Facebook | Dominik Mayer – Products, Asia, Productivity

Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg:

And so if you always start from the position of: “This is what I believe. I don’t expect you to believe it, I don’t think you have to believe it, I’m not saying it’s true” you can actually always communicate authentically.

‘cause if you walk in the room – and this gets worse as you get more senior: “Here’s the answer.” You’re not giving anyone else any room to say anything.

And if you walk in the room and say: “I believe this. For this reason. What do you believe?” If you share your truth in that language, you give people room to […] communicate authentically.

I invited two friends to facebook. They joined. And added my whole friend list. Now everyone’s asking me who they are. Annoying.

What I don’t understand: Why are so many people are accepting the request?

A friend’s wall says:

Unlike the link title suggests, there is no way to find out which kind of “special hug” she sent. Instead, you end up on a page where they want you to hug others yourself. And, of course, the “Skip” button doesn’t work.

I hate these applications.

Webware’s Rafe Needleman shares my aversion to some facebook apps. Let’s hope they’ll vanish somehow.

And it’s going on. facebook fights against spammy applications.

Webware has an article about a change in facebook’s platform policy. It now forbids applications to force users to invite others in order to get to desired results. Bad luck, color app.

The next step should be the introduction of a minimum period of time between installation and the possibility to invite others. You wouldn’t recommend a book or a movie without having seen it or at least knowing more about it that just the title, would you?

“Dominik has no time to be excited about Shanghai.” That was on Wednesday. Now the exams are over and I’m going to move out tomorrow. Still not much time, but there is room for a little excitement.

When will facebook finally disable the possibility to “invite” others to use applications, to obtrude your (still) friends with total rubish. Today, a friend talked me into installing “What Color Are You?”. As usual, I didn’t let it put anything in profile, menu, etc. and nope, I do not want to invite up to 20 friends per day (!).

Next page, nine multiple choice questions. Yes I would like to live in a New York Penthouse and I have no idea what I would do if I saw a friend of mine cheating on his or her boy- or girlfriend. As you see, talking is not an option:

• Walk away and pretend it never happened
• Stop it right away and tell their boyfriend/girlfriend
• Stop it right away and forget about it
• Blackmail them for life
• Join in the fun!

Eagerly, I clicked on the “What color are you?” button. But: No color. More friends:

I don’t know why there is a “Skip” button. In fact it doesn’t fulfill any function. You cannot be a color without spamming anyone. I rather be colorless. Application removed.

I mentioned before that I don’t appreciate the behavior of many facebook applications. A good example are all these walls. Fun, Advanced, Super, Giga, Mega, Monster Wall. No one can tell me they were made for the user. The only reason they’re still out there is because they spam around like hell.

While skyping with a friend we both checked out his facebook profile and I asked him about an item in his Mini-Feed. A mutual friend sent him something that looked like a blond girl:

We clicked on it and it was… nothing. Niente. Nada. Nichts:

But the fun continued. After clicking on the link I was forced to install Super Wall and found myself on a page with a dozen postcard images. I clicked next without selecting anything and got to another page where the application asked me to chose the friends I wanted to spam. I clicked on “Skip”, was sent back to the wall and found a message. A message I had sent. At least that’s what it says:

Seems like all my friends got it… Arrrg. I hate spammers and now that crap made me seem like one. :x

And I got an empty post, too. From my friend, who also said he didn’t send it. Perhaps they’ll go broke one day. In the meantime, just it.

Update: I hope this will help:

Is it because of this blog or why do I get Swedish facebook ads now?

À propos ads. I don’t know if it’s the same in Germany, it never caught my eye, but Stockholm seems to be flooded with the same couple of ads over and over. Some popular examples:

Safe an Alien developer Roy Man wrote that my download problems are caused by “problems with image uploads” on Ubuntu. According to him the matter will be fixed in the next version.

Messages from the facebook news feed:

xy has sent a new message yz sent a new graffiti xy and xz have received a new message

Who on earth wants to know that? It’s just selfish touting, trying to force the user into installing useless applications. As unnerving as these “invite your friends” pages used by those that can’t convince.

Sure, Safe An Alien is a rather useless application, but I like the concept and the aliens look nice. What I don’t like is the fact that, so far, it has been impossible to download my alien. And I’ve been trying it for over a month now. The only thing I get is a magenta box saying:

Generating your wallpaper! it may take a few seconds…

These picture sites seem not to like me.