolith social network currently in charge of the social networking scene, needs to make money… like… really needs to make money. With an impressive 200million users you’d think the site would be churning out profit hand over fist, but it’s not. In an attempt to monetize and keep up with the explosive growth of Twitter, Facebook redesigned last month to look more like twitter, or did it? 

When you look closely at the redesign, the real emphasis is more about ‘pages’ and less about ‘trying to be like twitter’. But Facebook doesn’t want to shock it’s userbase with this new emphasis, it wants a slow dip in the pool, as opposed to a splash. 

And so it begins. If you haven’t noticed yet, your “highlights” column is probably about 50% page-based activities… your friends liking brands, ‘fanning’ brands, commenting etc. Facebook’s next move was relocating ‘People You May Know’ above the fold… previously it was underneath the ‘highlights’ column, generally below the fold. While the location change didn’t seem to be a big deal, the next move certainly is- “People You May Know’ is now ‘Suggestions’. These newfound ‘Suggesstions’ extend beyond freinds… to brands. Finally the Facebook vision is coming full circle, as it actively ‘pushes’ brands at you based on the activities of your friends. It pulls this off in a cunning way, by mixing in the brands with your friends.

Here is a great example of this, Facebook’s ‘Suggestions’ for me (and a bunch of people I don’t know):

Don’t get me wrong I love the office, but for me Facebook is about connecting with friends NOT about beomcing a poster child for a brand just because i may use/like them. I like “The Office” I watch it every week, but I am not a Facebook Fan of the Office. 

As Facebook pushes forward with it’s plans to monetize the question becomes “at what cost?”. Is Facebook alienating users by putting so much emphasis on brands and activities centered around brands? What do you think?