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.

One format is an updates ticker that allows for joining real-time conversations based on customized selection options. The other is a news aggregator, which functions as a newspaper, to keep users informed of the most important events and posts they have missed while they have been away.

The ticker is the most simple and straightforward feature. It makes it very easy for you to select whom you want to receive news from, and how often you want to hear from them.

When those people post updates - and they are selected as someone you want to hear from more frequently - you will immediately be alerted to join the conversation. Less relevant people will not signal as often or immediately.

It's kind of like being able to predict frequency and then assign a value to the number of times your annoying Aunt Betty calls you to tell you again about the neighbor's cats. In this way, you are judging just how close you want to be to Aunt Betty - and her cats - regardless of how close Aunt Betty wants to be to you. It's a subtle move by the engineers at Facebook.

Facebook is also changing its news feed, moving away from the rather clumsy "Most Recent" and "Top News" tags.

Facebook has made it so that if you are one of those people who spends a few weeks away from Facebook at a time, the next time you log on, you will see all the most important things you missed while you were away, arranged like it was a magazine or newspaper, with big pictures and easy to navigate buttons.

The rollouts today bring some solutions that calm the information storm fired up after the company rolled out Subscriptions recently.

Once it became possible to follow anyone (if they enabled the feature), the noise to signal ratio went haywire. Suddenly, it was Aunt Betty updates to the nth power. With this new feature, I can pretty much customize my feed so that everything makes sense, and I am not overwhelmed by noise.

Finally, it appears that a social network with over 750 million users has finally figured out how to act socially.

Image via Facebook.

Editor's note: This story is part of a series we call Redux, where we'll re-publish some of our best posts of 2009. As we look back at the year - and ahead to what next year holds - we think these are the stories that deserve a second glance. It's not just a best-of list, it's also a collection of posts that examine the fundamental issues that continue to shape the Web. We hope you enjoy reading them again and we look forward to bringing you more Web products and trends analysis in 2010. Happy holidays from Team ReadWriteWeb!

According to B&B, a magazine for marketing strategists, there are definitely some scenarios when social media should be avoided. In a recent article, they listed what these were:

1. You're in a high-ticket business:  The article recommends that businesses with only a few customers who each spend tens of millions of dollars with the company each year are better off not using social media. Instead, face-to-face interactions and phone calls will still work better.
2. You fight with your employees: In some businesses, management and employees are constantly at odds. (An example was given of a unionized workforce where management-labor strife was common). This is also not the type of company that should encourage employees to communicate directly with customers via social media.
3. Management skepticism: If management doesn't believe in social media, then employees who have been told for years that public communication needs to be filtered will be hesitant to try out a new medium which requires them to speak openly. In this scenario, management needs to encourage and reward participation to make social media work. If they don't, it will fail.
4. Strategic Vacuum: Don't do social media just to do social media. If a company doesn't know what they're trying to accomplish, then there will be nothing to measure and no way to determine success. Just as with any other initiative a company takes on, there needs to be an objective...and that objective shouldn't be to distribute a press release.
5. Privacy and regulatory concerns: If you work for a company where what you say in public could send you to jail, proceed with caution. You'll probably even need lawyers involved (sigh).

But Don't Be Afraid to Try!

All that being said, outside of a handful of scenarios, there is still plenty of room for growth when it comes to social media. For example, the results of a recent survey put out by marketing intelligence specialist WebTrends found that only 2% of businesses are using Twitter as a marketing tool. Only 2% - can you believe that?

Perhaps the problem is that businesses are hesitant to dip their toes into the water because they're unsure of how to proceed. Social media community members, such as those on Twitter, can be very critical of the companies they think are "doing it wrong." The backlash can be brutal...and not necessarily good for your brand, either. In other words, businesses thinking of getting involved with this platform should definitely think before they leap.

As it turns out, that was the exact advice Sarah Milstein gave at last week's Web 2.0 Expo out in San Francisco. At her session, "Effective Twitter," she recommended that companies consider the following questions before diving in:

• What will be different in 3, 6, 12 months as a result of our Twitter account?
• Who are we hoping to connect with?
• What kind of information is interesting to them?
• What might go wrong? What expectations might people have of us?

(Her session also had a number of other good resources - you may want to check out the PDF summary here.)

During Milstein's presentation, audience members were furiously scribbling down her every word as if this was the first time they had ever heard this information! Of course, it probably was. Although the right and wrong ways to use Twitter and the tools that can help you use it better may be old hat to some of us who live and breathe this stuff, but it's clear that to many people out there, this information is incredibly new...and intimidating.

This is unchartered territory for a lot of companies and many of them are just now beginning to think about their strategies and levels of involvement. You could literally see this trend in action at the Expo. There, some of the top sessions, the ones so jam-packed that it was standing room only, were specifically about social media and marketing. Twitter, Facebook, community building, etc...people just couldn't get enough.

This makes us wonder if 2009 be the year that social media really goes mainstream? Or, will the experimentations continue? We think it's possible that it will be both. Companies will try new things using social media. Some will succeed and some will fail, but in the end it will be these experimentations, led by the big brands, that will help push social media further out into the limelight than it is now.

Of course, having more Hollywood celebs sign up for Twitter couldn't hurt either.

1. You're in a high-ticket business:  The article recommends that businesses with only a few customers who each spend tens of millions of dollars with the company each year are better off not using social media. Instead, face-to-face interactions and phone calls will still work better.
2. You fight with your employees: In some businesses, management and employees are constantly at odds. (An example was given of a unionized workforce where management-labor strife was common). This is also not the type of company that should encourage employees to communicate directly with customers via social media.
3. Management skepticism: If management doesn't believe in social media, then employees who have been told for years that public communication needs to be filtered will be hesitant to try out a new medium which requires them to speak openly. In this scenario, management needs to encourage and reward participation to make social media work. If they don't, it will fail.
4. Strategic Vacuum: Don't do social media just to do social media. If a company doesn't know what they're trying to accomplish, then there will be nothing to measure and no way to determine success. Just as with any other initiative a company takes on, there needs to be an objective...and that objective shouldn't be to distribute a press release.
5. Privacy and regulatory concerns: If you work for a company where what you say in public could send you to jail, proceed with caution. You'll probably even need lawyers involved (sigh).

But Don't Be Afraid to Try!

All that being said, outside of a handful of scenarios, there is still plenty of room for growth when it comes to social media. For example, the results of a recent survey put out by marketing intelligence specialist WebTrends found that only 2% of businesses are using Twitter as a marketing tool. Only 2% - can you believe that?

Perhaps the problem is that businesses are hesitant to dip their toes into the water because they're unsure of how to proceed. Social media community members, such as those on Twitter, can be very critical of the companies they think are "doing it wrong." The backlash can be brutal...and not necessarily good for your brand, either. In other words, businesses thinking of getting involved with this platform should definitely think before they leap.

As it turns out, that was the exact advice Sarah Milstein gave at last week's Web 2.0 Expo out in San Francisco. At her session, "Effective Twitter," she recommended that companies consider the following questions before diving in:

• What will be different in 3, 6, 12 months as a result of our Twitter account?
• Who are we hoping to connect with?
• What kind of information is interesting to them?
• What might go wrong? What expectations might people have of us?

(Her session also had a number of other good resources - you may want to check out the PDF summary here.)

During Milstein's presentation, audience members were furiously scribbling down her every word as if this was the first time they had ever heard this information! Of course, it probably was. Although the right and wrong ways to use Twitter and the tools that can help you use it better may be old hat to some of us who live and breathe this stuff, but it's clear that to many people out there, this information is incredibly new...and intimidating.

This is unchartered territory for a lot of companies and many of them are just now beginning to think about their strategies and levels of involvement. You could literally see this trend in action at the Expo. There, some of the top sessions, the ones so jam-packed that it was standing room only, were specifically about social media and marketing. Twitter, Facebook, community building, etc...people just couldn't get enough.

This makes us wonder if 2009 be the year that social media really goes mainstream? Or, will the experimentations continue? We think it's possible that it will be both. Companies will try new things using social media. Some will succeed and some will fail, but in the end it will be these experimentations, led by the big brands, that will help push social media further out into the limelight than it is now.

Of course, having more Hollywood celebs sign up for Twitter couldn't hurt either.

Besides reducing the application content in the stream, Facebook will also introduce automatic updates of the feed, so that users won't have to reload the page. Given how much Facebook pushed the idea that the stream was 'real-time,' we always wondered why this feature wasn't part of the original design.

Facebook also plans to introduce features that will filter out wall posts and other content that is directed to specific users, in order to make way for more content that was explicitly meant to be shared with others.

About 1.2 million users have now voiced their disapproval of the new homepage through this unofficial poll (only 80,000 left positive feedback). This also means, however, that an overwhelming number of Facebook's over 175 million users didn't register any opinion yet.

Will These Tweaks Help?

If Facebook were indeed a democracy, one million votes would barely register, and Facebook's users have always had a propensity for complaining about any change to their beloved service. Still, it would be hard for Facebook to just simply ignore a million irate users, though it seems like Facebook is not ready to completely backpedal and bring back the original design - instead, it is actually adding more functionality to the updated homepages.

Cox's post on the Facebook blog also doesn't address some of the main issues users had with the new design. In reading through most of the earlier feedback, we didn't see anybody who was looking for auto updates of the feed or minor tweaks to the interface - instead, most users simply wanted the old layout back.

What Should Facebook Do?

Facebook obviously has no interest in upsetting its users, but we will have to wait and see if the tweaks that Cox announced yesterday will be enough to appease those users who passionately dislike the new design. The current feedback is not exactly encouraging in this respect

FriendlyFavor nicely integrates with your AOL, Yahoo, Gmail, Plaxo, and Outlook address books, so that you can immediately start to ask your friends for help with that big move next weekend without having to establish a new contacts list on FriendlyFavor. Whenever you ask for a favor, FriendlyFavor will send out emails with the details. These details can include pictures, deadlines, information about how to best respond, and other details.

Offer Services

However, while asking for things is definitely a major part of the FriendlyFavor experience, you can also offer your services. Maybe you have some tickets to a ball game this weekend that you can't use and would like to offer to your friends, for example.

Cash or Karma

Of course, not all favors come for free, so FriendlyFavors lets you reward your friends with good karma, but also with electronic gift cards, or a donation to your favorite charity through TisBest.

Overall, FriendlyFavor is is a fun idea, and we really like the fact that you can repay favors with charitable donations. While its focus is on asking for favors, the tool is also quite flexible. There is no reason why you couldn't use it to organize a party or ask your friends if they want to play golf this weekend.