Facebook: the new Calvinball

Anyone else remember Calvinball? It was the game that Calvin and Hobbes played whose rules changed constantly, with players changing them on fly as the game went on (look: here’s a wikipedia entry!). That’s pretty much how business and non-profit users relationship with Facebook has been over the last few months.

I should start by saying that I remain a big fan of Facebook. I think it is to social networks what the 1970’s Apple was to the personal computer: a critical mature player in an evolving space once only restricted to hobbyists that bridges the gap to bring technology to the masses. It balances the desire to connect with friends with the desire for privacy, and has maintained a core identity, a space for real-life friends to connect on the web, despite business pressures to sell out.

That said, recent choices made by Facebook have convinced me that there really aren’t any solid structures or expectations with regard to the user/company relationship, just a floating set of rules that morph daily.

Examples, and what it means for non-profits, below the fold…

The first example, which started this line of thinking, was when I received a message from a co-worker that a test update sent to fans of the Beaconfire Facebook page was now viable to all users, even though it originally just went to people who were fans at the time (of which there was one). Our first message was a test so we could see what the output side looked like and if HTML worked. Go ahead and become a fan of us and look – and yes, we’re a little embarrassed. But, hey, that’s why we test things ourselves before rolling them out to clients.

Looking into this further, it seems that this particular piece of goalpost moving was the result of a line of thinking something like this:

Programmer A: So if a company sends out a message on Monday and I join on Tuesday, I won’t see any updates, right?

Programmer B: Um… yep.

Programmer A: Well, then why don’t we set it to show past updates, so that companies don’t feel a need to send out updates so often and overtax our servers and annoy their users.

I don’t think it ever occurred to them that companies would send out messages today that they’d prefer not appear tomorrow. So what was a perfectly reasonable decision made us, and probably others who like to test things before they go live, look a bit silly. Upon emailing support (a Herculean task in and of itself), I got a variety of canned responses that not only could I not delete the update (which I discerned myself when my keen powers of observation indicated that "delete update" was not among my two update-related links), but they wouldn’t delete it on the backend side, which was just annoying – how hard is it to delete one record from a database?

The second example was an update today sent to users of the Pages app entitled "How to promote your Page off Facebook." I opened it, thinking I would find helpful tools that would help me promote the Beaconfire Facebook page. What I found was a new set of usage guidelines that looked like they came from the helpful legal pad of some trademark protection attorney, including a bunch of their preferred do’s and don’ts, such as:

Ways you may refer to your Facebook Page:

• Do: “Find us on Facebook to discover more about…”
• Do: “Company X on Facebook” [...]

Ways you may NOT refer to your Facebook Page:

• Don’t: “Check out the Company X Facebook Page”  [...]

Ways you may use the Facebook Page badge: [...]

• Do: hyperlink the name of your business within your promotional copy to your Facebook Page. For example, Company X on Facebook

Ways you may NOT use the Facebook Page badge: [...]

• Don’t: hyperlink the word “Facebook” within your promotional copy to your Facebook Page. For example, Company X on Facebook

So… strike the sentences above which refer to the Beaconfire Facebook Page and replace them with the Beaconfire page on Facebook. Aside from the goofy brand identity defense parts of this (and to be clear, I completely buy the part about not pretending you have a partnership w/Facebook, just like the fact that a site appears in Google’s index doesn’t mean you’re a Google partner – I’m taking about the rest), it strikes me as just petty to want to mess with users’ search engine optimization like this.

For Beaconfire, since we work in the web space and our Facebook page and our site serve similar outreach purposes, it’s not a big deal if they both share high rankings. But I simply can’t believe that A) most companies want their Facebook presence competing with their main site in search engines and B) any single company could really threaten Facebook’s search engine rank on the term "Facebook."

As a matter of fact, I googled "Facebook" to test this theory (question: who would Facebook like me to link to on "Googled?"), and didn’t come up with any pages within the first 100 results. As a matter of fact, the first time I came across anything user-generated was result number 76, a gentleman by the name of William Hartz, which goes here. The whole thing just seems a little weird (the policy, not William’s profile entry).

The last example comes from programmers here at Beaconfire, that the Facebook devs have a habit of changing the way FBML (Facebook’s very own language – with 69 million users, they have a higher population than France, so it makes sense to have their own language) works on a regular basis. One update caused a variety of AJAX functions to just stop working in IE7, causing a combination of general pandemonium and Morton’s fork: do we recode to fix this, costing us time and no guarantee against future changes, or weather it and hope it fixes itself, causing our app to be broken in the meantime.

We chose the second, and were vindicated when it was fixed the next day. But that’s no reason to think it won’t change again tomorrow. It’s like if the Fed decided to fight inflation by declaring $5 bills to be invalid (I believe that this was a part of the President’s stimulus package that got cut) – it’s difficult to code in a world of ever-changing rules.

So what does this mean for non-profits? Well, the two solid takeaways are: don’t send anything to a page you’re building that you don’t want to appear later and check how you link to your Facebook page (is it okay to not link it at all?). But the bigger takeaway is that you shouldn’t be surprised when Facebook makes a change that suddenly makes you reexamine some of your earlier choices. That’s not to say you shouldn’t have made those choices, just that this will affect future engagements. But there will probably never be a "stable" version, so there’s really no reason to wait before jumping in the Facebook pool. Overall, these changes are largely pretty minor and more annoyances than anything.

Lastly, just to restate – I’m a big fan of Facebook. It’s one of only two socnets where I have a "real" profile that I actually use to connect with friends, and I leave it open all day long. I also wholeheartedly think that it’s going to remain a big deal for businesses, non-profits, and the growth of the web, and that the good far outweighs the bad. I still think that non-profits should engage on Facebook, as I’ve highlighted before. It’s just that if you want to play the Facebook game, you should get your Calvinball mask on.

With all credit to the great Bill Watterson, whose final Calvin and Hobbes is still on my father’s fridge.