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This week Facebook are rolling out their reduced Tab size change, which was originally mentioned last October. So make sure all of your custom Tabs and Apps are resized from 760 to 520 pixels otherwise you’ll be seeing the dreaded ‘broken’ icon.

More information can be found here. / Via InsideFacebook

So, a week after the launch of Facebook Places and what are your thoughts on it? Oh that’s right, it’s only had a US launch so you probably don’t have any first hand experience of it (unless you are Mark Zuckerberg or some other Facebook employee!). One particular luxury we have over here is we can sit back and watch with a reserved caution as others figure out the underlying privacy issues… Or get some good ideas on how to prank friends!

Dennis Crowley, owner of Foursquare doesn’t seem scared by the new competition, telling The Telegraph “I have now had a chance to play around with Facebook Places and it’s not that great or interesting. It’s a pretty boring service, with barely any incentives for users to keep coming back and telling their friends where they are.” He continues “The only interesting thing about Places is that it has a potential audience of over 500 million people around the world… but that can only be a good thing for location-based services, like Foursquare, as Facebook will educate the masses about check-ins.”

The introduction of Places seems to be working in contrast of Facebook’s push to monetise the platform by opening it up to marketers. We use Facebook for all of our clients. The way you can specifically target users based on the information they share makes it a platform that is second to none. But it is this that irks somewhat; with Places people don’t want to share where they are, or where their ‘friends’ say they are broadcast by default to ‘everyone’.

Facebook (well for me, personally) used to be somewhere my actual friends and I could chat online and share links, videos, events etc. Then school friends who I’d not been in touch with (or since) began using the platform and ‘Friend Requesting’ me, and it felt rude not to ‘Accept’ all of them. I realise I may be sounding a bit like a Grumpy Old Man and having contrary views to a company from progressing and growing but Facebook became a lot more open and a lot less personal. That was just the start. Facebook have 500 million+ users, I can’t imagine all of those users are completely web-savvy. Now people become some kind of Facebook celebrities with 1000+ ‘Friends’, reminiscent of the days of MySpace when it was common culture to friend collect. Imagine introducing Places to MySpace. It’s a thought TechCrunch made a whole lot more eloquently in a recent article. Would you feel comfortable sharing that much information with virtual/actual strangers by default? Is it time for Facebook to re-think their Social Graph? Should it introduce a friend tier, its own version of Followers/Following option?