If you’re one of those Facebook users scared as hell about your privacy but you can’t take the 2 minutes to go change the settings yourself then this is for you. Go ahead and try it out.

Take for instance the ‘Like’ button on top of this article. If you clicked ‘Like’, other friends you have, with no connection to me will be able to read and ‘Like’ this article as well. Ultimately, this is a Digg killer if you ask me (funny timing, Digg just announced layoffs).

Regarding the insights, you get a few reports to track this information which can be handy for users and is data that you don’t currently get with Google Analytics. One thing that bothers me is I can’t change the label for my domain or even delete it.

I would definitely check it out at http://www.facebook.com/insights.

One of the original things that attracted me to Facebook, was the ability to easily import data from my social networks to display to others.  Be it information automatically being imported from Youtube or Hulu, but also if I wanted to share a link it would give a decent amount of metadata to my friends.  But the flip-side of that is the constant noise and junk people put out there.  And the fact it’s taken me 2 years to gain the 100+ friends that I have.

With Google Buzz, they did something very nice.  Everyone who is your friend in Gmail automatically becomes your friend in Buzz.  No more spending years to find friends, send friend requests, etc.  Plus they support a lot of my social networks automatically with I’ve already filled out in my Google Profile.  So when I make a Twitter post it automatically comes through into Buzz.  Sweet.

So is this the end of me having to keep both HootSuite and Facebook open during the day to get my news and information?  Possibly.  I’m in Gmail all day as well anyway since it’s my main email client.  There is still some polishing up to do but overnight I think this has created major threats to Facebook, considering they have yet to integrate FriendFeed into their application for real-time social meta importing.

A couple of months ago, after three years as a Google product manager, I decided to leave for Facebook. I am writing this note to spread Good News to all the friends I haven’t already overwhelmed with my enthusiasm: Facebook really is That company.

Which company? That one. That company that shows up once in a very long while — the Google of yesterday, the Microsoft of long ago. That company where large numbers of stunningly-brilliant people congregate and feed off each other’s genius. That company that’s doing with 60 engineers what teams of 600 can’t pull off. That company that’s on the cusp of Changing The World, that’s still small enough where each employee has a huge impact on the organization, where you think about working now and again, and where you know you’ll kick yourself in three years if you don’t jump on the bandwagon now, even after someone had told you that it was rolling toward the promised land. That company where everyone seems to be having the time of their life.

I’m serious. I have drunk from the kool-aid, and it is delicious. Facebook is hiring ambitiously across the organization. If you’re an engineer, UI designer, product manager, statistician, bizdev god, general entrepreneurial badass, whatever, and you would even consider considering Facebook as your new place for hat-hanging, please send me a Facebook message. We can have lunch, or I can give you a tour, or we can go kick it with Mark Zuckerberg — whatever it takes.

That kool-aid probably tastes pretty damn good.  I really hope more companies take them as an example of how to run successful internet businesses.

Update: Another good library it seems when working with FQL, Facebook Linq to Fql addon.  Nice, I was wondering if someone had written one yet.

Facebook Developer Toolkit + MVC Addon

This seems to be one of the most popular libraries, as it has been in use for quite some time.  This also was the official toolkit released that was done by Clarity Consulting for the Visual Studio Express team.  It seems that this project was dead in the water until recently when it picked back up again with the last release on June 22, 2009.  To enable MVC support though, you have to download an external addon that basically gives you additional logic to work with MVC framework like custom filter attributes for authentication.  But the problem here is this addon was based on an old version of Facebook Developer Toolkit and the MVC framework, and was never updated.

Facebook Developer Toolkit
MVC Addon

Facebook.Net + Additional MVC Classes

Another developer recommended using the Facebook.Net library which was developed by Nikhil Kothari, and tweaking some of the code with their own additional changes.  This includes creating a action attribute, session and session classes that override the default behavior.  Again, the problem with this approach seems to be that Nikhil has abandoned the Facebook.Net library and it’s just too much out-of-date.

Facebook.Net
Additional MVC Classes

.NET Facebook API Client

This is one of the newer libraries to hit the scene, and while I think it’s the most kept up and robust, it is still lacking some API features.  Although, one of their philosophies is that they want to keep a library that is in sync as much as possible with the Facebook API changes that are constantly made which is a good sign.  They have a pretty extensive feature list that you can checkout here, but for me I need to work with the Events API which doesn’t look supported yet so this library might be a work in progress for me.

.NET Facebook API Client

So, it still seems there is no definite answer to using the latest Facebook API with ASP.NET MVC.  A lot of work in progress or out-of-date libraries which is a little frustrating.  I hope my digging helps someone out there come up with some definitive answers when using Facebook and ASP.NET MVC.

My biggest excuse for using public services like Flickr or Youtube/Vimeo was because if I wanted to share pictures or a video with friends they didn’t need to belong on Facebook.  Now, it seems almost everyone I know is on Facebook and is utilizing their built-in social applications like photo tagging, videos, among others.  If the point of me putting my pictures on Flickr is to only share them with my friends and family, why not just import them into Facebook and immediately share to everyone and avoid the $25/year I pay to Flickr?  I guess you could say there are some bits of data out there I want to keep 100% public, but do the people that see it really care?

Another thing to think about is what happens in 1 or 2 years and Facebook may no longer be the behemoth it is right now.  Will I be able to export my data out?  Or is it stuck within Facebook’s platform forever and there’s nothing I can do to ever get it exported back to my computer?  This would be a scary situation.  But then again, all my digital media is in the cloud as of today anyway and not backed up locally.

Joel Atwood of Coding Horror fame makes a good point that he will never use private social networks because we have the best social network right in front of us: the Internet.

In my honest opinion I think the point of what a social network is for, is to be social.  If all of my friends and family are on that network, it only makes sense to be social with my digital media within that network between them.

But for some reason I feel like I’m going against my conscious.