Google+ Resurrects Playback Feature From Wave, Renames It “Ripples”
october 2011 by patrix
Last August, Google asked us all to say good-bye to Google Wave. Some said Wave was ahead of its time, some said that the platform had enough features to sink the Titanic. However, Google today announced some significant updates to its social network, Google+, among them that Google Apps users can now sign up for G+ — the integration is finally live.
And one of these features launched today on Google+ seems a throwback to one now-defunct feature of Google Wave, called “Playback”. Or at least one might claim this as its genesis, with the feature having its roots in-house, as opposed to some sort of reaction to Facebook’s much bally-hooed timeline that launched this September.
Yes, today, Google launched its new Google+ Ripples, which will let users “re-live” the conversations, comments, and sharing that’s taken place over the history of their use of Google+. Check out Google’s blog post here.
In other words, Ripples is a “visualization tool for public shares and comments”, which users can access by simply selecting the “View Ripples” option in the drop down window to the right of the public post.
From there, Google+ pops open a new tab, where users can see the activity in a nifty graphical interface, zoom in on particular events — seeing the innerconnectedness of it all. The diagram shows the post spreading across the network as other users share the post, with arrows “indicating the direction of resharing” and the circles within circles representing the “resharing sequence” with the larger circles indicating the heaviest sharing (and sharers), according to the Ripples description.
Users can also see a feed of who shared the post as well as click play on a moving timeline that shows one how quickly the post spread and to what extent it has been shared over the days, months, weeks, and years.
The intention here, according to Google’s blog post, is to “rekindle that initial excitement” when one shared their post and to get a better understanding of how the post is flowing across the network and just what kind of reach and collective viewing it was (and is) getting.
Google says that Ripples is still experimental and is looking for feedback on how it can be more informative and “more awesome”. But so far, so good. And, just to make one thing clear: Yes, Google did name this feature after me. Thank you, Google.
But the interesting thing here is how similar Google Ripples is to Google Wave’s “Playback” feature, which allowed friends to get caught up on what everyone else in a wave has already been talking about. This was essentially like rewinding the wave to see what happened in the past, with the ability to watch it progress through its many changes. Playback allowed users to jump around and see all the edits sequentially as they progressed in time to take some of the confusion out of the feature-brimming communication platform.
Another notable update announced today is the so-called “Google+ Creative Kit”, which in part is a bit like a suped-up version of Instagram filters. Creative Kit allows a deeper way to edit one’s photos on G+, enabling users to sharpen their photos, add text, crop, rotate, resize, or overlay that vintage look now so often associated with Instagram and Hipstagram. (Or as one commenter and Google engineer has pointed out, Creative Kit seems to be the native integration of Picnik, a photo editing startup Google acquired last year.) According to Google, all you need to use Creative Kit is “an idea”:
In the spirit of Halloween, Google has added some limited-time, “spooky” features to Creative Kit and is launching a photo competition (through the end of October), in which users can share their frightening photos on Google+ with the hashtag “#gplushalloween”. A panel of celebrity judges will pick their favorite photos and prizes may even be awarded. Though we’re checking on that last bit.
Ripples, Creative Kit, and Google Apps integration are certainly notable enhancements to the Google+ platform, especially as the latter has been a much-called-for and needed feature for the millions of Google Apps users. Photo editing features are a bonus, too, considering Google+ users have added more than 3.4 billion photos to the platform since launch. While basic photo editing tools have been available, Creative Kit takes Google+’s editing options to the next level.
And, in terms of further narrowing the gap between itself and Facebook, Ripples is a natural addition for Google+ as a content sharing medium. Both Ripples and Facebook’s impending Timeline are both unique visual ways of presenting our social data. Timeline will essentially allow users to replace their profiles with chronological scrapbooks, tracking your “most important” photos, content shared, apps, and so on back to the day you were born (for photos), or joined Facebook for everything else.
Ripples has a slightly different use case, as it is designed to give users a visual look at the ripple effect of their content sharing, the directionality of that sharing, and the popularity of a given topic. Both are nifty visual features, but whereas Timeline seems to have the potential not only to change your Facebook and social footprint at a deep level, Ripples doesn’t quite get there. It has the potential for a nerdgasm as a cool data visualization medium, which Google rocks in spades. But, really, the question becomes: How much will you actually use Ripples? And, since, in the end, it’s all about money, which has greater value for brands and future monetization?
For more on these new Google+ features, here’s the blog post.
Crunchbase
GOOGLE
GOOGLE+
GOOGLE WAVE
Company:
Google
Website:
google.com
Launch Date:
July 9, 1998
IPO:
NASDAQ:GOOG
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....
Learn more
Product:
Google+
Website:
plus.google.com
Company
Google
A Google project headed by Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, Google+ is designed to be the social extension of Google.
Its features focus on making online sharing easy for users.
“Circles,” think social circles, akin to Facebook’s lists
“Sandbar,” a user-unifying toolbar
“Sparks,” a search engine for sharing content between users
“Huddle,” a group messaging app that allows users to share with certain “Circles”
“Hangouts,” group video chatting designed to allow up to 10 users video chat at once
Each Google+ user can replace his...
Learn more
Product:
Google Wave
Website:
wave.google.com
Company
Google
Google Wave is a tool for communication and collaboration on the web, launching in the second half of 2009. Google announced that they would discontinue new development on Google wave in August 2010.
In Google Wave, users create and invite other people to “waves”. Everyone on a wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing,...
Learn more
Social
TC
google
Google_Wave
from google
And one of these features launched today on Google+ seems a throwback to one now-defunct feature of Google Wave, called “Playback”. Or at least one might claim this as its genesis, with the feature having its roots in-house, as opposed to some sort of reaction to Facebook’s much bally-hooed timeline that launched this September.
Yes, today, Google launched its new Google+ Ripples, which will let users “re-live” the conversations, comments, and sharing that’s taken place over the history of their use of Google+. Check out Google’s blog post here.
In other words, Ripples is a “visualization tool for public shares and comments”, which users can access by simply selecting the “View Ripples” option in the drop down window to the right of the public post.
From there, Google+ pops open a new tab, where users can see the activity in a nifty graphical interface, zoom in on particular events — seeing the innerconnectedness of it all. The diagram shows the post spreading across the network as other users share the post, with arrows “indicating the direction of resharing” and the circles within circles representing the “resharing sequence” with the larger circles indicating the heaviest sharing (and sharers), according to the Ripples description.
Users can also see a feed of who shared the post as well as click play on a moving timeline that shows one how quickly the post spread and to what extent it has been shared over the days, months, weeks, and years.
The intention here, according to Google’s blog post, is to “rekindle that initial excitement” when one shared their post and to get a better understanding of how the post is flowing across the network and just what kind of reach and collective viewing it was (and is) getting.
Google says that Ripples is still experimental and is looking for feedback on how it can be more informative and “more awesome”. But so far, so good. And, just to make one thing clear: Yes, Google did name this feature after me. Thank you, Google.
But the interesting thing here is how similar Google Ripples is to Google Wave’s “Playback” feature, which allowed friends to get caught up on what everyone else in a wave has already been talking about. This was essentially like rewinding the wave to see what happened in the past, with the ability to watch it progress through its many changes. Playback allowed users to jump around and see all the edits sequentially as they progressed in time to take some of the confusion out of the feature-brimming communication platform.
Another notable update announced today is the so-called “Google+ Creative Kit”, which in part is a bit like a suped-up version of Instagram filters. Creative Kit allows a deeper way to edit one’s photos on G+, enabling users to sharpen their photos, add text, crop, rotate, resize, or overlay that vintage look now so often associated with Instagram and Hipstagram. (Or as one commenter and Google engineer has pointed out, Creative Kit seems to be the native integration of Picnik, a photo editing startup Google acquired last year.) According to Google, all you need to use Creative Kit is “an idea”:
In the spirit of Halloween, Google has added some limited-time, “spooky” features to Creative Kit and is launching a photo competition (through the end of October), in which users can share their frightening photos on Google+ with the hashtag “#gplushalloween”. A panel of celebrity judges will pick their favorite photos and prizes may even be awarded. Though we’re checking on that last bit.
Ripples, Creative Kit, and Google Apps integration are certainly notable enhancements to the Google+ platform, especially as the latter has been a much-called-for and needed feature for the millions of Google Apps users. Photo editing features are a bonus, too, considering Google+ users have added more than 3.4 billion photos to the platform since launch. While basic photo editing tools have been available, Creative Kit takes Google+’s editing options to the next level.
And, in terms of further narrowing the gap between itself and Facebook, Ripples is a natural addition for Google+ as a content sharing medium. Both Ripples and Facebook’s impending Timeline are both unique visual ways of presenting our social data. Timeline will essentially allow users to replace their profiles with chronological scrapbooks, tracking your “most important” photos, content shared, apps, and so on back to the day you were born (for photos), or joined Facebook for everything else.
Ripples has a slightly different use case, as it is designed to give users a visual look at the ripple effect of their content sharing, the directionality of that sharing, and the popularity of a given topic. Both are nifty visual features, but whereas Timeline seems to have the potential not only to change your Facebook and social footprint at a deep level, Ripples doesn’t quite get there. It has the potential for a nerdgasm as a cool data visualization medium, which Google rocks in spades. But, really, the question becomes: How much will you actually use Ripples? And, since, in the end, it’s all about money, which has greater value for brands and future monetization?
For more on these new Google+ features, here’s the blog post.
Crunchbase
GOOGLE+
GOOGLE WAVE
Company:
Website:
google.com
Launch Date:
July 9, 1998
IPO:
NASDAQ:GOOG
Google provides search and advertising services, which together aim to organize and monetize the world’s information. In addition to its dominant search engine, it offers a plethora of online tools and platforms including: Gmail, Maps and YouTube. Most of its Web-based products are free, funded by Google’s highly integrated online advertising platforms AdWords and AdSense. Google promotes the idea that advertising should be highly targeted and relevant to users thus providing them with a rich source of information....
Learn more
Product:
Google+
Website:
plus.google.com
Company
A Google project headed by Vic Gundotra and Bradley Horowitz, Google+ is designed to be the social extension of Google.
Its features focus on making online sharing easy for users.
“Circles,” think social circles, akin to Facebook’s lists
“Sandbar,” a user-unifying toolbar
“Sparks,” a search engine for sharing content between users
“Huddle,” a group messaging app that allows users to share with certain “Circles”
“Hangouts,” group video chatting designed to allow up to 10 users video chat at once
Each Google+ user can replace his...
Learn more
Product:
Google Wave
Website:
wave.google.com
Company
Google Wave is a tool for communication and collaboration on the web, launching in the second half of 2009. Google announced that they would discontinue new development on Google wave in August 2010.
In Google Wave, users create and invite other people to “waves”. Everyone on a wave can use richly formatted text, photos, gadgets, and even feeds from other sources on the web. They can insert a reply or edit the wave directly. It’s concurrent rich-text editing,...
Learn more
october 2011 by patrix
Twitter Is Testing An Expandable Timeline
october 2011 by patrix
Twitter is testing out new design changes which makes the main Twitter timeline expandable so that you can see media and related information right in the timeline instead of off to the side or clicking off to another page. We’ve gotten a couple of reports about this change, which only a few people are seeing, (and Twitter confirms it is a “small test”). Patrick Bisch of Pinglio blogged about the changes and even made a screencast (which you can watch below).
The changes are subtle, but they manage to simplify an already simple service. You can “open” up a tweet to see how many people retweeted it, the threaded conversation related to that tweet, or related photos and videos. For instance, here is a screenshot of a reply tweet along with the original tweet. (Hat tip also to tipster Paul Dufour)
You will notice that the star, retweet, and reply buttons have also been moved to the top right. And you can close the tweet to go back to the main timeline view. Many Twitter clients have long included inline media, and it is encouraging to see Twitter trying to figure out how to make it part of the official experience. Every time I have to click off to another page to see a picture or to figure out the context around a tweet is a waste of time (these clicks add up, especially if you spend as much time on Twitter as I do).
You can get a sense of the new experience by watching the video below.
Crunchbase
TWITTER
Company:
Twitter
Website:
twitter.com
Funding:
$1.16B
Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...
Learn more
Social
TC
from google
The changes are subtle, but they manage to simplify an already simple service. You can “open” up a tweet to see how many people retweeted it, the threaded conversation related to that tweet, or related photos and videos. For instance, here is a screenshot of a reply tweet along with the original tweet. (Hat tip also to tipster Paul Dufour)
You will notice that the star, retweet, and reply buttons have also been moved to the top right. And you can close the tweet to go back to the main timeline view. Many Twitter clients have long included inline media, and it is encouraging to see Twitter trying to figure out how to make it part of the official experience. Every time I have to click off to another page to see a picture or to figure out the context around a tweet is a waste of time (these clicks add up, especially if you spend as much time on Twitter as I do).
You can get a sense of the new experience by watching the video below.
Crunchbase
Company:
Website:
twitter.com
Funding:
$1.16B
Twitter, founded by Jack Dorsey, Biz Stone, and Evan Williams in March 2006 (launched publicly in July 2006), is a social networking and micro-blogging service that allows users to post their latest updates. An update is limited by 140 characters and can be posted through three methods: web form, text message, or instant message. The company has been busy adding features to the product like Gmail import and search. They recently launched a new site section called “Explore” for...
Learn more
october 2011 by patrix
Anti-Facebook Social Network “Unthink” Launches To Public
october 2011 by patrix
Scrappy outsider startup Unthink.com, which bills itself as the “anti-Facebook,” is opening up its doors today, allowing in its first round of beta testers. The Tampa-based company with $2.5 million in funding from DouglasBay Capital sees itself as a more open, more honest form of social networking – one where its users are the owners of their data, and not the product being sold to advertisers.
Unthink is the kind of startup that could only come from outside of traditional tech hotspots like Silicon Valley or New York, as there’s a certain level of audacity, and perhaps even ignorance, that you need in order to think you have a shot at displacing social networking giant Facebook and all of its 800 million users.
And taking down Facebook is the core of Unthink’s marketing campaign. In fact, the majority of Unthink’s message is about what it is not: it’s not another social network, it’s a social revolution. Unthinkers are not users, they’re owners. Unthink is not in control, you are. And so on. It even has its own manifesto, deeds and covenants.
“If we want to be free, we have to control our own communications…we have to claim that power,” CEO Natasha Dedis shouted with vitriol to the crowd at September’s Tampa Bay Barcamp (the un-conference), before delving into all the ways that Facebook does its users wrong.
She explained that the idea for Unthink came to her when her son wanted to sign up for Facebook and she read the terms of service. They were not something she wanted to agree to because they could change at any time. But for her son, that decision was met with a lot of anxiety. “He was really stressed about it, like he didn’t have a choice – he had to be on Facebook.” It was either be on Facebook, or be a pariah in school, she said. Whichever decision Dedis made, she felt like she was being bad mother.
(Above: a profile after sign-up)
On Facebook, your personal data, your posts, your likes – in short, all your social networking activity – is used to provide advertisers with a way to directly target precise demographics. Some may call it genius, but for others like Dedis, it feels exploitive.
“The number one thing that had to be ‘un-thought’ about social media, is who does it belong to? We need to own everything that we put on our page. We can be as private or as public as we want, as long as it’s our choice,” she said.
On Unthink, user data isn’t sold to brands. Instead, users choose a brand to sponsor their page, by way of an ad dubbed “iEndorse.” The idea is that a user will select a brand they feel some affinity with, and will then become an advocate for that brand. Users who don’t want to select a brand have the option to pay for the service instead ($2/year).
Brands also have a different way to communicate with fans than they do on Facebook, where messages are spliced into a users’ News Feed. On Unthink, there’s a separate section on users’ profile pages just for communicating with businesses. Users decide what companies they want to communicate with, what type of messages they want to receive and how often they want to receive them. Then, when they choose to interact with a brand, they’re rewarded for their engagement with points that can be used towards discounts and offers from the brand in question.
Upon signing up for Unthink, as I did today, you’re offered an app that will export your photos and videos from Facebook. You’re also asked to fill out the standard social networking questions (name, date of birth, gender, etc.) and are then directed to your own personal profile page.
These pages are split into sections, each with a dedicated purpose and easy-to-customize privacy controls. The top section, “iUnthink” is your public microblog, the middle, your social section, the third, your lifestyle section for connecting with brands (this part will launch in a few weeks), and the bottom, your professional section for connecting with business colleagues.
Oh, that’s right. Did I forget to mention?
Despite its anti-Facebook manifesto, Unthink actually wants to displace Twitter, Groupon and LinkedIn, too. If anything, however, it’s Diaspora done right. Hey, if you’re going to appeal to the “I don’t want corporate control of my data!” crowd, you may as well go all in.
Will Unthink take down Facebook? Not likely. But it’s fascinating to watch someone try on this scale.
Unthink is launching into a limited beta today. If you know someone who’s in, they can send you an invite. TechCrunch readers can email techcrunch@unthink.com to get to the head of the list.
(Above: full-page profile. Note that ticker would normally be at bottom)
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:
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Unthink is the kind of startup that could only come from outside of traditional tech hotspots like Silicon Valley or New York, as there’s a certain level of audacity, and perhaps even ignorance, that you need in order to think you have a shot at displacing social networking giant Facebook and all of its 800 million users.
And taking down Facebook is the core of Unthink’s marketing campaign. In fact, the majority of Unthink’s message is about what it is not: it’s not another social network, it’s a social revolution. Unthinkers are not users, they’re owners. Unthink is not in control, you are. And so on. It even has its own manifesto, deeds and covenants.
“If we want to be free, we have to control our own communications…we have to claim that power,” CEO Natasha Dedis shouted with vitriol to the crowd at September’s Tampa Bay Barcamp (the un-conference), before delving into all the ways that Facebook does its users wrong.
She explained that the idea for Unthink came to her when her son wanted to sign up for Facebook and she read the terms of service. They were not something she wanted to agree to because they could change at any time. But for her son, that decision was met with a lot of anxiety. “He was really stressed about it, like he didn’t have a choice – he had to be on Facebook.” It was either be on Facebook, or be a pariah in school, she said. Whichever decision Dedis made, she felt like she was being bad mother.
(Above: a profile after sign-up)
On Facebook, your personal data, your posts, your likes – in short, all your social networking activity – is used to provide advertisers with a way to directly target precise demographics. Some may call it genius, but for others like Dedis, it feels exploitive.
“The number one thing that had to be ‘un-thought’ about social media, is who does it belong to? We need to own everything that we put on our page. We can be as private or as public as we want, as long as it’s our choice,” she said.
On Unthink, user data isn’t sold to brands. Instead, users choose a brand to sponsor their page, by way of an ad dubbed “iEndorse.” The idea is that a user will select a brand they feel some affinity with, and will then become an advocate for that brand. Users who don’t want to select a brand have the option to pay for the service instead ($2/year).
Brands also have a different way to communicate with fans than they do on Facebook, where messages are spliced into a users’ News Feed. On Unthink, there’s a separate section on users’ profile pages just for communicating with businesses. Users decide what companies they want to communicate with, what type of messages they want to receive and how often they want to receive them. Then, when they choose to interact with a brand, they’re rewarded for their engagement with points that can be used towards discounts and offers from the brand in question.
Upon signing up for Unthink, as I did today, you’re offered an app that will export your photos and videos from Facebook. You’re also asked to fill out the standard social networking questions (name, date of birth, gender, etc.) and are then directed to your own personal profile page.
These pages are split into sections, each with a dedicated purpose and easy-to-customize privacy controls. The top section, “iUnthink” is your public microblog, the middle, your social section, the third, your lifestyle section for connecting with brands (this part will launch in a few weeks), and the bottom, your professional section for connecting with business colleagues.
Oh, that’s right. Did I forget to mention?
Despite its anti-Facebook manifesto, Unthink actually wants to displace Twitter, Groupon and LinkedIn, too. If anything, however, it’s Diaspora done right. Hey, if you’re going to appeal to the “I don’t want corporate control of my data!” crowd, you may as well go all in.
Will Unthink take down Facebook? Not likely. But it’s fascinating to watch someone try on this scale.
Unthink is launching into a limited beta today. If you know someone who’s in, they can send you an invite. TechCrunch readers can email techcrunch@unthink.com to get to the head of the list.
(Above: full-page profile. Note that ticker would normally be at bottom)
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october 2011 by patrix
Social network popularity around the world in 2011
october 2011 by patrix
Online social networks are everywhere these days, a truly global phenomenon. But where are the different social networks having the most success in terms of popularity? That is what we’ll try to answer in this post.
We have included 11 social networks in this survey: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Orkut, Tumblr, FourSquare, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 and Bebo.
Please note that this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list covering all social networks out there. There are literally hundreds of them.
To map popularity, we’ve used Google search statistics (their Insights for Search tool). This will give us a good indication of the interest – or popularity, if you will – of a social network in a given region. We’re basing this survey on search results from the past 90 days, so it’s a reasonably large, up-to-date sample. After all, we want to know the situation right now.
A few initial observations
We’ve gone through and summarized some of the information for you, but please feel free to scroll down and check out the individual social networks you’re interested in.
Top countries for each social network (in terms of interest)
Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Venezuela.
Twitter is most popular in Venezuela and Brazil.
LinkedIn is most popular in the Netherlands and India.
Google+ is most popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Tumblr is most popular in the Philippines and Brazil.
FourSquare is most popular in Indonesia and Malaysia.
MySpace is most popular in Puerto Rico and Myanmar (Burma).
LiveJournal is most popular in Singapore and Russia.
Hi5 is most popular in Thailand and Romania.
Bebo is most popular in Ireland and New Zealand.
Orkut is most popular in Brazil and Paraguay. The interest shown for Orkut in Brazil far outstrips that of any other country.
It’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the majority of users come from these countries. We’re talking about sheer interest in a service. The size of the local user base will depend on the size of the Internet population in that country.
Also note that we haven’t compared the social networks against each other. This is a survey that examines where each social network has managed to garner the most interest in its service.
Some standout countries in this survey
Brazil is in the top five for Twitter, Orkut, Tumblr and Bebo.
Singapore is in the top five for LinkedIn, Tumblr, FourSquare and LiveJournal.
The United States is in the top five for LinkedIn, Tumblr and MySpace.
The Philippines is in the top five for Tumblr, FourSquare and LiveJournal.
India is in the top five for LinkedIn and Orkut.
The United Kingdom is in the top five for LinkedIn and Bebo.
Indonesia is in the top five for Twitter and FourSquare.
Venezuela and Turkey are in the top five for Facebook and Twitter.
That was just a brief summary. Why don’t you go ahead and have a look for yourself? We’ve listed the results for all the included social networks here below. We’ve also included direct links to Google Insights for Search if you want to dig even deeper into the results and play around a little.
Facebook
Countries with the highest interest in Facebook:
Turkey
Venezuela
Tunisia
Colombia
Dominican Republic
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Facebook here.
Twitter
Countries with the highest interest in Twitter:
Venezuela
Brazil
Indonesia
Turkey
El Salvador
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Twitter here.
LinkedIn
Countries with the highest interest in LinkedIn:
Netherlands
India
United Kingdom
Singapore
United States
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for LinkedIn here.
Google+
Countries with the highest interest in Google+:
Taiwan
Hong Kong
Nepal
Finland
Honduras
(Ok, Hong Kong isn’t a country per se, but Google Insights for Search lists “regions”, which don’t always correspond to countries.)
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Google+ here.
Orkut
Countries with the highest interest in Orkut:
Brazil
Paraguay
India
Haiti
Oman
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Orkut here.
Tumblr
Countries with the highest interest in Tumblr:
Philippines
Brazil
Australia
United States
Singapore
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Tumblr here.
FourSquare
Countries with the highest interest in FourSquare:
Indonesia
Malaysia
Singapore
Thailand
Philippines
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for FourSquare here.
MySpace
Countries with the highest interest in MySpace:
Puerto Rico
Myanmar (Burma)
United States
Jamaica
Trinidad and Tobago
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for MySpace here.
LiveJournal
Countries with the highest interest in LiveJournal:
Singapore
Russia
Belarus
Ukraine
Philippines
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for LiveJournal here.
Hi5
Countries with the highest interest in Hi5:
Thailand
Romania
Peru
Laos
Portugal
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Hi5 here.
Bebo
Countries with the highest interest in Bebo:
Ireland
New Zealand
United Kingdom
Brazil
Australia
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Bebo here.
Final notes
As you noticed, we only included a limited list of social networks in this survey. For example, we didn’t include social networks that are regional by nature, i.e. don’t have a global focus. There are plenty of country- or language-specific social networks that are successful in individual countries, for example VKontakte in Russia and the Russian-speaking countries of the former Soviet Union, Mixi in Japan, RenRen and Qzone in China, Hyves in the Netherlands, etc.
If you’re curious, you can check out a similar survey we did three years ago, in August of 2008. We thought an update was long overdue, since things change so rapidly in social media.
This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.
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brazil
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Foursquare
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hi5
India
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LiveJournal
myspace
orkut
Philippines
report
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social
socialmedia
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study
survey
Tumblr
Turkey
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UK
USA
Venezuela
from google
We have included 11 social networks in this survey: Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, Google+, Orkut, Tumblr, FourSquare, MySpace, LiveJournal, Hi5 and Bebo.
Please note that this isn’t meant to be an exhaustive list covering all social networks out there. There are literally hundreds of them.
To map popularity, we’ve used Google search statistics (their Insights for Search tool). This will give us a good indication of the interest – or popularity, if you will – of a social network in a given region. We’re basing this survey on search results from the past 90 days, so it’s a reasonably large, up-to-date sample. After all, we want to know the situation right now.
A few initial observations
We’ve gone through and summarized some of the information for you, but please feel free to scroll down and check out the individual social networks you’re interested in.
Top countries for each social network (in terms of interest)
Facebook is most popular in Turkey and Venezuela.
Twitter is most popular in Venezuela and Brazil.
LinkedIn is most popular in the Netherlands and India.
Google+ is most popular in Taiwan and Hong Kong.
Tumblr is most popular in the Philippines and Brazil.
FourSquare is most popular in Indonesia and Malaysia.
MySpace is most popular in Puerto Rico and Myanmar (Burma).
LiveJournal is most popular in Singapore and Russia.
Hi5 is most popular in Thailand and Romania.
Bebo is most popular in Ireland and New Zealand.
Orkut is most popular in Brazil and Paraguay. The interest shown for Orkut in Brazil far outstrips that of any other country.
It’s worth pointing out that this doesn’t necessarily mean that the majority of users come from these countries. We’re talking about sheer interest in a service. The size of the local user base will depend on the size of the Internet population in that country.
Also note that we haven’t compared the social networks against each other. This is a survey that examines where each social network has managed to garner the most interest in its service.
Some standout countries in this survey
Brazil is in the top five for Twitter, Orkut, Tumblr and Bebo.
Singapore is in the top five for LinkedIn, Tumblr, FourSquare and LiveJournal.
The United States is in the top five for LinkedIn, Tumblr and MySpace.
The Philippines is in the top five for Tumblr, FourSquare and LiveJournal.
India is in the top five for LinkedIn and Orkut.
The United Kingdom is in the top five for LinkedIn and Bebo.
Indonesia is in the top five for Twitter and FourSquare.
Venezuela and Turkey are in the top five for Facebook and Twitter.
That was just a brief summary. Why don’t you go ahead and have a look for yourself? We’ve listed the results for all the included social networks here below. We’ve also included direct links to Google Insights for Search if you want to dig even deeper into the results and play around a little.
Countries with the highest interest in Facebook:
Turkey
Venezuela
Tunisia
Colombia
Dominican Republic
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Facebook here.
Countries with the highest interest in Twitter:
Venezuela
Brazil
Indonesia
Turkey
El Salvador
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Twitter here.
Countries with the highest interest in LinkedIn:
Netherlands
India
United Kingdom
Singapore
United States
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for LinkedIn here.
Google+
Countries with the highest interest in Google+:
Taiwan
Hong Kong
Nepal
Finland
Honduras
(Ok, Hong Kong isn’t a country per se, but Google Insights for Search lists “regions”, which don’t always correspond to countries.)
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Google+ here.
Orkut
Countries with the highest interest in Orkut:
Brazil
Paraguay
India
Haiti
Oman
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Orkut here.
Tumblr
Countries with the highest interest in Tumblr:
Philippines
Brazil
Australia
United States
Singapore
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Tumblr here.
FourSquare
Countries with the highest interest in FourSquare:
Indonesia
Malaysia
Singapore
Thailand
Philippines
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for FourSquare here.
MySpace
Countries with the highest interest in MySpace:
Puerto Rico
Myanmar (Burma)
United States
Jamaica
Trinidad and Tobago
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for MySpace here.
LiveJournal
Countries with the highest interest in LiveJournal:
Singapore
Russia
Belarus
Ukraine
Philippines
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for LiveJournal here.
Hi5
Countries with the highest interest in Hi5:
Thailand
Romania
Peru
Laos
Portugal
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Hi5 here.
Bebo
Countries with the highest interest in Bebo:
Ireland
New Zealand
United Kingdom
Brazil
Australia
You can dig deeper into Google’s search stats for Bebo here.
Final notes
As you noticed, we only included a limited list of social networks in this survey. For example, we didn’t include social networks that are regional by nature, i.e. don’t have a global focus. There are plenty of country- or language-specific social networks that are successful in individual countries, for example VKontakte in Russia and the Russian-speaking countries of the former Soviet Union, Mixi in Japan, RenRen and Qzone in China, Hyves in the Netherlands, etc.
If you’re curious, you can check out a similar survey we did three years ago, in August of 2008. We thought an update was long overdue, since things change so rapidly in social media.
This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.
october 2011 by patrix
Leaked Gmail redesign looks a lot like Facebook’s Message inbox
october 2011 by patrix
Google accidentally published a YouTube video today that introduced some big changes to its popular email product Gmail.
In the video, which is now marked as private, Gmail user experience Designer Jason Cornwell says, “We’ve completely redesigned the look and feel of Gmail to make it as clean, simple and intuitive as possible.” For the most part, this is true based on the images in the demo.
The overall design is largely taken from a Gmail preview theme, which is currently available to all users. However, there are plenty of new additions and drastic changes worth noting. First of all, there’s a ton of white space — making elements like the “important” arrows and message labels stand out like a sore thumb. Unread messages in the Inbox stay white while old messages are slightly shaded.
The Gmail navigation has also been refreshed. The top nav bar now consists of buttons with action icons instead of text descriptors ( e.g. – archive, spam, delete, etc.). The left-sidebar navigation is much cleaner than the current version. Links to Contacts and Tasks are gone, or at least hidden from view. The most prominent element in the sidebar is a brightly colored “Compose” button. Opening a message brings you to the default conversation-view mode that features profile pictures next to each message snippet.
Honestly, the new Gmail design looks dangerously similar to Facebook’s message center. (See side-by-side comparison below.) The navigation (left sidebar), advertising placement (right sidebar) and list of people in the conversation/suggested users (top of right sidebar) are in identical locations on both Facebook and the new Gmail. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gmail eventually started treating all messages between two people as one continuous conversation (with no distinction between Instant Messages and emails) like Facebook does.
Unlike Facebook, the inbox doesn’t have a fixed width and users can choose one of four display density types. This is a nice addition that’s also available in the preview mode theme.
And speaking of Gmail themes, the video also revealed a variety of new “high-definition themes”, which were little more than high-resolution background photos that cancel out everything else on the page. Seriously, if you use one of those photo backgrounds Gmail instantly becomes Flickr. Hopefully, Google will allow users to upload their own custom themes when the refresh rolls out to everyone.
We’ve embedded screenshots from the Gmail video below. Let us know what you think of the design changes in the comments.
Filed under: social, VentureBeat
social
VentureBeat
email
gmail
redesign
user_interface
from google
In the video, which is now marked as private, Gmail user experience Designer Jason Cornwell says, “We’ve completely redesigned the look and feel of Gmail to make it as clean, simple and intuitive as possible.” For the most part, this is true based on the images in the demo.
The overall design is largely taken from a Gmail preview theme, which is currently available to all users. However, there are plenty of new additions and drastic changes worth noting. First of all, there’s a ton of white space — making elements like the “important” arrows and message labels stand out like a sore thumb. Unread messages in the Inbox stay white while old messages are slightly shaded.
The Gmail navigation has also been refreshed. The top nav bar now consists of buttons with action icons instead of text descriptors ( e.g. – archive, spam, delete, etc.). The left-sidebar navigation is much cleaner than the current version. Links to Contacts and Tasks are gone, or at least hidden from view. The most prominent element in the sidebar is a brightly colored “Compose” button. Opening a message brings you to the default conversation-view mode that features profile pictures next to each message snippet.
Honestly, the new Gmail design looks dangerously similar to Facebook’s message center. (See side-by-side comparison below.) The navigation (left sidebar), advertising placement (right sidebar) and list of people in the conversation/suggested users (top of right sidebar) are in identical locations on both Facebook and the new Gmail. I wouldn’t be surprised if Gmail eventually started treating all messages between two people as one continuous conversation (with no distinction between Instant Messages and emails) like Facebook does.
Unlike Facebook, the inbox doesn’t have a fixed width and users can choose one of four display density types. This is a nice addition that’s also available in the preview mode theme.
And speaking of Gmail themes, the video also revealed a variety of new “high-definition themes”, which were little more than high-resolution background photos that cancel out everything else on the page. Seriously, if you use one of those photo backgrounds Gmail instantly becomes Flickr. Hopefully, Google will allow users to upload their own custom themes when the refresh rolls out to everyone.
We’ve embedded screenshots from the Gmail video below. Let us know what you think of the design changes in the comments.
Filed under: social, VentureBeat
october 2011 by patrix
The Road to IPOVille: Zynga Will Trade on Nasdaq as ZNGA
october 2011 by patrix
The Zynga IPO is still on track. The social gaming giant has finally settled on a ticker symbol for the forthcoming $1 billion offering: ZNGA. In an amended S-1 filing with the SEC today, the company said its shares will trade under that symbol on the Nasdaq exchange.
Zillow already has dibs on Z; evidently ZNGA was the next best thing in Zynga’s eyes. I hope they at least considered BUBL.
Because the company plans to raise $1 billion for its upcoming IPO, that will give it an implied valuation of some $20 billion. To put that in perspective, it’s about the size of Activision’s and Electronic Arts’s valuations combined. That seems a heady number for a company whose business model is essentially fad-driven. But, as Zynga notes, it does control many of the most popular and successful online social games, and gaming has grown to become the second most popular online activity in the U.S. by time spent, surpassing even email.
News
Social
Farmville
IPO
mark_Pincus
social_gaming
ticker
ticker_symbol
ZNGA
Zynga
from google
Zillow already has dibs on Z; evidently ZNGA was the next best thing in Zynga’s eyes. I hope they at least considered BUBL.
Because the company plans to raise $1 billion for its upcoming IPO, that will give it an implied valuation of some $20 billion. To put that in perspective, it’s about the size of Activision’s and Electronic Arts’s valuations combined. That seems a heady number for a company whose business model is essentially fad-driven. But, as Zynga notes, it does control many of the most popular and successful online social games, and gaming has grown to become the second most popular online activity in the U.S. by time spent, surpassing even email.
october 2011 by patrix
A Social Network for Hypochondriacs
october 2011 by patrix
As winter approaches, Baltimore-based startup Sickweather is getting ready to forecast a different sort of cold front—and hoping to turn runny noses, coughs, and fevers into a healthy revenue stream.
read more
Advertising_&_Branding
Technology
Sickweather
Social
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read more
october 2011 by patrix
Topsy Says Its Google+ Search Is Better Than Google's
october 2011 by patrix
The real-time search engine Topsy, which has until now indexed Twitter, today adds public Google+ posts.
In what it says is an improvement on Google’s newly added Google+ search feature, Topsy says it ranks search results by trying to determine which users and posts are most globally and recently relevant for the query, rather than whether a user is close to or within the searcher’s Google+ network.
Google isn’t handing out much access to Google+ to developers yet, so Topsy is crawling the site’s public posts. That’s different from how Topsy indexes Twitter, which is through an agreement to use the official Firehose of all user tweets.
It’s unclear how many people are using Google+ these days, though user registrations seem to have ballooned up to at least the 50 million mark. According to Topsy’s observations, the number of public posts and comments on Google+ had grown to two million per day as of last week, up from 200,000 when it opened to the general public.
It should be possible to use Topsy search to get a better idea of how big Google+ is — or at least how big public behavior on the site is. For instance, Topsy execs told me Google+ was already getting 100,000 videos posted per week, compared to 200,000 posted on Twitter. After I mentioned how much it seems Google+ people like to bitch about Facebook, they found 82,000 mentions of Facebook on the site in the previous day.
Those numbers change every day, but now that Topsy’s Google+ search is open to the public, users can check for themselves.
Topsy has worked on, but never released, search for public Facebook posts, which it said Facebook makes difficult by throttling API access and other means. The search start-up might next release search for sites like Quora or blogs, the execs said.
News
Social
Facebook
Firehose
Google
Quora
Topsy
Twitter
from google
In what it says is an improvement on Google’s newly added Google+ search feature, Topsy says it ranks search results by trying to determine which users and posts are most globally and recently relevant for the query, rather than whether a user is close to or within the searcher’s Google+ network.
Google isn’t handing out much access to Google+ to developers yet, so Topsy is crawling the site’s public posts. That’s different from how Topsy indexes Twitter, which is through an agreement to use the official Firehose of all user tweets.
It’s unclear how many people are using Google+ these days, though user registrations seem to have ballooned up to at least the 50 million mark. According to Topsy’s observations, the number of public posts and comments on Google+ had grown to two million per day as of last week, up from 200,000 when it opened to the general public.
It should be possible to use Topsy search to get a better idea of how big Google+ is — or at least how big public behavior on the site is. For instance, Topsy execs told me Google+ was already getting 100,000 videos posted per week, compared to 200,000 posted on Twitter. After I mentioned how much it seems Google+ people like to bitch about Facebook, they found 82,000 mentions of Facebook on the site in the previous day.
Those numbers change every day, but now that Topsy’s Google+ search is open to the public, users can check for themselves.
Topsy has worked on, but never released, search for public Facebook posts, which it said Facebook makes difficult by throttling API access and other means. The search start-up might next release search for sites like Quora or blogs, the execs said.
october 2011 by patrix
Once Facebook launches Timeline, you’ll never want to leave
october 2011 by patrix
When Facebookers began thinking about the design for Timeline, the name for the new look and feel of Profiles, they reached for books more often than browser tabs.
As a result, while the new Facebook Profiles might look a bit like a WordPress or Tumblr theme, they actually have a lot more in common with a physical scrapbook or a box of old photos once you start using them (and most users will be able to activate the new options within a few weeks).
“We looked at a lot of print, and we did entire studies on scrapbooks,” Facebook product chief Sam Lessin told VentureBeat in an interview in San Francisco.
“We’d get out a big box of old pictures, flip through the photos and talk about them. We were watching test users reminisce over these things, and we tried to design with that in mind and create that experience.”
Reminiscence, memory and nostalgia are concepts that came up over and over in our talk with Lessin. He brought up the fictional Mad Men character Don Draper’s pitch for the Carousel slide projector, a presentation that emphasized memory and emotion.
“We must have watched that Carousel video internally fifty times, thinking about nostalgia,” said Lessin.
And that focus shows. When I activated Timeline on my own profile, I was immediately struck by what Facebook had done.
Years-old memories flashed before me — old friends, old places, things I hadn’t thought about in ages. I got sucked back into the past the same way I would have in front of my mother’s old cedar chest, a trunk packed full of childhood tchotckes and pictures that holds our family’s history.
This innocuous social web tool had just made a powerful and convincing bid for more than my information or my time. Facebook was grasping at my emotions by way of my memories, and it was doing a damn good job.
With Timeline, Facebook is succeeding where so many other web companies have failed: It has created a technology with real emotional power.
Under so strong a grip, I think it unlikely that any Facebook user would seriously consider leaving the site. The company would have to do something egregious to make its users abandon such an elegantly organized personal history of memories and relationships.
Is that scary? It’s as scary as you want to make it. You can still easily export all your posts and photos if you ever want to leave Facebook or simply back up your data. But Facebook is also giving you a well-designed, interactive, shareable, cloud-based scrapbook that’s more useful and possibly more interesting than the traditional format scrapbook sitting at the bottom of your mother’s cedar chest.
How Timeline came to be
The first thing I wanted to know from Lessin is where this Timeline idea came from. Facebook is famous for developing features and products with small teams of two or three employees working independently and intrapreneurially. Had Timeline been the work of a couple designer/hackers coding their butts off for a few months?
Lessin told me that Timeline was different from most other Facebook features in that respect.
“The number of people that touched this to make it happen was enormous. A large part of the design team worked on parts of Timeline. It was uniquely, really collaborative, and it took a village to get it done.”
The new user interface has been a long time coming; in fact, a lot of people have been wondering why a bold Profile redesign didn’t roll out sooner. “The most recent iteration took at least a year,” he said, “but even getting to that point took years.”
Lessin continued, “We had a thousand iterations for this. If you look at books, a lot of timelines are horizontal, so we had a bunch of iterations based on that. There were a lot of designs that we built and unbuilt with different designers.”
Also, Lessin confirmed that the Timeline idea “wasn’t something we at Facebook hadn’t thought about before.” In other words, Facebook has been thinking about chronological design and restructuring Profiles for quite some time – years, in fact. So while the thesis was easy and the end was a lot of work, Lessin said, “The really tough part was the middle. It’s hard to know when to go into build mode.”
Ultimately, one point stood out for the team: Facebook users kept going back in time.
That is, people were constantly looking through deeper, older information on their Walls and friends’ Walls. And that desire to quickly, easily navigate through time, skimming over the detritus but not overlooking the gems, was a large part of what motivated the team to structure the new Profiles as a timeline wherein memories are distilled and important events are highlighted. In the end, Facebook made Profiles an algorithmically derived scrapbook that can contain and beautifully display the most important things about you.
“Time is not a new concept,” said Lessin. “People have been making timelines since the Romans and before. So we had a lot of source material to draw from.”
Lessin also said that, as modern citizens, the designers looked to a wide variety of industries, time periods and places for inspiration. They even got into infographics and information design, which led them to two new hires with deep roots in information design.
“The way the project ended up running, we had certain people who spent 24/7 working on this, living and breathing it,” said Lessin. “Nick Felton was one of them, from the time he joined Facebook to the product launch.”
Felton was an information designer with whom Facebook had worked in the past, primarily on collateral for the company’s 2010 f8 developer conference. Felton is known for being a master of weaving time and information into stunning and clear graphical interfaces. His annual reports are visually fantastic, data-rich representations of personal interactions throughout the year. In short, his work represented exactly the kind of thinking Facebook needed behind Timeline.
Ryan Case was another person Facebook brought on specifically to design the new Profiles. Case was Felton’s co-founder at Daytum, a name the duo established to work on personal data visualization projects. So with a pair of infographic gurus at the helm, Facebook was ready to start building what became Timeline.
How and why Timeline works
As a result, said Lessin, “The design is obviously interesting. There’s a lot that may be familiar, but there’s a lot that’s new.”
With a Timeline-enabled Profile, the above-the-fold area of the screen (the information you see first without any serious scrolling) acts like a table of contents for your life and personality. You can read straight through or skip to the good parts, like what music someone likes or highlight posts from the year you met him or her.
The first thing each Timeline page displays is a large header image that Lessin called a “cover photo.” Because of the dimensions of the image space, this isn’t really an appropriate place to plaster up yet another headshot; rather, it’s a space to show people what you’re about. Facebook is channeling its users from narcissism toward genuine self-expression.
“There are a lot of reasons for your profile picture to be a picture of you,” said Lessin, “but people have been hacking that for self-expression. Watching people choose their cover photos, people are really using them to express themselves. It’s a rich storytelling opportunity.”
As you scroll down past the header and initial string of app-related information, the Timeline acts much like a prettier version of the Facebook Wall you already have, but the scrolling never stops. Better yet, it never gets boring.
As you continue backwards in time down the page, you see less detail and more of the bigger picture. You’ll get the highlights of months and years past. You’ll get highly visual content that triggers memories; you’ll be reminded of when you first made important friendships. If you see an event, image, or update that strikes you as particularly important, you can star it; the item will become a full-page-width pictorial display.
“The first few minutes of using the product is zipping through and looking at their memories, things that have always been there but weren’t easy to surface,” said Lessin.
For those who want to dig deeper, the Timeline theme (chronologically organized information that has more detail for recent events and big highlights for later events) carries throughout the applications listed on your Profile. Want to see all your Spotify information? It’s right there in a consistent, easy-to-browse timeline. Even the geographically organized map view, which sorts all your posts and photos by location, has a timeline on the side.
Ultimately, Facebook has managed to make something that is completely and visually personal without resorting to the kind of customization options that made a designer’s nightmare out of MySpace.
“We really wanted to make this feel like it’s yours,” Lessin told us. “It’s designed very differently from News Feed. I don’t know how the rest of the site is going to evolve over time, but the central concept is that if something is yours, it should feel different from other people’s pages and other Timelines on Facebook.”
While the design focus was intense and highly specialized and the engineering behind Timeline involved “a lot of heavy lifting,” Lessin said the most important part of building Timeline was an understanding of how people engage with one another and with information online.
“We had to figure out the interactions that people wanted to have, the social construction … We like to think we have a competency in that,” he said.
Finally, I was left wondering how Facebook users would react to the changes. Historically, Facebook makes incremental tweaks to the interface, and users revolt in agony and frustration. They don’t leave the site, but much to-do is m[…]
dev
social
Facebook_f8_2011
Facebook_Profiles
facebook_timeline
timeline
from google
As a result, while the new Facebook Profiles might look a bit like a WordPress or Tumblr theme, they actually have a lot more in common with a physical scrapbook or a box of old photos once you start using them (and most users will be able to activate the new options within a few weeks).
“We looked at a lot of print, and we did entire studies on scrapbooks,” Facebook product chief Sam Lessin told VentureBeat in an interview in San Francisco.
“We’d get out a big box of old pictures, flip through the photos and talk about them. We were watching test users reminisce over these things, and we tried to design with that in mind and create that experience.”
Reminiscence, memory and nostalgia are concepts that came up over and over in our talk with Lessin. He brought up the fictional Mad Men character Don Draper’s pitch for the Carousel slide projector, a presentation that emphasized memory and emotion.
“We must have watched that Carousel video internally fifty times, thinking about nostalgia,” said Lessin.
And that focus shows. When I activated Timeline on my own profile, I was immediately struck by what Facebook had done.
Years-old memories flashed before me — old friends, old places, things I hadn’t thought about in ages. I got sucked back into the past the same way I would have in front of my mother’s old cedar chest, a trunk packed full of childhood tchotckes and pictures that holds our family’s history.
This innocuous social web tool had just made a powerful and convincing bid for more than my information or my time. Facebook was grasping at my emotions by way of my memories, and it was doing a damn good job.
With Timeline, Facebook is succeeding where so many other web companies have failed: It has created a technology with real emotional power.
Under so strong a grip, I think it unlikely that any Facebook user would seriously consider leaving the site. The company would have to do something egregious to make its users abandon such an elegantly organized personal history of memories and relationships.
Is that scary? It’s as scary as you want to make it. You can still easily export all your posts and photos if you ever want to leave Facebook or simply back up your data. But Facebook is also giving you a well-designed, interactive, shareable, cloud-based scrapbook that’s more useful and possibly more interesting than the traditional format scrapbook sitting at the bottom of your mother’s cedar chest.
How Timeline came to be
The first thing I wanted to know from Lessin is where this Timeline idea came from. Facebook is famous for developing features and products with small teams of two or three employees working independently and intrapreneurially. Had Timeline been the work of a couple designer/hackers coding their butts off for a few months?
Lessin told me that Timeline was different from most other Facebook features in that respect.
“The number of people that touched this to make it happen was enormous. A large part of the design team worked on parts of Timeline. It was uniquely, really collaborative, and it took a village to get it done.”
The new user interface has been a long time coming; in fact, a lot of people have been wondering why a bold Profile redesign didn’t roll out sooner. “The most recent iteration took at least a year,” he said, “but even getting to that point took years.”
Lessin continued, “We had a thousand iterations for this. If you look at books, a lot of timelines are horizontal, so we had a bunch of iterations based on that. There were a lot of designs that we built and unbuilt with different designers.”
Also, Lessin confirmed that the Timeline idea “wasn’t something we at Facebook hadn’t thought about before.” In other words, Facebook has been thinking about chronological design and restructuring Profiles for quite some time – years, in fact. So while the thesis was easy and the end was a lot of work, Lessin said, “The really tough part was the middle. It’s hard to know when to go into build mode.”
Ultimately, one point stood out for the team: Facebook users kept going back in time.
That is, people were constantly looking through deeper, older information on their Walls and friends’ Walls. And that desire to quickly, easily navigate through time, skimming over the detritus but not overlooking the gems, was a large part of what motivated the team to structure the new Profiles as a timeline wherein memories are distilled and important events are highlighted. In the end, Facebook made Profiles an algorithmically derived scrapbook that can contain and beautifully display the most important things about you.
“Time is not a new concept,” said Lessin. “People have been making timelines since the Romans and before. So we had a lot of source material to draw from.”
Lessin also said that, as modern citizens, the designers looked to a wide variety of industries, time periods and places for inspiration. They even got into infographics and information design, which led them to two new hires with deep roots in information design.
“The way the project ended up running, we had certain people who spent 24/7 working on this, living and breathing it,” said Lessin. “Nick Felton was one of them, from the time he joined Facebook to the product launch.”
Felton was an information designer with whom Facebook had worked in the past, primarily on collateral for the company’s 2010 f8 developer conference. Felton is known for being a master of weaving time and information into stunning and clear graphical interfaces. His annual reports are visually fantastic, data-rich representations of personal interactions throughout the year. In short, his work represented exactly the kind of thinking Facebook needed behind Timeline.
Ryan Case was another person Facebook brought on specifically to design the new Profiles. Case was Felton’s co-founder at Daytum, a name the duo established to work on personal data visualization projects. So with a pair of infographic gurus at the helm, Facebook was ready to start building what became Timeline.
How and why Timeline works
As a result, said Lessin, “The design is obviously interesting. There’s a lot that may be familiar, but there’s a lot that’s new.”
With a Timeline-enabled Profile, the above-the-fold area of the screen (the information you see first without any serious scrolling) acts like a table of contents for your life and personality. You can read straight through or skip to the good parts, like what music someone likes or highlight posts from the year you met him or her.
The first thing each Timeline page displays is a large header image that Lessin called a “cover photo.” Because of the dimensions of the image space, this isn’t really an appropriate place to plaster up yet another headshot; rather, it’s a space to show people what you’re about. Facebook is channeling its users from narcissism toward genuine self-expression.
“There are a lot of reasons for your profile picture to be a picture of you,” said Lessin, “but people have been hacking that for self-expression. Watching people choose their cover photos, people are really using them to express themselves. It’s a rich storytelling opportunity.”
As you scroll down past the header and initial string of app-related information, the Timeline acts much like a prettier version of the Facebook Wall you already have, but the scrolling never stops. Better yet, it never gets boring.
As you continue backwards in time down the page, you see less detail and more of the bigger picture. You’ll get the highlights of months and years past. You’ll get highly visual content that triggers memories; you’ll be reminded of when you first made important friendships. If you see an event, image, or update that strikes you as particularly important, you can star it; the item will become a full-page-width pictorial display.
“The first few minutes of using the product is zipping through and looking at their memories, things that have always been there but weren’t easy to surface,” said Lessin.
For those who want to dig deeper, the Timeline theme (chronologically organized information that has more detail for recent events and big highlights for later events) carries throughout the applications listed on your Profile. Want to see all your Spotify information? It’s right there in a consistent, easy-to-browse timeline. Even the geographically organized map view, which sorts all your posts and photos by location, has a timeline on the side.
Ultimately, Facebook has managed to make something that is completely and visually personal without resorting to the kind of customization options that made a designer’s nightmare out of MySpace.
“We really wanted to make this feel like it’s yours,” Lessin told us. “It’s designed very differently from News Feed. I don’t know how the rest of the site is going to evolve over time, but the central concept is that if something is yours, it should feel different from other people’s pages and other Timelines on Facebook.”
While the design focus was intense and highly specialized and the engineering behind Timeline involved “a lot of heavy lifting,” Lessin said the most important part of building Timeline was an understanding of how people engage with one another and with information online.
“We had to figure out the interactions that people wanted to have, the social construction … We like to think we have a competency in that,” he said.
Finally, I was left wondering how Facebook users would react to the changes. Historically, Facebook makes incremental tweaks to the interface, and users revolt in agony and frustration. They don’t leave the site, but much to-do is m[…]
october 2011 by patrix
Timelines.com Sues Facebook, Says Its New Timeline Feature Could “Eliminate” Them
september 2011 by patrix
Timelines Inc., a small venture capital-backed Chicago company that operates the Timelines.com website, has launched a trademark-infringement suit against Facebook on Thursday, claiming that the latter’s recently announced Timeline feature could “quite possibly eliminate” its entire business.
Timelines.com is a website that basically allows people to record and share personal or historic events, and contribute descriptions, links, photos and videos related to those events, people, companies, bands and whatnot (i.e. Cuban Missile Crisis, Al Capone and Pink Floyd).
The suit essentially claims that Facebook’s Timeline service (see their blog post announcing the feature) has the potential to put Timelines Inc. straight out of Compton business.
From the complaint (also embedded below):
This matter seeks to protect Timelines, a small company headquartered in Chicago, that has been in business for almost five years, from being rolled over and quite possibly eliminated by the unlawful action by the world’s largest and most powerful social media company, Facebook.
Facebook has announced its intention to use and, indeed has already begun to re-direct Internet traffic, using Timelines’ federally registered “TIMELINES” trademark as the centerpiece of Facebook’s new product offering going forward, a move that, given the size and reach of Facebook, will essentially eliminate Timelines and leave the public with the confusing impression that plaintiff Timelines is somehow affiliated with Facebook.
In the event that Facebook is permitted to move forward with release of its “Timeline” product offering, consumer confusion with Timelines’ existing “Timelines” website will invariably result.
The suit also claims that Facebook hijacked the URL Facebook.com/timelines, which used to lead to Timelines’ Facebook page (and is, ironically, still linked to at the top of the Timelines.com website):
Facebook’s “Timeline” offering and its misdirection of users attempting to access Timelines’ offering is intended to prevent Internet users from accessing information about Timelines.com and to allow users to instead use Facebook’s “Timeline” offering.
Timelines is the owner of the registered trademarks “Timelines” (U.S. Reg. No. 3,684,074), “Timelines.com” (U.S. Reg. No. 3,764,134), and “Timelines & design” (U.S. Reg. No. 3,784,720).
We’ve reached out to Facebook for a response to Timelines’ allegations.
View this document on Scribd
Crunchbase
TIMELINES
FACEBOOK
Company:
Timelines
Website:
timelines.com
Funding:
$3M
Timelines, Inc. provides services that enable people and entities to discover, record and share history using the web. The company’s platform is uniquely built to chronicle events (using descriptions, photos, videos, and locations contributed by multiple users), and then enables people to relate these events to each other based on time, place or topic.
Timelines offers three services:
Timelines.com, for individuals and entities that want to reach and interact with a broad audience about publicly shared events;
Timelines...
Learn more
Company:
Facebook
Website:
facebook.com
Launch Date:
January 2, 2004
Funding:
$2.34B
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.
The original idea for the term...
Learn more
Social
TC
WTF
facebook
lawsuit
Trademark
timelines
Timelines.com
from google
Timelines.com is a website that basically allows people to record and share personal or historic events, and contribute descriptions, links, photos and videos related to those events, people, companies, bands and whatnot (i.e. Cuban Missile Crisis, Al Capone and Pink Floyd).
The suit essentially claims that Facebook’s Timeline service (see their blog post announcing the feature) has the potential to put Timelines Inc. straight out of Compton business.
From the complaint (also embedded below):
This matter seeks to protect Timelines, a small company headquartered in Chicago, that has been in business for almost five years, from being rolled over and quite possibly eliminated by the unlawful action by the world’s largest and most powerful social media company, Facebook.
Facebook has announced its intention to use and, indeed has already begun to re-direct Internet traffic, using Timelines’ federally registered “TIMELINES” trademark as the centerpiece of Facebook’s new product offering going forward, a move that, given the size and reach of Facebook, will essentially eliminate Timelines and leave the public with the confusing impression that plaintiff Timelines is somehow affiliated with Facebook.
In the event that Facebook is permitted to move forward with release of its “Timeline” product offering, consumer confusion with Timelines’ existing “Timelines” website will invariably result.
The suit also claims that Facebook hijacked the URL Facebook.com/timelines, which used to lead to Timelines’ Facebook page (and is, ironically, still linked to at the top of the Timelines.com website):
Facebook’s “Timeline” offering and its misdirection of users attempting to access Timelines’ offering is intended to prevent Internet users from accessing information about Timelines.com and to allow users to instead use Facebook’s “Timeline” offering.
Timelines is the owner of the registered trademarks “Timelines” (U.S. Reg. No. 3,684,074), “Timelines.com” (U.S. Reg. No. 3,764,134), and “Timelines & design” (U.S. Reg. No. 3,784,720).
We’ve reached out to Facebook for a response to Timelines’ allegations.
View this document on Scribd
Crunchbase
TIMELINES
Company:
Timelines
Website:
timelines.com
Funding:
$3M
Timelines, Inc. provides services that enable people and entities to discover, record and share history using the web. The company’s platform is uniquely built to chronicle events (using descriptions, photos, videos, and locations contributed by multiple users), and then enables people to relate these events to each other based on time, place or topic.
Timelines offers three services:
Timelines.com, for individuals and entities that want to reach and interact with a broad audience about publicly shared events;
Timelines...
Learn more
Company:
Website:
facebook.com
Launch Date:
January 2, 2004
Funding:
$2.34B
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.
The original idea for the term...
Learn more
september 2011 by patrix
You Might Have Klout, But What’s Your Kred?
september 2011 by patrix
Reputation on the Internet is a tricky thing to measure. But with the rise of social media—with its retweets, likes, +1s, replies, and followers counts—companies are trying to keep score. If you are a big user of Twitter, you have probably checked out your Klout score or at least heard of it. Well, soon Klout will have a competitor called Kred. It is currently accepting sign-ups for a gradual rollout starting next week.
Kred is the latest product from social data mining startup PeopleBrowsr. “We have been receiving the firehose since 2008,” says CEO Jodee Rich, referring to the full Twitter firehose, “indexing it since then. We have sorted it by community and topic. We look for small close networks of people and look for how they can be just as influential as rockstars.”
Every person or account on Twitter has a Kred score, which is made up of two parts: the influence score and the outreach score. Your influence score is a measure of your ability to inspire others. It is a number on a scale from 1 to 1,000, and is based on how often your tweets are retweeted, how many new followers you are gaining, and how many replies you generate. (Kred also looks at Facebook likes and Google +1s, but Twitter is the main source of data). It is very much like your Klout score. The Outreach score is measured in levels and is a reflection of how generous you are with retweeting and replying to others.
Kred also figures out which of 200 communities you belong to based on the information in your Twitter bio (which is not always a great description of who you are). It can show you the influence of your whole community and how you rank in that community. “Everyone is an influencer somewhere,” says Jodee. “Our job with Kred is to show you where you have influence.” Brand managers will be able to define their own communities (for a fee), which they will then be able to track.
So how is this different from Klout? The main difference is Kred’s transparency. It shows you exactly how you got your score and lets you drill down to every retweet to see how many points it was worth. A normal retweet might be worth 10 points, but one from somebody with high Kred might be worth 50. A mention is worth more than follow, and so on. Since Kred is calculating everyone’s scores in realtime, it normalizes your score against the average.
Kred also lets you incorporate your real-world accomplishments like degrees, honors, awards, and certificates. You will be able to send Kred a PDF proving an offline achievement, and they will add it to your Kred.
Crunchbase
KRED
KLOUT
Product:
Kred
Website:
Kred.ly
Company
PeopleBrowsr
Learn more
:
Website:
Learn more
Company:
Klout
Website:
klout.com
Funding:
$10M
Klout measures influence across the social web.
Klout allows users to track the impact of their opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. Data is collected about the content users create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of their networks. Klout identifies influencers and provides tools for influencers to monitor their influence.
Learn more
Social
TC
from google
Kred is the latest product from social data mining startup PeopleBrowsr. “We have been receiving the firehose since 2008,” says CEO Jodee Rich, referring to the full Twitter firehose, “indexing it since then. We have sorted it by community and topic. We look for small close networks of people and look for how they can be just as influential as rockstars.”
Every person or account on Twitter has a Kred score, which is made up of two parts: the influence score and the outreach score. Your influence score is a measure of your ability to inspire others. It is a number on a scale from 1 to 1,000, and is based on how often your tweets are retweeted, how many new followers you are gaining, and how many replies you generate. (Kred also looks at Facebook likes and Google +1s, but Twitter is the main source of data). It is very much like your Klout score. The Outreach score is measured in levels and is a reflection of how generous you are with retweeting and replying to others.
Kred also figures out which of 200 communities you belong to based on the information in your Twitter bio (which is not always a great description of who you are). It can show you the influence of your whole community and how you rank in that community. “Everyone is an influencer somewhere,” says Jodee. “Our job with Kred is to show you where you have influence.” Brand managers will be able to define their own communities (for a fee), which they will then be able to track.
So how is this different from Klout? The main difference is Kred’s transparency. It shows you exactly how you got your score and lets you drill down to every retweet to see how many points it was worth. A normal retweet might be worth 10 points, but one from somebody with high Kred might be worth 50. A mention is worth more than follow, and so on. Since Kred is calculating everyone’s scores in realtime, it normalizes your score against the average.
Kred also lets you incorporate your real-world accomplishments like degrees, honors, awards, and certificates. You will be able to send Kred a PDF proving an offline achievement, and they will add it to your Kred.
Crunchbase
KRED
KLOUT
Product:
Kred
Website:
Kred.ly
Company
PeopleBrowsr
Learn more
:
Website:
Learn more
Company:
Klout
Website:
klout.com
Funding:
$10M
Klout measures influence across the social web.
Klout allows users to track the impact of their opinions, links and recommendations across your social graph. Data is collected about the content users create, how people interact with that content and the size and composition of their networks. Klout identifies influencers and provides tools for influencers to monitor their influence.
Learn more
september 2011 by patrix
The social networks of yesteryear. How the mighty have fallen
september 2011 by patrix
The current big international social networks are Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn and the newly formed Google+, and perhaps Tumblr, if you choose to look at it as a social network. However, go back to around 2004-2005 and these were either not around yet, or just taking their early baby steps. Back then the big ones were Friendster, LiveJournal and MySpace.
And we’re talking in past tense, because oh how the mighty have fallen. Web users are a fickle bunch, and there is probably no market as trend sensitive as social networking.
How bad is it? As you’ll see, they’re all caught in a downward spiral, but they might have peaked later in life than you think.
MySpace
Started in 2003, MySpace was the big dog before Facebook stole its thunder. It was a pretty strong player until quite recently, especially in the United States.
At its peak in 2007-2008, the then News Corp-owned MySpace was valued at $12 billion. In June this year, News Corp. sold MySpace for $35 million and a 5% stake in the new owner, Specific Media.
Worldwide interest in MySpace, 2004 – today:
Worldwide site traffic to Myspace, 2009 – today:
(There’s more information over at Wikipedia, if you want to read up on MySpace’s history.)
Friendster
Started in 2002, Friendster quickly became a huge success (it’s the site that inspired MySpace) and pretty much became a blueprint for the modern-day social network. It went from being popular everywhere, to mostly being used in Asia, especially SE Asia, which has remained its power base.
In May this year, Friendster pretty much committed harakiri – at least as a social network – and was completely redesigned to focus on social gaming.
Worldwide interest in Friendster, 2004 – today:
Worldwide site traffic to Friendster, 2009 – today:
(You can read more about Friendster’s history over at Wikipedia.)
LiveJournal
Started in 1999, LiveJournal is a blogging service with strong social elements. In many ways it’s one of the social networking pioneers. To give you an idea of its status, early in the movie The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg (as played by Jesse Eisenberg) is seen blogging on LiveJournal. The scene takes place in 2003.
In 2009, after having been bought by a Russian company (SUP) a couple of years earlier, the operation of LiveJournal was moved from the United States to Russia.
Worldwide interest in LiveJournal, 2004 – today:
Worldwide site traffic to Livejournal, 2009 – today:
(More about LiveJournal’s history over at Wikipedia.)
“Hold on, we’re not dead yet!”
The funny thing is, relatively speaking these social networks are still big. They still have millions of users. They haven’t died, they’ve just fallen from grace, most of their users having left for greener pastures.
It’s like one of those aging Hollywood movie stars of yesteryear, still good, but no longer cast in the best roles and no longer able to pull the crowds to the theaters.
“I used to be famous,” she said with a sigh. “I used to be a star.”
This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.
Main
charts
Friendster
history
internet
LiveJournal
myspace
social
socialmedia
socialnetwork
traffic
trends
usage
users
from google
And we’re talking in past tense, because oh how the mighty have fallen. Web users are a fickle bunch, and there is probably no market as trend sensitive as social networking.
How bad is it? As you’ll see, they’re all caught in a downward spiral, but they might have peaked later in life than you think.
MySpace
Started in 2003, MySpace was the big dog before Facebook stole its thunder. It was a pretty strong player until quite recently, especially in the United States.
At its peak in 2007-2008, the then News Corp-owned MySpace was valued at $12 billion. In June this year, News Corp. sold MySpace for $35 million and a 5% stake in the new owner, Specific Media.
Worldwide interest in MySpace, 2004 – today:
Worldwide site traffic to Myspace, 2009 – today:
(There’s more information over at Wikipedia, if you want to read up on MySpace’s history.)
Friendster
Started in 2002, Friendster quickly became a huge success (it’s the site that inspired MySpace) and pretty much became a blueprint for the modern-day social network. It went from being popular everywhere, to mostly being used in Asia, especially SE Asia, which has remained its power base.
In May this year, Friendster pretty much committed harakiri – at least as a social network – and was completely redesigned to focus on social gaming.
Worldwide interest in Friendster, 2004 – today:
Worldwide site traffic to Friendster, 2009 – today:
(You can read more about Friendster’s history over at Wikipedia.)
LiveJournal
Started in 1999, LiveJournal is a blogging service with strong social elements. In many ways it’s one of the social networking pioneers. To give you an idea of its status, early in the movie The Social Network, Mark Zuckerberg (as played by Jesse Eisenberg) is seen blogging on LiveJournal. The scene takes place in 2003.
In 2009, after having been bought by a Russian company (SUP) a couple of years earlier, the operation of LiveJournal was moved from the United States to Russia.
Worldwide interest in LiveJournal, 2004 – today:
Worldwide site traffic to Livejournal, 2009 – today:
(More about LiveJournal’s history over at Wikipedia.)
“Hold on, we’re not dead yet!”
The funny thing is, relatively speaking these social networks are still big. They still have millions of users. They haven’t died, they’ve just fallen from grace, most of their users having left for greener pastures.
It’s like one of those aging Hollywood movie stars of yesteryear, still good, but no longer cast in the best roles and no longer able to pull the crowds to the theaters.
“I used to be famous,” she said with a sigh. “I used to be a star.”
This was a post from the guys at Pingdom, a site monitoring service that makes sure you're the first to know when your site is down. Check it out for free.
september 2011 by patrix
Cory Doctorow: Tech companies exploit the way we undervalue privacy
september 2011 by patrix
How much is your personal data worth? Will photos you post on Facebook or your Foursquare check-in data get you into trouble in five years’ time? In one of the standout talks at this week’s O’Reilly Strata Summit, author and Boing Boing editor Cory Doctorow explained why people undervalue their privacy and how data-driven companies exploit this mis-pricing of privacy.
The privacy bargain we make with tech companies usually involves giving up some personal data in return for a free service, as with Facebook or many mobile applications.
Doctorow argues that it’s hard for people to assign a value to personal data when the full consequences of giving up that data are still unknown. How do you determine whether the privacy bargain is a fair one?
“It’s hard to get worked up about things where the failure and the deed are separated by a long way,” said Doctorow. “It’s the same reason that people start smoking.”
He insists data-driven companies such as Facebook actively exploit users by soliciting as much data as possible. “Facebook trains you to undervalue your privacy. These companies are [full of] social scientists now and those people have read their Skinner (an American behaviorist), have read their Adler (founder of the school of the school of individual psychology) and they understand intermittent reinforcement.” In exchange for posting status updates, photos and other information, Facebook users are intermittently rewarded with attention from people they care about. This mechanism can have addictive qualities similar to gambling.
“Eli Pariser, who wrote The Filter Bubble, told me someone at Facebook explained to him that they know that men who have female friends who post photos of themselves, spend more time on the site,” reports Doctorow. “They know that women who see their friends post photos, upload photos in response. So if a man who used the site a lot then dropped off, they look for women in his social group, show them pictures of their girlfriends, the women post pictures back and then the men stay on. This is not the bargain.”
Another form of social manipulation practiced by tech companies involves search results and news feeds.
“The algorithms by which things like Facebook decide what to show you and what to hide are totally opaque. There’s this kind of weird, big lie about how an algorithm is not a form of editorial control. Google will say ‘we have organic search results’ in contrast with what Alta Vista used to do, where they would take payment to put a result first. It’s ‘organic’ because it’s done with math, but actually it’s editorial by another name. All the companies that do editorial by algorithm claim that there’s something about math that makes it free of bias and will.”
Tech companies often do not offer clear or easy privacy choices to users. Facebook constantly changes its privacy settings to push the default towards more public data, and its Byzantine custom privacy settings are bewildering for a new user. “Complexifying a proposition is usually there to stop you from finding out whether the deal is good,” comments Doctorow.
With mobile applications, the choice is often between giving the application all the data it requests or not installing it at all. “Imagine apps that let you iterate through privacy decisions when they arise, not making a lot of a priori decisions,” explains Doctorow. “Apps that start from a presumption of privacy, and when your privacy settings interfere with your stated desire to access a service, in that moment you are prompted to make the decision.”
More generally, Doctorow says we need simpler cookie managers: “One of the things you can do is give people meaningful choices in their browsers. That would be way more useful to me than giving them hard to enforce, impossible to audit, privacy legislation.”
He also thinks that the way we approach educating children about privacy is flawed. “We have this weird contradiction in our school system where all the grown-ups in the school spend all their time wagging their fingers at kids saying ‘Get off the Facebook, every disclosure you make is something precious that you lose forever ‘ but ‘I’m spying on every click you do, spying on every IM you send, spying on all your Facebook conversations’ just like a parent who has 3 fags in his mouth and says ‘You shouldn’t smoke because it’s bad for you,’” he says.
“We could start by teaching kids to jailbreak every device, break every firewall, to do all the things that will make them good at privacy. It’s a learned skill. If kids can compete to see who can divulge the least information to the grown-ups in their lives, we will, by definition, get kids who are better at not divulging information than kids who are punished every time they try to prevent grown-ups from looking at their information.”
One of the reasons that we undervalue our personal data seems to be that the threat is not visceral and concrete. “In technology we often have this core problem of taking a fairly abstract social harm and rendering it concrete,” concludes Doctorow. “I think science fiction is rubbish at predicting the future, but it can create narratives that become part of our discourse. Imagine it’s 1947 and Orwell hasn’t written 1984 yet, and you’re trying to explain to someone why you don’t want to be electronically surveiled.”
Filed under: social, VentureBeat
social
VentureBeat
privacy
editor's_pick
cookies
1984
algorithms
from google
The privacy bargain we make with tech companies usually involves giving up some personal data in return for a free service, as with Facebook or many mobile applications.
Doctorow argues that it’s hard for people to assign a value to personal data when the full consequences of giving up that data are still unknown. How do you determine whether the privacy bargain is a fair one?
“It’s hard to get worked up about things where the failure and the deed are separated by a long way,” said Doctorow. “It’s the same reason that people start smoking.”
He insists data-driven companies such as Facebook actively exploit users by soliciting as much data as possible. “Facebook trains you to undervalue your privacy. These companies are [full of] social scientists now and those people have read their Skinner (an American behaviorist), have read their Adler (founder of the school of the school of individual psychology) and they understand intermittent reinforcement.” In exchange for posting status updates, photos and other information, Facebook users are intermittently rewarded with attention from people they care about. This mechanism can have addictive qualities similar to gambling.
“Eli Pariser, who wrote The Filter Bubble, told me someone at Facebook explained to him that they know that men who have female friends who post photos of themselves, spend more time on the site,” reports Doctorow. “They know that women who see their friends post photos, upload photos in response. So if a man who used the site a lot then dropped off, they look for women in his social group, show them pictures of their girlfriends, the women post pictures back and then the men stay on. This is not the bargain.”
Another form of social manipulation practiced by tech companies involves search results and news feeds.
“The algorithms by which things like Facebook decide what to show you and what to hide are totally opaque. There’s this kind of weird, big lie about how an algorithm is not a form of editorial control. Google will say ‘we have organic search results’ in contrast with what Alta Vista used to do, where they would take payment to put a result first. It’s ‘organic’ because it’s done with math, but actually it’s editorial by another name. All the companies that do editorial by algorithm claim that there’s something about math that makes it free of bias and will.”
Tech companies often do not offer clear or easy privacy choices to users. Facebook constantly changes its privacy settings to push the default towards more public data, and its Byzantine custom privacy settings are bewildering for a new user. “Complexifying a proposition is usually there to stop you from finding out whether the deal is good,” comments Doctorow.
With mobile applications, the choice is often between giving the application all the data it requests or not installing it at all. “Imagine apps that let you iterate through privacy decisions when they arise, not making a lot of a priori decisions,” explains Doctorow. “Apps that start from a presumption of privacy, and when your privacy settings interfere with your stated desire to access a service, in that moment you are prompted to make the decision.”
More generally, Doctorow says we need simpler cookie managers: “One of the things you can do is give people meaningful choices in their browsers. That would be way more useful to me than giving them hard to enforce, impossible to audit, privacy legislation.”
He also thinks that the way we approach educating children about privacy is flawed. “We have this weird contradiction in our school system where all the grown-ups in the school spend all their time wagging their fingers at kids saying ‘Get off the Facebook, every disclosure you make is something precious that you lose forever ‘ but ‘I’m spying on every click you do, spying on every IM you send, spying on all your Facebook conversations’ just like a parent who has 3 fags in his mouth and says ‘You shouldn’t smoke because it’s bad for you,’” he says.
“We could start by teaching kids to jailbreak every device, break every firewall, to do all the things that will make them good at privacy. It’s a learned skill. If kids can compete to see who can divulge the least information to the grown-ups in their lives, we will, by definition, get kids who are better at not divulging information than kids who are punished every time they try to prevent grown-ups from looking at their information.”
One of the reasons that we undervalue our personal data seems to be that the threat is not visceral and concrete. “In technology we often have this core problem of taking a fairly abstract social harm and rendering it concrete,” concludes Doctorow. “I think science fiction is rubbish at predicting the future, but it can create narratives that become part of our discourse. Imagine it’s 1947 and Orwell hasn’t written 1984 yet, and you’re trying to explain to someone why you don’t want to be electronically surveiled.”
Filed under: social, VentureBeat
september 2011 by patrix
Sean Parker says Spotify on Facebook lives up to original Napster vision (video)
september 2011 by patrix
Sean Parker, the billionaire of Napster and Facebook fame, is on to his next big deal: Spotify, which started in Europe and is now offering streaming music in the U.S.
In a conversation with Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek, Parker said that the rise of Spotify and other music streaming services and the debut of their integration with Facebook today fulfilled the original vision he had for Napster. And that vision wasn’t about music piracy.
“This is actually very similar to what I dreamt of 10 years ago,” Parker said, speaking on stage at a press event after Facebook’s f8 event. (That’s Parker on the right in the above photo; Ek is on the left in the “Suits Suck” t-shirt.) “We never really wanted to create a service to destroy the record business or hurt artists in any way. The goal was really to create a more frictionless system. We really believed we would succeed in striking deals with the record labels.”
Parker predicted no less than a rebirth of the music business itself, thanks to better music discovery through the combination of Facebook and Spotify.
Parker was a co-founder of Napster, an early shepherd of Facebook, and is now an investor in Spotify. He was such a unique and interesting character that he was played by Justin Timberlake in the movie The Social Network, a fictionalized account of the founding of Facebook. In real life, he played a role in cracking the foundations of the old music business, and now he’s looking to rebuild it.
Parker and Ek held their discussion in a warehouse in San Francisco with opulent party trimmings. The catered meal included roasted pigs, oysters, bottles of tequila, and sushi. The entertainment included The Killers, Jane’s Addiction, and Snoop Dogg.
Ek said that Napster, the disruptive music sharing service started by Parker and Shawn Fanning (who was also there tonight), inspired him when he was growing up.
“Napster for me personally was probably the biggest event in my life when it comes to the internet,” Ek said. It really changed how I considered music, my favorite artists, how I shared music with friends.”
And Parker said, “Meeting Daniel was one of the three key moments in my life, alongside meeting Shawn Fanning and meeting Mark Zuckerberg.”
Facebook today announced that Spotify would be integrated into Facebook so that a friend could listen to a song at the very same moment another friend was listening to it, in a kind of social music discovery. Spotify’s iPhone app, which offers users convenience, requires a subscription fee. Users can now listen to music, watch TV, or view movies without ever leaving Facebook.
“If you want full portability, you have to pay,” Parker said. “The iPhone version has paved the way for that. This was ultimately the most important element in monetization. The element that consumers were wiling to pay for was convenience.”
Parker added, “Solving the music piracy problem can’t happen unless you build a music service that is more convenient than piracy. It didn’t compete with any of the existing services like iTunes or Napster. It competed with piracy.”
The most important unanswered question? Parker said, “Music discovery has always been social. Obviously there has been these top-down media like MTV and radio, but so much music discovery has happened by word of mouth in a dorm room, people going to clubs or hearing music in a restaurant. That social process has always been the real fuel.”
With Facebook, Spotify can now “supercharge that discovery,” Parker said. “More people will experience music than ever before. As long as that is coupled with a monetization platform that actually works, we have a solution.”
Here’s some video of the full conversation between Parker and Ek below. And below that we have a panel of industry artists and managers talking about the significance of Spotify. The panel includes Jane’s Addiction lead singer Perry Farrell, Brandon Creed (manager for Bruno Mars), producer Ray Romulus, Paul Rosenberg (Eminem’s manager) and disc jockey Kaskade. Afterward, the Killers opened the show and Parker danced next to me. At the bottom is the Killers performing.
Filed under: social
social
editor's_pick
Facebook_f8_2011
music
Snoop_Dogg
streaming
Streaming_media
The_Killers
from google
In a conversation with Spotify chief executive Daniel Ek, Parker said that the rise of Spotify and other music streaming services and the debut of their integration with Facebook today fulfilled the original vision he had for Napster. And that vision wasn’t about music piracy.
“This is actually very similar to what I dreamt of 10 years ago,” Parker said, speaking on stage at a press event after Facebook’s f8 event. (That’s Parker on the right in the above photo; Ek is on the left in the “Suits Suck” t-shirt.) “We never really wanted to create a service to destroy the record business or hurt artists in any way. The goal was really to create a more frictionless system. We really believed we would succeed in striking deals with the record labels.”
Parker predicted no less than a rebirth of the music business itself, thanks to better music discovery through the combination of Facebook and Spotify.
Parker was a co-founder of Napster, an early shepherd of Facebook, and is now an investor in Spotify. He was such a unique and interesting character that he was played by Justin Timberlake in the movie The Social Network, a fictionalized account of the founding of Facebook. In real life, he played a role in cracking the foundations of the old music business, and now he’s looking to rebuild it.
Parker and Ek held their discussion in a warehouse in San Francisco with opulent party trimmings. The catered meal included roasted pigs, oysters, bottles of tequila, and sushi. The entertainment included The Killers, Jane’s Addiction, and Snoop Dogg.
Ek said that Napster, the disruptive music sharing service started by Parker and Shawn Fanning (who was also there tonight), inspired him when he was growing up.
“Napster for me personally was probably the biggest event in my life when it comes to the internet,” Ek said. It really changed how I considered music, my favorite artists, how I shared music with friends.”
And Parker said, “Meeting Daniel was one of the three key moments in my life, alongside meeting Shawn Fanning and meeting Mark Zuckerberg.”
Facebook today announced that Spotify would be integrated into Facebook so that a friend could listen to a song at the very same moment another friend was listening to it, in a kind of social music discovery. Spotify’s iPhone app, which offers users convenience, requires a subscription fee. Users can now listen to music, watch TV, or view movies without ever leaving Facebook.
“If you want full portability, you have to pay,” Parker said. “The iPhone version has paved the way for that. This was ultimately the most important element in monetization. The element that consumers were wiling to pay for was convenience.”
Parker added, “Solving the music piracy problem can’t happen unless you build a music service that is more convenient than piracy. It didn’t compete with any of the existing services like iTunes or Napster. It competed with piracy.”
The most important unanswered question? Parker said, “Music discovery has always been social. Obviously there has been these top-down media like MTV and radio, but so much music discovery has happened by word of mouth in a dorm room, people going to clubs or hearing music in a restaurant. That social process has always been the real fuel.”
With Facebook, Spotify can now “supercharge that discovery,” Parker said. “More people will experience music than ever before. As long as that is coupled with a monetization platform that actually works, we have a solution.”
Here’s some video of the full conversation between Parker and Ek below. And below that we have a panel of industry artists and managers talking about the significance of Spotify. The panel includes Jane’s Addiction lead singer Perry Farrell, Brandon Creed (manager for Bruno Mars), producer Ray Romulus, Paul Rosenberg (Eminem’s manager) and disc jockey Kaskade. Afterward, the Killers opened the show and Parker danced next to me. At the bottom is the Killers performing.
Filed under: social
september 2011 by patrix
Share Buttons? Ha. Facebook Just Schooled The Internet. Again.
september 2011 by patrix
After last year’s f8 keynote, my initial thought was pretty straightforward: I Think Facebook Just Seized Control Of The Internet. Between the Like Button, the Open Graph, and the Open Graph API, I felt like we were shifting from Google being the fabric of the web, to Facebook taking over. A few days later, a now unpaid blogger declared it: The Age of Facebook.
Both of these declarations pissed a lot of people off.
Facebook is the new AOL! Walled garden! The end of open! Blah. Blah. Blah. While everyone else has been busy whining — including plenty of competitors — Facebook has been kicking ass and taking names. And today is proof of that.
For the past year, Facebook has been working on the beautiful re-imagining of the Profile, which they call “Timeline“. I just got it enabled on my account. Going back in time and seeing the past several years of my life displayed in this way is nothing short of profound. Facebook has used software to make something meaningful. Something emotionally powerful.
Because of this impact, some people will undoubtedly hate it. But more will love it. It’s incredible: Facebook has become a tool that’s a reflection of who we are. Just in case it wasn’t painfully obvious already, they’re far more than just another web startup that will flame out in a few years. They are the real deal.
And they just made their competition look rather foolish.
All we’ve heard about in the blogosphere the past few months is how Google+ could take down Facebook. How Google actually did something halfway decent in the social space — watch out Facebook! And look — now Facebook is even copying them!
Please.
I have no doubt that some of Facebook’s little moves over the past few months have been in reaction to Google+. But focusing on that is silly. Those are tiny features compared to what Facebook just unveiled today. They weren’t even worthy of being on stage at f8.
While Google was busy rushing to get a social network that could compete with Facebook out the door, Facebook was thinking about the next phase of social networking. They were building the next Facebook! Google+ does compete with Facebook — the old Facebook. It does not compete with what Facebook launched today.
In that regard, Facebook pulled an Apple. Apple releases something, and everyone in their space rushes to do the same thing. But they never realize that it’s a losing position. They’re skating to where the puck has been. Apple skates to where the puck is going to be. Facebook is skating to where the puck is going to be.
Also reminiscent of Apple: when Facebook unveiled the Like button last year, they were hardly the first to do a button. But they were the first to do a button in the correct way. One click. Done. Suddenly, everyone needed this one-click button.
But while all the competitors were busy making that button, Facebook was busy making the button obsolete. Today’s Open Graph changes represent a world where the button isn’t needed. Sure, it will continue to exist for certain types of content. But it will be more like an on/off switch.
With the new Open Graph, you’re sharing stuff as you do it. You don’t have to think about it. You’re listening to music on Spotify and it’s being shared with your friends automatically in the Facebook Ticker. The only button you hit is “play”.
Obviously, that’s not ideal for all content. But for some of the best content, it’s beyond ideal. The idea of hitting a share button to push your favorite song to Facebook is stupid. Enjoy the music, don’t worry about having to remember to share it. That’s how this should work.
There’s one massive problem in the social space: everyone is competing for the same user time. But most services compete by piling on features that erode that time even quicker. They’re offering up services that if I use, it means I’ll have even less time to actually enjoy life. That’s not a sustainable model. Being “social” online has become far too much work.
Facebook has clearly been thinking about this problem. And now they have a way to tap the power of social without thinking about it. That’s the future of the space. It’s not about needing a share button. It’s about not needing a share button.
Crunchbase
FACEBOOK
Company:
Facebook
Website:
facebook.com
Launch Date:
January 2, 2004
Funding:
$2.34B
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.
The original idea for the term...
Learn more
Opinion
Social
TC
F8
facebook
google
Open_Graph
from google
Both of these declarations pissed a lot of people off.
Facebook is the new AOL! Walled garden! The end of open! Blah. Blah. Blah. While everyone else has been busy whining — including plenty of competitors — Facebook has been kicking ass and taking names. And today is proof of that.
For the past year, Facebook has been working on the beautiful re-imagining of the Profile, which they call “Timeline“. I just got it enabled on my account. Going back in time and seeing the past several years of my life displayed in this way is nothing short of profound. Facebook has used software to make something meaningful. Something emotionally powerful.
Because of this impact, some people will undoubtedly hate it. But more will love it. It’s incredible: Facebook has become a tool that’s a reflection of who we are. Just in case it wasn’t painfully obvious already, they’re far more than just another web startup that will flame out in a few years. They are the real deal.
And they just made their competition look rather foolish.
All we’ve heard about in the blogosphere the past few months is how Google+ could take down Facebook. How Google actually did something halfway decent in the social space — watch out Facebook! And look — now Facebook is even copying them!
Please.
I have no doubt that some of Facebook’s little moves over the past few months have been in reaction to Google+. But focusing on that is silly. Those are tiny features compared to what Facebook just unveiled today. They weren’t even worthy of being on stage at f8.
While Google was busy rushing to get a social network that could compete with Facebook out the door, Facebook was thinking about the next phase of social networking. They were building the next Facebook! Google+ does compete with Facebook — the old Facebook. It does not compete with what Facebook launched today.
In that regard, Facebook pulled an Apple. Apple releases something, and everyone in their space rushes to do the same thing. But they never realize that it’s a losing position. They’re skating to where the puck has been. Apple skates to where the puck is going to be. Facebook is skating to where the puck is going to be.
Also reminiscent of Apple: when Facebook unveiled the Like button last year, they were hardly the first to do a button. But they were the first to do a button in the correct way. One click. Done. Suddenly, everyone needed this one-click button.
But while all the competitors were busy making that button, Facebook was busy making the button obsolete. Today’s Open Graph changes represent a world where the button isn’t needed. Sure, it will continue to exist for certain types of content. But it will be more like an on/off switch.
With the new Open Graph, you’re sharing stuff as you do it. You don’t have to think about it. You’re listening to music on Spotify and it’s being shared with your friends automatically in the Facebook Ticker. The only button you hit is “play”.
Obviously, that’s not ideal for all content. But for some of the best content, it’s beyond ideal. The idea of hitting a share button to push your favorite song to Facebook is stupid. Enjoy the music, don’t worry about having to remember to share it. That’s how this should work.
There’s one massive problem in the social space: everyone is competing for the same user time. But most services compete by piling on features that erode that time even quicker. They’re offering up services that if I use, it means I’ll have even less time to actually enjoy life. That’s not a sustainable model. Being “social” online has become far too much work.
Facebook has clearly been thinking about this problem. And now they have a way to tap the power of social without thinking about it. That’s the future of the space. It’s not about needing a share button. It’s about not needing a share button.
Crunchbase
Company:
Website:
facebook.com
Launch Date:
January 2, 2004
Funding:
$2.34B
Facebook is the world’s largest social network, with over 500 million users.
Facebook was founded by Mark Zuckerberg in February 2004, initially as an exclusive network for Harvard students. It was a huge hit: in 2 weeks, half of the schools in the Boston area began demanding a Facebook network. Zuckerberg immediately recruited his friends Dustin Moskowitz and Chris Hughes to help build Facebook, and within four months, Facebook added 30 more college networks.
The original idea for the term...
Learn more
september 2011 by patrix
Social Bicycles
august 2010 by patrix
"The Social Bicycle System (SoBi) is a public bike share system that uses GPS, mobile communications, and a secure lock that can attach to almost any bicycle and lock to any regular bike rack."
Much like zip cars, SoBi tries to introduce the social bicycle system. I wonder why wasn't it done before doing it with cars. This would work great in any large university campus or town as well.
bicycle
social
community
upb
Much like zip cars, SoBi tries to introduce the social bicycle system. I wonder why wasn't it done before doing it with cars. This would work great in any large university campus or town as well.
august 2010 by patrix
thesixtyone
january 2010 by patrix
a music adventure
music
mp3
community
social
discovery
from delicious
january 2010 by patrix
Participatory media and why I love it (and must defend it)
january 2010 by patrix
Systems such as Wikipedia, Flickr, Delicious, Facebook, Twitter, Hunch and various parts of the open source movement are based around small contributory systems, bodies of work in which there are incremental improvements by multiple contributors, or exposing small actions that would be insignificant in isolation, but are meaningful in the aggregate.
web2.0
internet
social
media
collaboration
participatory
crowdsourcing
from delicious
january 2010 by patrix
Pinboard - antisocial bookmarking
january 2010 by patrix
Fast, bloat-free bookmarking with a spare user interface.
bookmarking
bookmarks
social
tagging
tools
nefa
del.icio.us
january 2010 by patrix
The Tweetbook
march 2009 by patrix
"Well, someone had to do it, and I think I’m the first. I’ve archived my first two years of twittering to a hardback book."
nefa
fordesipundit
twitter
publishing
inspiration
books
social
microblogging
lifestream
march 2009 by patrix
The girl in the window
august 2008 by patrix
You might have heard of child abuse but this beats everything.
wtf
society
stories
social
sad
children
nefa
august 2008 by patrix
Crackbook - A spoof of Facebook
october 2007 by patrix
Crackbook is an addictive social utility that makes you feel that you're connecting with people when actually you're just not
facebook
funny
humour
spoof
crackbook
social
NEFA
october 2007 by patrix
Bluetooth helps Facebook friends
august 2007 by patrix
A team of UK researchers is combining the power of social network Facebook with communications tool Bluetooth to learn more about human interactions.
bluetooth
facebook
socialnetworking
NEFA
communication
social
networking
august 2007 by patrix
How To Exit A Conversation
august 2007 by patrix
The only real rule I can think of is to stay polite. No matter where you are or who you’re talking to, maintaining a civil attitude goes a long way
conversation
social
communication
lifehacks
howto
NEFA
august 2007 by patrix
Who is digging your stories?
april 2007 by patrix
A useful tool to track Diggers on your stories.
digg
statistics
tools
web2.0
social
NEFA
april 2007 by patrix
The allure of Twitter
april 2007 by patrix
Watching Twittervision is akin to sitting at a sidewalk cafe and letting a slightly nerdier version of the real world go by.
twitter
web2.0
internet
social
NEFA
april 2007 by patrix
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