The Social Space Station

According to their blog, Facebook is set to to support vanity URLs or descriptive usernames to more easily identify and link Facebook accounts. This is a big deal so in preparation for the rush, Facebook have teased their community by promoting an exact day and time to release this service - June 13th 4:01pm (see the dynamic timer by clicking the image above).

The desriptive usernames will replace the meaningless number (at least publically) to identity and link users through their URLs. For example, my URL for Twitter is http://twitter.com/socialspace, however, as Facebook encourages authentic names, users will jump over screaming children and broken glass to register their names first. And as they are dished out on a first-come-first-serve basis you can pretty much guarantee a bun fight.

You’ve been warned! (and oh, see you there)

I’m not overly parochial particularly when talking about the Internet but I thought it important to point out a recent oversight by Facebook. In addition to the new profile design, Facebook have added a new splash screen where the largest component of this is a flat-map of the world (see below).

Superimposed over the map is a representation of social connections between countries and continents illustrating the world-wide span of the Facebook empire. However, a glaring omission exists - New Zealand is not tied to the rest of world.



As stated already, I’m not especially parochial but in this case the map is inaccurate, well it’s inaccurate in lots of ways but for the purposes of this post, I’m focusing on the unintentional isolation of New Zealand in cyberspace. Which is not true, even if the country is geographically.

Currently, the New Zealand network on Facebook has 340,219 people signed up. This number is smaller than I would expect so am assuming that many members have simply not joined the New Zealand network yet. I would be interested in knowing just how many actual Facebook members operate out of New Zealand.

Incidentally, the Otago network (in which I belong) has 7,733 people.

This omission I think is an unintentional oversight by Facebook in order to better serve their design. However, I have contacted them to see if they can join the dots to New Zealand in an effort to improve the accuracy of their map.

I will post their response when I get one.

Update (Weds): I received an automated response late this morning with a suggestion to check out Mark Zuckerberg’s thoughts on the new Facebook.

It seems the ubiquitous Facebook is down for maintenance. A terse, business like message is displayed (see below) instead of fun and frothy feedback like the fail whale from Twitter (unsurprisingly I guess).



Speaking of the fail whale, here is the iPhone being rescued by the reliable Tweeters:



(c/o The Fail Whale Fan Club)