Facebook Mobile Acquisitions
Facebook goes mobile: acquires Snaptu (apps) after Rel8tion (ads) and Beluga (messaging); http://eicker.at/FacebookAcquisitions
Tagged: Facebook Groups Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook and Enterprises
Taschek on Facebook Messages: Facebook is completely ignorant of the enterprise. And why not? http://eicker.at/1f (via @mooose)
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Office
Facebook Messages adds Microsoft Office Web Apps: Still not designed as an enterprise product? http://eicker.at/FacebookOffice
Gerrit Eicker
Wikia 2.0
Wales: The idea of Wikia 2.0 is to attract new people who thought wikis would be too complicated to use; http://eicker.at/Wikia
-
Gerrit Eicker
Guardian: “Where Wikipedia is encyclopaedia-like, neutral (despite the regular flame wars between disputing editors) factual information, Wikia is for fan communities and more expressive. Rolling out an overhauled version in the past few weeks, Wales claims the new Wikia is far more social with better sharing features, a simpler ‘WYSIWYG’ editing interface, theme designer and improved navigation. – ‘The idea is to move into new markets, attract new people – people who traditionally thought wikis would be too complicated to use,’ Wales told the Guardian. ‘Wikia 2.0 marries the traditional wiki tools that have been so successful with newer social and editing features.‘ – Behind all these improvements is the ambition of making Wikia stickier, encouraging people to keep nurturing their wiki after the initial burst of excitement. … ‘Wikipedia is a cultural institution – and still the number five site on the internet,’ said Wales. Given that Wikia was founded in 2004, and Wikipedia in 2001, Wales’s empire doesn’t seem ready to buckle just yet. ‘I should’ve started sooner. All the tech components needed to start these projects existed several years earlier – there was no reason I couldn’t have started Wikipedia in 1996.‘”
RWW: “The company said it has a number of features in store for its users: Integration of social tools to let users share their edits and contributions with friends. Highlighting of top editors so readers can see who created the content and learn more about them. Surfacing photos and videos more broadly on content pages and including images in search results. Radically improved content editing via a new, easy to use, visual editor. Fan activity modules such as real-time streams, polls, top 10 lists, and achievement badges. New opportunities for brands to get involved in the conversation with their fans.”
TNW: “However if his software could be licensed and used to build company intranets, extranets, and platforms for writing rich documentation, websites and collaboration tools – that would be something cool to see.”
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Apps
Updated Facebook iPhone/Android apps include: Facebook Groups, Facebook Deals, photo check-ins; http://eicker.at/FacebookApps
-
Gerrit Eicker
IF: “Version 3.3.1 of Facebook for iPhone brings Groups, Deals, and enhanced Places functionality to the most popular Facebook mobile app. Released today, the app allows users to post to Groups and read Group feeds, add photos and tag additional friends to an existing check-in, and discover rewards Deals offered at local Places. – Facebook last made a major update to its iPhone app when it launched Places, and fixed a few bugs with a release in September. When Groups was launched last month, the only mobile way to access the feature was through m.facebook.com, which has now changed. Details about the new Deals feature leaked a few days ago, but today Facebook walked members of the press through how it businesses can use it to incentivize check-ins. … The new version of Facebook for iPhone is fast, easy-to-use, and offers both unique mobile functionality and new replications of web interface features. Instead of answering user demands for minor features like the ability to add photos to albums, or remove friends, Facebook is giving users new ways to take advantage of the iPhone’s GPS and camera. While Facebook for Android also received an update today, Facebook apps for Palm, Blackberry, Windows, and others which still don’t have Places functionality will now look even more antiquated.”
RWW: “Today’s updated version of the Android app adds Places and Groups, as well as improves the Notifications from within the app. The Android app still lacks the Chat feature, something iPhone users can still gloat about. But today’s release brings the Android app closer to parity with the iPhone. … The iPhone now gets the Groups feature too. But in addition, there’s a new look to the News Feed, which now makes it easier to add photos and check-ins, not merely status updates. Within the new Groups feature, similarly, buttons urge users to add photos and/or posts.”
Gerrit Eicker
Social Networks
McClure: How to take down Facebook. An open letter to the next big social network; http://eicker.at/SocialNetworks
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Groups for Enterprises?
Zuckerberg: Not today, [Facebook Groups] is not designed to be an enterprise product. So, what about tomorrow? http://eicker.at/x
-
Gerrit Eicker
RWW: “Mark Zuckerberg, interviewed on the subject of Facebook Groups, told GigOm’s Liz Gannes ‘Yeah, well maybe this will replace Socialcast! [laughs] Not today, this isn’t designed to be an enterprise product.’ … ‘Facebook Groups actually strengthens the case for Yammer,’ says Yammer CEO David Sacks. He points out that if organizations don’t adopt their own enterprise social networking systems ‘Your employees may start using a public platform that you have no control over.‘ He encourages to organizations to formulate an internal social networking policy and set aside funds to purchase enterprise social networking software. … All enterprise SaaS solutions involve putting intellectual property on someone else’s servers, but Facebook will need an enterprise friendly TOS before this behavior is actively condoned by corporate users. … Then there’s that qualifier ‘yet’ in Zuckerberg’s statement. Someday, with tighter, more integrated access controls and an enterprise friendly TOS, Facebook might give enterprise collaboration companies something to lose sleep over.”
Rodriguez, Clearvale: “On the low-end, Facebook Groups is likely to put pressure on vendors that provide simple collaboration tools – for example, 37Signals, Ning, and Google. We’ll have to see how much pressure – some of these tools are quite popular and quite good. But on the higher end of the market – the part of the market that sells to the enterprise – the disruption is likely to be more subtle. The enterprise will require a whole lot more functionality, and more in the way of privacy and security. But Facebook Groups could help evangelize the new architectural requirements for business collaboration. It wouldn’t be the first time that Facebook taught the business community something about collaboration – think of all the Enterprise 2.0 vendors who cannot resist telling customers that they are a ‘Facebook for the enterprise’? But the new lesson from Facebook – obvious to some, but not yet clear to many – is that collaboration with people outside your company needs to be in the cloud – how else would you be able to freely connect and collaborate with them?”
Cannell, Gartner: “For me, the biggest reason Facebook is exciting (from an enterprise perspective) is because it is establishing a new widely recognizable online interaction pattern (consisting of streams of status messages and activity notifications). Enterprise collaboration products that have been providing group-focused workspaces for many years are being refitted to tap into the broad familiarity of Facebook. If they can provide something that behaves like Facebook then people will be more comfortable using it and will more easily recognize its benefits. The rebranding of enterprise wikis as enterprise social software is just one example of where this is happening. If Facebook Groups succeeds then expect enterprise products to soon follow by providing similar experiences. – Personally, I would love to see Facebook Groups succeed. Not for the sake of Facebook, but for the sake of enterprises trying to use their intranets for something like Facebook.”
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Groups vs. Facebook Pages
Zuckerberg: For brands, we have Pages. Lazerow: Groups offer sharing both internally and externally; http://eicker.at/j
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Groups
Facebook gets social finally: renovates Facebook Groups which are closed by default; http://eicker.at/FacebookGroups
-
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “The biggest problem in social networking is helping you easily interact with your friends and share information in lots of different contexts. … We set out to build a solution that could help you map out all of your communities, that would be simple enough that everyone would use it and that would be deeply integrated across Facebook and applications so you can communicate with your different groups in lots of different ways. … Today we’re announcing a completely overhauled, brand new version of Groups. … The default setting is Closed, which means only members see what’s going on in a group. … We’ve built an easy way to quickly download to your computer everything you’ve ever posted on Facebook and all your correspondences with friends: your messages, Wall posts, photos, status updates and profile information. … We’re launching a new dashboard to give you visibility into how applications use your data to personalize your experience. … We’ve heard loud and clear that you want more control over what you share on Facebook – to manage exactly who sees it and to understand exactly where it goes. With this new Groups experience and the other tools we’re rolling out today, we’re taking a few important steps forward towards giving you precise controls.”
Facebook: “When a group member posts to the group, everyone in the group will receive a notification about that post. … We’ve also added a bunch of new features to Groups to make sharing and communication with small groups of people easier. … You can also use Groups as a replacement for mailing lists by setting up your group to send an email to you anytime anyone posts in it. … You can also use the settings to create groups that have their name and members unlisted (‘Secret’), or create groups that have more public settings (‘Open’).”
NYT: “The move is an effort to address a longstanding problem: Facebook friends often span a broad range of relationships that include relatives, classmates, casual professional acquaintances or jogging partners – and not everyone wants all of them to see his or her information. … With the new feature, called Groups, Facebook hopes to encourage users to upload more photos, videos and other information to the site while giving them new ways to control who sees what. … Some privacy advocates welcomed Groups, but others worried that it would give Facebook even more information about users, which it could provide to marketers and others. … ‘We think about this stuff a lot,’ Mr. Zuckerberg said, referring to privacy. ‘Often people don’t think we think about it as much as we do.’ … Mr. Zuckerberg said he thought the system would police itself because everyone in the group would be notified when a new member joins and would flag someone who does not belong. But Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, called the new service ‘double-edged.’ ‘Yes, it’s good to be able to segment posts for particular friends,’ he said. ‘But you will also be revealing information to Facebook about the basis of your online connections.’”
RWW: “The creation of groups in any set of subscriptions, and that’s what your Facebook social graph is thanks to the News Feed, is a key way to offer users an option to change the signal to noise ratio of what they are reading moment-by-moment. … Focused conversations and collaboration in Groups will differ substantially from the old Facebook experience of undifferentiated broadcast. … Pete Warden: ‘I’m still worried that they’re taking the same approach to privacy that Microsoft takes to security. Their space-shuttle control panel approach is like having lots of noisy popups, people are confused and learn to ignore them. Far better if you can have a really simple story. Even with something as simple as open/closed for groups, it’s still too much for most people.‘”
SEL: “In a bid to give users more tools and control over the sharing of information (and perhaps preempt Google) Facebook introduced a new way to create and communicate with small private groups of people. Through an API this same functionality will be extended to publishers and third party developers like Facebook Connect is today. … The absence of easy ways to share information privately with smaller groups has been one of Facebook’s perceived vulnerabilities and a potential entry point and differentiator for a hypothetical ‘Google Me.’ … The new Groups offering is live now. It should very quickly become a hugely successful product for Facebook and will create further headaches for anyone (read Google) trying to exploit holes in Facebook’s products to better compete with them.”
SB: “I was also curious about whether Groups could be used for work-related purposes, say collaboration between a team in the office. Andrew Bosworth, the company’s director of engineering, said that once again, that’s not really what the Feature was designed for, but it could be used that way. In fact, he showed me that his team was using a Group to help coordinate the wider launch of Groups. … It does sound like Facebook executives think the social design principles behind Groups are part of what sets them part, and that the ‘algorithmic approach’ might be part of why Google’s social efforts like Buzz and Wave haven’t taken off.”
TC: “Groups have an icon, and a logo.’It’s mean to resemble a human space,’ head of product Chris Cox added. – Groups aren’t replacing Friend Lists, Zuckerberg says. He doesn’t see the value in deleting what people have already worked on – but going forward, Groups is going to be the way this social element is set up. – This is a big part of creating what Zuckerberg calls ‘a pristine graph.'”
NW: “Die geschlossenen Gruppen und das Einladungssystem leisten jener Polarisierung Vorschub, die im Internet mit den sozialen Medien ohnehin und namentlich in der bipolaren amerikanischen Politik als krassestes Beispiel zu beobachten ist. – Das ist eine 180-Grad Wende nicht des Gedankens von Facebook, aber seiner Wirkung. Denn erst durch Facebook und die Schmelztiegel-Wirkung, welche die einfache Abbildung der sozialen Verbindungen mit sich brachte, sind Einblicke in Ansichten und Lebensumstände anderer Menschen entstanden, die wir vorher nicht hatten: Durch die undifferenzierte Publikation der Nachrichten und Infos im Newsstream kriegte man auch jene Seiten aus dem Leben der andern mit, die man im Gesangsverein oder in der lokalen Partei eben nicht zu Gesicht kriegte. Die vermeintlich oberflächlichen Beziehungen auf Facebook sorgten in Tat und Wahrheit für ungewohnte Annäherungen. – Diese Einsichten und Einblicke könnten durch die neuen Gruppen weggewischt werden. Denn mit dem komplexen Gefüge der realen sozialen Beziehungen hält auf Facebook auch die Segregation der Meinungen wieder Einzug.“
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Pages vs. Facebook Groups
Randi Zuckerberg: Relying on groups, which have been available longer [than pages], is a mistake; http://bit.ly/Nw50L
-
Gerrit Eicker
WSJ: “Nonprofit organizations seeking to harness Facebook can get the most bang for their buck by using fan pages in addition to groups, streamlining their app usage and livening things up, one of its marketing execs said Friday. – Pages operate like profiles for organizations or businesses, can only be created by official representatives and can add applications, while groups are unofficial and can be created by any user. Relying on groups, which have been available longer, is one of the biggest mistakes nonprofits make, said Randi Zuckerberg, who works on marketing and nonprofit initiatives and is co-founder Mark Zuckerberg’s sister. ‘You lose a lot of the incredible viral power.'”
Mashable: “Groups are great for organizing on a personal level and for smaller scale interaction around a cause. Pages are better for brands, businesses, bands, movies, or celebrities who want to interact with their fans or customers without having them connected to a personal account, and have a need to exceed Facebook’s 5,000 friend cap.”
SEJ: “Pages are generally better for a long-term relationships with your fans, readers or customers. – Groups are generally better for hosting a (quick) active discussion and attracting quick attention.”
Haydon: “Facebook Pages: Create a presence for a business, brand or non-profit on Facebook. – Facebook Groups: Organize a group of people around a common issue or interest. – Facebook Profiles: Create a home base on the web for individuals to express themselves and connect with others.”
Microsoft: “Starting today, from Facebook you can view Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents via Office Web Apps with just one click. – It goes without saying that social networks are definitely becoming an indispensable part of people’s lives. People don’t just use social networks to connect with their personal and professional contacts, but also to discover new things and great ideas shared by people across their life. … Facebook’s new messaging platform integrates the Office Web Apps to enable Facebook users to view Microsoft Word, Excel, and PowerPoint documents with just one click.”
RWW: “Facebook’s newly announced messaging platform will deeply integrate Microsoft’s Office Web Apps so that Facebook users can view Word, Excel and PowerPoint attachments without having to leave the site. Rumors about this integration started to make the rounds on the Internet earlier last week. Oddly, though, Facebook didn’t mention this integration during today’s press conference and makes no mention of it in the official announcement on its corporate blog. … While Microsoft points out that this integration can also be used for ‘serious’ business, Business users aren’t likely to share their documents through the Facebook platform, after all. – For Microsoft, this is a major win, as its flagship Web productivity apps will now play a central role on the Web’s most popular social network.”
VB: “The step into Facebook is less of a grab at the collaboration space and more like another jab at Google. … If Microsoft were looking to challenge Google in the business collaboration space they would go after a networking application like Yammer, a social network like Facebook for businesses. But there’s a strong statement that Microsoft could make here with the high school and college student presence on Facebook. … Either way, this is good news for the collaboration space and just about everyone else. Businesses can cross their fingers and hope to see office application integration – on either Google’s or Microsoft’s end – in other enterprise collaboration services.”
IF: “Gmail and other email programs have tried to make previewing as easy as possible for all formats. So, for Facebook, one ramification of Microsoft’s special access is less value for users who want to share a document in any other format. Maybe the average user doesn’t want to share documents on Facebook in the first place, or maybe Facebook will find that users want to do more document-sharing with the service.”