Demian's Tech Blog

Recommended reading

• cfis : Rails’ Unusual Architecture – a peek under the hood of Rails
• The Evolution of Cell Phone Design Between 1983-2009 | Webdesigner Depot – I really want one of those Motorola DynaTAC 8000X

UPDATE: some of the info in this article may not be accurate with regards to the new privacy settings Facebook introduced in late May 2010, but much of it still is.

The subtitle for this post should be, “… and avoid wasting 2 hours!”. That’s how long it took me to discover and workaround the various Facebook UI quirks and setup the minimum privacy needed to make my business page viable.

Setting up a Facebook page for business breaks down into the following areas.

1. Where to click to create a Facebook Page

That’s the first challenge. The link you need is nowhere within the hundreds of links on your homepage. Nor is it anywhere within the hundreds of links of your profile page. In order to setup a new page you need to Google ‘facebook pages‘. Using Facebook’s search feature will not return any relevant results. The page you need is http://www.facebook.com/advertising/?pages.

2. Should I use Facebook for business?

Quite an obvious question, but do you really want your business colleagues and clients to have access to the same material (photos/comments/games/etc.) as you share with your friends?  Probably not! Luckily you can restrict what each friend sees and it’s possible, if you know how, to expose quite a benign level of information about yourself and still take advantage of the fantastic networking features Facebook offers.

If your business’ products and services are in any way aligned with web2.0 features like user-generated content, viral sharing and media enthusiasm, you definitely will see benefit from spreading the word about yourself with Facebook pages.

3. Can I create a separate Facebook Account for my pages(s)?

Well this would seem an obvious choice.  I tried it myself, after asking around it seemed like a good idea.  Turns out it’s wrong, not permitted and Facebook threatens to close down your legit account if they discover you’re doing this.  And the only way to discover you’re not allowed multiple accounts is to spend the significant amount of time required creating your new page, then trying to create your new user account and only at this point do you get the detailed error message and warning from Facebook that you’re treading in dangerous territories.

Then once you’ve created the page you want, and you’ve been told it must link to your legit account, you will discover it is not possible to do.  Facebook doesn’t allow you to!  Neither can you associate the orphan page with your existing account, nor can you login to your legit account, fetch the orphan page, and link to it.  No, you must delete the page, login to your legit account, and start from scratch following step #1 above.

4. How Do I Split my Facebook account for Personal and Private Use?

This is the fun part.  If you’ve clicked around anywhere in your account in the last 6 months you’ll have noticed the concept of lists, and the fact that you can add some of your friends to custom lists that you create.  Lists are an ambiguous metaphor for grouping, effectively that’s the purpose they serve.  And there is one default, built-in group/list you need to know about called limited profile.

When you select your Friends from the top navigation, then scan down the left hand menu and select Friends again (this brings up the list), you’ll notice there is a list option to the right of each friend.  The first item you can choose from the list is limited profile, which is starting to sound promising.  Limited profile corresponds to a privacy feature that you can setup, but that is not done for you by default.  Just adding a friend to limited profile will have no effect.  Surprise

To configure your limited profile settings you need to go to Settings in the top navigation, then choose Privacy Settings.  From the list that appears on the subsequent page you need to select Profile Settings.

Here you’ll find a typically huge list of options you may find daunting.  The concept is important.  Do you care if you business contacts have access to some of the personal data about you, ie, contact info, family relations, favourite films, etc?  No, probably not.  But what you really don’t want is for your professional colleagues to browse all those eyebrow-raising photos you’ve uploaded over the years, right?  So you scan down and locate the choices that look relevant: Photos and videos of me, and Photo Albums.  Photo Albums leads to another page with a huge list of every single photo album you’ve ever created, and apparently suggests you should apply privacy settings on a per-album basis.  Acck!  Photos and videos of me seems more straightforward: you can open the menu, select customise, and then in the Hide this from field you can type in limited profile (why do you have to type it in?  Isn’t it a default option?).

But attempting to do the same for each of your 23 photo albums has a more interesting effect, in programmer terms it’s what we call a silent failure.  Do the same operation, select Customise, then type in limited profile, and hit ok, and you’ll see the option is saved and appears to be enforcing the restriction on your album.  Login to another Facebook profile, if you have access, one of a friend you’ve set to limited profile, and you’ll be amazed to see the setting has no effect whatsoever.  Even more amazing, go back to your own profile, refresh the page, and the limited profile indicated on the album you just configured has disappeared!  That’s silent failure

Trial and error revealed that the workaround for this mysterious and frustrating usability error is that privacy settings cannot be effected on this particular privacy screen.  You need to go to another which does respond to user configuration.

Go to Settings again in the top menu, and then Application Settings.  Here, with any luck, you’ll see your Photos app in the list.  If not, try a different setting on filter combobox at the top of the screen, set to Recent apps by default.  Once your Photos app appears, select Edit Settings, then Edit Custom Settings.  Here is where you can apply the custom block against limited profile users, and if you set it here it will stick!

5. Using Facebook pages for business

With these settings in place you can rest assured your business contacts will only see the relevant information about you on Facebook, ie your limited profile and not your photos, and you’ll be free to continue sharing the usual personal stuff with your friends.

With the page in place there are many ways to spread the news about your business and/or products:

• use the Facebook badge and add it to your website, encouraging users to become fans
• use Facebook’s paid advertising program to show your profile as an ad to users who are most likely to respond to it
• add a link to your Facebook page in your email footer

The great feature about Facebook business pages is there is a real opportunity where your friends and their friends are likely to be interested in your products, and can spread the word on your behalf.

Here’s some tips on how to make your Facebook page successful.

Thanks for reading and feel free to check out my page for Seagull Systems.

Recommended reading

• Is an MBA a Plus or a Minus in the Startup World? – This article argues fairly convincingly that techies can seriously benefit from doing an MBA
• Yankee Group Blog » Blog Archive » Apple’s new record: the fastest product ramp to $1 billion – After 34 years of practice, Apple has mastered the art of making a successful tech device
• http://www.sandia.gov/~sjplimp/mapreduce.html – The open source implementation of MapReduce, got a few spare machines lying around?

Alan Perlis once said: “A language that doesn’t affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing”

Using the facial recognition API from face.com you can do the following, using only javascript:

• identify all faces within a photo
• detect whether a face is male or female
• whether the face is wearing glasses
• whether it is smiling

Each guess is accompanied with a probability score.

Check out this interactive widget which lets you submit any photo to the api (try your flickr account), and examine the returned data structure.

Low quality web development from massive brand names is one of my pet peeves.  For those not UK based, First Direct is the online branch of HSBC, one of the biggest banking brands on the planet.  Low quality banking sites is another peeve, HSBC has taken first place in this category for a number of years, I will post more on this subject at some point.

I’ve been a First Direct customer for around 10 years and while their service is better than average, their standards for quality are like many other banking sites, massively below average consumer sites and therefore falling way short of customer expectations.

Let’s take the example of bank email.  Ever since I first became a customer of First Direct their concept of email consisted of the  following 2 features:

• a flashing link on your accounts screen that would tell you if you had a new message
• the ability to click on the link, then you would be able to view the message ONE TIME ONLY

So if you ever wanted to track conversations with the bank (remember they don’t allow you to use regular email for security reasons) it was impossible.  Also impossible was seeing any message for a second time, so you’d better be sure that you dealt with all aspects of the message the ONE time you decided to click on it, because it would be lost to oblivion as far as the customer was concerned any time after you clicked on the ‘view email’ link.

Fast forward to the present: a few month ago First Direct finally allocated resources to make the email work in a slightly more user-friendly way.  Now you get an inbox, an outbox, and you can click more than once on each of your messages  - LO  AND BEHOLD! Web banking in 2010

But wait, check out the grab below, it seems the FD team  decided to use some kind of token in the message body, apparently to help them format message – but it seems its not always getting parsed!

I don’t know about you but when I see things like “Dear {firstname}” I am reminded of only the most incompetent, newbie spammers who learned about the Internet and Email yesterday.  How is it a multi-million pound banking goliath can make the same mistake?

When the apple is ripe but a mere breeze is all that’s required to dislodge the fruit …  I recently read this comment by Joel Spolsky and promptly quit Twitter, have felt undescribably better ever since:

Although I appreciate that many people find Twitter to be valuable, I find it a truly awful way to exchange thoughts and ideas. It creates a mentally stunted world in which the most complicated thought you can think is one sentence long. It’s a cacophony of people shouting their thoughts into the abyss without listening to what anyone else is saying. Logging on gives you a page full of little hand grenades: impossible-to-understand, context-free sentences that take five minutes of research to unravel and which then turn out to be stupid, irrelevant, or pertaining to the television series Battlestar Galactica. I would write an essay describing why Twitter gives me a headache and makes me fear for the future of humanity, but it doesn’t deserve more than 140 characters of explanation, and I’ve already spent 820.

This device can connect to your iPhone via Bluetooth, sending vital information such as physical activity, your pulse and other medical details to the app, which will then show you the information and store it for you to track it later.