Google Plus One
Google wants likes too: +1 adds shared links to Buzz profiles, impacts search results of followers; http://eicker.at/PlusOne
Tagged: Google Me Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
Gerrit Eicker
Google Updates Social Search
Google: Social Search will now be mixed throughout results, adds notes, connects social media; http://eicker.at/SocialSearch
Gerrit Eicker
Social Ingredient
Barra, Google, on Google Me: We think of social as an ingredient rather than a vertical platform; http://eicker.at/1d
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 Should Buy Skype
Bernström: Voice is the new black. How should [Facebook] enter the space? Buy Skype; http://j.mp/bMUD44
-
Gerrit Eicker
SB: “Voice is the new black. Seems like after all the hype of apps, the world still wants to connect in real-time and in many cases is willing to pay for such value. In the battle of voice, Skype, Google, Apple, telecom operators and independent outfits are gearing up for battle. The trillion-dollar land grab is officially on. – Apple launched FaceTime video chat. Google Talk is turning into the new pay phone. Oh, and Skype has filed for an IPO as well as announcing plans to enter the enterprise space. – But besides the indie stalwarts, who’s the dark horse in the room? – Facebook. – What should it do? How should it enter the space? The answer is clear. Buy Skype. – Four reasons why Facebook should acquire Skype.“
Gerrit Eicker
This is Winning
Schmidt on China, DOJ, Facebook, Apple: If we were losing, we would not have these problems; http://j.mp/cHNKmg
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: Global Leader
Facebook is cementing itself as the global leader: quadrupled in Germany, to 19 million users; http://j.mp/dhA5mP
-
Gerrit Eicker
NYT: “Facebook, the social network service that started in a Harvard dorm room just six years ago, is growing at a dizzying rate around the globe, surging to nearly 500 million users, from 200 million users just 15 months ago. – It is pulling even with Orkut in India, where only a year ago, Orkut was more than twice as large as Facebook. In the last year, Facebook has grown eightfold, to 8 million users, in Brazil, where Orkut has 28 million. … Now about 70 percent of Facebook’s users are outside the United States. And while the number of users in the United States doubled in the last year, to 123 million, according to comScore, the number more than tripled in Mexico, to 11 million, and it more than quadrupled in Germany, to 19 million.”
Google: “First, social search results will now be mixed throughout your results based on their relevance (in the past they only appeared at the bottom). … Second, we’ve made Social Search more comprehensive by adding notes for links people have shared on Twitter and other sites. … Third, we’ve given you more control over how you connect accounts, and made connecting accounts more convenient. … As always, you’ll only get social search results when you choose to log in to your Google Account. We’re starting to roll out the updates today on Google.com in English only and you’ll see them appear in the coming week.”
GigaOM: “Google is slowly finding its social legs and is rolling out a set of improvements to its search product that help it keep pace with rivals, who are increasingly weaving social signals into search results. … It’s not the social layer that Google is said to be working on. But it’s another sign that shows Google is figuring out how social fits into its existing properties. The pressure is on the web giant to sort out its strategy in search as rivals like Bing and upstarts Blekko, Greplin, Wajam and others bring the fight to Google.”
FC: “This is a clever, if subtle, way to inject a little extra social relevance into Google’s core business of search, and it will make Googling something seem a little more personalized than simply interacting with a blind, international giant digital tool. It also differentiates it from competitors, like the fast-growing Bing… Will this trick work to convince us Google’s good at social media? Is this the very first layer of social network technology that may become the rumored Google Me social network? We can’t tell. Maybe we’ll Google it up and see what our friends, co-workers and that girl from the coffee shop we once Twittered think.”
RWW: “This, however, is personalization taken to another level. This is personalization in the form of looking at who you know, who you’re connected to on various social networks, and ranking content according to who created it and who shared it. We were told that Google will even go a step further and look at content shared by friends of friends. … Your friends don’t have to even have a Google profile for their content to show up in your search. If you’re friends with them on Twitter and you connect your Twitter account, you can see what they share on Twitter in your search results. … A move to create another, stand-alone social network would seem like folly to some, especially with the company’s track record when it comes to social. This move, on the other hand, feels just right. Gather the information and use it as yet another signal on what is relevant to your search.”