ReCrunch

[TC] Do The Right Thing: Save An Alien (and this startup) (Exhibit A):

perhaps Save An Alien, an Israeli Facebook-only startup, can reach their goal of 10 million users in six months. I sure hope they do, anyway. Otherwise a bunch of cute little aliens are going to die. … And if you really like your alien you can buy a tshirt with it on it. I imagine other revenue generating merchandising opportunities may be thought up later, too.

[TC] Epson Joins Sprint: They Suck And Their New Website Is Stupid (Exhibit B):

I’m pretty sure there are some consultants out there who are telling big, clueless companies that the way to engage with their audience is to engage with them on an interactive, emotional level. … now those consultants have conned Epson into doing the same thing on a new site called Epsonality. They ask questions like “You come across a bear in the woods, what do you do?” and “you find $199.99 lying on the ground, what do you do?” and use your answers to somehow determine the right printer for you. All in a sick, highly personalized Flash interface.

Save An Alien is a fairly well-crafted Facebook Ponzi scheme in a class of its own. Most Facebook apps can be classified into two categories: either amateur creations by college kids seeking their five minutes of fame, or promotional vehicles for startups looking to get a few more users and show something at the next investor meeting. Save An Alien is neither. It appears too elaborate to be crafted overnight in a dorm room and yet there is no product or service it is supposed to sell. Well, there are the t-shirts. If they’re selling as well as photo albums at Flickr, maybe they’ll unload a hundred of them. Big money, big money! All Save An Alien has to do is infect 10 million Facebook profiles.

Epsonality is just a corporate quiz site. Answer a few questions and they shove one of Epson’s printers in your face.

By installing the Save An Alien, you hand over all your the info stored in your Facebook profile. Sure, they’re not supposed to keep it, but who is going to enforce that? Epsonality is totally harmless. And now you know Epson makes printers. And if you’re more likely to buy one now. Yes, even if you thought that website was stupid.

I know one more difference between the two. Save An Alien guys will worship Michael Arrington if the site makes it onto TechCrunch. I doubt anyone at Epson even knows who he is.

Have we learned a lesson here today?

[TC] College.com: Returning To Facebook’s Roots:

Largely the expansion has paid off for the Facebook, with the site’s growth rate hastening after each change. However, the changes have left some users wistful for a time when Facebook was a place just for college students. College.com plans to serve those users.

It’s a funny way of returning to Facebook’s roots. The registration is open to anyone, with or without a .edu email, meaning that there is no way to restrict this to college students. This was one of the changes that Facebook implemented. On College.com, anyone can join any college network. Facebook was initially only available at a few select schools and has always used your email address to validate college affiliation. There are also dating compatibility tests, flash cards, professor ratings, and a variety of other features. Part of Facebook’s initial appeal was its clean interface and a limited feature set. Unlike, you know, MySpace.

So really this is not returning to Facebook’s roots at all. It’s just another botched attempt to capitalize on the college student market that Facebook has conquered long ago.

[TC] People Search Business Just Got More Complicated As Facebook Enters Market:

Facebook just announced that they are now allowing public searches of their users by people without Facebook accounts. … To the extent any one service such as Facebook (or LinkedIn, etc.) gather lots of centralized information about a large group of people and then make it available for general search, these people search engines become much less important. If these startups were public entities, their market valuations would dip today.

So now anyone can find out if John Smith has a Facebook account without signing up. Revolutionary! To actually view anything besides a thumbnail, though, you still need to get an account. Back to square one. I guess nothing really changed after all.

Perhaps it’s just an SEO trick. From their blog entry:

In a few weeks, we will allow these Public Search listings (depending on users’ individual privacy settings) to be found by search engines like Google, MSN Live, Yahoo, etc.

Seems like an easy way to add millions of additional pages to Google’s index. More pages in the index lead to more hits lead to higher advertising revenue. This is something that others have been taking advantage of already. Rapleaf, for example, has been crawling social networks and making that data publlic for a while now.

[TC] Like Sands Through The Hour Glass, Another Person Is Claiming To Have Founded Facebook:

The New York Times has discovered a new claimant for the title of founder of Facebook. Aaron Greenspan, a Harvard classmate of Mark Zuckerberg claims that he created the original college social networking system, before either Facebook or ConnectU were founded. Mr. Greenspan is said to have established a web service that he called houseSYSTEM in 2003, 6 months prior to Facebook launching.

It’s not especially surprising that the mainstream media has only discovered this now, but I thought TechCrunch is supposed to be on top of all this social networking stuff. Aaron Greenspan posted an open letter to Mark Zuckerberg back in September 2006 in which he made his claims:

Remember that web site you signed up for at Harvard two days before we met in January, 2004, called houseSYSTEM - the one I made with the Universal Face Book that pre-dated your site by four months? (You left it out of your speech at Stanford, which is why I ask.)

Well, it was posted on an obscure web site, so maybe no one noticed. No, wait. The letter was discussed on Slashdot, WebProNews, and a bunch of minor blogs. Crap.

[TC] Now We’re Not Talking: Telstra Bans Facebook:

Telstra, Australia’s largest telecommunications company, has banned its approximately 49,000 employees from using Facebook. As Cameron Reilly at G’Day World puts it, “This would be a retarded move for ANY company, let alone a company that is trying to position itself as a company that “gets” online.”

I forgot that being hip was more important than being productive nowdays. Let’s look back at what TechCrunch itself has taught us about social networking at work.

[TC] Career Advice: Don’t Spend Half Your Work Day On Facebook And Then Brag About It:

A Goldman Sachs trader in the UK named “Charlie” was warned by his employer that his visits to Facebook on company time were to stop. He spent, apparently, over 500 hours on Facebook in a six month period. That works out to about 4 hours per day.

Perhaps if employees did not spend half their time on Facebook, companies would not be banning it.

[TC] Truemors For Facebook:

Guy Kawasaki’s Truemors is testing out a new version of the service for Facebook. … TFF is for you to “tell your friends.” You can post something that only your friends can read and discuss. In fact, you can get even more specific: Selecting just a few of your friends.

In other words, now you can add a Facebook app that does virtually the same thing as Facebook Notes. This one, however, carries the Truemors branding and will undoubtedly try to get all your friends to install it. And just wait until someone figures out how to actually monetize it.