This week was published the preliminary prospectus for facebook IPO. The table of content summarizes some numbers about facebook: 

And facebook’s goal: 

Registration Statement on Form S-1 via kwout

Then I found this screenshot from FT Alphaville relevant about facebook user experience:

FT Alphaville » Become Facebook’s friend via kwout

Found via FT Alphaville » Become Facebook’s friend

Station: The UnFacebook World via kwout

Found via FlowingData.

Kashmir Hill – The Not-So Private Parts – Forbes via kwout

Found via The Atlantic:
What You Shouldn’t Post on Your Facebook Page If You Want a Job – Alexis Madrigal – Technology – The Atlantic

BBC reported a brief Facebook outage yesterday. I was just curious about the way Facebook communicated on the outage. I didn’t find any formal information on their blog for instance. I just found this 30 Min. gap of service in their Platform Live Status page:

Platform Live Status – Facebook Developers via kwout

Andre Breton the artist part of the surrealism group was dreaming to live in a house of glass. Today with Facebook, everybody has the ability to put their digital life in a House of Glass.

Alec Saunders published an interesting post that describes how to do some quick data mining with Facebook. The starting point is to click on the advertisers link at the bottom of any Facebook page. Follow the steps as described by Alec up to the audience choice. That’s where the data mining can be done. For instance  Facebook reports that there are 1,053,740 people located in France:

If more accuracy is required, we may select only women. There are  319,600  Women located in France:

We can do the same for Men. There are 321,440 men located in France.

There are slightly more men, but there is almost a perfect balance between men and women. The strange thing is if we add Men + Women located in France, we get 641,040 (and not 1,053,740). This means that about 400,000 people didn’t complete the sex information in their profile. This point shows the limit of accuracy of Facebook data mining.

Another interesting finding is the difference between single and married people. There are 166,280 Singles.

And there are 56,540 married people.

We can explain the fact that there are more single people because there are more young people (under 25 so not married yet). It will be interesting to check those figures in a few months to see how the network evolves.

Webware published a very good introduction to Facebook: Newbie’s guide to Facebook. This introduction gives you:

• A definition of what is FB
• The way to setup an account/Profile
• Advices on security/Privacy settings
• A definition of Poking and how to use it
• Advices on the way to share information with friends
• A short description of the FB platform
• A list of addons to enhance the FB experience

I would have loved to find this introduction on FB earlier when I was a newbie to FB.

The very serious Financial Times published on his web site a few days ago this call for advice:

I work in an advertising agency and my boss (who is quite cool) has just asked to be my friend on Facebook. I feel invaded – I’m passionate about my work but want to keep it separate from the rest of my life. I definitely don’t want him spying on what I say to my friends. He has also asked other people in the office who have said Yes and they seem to think it’s fine. But I don’t want to. Can I say No without damaging my career?

Advertising creative, female, 26

This is rather a new kind of problem generated by social networking sites like Facebook. And it’s symptomatic that this has been reported on Facebook. As actually Facebook appear to be both a networking site for professional and personal linking. The solution proposed by  Lucy Kellaway from FT.com is rather drastic: stop using Facebook. But Facebook should offer in the future the ability to separate your work friends from your social ones.