Tag Archives: Facebook

You May Have Missed This

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I don’t think I know anyone who has ever used it, but since 2010 Facebook has supported an email service that comes free with your Profile and Account. Unsurprisingly, Facebook recently decided to shelve the service due to low user numbers. The way they’re doing this, however, is slightly odd. Any email sent to your Facebook.com address will be routed to your original login email, so in essence, anyone who can find your Facebook can send an email to you.

According to representatives of Facebook, this will be less of a problem than it seems. According to Mashable, “We limit the number of messages a person can receive in their inbox from people they’re not connected to. We also have systems in place to detect spam, and will not forward messages that we think are spam. The external email provider will also do their own spam checks. People also have the ability to turn off forwarding once we roll this out in a few weeks.”

It remains to be seen if this is going to be a beneficial messaging change or a tidal wave of spam messages, but for the time being it’s good to know who is sending you any random messages you may receive.

What Sparks Our Fire: Knowledge is power.

Does this change worry you?

This Just In

Facebook released a new app yesterday, and it’s awesome.

Recently, representatives of Facebook described the website as an aggregation of content shared by your connections, in essence a personal newspaper or magazine. The new app, Paper, uses that concept and takes it to an entirely different level. It combines stories from your news feed, articles and pieces of content into one elegant interface. The outside content is selected by choosing various tabs based on subjects and interests, in the same way that Pulse or Flipbook does. In this instance however, Facebook limits the number of tabs you can select, which makes you think about the content you want to see, rather than just seeing everything.

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I played with it all day yesterday, and I’m sold. Facebook making apps is awesome, and I’m much more hopeful for this avenue than the HTC First debacle. Facebook is meant to be used on all operating systems, not to be the operating system.

What Sparks Our Fire: A news aggregator that’s not only functional, but very nice to look at and interact with.

Will you use Paper as your new news site?

This Is So Last Decade

So apparently Facebook isn’t cool any more. While the numbers for the website remain high, it simply does not engage adolescents as much anymore. More and more, middle and high school age kids are preferring apps like Snapchat and Instagram to the older social network. We at Canopy theorize this is because their parents are on it, which drives them away and negates the cool-factor of Facebook.

Imagine your parents started hanging out at your favorite spot while you were in high school. It would quickly get uncomfortable and you’d leave to find somewhere new to uphold your sense of privacy.

Personally, my parents and even my grandparents have friend-requested me and I won’t accept, but even then I don’t want them to see my public profile, even though there’s nothing inappropriate. I prefer to have my own space, but my personal network is so tied to Facebook I simply can’t make the switch easily. Teens who are just starting out on the internet can make the choice more easily.

Here’s a chart from Mashable that approximates the breakdown of demographics in both 2011 and 2014. Note, it doesn’t take into account users who aged out of being a teenager during those years, so the “millions of teens” may or may not be significantly less than it appears.

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What Sparks Our Fire:  Watching trends, especially on social networks, is incredibly important to the work we do at Canopy.

Do you find Facebook uncool?

Improving Facebook

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I know, I know. They said it couldn’t be done. Mark Zuckerberg hit upon a vein of genius when he created Facebook, and the pure, unadulterated social network has remained, golden and unchanged, for years.

Or at least that’s what the people currently posting on the website seem to want. It seems  with every interface change millions of irate users take to their statuses to crow how they “hate the Timeline” or that “the chats were so much better without knowing whether or not the person you’re chatting with is on a desktop or a mobile device.” And yet, somehow, they keep using the website. But now Facebook has added a feature that allows you to save posts for later, and it may well be that this change is something Facebook purists won’t mind.

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Zuckerberg considers his website to be a “social newspaper”, where you often will come across posted articles that are not always recent, but almost always are interesting. If, in your scrolling, you come across an interesting post from a friend, but you don’t have the time to read it just then, you can click a button that saves the link, picture, or other story to a list for later. This allows you to peruse it at your leisure, and makes the website even more like a newspaper.

The feature is still rolling out to all users, and hopefully won’t result in more status-fury.

What Sparks Our Fire: Facebook saw potential for improvement, to initiative to address a need, and created a solution. That’s an important part of a successful company.

What do you think needs improvement on Facebook?

The “Face” of Facebook

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Imagine 1.27 billion faces aggregated on a single webpage. That daunting task is exactly what “The Faces of Facebook” has accomplished, arranging every Facebook profile picture in chronological order on a one page. Any user can find their picture and their friends within the page, and it shows who amongst your friends joined the site soonest. It starts as a graphic that looks a lot like white noise, but as the page zooms in, you can see the millions of faces of the users of Facebook.

The webpage does not violate privacy settings, because it only accesses the publicly viewable sections of users profile pages. The webpage is accessible as an app for your profile.

What sparks our fire: Amongst the billions of us, our faces are still distinguishable.

Can you find your face? Where is it located on the page?