After the emergence of Google Plus this year, many people were wondering if Facebook had finally met its match. Maybe that's so, but Facebook has upped the ante over the past couple of weeks. It has significantly scaled up the amount of information it tracks about you - and many millions of other people. The once humble status update field has been expanded to include 5 types of "life events." You now automatically share data about what you're reading or listening to. There are more ways to follow and filter people. Those are just a few of the changes.
The big Facebook re-design has caused a predictable user backlash and media frenzy. To help you get a handle on what has changed, in this post we'll summarize the new Facebook and explore the major implications.
While the focus of today's Facebook announcements was the new Timeline profile, the Read, Watch, Listen media sharing apps have generated a lot of interest too. These so-called "social apps" haven't been widely launched yet, but you can get a sense of what they will do by adding a couple of brand new newspaper social apps to your Facebook profile: The Guardian's app and one from Washington Post.
Be forewarned though, with these apps you're automatically sending anything you read into your Facebook news feed. No "read" button. No clicking a "like" or "recommend" button. As soon as you click through to an article you are deemed to have "read" it and all of your Facebook friends and subscribers will hear about it. That could potentially cause you embarrassment and it will certainly add greatly to the noise of your Facebook experience.
The biggest announcement at Facebook's f8 event in San Francisco today was a radical new profile design. Called Timeline, the new design turns your profile into a colorful, easily searchable timeline of your entire life - at least the parts of it on Facebook. The Timeline won't go live until a few weeks, but you can set it up as a developer preview by following these instructions. This is a "Developer Release" version of Timeline, so it may be a little buggy.
Here is a first look at Facebook's Timeline, using my own Facebook account.
On-demand music streaming service Spotify will be deeply integrated into Facebook, Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced at the f8 developer conference today.
The new integration will allow Facebook users to stream Spotify tracks directly from the news feed or from one's own profile, where their top tracks will be listed. The partnership is also designed to better facilitate music recommendations among friends.
Whenever Facebook launches a major re-design, there is a user outcry. Partly that's because Facebook is known for its clumsy and confusing design, partly it's because people are resistant to change. This time round though, the main issue is that Facebook is trying to be something it is not: a newspaper.
The change causing all the fuss is to the News Feed, which makes up the primary content on your Facebook homepage. Instead of the most recent content from your social network displaying on your homepage, now you see "top stories" as determined by Facebook's software. In announcing the change, Facebook claimed that "News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper." The problem is, Facebook is a social network - not a news network.
Today at the Strata Summit on Big Data, Google's Bradley Horowitz noted an intriguing statistic about Google Plus usage: users of Google Plus are two to three times as likely to post content to private circles than they are to post it publicly. As our own Marshall Kirkpatrick commented, these numbers suggest the Circles metaphor is working.
Horowitz is VP of Product Management and a leader of the Google Plus social network, so he knows better than anyone the usage data. Still, I am very surprised to hear that private posts are 2-3 times as likely as public posts on Google Plus. I myself hardly ever post privately and I had thought that not many of the people I follow do either. So let's do an informal poll: do you regularly post privately in Google Plus?
"Our ambition is to up-level the model of social networking. We want to support asymmetric relationships with brands and celebrities - but we also wanted to support intimate communication with real life friends and family. Could we do both of those things? Being all things to all people is the path to hell - but could we do it?"
Bradley Horowitz, VP of Product Management and a leader of the Google Plus social network, said a lot of very interesting things today in an interview with Tim O'Reilly at the Strata Summit on Big Data. One of the most interesting, though, was to quietly introduce the data scientist behind Google Plus and its future development. Dr. Andrew Tomkins (above) used to be the Chief Scientist of Search at Yahoo but two years ago left and joined Google. No one noticed. At least no one indexed by Google News. Today we learned what Tomkins has been doing since joining Google. He's nerding-out on social network user activity data and gathering observations to help Google Plus aim to be all things to all people. Andrew Tomkins is charting the path to hell.
Today Ning chairman and co-founder Marc Andreessen announced the "merger" of his company with a larger company, Glam Media. In other words, Glam acquired Ning. It's interesting to look back at the history of Ning, a DIY social networking service that launched in 2005 when the Web 2.0 tech boom was in full flow. I wrote about the launch of Ning in October 2005, here on ReadWriteWeb, nearly 6 years ago.
Since that time Ning has negotiated the often rocky terrain of changing web trends. In 2005, mash-ups were all the rage and so Ning started out as a way to help you blend different web services together to create a "social application." This was the era when MySpace was the leading social network (it was acquired in July 2005 by News Corp.). Ning ultimately evolved to become a fully fledged social website builder. The history of Ning neatly explains how it fits into Glam Media's business, so let's take a closer look.
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.
Facebook seems to be testing a new feature that could give it more granular data of people's profiles and strengthen bonds within its social graph. Facebook has started showing users a "needs review" notification for information that others add in your profile. For instance, say you want to add a colleague from a past or current job, the person gets a notification that says that there is information that you need to review.
In terms of employment, this brings Facebook much closer to LinkedIn's style of strengthening connections along its social graph. LinkedIn makes it very clear that you must have a connection with the other person and the connection must be approved by both people before the link is completed. In this way, Facebook can make stronger ties in the vast web of its social graph.
