Inside Facebook

Facebook users may now display that they have an “Expected: Child” within the family section of their profile beneath their profile picture. The option is available in the Friends & Family section of the profile editor, and users may also set a due date and name for their unborn child, though no actual profile or Page is created for the child.

However, in what appears to be a glitch, users are able to set an existing Facebook friend as their expected child. This doesn’t make any sense because Facebook’s terms of service dictate that all users must be at least 13 years of age.

Update 8/4/2011: This glitch has been fixed and users can no longer select a friend as their expected child

Aside from the glitch, which will likely be corrected, the ability to list an expected child should help users more accurately express their identity, and it may reduce the frequency of parents breaking the rules to create profiles for their unborn children.

Facebook added the ability for users to prominently list their family members in their profile as part of the December 2010 profile redesign. These relationships, as well as featured friend lists, appear in a column beneath a user’s profile picture. The option can help users show their friends who is important in their life. This freedom of self-expression makes allows Facebook to offer a more accurate representation of themselves, encouraging users to invest time building their network and manicuring their profile.

With similar intentions, in February Facebook began allowing users to list their relationship status as “in a civil union” or “in a domestic partnership”. This was helpful for those in less common forms of partnerships as well as gay couples who live in places that don’t permit gay marriage, and could be interpreted as a victory for civil rights.

How to Add an Expected Child

Now, alongside the option to list a Facebook friend as one’s brother, cousin, or other family member, users can add list an expected child. To do so, users visit their profile, click “Edit Profile”, enter the Family & Friends tab, and under Family select to “Add another family member”. They can then select “Expected: Child” from the drop down, and then choose to enter a due date and name.

A blank profile picture labeled “Expected: Child” along with the name and due date if applicable are then shown in the Family section of the user’s profile. Unlike other listed family members, clicking the expected child’s panel just reload’s the parent’s profile. Listing an expected child also generates an activity feed story on the parent’s wall and the news feed of their friends.

Previously, parents on Facebook often used profile pictures of ultrasound scans, as well as status updates to announce they were expecting a child, but there wasn’t a good way to persistently display this information without making it the focus of one’s profile. In some cases, parents would create a profile for their unborn child, which violates Facebook’s terms of service, or alternatively create an official Page for them. This new option lets users to prominently display the momentous news of having a baby on the way without creating a separate presence for the child.

The Now-Fixed Friend as Expected Child Glitch

Users could temporarily subvert the expected child option, though, until Facebook fixed the glitch. If users set a friend as another type of family member, then saved, and then went back and edited their family relationship type to “Expected: Child”, that friend’s name, but not their picture, was displayed in the user’s profile as their expected child. The friend received a family relationship request, which if accepted caused a link to their profile and their picture to appear in the family section of the profile of their “parent”.

Users may have been able to take advantage of this glitch for a little practical joking, but Facebook disabled the option to list friends as expected children a few days after this article was originally published, leaving only the intended use case.

Earlier this week, Microsoft’s search engine Bing significantly deepened its Instant Personalization integration with Facebook. It launched several new social features for its web search, shopping, travel, and toolbar products; and it began triggering the display of social content much more frequently.

By improving result quality with both the data of a user’s friends and the Facebook user base at large, Bing is positioning itself as the search engine of choice for when people need social reassurance to make a decision.

We sat down with the Director of Bing, Stefan Weitz to ask him a few questions about the motives behind the update. We’ll follow that with an in-depth look at the product changes.

Q&A on Social as the Future of Ecommerce Search

Inside Facebook: Why is Bing pushing to get social integrations so deep into decision-based search?

Stefan Weitz, Director of Bing: Decision search is moving from exploration to active conversation because 80% of people delay making a purchase online until they can talk to a friend.

Core search stuff has been taken care of by intelligent organization. But how do people sort through all the links and make a decision? You do all the research, but at the last minute you walk away from the purchase process because you’re not convinced until you get a social recommendation.

When you want to tap into that info you have to go to a bunch of different places. Whether it’s just Facebook that solves that problem, or if it’s Quora and other sites, behavior is already moving in that direction (of seeking advice online rather than offline). But no one does a good job of pulling it all together into search.

IF: What has changed that’s made this possible but also necessary?

SW: Stuff that was previosuly in your brain is now in a format that machines can read. Friend connections are a new way of thinking about ranking search.

Meanwhile, humans are creating 5 billion gigabytes of data every two days, and machines are losing their ability to categorize it all. How can PageRank handle a Yfrog image? It probably doesn’t have a title, or caption, or anything else that could help index it. But if a friend Likes it, that’s important.

IF: Why is the social content appearing more frequently now?

SW: Honestly, it was light before. You didn’t see much of it.  Now it’s gone up a ton, you’ll see it a lot more. It triggers more because we have higher coverage [across products]. Its more than just Likes now. We think of people as having characteristics and attributes, not just actions. Now we’re considering what other meta data can we use that people will give us access to so we can continue to personalize search.

Improvements to Bing’s Existing Facebook Integration

Bing began its Facebook integration by indexing Page updates and publicly visible links posted by users in June 2010. In October of that year, it partnered with Facebook to offer Instant Personalization of Bing search results so users could could see Likes by friends of search result objects, and their network connections to Facebook users found through a name search.

However, the search result Likes were displayed very infrequently, so some hardly noticed the change. Microsoft also released the Bing Bar toolbar, which allowed users to view the Facebook news feed and their notification from any tab, but it didn’t offer an easy way to share web pages and links copied into its Facebook publisher weren’t formatted as they are on Facebook.com.

Bing has now fixed these issues and greatly expanded the functionality of its Facebook integration. As Weitz said, social content now appears in search results much more frequently. Meanwhile, the Bing Bar now has a “Universal Like Button” — a one click way to share the currently viewed webpage to the news feed with the same rich story formatting as if one had pasted the link into the Facebook.com publisher.

Search With More Social Content

Along with more frequently showing you Likes by friends of things represented in top search results, Bing now actually personalizes the rank of results based on these Likes. Weitz tells us that “based on the actions of friends, results that would be on page two or three are pulled onto page one.” Even if no friends have Liked a result, in some cases it will display the total number of Facebook users that have Liked it, helping users make decisions about topics outside the expertise of their network.

In one of the most useful new additions to Bing, frequently Liked webpages from within popular websites will appear beside their Like count underneath a result, allowing users to sift through today’s content heavy blogs and community sites. For instance, articles from a news site or recipes from a cooking site that have been Liked by friends or many other users are now much easier to discover.

Related updates from Facebook Pages now appear in general search instead of being isolated in the dedicated “Social” search tab. As Pages become a sort of news ticker and deals distribution platform for many brands, Page updates are becoming valuable content to surface.

Bing Augments People,Travel, and Shopping Search With Friend Profile Characteristics and Sharing Options

While before users could search for people through Bing, the results were no more helpful in finding the right “Bob Smith” than Facebook’s own search engine. Now people search results display profile data visible to the searcher, such as current city, workplace, and education history if its public or is to visible to “friends of friends” and they have a friend in common.

Similarly, Bing Travel searches will display the friends that live or previously lived in a city that’s been searched for. In an innovative use of the ability for owners of Like buttons to publish news feed updates to those that click them, users who Like flight results between two cities will receive feed stories about about deals on those flights. Users can also share Travel Wish Lists with friends. Bing Shopping has also rolled out it’s previously announced shareable product comparisons so users can seek advice from friends.

Where Social Search Can Go From Here

Bing’s latest social additions could make it a sensible tool for people inquiring about things outside their comfort zone. If I don’t know anything about LCD TVs, but want to buy one, Bing could help me discover reputable brands and popular sources of tech hardware reviews, or share the choices I’m comparing with my friends.

There’s still more to do, though. For instance, I might see that one friend Likes one tech hardware review blog, and another friend Likes a different blog. Perhaps Bing or another social search engine could analyze the full set of Likes of those friends, and determine if one is an expert on technology because they’ve Liked several other tech brands or publications. This friend’s Like could then be weighted more heavily or shown more prominently.

There’s also the question of those who really don’t want a social search experience. Now, even if a Bing user doesn’t have a Facebook account they’ll still see anonymized data about the Likes of the general Facebook user base. By providing an option to completely opt out of seeing Facebook data in search results, Bing could continue aggressively integrating social data without alienating those who don’t believe in the wisdom of the crowd.

Now when users go to hide an automatically generated Recent Activity post from the wall of their profile, they’ll have the option to “Hide all” current and future stories of that type. For instance, users could choose to never show Recent Activity stories when they add someone as a friend, RSVP to an Event, comment on a photo, or Like a Page. Users can unhide story types if they reconsider via the profile story settings manager.

The new “hide all” option will allow users to freely take action around the site without announcing these activities or manually hiding the stories they produce. This will be especially useful for power users who might leave dozens of comments or Like dozens of Pages at a time

Facebook has made several other changes to the Recent Activity section of the profile wall over the last few months. It tested and then implemented text excerpts for comment activity stories, began showing a “became friends after attending [Event]” story, and tested showing Page Likes as rich, full news feed stories before reverting them to simple, one-line Recent Activity stories.

To use the new “Hide all” option, users can click the ‘x’ next to a Recent Activity feed story they don’t want shown on their profile wall. This will reveal the standard option to remove just that post, as well as one to “Hide all [of that story type]“. If clicked, the “Hide all” option reveals a confirmation prompt explaining that all stories of that type will no long appear in Recent Activity.

If users click the “Edit Options” link at the end of the prompt or at the bottom of their profile wall, they’re shown the “Edit your profile story settings” manager, allowing them to return previously hidden story types to their wall. Note that friends will still be able to see a user’s activity where it took place — the “hide all” option merely prevents a link to that activity from appearing on a user’s profile. Only users can take advantage of this options — Pages only have the ability to remove individual Recent Activity stories, not hide them in the future.

As well as enabling users to secretly engage with content on the site over time, the new option facilitates bursts of certain types of activity. For instance, a user could answer a slew of Facebook Questions, update their profile by Liking all of their new favorite bands, or leave a multitude of comments on a new photo album of a best friend. It can also help users preemptively scrub their profile of Recent Activity stories that might get them in trouble, such as commenting on a photo of an ex-girlfriend, or posting identical birthday greetings to multiple friends.

By enabling this option, Facebook increases flexibility in site usage for its most engaged or sensitive users. This means they can interact as much as they want with whoever they want without broadcasting their habits, which for may have been inhibiting activity for some. Brand marketers might not be too happy about the new option though, as the Recent Activity stories published when users Like a Page or comment on a Page’s wall can help convert their friends into fans.

Update: To be clear, this only hides stories from the Recent Activity section of a user’s wall. News feed stories about actions that have been hidden using this feature still appear to friends.

[Thanks to Brittany Darwell and Lionel Bonnaz for the tip]

When users view the profiles of their friends, they’ll now see an online status indicator next to that friend’s name. Similar to the Facebook Chat panel, a green dot means the user is actively online, a grey crescent moon means they’re online but idle, and an empty grey circle means they’re offline or have turned off Chat. Showing the online statuses of friends so prominently on profiles will remind users of the option to Chat, increasing usage of a feature that can boost time-on-site.

Facebook has experimented with where to display online status on the profile. At different times, it has has shown a link to initiate a Chat beneath the profile picture, and an online status indicator in the top right corner of the profile. Most recently prior to the current design, users would see a gray Chat button in to right of the profile.

Now the different online status indicator icons appear next to a friend’s name, or the name of the profile tab a user is currently viewing. When hovered over, icons reveal text labels denoting their meaning.

Facebook’s Messages product formats direct communication between users as Chat if a recipient is online, and as a Message if the recipient is offline. The online status indicator no longer signals what medium the sender should use, as this is irrelevant, and instead it signals through which medium will communication be received. In this case, the indicator will help inform senders whether or not they should expect an immediate response.

However, this same information is implicitly conveyed if a user clicks to send a Message to an available friend and is directed to the Chat window, or tries to Chat an unavailable friend and is notified that their Chat will be delivered to the recipient’s Message inbox.

Therefore, the prominent placement of the online status indicator is probably an attempt on Facebook’s part to increase the number of Chats and Messages sent. Now when a user clicks through to a friend’s profile from a photo or news feed update, they’ll immediately be shown whether they can instantly communicate with that friend. In this way, the green icon serves as an invitation to Chat.

Facebook only launched Chat in 2008, years after Gmail, MSN, and AOL established themselves as instant message platforms. Until mid 2010, there were significant stability issues with Chat that left a negative public impression that the feature is still trying to recover from. The move of the online status indicator may be Facebook’s announcement that Chat is ready to become a more central part of the service’s experience, and that users shouldn’t forget about it.

Last week, Facebook released a tool allowing users who had created a personal profile for a business venture to convert that profile into a Page and change their friends into fans. However, some users didn’t fully understand the consequences of conversion while others had their profile deleted but no new Page created due to a technical issue. To help repair the damages from these issues, Facebook has created a Profile to Business Page Migration Appeal that users can fill out to apply to have the conversion reversed and their profile restored.

This quick answer to complaints and horror stories should help Facebook mitigate the backlash stemming from its troubled attempt to provide the conversion tool users had requested for years.

Text on the appeal page explains:

“Profile to business Page migrations are meant for profiles that do not represent a person. If you have accidentally migrated your profile to a Page, you can submit your request for a reversal. Please keep in mind that we will remove your business Page if your profile is restored. We may reject any appeals that we deem to be inappropriate. Further, we may not reply to all submitted appeals.”

Though this says the appeals process is for accidental conversions, users whose conversions were interrupted and never finished, possibly due a severe strain on the Facebook API at the time, may also be eligible for a conversion reversal. Facebook temporarily disabled the feature over the weekend while the API issue was being fixed

While Facebook clearly explained how the process worked in a warning on the tool and a series of Help Center article, we received reports of people assuming they could reverse the conversion themselves, or that their new business account would have the same capabilities as a standard profile. Some other unforseen issues, such as the inability to re-register with any email addresses or mobile phone numbers connected to a user’s old profile, may have led some users to wish they could reverse the conversion.

Facebook has been working to erase any perception that it doesn’t care about users — a sentiment that developed during several crises around changes to its privacy controls and before that Beacon, which syndicated user behavior offsite to the news feed. It has since become more receptive to concerns, adding a requested unmerge option to merged Pages/Places, returning the Most Recent reverse-chronological feed to Page walls, and suspending the ability of applications to request user phone numbers and home addresses.

The Profile to Business Page Migration Appeal process is another example of Facebook’s efforts to keep users, and especially Page admins who buy ads purchases, happy with the social network. Rather than stifle innovation, Facebook has chosen a riskier but ultimately more progressive stance of iterating quickly and occasionally making mistakes, but hurrying to fix them when necessary.

Reppler is a new online reputation management tool that scans a user’s Facebook profile for objectionable content, privacy leaks, and security threats. The free tool can help users, especially young adults in the job market, ensure that their Facebook profiles don’t jeopardize their future prospects.

This first iteration of Reppler has some deficiencies, most notably that it only analyzes a user’s 100 latest posts. However, more comprehensive scanning may be available in later releases, and a premium tier of the service that is currently in development could offer historical analysis, custom flagging and more.

Other online reputation management services such as Reputation.com (formerly Reputation Defender) and LifeLock provide more professional and enterprise level identity and business intelligence theft prevention. Reppler is aimed more squarely towards younger users who may exhibit more risky behavior but aren’t willing to pay up to hundreds of dollars a year for protection. SafeToBe.Me, the 4-person Palo Alto-based startup that developed Reppler, has taken a small seed round of funding led by Norwest Venture partners

SafeToBe.Me’s founder and CEO Vlad Gorelik cites a Microsoft-backed study indicating that seven out of ten recruiters performed some kind of online background check of job candidates, including checking their Facebook profile. He says these checks aren’t likely to dig deeper than a user’s latest 100 posts, but that Reppler plans to provide more historical data once the service matures. The service could also prove useful for parents who want to keep their kids safe without monitoring every single thing they share.

When users visit the Reppler site, they’re asked for long list of extended permissions. Once granted users must wait a few minutes for their data to be analyzed before seeing the results in four different sections: My Impression, My Inappropriate Content, My Information, and My Privacy and Security Risks. They can also connect their YouTube, Flickr and Picasa account for scanning.

My Impression gives a sentiment analysis of a user’s wall, showing whether the general tone was positive or negative. Users can drill down to see the most frequently used words, posting trends by weekday or hour, a pie chart breaking down the sources of wall posts, and a bar graph showing in what categories users have the most Likes.

My Inappropriate Content flags posts with mentions of strong, derogatory, alcohol, drug, or adult language. Users can click the “Fix This” button to visit a flagged post on Facebook where they can choose to delete it. My Information scans the info tab of a user’s profile and shows links to recently tagged and uploaded photos and videos. My Privacy and Security Risks alerts users to malicious links that could result in their account being hacked.

Users can manage their notification settings through a set of sliders to choose whether they’ll be notified of risks immediately, by email summary, through the Reppler site, or not at all.

For being a free tool, Reppler offers a wide breadth of information about a user’s Facebook profile. Gorelik tells us that the next steps in its product roadmap include offering support for other social networks such as Twitter and LinkedIn.

While Reppler can’t provide total assurance for one’s reputation yet, it can offer users a reality check of their safety, security and the impression their profile can give. By capturing younger users with a free tool now, Reppler may be able to turn them into paying customers as they grow up and more of our lives are shared online.

For the first time, Facebook now allows personal user profiles to be converted into official business Pages, turning all their friends into fans. The “Profile To Business Page Migration” tool will help people who either created a personal profile for a business before Pages existed, or accidentally started accumulating fans as friends instead of Likes.

The migration tool should come as exciting news to business owners struggling with the decision of whether to continue a profile with its limited capabilities, or start a Page from scratch with zero fans. Facebook has not formally announced the tool, but it appears to be available worldwide.

Facebook has added a new Help Center article on converting profiles to Pages with details about the migration process. Any user with a verified account can use the migration tool. Once migrated, the user still uses the same login and password to access Facebook. Their profile photo will be transferred, and all their friends will be converted into users who Like their Page.

All other profile content, including additional photos and wall posts will disappear and all Like connections to other Pages will be severed. Therefore, anyone using the migration tool should consider using Facebook’s Download Your Information tool first to back up their content. It appears that users with less than 100 friends can rename their new Page during the migration process giving them a chance at rebranding, but those with more than 100 friends must use their profile name.

Converted Pages don’t appear in the interests section of users who were previously friends with the profile and were migrated, limiting the potential for the tool to be used for bait-and-switch. In some cases, users may receive a message informing them that one of their friendships has been converted to a Like.

Migration will be especially useful for users who initially planned to use their profile to promote a small business, such as an event promotion company or consultancy, but eventually hit Facebook’s 5000 friend limit. It will also allow those promoting a business with a personal profile to begin using third-party Page applications that allow them to set up a Like-gated landing page, run contests, collect email addresses, and recreate functionality from websites.

The tool also allows Facebook to gracefully shift users towards terms of service compliance, as representing a business or other non-human entity with a profile instead of a Page is prohibited.

There is no way to convert a Page to a user profile, so users should be sure they want to migrate before doing so. They won’t be able to write on the walls of friends, see their updates in the news feed, or access their messages once they become a Page. Users won’t be able to register for a new account using any of the email addresses or phone number associated with their old profile. In some cases, the migration can cause a user’s Facebook vanity URL to longer work.

Overall, the option is a huge win for some would-be Page admins. However, users should be extremely cautious about using the tool, and it shouldn’t be used by anyone except those who weren’t using their profile for anything but business.

Update 3/31/2011 4pm PST: Many of our commenters have expressed a desire for a “merge profile with Page” tool. However, this tool would have significant abuse potential, as hacked or stolen accounts could be quickly rolled into the hacker’s Page. Therefore, its unlikely that Facebook will add such as merge option.

Update 3/31/2011 9pm PST: The migration tool is no longer accessible at the URL listed above. The removal may be a temporary or a permanent change. We’ll continue to update this article to reflect the return or continued absence of the feature.

Update 4/4/2011 3:30pm PST: The migration tool has been reinstated at the URL listed above. However, proceed with caution as we’ve heard reports of breakage during the conversion that has caused profiles to be deleted without being replaced with a new Page.

Update 4/6/2011 5:00pm PST: Facebook has released a Profile to Business Page Migration Appeal tool for users who wish to reverse the conversion process. We recommend the appeal process to any users who didn’t like the outcome of the conversion, converted accidentally, or whose conversion was interrupted resulting in them having neither a profile or a Page.

Update 9/14/2011: Facebook has told us that the profile to Page conversion tool will also convert a user’s subscribers to Likes.

[Thanks to Amit Lavi for the tip]

Strategies for Page admins and a walk-through of all the changes from the February 2011 Page redesign can be found in the Facebook Marketing Bible, Inside Network’s guide to marketing and advertising on Facebook.

A thread on Quora from Evan Priestley, an engineer with Facebook, outlines how the company has moved videos from its own separate tab to the photos tab on profiles. Pages continue to have a separate video tab with the new layout. The change may temporarily make videos difficult to find for some users.

Priestley responded to a Facebook user’s question about the whereabouts of their videos and with the new information.

Previously the videos were accesible via a link under the profile picture and a video tab at the top of the old profile. Now a user’s videos may be accessed by clicking on the photos tab, then “see all” then clicking on “video.” Here’s the new profile

Videos on Facebook are costly to serve, not tagged as often as photos, reduce cross-site browsing and are not as popular as photos, so burying them may be somewhat in Facebook’s interest. However, many users didn’t have any uploaded or tagged videos, so giving them a separate section needlessly cluttered profile navigation in some cases.

Priestley concludes his answer stating “this is an intentional part of our meticulously orchestrated master plan”, so the change could pave the way for a forthcoming change to media browsing.