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/pages/learn.php.

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.

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?

I wish I hadn’t waited so long to install the ClickToFlash plugin, it totally improves the web experience.  The idea is simple, all flash animations are paralyzed by default  To view flash, including videos like youtube, etc, you have to click to play.  A lot healthier for the laptop, no more CPU running at 100% nor mindless distractions when you’re trying to absorb valuable content.

Thanks to Pam for the heads up about this new app in the app store, WorkSnug.

WorkSnug uses Augmented Reality to connect mobile workers to the nearest and best places to work in the city. We’ve visited and rated hundreds of workspaces, assessing noise levels, power provision, community feel, even the quality of the coffee. London has been launched first. San Francisco, New York, Berlin, Madrid and several other cities are on the way in the coming weeks

Covered recently in Web Worker Daily, check out the video to see the app in action.

The Readability bookmarklet is by far the most useful bookmarklet I’ve used.  A must try for anyone who spends an inordinate amount of time reading stuff on the web

[first direct's] research has shown over 80% of Brits use social media once a month and 53% are now .

Wow, that is really significant.  I guess they mean 53% of the 80%, but still that’s a much higher figure than instinct would suggest.

We need this app on the iphone – it makes even augmented reality stuff look paltry:

Here’s some more interesting AR videos.

I have a lot of customers who are confused about the pros and cons of selecting web versus native development solution for the iPhone.  And now that Google has clearly bet the farm on all mobile development going web with HTML5, it’s good to hear some other opinions on the matter.

This article gives some valuable insight:

1. Offline Mode — The ability to continue to use an application when you are not connected to the Internet.
2. Findability — If you’re not in the App Store, people won’t be able to find your application.
3. Performance — Javascript on mobile is too slow to use for application development.
4. Device Attributes — The need to access things like the camera, gps and the accelerometer.
5. Monetization — The ease with which people can and will buy your application.

To find out more about using MySQL in iPhone development see the full details over at the eval-art website.

Drew Crawford has written an excellent article How to find an iPhone developer that describes some of the details involved in building an iPhone app and dispelling many common myths.

• All you have to do is find a developer
• No, your app is not “simple”
• The good developers are always busy
• But this five-star company on eLance offered to make my app for $10!
• How to find a developer
• If you don’t have $5k, walk away