So, facebook released the (public beta) of the “lite” version of their service, last week. Some think that facebook lite is just a response to twitter’s popularity and the trend of real-time web. Especially with facebook acquiring friendfeed and then releasing the code in a open source project called tornado. Still, there is more than just imitating the hot new kid on the block. Here is why:

Facebook lite is has two goals:

• Making the user experience simpler, by removing unnecessary functions or noise.
• Making the service usable in countries or places where there is a lack of broadband internet

Facebook needed to change this because it is too hard to use for most celebrities, as stated in this post about twitter being underhyped:

Other services are too hard for the celebrities to use, particularly from their mobile phones. I’ve been using the new Facebook app on my iPhone, but it has some severe limitations for businesses and celebrities.

Later Scoble states what are the problems with facebook today and it’s limitations:

Facebook has brand troubles. Most people like facebook for its private features (my wife can send me and a select group of friends our baby photos, for instance but the newer public features, like fan pages, are misunderstood). If I were Mark Zuckerberg I would split these two usage models into two: one usage model that’s kept behind the privacy walls. Another that I would call "facebook public" that would be all the totally public features, including search and APIs.

Twitter might rule Hollywood because of its simplicity, anybody can send a SMS. Also if you think about it, it gives celebrities a direct connection to their fans, eliminating the middle man: media. Even if they use ghost writers [link a ghost writers], they have more control than using media.

The above lead me to think that facebook doesn’t care about the average Jane or Joe posting on twitter, but getting the celebrities or public figures. They have been pitching to them (celebrities), to use the fan pages in facebook, but have had  little success compared to twitter. This is due to their complexity and ambiguity of facebook fan pages. With facebook lite, things might change, thanks to a redesign of the newsfeed (or stories). In the new design, we have three buttons to post: text, photos or video. Also we have nested comments, excluding the image of the friend that commented. And that is all, no more birthdays and other unnecessary information.

Still is very hard  to make celebrities do everything through facebook, even with the twitter facebook app.

If you think facebook is not going after celebrities and public figures, then just read this from the facebook blog:

Public figures, musicians, businesses and organizations of all types who’ve created Facebook Pages often want to share a status update, a photo or an event with as many of their supporters as possible. Celebrities may want to share personal news or charities may want to put out calls for help to both their Facebook fans and their Twitter followers, all at the same time.

If you manage a Facebook Page, you now will be able to decide whether to share updates with their Twitter followers, and you also will be able to control what type of updates to share: status updates, links, photos, notes, events or all of them. If you have multiple Pages, you will have the option to link each of those Pages to different Twitter accounts. This new feature will soon be available at http://www.facebook.com/twitter.

As you can see, the idea is to bring celebrities and public figures on board of the facebook ship and from there they can take row boats (i.e twitter) to get to other places.

No Clone Wars for you

I must admit that twitter and facebook lite are very similar, it might even be seen as a upgrade to twitter (with threading and no character limits), still there is more than what meets the eye. First of all, twitter’s connections with others is loose: if your profile is public anybody can follow you or see your posts. In contrast facebook requires both parties need to agree (one sends the requests the other accepts) to be able to become friends. This difference between how people form “ties” or connections, is what determines how both services will be used.

Facebook original idea is to connect and keep in touch with people you knew face to face. The reason you may need facebook to keep in touch, rather than using traditional tools like Instant Messaging, Email, Phone, etc. Since you know this people you’re connecting with (because of the strong ties made while meeting face to face), in theory you want them to see and share photos and videos from trips, parties and everyday life. In the case of twitter things are very different, initially the idea was to test a new paradigm of communication, or broadcasting what are you doing and sharing ideas. Anybody could follow what where you doing and what ideas you are sharing, meaning that you could follow 20 people, while you are being followed by 4932. Soon it became a source of information (accurate or inaccurate) of what is happening, resulting in a representation of the real-time web.

How you connect with people and how the customer pain was solved, is what makes facebook: facebook and twitter: (you guessed right) twitter. Even if facebooks clones the User eXperience of twitter, facebook will never be a replacement of twitter. However we never said that twitter or any other service out there, could become a extension of facebook, now that is Google scary.

Although most are trying to figure out what exactly the Web  3.0 will be, I like to take a moment and show you what the business model of Web 2.0 was and what is happing today with web a.k.a Web 2.5.

The best way to explain what was the predominant business plan of the Web 2.0 companies, let take a look at this clip from the South Park episode called Gnomes (or “Underpants Gnomes”):

Finished? Cool stuff how the Gnomes business model and Web 2.0  look alike. Here is the comparison:

The success of Google gave “permission” to a bunch of VCs and companies to launch a “cool” or “innovative” way of using the web, getting a bunch of registered users and then (if no big company wants to buy them) try to figure out how to make money i.e facebook and youtube. Being  twitter and friendfeed  the last famous companies of the batch to use Gnomes business model.

With the economic recession [in other words realizing that we can't just waste money on promises and bet on money we don't have], it’s harder for web companies to get funding, if they don’t have clear revenue model (other than advertisement). So, today in the Web 2.5, companies like Vimeo, Animoto, Userfly and Mailchimpp, offer a trial or basic version of the service for free. If you want or need more advance features you can pay a subscription fee or paying as you go. Generally the “pay as you go” is for occasional users. What is interesting is that this is not a new business model, its basically the same used by companies behind  famous “shareware” software. But because the trend is to provide “software as a service” hosted on the “cloud” then, they took the principal of the shareware model and applied it to services. It will not be called the “shareware” model because its not software that you download and installed ( you just log and run it in your browser). The contemporary name is “freemium“.

Finally what is Web 2.5, well here is my kind of chaotic definition:

• Use freemium (or any variation) as their business model
• “the design style is really a re-emergence of the pre-web standards era of the late nineties”
• refocus on mashups and APIs
• target is less mainstream (as a result of a focus on making money)
• better user experience
• transition phase, were the lessons learn from web 2.0, are applied.

I was asked by mjhb in twitter, how to get Spaz (a open-source desktop Twitter client), working with a local copy of laconi.ca. Here is how:

Go to Preferences Tab (First tab going from right to left).

The click on the Account Information section, so the options are showed (as we see in the image bellow).

Then click on the Service URL and click on Load settings for.

This way there Spaz will not try to load any preset settings for twitter or identi.ca. Next thing to do is to fill up your Authentication info: Username, Password and the URL of your server, as we see bellow.

Note that is similar to the settings for identi.ca. In base API URL just put the IP or URL of your server followed by “/api/”. Then in Base WWW URL you put the ip or host of the server. There is one more step and I guess this is the dirty trick to make it work.

Go to the networking section and then uncheck the Auto-adjust refresh interval checkbox. After that click on the Save Preferences bottom to check that all is good. If you have any questions, leave a comment or tweet me at gtothesquare.

Here is the video of Twitter being hacked by GMZ:

Apparently GMZ (the hacker and a 18 student) used a dictionary attack to login in into a Admin account. How was this possible? Well if you try to log in into Gmail or Hotmail and failed for x number of time, then you are ask to confirm that you are human using captcha. Twitter didn’t have this feature, therefore anybody (in this case GMZ) ran a script overnight and guessed the password by brute force.

Like I said it before, twitter needs to go back to beta. By the way, if your site doesn’t have something from preventing this attack, you know now what can happened.

Want to read more about the topic, here are some links to:

The Register and Wired

Earlier I posted about the reports of the phishing attacks against Twitter. Apparently high profile accounts i.e Obama, Britney where hacked. The good side is that the Hackers have a sense of humor, the bad thing is that they have been fixed. 

It looks like the vector of attack here some tools that where used by support, to help users change their email. I guess that the hacker was able to change the email of the accounts, change the password and login. Makes me wonder if somebody in the support team had something to do with this?

I guess they should go back and but a BETA tag like most Web2.0 sites, at least that is a good excuse (Gmail is still BETA).

Image source ReadWriteWeb

According to the Twitter blog, phishing scams targeted at Twitter users, have appeared. If you wonder what scammers are trying to achieve with it? Well think about it, there is a lot of value in Twitter account. Maybe not on the average Joe Twitter user, however there are a lot of high profile Twitter users, which account info may be of value. Just by having the president of the USA there, is worth trying the scam. Imagine if they could get the account of any high profile user  or with thousands of followers ? Some interesting social engineering could be done against the followers of the accounts hijacked.

At the end of the day, scammers may be betting on users using the same password on all their sites. Actually it makes sense, think about it, it takes some effort to come up with a new password that you can remember. And since people might think, that their Twitter account is not worth the effort of a new password, then why not use the “standard Web 2.0” password. Just shows how valuable are login information to popular Web 2.0 sites, even if the sites itself is not making money, doesn’t mean scammers can make money out of them.