While I personally am all for that change, having been an ardent Twitter user since early last year, there has been plenty of backlash from Facebook users about the extent of these changes. And all of the usual suspects of the blogosphere are weighing in, with heavy-weights like TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington and Robert Scoble siding with Facebook’s right to basically do what it wants with the free service it provides.

Even going so far as arguing that listening to your customer too much can be counterproductive. Here is a quote from Mike Arrington’s piece "No! Never Surrender To Your Users, Facebook.":

In an interview last year, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg talked with me about how users are willing to accept change over time, and that Facebook would continue to push things along. Suddenly, though, they surrender because a few users have a belly ache over a redesign.

If they wanted to make these changes anyway, they shouldn’t have titled their blog post “Responding to Your Feedback.” They should have just continued to ignore the ranting, and announced further changes. Showing that you’re listening to feedback just invites more of it.

Someday, if they’re not careful, someone is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace, who in turn did it to Friendster. Making users happy is a suckers game. Pushing the envelope is what makes you a winner.

While I can see their point to a degree, social media represent a whole new ballgame in many ways, which it makes it harder to predict what will happen. While these “A camel is a horse designed by committee" ideas may have validity in the realm of physical product design (Scoble is using a quote from a mentor about the problems with crowd-sourcing the design of a Porsche), I would hold that things may not be so straight-forward in the digital/social media realm:

1) Facebook already had several cases where it needed to retreat in shame from changes to the Facebook platform, the biggest among them the Beacon activity-tracking system that caused such privacy concerns and general outrage among Facebook users that it had to basically be abandoned.

More recently, the above-mentioned Facebook Terms of Service (TOS) debate around changes that appeared to give Facebook almost complete, irrevocable control over a users data and images even PAST the closing of an account, brought forth a similat swift user community response, and backing off by Facebook (for now to the original TOS, with supposedly a crowd-sourced version being on the way).

So with this partial retreat by Facebook, incidentally again due to privacy concerns, they’re really batting 0 for 3. One would think that they would be wising up on the PR front by now. And so much for "Zuckerberg never backs down"…

2) Much of this is not really surprising since Facebook’s users are perfectly empowered through Facebook’s platform:

Perfect for sharing photos with your friends, and throwing virtual sheep at them, but also perfect as a virtual soapbox to… complain about changes to Facebook’s platform.

With Facebooks recent full-scale mainstreaming, bringing it’s rate of new user adoption to well over 1 Million a day, one of the side effects is that now, even if only 1% of users strenuously object to something, that’s still close to 3 Million people howling.

And after all, it is called SOCIAL media, so most controversial/high impact messages have a tendency to spread virally, aided by speed of light technologies, AND Facebook cannot come off as looking patently anti-social.

So while Steve Gillmor is arguing that inertia would tend to win out, I’d say that he may be underestimating the righteous indignation that can come with perceived violations of SOCIAL trust.

Certainly there is room for back and forth here, but at some point, if the rubber band is stretched too far, it could snap. Users could turn their collective backs on Facebook, especially since the internet all around Facebook’s so-called "Walled Garden" is always continuing to hustle, and to add to the functionality available with quantum-leap innovations all of the time, making it less and less necessary for users to be locked into Facebook.

3) Which brings me to my last point: Facebook, having started from an, admittedly elegant (especially in comparison to MySpace) but mostly static, user profile page, has already been changing in response to "the rise of feeds". First the profile was redigned to look and feel more like FriendFeed, leaving a lot of the social apps to languish and whither on a back tab when compared to before (I certainly haven’t used many anymore since that point).

Next, the meteoric rise of Twitter, and its persistent "attention hogging", especially with the "hip early adopter" crowd, prompted an attempt by Facebook to buy Twitter (though the offer was mostly in hard to value Facebook stock), and now the redesign of the user’s homepage to look suspiciously like Twitter with it’s realtime feed of friends’ updates and activities.

But the truth is that Facebook users may not be ready for this level of speed, which Twitter users have already "living and breathing" for months or years at this point. Since I’ve been piping my Twitter updates to Facebook status updates, I’ve always worried that it was overloading my Facebook friends, and have recently throttled the pass-through way down.

So the jury is out whether Facebook users are en masse willing to take it to that level, or for that matter make use of the new possibilities of opening up one’s updates to the world (and thereby to Google to index). And since everyone all around Facebook is sharing things (like photos, which Facebook already just said in its TOS attempt it wants to hoard for itself), it may be hard to both maintain the Walled Garden, as well as open up Facebook in ways that could steal Twitter’s thunder.

So no, I don’t think Mark Zuckerberg has a completely free hand to play anymore. The ghosts that the sorcerers apprentice has called may prove harder and harder to call back. The monster that is Facebook is becoming harder and harder to control.

This should be fun to watch…

And one thing appears to be clear: Regardless of the merits of the technology and features behind the platform, Wallop never had much of a chance of succeeding during the same time frame in which first MySpace and then Facebook rose to massive prominence.

Why? Because the “Wallop” brand name that the new owners (presumably voluntarily) took over from Microsoft Research Labs is simply a horrible idea branding-wise.

One can almost see how a group of middle aged techies thought it sounded sort of cool. But as reality has proven, there are a number of things wrong with the name:

1) It is a generic noun/verb and as such creates little differentiation in the mental real estate of consumers.

2) It is confusing in terms of giving no indication what “Wallop” is supposed to do for its users. Brand names like Friendster, MySpace and Facebook on the other hand give a reasonable hint. When you are free to choose, when in doubt opt for something that makes a modicum of sense, and actually helps make your case as a company.

(Granted that a number of very successful companies have used “non-sequitur” names – Google, Amazon, and Yahoo come to mind. But that was during the Web 1.0 era when it was a lot easier to break through the noise, and get your share of attention to imprint your brand on the mental real estate of consumers. Also, back then everything Web was still so new and wondrous…)

3) Worst of all, the only association it does have is with something negative and somewhat archaic sounding, per the American Heritage Dictionary, “Wallop – v. tr. 1. To beat soundly; thrash. 2. To strike with a hard blow.”

Given that Wallop apparently started out as a photo sharing site at Microsoft Research, the name makes even less sense. But one should NEVER use a name in branding that conjures up potentially negative associations. Unless you know exactly what you are doing (as in some youth slang were “bad”, “ill”, etc. actually means “good” – or at least has in the past), and know your target market audience to a T.

Not so good if your 15-30 year-old target market for a social networking site associates your brand name (even if more or less unconsciously) with spankings they may have received by their parents, or on the playground.

4) It is missing any kind of pleasantness in sound, rhythm, or rhyme that would make it more likely to be repeated by people (to themselves or to others), which may seem trite, but in reality can make a huge difference in the adoption of your brand name “meme”.

Wallop rolls of the tongue like a sack of potatoes. Its particular combination of consonants and vowels leaves it oddly unpleasant to say (maybe that’s because the word originally denotes an unpleasant event). Just try it out-loud to yourself a few times: “Hey dude, go check out that party invite I put up on Wallop.”

5) There could be spelling issues in terms of people hearing it word-of-mouth (if it weren’t for the fact that people are already less likely to repeat it very often), as to the number of L’s and P’s, also never an advantage in getting something to spread “virally”.

Do your homework…

In regards to both 4) and 5), do your homework people: It’s easy enough to bounce names off of friends and family, and see what they think, and more importantly, if they can’t stop saying the new name – or not. See if people spell it right in writing each time without you spelling it out for them (the recent “Cuil” launch has become infamous in this regard).

Why am I kicking Wallop in such detail when they are already down? Only for this reason: To demonstrate that despite what I actually believe may have been some reasonably innovative technology, these good folks were never even close to helping their business venture from a branding perspective.

In this regard, it is very telling that they apparently neglected to hire a branding firm or other similar assistance when they spun-off Wallop from Microsoft Research, and kept the name (needlessly, as there likely was next to zero brand equity accrued to the name at that point).

There is always the danger/trap that as a business founder you become attached to a name created during an incubation phase that has simply grown on you. Or appears clever TO YOU in one way or another (and is often too-cute-by-half). None of which guarantees that anyone else will think so, which is why you need to ideally test such names with your target market (of course some simply get lucky, such as Facebook).

And when you are trying to launch a social network, something that almost by definition needs to make use of “viral” network effects, the above factors, and hence the rate and speed with which your brand spreads, do indeed matter.

Just ask the guys who got it right almost accidentally, like Facebook. Ignore these principles in your own small business branding at your peril.

Facebook on Tuesday announced "fbOpen" as its competing OPEN standard for building Facebook compliant social networks. I would expect that a competitor to Google’s FriendConnect for accessing Facebook’s (and other compliant social networks’) social graph information, if not already included, is soon to follow.

How nice of them to be complying with my recent prediction so quickly… as for the other shoe to drop and Microsoft buying them, we’ll see.

Here’s what I said May 16 on Microsoft’s options:

… Buy Facebook and VERY QUICKLY throw weight behind Facebook’s API as a competing standard to OpenSocial in opening up the “walled garden” of Facebook in strategic ways.

Given Facebook’s recent loss of developer energy and possible setting in of some user boredom, in reality this move is not much of a surprise per se, but the speed of the reaction is. This goes to show that mind-set and mind-share are everything in this new Attention Economy of Web 2.0 and beyond.

Facebook just couldn’t afford to let Google own the "open social network API" category and run away with things. So they had to reverse course and open up their social graph. We’ll soon know if Microsoft thinks it can afford being without a credible stake in the social networking space as a whole. (And no, their "Live Spaces" offering is NOT a credible stake.)

My bet is on them buying Facebook, and quickly.

I was reminded today that Rupert Murdoch did the MySpace deal in one weekend back in 2005. And despite the recent MySpace plateauing (at least in the U.S.) until about the beginning of this year when they made their moves on MySpace apps and a more solid API footing supporting Google’s OpenSocial, the then $580M price tag must appear like the steal of the century now that Facebook might go for $15B+.

Given that Micro-hoo negotiations appear to have more thoroughly collapsed for the time being (both sides have made statements in the last week or so that things were never as close to a deal as assumed before Ballmer’s pull-out, with both Bill Gates and key Yahoos presumably holding serious reservations), Microsoft does have a lot of cash burning a hole in it’s pocket.

More on that continuing saga later. I still owe you "Micro-hoo: The Post-Mortem Post Part II", only the developments are moving faster than I can write… intelligently…

Today, some not so minor controversy erupted in the blogosphere in reaction to the news that Facebook had just shut down Google’s FriendConnect on its platform. There were a lot of details being discussed re: data privacy vs. data portability between still largely "walled garden" social networks, all of which are quite relevant to a larger discussion on the future of the Web.

And Robert Scoble of Fast Company and Mike Arrington of TechCrunch got into a bit of shouting match on Twitter, a "GillmorGang" teleconference call, and their respective blogs.

I am not going to get into the finer points of the data issues here (but you should by all means read the above posts and commentary if you are into this sort of thing). But once again it appears that some larger strategic issues are being lost in the shuffle.

Check out what I wrote in a comment on a Silicon Valley Insider Micro-hoo post about a week or so ago:

While nothing is certain, this [Microsoft-Facebook deal idea would be] already a much better idea than the Yahoo deal. Given what’s going on right now with MySpace adopting Google’s OpenSocial, and making deals with Twitter, Yahoo, et al. to use MySpace data/resources in their systems, MSFT could actually try to preempt Google from running away with social networking:

Buy Facebook and VERY QUICKLY throw weight behind Facebook’s API as a competing standard to OpenSocial in opening up the "walled garden" of Facebook in strategic ways. Facebook apps are starting to lose developers from what I hear, many of which may be moving to OpenSocial API app development. Such a move could stop the slow-down/bleeding, if developers had a sense that big MSFT dollars were now gearing to put the pedal to the metal…

The longer term question is not IF social data will become complete openly exchangeable on the Web, but when. There is no need to have the same things stored/replicated in 1/2 dozen or more places/systems.

Alternatively, MSFT/Facebook could just adopt OpenSocial, and then look to gain more influence on the standard, trying to out-flank/out-innovate MySpace/Google. No good if MSFT let’s Google run away with it in yet another area.

(I took the liberty of adding a few links and minor grammar improvements into the quote.)

And this, in a nutshell, has been exactly the underlying dynamic of what has been playing itself out since yesterday. Leave out MSFT for a moment (though they are certainly lurking in the background), and the Facebook vs. Google/OpenSocial/MySpace battle lines were clearly being drawn…

This shut-down of Google’s FriendConnect application on Facebook, for which both sides have already offered various rationales, justifications, and rebuttals as to the true facts, is just the first salvo in what is sure to be a prolonged war, with Microsoft’s next actions being the potential wild card.

Not that their entry into the fray would guarantee anything one way or the other, but $45 Billion in mostly loose cash can have interesting effects to say the least, especially if Microsoft could get over themselves on this one and make a true attempt at unbridled innovation for once.

The social network issue in itself is very telling by the way how far Yahoo has been falling behind, and how Micro-hoo would have been far from a sure bet to getting any traction in this area: Go check out Yahoo’s two in-house social developments, Yahoo 360, which is hanging in limbo (view their more or less orphaned developer blog here), and Mash (their dev blog also apparently abandoned).

And as I mentioned before, I have it from inside sources that Yahoo also killed another very innovative social-cum-wiki type project (presumably different from Mash) in its early alpha mock-up stages just before the MSFT bid occurred, apparently that was too forward-thinking as well.

Facebook has certainly built up a lot of sophistication in their platform, there is a lot more there technically for those with the eyes to see it. I am not arguing that anyone should therefore like/love Facebook, but they deserve at least a little credit for things they have innovated.

Also, in regards to the Micro-hoo visions of better competing with Goolge in the ad serving realm, Facebook social ads do have quite a bit of potential as there are so many more demographic targeting angles available. In throwing up ads with social properties or (YouTube) videos, context is everything.

Get the context just right, and someone might actually click on an ad. And the key to the context outside of search (which in itself gives you an idea of what the querent wants), is to have the demographic and other semantic context. And that’s where social networks in principle have the chance to shine.

If Microsoft wants to be in ad serves at all, which they clearly still do, it would be better to figure out how to do it right on Facebook instead of a smaller stage. So, all in all, a Microsoft-Facebook play could be a decent idea, though it would all be in the execution… and MSFT not trying to rename things "Windows Live Facebook".  :)