Facebook recently launched a new group called the Sneak Preview Group. Apparently, its a response to the backlash that occured last fall from the release of the news feed without pre-testing.
Its an interesting move by Facebook to allow users to see an…

I mean, this is nothing new…Google Labs, alpha testers, etc…Facebook has taken 3 years to roll something out like this, and so they spin it as some new innovative concept, but its really just some screenshots and PR.

Via the Facebook Blog, a “Sneak Preview” group has been setup to introduce upcoming design changes and features. Personally, the new design changes look great to me. The redesigned navigation sports an Inbox, replacing messages and shares. …

I have a transcript of a talk with Zuckerberg at my school, where I asked him a question and he was not able to justify facebook’s valuations or explain its business model : (

Okay, Facebook’s usage patterns are more sensible to advertisers and the service at least manages to be profitable and the tech costs for user reach are lower. But the demographic of users is MUCH more narrow. And at the end of the day most big COs pay for the # of registered users

- different levels between friend, family and contact (flickr got that right) instead of the stranger/network/friend/custom setting mess they have now
- don’t show last names if someone isn’t your friend
- prevent other people from tagging you in photos (I use a nickname rather than fullname on Facebook and I got the friggin idiot who started commenting on photos friends had posted with “hey, isn’t that real-name not nick-name?)
- prevent your Facebook profile from showing up in external search engines (they may do this, I know by default LinkedIn can show up)

A site redesign would be awesome as the privacy settings are all over the place and even if you know what you want to tweak it’s impossible to find half the time.

YouTube has some extremely interesting revenue models that can be implemented in line with the content they distribute. I’m not convinced the same is true of Facebook. Most of Facebook’s ad content is peripheral and useless.

because they want US users?

Being semi-protected by using uni email addresses, starts people off trusting the site. It’s a communication tool like chat, rather than a place for publishing like MySpace, so I don’t think there’s any real competition there. Lots of people use MySpace, DeviantArt, Facebook, YouTube as *they* find convenient, then cross-link their pages. Everything’s a click-apart on the web, you can pick&mix…

(Oh and Facebook’s design is incredible. Someone designed that as an application, not just a bunch of screens in Powerpoint. )

Facebook has a great future, and it’ll continue to grow at a ridiculous pace for quite sometime. It’s the usable social network, an antidote to the MySpace 404 – and it just keeps you coming back because of it. And unless you use Facebook with all your friends as I do, you just won’t get it.

If Facebook goes to Google, it’ll be interesting to see if it goes for enough that Zuckerberg doesn’t look like a jerk for not taking the billion-dollar offer.