EdgeRank is an algorithm developed by Facebook to govern what is displayed (and how high) on the News Feed.

My ability to select the best candidates for our positions has been irreparably compromised by looking into their private lives. I’ve been “tainted” by knowledge of their sexual orientation, illnesses, religion, political affiliations, and other factors that expose us to anti-discrimination legislation. We can't even claim that the employee improperly disclosed these matters to us, as we are the ones initiating the investigation of their private doings

At UX Week 2010, Facebook Product Designer Adam Mosseri gave a presentation called Data Informed, Not Data Driven. It’s an excellent talk and Adam gave some really good examples demonstrating how data-driven design can take you into “local maximum”, which is essentially a design cul-de-sac caused by a blinkered over-emphasis on Analytics and MVT.

We know this because back in college and in the year or so following, Mark Zuckerberg held lots of instant message conversations with friends and confidants about his plans for life and work. Due to a lawsuit or two, these instant messages were preserved. We have viewed some of them.

You need to approach Facebook like you would a long-term relationship. Facebook is not a one-night stand.

Even if you are logged out, Facebook still knows and can track every page you visit. The only solution is to delete every Facebook cookie in your browser, or to use a separate browser for Facebook interactions.

Stories from The Onion as interpreted by Facebook

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The New York Times has a pretty prominent article today called Blogs Wane as the Young Drift to Sites Like Twitter. The title was probably written by an editor, not the author, because as soon as the article gets past the two token teenagers who tumble and Facebook instead of blogging, the stats show all the major blogging services growing — even Blogger whose global “unique visitors rose 9 percent, to 323 million,” meaning it grew about 6 Foursquares last year alone. (In the same timeframe WordPress.com grew about 80 million uniques according to Quantcast.)

I’m fascinated by the way Facebook operates. It’s a very unique environment, not easily replicated (nor would their system work for all companies, even if they tried). These are notes gathered from talking with many friends at Facebook about how the company develops and releases software.

As a new strain of Social Network fever infects the nation, and you finally decide to share your face with the world, get the lay of the virtual land with our own open graph of portrait types.

Blaine Cook was in charge of building Twitter for the first couple of years of its existence before moving on to pastures new. At the moment, he is working with Osmosoft which is the open source innovation arm of BT. Last month, he came to Galway, Ireland to speak at BlogTalk 2010 about another one of his current projects, Webfinger.

Discussion with ReclaimPrivacy.org creator

To help illustrate Facebook's shift away from privacy, we have highlighted some excerpts from Facebook's privacy policies over the years. Watch closely as your privacy disappears, one small change at a time!

Just because you've set your Facebook profile to "Friends only" access doesn't mean someone who is not your friend can't see it. One of the most confusing aspects of Facebook's privacy settings is an area where you specify what information your friends can share about you through applications and web sites, even parts of your profile you made private.

To manage your privacy on Facebook, you will need to navigate through 50 settings with more than 170 options. Facebook says it wants to offer precise controls for sharing on the Internet.

People using the Web without understanding URLs are quite literally putting themselves in danger, just as if they went out driving on the road without understanding how to read road signs.

Over the past few years, relational databases have fallen out of favor for a number of influential people in our industry. I'd like to weigh in on that, but before doing so, I'd like to give my executive summary of the events leading up to this movement:

"Tell us about the olden days!" "Yeah, what was life like in 2009?"

Francois Jordaan - network on Facebook visualised

I figured that many people would benefit from a thorough overview on how to protect your privacy on Facebook. Below is a step by step process for protecting your privacy.

With his two Web sites (which have crashed from too much traffic), Booksthatmakeyoudumb.com and Musicthatmakesyoudumb.com, Griffith used aggregated Facebook data about the favorite bands and books among students of various colleges and plotted them against the average SAT scores at those schools, creating a tongue-in-cheek statistical look at taste and intelligence.

LittleSis is an involuntary facebook of powerful Americans, collaboratively edited by people like you.

If you create a Facebook application, one of the most confusing parts of setting it up is choosing whether to make your app use IFrames or FBML as the default for your application’s canvas pages. [...] I think it is now easier to create a better app by using IFrame canvas pages than it is with FBML.

This wiki is a reference for developers interested in Facebook Platform. Facebook Platform is a standards-based Web service with methods for accessing and contributing Facebook data. We've made the methods as easy to understand as possible, and this wiki includes full documentation to help you learn more.

In recent research, WatchMouse found that many of the world's largest online social networks have poor site performance, leaving users waiting for sites to load or encountering errors. Of the 104 sites monitored, the immensely popular Facebook (facebook.com) site was the worst performer; recording a slow load time and more errors than any other monitored site.

I've been thinking a lot about the social graph for awhile now: aggregating the graph, decentralization, social network portability, etc.