I’ve been suggesting for a long time that inch by inch, day by day, Facebook moves closer and closer to becoming AOL 2.0. I am not talking about the new AOL that’s a collection of blogs, I am talking about the 14.4 dial up, 3.5″ floppies, look at photos of Cindy Crawford and email “You’ve Got Mail” AOL.

It’s easy to see how hooked people are to Facebook when the service is down as it has been a couple of times the past month. It’s the same crack that had me and lots of my friends hooked to AOL back in the 90s and pushed my first bill over $600.

In February I took a long look at the components of Facebook and compared them to the old AOL. Facebook had a press conference today to discuss a variety of updates at the social networking service. Next Web has a recap of all of the changes. The Facebook Groups update was the most interesting to me. It was fun to watch how quickly everyone ran for a group and how many updates were posted on my Facebook page about x person joining y group. It was interesting to note that groups can have email addresses @facebook.com which is one of the items I noted back in February would be coming. I still believe we will see full username@facebook.com email addresses coming soon. Email was the core functionality of AOL so it’s easy to see why I think it will be coming to Facebook.

Email is really the only function left that keeps Facebook from being its own complete island. Almost all of the other services a normal Internet user uses on a regular basis are provided by Facebook. From photos to videos, groups, IM, chat, apps, games, what else is there where a person would need to go outside the walls of the Facebook?

While many compare Facebook and Google, I would actually suggest Facebook’s next battle will be with Apple.

I’ve been watching how my sister has been using Facebook as of late and it is EXACTLY the same way she used AOL.

Continue reading “Facebook Takes Another Step Towards AOL 2.0” »

No idea what’s up with all the downtime over the past couple of weeks! It appears now social networking site Facebook is currently out of action. Reports are coming in rapidly that the site is either completely not loading and/or the service is loading very slowly. I am unable to access Facebook currently from multiple Internet connections. Twitter users are also noting issues connecting to Facebook.

From what I can tell the non-logged in Facebook is working but the portions where you need to be logged in to use are currently down.

I received the following message on several refreshes:

Internal Server Error – Read

The server encountered an internal error or misconfiguration and was unable to complete your request.

Reference #3.475e613f.1286340507.305b33cc

Perhaps this downtime is related to the press briefing on Wednesday afternoon. Two weeks ago Facebook suffered their longest outage.

Blogger Robert Scoble noted this evening that he will be interviewing Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg tomorrow. I guess some of the questions will be related to the recent server performance.

Update 1AM Eastern – Facebook is back – resume posting photos, videos, other media and liking everything!

We have emailed Facebook for more information and will update this post when we hear back.

As always, please report in if Facebook is down for you and also note what you are doing to occupy your time during this outage.

Yesterday I was the first (and one of the few) to write about Facebook being down and out of service. From everything I could gather, it seemed like if you were west of the Mississippi river in the U.S. or in another country, Facebook was out of service for a good while.

Also similar to yesterday’s outage, the Facebook social buttons (e.g. Like button) are out of service.

My favorite note about the outage comes from Twitter user Fake Dispatch who notes, “BREAKING WORK TIP: Do not be the first one in your office to announce that Facebook is down.”

Update: Facebook has posted regarding today’s outage. The posting is VERY technical in its discussion of what happened.

One difference with yesterday for me is that yesterday I received no connection to Facebook at all. Today I received the following message:

Gateway Timeout

The proxy server did not receive a timely response from the upstream server.

Reference #1.165e613f.1285271126.18ab8868

We have emailed Facebook for more information and will update this post when we hear back.

As always report in if Facebook is down for you – but please also note your location so I can see if there is a similar pattern today.

Update Thursday September 23 – please visit our updated Facebook down page for today.

It appears social networking site Facebook is currently out of action. Reports are coming in rapidly that the site is either completely not loading and/or the service is loading very slowly. I am unable to access Facebook currently from multiple Internet connections. Twitter users are also noting issues connecting to Facebook.

From what I can tell, most of the tweets regarding issues connecting to Twitter are in languages other than English. Also important to note that Facebook social like buttons are also not loading.

My favorite note about the outage comes from Twitter user Fake Dispatch who notes, “BREAKING WORK TIP: Do not be the first one in your office to announce that Facebook is down.”

We have emailed Facebook for more information and will update this post when we hear back.

Update 2:45pm Eastern: My6Sense VP Louis Gray is currently reporting in that Facebook works for him in Silicon Valley.

Update 2: a large percentage of the U.S. based comments are coming from Texas – I wonder if this has anything to do with the SSL outage on Time Warner on Monday?
Continue reading “Facebook Down?” »

Dan Lewis blogs at dlewis.net and is available on Twitter. This month he launched the, “Now I Know” newsletter where he will share items he finds interesting.

Go to your Facebook News Feed and you may see, in the upper right, Facebook suggests some brand Pages for you to follow. Typically, Facebook shows two in tandem — and sometimes, the results are… well, see for yourself:

Facebook Games: Better than Facebook?

And to make matters worse, Mafia Wars isn’t even the biggest game — Farmville and Treasure Isle top it, easily.

Donuts versus Breast Cancer Awareness
Continue reading “Unintentional Humor, Facebook Recommendations Style” »

Over the past few weeks, the tech blogospehere has been up all night writing posts about how Facebook makes it nearly impossible to delete an account. And this weekend saw a bunch of posts with regards to a specific user and why his account was reinstated. I’ve been thinking about a way for Facebook to fix the user deletion issue and the fix is actually quite simple. It appears the process is so complicated and/or different than other online services that there’s a Facebook group setup just to help you delete your Facebook account.

From what I understand, the current process to delete/cancel a Facebook account is as follows:

• user visits the account deletion page
• user goes through all of the steps to delete their account — confirmations, captchas, etc.
• once user makes it past all of the security clearances then clicks the final deletion button
• account is still “live” but is now placed into a 14-day hold period. If during the 14-day period, user has logged into Facebook, their delete request is removed.

The 14-day delete window appears to be the issue – this is not a typical behavior of a Web app. The Facebook delete group notes, “You must NOT log in to, or interact in any other way with Facebook for at least two weeks, as it will cancel the deletion request. That includes NOT logging in to Facebook using any client (like the iPhone app or IM:s like Pidgin), NOT clicking embedded Like-buttons on other websites, NOT logging in to other services using Facebook Connect (like Digg) etc etc.”

Continue reading “An Easy Fix To The Facebook Account Delete Issue” »

Today is apparently the big “quit Facebook day” – the day when billions of people around the world will delete their Facebook pages. I lined up in Times Square for one hour thinking it was the line to get to the Facebook deletion machine but it turned out to be a line for free hot dogs. If you are going to delete your Facebook page, you should probably do it on video — bonus points for doing it live!

The official quit Facebook day website shows 32,000 people have confirmed that they will quit today. How many actually delete their page is anyone’s guess.

This is probably a great use case for the new Meetup Anywhere platform. People can setup “delete my Facebook page” meetups all over the world and then get together for the event – maybe that “space” site could sponsor the meetups.