Posts tagged Facebook

Is your Facebook feed full of content you don't want? This will help.

I regularly hear people complaining about the content that shows up on their Facebook feed. Either they’re annoyed with the person who posts endlessly (or those so annoying game notifications), or they’re frustrated that they missed out on an important announcement from a close friend. Well, it may take a bit of work, but you can tweak your feed to make it much more tailored to what you actually want. Have a read of this from Robert Scoble. You’ll be glad you did.

Have an iPhone? Try out the new Facebook Camera app

I’m really liking this new Facebook app—specifically for editing, tagging, and sharing multiple photos in a much easier way.

U2's Bono to become the world's richest musician…thanks to Facebook

NME:

Given the social media company is currently valued at over $100billion (£63 billion), this makes Bono’s share worth over $1.5 billion (£940 million) and puts him well above Paul McCartney, who is currently the world’s richest rock star with a fortune of £665 million.

Bono owns 2.3 per cent of the shares in Facebook through his private equity firm, Elevation Partners—hence why he’ll be a whole lot richer at the end of today!

Why The Next Shoe To Drop Post-Instagram Is Apple Buying Twitter for $10 Billion

Eric Jackson, Forbes:

Sure Twitter could IPO but, realistically, it’s going to sell itself to either Apple, Google, or Microsoft.

Apple clearly has a good relationship with Twitter and on some levels I’m surprised Apple hasn’t bought Twitter already. It’ll be interesting to see whether Facebook’s purchase of Instagram makes that deal more likely.

Why Facebook bought Instagram

Om Malik at GigaOm:

Facebook and Instagram are two distinct companies with two distinct personalities. Instagram has what Facebook craves – passionate community. People like Facebook. People use Facebook. People love Instagram. It is my single most-used app. I spend an hour a day on Instagram. I have made friends based on photos they share. I know how they feel, and how they see the world. Facebook lacks soul. Instagram is all soul and emotion.

I agree with much of this. But, that said, I don’t think that Instagram were anywhere close to being a true rival to Facebook. I can see why it makes sense for Facebook to snap them up, but I don’t think Zuckerberg went for the buy because he was ‘scared shitless’.

Facebook has bought Instagram

Mark Zuckerberg:

We think the fact that Instagram is connected to other services beyond Facebook is an important part of the experience. We plan on keeping features like the ability to post to other social networks, the ability to not share your Instagrams on Facebook if you want, and the ability to have followers and follow people separately from your friends on Facebook.

Wow. Pleased to see it’ll still be to some extent separate from Facebook.

Google+: The Charge Of The Like Brigade

Devin Coldewey at TechCrunch:

Google lost its status as a neutral party because of a number of choices that minimized the user and promoted themselves unilaterally. How many of these decisions were made deliberately, and how many innocently? It’s hard to say, but in the end the analysis is merely academic. The reality is that they are no longer trusted. The liberties they took with their best assets were questionable at best and infuriating at worst. And they have had the side effect of drawing attention to just how much power Google wields.

Two years ago, Google was a utility. Now it’s a monopoly being watched not only by the government but by every user, many of whom have been burned or frustrated by one of the many changes. Two years ago it was Facebook in that position, and people were excited about the prospect of a better, more independent social network. Now people are uploading videos to Facebook instead of YouTube. Think about that.

On Monday I shared an article entitled ‘The Case Against Google’, this is another strong, thorough piece looking at Google and unpacking the missteps it has been taking, particularly in regard to Google+.

The Enemy Of My Enemy Is My Friend

MG Siegler:

[Google] have all the biggest technology companies in the world pointing guns right at them. You don’t get to the top without pissing off people along the way. But the way Google has managed to unify all of these main rivals against them should at the very least give them pause. Microsoft and Apple are the two biggest examples. But Facebook and Twitter are finding common ground against Google as well thanks to the search giant’s foray into the social realm.

Interesting thoughts on how Google seems to be uniting pretty much every major tech company against them. They may be able to get away with this for a while, but it doesn’t seem a very good long-term strategy.

Facebook’s ‘sponsored stories’ have gone too far

Emma Barnett, The Telegraph:

The reason why my friend felt so comfortable to put photos of her baby on Facebook in the first place, is because up until now, she felt she was only sharing them with all of her friends. By adding sponsored stories into the border of such personal photos, takes away the personal and friendly feel of the site. It is invasive, as many people have been tweeting.

Totally agree. It’s all well and good having some ads on the side whilst we scroll through our friends updates, but with Facebook now starting to embed their ads into the more personal elements (like they are doing with photos), they are going to start driving people away. I don’t want pictures of Eloise having any advertising placed alongside them. It feels like a step to far.

Facebook looking to bring advertising to mobile phone apps

NY Times:

“We do not currently directly generate any meaningful revenue from the use of Facebook mobile products, and our ability to do so successfully is unproven,” the company (Facebook) said in its review of the risks it faces.

Just yesterday I was talking about Facebook’s lack of any advertising on their mobile apps with my friend Chris. And our conclusion was that the moment Facebook try to implement mobile advertising will be the moment everyone stops using Facebook.

It looks like Facebook are prepared to take that risk. In truth, they have to. They make no money at all from people accessing their site via smart and mobile phones. And the reality is that more and more people are accessing Facebook only via mobile means. So for Facebook to be sustainable on a long-term basis, it has to find a way to make money in the mobile environment.

The big challenge for them is whether they can pull it off without alienating huge numbers of their users.

Interesting times.

"I'm all for sharing, but why the online obsession with revealing every detail of your life?"

Charlie Brooker in The Guardian:

Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for sharing thoughts, no matter how banal (as every column I have ever written rather sadly proves). Humans will always babble. If someone wants to tweet that they can’t decide whether to wear blue socks or brown socks, then fair enough. But when sharing becomes automated, I get the heebie-jeebies. People already create exaggerated versions of themselves for online consumption: snarkier tweets, more outraged reactions. Online, you play at being yourself. Apply that pressure of public performance to private, inconsequential actions – such as listening to songs in the comfort of your own room – and what happens, exactly?

It’ll only get worse. Here’s what I am listening to on Spotify. This is the page of the book I am reading. I am currently watching the 43rd minute of a Will Ferrell movie. And I’m not telling you this stuff. The software is. I am a character in The Sims. Hover the cursor over my head and watch that stat feed scroll.

On the whole, I’ve tended to embrace most of Facebook’s innovations. But their emphasis on automated sharing - ‘frictionless’ as they prefer call it - seems, well, unnatural and out of sync with how real life sharing has happened throughout history.

Facebook is making us miserable

Daniel Gulati at HBR:

 As Facebook continues to add new features to help us connect more efficiently online, the battle to maintain off-line relationships will become even more difficult, which will impact their overall quality, especially in the long-run. Facebook is negatively affecting what psychology Professor Jeffrey Parker refers to as “the closeness properties of friendship.”

Very interesting read. I don’t doubt that some of the scenarios he mentions are reality for some, but I’m not sure how widespread that level of addiction is. There’s no doubt that it’s always worth remembering that online tools are there to enhance real life friendships, not subtract from them. I love that I can stay closer to friends on the other side of the world due to Facebook (and other online tools like Skype, FaceTime, etc), but the moment we’re spending more time on Facebook and less time face-to-face with the friends and family around me, something has gone wrong.

Path and Instagram are making Facebook look incredibly uninventive at mobile

Dan Frommer asks a very valid question in a post questioning the inventiveness of Facebook when it comes to their mobile apps:

When’s the last time Facebook really wowed you with something in mobile?

I’d go further: The Facebook app for the iPhone and iPad is thoroughly disappointing as well as being very buggy.

Facebook are building a smartphone

Liz Gannes and Ina Fried at All Things D:

After years of considering how to best get into the phone business, Facebook has tapped Taiwanese cellphone maker HTC to build a smartphone that has the social network integrated at the core of its being.

It’s been rumoured for close to two years and it now seems that those rumours are true - though Facebook are still neither confirming nor denying it.

Why do Facebook need to get into the smartphone industry? Because they want to be a major player and not not just a support act to Apple and Google. The future is mobile and, though the Facebook app is the most popular smartphone app, it is still dependent on Apple and Google for creating the platforms that their app can run on. And what if they decide not to work with Facebook any more? For Facebook to be in charge of its own destiny, it doesn’t really have a choice but to enter the smartphone market.

The problem for Facebook is that I suspect, though they have millions of users, the true devotion of their users is not as great as they’d like it to be. I sense more and more that people are using Facebook because they have to (there’s no alternative where all their friends are) rather than because the love Facebook. Compare that to the devotion of people towards buying Apple products. Do Facebook have the kind of customers who love them enough to want to start to buy a phone from them? I’m not sure.

Oh, and just to be clear, it’ll almost certainly be at least another 12 months before we see anything close to a product ready to buy from Facebook.