Google Plus Redesign
Google Plus redesigns for its 170M users (100M monthly): adaptive, fluid web design; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusRedesign
Tagged: Redesign Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Pages Timeline
AdAge: Facebook to release Facebook Timeline for Facebook Pages this month; http://eicker.at/FacebookPagesTimeline
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Gerrit Eicker
AdAge: “Facebook will bring its Timeline profile pages to brands this month in the U.S., according to executives briefed on the company’s plans. – At its F8 conference in September, Facebook introduced a dramatic transformation of profile pages for its more than 800 million users with the Timeline format… At the time of the announcement, the company said it would wait to roll out the new feature for brands. Facebook VP-Marketing and Business Partnerships David Fischer said Timeline for brands would be ‘consistent’ with the Timeline look-and-feel, but not a carbon copy. – The new pages for brands will start in beta with a handful of partners and then be released to more marketers in stages… Timeline has significant implications for Facebook fan-page management. One top consideration is that a brand’s Facebook presence no longer must date to when it joined the site but can be represented with content populating its Timeline from throughout its history.”
RWW: “Facebook will soon bring Timeline to brand pages. Currently Timeline is only available for Facebook user profiles. It transforms the Facebook experience from a fly-by bulletin board and events site to a scrapbook-esque, lifestreaming version of a social networked reality both past and present. … On February 29, Facebook will host fMC, its first-ever event specifically for marketers – and Timeline brand pages will no doubt be a part of it. … We reached out to Facebook. Here’s what they said: ‘As we said at f8, we believe that consistency in both functionality and appearance increase use of Facebook,’ a Facebook spokesperson told ReadWriteWeb. ‘We hope to make Pages more consistent with the Timeline in the future, but we have nothing further to share at this time.‘”
IF: “Marketers have been dreaming up ways to use Timeline for businesses since the new profile debuted at f8, but Timeline hasn’t been an option for brands because the social network requires companies use pages instead of profiles. … Timeline could be a significant improvement for pages, which users typically visit once to Like but they rarely return or spend much time on them. … A big question remains: what will happen to tab applications? Many pages – from top global brands to small local businesses – have invested in iFrame apps to welcome users to their pages or provide additional experiences. The company has frequently changed the size of tabs, forcing developers to redesign their apps, and it could do so again. … The last time Facebook redesigned profile pages in December 2010, business pages got a matching update in February.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus + Google Reader
Google Reader gets redesigned and plusified: Google Plus now on Search, Blogger, Google Apps; http://eicker.at/GoogleReaderPlus
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Today we’re rolling out the new Reader design, and the Google+ features that we mentioned just over a week ago. Before the day’s over, all Reader users will be able to enjoy the following improvements: A new look and feel that’s cleaner, faster, and nicer to look at. The ability to +1 a feed item (replacing ‘Like’), with an option to then share it with your circles on Google+ (replacing ‘Share’ and ‘Share with Note’). … Updates to Google Reader on the web are rolling out gradually and should reach all users by end of day. A new Android application will follow soon. If you have questions about today’s announcements, please check out our Help Center.”
RWW: “After announcing on October 20 that Google Reader would be annexed by Google Plus, Reader has gotten the ol’ +1 today. Google is rolling out the new, clean Plus theme that has already come to Gmail, Docs and elsewhere, and it is replacing the Reader ‘Like’ function with the +1 button. Sharing from Google Reader now produces a +snippet. I guess we no longer need that nice workaround. … For anyone who doesn’t use Google Plus, there are some amazing RSS clients that use your Google Reader as the back-end but let you share however you’d like. And you know you can still add all your preferred sharing services to the ‘Send To’ tab, right? The same settings we showed you before to add Google Plus as a Reader service will let you add anything else, too.”
RWW: “Google has made very clear over the past month that Plus will be integrated into all of Google’s products over time, so this wasn’t a surprising move. However, rather predictably, there has been a user backlash anyway. … I believe that comment was a little disingenuous from Gray, because he knows that Google dominates what’s left of the RSS Reader market. There are always alternatives, but the reality is that relatively few people will use them. What’s more, most of the alternatives rely on Google Reader for content. … The RSS Reader market has declined because reading content is a very fragmented experience these days. … Even despite all of the changes in the way people consume content on the Web, Google Reader had been the holdout as a specialist RSS Reader product. It has (had?) a passionate community of RSS Reader fanatics.”
TNW: “The new look falls in line with the rest of the changes that we’ve seen from Google over the past few months, specifically after the launch of Google+. You’ll see a new preview pane that shows you all of your stories, with subscriptions along the left in a list like before. – Sharing in Google Reader is now considerably different than before. Instead of having a network in and of itself, anything that you share is now going to happen via a +1 to Google+, as detailed in a blog post last week. Google says that it has done this in order to ‘streamline Reader overall’, but the changes aren’t as welcome by everyone. … Ultimately it doesn’t take away from the usefulness of Google Reader as a product, and it’s not the first time that Google has pushed its way into your social life, either (remember the launch of Buzz?). At the end of the day it will be up to users to figure out if they want to share content via a +1, but chances are that Reader fans aren’t going to be adversely affected overall.”
TC: “As expected, Google has ignored the cries of the niche community of Google Reader sharing enthusiasts [as well as what seems to be the entire online population of Iran], and has pushed forward in its plans to remove Google Reader’s native sharing features to promote deeper integration with Google+. While the ability to share with Google+ is an obvious important step forward for Google’s social agenda, it will be disappointing change for at least some of the Google Reader community – a community that even went so far as to create a petition to save the old features. The petition is now pushing 10,000 responses.”
Blogger: “In fewer than 4 months since its launch, more than 40 million people have joined Google+, making it a living, breathing space for social connections and sharing to thrive. – Today we’re excited to announce the first way you will be able to leverage Google+ – by making it possible to replace your Blogger profile with your Google+ profile. – In addition to giving your readers a more robust and familiar sense of who you are, your social connections will see your posts in their Google search results with an annotation that you’ve shared the post.”
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Gerrit Eicker
Winer: “People should know that there is more than one way to do an RSS reading app. Google Reader is one approach. A thousand flowers should bloom to fill the gap it’s creating in the market. There is a way to do plumbing that’s open, that people can subscribe to, independent of Google. That does what Google Reader just stopped doing. I would try to make it work as much as I could without inventing new formats. … I love when people like Richard put awful ideas out there like the one he did. You’re trapped inside Google’s silo, even for something that was open from the start like RSS. Well I think there are a lot of people who are smart enough to know that that’s not true. Those are the very people I want to work with.“
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Growth
Google Plus is joined by millions of new users since its opening, according to Paul Allen; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusGrowth
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Gerrit Eicker
Allen: “My team just completed a new round of counting Google+ users by surname. And I have updated my model. Our sampling of 400 uncommon surnames in the U.S. also reflects usage in many other countries, since the list of 400 includes names that are popular in India, Germany, Italy, France, Japan, and many other countries. … On September 9, our model showed 28.7 million users – This morning, our model shows 37.8 million users, with most of the growth coming in the last 2 days – By adding a fudge factor (see below) to account for private user profiles and for non-Roman surnames (both of which are totally overlooked by our surname counting model), my current estimate is 43.4 million users … My earlier model… which proved to be very accurate in the first 2-3 weeks, did not address either private profiles or non-Roman alphabet. According to FindPeopleOnPlus.com, there are substantial numbers of users from countries like Indonesia, China, Vietnam, Japan, Thailand, and many other countries, which my surname counting approach does not include. So I have decided to add a 5% privacy fudge factor and a 10% non-Roman alphabet fudge factor in my Google+ model. I’ll need to develop a way to actually calculate those percentages somehow, rather than just guess on them.”
SEL: “A Google+ post by Paul Allen, founder of ancestry.com and a self-proclaimed ‘unofficial Google+ statistician’, shows significant growth of Google’s social network since opening to the public. These growth rates were only first seen during the first few weeks of field testing when the user numbers were very low. In terms of the current growth spurt Allen states: ‘it is clear that Google+ is absolutely exploding – 30% growth in just 2 days and with a base of nearly 30 million members already.’ … So what does this mean? Google+ may be cementing themselves as a credible social network, but the mass exodus from Facebook just isn’t happening.”
eWeek: “Facebook now has 800 million users. Grumble as they might at the privacy and UI changes Facebook makes every few months, the users that comprise the vast social network stick around. – That’s user engagement, and by extension social advertising opportunities, Google can only aspire to at this stage.”
UG: “With Facebook’s recent introduction of the Timeline profile, the two networks are going to be quite different from one other – which is a good thing in my opinion. After all why would anybody want to use two of the same thing? Google is keeping it simple and minimalistic, while Facebook seems to be going in the opposite direction by letting users add even more about themselves on the network. Both services have their merits, so I guess we’ll continue to see users using Facebook and Google+ instead of completely migrating to one.“
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Timeline
Facebook’s Timeline: the story of our lives – and the perfect emotional advertising base; http://eicker.at/FacebookTimeline
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “Introducing Timeline – Tell your life story with a new kind of profile.”
Facebook: “Since the beginning of Facebook, your profile has been the place where you tell your story. … Over time, your profile evolved to better reflect how you actually communicate with your friends. Now you can can share photos of what you did last weekend, and updates about how you feel today. … Imagine if there was an easy way to rediscover the things you shared, and collect all your best moments in a single place. – With timeline, now you have a home for all the great stories you’ve already shared. They don’t just vanish as you add new stuff. … Timeline is wider than your old profile, and it’s a lot more visual. The first thing you’ll notice is the giant photo right at the top. This is your cover, and it’s completely up to you which of your photos you put here. … If important parts of your story aren’t included on your timeline, you can go back to when they happened and add them. – Or go to your private activity log. This is where you’ll find everything you shared since you joined Facebook. Click on any post to feature it on your timeline so your friends can see it, too. … Now, you and your friends will finally be able to tell all the different parts of your story – from the small things you do each day to your biggest moments. What will you create? We can’t wait to find out.”
RWW: “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.”
GigaOM: “‘Timeline is a completely new aesthetic for Facebook,’ Zuckerberg said. … Timeline and all its features will be viewable from any type of mobile device, Zuckerberg said, which may indicate the app is built with HTML5. … The new interface is aimed at making it much easier to get a full picture of a person by seeing more about them than just their most recent updates, Zuckerberg said. … Each user can customize his or her own Timeline, which will make each individual profile more personalized than Facebook profiles have been in the past. … Users often grumble about even the smallest of changes Facebook makes to its interface, so it will certainly be interesting to watch how the response to Timeline plays out.”
pC: “The Timeline redesign will likely be jarring to Facebook’s famously change-averse users, but Zuckerberg and Facebook director of product management Chris Cox said that the idea was to allow people to create virtual scrapbooks of their lives through Facebook. Users will be able to sort their Timelines by certain pieces of content, such as clicking on button that will display all the photos taken of you in the last year. The new Timeline will be rolling out over the next several weeks, and it will be the home for a new set of social applications.”
Mashable: “Timeline, a major re-imagining of user profiles that allows users to build what’s essentially a visual scrapbook of everything they’ve done on the site. – CEO Mark Zuckeberg showed off the new features in his keynote at the company’s f8 conference. It algorithmically organizes everything you’ve done on Facebook — from post photos to change relationship status to check in – and also allows users to fill out a ‘Way Back’ section to add details that are omitted or pre-date the social network.”
Mashable: “The Evolution of the Facebook Profile in pictures…”
TC: “Trying to display all of this content was a major design challenge, Zuckerberg noted. How do you do it all on a single page? Well, all of your recent content is shown in a new grid-view. But as you go back in time, it’s more about summarizing your content to display the most important content. The farther back you go, the less you see – it’s just the key moments. ‘This is the magic of how Timeline works,’ Zuckerberg said.”
pC: “The recent consumer trend has, indeed, been toward more personal sharing and transparency. And Facebook has been working to improve privacy controls around that. But there are also some folks growing unsettled by Zuckerberg’s share-everything mantra, wondering whether Facebook ever stops to question the inevitability of the movement. And are we already witnessing the first few signs of consumers’ social networking fatigue?”
Mashable: “Facebook Timeline sounds like a good idea. It’s your life, organized and summarized for public consumption – or as public as you want to make it. … I don’t know if anyone is ready to trust Facebook’s algorithm to decide what to show and hide as the Timeline grows. Up top is full of minutiae. Down below, it’s an outline. But what Facebook deems important: – a birth, first steps, new job – may only be the highlights… With Timeline, and to a certain extent Open Graph, Mark Zuckerberg is once again racing forward to the next big thing. Let’s hope that he doesn’t inadvertently leave his users behind.”
GigaOM: “Now Facebook isn’t doing this just to help us cherish our memories. The more data it has and the more it understands what has emotional meaning to us, the better it can target us with ads. By letting us preserve the things, activities and apps that matter to us, it gives Facebook an even better way to tailor ads that demand a higher rate from advertisers. … But Timelines can also be an opportunity to create recommendation tools for users to suggest products they might like based on their tastes and interests. … Perhaps most fundamentally for Facebook, Timeline will give people a new reason to go into oversharing mode. … This move to organize past activity is increasingly what Facebook needs to do, I think, as it exploits the opportunities in its own timeline. It is further exploring the opportunities in the future, by helping people better discover what to do from their friends.”
TC: “How To Enable Facebook Timeline Right This Second – Fortunately, enabling Timeline a bit early isn’t too difficult – but it’s not at all straight forward, either. … You probably don’t want to do this unless you’re actually a developer. Expect bugs. … Here’s how to do it…“
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook News Feed: Relevance?
Facebook redesigns its news feed for more relevance: resistance is futile; http://eicker.at/FacebookNewsFeedRelevance
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “Starting today, it will be easier to keep up with the people in your life no matter how frequently or infrequently you’re on Facebook. … Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top. If you haven’t visited Facebook for a while, the first things you’ll see are top photos and statuses posted while you’ve been away. They’re marked with an easy-to-spot blue corner. … Ticker shows you the same stuff you were already seeing on Facebook, but it brings your conversations to life by displaying updates instantaneously.”
Guardian: “‘Lame,’ snarks Brandi Genest Weeks on the Facebook blog. ‘Quite frankly I don’t want Facebook deciding who is most important in my life. I want my news feed to just go chronologically and if I want to hide posts from someone, I will. Stop changing. You’re becoming MySpace and I left there for a reason.’ – Ouch. And 845 people ‘Liked’ Brandi’s comment. Almost 500 disgrunted Facebook users concurred with Fiona Robinson, who blasted: “NOOOO! I STILL want ‘most recent’ at the top like it used to be, so we have the OPTION of seeing what has been posted most recently instead of what Facebook deems a ‘top story’. This is total garbage. … Once the ticker is populated with my friends’ Spotify tunes, Vevo videos or Wall Street Journal stories, then I’m interested. How about you?”
RWW: “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. … Don’t get me wrong, I applaud many of the changes that Facebook has recently made and is about to make. … Lists for friends, media sharing, filtering information that you see on your homepage through the Subscribe button. All of those are features that enhance Facebook’s core purpose: to be asocial network. And just as importantly, all of those features are directly controlled by the user. Not by Facebook’s software.”
GigaOM: “The repeated use of the term ‘newspaper’ makes it obvious that Facebook wants this new feature to be about more than just seeing updates from your friend’s birthday party – and it could become especially interesting when combined with another new Facebook feature: the launch of the ‘Subscribe’ service, which allows users to follow and get updates from people or sources they are not friends with, in much the same way that Twitter does. Facebook has been promoting that feature as a way to stay connected to what celebrities and journalists are doing, and it seems likely that many of those items could wind up on the top of your ‘personal newspaper‘ thanks to the news feed changes.”
GigaOM: “The new updates show that Facebook is still in the midst of the ‘launching season’ CEO Mark Zuckerberg first discussed in June, when it announced a new video chat feature with Skype. With the company’s f8 developer conference coming up this Thursday, something tells me that Facebook still has a few more big announcements up its sleeve.”
AF: “Lest any of us mistake the redesigned news feed and official ticker launch as Facebook giving away the goods before the f8 developers conference this week, Schact said that the company has plenty of other things to announce at the annual event on Thursday. – Of course, users of Facebook will likely grumble about the changed formatting and then decide they like this layout when the next one comes through – that happens every time the site revamps its layouts.”
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: Read, Watch, Listen
Will Facebook F8 fully embrace multimedia? Read. Watch. Listen. Coming soon; http://eicker.at/FacebookReadWatchListen
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Gerrit Eicker
ATD: “Facebook will unveil its next massive initiative to socialize the Web at its f8 developer conferenceon Thursday. A key focus of this year’s annual event has been well reported: Content. – And that’s the way the social networking giant will play it at the confab, using the basic phrasing, ‘Read. Watch. Listen.‘ … Many of the implicit and explicit content sharing tools at f8 will have a precedent in those Facebook has built for gaming, according to sources familiar with Facebook’s plans. For instance, look for a live-updating sidebar of friends’ content consumption activity, just as the site offers for games, and separate from the news feed wall.”
TC: “The cat is out of the bag that Facebook is going to launchsomething big at its developer conference f8 this week. We’ve heard about the social music services that could be debuting in a few days, but as the New York Times conveyed this past weekend, Facebook is planning for ways to surface personal content better. And we’ve heard from a source that Facebook will introduce new buttons on the wall that will begin introducing some granularity to the ‘Like’ concept. We’re told these new buttons are ‘Read,’ ‘Listened,’ ‘Watched.’ The network will also soon launch new social commerce buttons like ‘Want‘ following the introductions of the aforementioned buttons.”
RWW: “According to reports, Facebook’s f8 developer conference this coming Thursday will have the motto ‘Read. Watch. Listen.‘ Other than reminding me of a certain tech blog’s name, this motto excites me because of the promise it holds that Facebook will fully embrace multimedia. But that has some major implications, which will affect many in the Web ecosystem. In this post we highlight 3 of the biggest potential implications. … Given my recent posts about the battle between Facebook and Google Plus, the ‘Read, Watch, Listen’ services look set to one-up Google Plus. Although who better to implement their own ‘Watch’ button than the owners of YouTube? Also Google has its own services that cover reading and listening – Google Books, Google Reader, Google Music and others – so they have a great opportunity to integrate all of those into Google Plus.”
RWW: “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. … The ‘Read‘ portion of Facebook’s announcement is perhaps the most mysterious. Yet, it has themost precedent in what Facebook has rolled out in previous years and may be tied closely with the platform’s social graph. … Facebook is already one of the top destinations for video on the Web. Most of that is shared content from the likes of YouTube, Vimeo and local news. This is going to be rolled out even further and it will likely to two-pronged – content sharing from outside of Facebook and consumption from within. … While we do not know the specific details of the ‘Listen’ products, we have clues. The primary indicators are MOG, Rdio and Spotify, all of which have been tied to Facebook over the summer. ‘Facebook Music‘ will likely be a conglomeration with MOG, Rdio and Spotify that will allow users to use Facebook as an iTunes-like streaming platform. … What does this all point to? Well, a major profile redesign could possibly be in the works to feature all of this new content. Mashable is reporting that Facebook will announce a redesign at f8 and the idea is to become ‘stickier.'”
Mashable: “Facebook plans to roll out a major redesign of user profiles at its f8 developer conference this week, Mashable has learned. – Details about the redesign are sparse, but two sources familiar with Facebook’s plans (who have asked to remain anonymous) have told us that the redesign is ‘major’ and will make Facebook profiles nexuses for consuming content.
IF: “Strengthening Broad Category Interest targeting could produce big revenue gains for Facebook. As we discussed earlier today, the Facebook Ads marketplace is inaccessible to many small businesses because they don’t have the know-how to effectively use the self-serve tool, or big enough budgets to use many of the tools and services built on the Ads API. As Broad Category Interest targeting is far easier to use than Specific Interest targeting, an improvement of the feature thanks to the ‘Read’, ‘Listened’ and ‘Watched’ buttons could help Facebook recruit this long-tail of advertisers.”
TNW: “Read: Facebook is assumed to be partnering with large online publishers like Yahoo, CNN, the Washington Post andThe Daily. – Watch: The platform will be merging with several online video hosting sites, Ooyala rumored to be one of several. – Listen: Facebook Music is coming with companies like Spotify AB and Rdio Inc. publish user activity on Facebook pages. … The Google+ vs Facebook war seems more heated than ever with Facebook putting up a good fight to maintain its lead in the world of social networking. It remains to be seen how Google+ will keep up with the seemingly impressive features Facebook has up its sleeve, and we can only watch and wait to see how it all turns out.”
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: Sharing Privacy
Facebook follows Diaspora, Google Plus: Making it easier to share with who you want; http://eicker.at/FacebookSharingPrivacy
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “Today we’re announcing a bunch of improvements that make it easier to share posts, photos, tags and other content with exactly the people you want. You have told us that ‘who can see this?’ could be clearer across Facebook, so we have made changes to make this more visual and straightforward. The main change is moving most of your controls from a settings page to being inline, right next to the posts, photos and tags they affect. Plus there are several other updates here that will make it easier to understand who can see your stuff (or your friends’) in any context. Here’s what’s coming up, organized around two areas: what shows up on your profile, and what happens when you share something new. … These changes will start to roll out in the coming days. When they reach you, you’ll see a prompt for a tour that walks you through these new features from your homepage. In the meantime, you can read more about the upcoming changes from the links throughout this post. We’ll look forward to your feedback on all of this. – Taken together, we hope these new tools make it easier to share with exactly who you want, and that the resulting experience is a lot clearer and a lot more fun.”
WSJ/ATD: “Facebook Makes Sharing More Granular (Hmm … Where Have We Heard That Pitch Before?) – Facebook isn’t borrowing the greater Google+ anatomy, like ‘Circles’ of friends and a mix of asymmetrical and mutual relationships. – Instead, Facebook is making a huge number of tweaks to its profile design, many of them aimed at addressing common user complaints. – This launch seems likely to ruffle Facebook users’ notoriously sensitive feathers given its little tweaks affect so many parts of the Facebook experience. But at least based on the press briefing, it’s not obvious that any one change will be controversial or dramatic.”
NYT: “No doubt the company also wants to diminish the possibility of legislation, investigation or litigation stemming from complicated or confusing privacy settings. And with mounting competition from other social networking sites, namely Google+, which emphasizes more compartmentalized communications to different sets of friends and acquaintances, Facebook is also keen to keep its customers’ trust. … Whether users will find the changes more inviting or simpler remains to be seen – as does whether they will opt to be more or less private. Facebook declined to share statistics on its users’ current privacy settings.”
TC: “So what changed? The obvious answer is Google+. Facebook’s response to my assertion was that Facebook wished it could have built these features in the time since Google+ launched, but that work on these changes actually began around six months ago. Which is probably half true. Facebook knew Google was going to be launching a social network that would try to underscore all of its flaws — note how many of these features are already live on Google+ — so it preemptively started working to fix the things that annoy people about Facebook. – Whatever the case, these are all good changes, and they make Facebook better.”
VB: “The features sound a lot like the features that appear in Google’s latest social network Google+. Rather than sequester the privacy settings on a separate settings page away from the actual action on the site, Facebook is moving its privacy and sharing features straight to the main page. It removes a lot of the hassle of having to jump to different pages to tweak privacy controls.”
GigaOM: “And although Facebook executives have dismissed Google+ as a non-threat, Facebook has certainly showed a renewed zest in shipping new products and features in the weeks since Google’s social network launched. As my colleague Mathew Ingram wrote recently, ‘It seems clear that the competition is keeping Facebook awake at night — which may be a good thing.‘ As Facebook and Google duke it out for consumer loyalty, they’re both bringing their best efforts to the table as quickly as possible — and the real winners will be the millions of social media users across both platforms.”
IF: “The changes may reduce the volume of content that is unwittingly overshared, and help users protect themselves from being associated with objectionable content against their will. The end result could be an increase in confidence in Facebook privacy that leads users to be comfortable sharing more, which could in turn increase engagement with the site. … Privacy has been Facebook’s biggest problem to date. A lack of confidence in the site’s privacy settings has scared away new users, frustrated existing users, and kept people from sharing more sensitive content. If Facebook can combine technological and design solutions with reassurance that users are in control of their online presence, it could leave its troubles behind and move towards making users happy rather than preventing them from getting angry.”
Gerrit Eicker
Beyond the Classical Blog Scheme
Gawker moves beyond the classical blog scheme: scoop, aggregation, personality, visualisation; http://eicker.at/MagStyle
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
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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 08:52 on 12. April 2012 Permalink |
Google: “More than 170 million people have upgraded to Google+, enjoying new ways to share in Search, Gmail, YouTube and lots of other places. It’s still early days, and there’s plenty left to do, but we’re more excited than ever to build a seamless social experience, all across Google. – A critical piece of this social layer is a design that grows alongside our aspirations. So today we’re introducing a more functional and flexible version of Google+. We think you’ll find it easier to use and nicer to look at, but most importantly, it accelerates our efforts to create a simpler, more beautiful Google. … Once you’ve upgraded to Google+, it’s easy to share with your circles from just about anywhere. We’re dreaming bigger, though. We’re aiming for an experience that fuses utility with beauty… Today we’re adding a dedicated Hangouts page that creates even more opportunities to connect in person… Today’s Google+ update extends beyond navigation, the stream and hangouts. For instance: there’s a new Explore page that shows what’s interesting and trending across the network. And a new profile with much bigger photos. And a new chat list that puts your friends front and center. And a whole lot more. … By focusing on you, the people you care about, and the stuff you’re into, we’re going to continue upgrading all the features you already know and love – from Search and Maps to Gmail and YouTube. With today’s foundational changes we can move even faster-toward a simpler, more beautiful Google.”
Guardian: “Google says 170m people have registered for its Google+ service since it was launched 10 months ago – and that 100m have ‘engaged’ with the service at least once in the past 30 days and 50m have engaged with the service at least once a day in the past month. … Since January, new users signing up for Google services such as a YouTube or Gmail account have had to create a Google+ profile: in the past three months, that has added 80m people, says Search Engine Watch. In all, Gmail has 350m users worldwide. … In the US, Google has pushed Google+ profiles into search results – with the effect that a search for ‘Mark Zuckerberg’ puts his Google+ page ahead of his Facebook page, a result which appeared distorted compared with previous Google search results.”
TC: “It’s interesting that Google+ has now changed its design, after its first efforts received such praise. But, after using the service for some time, it became clear that Google+’s navigational elements became a little cluttered. That ‘share a YouTube video’ feature, for example, which popped out a box on the right side of the screen, felt tacked on. … The new interface drops the static icons at the top and moves all the navigation off to the side, allowing users to reorder the icons as they wish. … Hangouts, which have always been one of the network’s main selling points, are now being better highlighted in the refreshed site, and now have their own dedicated page, featuring a list of Hangout invitations from people in your Circles, easy access to live and public Hangouts, and a rotating billboard showing popular Hangouts, and other information.”
VB: “Tough questions aside, the redesign appears to give those who use Google+ on purpose some handy new features and better visuals. First off, you’ll notice on the left side that there is a new customizable navigation bar that lets you drag apps up or down to create the best order for accessing content. You can even hide apps by moving them in and out of the ‘More’ panel. … The roll out appears to be moving slowly as many folks on Google+, including myself, are still waiting for the redesign to go live. Google expects all users to get the new digs in ‘the next few days.’”
GigaOM: “The key term here seems to be ‘applications.’ The sidebar is essentially an app launcher, and users can use it to get quick access to certain actions available through individual apps. Want to share a photo from your phone? Then simply hover the photos app and select the relevant action. … Apps can also be rearranged in one’s personal order of importance, or completely hidden from plain sight. All of this makes it easier to use the Google+ apps that are available today, including Hangouts, games and photos – but there’s really not that much of a point in constantly reorganizing a half dozen apps. Instead, this seems to be built for something much bigger.”
FC: “Google+ has failed to take off. And it’s not even necessarily a fault of the product: Facebook is the de facto social network of our time. … But that’s not stopping Google from announcing a major redesign of Google+ today. It’s better in almost every way, focused on real-time trends, customization, and playing to Google’s few advantages they have in the space. But, you know, it’s just a little too late for design alone to save the day. … A lot of what Google announced today was pure catch-up. It snagged a new ‘Trending on Google+’ function from Twitter. It now features a profile page with a top, landscape portrait that’s nearly identical to Facebook’s Timeline. But if Google is going to copy, at least they’re copying some good ideas. And at least they haven’t given up on the vast potential of the one ace up their sleeve: Hangouts.”
TC: “Instead of a traditional fixed-width design, responsive design adapts to the size of your browser window. So while your Facebook page always looks the same, no matter whether you’ve maximized your browser window or not, the new Google+ design actually changes as you resize your browser window. Right now, Google isn’t doing much with this capability, but it definitely built this redesign around this idea. … What Google will do with this space is anybody’s guess. As we’re moving to bigger and wider screens, though (which are actually rather suboptimal for the kind of news feeds that are at the center of services like Google+, Facebook and Twitter), it only makes sense for Google to experiment with wider layouts as well and to figure out how to best use them.”