Facebook recently changed its design to “New Facebook”. This is what many employees of Facebook are facing now.

Don’t poke granny’s boyfriend, BEE-ATCH!

AFTER A childhood of being beaten up in the playground, people with daft names are now having their Facebook book accounts suspended.

The anti-social networking site is suspending the owners of strange names without warning and holding personal information to ransom until you show them a government-issued ID.

Sydney’s Elmo Keep tried to log in to her account and was told she was banned for life for violating the site’s terms of use. Facebook believed she was not using her real names.

According to AP other names who have been banned include US political blogger Jon Swift, Japanese author Hiroko Yoda, British MP Steve Webb, Australian graphic designer Beta Yee, and New Zealander Rowena Gay. If you have a surname that includes ” podcast”, “beaver”, “jelly”, “beer” and “duck” you could also be banned.

Unfortunately for Facebook, Ms Keep is a hack who slags off popular beat combos for a living and is not likely to stay quiet. Apparently she relies on the site as her primary way of keeping in touch with friends and as a way of soliciting freelance writing work.

She is also an online journalism lecturer at the University of Technology, Sydney, and consulting for businesses on how they can incorporate social networking into their business strategy so she knows a bit about the Inter web.

She felt like her world had been ripped from under her, she claimed. People had noticed she had gone from Facebook and thought she had died.

After finding out the Facebook email address, which was so difficult required black magic and talking to the dead, Keep was told she had been banned for ’security reasons’.

In other words, the site feared she might poke someone too hard and there would be a fatality. Terrorist poking is Al Qaeda’s latest evil trick. They asked her to prove her identity with a government approved ID which would prove that she is not a member of a terror poking cell.

Keep had her account reinstated after she sent the site copies of her passport and driver’s license.

Ironically Facebook’s rules mean that people with unusual names are forced to sign up with fake names to avoid being banned.

This happens in real life. A bloke in my school changed his name from Bad cock to Bad co, ironically after he left the school where he was ribbed over the moniker. Makes us wonder whether that nice US press officer Wendy Wank changed her name after her experiences with the newsroom of Network News a while back. She has not come sniffing about the offices of the INQ. Probably has more sense.

If you’re not a Facebook user, God bless your merry little soul (pretending that God exists) and please be off on your merry way before you get sucked into the muddy whirpool of senselessness.

Because, today, I am on a crusade to knock some sense into Facebook users who have Super Wall or FunWall or both (duh, people!) installed in their Facebook accounts.

Because — brace yourself now for the revelation of the century — neither of the walls are even remotely super or fun.

Oooooh… noooo! You don’t say!

Honestly, they’re horrendous misuses of Internet real estate. I cannot understand why people don’t see it.

There is nothing super or fun about:

1. Junk mail, chain letters and forwarded rubbish.
2. Having multiple copies of the same rubbish on your profile.
3. Allowing people to advertise their services for free on your profile.

What is the matter with people?

Don’t you ever get annoyed having to scroll down endlessly just to try to see at least something that’s of interest?? Why would you want such junk on your Facebook profile? I really don’t get it.

who has a crush on u?…

man this is creepy its called mind reader. send this to every1 on ur list and then press F8 and ur crushes name will appear on ur screen**

Seriously!!!

I dearly want to examine the minds of people who read this and think, “Oh, wow! I’m gonna try this now!”

…

“Hey! It doesn’t work! How fun! I think my friends will love it! I’m going to forward this to everyone because I had so much fun trying it out and seeing it not working!”

Strangle me with a wet rag.

People who install either or both walls, why? How does it enrich your life to have repeated copies of spam on your Facebook profile? How does it enrich the life of friends who are visiting your Facebook profile?

I mean, what benefit does it give?

Does it impress the girls (or the boys) who are viewing your profile? No.

Does it make you more intelligent? No.

Does it save a starving child in Ethiopia? No.

Does it make your Facebook profile look like a landmine about to go off? Yes.

People who forward forwards to other people’s walls, why? Do you think your friend reads/watches them? Will your friend love you for sending them? Do you even realise that the “friend” you’re sending this chain letter to already has three of the exact same chain letter on his wall?

People who create those damned rubbish forwards, especially chain letters, WHY? Chain letters are so last millennium. You’re not going to get a Nobel prize for it and it’s not going to make people worship you and kiss your feet because they passed on your stupid chain letter to 50 people in their address book and, as a result, miraculously solved all their life problems and won a date with Angelina Jolie.

Hello??

The applications are not bad, per se. But people misusing them is bad.

I installed both when I first signed up with Facebook because I thought it was pretty cool being able to draw pictures and post videos on someone else’s profile. One could get really creative and have some fun with it.

But I believe in doing things in a sincere and personal way. If not, there is no point in doing anything, is there? Why waste time doing things just for the sake of doing things? So I drew pictures myself and typed nice, personal messages to brighten a friend’s day.

But I never got anything like that on my walls in return. All I got were impersonal forwards from people who received forwards themselves and decided to send it on to everyone else on their friends list.

I deleted both walls because it wasn’t adding discernable value to my Facebook profile.

I know I can stop visiting people’s profiles or even stop visiting Facebook altogether if the walls bother me all that much.

But that isn’t quite the point. The point is that it irks me that people are perpetuating a useless custom and contributing more rubbish to an already rubbish society of thoughtless, mindless puppets.

So, people, please. Grow a brain and think.

My mother taught me to use the word “hate” as little as possible. Being young, I didn’t understand why, and so in typical childish rebellion I “hated” everything. I hated green food, I hated my fourth grade teacher and I hated the way I was told to not hate things. Eventually, I grew up,
and I stopped saying I hated everything.

Then I signed onto Facebook, and with the naivety of a 4-year-old, I mindlessly checked a little box that signed me up as a commodity. I willingly agreed to commercialize my friendships, and I did it with a smile on my face. One year later I can only smile at how stupid I was, and say it once, twice, three times, a sucker: “I hate Facebook, I hate Facebook….and I hate Facebook”. Indeed, I say it freely and meaningfully, “I hate Facebook”, and so should you. Here’s why:

1-Reason I Hate Facebook: Because it’s a Virtual Tabloid

For any of you that have had to make a public break-up on Facebook, I’m sure you’ understand why I hate Facebook. Apparently, when you no longer want to be “in a relationship”, everybody, and I mean everybody- the boy you knew in kindergarten, your grandmother, your yoga teacher- gets to find out about it on the mini-feed!

The mini-feed is basically the common denominator of most trashy tabloids, it’s full of scandal, drunken pictures from last night’s party, and banal information (status updates, relationship changes) about people you barley know. It’s so ridiculously trivial that you may as well go read the National Enquirer with your grandmother. And if you value your privacy AT ALL, this is the number one reason to hate Facebook: because your entire life is documented for the entirety of your 300 “friends” to know.

2-Reason I Hate Facebook: Demand Generation Marketing Schemes

Personally, this tops the list for why I hate Facebook. As you may know, companies like Google work to help consumers get the products they are purposefully looking for, which is called “demand fulfillment”. Facebook, however, is in the market to get people
to buy products they aren’t really looking for. And they are mighty sneaky about it. Making profits from our need to be “individuals”, they take the information you fill out in your profile (things like your interests, political and religious beliefs, favorite books, movies, bands, and TV shows) and sell it to companies that then send you advertisements tailored to your demographic.

Another reason I hate Facebook’s marketing is because of it’s partnerships with major online retailers. Every time you buy a widget on a partner’s site, all of your Facebook friends find out. This is tantamount to McDonald’s notifying every person you know every time you buy a burger. Not cool.

3-Reason I Hate Facebook: Narcissism, or “Individuality”

I’ll admit, I’ve spent many a wasted hours meticulously filling out random profiles in such a way as to reflect my “individuality”. You know what I’m talking about. I see it all the time- elaborate, finely detailed descriptions of oneself that are cute/funny/interesting yet oozing with the sort of contrived crap you’d find in the “Personals” section of a newspaper. It’s ridiculous. I mean, do you really know anyone who introduces themselves with ” Hi, I a lost wanderer of this universe who is interested in the abstraction of beauty and words, loves the sound of rain and spends full days contemplating the ubiquity of nature and man”? Come on.

With the advent of Photoshop and other “image enhancing” software, not only do we pre-formulate who we are, we pre-formulate what we look like. It’s no wonder the Internet, and places like Facebook, are a virtual breeding ground for narcissism cleverly disguised in a cloud of “Individuality”. What’s worse, we do it all to one-up people we barley know, let alone those we actually care about. Facebook, it seems, is a sepia-toned high school reunion masquerading around as a place to “re-connect” in a “real” way. Thanks, but I’ll take the real thing over the pix-elated version any day.

4-Reason I Hate Facebook: Real Human Interaction VS. Digitalized Relationships

On an emotional level, this is probably why I hate Facebook. I am an 80’s kid, so I know both sides of the whole pre/post 1998 versions of human interaction. I remember a time when walking over to a friends house and asking them to come out was an acceptable way to iniate human
interaction, but I also actively participate in the now more “normal, convenient, and efficient” way of doing it. That is, via text, fax, email, msn, or social websites such as Facebook. However, at some point I realized that this life is short, it’s sweet, and it’s worth me making the effort to call up my best friend. It’s also worth spending the time to go outdoors, hang out with family, and work on constructive passions and goals rather than constantly updating my status on Facebook.

It sounds extreme, but a recent poll conducted by Harvard found that most university students will have spent over 4 weeks of their life over the course of a four-years. Another study by FaberNovel Consulting estimated that most members of Facebook spend 20 minutes a day on Facebook- which works out to roughly three days a year, and two weeks every five years. Yet another study, this time by Australian Law Firm Deacons, showed that half of 700 people polled would refuse a job if Facebook was unavailable to them.

These are just a few of the myriad of reasons I decided to eliminated Facebook from my life. I still use MySpace, and I still use the computer, but I’ve found that since cutting out Facebook, I’ve had much more time to spend on the things I love. So I’ll say it again: I hate Facebook, I hate Facebook, I hate Facebook. And although my mother always told me that hate begets hate, I think in this case she’d be proud.

Joyce Park, co-founder and CTO of Renkoo (developer of Booze Mail), says all is not well in Facebook Developer Land.

Park complains that many application developers get ahead despite the fact that they violate Facebook’s terms of service.

“So far, [Facebook has] built a system where you can only win by cheating,” Park said at a panel discussion at Web 2.0 Expo, a conference in San Francisco. “They don’t enforce their policies clearly, transparently or consistently . . . And when you try to talk about it with them, they give you this, ‘We’re young, we’re figuring it out’ line, but this is business.”

Although Park was reluctant to name names, she says she’s seen quite a few applications that have copied parts of social graphs to their servers.

And on another note, she thinks a lot of the ads on Facebook are “skanky.”

“They’re these cheesy sexyish ads . . . And who does that help?”

VERY FUNNY SONG FOR THE PEOPLE THAT HATE FACEBOOK AND ABOUT FACEBOOK.

Facebook is so big now - over 175 million members - that even an interface change may throw many of the less technical users completely off-guard. And from what we’ve heard, non-geeks really do find the new design more difficult to use. The new site, particularly the activity feeds on member profiles, really do look different. The blurring between status messages and wall posts doesn’t make much sense in my opinion. I have gathered few bitter but truthful comments given by Facebook users who were crazy earlier but now they are just hating it for some reason.

1. I enjoyed using facebook for the first three months and now I have lost interest and don’t do updates and all of that nonsense because I am too busy. I can sense hostility from fellow facebook devotees. How dare you? Do you think you are too good for facebook?? Once my coworkers and bosses starting sending friend requests, you have to say yes and it all pretty much ends being able to “express” yourself freely. I would rather say nothing than post a status report about how I am doing laundry. News flash: no one cares.

2. I quit my job because i posted on my facebook that “i had a crappy day at work” and a nosy neighbor told my boss. i deactivated the same day. it was wonderful all through college but 500 “friends” became a detriment and not a positive thing.

3. I find these virtual reality sites to be somewhat sophmoric and endlessly boring. No matter how much these electronic cave dwellers, write on each other’s walls,these sites do not in my opinion, take the place of real time,real face contact with other humans. While these sites may be useful for handicapped or shut in’s, most of the rest of the users would benefit greatly I think, by honing up their social skills, and get out of those electronic caves.

4. I completely agree with John in Boston. I am also 28, and I can’t understand the hype with Facebook. I created an account solely so I could see some pictures my brother uploaded to his site, intentionally leaving my last name off my profile so people would be less likely to find me in a search. It has been useful in that I have reconnected with one friend who I genuinely did miss from high school, but now I also get friend invites from people who were at best slightly more than acquaintances. I don’t get to see and speak with my REAL friends nearly often enough — why on earth would I want to be fake online friends with people I hardly know just because we went to the same high school? I have better things to do with my time.

5. I joined Facebook for the same reason I joined Myspace, just to see what all the hype was about. It’s a lame product. I really don’t care to read the minute details of every waking thought my friends have, so I almost never check either account. I have better things to do with my time, like answering CNN opinion polls.

6. I’m pretty sure my wife is going to leave me…for Facebook.

7. I joined Facebook because a couple of months back a friend of mine who has been a member for some time found an old friend from high school who I have been looking for. Well I only have…..40 friends (not 400) and I don’t update anything. I ignore most requests. I don’t feel the need to let people know what I’m doing 24/7. It’s my private life. With what people put on FB, they still wonder about identity theft. If my friends want to know what I’m up to, send me email or call me.#

8. Facebook is pointless. It’s for the weak. If you want to stay in contact with someone, get off your couch and go see them or pick up the phone and call them. It’s really only for the people you want to keep tabs on and keep at an arm’s distance too. It’s basically just a tool for voyeurs without any semblance of life.

9. I’m on Facebook, but only so much as I’ve started a page and I never update it. I occasionally get emails or friend requests, but realized they’re only from people that I haven’t talked to in 10 years because I don’t want to! I have 2 emails and 5 friend requests I’ve never responded to. The only thing I’ve done that’s changed the look of my Facebook page is add in the StumbleUpon plugin - Stumble lets me go places, learn things, and see things I never knew existed, and I find it much more socially-oriented. Facebook could disappear overnight (how about tonight?) and it wouldn’t bother me a bit. Basically, it acts as a place-holder… it’s there incase anyone wonders if I’m still alive.

10. My problem with facebook is that its ultimately kind of pointless. The only things I think are useful is coming in contact with people you haven’t talked to in a while and sharing pictures. The “high school buddy” thing is a one shot deal. Once you’re back in contact, you’re done. Frankly, it wears on you. I’ve had one date as a result of that (from myspace, no less), which resulted in a little making out at the end, and that was it. Recently a few people re-connected with me, and I’ll be honest. I could take or leave most of them. Sharing pictures? OK, works pretty good, but otherwise, its not blowing me away.

If you have tons of time and want to do random crap that nobody cares about, great. Movie trivia? Super poke? Thanks. I have a job and need to do stuff during the day.

Today I had a professional organizer come in to sort out my monthly bills and filing system. Why doesn’t that site get 9 to 10 figure development funding? That’s something you’d use all the time. Facebook, while slick, was designed for college kids to kill time online, and I think unless there’s something real going on there, people will get sick of it.

Also, by the way. The layout is cluttered and confusing.

Managing an office and workforce is always a challenge especially now a days when Facebook and other social networking sites has raised the chances of sticky new situations in offices.

Imagine that when you walked into office, you encountered with not only your colleagues and co-workers but also your spouse, your college drinking buddies, your Senior Prom date, and, off in a corner, your adolescent son and may be possible your ex-managers, busy in telling your boss that how many hours daily you spend playing GTA.

Even if you are careful in posting work-related news in your facebook status and comments on others’ walls. One buddy writing “Yo, how did the layoffs go down?” on your wall is enough to cause havoc in your office particularly if layoff day hasn’t yet happened.

1 - Too Many Friends
Its been reported that young people are more open to accepting friends request compare to older colleagues who are not keen in revealing their secrets.

Michael Argast, director of Global Sales Engineering at security vendor Sophos Plc said, “Younger people are using Facebook on a quasi-professional basis to build stronger relationships with people. That means they’re sharing a lot of information with a lot of people on a regular basis.”

Imagine you’ve just had an innocent lunch with a former co-worker who works in competitor company and discussed joining her fantasy baseball league. You come back to find a post on your wall that reads, “Great talking to you, and I’ll be sure to let you know if there are any openings.” What kind of rumors will that start among your staff and colleagues?

2 - Information Travel Too Far
The currency of Facebook is the information that friends choose to share with one another — status updates, wall posts, external Web links, photos, videos, survey results, application feeds, and comments on all of the above. The unending flow of data from friends and supposed friends can easily get out of hand.

Say a Facebook user posts a funny picture of a cat. If one of her friends your employee, as it turns out comments “LOL,” there’s no harm done. But what if your employee instead writes, “thanks. i really needed a laugh this morning everyone here is freaking cuz our servers are down.” Suddenly lots of people she may not know, and you certainly don’t, are now aware of your company’s technical difficulties, all in lightning-quick Internet time.

3 - Facebook can blur the line between Boss and Employees
Facebook can be a swamp for boss and employee alike as everything from romantic entanglements and political views to over-sharing about recreational substance use makes its way from the digital world to the physical office.

If your top programmer announces on Facebook that she’s pregnant, but neglects to tell you in real life, is this information you now “know” for planning purposes or not? If a long-time contract programmer shares in his status update that he just got a contract to write a book, are you out of line in asking if he still has time for your projects?

4 - Facebook photos and apps can be very dangerous
Even if you and your employees are careful not to share sensitive information in wall posts and status updates, it’s still easy to inadvertently spill the beans. The Internet is chock-a-block with applications that bring data into Facebook from outside sources again, often without the user’s realization.

As just one example, There’s a way to capture Delicious bookmarks to Facebook so that everything you bookmark gets posted to your feed. If your research team is using Delicious to bookmark source pages and haven’t checked their privacy settings, their work may be getting propagated on Facebook, giving friends and potentially competitors alike a pretty good idea of what your company’s next big idea is going to be.

Many people will argue that instead of banning Facebook in office you should train your staff. My question is can you do that? is it possible?