If you’re on Facebook, chances are that you don’t think it’s anywhere near perfect. At least that’s the findings of the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which released its results for 2011 yesterday. Facebook scored a 66 out of 100. While that may not sound that low, it comparison to other sites it is.

Not only is Facebook the lowest ranked social networking site, but it also scored the lowest of any company in the technology business that ACSI studied. Can you say ouch?

Leading the pack in the social media category was Wikipedia, with a score of 78. YouTube came in second at 74, and a category called “Others” at 67. I guess it’s pretty bad when you’re even losing to unnamed services. Social networking in general doesn’t garner high satisfaction overall among consumers, ACSI says. With a group rating of 70, only airlines, newspapers, and subscription television services score lower.

It’s really too early to say whether Google+ may turn the fortunes of this sector around — the survey results were compiled before the site launched. However, researchers believe it may score high. “We do know is that Google is one of the highest-scoring companies in the ACSI,” Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, creator of the ACSI said.

“An existing dominance of market share like Facebook has is no longer a safety net for a company that is not providing a superior customer experience,” he argued. In other words, 2012 could be interesting.

I had fun this morning recording a Bloggingheads.tv discussion about the techverse’s hottest topic of the moment, Google+.  My conversation partner was Slate’s Farhad Manjoo–and here we are. (Farhad’s a bit more of a Google+ skeptic than I am–but both of us see both promise and pitfalls in the service.)

When Google+ arrived at the end of June, it made a splash in part based on its defining notion: you have different kinds of friends and don’t want to share everything with all of them all of the time. This week a new iPhone group-messaging app called Katangoo is debuting. And its defining feature–which it came up with a long time before Google+ went public–is that people have different kinds of friends and dont want to share everything with all of them all of the time.

Katango’s distinctive feature is that it uses artificial intelligence to analyze all your Facebook friends, identify common attributes, and then automatically sort them into groups of people with something in common. The more friends you have, the more time this approach might save compared to you trying to organize them by hand.

Continue reading this story…

Just a reminder: I’ll be at Facebook HQ on Wednesday morning at 10am PT and will liveblog its event at technologizer.com/facebookevent. According to TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington, the news–part of it, at least–involves Skype video chat integrated into Facebook.

Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg seems to have more friends on Google+ than anyone else. I wonder who’s more embarrassed by that–Zuck or Google?

Maybe Facebook’s event next week doesn’t relate to the iPad at all. TechCrunch’s Michael Arrington says that the news is something entirely unrelated, but potentially cool: Skype-powered video chat within Facebook.

Is Facebook going to announce an iPad app next week? I hope so. If it does, I’ll be among the first to know, because I’m attending the company’s press event–as usual, involving unspecified news–at its headquarters in Palo Alto on Wednesday, July 6th at 10am. And I’ll liveblog the news as I get it at technologizer.com/facebookevent. Hope to see you there.

Back in 2007, Microsoft paid $240 million for 1.6 percent of Facebook, putting the three-year-old startup’s valuation at a cool $15 billion. People thought Microsoft was crazy. What’s Facebook’s valuation in June 2011? An even-cooler $70 billion.

Yesterday, TechCrunch’s MG Siegler wrote about an unreleased Facebook photo app for the iPhone. Today, he’s reporting that Facebook is working on a super-ambitious platform for Mobile Safari on the iPhone and iPad–one that uses HTML5 to deliver the sort of experience usually associated with native iOS apps. He doesn’t have any real details, but it could be cool, and would explain Mark Zuckerberg’s famous disinterest in doing a Facebook app for the iPad.

There are some nifty browser-based mobile apps out there–Google’s Gmail for phones and tablets comes to mind. But there hasn’t been a truly killer app yet of the sort that leaves millions of people thinking that Web apps rather than local apps are the wave of the future. If Facebook is at least trying to pull off something like that, it’s exciting news.

TechCrunch says that it’s got its hands on a massive cache of info about an unannounced photo-sharing app for the iPhone–from Facebook. And it says that the app looks amazing.

Don’t worry about hidin’ yo kids, Mark Zuckerberg isn’t after them. Several news outlets made a lot of hay out of the Facebook CEO’s comments at an education conference last week, seemingly suggesting that the company was ready to remove its requirement that users be over the age of 13.

Not that it matters: a recent study indicated that a third of those under 18 were below that minimum age, and often using Facebook without any parental supervision. That’s a problem, since estimates say that about a million children were cyberbullied on Facebook in the past year.

Zuckerberg argued that the press had taken his comments out of context, and rather he meant that bringing children online on Facebook was not a priority for the company. The site may consider doing so in the future, but not now. It may not really matter in the end anyway, given parents are already allowing their kids on the site regardless of its rules.

In the end, it’s the parents’ responsibility to know what their kids are doing online. Facebook’s not meant to be a babysitter.

Microsoft’s search site Bing just got a whole lot more social with the addition of a bunch of new Facebooky features so you can “bring the Friend Effect to search” (Bing’s phrase, not mine).

What’s the Friend Effect? According to Bing, it’s the way that “90 per cent of people seek advice from family and friends as part of the decision making process.”

Continue reading this story…

How could Facebook (a smart company) and Burson Marsteller (a smart PR agency) not have figured out that attempting to plant anti-Google stories in the media–without disclosing Facebook’s involvement–was a lousy idea?

For the past few days, a mystery has been unfolding in Silicon Valley. Somebody, it seems, hired Burson-Marsteller, a top public-relations firm, to pitch anti-Google stories to newspapers, urging them to investigate claims that Google was invading people’s privacy. Burson even offered to help an influential blogger write a Google-bashing op-ed, which it promised it could place in outlets like The Washington Post, Politico, and The Huffington Post.

The plot backfired when the blogger turned down Burson’s offer and posted the emails that Burson had sent him. It got worse when USA Today broke a story accusing Burson of spreading a “whisper campaign” about Google “on behalf of an unnamed client.”

But who was the mysterious unnamed client? While fingers pointed at Apple and Microsoft, The Daily Beast discovered that it’s a company nobody suspected—Facebook.

Friendster–which will forever be known as the site that had a chance to be Facebook before Facebook was Facebook, and blew it–is telling members it plans to blow away much of their data in preparation for a relaunch. I wonder what the odds are that Facebook will ever have to do anything comparable in, say, the next thirty years?

The online coupon industry is getting crowded. Facebook is the latest to announce, launching Deals on Facebook in five cities on Tuesday. The first cities to get the service will be Atlanta, Austin, Dallas, San Diego, and San Francisco, although if you live elsewhere and are interested you’ll be able to sign up to be notified.

Of course if Facebook is involved there’s going to be some kind of social aspect, so the company says it will make it easy for users of the service to share the deals they find, as well as helping “find interesting experiences around you to do with friends.” You’ll also be able to “Like” the deal in true Facebook fashion.

Continue reading this story…

The news at Facebook’s event this morning turned out to be interesting behind-the-scenes stuff: it’s not only talking about the super-efficient servers it built for its data center in Prineville, Oregon, but creating a group called the Open Compute Project to help other companies build their own servers based on the same design. I wrote all this up for Techland.