Facebook Subscribe Button
Facebook joins Twitter, Google Plus: allows non-reciprocal connections, aka following; http://eicker.at/FacebookSubscribeButton
Tagged: Social Media Aggregators Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Stream
The Google Plus Stream needs fixes: it’s like Twitter without clients or Facebook without EdgeRank; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusStream
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Differences
How the Google Plus services, Circles, Sparks, Hangouts, Huddle, differentiate from Facebook/Twitter; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusDifferences
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Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Circles makes the biggest difference between Google Plus and Facebook: Google Plus Circles bases on Twitter’s paradigm of non-reciprocal following, with the option to establish a closer relation like Facebook’s reciprocal friending. Additional, ‘circling’ is a must: while Facebook Friends Lists and Twitter Lists are optional, following/friending on Google Plus requires to move users to at least one circle.
Evangelos: “I have read many of the initial reactions to Google+ and most of them compare it to Facebook… Unlike Facebook, you can add someone without their permission. This is pretty much like following someone on Twitter – their public posts appear in your stream. But unless they ‘follow you back’, your updates don’t get into their stream. As soon as they add you, too, the Twitter-like following feature becomes a Facebook-like friendship relation with mutual posts in streams, depending on which circles you are in. This is a) a great way of getting a network going early on (and have a lively stream from the very beginning) and b) combines Twitter-like publishing with Facebook like media and commenting. I keep thinking this might turn out to be more dangerous to Twitter than it is to Facebook. … Now that I understood their adding mechanics, I see why there is no initial Fanpage product: It is not necessary.”
The Google Plus Stream reflects this main differentiator:
VB: “There are numerous comparisons between Google’s new Google+ social offering and Facebook, but most of them miss the mark. Google knows the social train has left the station and there is a very slim chance of catching up with Facebook’s 750 million active users. However, Twitter’s position as a broadcast platform for 21 million active publishers is a much more achievable goal for Google to reach. … When posting on Google+, it forces users to select specific social circles they are posting to, which includes ‘everyone’ as an option that mimics a Twitter-style broadcast. If not for the lawsuits and FTC settlement about Google Buzz automatically broadcasting posts, it is likely that Google+’s default setting would be public posts. … While Facebook is not sweating about Google+, the threat to Twitter is significant. Google has the opportunity to displace Twitter if it gets publishers and celebrities to encourage Google+ follows on their websites as well as pushing posts to the legions of Google users while they are in Search, Gmail and YouTube.”
But the Google Plus Stream is one of the main cons of Google Plus, too: it’s noisy! There’s a strong need to add an option to mute users or even better: +Circles. And there’s a strong need to add better ranking algorithms. Believe it or not: Facebook seems to be far ahead of Google in this place!
Mashable: “Google+ is designed to minimize noise in the stream through the use of circles, but it’s still too noisy for most users. The big issue is that posts are pushed to the top whenever there’s a new comment, something that most users think is unnecessary. There are also still issues with collapsing posts with long comment threads. … Google+ needs to stop bumping posts to the top of the stream anytime there’s a comment, and this change needs to be implemented as soon as possible. There needs to be a way to see ‘top stories’ from your stream. Yes, it’s a Facebook feature, but it’s a really good Facebook feature.”
That’s all? No more differentiators? No, not yet. Sure, there’s Hangouts – currently a Skype-clone. And Google Plus can be found on (nearly) all Google properties on the Web. But more conceptual differences? Obviously we’ll have to wait.
Gerrit Eicker
Google Plus Sparks
Strike up a conversation, about pretty much anything: Google Plus Sparks an online sharing engine; http://eicker.at/GooglePlusSparks
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Gerrit Eicker
Google: “Healthy obsessions inspire sharing, and we’ve all got one (or two, or three…). Maybe it’s muscle cars, or comic books, or fashion, but the attraction is always the same: it comes up in conversation, we immediately jump in, and we share back and forth with other fans. Often for hours. The trick is getting things started, and getting over that initial hump. Fortunately, the web is the ultimate icebreaker. – The web, of course, is filled with great content—from timely articles to vibrant photos to funny videos. And great content can lead to great conversations. We noticed, however, that it’s still too hard to find and share the things we care about – not without lots of work, and lots of noise. So, we built an online sharing engine called Sparks. – Thanks to Google’s web expertise, Sparks delivers a feed of highly contagious content from across the Internet. On any topic you want, in over 40 languages. Simply add your interests, and you’ll always have something to watch, read and share – with just the right circle of friends.”
GigaOM: “Sparks … is a new feature that allows you to create topics of interest and use them as source of information and then share it with various different groups. For instance, I could share results of Top Gear with my ‘petrol head’ friends. These ‘interest’ or ‘topic’ packs offer a lot of content and not surprisingly YouTube videos. Circles, Hangout and Huddle are about personal sharing and personal communications. Sparks on the other hand is devoid of that connection and stands out as a sore thumb. … Google needs this social effort to work – it needs to get a lot of people using the service to create an identity platform that can rival Facebook Connect. It needs the people to improve its search offering. Of course, the Google’s biggest challenge is to convince people to sign-up for yet another social platform, especially since more and more people are hooked into Facebook (750 million) and Twitter. I don’t feel quite compelled to switch from Facebook or Twitter to Google, just as I don’t feel too compelled to switch to Bing from Google for Search. – I can easily see services such as Hangout and Huddle get traction, but will that be enough to get traction with hundreds of millions of people?“
Gerrit Eicker
Rivva Recharged
Rivva ist zurück, schreibt Westphal: recharged by BMW i. als Unterstützer; http://eicker.at/RivvaRecharged (via @jayzon277)
Gerrit Eicker
Rivva schließt
Westphal scheint den deutschsprachigen Nachrichten–Aggregator Rivva endgültig zu schließen; http://eicker.at/RivvaSchliesst
Gerrit Eicker
Data Markets
Valeski: Read the terms of service for social media services before you complain about privacy; http://eicker.at/DataMarkets
Gerrit Eicker
Editors + Social Curation
Digg adds an additional editorial layer to speed up breaking news and stories beyond curation; http://eicker.at/Editors
Gerrit Eicker
HootSuite Freemium
HootSuite, social media dashboard for Twitter, Facebook etc., introduces pro and enterprise plans; http://j.mp/c8FLtv
Gerrit Eicker
Yahoo Integrates Facebook
Yahoo deeply integrates Facebook, updates Yahoo Profiles, becomes a social network aggregator; http://j.mp/91YVVI
Gerrit Eicker 10:20 on 15. September 2011 Permalink |
Facebook: “In the next few days, you’ll start seeing this [Subscribe] button on friends’ and others’ profiles. You can use it to: Choose what you see from people in News Feed – Hear from people, even if you’re not friends – Let people hear from you, even if you’re not friends”
AF: “This option seems geared toward making sure there are still public status updates going up – now that the Facebook has made the privacy controls more visible to the average user, these settings ought to increase in usage. … To encourage the use of the new feature, Facebook suggesting people for you to subscribe to, based on your friends’ activity. These prompts show up in the right-hand column of the homepage. You can click on the upper right-hand corner of these suggestions and they will disappear, plus subsequent prompts will take a different direction.”
IF: “These new options will add user preference to Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm for determining what’s relevant to surface in the news feed. Users will no longer have to suffer the annoying stories about high scores or new items earned by their little brother in social games. Another example Gleit cited was that if a user has an acquaintance who is a great photographer, they can select to just see their photo updates, not status updates about their daily lives. – Users will no longer have to use multiple services in order to handle different relationships such as those based on real-life friendship, interests, or acquaintanceship. Twitter may have already built up a graph of 100 million people based on connections, but Facebook could bring the knowledge accessible through assymetrical following to the mainstream while improving the quality of the news feed.”
GigaOM: “Should Twitter be afraid of Facebook’s subscribe feature? – It’s not just that Twitter is an asymmetric network. Facebook is much more of a full-fledged social network in ways that Twitter is not; its focus is on connecting you with your social graph so you can share thoughts, photos, games and so on. Obviously, it’s also an information platform, and it seems clear network wants to boost that aspect of its business, but I think most users still see it as a place they go to get information and/or news primarily from their friends. … But if Facebook seems to have a lock (at least for now) on the status of leading social network for connecting with family and friends, Twitter seems to have become the defaultinformation network for getting real-time news from a wide variety of sources, whether they are friends or not.”
RWW: “Does Facebook’s Subscribe Button Betray What the Company Was Built On? – Facebook evolved around the notion of ‘balanced following.’ You couldn’t be friends with me unless I was a friend to you. At the start, Facebook held tight to that rule. As time went on, that started to evolve and erode where you could see updates of people you had sent a request to even if they had not yet responded. Later, Facebook instituted sharing options where ‘friends of friends’ and such could see your posts if you so chose. … The subscribe button changes that.”