August 6, 2008 • 10 mins
Facebook is a social networking site. It was created for Harvard students but has expanded to an open membership. Learn about Facebook, it's network and new redesign in this HowStuffWorks podcast.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi there,
Welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Polette. I'm
an editor here at how Stuff Works and with me
according to its profile on Facebook, is writer Jonathan Strickland.
(00:22):
Will you be my friend? Sure? So, yeah, Today we're
gonna talk about Facebook in general and the recent Facebook
redesign in particular. UM. In case you have been under
a rock for the last four years, here's the brief
overview of Facebook. It's an online social network, uh debuted
(00:44):
in two thousand four and it was originally UM geared
for college students, so that's what the For the first
several months of development, it was pretty much just college
kids using this to to build up groups of friends
and keep in contact with each other and find out
what each other are doing and all that sort of thing.
And then eventually Facebook opened it up to the public
(01:07):
in general, and everyone and their dog got a Facebook page.
And I'm not kidding there are dogs with Facebook pages
and cats as well. They don't discriminate. Um. And then
in August of two thousand six. So two years after debuted,
Facebook announced that it was going to open up uh
some of its programming to developers, and a year later,
(01:28):
in two thousand seven, they actually allowed developers to use
Facebook as a platform. And then that's when you saw
this explosion of of applications hit Facebook. So, um, if
you are the person who has the zombie pirate, armored
night Scribulous uh Facebook profile, you know exactly what I'm
(01:50):
talking about here, unless, of course, that yours is one
of the ones affected by a Scrabulous you might be
you might be surprised to know there's there was a
basically a knockoff of the game, the popular Scrabble brand
crossword game by Hasbro UM And you might say, why
are you using the trademark name, Well, that's uh, somebody
(02:13):
did a knockoff these two guys in India, um basically
because Hasbro didn't have their own version of Scrabble on there.
And you might say, why do I care about this program? Well,
Scrabulous became huge. It was a very very popular way
to network with with other Facebook users with friends and family.
Speaking from personal experience, been playing Scrabulous for for months
(02:35):
with different family members across the country, and UH, Hasbro
got a little jealous, and all of a sudden, everywhere
you turn on all these websites after Scrabble UH made
its debut and Hasbro is announcing a lawsuit against the
creator Subscribulous. It's on every news site everywhere from the
(02:55):
United States to everywhere else in the world. It's amazing
how a scrap bowl game became the talk of Facebook
for you know, a week or more, right, actually months, really,
because if you've been listening to other podcasts or if
you've read the news, you probably have seen things about
about this story. But really, let's let's let's try and
(03:15):
keep this in mind. Describulous is just one of many
programs that's on Facebook. In fact, I read one in
one source that there are now more than twenty four
thousand programs on Facebook. That's a lot of programs. And
the redesign kind of addresses this issue because here's here's
how these programs work. Developers create their own applications, UH,
(03:39):
they host them on their own servers, and then it
links to Facebook. And if you subscribe to one of
these applications, if you if you install it within your
profile page, you give that developer the right to look
at your information. Now, Originally Facebook said we just want
developers to look at whatever information they application needs to
(04:01):
know in order to ron. So maybe that's just the
number of friends you have or your profile name. But
the problem is that there was not really a way
to enforce that. So technically developers were getting as much
information as they wanted that was available on your profile.
So that could be your birthday. Even friends who had
set their profiles to private, if you UH installed an
(04:25):
application on your profile, the developer would be able to
look at that person's profile as if he or she
were you. So there were some major privacy issues early
on with this UH, with all these programs coming up. Yeah,
and I saw a report not too long ago about
a student who had been asked to give up even
(04:48):
more information, including his social Security number, and it got
him in a lot of trouble because it allowed UH,
it allows identity theft. So basically, once they've they've lulled
you into a sense of secure where you're willing to
give up some information. You know, there are some people
who are let's say less scrupulous, not scrupulous scrupulous than others, uh,
(05:11):
you know, are are starting to ask for more information
under the guys of hey, well we need this to
make your make the program work. And um, you know,
there have been people who have been fooled into thinking
that somebody is going to use this for a good purpose,
and you know, it's a bit of social engineering on
their part to get some information they probably shouldn't otherwise have.
And and even on a more benign level, that it
(05:32):
could mean something like selling your information to advertisers so
that you could be the the the target of targeted advertising.
And uh, I don't know about you, but I think
most people probably feel they see enough commercials as it is. Um. So,
so yeah, this was a big problem and that was
part of the reason Facebook was looking into its major redesign.
(05:55):
And another part was just that if you go to
a Facebook page and you look at someone's profile and
this person has subscribed to a lot of these applications, uh,
the page gets pretty cluttered. That's true. Each of these
applications has a little image that goes along with it.
So if you tell the program that you're installing that
you want to uh to include this in your profile,
(06:18):
then it's going to put another little badge on there.
It's it's not unlike I guess the badges you would
see on the side of a fighter jet in World
War Two every time they shot down another plane and
get the little thing on the side of the nose
where you'd have, you know, sixteen different ones. Well, on Facebook,
you know, you have, say, you have fifteen different applications installed,
and you let it show that on your profile page.
(06:39):
All of a sudden you've got this little string of
little I don't know, probably sixteen by sixteen pixel or
a thirty two by thirty two images, you know, representing
each of those applications. And and it gets worse than
that because some of the applications also put will put
a box in your profile page so that um, it'll
it'll take up even more space on your profile. Now,
(07:00):
not every application does that, but and you can choose
to not let it do that. But if you're not
paying attention and you're just saying, oh, I want to
be a pirate, Oh I want to be a zombie,
Oh I want to be aware wolf, Oh I love
this movie application, eventually you're you're a profile is just
gonna be filled with all these different boxes and it's
it's arranged vertically so you have to scroll down and
(07:21):
down and down, and it may be that that it
takes a good minute and a half to scroll all
the way through your page, which is not very elegant.
So that was another part of the redesign. We should
probably actually got around to talking about what the redesign
looks like. It's it's pretty neat. Actually. They they've organized
the Facebook profiles into tabbed pages, so everything is now
(07:42):
organized within tabs, and all those applications are now in
a tab called boxes. Um. I'm sure this probably has
some of the developers a little peeved because it's if
you're looking at the main profile page, you don't see
the applications there anymore. And I bet that's got some
people rubbed the wrong way. That's true, but it doesn't
make the the profile a lot easier to navigate. I mean,
(08:05):
rather than having a list of all your applications and
being limited to see only a few of them at
a time, you can actually hit the applications tab and
uh and see all the different applications in one place. Um.
You can also, you know, there's also links to your
friends to your inbox. You'll see your status updates right there,
and they opened up, UM, and they had basically three sections.
(08:29):
You had your left navigation and then the main content
on your profile, then another in the right rail. And
they basically got rid of the entire left navigation scheme
and put it into those tabs. So it really opens
up a lot of white space and makes the page
easier to uh, to get through. Right. It doesn't look
nearly as busy as it used to, and it's I
(08:49):
think it's a it's a huge improvement. UM. I do
use Facebook occasionally and UH, and I really do like
the new layout. Now, if you haven't seen the new layout,
that's probably because Facebook hasn't really rolled it out to
the site at large, but you can check it out
at www dot new dot Facebook dot com. That's in
(09:10):
e w UM and that's where you can see the
the the new design. And UH, I think it's pretty nifty.
I know too. Although a lot of the feedback that
I've seen on blogs and different social networks that aren't
Facebook and uh, a lot of the people who I
follow have not been at all thrilled with it. But
(09:30):
someone who might have been thrilled with it, um at
least enough to get hit with a lawsuit. UM. As
a German organization which is uh sort of a very
similar website called study vz, and they are accused of
and I quote copying the look, feel, features and services
(09:51):
and quote um of the Facebook uh layout according to
the Financial Times, So they have actually gotten as close
to Facebook as they could to the point where Facebook
is willing to take legal action. So you know, it's um.
It's a popular layout for for social platform. Yeah. Whenever
(10:14):
a new social networking site comes on, the inevitable comparisons
against the two biggias MySpace and Facebook come around. And
in some cases those comparisons you say, it doesn't just
resemble it, it it's identical to it. And that's a
that's not a not the best route to take. I think. Well,
if you want to learn more, you should visit how
stuff works dot com and read how Facebook Works. Until then,
(10:38):
we'll talk to you later for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com?
Let us know what you think. Send an email to
podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you
by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are
you
Brought to you by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera.
It's ready. Are you get in touch with technology? With
tech stuff from how stuff works dot com. Hi there,
Welcome to the podcast. My name is Chris Polette. I'm
an editor here at how Stuff Works and with me
according to its profile on Facebook, is writer Jonathan Strickland.
(00:22):
Will you be my friend? Sure? So, yeah, Today we're
gonna talk about Facebook in general and the recent Facebook
redesign in particular. UM. In case you have been under
a rock for the last four years, here's the brief
overview of Facebook. It's an online social network, uh debuted
(00:44):
in two thousand four and it was originally UM geared
for college students, so that's what the For the first
several months of development, it was pretty much just college
kids using this to to build up groups of friends
and keep in contact with each other and find out
what each other are doing and all that sort of thing.
And then eventually Facebook opened it up to the public
(01:07):
in general, and everyone and their dog got a Facebook page.
And I'm not kidding there are dogs with Facebook pages
and cats as well. They don't discriminate. Um. And then
in August of two thousand six. So two years after debuted,
Facebook announced that it was going to open up uh
some of its programming to developers, and a year later,
(01:28):
in two thousand seven, they actually allowed developers to use
Facebook as a platform. And then that's when you saw
this explosion of of applications hit Facebook. So, um, if
you are the person who has the zombie pirate, armored
night Scribulous uh Facebook profile, you know exactly what I'm
(01:50):
talking about here, unless, of course, that yours is one
of the ones affected by a Scrabulous you might be
you might be surprised to know there's there was a
basically a knockoff of the game, the popular Scrabble brand
crossword game by Hasbro UM And you might say, why
are you using the trademark name, Well, that's uh, somebody
(02:13):
did a knockoff these two guys in India, um basically
because Hasbro didn't have their own version of Scrabble on there.
And you might say, why do I care about this program? Well,
Scrabulous became huge. It was a very very popular way
to network with with other Facebook users with friends and family.
Speaking from personal experience, been playing Scrabulous for for months
(02:35):
with different family members across the country, and UH, Hasbro
got a little jealous, and all of a sudden, everywhere
you turn on all these websites after Scrabble UH made
its debut and Hasbro is announcing a lawsuit against the
creator Subscribulous. It's on every news site everywhere from the
(02:55):
United States to everywhere else in the world. It's amazing
how a scrap bowl game became the talk of Facebook
for you know, a week or more, right, actually months, really,
because if you've been listening to other podcasts or if
you've read the news, you probably have seen things about
about this story. But really, let's let's let's try and
(03:15):
keep this in mind. Describulous is just one of many
programs that's on Facebook. In fact, I read one in
one source that there are now more than twenty four
thousand programs on Facebook. That's a lot of programs. And
the redesign kind of addresses this issue because here's here's
how these programs work. Developers create their own applications, UH,
(03:39):
they host them on their own servers, and then it
links to Facebook. And if you subscribe to one of
these applications, if you if you install it within your
profile page, you give that developer the right to look
at your information. Now, Originally Facebook said we just want
developers to look at whatever information they application needs to
(04:01):
know in order to ron. So maybe that's just the
number of friends you have or your profile name. But
the problem is that there was not really a way
to enforce that. So technically developers were getting as much
information as they wanted that was available on your profile.
So that could be your birthday. Even friends who had
set their profiles to private, if you UH installed an
(04:25):
application on your profile, the developer would be able to
look at that person's profile as if he or she
were you. So there were some major privacy issues early
on with this UH, with all these programs coming up. Yeah,
and I saw a report not too long ago about
a student who had been asked to give up even
(04:48):
more information, including his social Security number, and it got
him in a lot of trouble because it allowed UH,
it allows identity theft. So basically, once they've they've lulled
you into a sense of secure where you're willing to
give up some information. You know, there are some people
who are let's say less scrupulous, not scrupulous scrupulous than others, uh,
(05:11):
you know, are are starting to ask for more information
under the guys of hey, well we need this to
make your make the program work. And um, you know,
there have been people who have been fooled into thinking
that somebody is going to use this for a good purpose,
and you know, it's a bit of social engineering on
their part to get some information they probably shouldn't otherwise have.
And and even on a more benign level, that it
(05:32):
could mean something like selling your information to advertisers so
that you could be the the the target of targeted advertising.
And uh, I don't know about you, but I think
most people probably feel they see enough commercials as it is. Um. So,
so yeah, this was a big problem and that was
part of the reason Facebook was looking into its major redesign.
(05:55):
And another part was just that if you go to
a Facebook page and you look at someone's profile and
this person has subscribed to a lot of these applications, uh,
the page gets pretty cluttered. That's true. Each of these
applications has a little image that goes along with it.
So if you tell the program that you're installing that
you want to uh to include this in your profile,
(06:18):
then it's going to put another little badge on there.
It's it's not unlike I guess the badges you would
see on the side of a fighter jet in World
War Two every time they shot down another plane and
get the little thing on the side of the nose
where you'd have, you know, sixteen different ones. Well, on Facebook,
you know, you have, say, you have fifteen different applications installed,
and you let it show that on your profile page.
(06:39):
All of a sudden you've got this little string of
little I don't know, probably sixteen by sixteen pixel or
a thirty two by thirty two images, you know, representing
each of those applications. And and it gets worse than
that because some of the applications also put will put
a box in your profile page so that um, it'll
it'll take up even more space on your profile. Now,
(07:00):
not every application does that, but and you can choose
to not let it do that. But if you're not
paying attention and you're just saying, oh, I want to
be a pirate, Oh I want to be a zombie,
Oh I want to be aware wolf, Oh I love
this movie application, eventually you're you're a profile is just
gonna be filled with all these different boxes and it's
it's arranged vertically so you have to scroll down and
(07:21):
down and down, and it may be that that it
takes a good minute and a half to scroll all
the way through your page, which is not very elegant.
So that was another part of the redesign. We should
probably actually got around to talking about what the redesign
looks like. It's it's pretty neat. Actually. They they've organized
the Facebook profiles into tabbed pages, so everything is now
(07:42):
organized within tabs, and all those applications are now in
a tab called boxes. Um. I'm sure this probably has
some of the developers a little peeved because it's if
you're looking at the main profile page, you don't see
the applications there anymore. And I bet that's got some
people rubbed the wrong way. That's true, but it doesn't
make the the profile a lot easier to navigate. I mean,
(08:05):
rather than having a list of all your applications and
being limited to see only a few of them at
a time, you can actually hit the applications tab and
uh and see all the different applications in one place. Um.
You can also, you know, there's also links to your
friends to your inbox. You'll see your status updates right there,
and they opened up, UM, and they had basically three sections.
(08:29):
You had your left navigation and then the main content
on your profile, then another in the right rail. And
they basically got rid of the entire left navigation scheme
and put it into those tabs. So it really opens
up a lot of white space and makes the page
easier to uh, to get through. Right. It doesn't look
nearly as busy as it used to, and it's I
(08:49):
think it's a it's a huge improvement. UM. I do
use Facebook occasionally and UH, and I really do like
the new layout. Now, if you haven't seen the new layout,
that's probably because Facebook hasn't really rolled it out to
the site at large, but you can check it out
at www dot new dot Facebook dot com. That's in
(09:10):
e w UM and that's where you can see the
the the new design. And UH, I think it's pretty nifty.
I know too. Although a lot of the feedback that
I've seen on blogs and different social networks that aren't
Facebook and uh, a lot of the people who I
follow have not been at all thrilled with it. But
(09:30):
someone who might have been thrilled with it, um at
least enough to get hit with a lawsuit. UM. As
a German organization which is uh sort of a very
similar website called study vz, and they are accused of
and I quote copying the look, feel, features and services
(09:51):
and quote um of the Facebook uh layout according to
the Financial Times, So they have actually gotten as close
to Facebook as they could to the point where Facebook
is willing to take legal action. So you know, it's um.
It's a popular layout for for social platform. Yeah. Whenever
(10:14):
a new social networking site comes on, the inevitable comparisons
against the two biggias MySpace and Facebook come around. And
in some cases those comparisons you say, it doesn't just
resemble it, it it's identical to it. And that's a
that's not a not the best route to take. I think. Well,
if you want to learn more, you should visit how
stuff works dot com and read how Facebook Works. Until then,
(10:38):
we'll talk to you later for more on this and
thousands of other topics. Does it how stuff works dot com?
Let us know what you think. Send an email to
podcast at how stuff works dot com. Brought to you
by the reinvented two thousand twelve camera. It's ready, are
you
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