It's been a fascinating year in the social networking space, as heavyweight champion Facebook fends off some solid blows from muscley contender Google Plus. However over the past week, it's been nearly all Facebook - with the release of the Subscriber button and vastly improved lists (akin to Google Plus "circles"). This week, or perhaps I should say round, is also shaping up to be a big one for Facebook. Its annual developer conference F8 is on this Thursday in San Francisco. According to uber-blogger Robert Scoble, "Facebook has one of its biggest releases ever coming this week." ReadWriteWeb will be at F8 to cover whatever big punches Facebook delivers.
Meanwhile the Google Plus team has been fairly quiet lately, other than the announcement of a (limited) API last week. Here are five things we wish Google Plus would do, both to improve its still nascent product and to make Facebook stagger a little against the ropes!
One of the most intriguing of this year's Web battles is between Facebook and Google Plus, as the two products vie for social networking supremacy. Yesterday we explored the ramifications of Facebook's new Subscribe button, which partly aims to match Google Plus on public sharing. Today we turn out attention to another new feature that Facebook launched this week: improved friend lists. It's a direct response to the "Circles" feature of Google Plus, which enables you to put your friends into lists. The new Facebook lists are definitely an improvement; and Facebook even gets one over Plus. Facebook has managed to automate some of the process of creating lists, whereas creating and populating Circles requires manual labor in Google Plus.
To make the most of Facebook's improved lists, we bring you this guide and analysis.
It's been fascinating to watch the to and fro between Facebook and Google +, as the two products vie for social networking supremacy. As you'd expect, a strong challenger (Google +) has forced the current social networking world champion (Facebook) to make some defensive moves. Facebook made two big changes this week: automated friend lists and a new subscriber button. In a series of posts, I'll be analyzing this intriguing battle in more detail - because it's changing the social networking landscape significantly.
I'll start with Facebook's launch of the Subscribe button, another in a long line of Facebook efforts to get its users to post public updates. The Subscribe button has some undeniably good features, but the contentious one is that it enables you to subscribe to people's public updates instead of asking them to be your friend. This has the effect of prompting users to post more public updates in Facebook, so that subscribers have something to read from you.
Goodreads, a social network that lets readers rate and review books, has launched a recommendation engine designed to help users choose what to read next.
The new feature comes six months after the startup acquired Discovereads, a book recommendation engine which is something CEO Otis Chandler cited as a sought-after feature among Goodreads users.
David Cameron, the prime minister of the United Kingdom, who made comments in the wake of last month's nation-wide riots about the possibility of blocking participants in civil unrest from using social media, has joined Google's new social network, Plus. Joining him this morning were +Ed Miliband and +Nick Clegg (as they are referred to on Google's site), leaders of the Labor and Liberal Democrat party.
Cameron's remarks about discussing the possibility of blocking social networks at times of unrest were widely criticized as either a balloon being floated for dictatorial contro, an appeasement of angry critics of social networks or simply heavy-handed. Others said it was simply a matter of putting a widely discussed idea on the table. When the city of San Francisco shut off cell phone service in its transit system in order to prevent organizers of a protest against police brutality from using their mobile devices to organize - that made the whole matter feel much more serious.
Last week, Diaspora, the open-source, privacy-aware social network of our nerdy dreams, posted its first public response to the launch of Google Plus and the recent efforts around privacy and selective sharing at Facebook. For a reaction to news that two Web behemoths are drinking Diaspora's milkshake in terms of features, the blog post sounds pretty upbeat, with perhaps just a hint of caginess. "We're proud that Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles," the Diaspora team writes. "We're making a difference already."
Let's not get into whether Diaspora can take credit for features of Google Plus and Facebook. There are things about Diaspora that still are unique among its competitors. Not only is it open-source, it's decentralized and distributed. Users are encouraged to set up their own servers. But these are not features for normal human users. In that category, the social networking superpowers seem to have Diaspora cornered.
One of LinkedIn's greatest advantages is that it has a wealth of data on the workforce. It can take that data and analyze market segments to find trends of who works in a specific industry, what kind of education they have, what their background is, who they know, where they are from and so on. This morning LinkedIn released an infographic studying entrepreneurs and how they came to their position if life.
LinkedIn says it is "Sequencing the Startup DNA." Unsurprisingly, the top three schools that startup founders come from are Stanford, Harvard and MIT Sloan. Yet, LinkedIn goes on to dispel a myth of startup founders that concoct their ideas to change the world from their dorm rooms.
Klout, the startup that's attempting to create a social media credit agency, quietly added two new features to its platform last night. Answering calls for bulkier lists and more social graph measurement, Klout now lets users import Twitter lists and it finally links up accounts to Facebook Fan Pages.
The Twitter list feature is good, but the Facebook Fan Pages should excite people manning the desks at brands and agencies. They've been clamoring for more functionality - and legitimacy - with Klout.
For the first time ever, 50% of all American adults are using social networking sites, according to new data from the Pew Internet and American Life Project.
Of active Internet users in particular, 65% are social networking users, a number that continues to climb. To put things in perspective, only 29% of adult American Internet users reported using social networking tools in 2008.
Rob "CmdrTaco" Malda has announced his resignation as editor-in-chief of Slashdot after 14 years and over 15,000 stories posted. In his farewell post, Malda cites "dramatic" changes to the Internet since Slashdot's inception. "For me," writes Malda, "the Slashdot of today is fused to the Slashdot of the past. This makes it really hard to objectively consider the future of the site. While my corporate overlords and I haven't seen eye to eye on every decision in the last decade, I am certain that Jeff Drobick and the other executives at Geeknet will do their best."
