There is a reason that Facebook delayed its developers' conference until the fall this year, after having hosted it in the spring or early summer previously. Simply, Facebook has been busy. It will have been nearly a year-and-a-half since Facebook last held a major event (Skype calls do not really count) and that is a long time for the platform to decide and then implement and announce where it is going next. We will learn exactly what the path is at f8 on Thursday.
So, what are we looking for? Facebook's recent release strategy provides a good road map. Since the release of Google Plus, almost all of Facebook's new features have been to counter Google's push into its territory. Those are just reactionary moves, blips in the road. Content is going to be heavily featured at f8 and the true ground shaking updates will be announced this week.
According to reports, Facebook's f8 developer conference this coming Thursday will have the motto "Read. Watch. Listen." Other than reminding me of a certain tech blog's name, this motto excites me because of the promise it holds that Facebook will fully embrace multimedia. But that has some major implications, which will affect many in the Web ecosystem. In this post we highlight 3 of the biggest potential implications.
To summarize the developments so far. TechCrunch reported that there will be three new buttons announced: "Facebook users will be able to click Read, Listened, Watched on content in their news feed. And soon, "Want" as well." Meanwhile All Things D reported that "Read" partners include big online publishers such as Yahoo, "Watch" will be "a range of Web video sites" and "Listen" will be music services.
Disqus is quietly testing an interface that allows site owners to rank and give credentials and labels to their commenters. The feature takes advantage of a trend towards being able to find experts through social search.
The project is called Disqus Ranks, and it should be rolling out shortly. Disqus did not return a request for information about the timing of the rollout.
iPad magazine apps have been one of the big trends over the past year. Flipboard is the most well known and successful so far, but others have tried to get a slice of the action. News.me is a notable example, created by the same Twitter-focused stable (Betaworks) that produced TweetDeck and Bit.ly. The New York Times was also a partner. Today News.Me became a separate company and announced that it will henceforth be a free app.
Although News.me and Flipboard are similar products, their approaches are fundamentally different. News.me is a curated reading experience, whereas with Flipboard you select your reading material directly. It's ultimately a matter of personal preference which approach you prefer. But this is going to be a key point in whether News.me can gain momentum in this crowded market.
The Guardian has taken a big step across the pond today with its launch of a U.S. homepage at guardiannews.com. The design is consistent with the U.K. front page, but the stories and sections are tailored to a U.S. audience. In her editorial announcing the launch, Guardian US Editor-In-Chief Janine Gibson calls it "the first tiny step in our bid to improve the Guardian website for US users," marking the beginning of the organization's new digital operations based in New York City.
Gibson goes to great lengths to downplay the importance of this launch, calling it "very, very beta," but there are some big announcements here beyond just this homepage news. The announcement also says that the Guardian is hiring a whole U.S.-based newsroom. Today's U.S. homepage launch appears to be just one step in the Guardian's transformation into a full-fledged international news organization.
Earlier this week we looked at the remarkable growth of Tumblr, a blogging and curation service that now gets over 12 billion page views per month. Tumblr is mostly used as a consumer curation tool - it's an easy way for people to re-post articles, images and videos. But Tumblr can also be used to power a news website. That's exactly what ShortFormBlog does.
Launched in January 2009 by Ernie Smith from Washington D.C., the site publishes about 30 news soundbites a day. ShortFormBlog is still a part-time project for Smith, who also works as a graphic designer at The Washington Post. He's hoping to turn the site into a full-time business. And I think he's onto something, certainly in terms of using a tool like Tumblr to change the way news is delivered and consumed. I interviewed Smith to find out more about his Tumblr-powered news service.
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.
This time last year, we compared the growth of the two leading light blogging services: Tumblr and Posterous. The conclusion was that Tumblr had all but defeated its rival. All through 2010, Tumblr showed exponential growth. That has continued into 2011. Over the past year, Tumblr has grown from just over 100 million visits per month to over 300 million now (according to Quantcast). Over the same period, Posterous has grown from about 7M visits per month to about 11M. So the gap has widened: a year ago Tumblr got 14-15 times more visits per month, now it's double that.
Tumblr is now so popular that its founder got invited to The White House and its logo acquired a fish jumping through it. Tumblr is also getting 12 billion page views per month, an estimated 8 times more than Wordpress.com.
In an effort to capture growing mobile traffic, The Guardian has launched a versatile native Android app. The app is free and ad-supported for all users, but it offers some powerful and distinguishing features.
It displays full-screen photo galleries and audio and video content in addition to text articles. It enables browsing by section, topic, or author, and users can save favorites for easy browsing from the app or the phone's home screen. It even allows downloading of the personalized homepage and favorites for offline reading. The feature set reflects a solid understanding of the needs of new media consumers on the part of The Guardian's mobile team, which we've been watching for a long time.
Michael Stipe is the lead singer of R.E.M., one of the most influential bands of all time. In an interview with Creators Project, Stipe describes how he uses the blogging platform Tumblr to publish his side project art work. "In a way, like the rest of the world, I'm kind of self-publishing on my Tumblr site," said Stipe in the interview.
It's refreshing to know that someone as famous as Michael Stipe is admitting that he's just like every other Tumblr user. It shows both how truly democratic these Web tools are and the level of control that anybody - Michael Stipe or not - can have over their creative work.
