Facebook made significant changes to how it delivers your friends' news and updates today by releasing a ticker feature and a news feed format that arranges missed updates in a newspaper-style format.
The move is an improvement in relevancy of information feeds in social profiles and it demonstrates an intelligent system for delivering information and encouraging interaction on the world's largest social network.
When Steve Jobs unveiled iMessage, Apple's new cross-device mobile messaging feature, at the WWDC in June, fans of the company's products were excited to see a potential "SMS killer" coming down the pike. What the company's then-CEO failed to mention is that the service will work with their iChat desktop client as well.
iMessage, which will be rolled out to iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch users when iOS drops this Fall, will apparently be available to users of OS X Lion via the iChat application, according to Mac Rumors.
Twitter will support Chinese language in the coming weeks, according to a research report published today.
It's not clear how well that will help Chinese users in the mainland, since the service has been banned since 2009. It may not make much of a dent at all in Twitter's hopes to capture the hearts and minds of Chinese-language users of the microblogging platform.
Facebook is evolving its mobile messaging system. The company announced this afternoon a new mobile application called Messenger that stands alone from its original platform app. It will be available for Android and iOS and is a dynamic shift away from how Facebook has approached its mobile products, keeping everything within its dedicated platform app. Facebook is now stepping into the territory of Talk for Android and BlackBerry Messenger and is getting closer to having a true unified communications platform.
Messenger is fairly simple. If you have used BlackBerry Messenger before then you should be able to understand Facebook's newest offering (without the confusing PIN system of BlackBerry). Messenger can also do group chat, which puts it in competition with the Google Plus Huddle function in its mobile app on iOS and Android. What do you think of Facebook's new Messenger initiative? Is it something you plan on using?
This week we're running a 5-part series of posts looking back on the significant trends of 2011. Today we're reviewing group messaging, the hot trend at this year's SXSW festival. Group messaging started out as a battle between several startups, but over the past few months it's turned into a fascinating Google vs. Facebook vs. Microsoft faceoff.
Group messaging threatened to become a breakout activity at SXSW, as tweeting and 'checking in' had done at previous SXSW events. It didn't quite pan out that way, partly because a giant (Facebook) acquired one of the leading scrappy startups before things got interesting. Also, there were minor but irritating glitches with the apps. A few months on and group messaging is no longer as hyped as it was at SXSW. Yet it's more than ever a key feature in the social and mobile products of Google, Facebook and Microsoft.
The video and voice calling service Skype is coming to a TV near you, thanks to a new partnership with Comcast, a leading provider of cable TV services here in the U.S. This morning, the two companies formally announced a deal that will allow Comcast customers to use Skype's HD video calling on their HD television sets, made available through a Comcast-provided adapter box which works in conjunction with an HD video camera.
Customer trials of the new service will begin in "the coming months," but no exact date was given for the service's wider launch, only that more details will be made available "later this year."
IM+, the multi-platform chat client that runs on nearly every type of mobile phone, has found its way onto the desktop. The company has been beta testing a Web-based version of its popular app since August and tomorrow is taking it out of beta.
CiviGuard is a new mobile-based solution for emergency communications. At heart it's an alerts and notification system, with messages distributed via text messages, an HTML5 web app, push notifications and social media services like Twitter. The product was developed by 3 students of Singularity University: Zubin Wadia, Shawna Pandya and Timothy Coleman. It was inspired by 9/11, Hurricane Katrina and other recent crises.
CiviGuard is an inspiring example of how mobile and real-time web technologies can be used to bring about meaningful change. I spoke with the 3 founders to find out more.
ABC News Radio and StatusNet, the open-source microblogging service that serves as the foundation for identi.ca, have "unofficially" partnered to unveil a newswire for the radio service.
While the partnership may not be "official", it is yet another vote of confidence in the Twitter-alternative and the open Web.
Miio is a new microblogging service which is a bit like a mashup between Twitter, FriendFeed, Facebook and an RSS reader. Now typically, we don't like describing services as a "it's like a this plus a that," but Miio is precisely the kind of service that needs a little help in the "what this is" department.
Don't get us wrong, the concept itself isn't bad: a discussion board built around interests as opposed to popularity. It's just that the execution makes the service seem a little confusing.
So what is miio? That's what we're trying to figure out today.
