Facebook has come up with what I believe is a very creative way to get more information about their ads by allowing Facebook users to judge their own Facebook ads. They use thumbs up and thumbs down at the bottom of the ad, and then lets you provide a reason for your vote with options. Here is one example of what this new ad looks like:

When you thumb down, you get the following options:

• Misleading
• Offensive
• Pornographic
• Uninteresting
• Irrelevant
• Repetitive
• Other

When you thumb up, you get these options:

• Interesting
• Relevant to me
• Good offer
• Other

If Facebook has not patented these ad styles, I highly expect to see this style of ad feedback coming to many ads in the near future, and thereby rendering them useless as people begin to ignore them as they become too common.

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Not that many people use Facebook in China when you can make the same service such as Xiaonei (how many times must one say this, in today’s world, the minute an online company plans to go global, you better actually go global or choose the nations that have the highest Internet population–and that means China), but seems China is currently blocking Facebook,as Danwei notes:

Danwei readers in Beijing reported earlier today that Facebook seemed to be blocked. It was accessible in Shanghai this afternoon, but now seems to be blocked nationwide.

Creating a large frustration for presumably many young people who helps provide pictures for Engrish.com

The Wall Street Journal China’s Journal:

Beijing’s Olympic organizers have said that the Internet will be uncensored during the Olympics, a dubious claim. If Facebook still is running into interference in Beijing come August, organizers can be fairly certain that at least some of the half million foreign visitors expected here this August will notice.

Wouldn’t be surprised if Facebook has problems for awhile, just like Youtube before it, and Google before that.

Update (07/02/2008):

Aw provides some backend blocking pictures for the proof.

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Looks like a battle royale for the Chinese social networks will soon come to head with QQ launching its own service:

QQ soft launches a new service called QQ Xiaoyou, which is a social networking service targeted at students in universities and high schools. Actually, Xiaoyou is the Chinese Pinyin for alumni. Currently, only invited QQ users are allowed to test the service.

Obviously QQ want to make Xiaoyou another China’s Facebook, it also has the similar UI as Facebook. However, The net culture of Facebook is quite different from that of QQ. In Facebook, people tend to use their real name in offline life, and bring their offline connection online, while in QQ, almost all users take online ID not real name, use avatar not their own photos, and make online friends. Now, QQ Xiaoyou requires its users to use their real name and real photo, and will verify it strictly. Now you need to let QQ Xiaoyou approve your information within three days.

I’d be interested in seeing how they would actually verify it so strictly–there’s no real way unless you’re meeting them in person or having them fill out a form that scares people into being real on it. Otherwise, I would not call anything else very strict.

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Craig Hordlow put forth an interesting concept publicly that he’s been working on for awhile noting that Google’s growth is slowing as more and more people go directly to other sites such as Craigslist or Youtube or Wikipedia to find information within their respective niche as those sites become the authority over time and as such, people begin to not use Google’s search engine as much. He explains it as such:

What I mean by that is that, for example, people are less likely to go to Google and search for “apartments in San Francisco”, or “cleaning services in San Francisco”. They’ll either go straight to Craigslist.org, yelp.com, cityspace.com, or another destination.

This is because as people become more familiar with the web’s flora, they don’t need search to guide them to obvious destinations. So they use search increasingly for eclectic reasons and less for simple navigation.

[...]In 2005, the top 5 sites were all search engines. Now there are only 4 search engines in the top 10, and we have 4 social networking sites (none in 2005).

As much as I dislike having to disagree with him, here are the basic reasons why his facts are off:

• Graph does not directly show a correlation
• He’s using Alexa for the data
• One graph cannot show that the reason for peaked growth is due to a change in search habits

More details after the jump.
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Ran across an interesting mixture of social bookmarking site that brings together some of the most worthwhile sites on the net (in my opinion) called Doggdot.us:

why doggdot.us digg, slashdot, and del.icio.us/popular - this is a constant browsing cycle for me. So why not combine them into a unified format without all the extra chrome? We can eliminate dupes and add some extra niceities

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Over at Americablog, John Aravois noted that Facebook is taking things from external sites and putting them into your Facebook notification network:

From what we’ve been able to glean, Facebook automatically opts its users in to this privacy-violating pyramid scheme and the only way you can get out of it is by visiting every single one of Facebook’s corporate partners (whoever they are, we only know about Fandango at this point), and telling each and every one (if you can figure out where to tell them this) to stop publishing your private information on Facebook.

At first I wanted to laugh as usually this entailed the user of Facebook specifically having to add applications, widgets, etc. to opt in on their own accord (Anybody who’s big on privacy and the Internet, those of us who love Slashdot for example usually have an idea of what we’re opting in on). (more…)

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