Tag: Friendfeed

  • It starts..again..

    Facebook is on the march, though I have no clue about the destination. A few days back, I read about the ‘Search Inbox’ feature getting added, that’s after the overall search was revamped and the rumours of the “Everyone Button“. With photo sharing, a revamped mail box, status updates, videos, games, I guess I’ll have to correct the earlier statement and say that the ‘walled garden’ has offered enough evidence that it is making itself *the* destination.

    I remembered an article I read a couple of weeks back on how its this merging of activities on facebook that has given it a growth of 8.54% growth in the last month, as compared to Twitter’s sudden fall to a relatively dismal 1.47% growth rate. As Shefaly pointed out the last time I’d compared the two services, there’d still be an audience that consider the Twitter protocol more useful in spite of Facebook’s ‘charms’. A general comparison of the user figures would show that Facebook has the mass. Whether the Twitter audience is a good enough number, time will tell.

    The other interesting article I read was about the social network identity crisis. For one, this is not about us, the users, but the networks themselves. I’d written sometime back about LinkedIn’s attempts to be like Facebook, which thankfully didn’t develop much. This article compares LinkedIn, Facebook and Twitter, and their overlap. Friendfeed is another unique character in the mix, and serves well as a great aggegator, though it does appear geeky as far as the average user of Facebook goes. Like I’ve said before, Friendfeed thinks up all the neat stuff, and Facebook makes them popular to the masses. As for LinkedIn, their ‘official’ networking positioning keeps them at a safe distance now.

    But yes, the battle, in different manifestations for several years now- as mailboxes, portals and so on, has been for the spot of destination site, or rather the starting point of the user experience on the web, the first site a user opens on his browser, the base. And that’s the reason i feel that the recent spate of Facebook’s initiatives, while they seem to be aimed at replicating the utility of Twitter, are actually targeted against Google, and specifically, Wave. The approach of both are actually from two opposite directions – Google, from Mail and Talk to the spectacular collaborating, sharing and weaving features of Wave, and Facebook from social networking to newsfeed, to chat and mailboxes. Wave is Open Source, Facebook is opening the stream to developers. It will be interesting to see whether there can only be one/couple/all survivor/s from Wave, Facebook and the simple appeal of Twitter.

    until next time, Wavebook 🙂

    Update: Excellent post on Facebook vs Google, (click it, dammit :p) and here too, and why Facebook has a chance.

  • Social Connectivity

    Just yesterday, I read about AOL launching Social Thing for websites. Adding the service to your website gives you a navigation bar at the bottom of the page, users can sign in with their AIM/AOL/Bebo/ICQ ids and comment. They can also chat/IM, check out what their buddies are doing, and share stuff with them. According to Mashable, “Authentication goes through AOL’s Open Authentication API, which is being extended to include support for a single sign-on from Facebook, Google, Yahoo, OpenID and other services.”

    As TechCrunch mentions in its article which talks about Facebook opening its stream API to developers, the conversation wars are heating up. Facebook Connect and its potential is something I’ve written about several times before. Broadly, as a site owner, the implementation of FB Connect allows me to broadcast my content to my Facebook audience, and if they comment using FB Connect, it gets added to their stream thus multiplying the reach. As a commenter, I can share my activities on other sites on my FB stream. The opening of the API enhances the potential for FB stream conversations to happen outside FB.

    Meanwhile, a few days back, there was also a news about Twitter Connect. Obviously, since Twitter has very less profile data as compared to FB, it need not be seen as a competitor to FB Connect, but seen from a “conversation  platform choice” perspective, i’d say it still is. For those interested in how each of these Connect services work, this is an excellent detailed read.

    And what Connect conversation can be complete without the omnipresent Google. Before we get to Friend Connect, a detour. Google recently decided to give us more control of how we would be seen in a search result page – Google Profiles will now be part of search results and we can edit it. In addition to regular data, you can showcase links to your profiles on services like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace and so on. While Google claims its just responding to users’ needs, its obviously aimed at getting more user data. However, the profiles will only be shown at the bottom of the search pages, and will not ‘save’ you if you’ve been making news otherwise. 🙂 I assumed that the Profiles so created would be in sync with what gets displayed on Google Friend Connect, but apparently its not so. But you can have a vanity url (google.com/profiles/your name) so long as its connected to your gmail id. You can get a detailed report on the new Profiles here.

    Back to Google Friend Connect, once implemented on your site, it allows users to log in using GMail/Open ID/Yahoo/AIM . Users can comment, rate etc (depending on the gadgets you’ve added), engage with other users, and invite their friends from other networks to check out the site. There are many related things I am thinking of – will Profile and Friend Connect be made to work in sync, and is Google doing the opposite of what FB has done? FB created a social network first and then decided to connect other sites with it and thus enhance its own lifestream. With Google’s many services, it has a ‘disaggregated’ social network in place – YouTube/Picasa/Blogger/(even) Reader. At some point will Profile be just the equivalent of the ‘Info’ tab on Facebook and something like iGoogle (or God forbid Orkut) serve as the aggregator of one’s conversations across the web, not just across Google services, but the sites in which one logs in using Friend Connect. Google is always hungry for more data on users, so it can build more (and truth be told, sometimes better – like the proposed new Google News) products and get more data and obviously find more ways of making money.

    Of the four, Facebook is now using its Connect on popular sites to add more layers to its existing user data  and increase the conversations on Facebook. The opening of the stream API should get us some interesting apps. We’ll have to see what AOL does with its new service, how it ties it with Bebo etc. Twitter Connect is in many ways a different animal altogether, its simplicity and existing third party applications throw open many possibilities (as always) The data just goes back to Twitter, and it can be argued both ways whether Twitter Connect can be used effectively to increase a site’s visibility in the open yet ‘noisy’ stream, but the commenting using Twitter login would be useful to quite a few people  (a wild thought – maybe Twitter should just buy Friendfeed and make that its base social network). Google Connect is easy to implement and interesting gadgets are sure to happen. The possibilities of aggregating  it into a network remain. Now I wonder if Microsoft will find new ways to connect, or will they just Vine? As for Yahoo, maybe they’ll connect with Microsoft finally!! What will be interesting is what handle you would use to connect.

    until next time, connecting people ain’t just Nokia’s job no more

    PS.  6 years of blogging. A week’s break. 🙂

  • More delicious stuff on the horizon?

    Social Median has been a pending site in my things-to-do list for such a long time that guilt no longer describes the feeling enough 🙁

    I’ve liked the concept of the site a lot, and while I’ve been following developments there, and have added the bookmarklet to the browser, and though I’ve started several groups (example) I’ve just not managed to become a regular user. The SM bookmarklet has been idle. But more importantly, while the site sends me updates every single day, I rarely manage more than a cursory look at the shared items.

    Why am I so bothered about my non usage? To put it as simply as possibly – it brings together the link sharing capabilities of Delicious, the voting of Digg, topic based groups in which you can add sources and stories get pulled automatically, commenting on shared stories, ranking keywords and topics, and most importantly uses collaborative filtering through people with similar interests to serve you content you should read. A compelling proposition and I don’t have a logical explanation for my non usage.

    So, what’s the context? A few days back, I got a mail stating that Social Median has implemented Facebook Connect, and I feel that’s really big news. It essentially means that you can sign up for Social Median with your Facebook account and share the stuff with your Facebook contacts!! While I do admit that the newsfeed is a complete mess after the redesign, I’m also looking at the enormous data of user preferences that Facebook will now gain, and how Facebook can leverage itself as a news sharing source much more now. In future, this could reveal tons of data on news consumption patterns and interests. Facebook Connect’s importance is something I’ve been stressing on for quite sometime now, and this strengthens that thought. I wonder what this does to Digg’s Facebook Connect plans though.

    Another ‘link’ based service – Google Reader (okay, feed based), one which I use a lot,  has also done a small tweaking and added a commenting feature, though its utility The debate on that is still on. There is a feeling that it will become the place of conversation and take comments away from the source (blog/site). Also, as The Inquisitr mentions rightly, the implementation is quite clunky, and if a full feed is published it takes away most of the reasons for the reader to visit the site. I hope that at least a plugin similar to the Friendfeed one (where the conversation is synicated back to the original source) will be developed soon, but since there’s been no API release, they’d have to do it themselves. Doubtful.

    Friendfeed has been around for sometime now, and though its a perfect place to have threaded conversations based on links shared from practically anywhere on the social web, it is still deemed to be a geek service. I wonder if a tags feature to categorise all imported data makes sense. Speaking of Friendfeed, I also read about a new service launched recently called Streamy. According to TechCrunch, “Streamy is a personalized news service and social network that combines elements of Google Reader with FriendFeed.” Streamy does boast of an extremely good interface and suggests interesting stories to you, which you can then share with friends on supporting networks from Streamy itself. And its implementing Facebook Connect. So, a package with potential. (RWW has a comprehensive post on the service)

    Now the social bookmarking service I use regularly is Delicious, though its via the browser add on, and its been ages since I visited the site. But while they were one of the pioneers of social bookmarking, they really haven’t developed further. They could easily build conversations around the links shared by different people, make it easier to create communities around topics of interest – all the stuff that Social Median is doing, and definitely make it easier to share the links on say, Twitter – the reverse traffic of Twitticious, like what Krumlr is doing. I think enabling BOSS to pull stuff (history and top tags) from Delicious is a good step in the right direction. I have just started using a Firefox plugin called tweecious. What it does is go through your tweets, find those with links and post them to your delicious account. Pretty neat, though it would help if it gave me more control over what data needs to be transferred to delicious. (eg: I tweet a lot of posts from my blog,  and perhaps some topical news from news sites, I wouldn’t want that on delicious, so a feature to ignore links from a particular domain?)

    Reports indicate that Twine, another service which i have not used much, (despite L Bhat sending me an invite and taking pains to explain it 🙁 ) could soon challenge Delicious, in terms of unique visitors, and with the kind of work it seems to be doing in the semantic web space, would easily become a more useful tool. I also got a mail a few days back announcing a Twine bookmarklet, with which you add content to Twine as well as tweet it to Twitter!!

    until next time, linking in

    PS. While on links, check out the following too

    BackTweets, a very useful resource to see who’s tweeted links to a site

    OneRiot, a new Twitter search engine which shows the links shared on a particular keyword (instead of tweets)

    Twazzup – another Twitter search engine which shows the regular search results as well as trends , popular tweets and links, with more visual appeal

    Fleck, a social bookmarking service, which has a bookmarklet for FF and IE, it also allows you to import bookmarks from browsers and delicious, and gives you the option to share links on twitter

    ambiently, which calls itself the web’s first discovery engine.  – it’s a search mechanism with a bookmarklet, which you can add to your browser. Now, when you’re on a particular page, and you click the bookmarklet, it opens up an ambient page that lists web links related to the page you’re currently in.

    PPS. The post feels a bit incomplete without Digg. Since I’m not a regular user of the service, I have not attempted to draw comparisons. However I do know that the latest on that front is the Diggbar. You can catch the action here.

  • Social Deluge

    The last time I’d written about Bebo was a year back, in the context of AOL buying it, and a tongue-in-cheek suggestion of getting Kareena Kapoor (whose nickname is Bebo) to be the brand ambassador when they launch in india. Recently,Medianama reported that they were launching this month.  According to ContentSutra, they will be talking to content producers in India to further their strategy of ‘conversations around media content’. The Social Inbox also sounded interesting – “a utility that combines Yahoo Mail, Gmail, AOL Mail and Twitter feeds, and also helps users discover content they’re interested in”. I can’t help but remember Rediff’s attempts at Orkut and Facebook integration.

    AOL recently said that it was confident about Bebo doing well in the long run, and was for now, concentrating on getting users, more than revenue. In an interview with Paid Content, Joanna Shields, President, AOL People Networks, talked about the AIM client based strategy that gives it a wider reach than say, a Facebook. By aggregating feeds from various networks onto AIM, AOL allows people to be connected with friends’ activities in   sites like Flickr, Twitter etc, even without them being on it. Bebo has been busy with quite a few things recently – Lifestream – a basic Friendfeed like aggregator; Social Discovery Engine – which leverages profile data  to recommend related music, videos and people; Lifestory – puts uploaded photos, events, and (soon) videos into a scrollable, chronological series of postage stamp icons at the top of members’ profile pages. In the long run, Bebo is also planning to allow its users to subscribe to updates from other users, brands, bands, and celebrities, whose updates will then appear in their LifeStory timelines. (via TechCrunch) This could provide revenue opportunities.

    In the US, AOL has migrated all its AIM user profiles to Bebo, thereby doubling Bebo’s presence in the US, thanks to AIM’s massive popularity. The Lifestream is now one gigantic feed that will have updates from you and all your friends on Flickr, Twitter and Delicious, Facebook, MySpace and YouTube, and the moment you link a service to Bebo, it keeps track of  your new friends there too. And with Social Inbox, the lifestream updates, AIM updates and emails can all land up there.

    Now, how good are bebo’s chances in India? The last Comscore report on social networking in India shows that Orkut is far ahead of Facebook, which has BharatStudent, hi5 and Ibibo following it relatively closely. I’m a bit familiar with Ibibo, thanks to their properties that are heavily publicised on TV, but since I’ve never been the target audience of any of those properties, I have never tried out the site. I don’t know about their revenues, but I am not sure if building properties which are quite tactical in nature is a good way to build long term equity for the site. During the tenure of the property, there will be heightened interest and traffic surges, but sustainability is a big question. I also read recently that Bixee, owned by Ibibo has ventured into several verticals – finance, shopping and auto. I’m really not sure where this is heading especially with web 18’s presence in these spaces and several other independent entities who are strong in these verticals. The way Ibibo’s traffic is declining (-50%) I think they need to relook.

    There’s definitely a space for another social network, even in what some would call a  cluttered space, provided it differentiates from the existing ones, and gives the user a reason to try it out. I’m really not sure how random invites like the ones from hi5 work. They don’t, for me. While the AIM strategy for Bebo works well for the US market, I don’t think it can work that well in India, (inspite of the GMail connection) though it will give Bebo a start, along with the existing AOL users.

    From a product standpoint, the lifestream goes where Facebook still really hasn’t (despite having copied commenting on status messages and the ‘Like’ feature from Friendfeed, and the real time stream from Twitter) – updating friends’ activities on other services in your lifestream. Will that be too much of a deluge for users, we”ll have to see., the Facebook redesign response will give a clue. It also remains to be seen whether Facebook will tear down the ‘walled garden’ and integrate these services quickly, or will only pursue the internal activities+ Facebook Connect way of adding activity feeds. If it does not, the more social version of Friendfeed could prove an irritant for Facebook. The difference maker, however, could be the content tie-ups (Medianama reports this to be the start) and what Bebo will do to ensure that conversations happen around it.

    until next time, a new socialite 🙂

  • Its complicated

    ..and a bit long 🙂

    What do you do when you can’t buy a service? If you have the capability, you build it yourself. That seems to be what Facebook is up to, triggering of what would perhaps be only the first of the battles for real time supremacy. When you log in to Facebook, you can see the message right at the top “Changes to the Home Page are coming soon”, and the link gives you a preview of what to expect on Wednesday. Keeping in mind Facebook’s history of design changes, its not going to be a democratic process like the TOS incident. Change will happen, whether we need it or not.

    So, what are these changes? RWW has a good post that captures the main features. The publishing bar is extremely similar to Friendfeed – Facebook’s favourite idea shop (the newsfeed, comments on the newsfeed, the like feature are all from there), and users can now publish photos, links, videos from here without going to the application. The homepage will now have the newsfeed in the centre (with better filtering features basis their relationship with friends, groups and even applications) When I wrote about Twitter saying no to the Facebook deal, I’d asked for a twitter like ‘Follow’ feature in Facebook, and now thats happening. Thanks to the updated privacy settings, you can follow a person’s updates without being his/her friend. The cap of 5000 friends is also going to be removed. Most importantly, the newsfeed is going to be real-time. Fan pages are changing too, and can brands/personalities (or whatever you’re a fan of) will now be normal profiles and can update their status, and if you permit, your newsfeed will be updated too. So yes, Britney will tell you, on your newsfeed, that she’s having a concert wherever!! I wonder if these changes will make a difference to the existing not-so-great engagement statistics between fans and their objects of fandom. Lastly, I read on TechCrunch that apps on Facebook will now be able to use the live chat functionality, giving them the chance to make an app go viral faster.

    So that’s what Facebook’s been upto. Sometime back, I read an article which compared Twitter to Palm. To summarise, Palm, which used to be a consumer darling for a long time, lost out when it refused to overcomplicate its products, while competitors solved the issues that had made them unsatisfactory. Twitter, thankfully hasn’t been idle. It has been working on its integrated search for sometime, and is now rolling it out (on a few profiles) with a search bar and a trends button. Meanwhile, there has been some speculation about Google buying Twitter. Google should definitely be interested considering Twitter’s prowess in real time search. As this Adage article says, its way beyond the contextual search that Google offers.

    In the future, searches won’t only query what’s being said at the moment, but will go out to the Twitter audience in the form of a question, like a faster and less-filtered Yahoo Answers or Wiki Answers. Users would be able to tap the collective knowledge of the 6 million or so members of the Twitterverse.

    (In that context, check out TwitterThoughts, its a work of art!! And if you’re the kind who misses the real time style of Twitter on google search, you will love this greasemonkey script. Amazing!!)

    While Twitter has been growing exponentially – a whopping 752% in 2008, Facebook has too – though at a relatively more normal 86%. I remember reading sometime back that Facebook was about 15 times larger than Twitter, and that if Facebook were to stop growing today, and Twitter were to add users at the best rate its shown so far, it would still take Twitter 36 years to catch up.

    Very subjectively, and from a user’s perspective, Facebook and Twitter are not competitors. My involvement with my Facebook friends is quite different from that with my Twitter friends, and I don’t have a lot of overlap. But I know a lot of users who have a huge overlap. I actually share a lot more stuff on Twitter and get a lot more stuff from there too. But I am only one user and perhaps represent a minority of typical Facebook usage patterns. For example, The Inquisitr had a good story on how tweets got more responses on Facebook than Twitter itself.

    I am always on Twitter thanks to the browser plug in, irrespective of whether i actively take part or not, I login to Facebook a few times every day. I have to wonder if real time on Facebook can change that. In Facebook, profiles/groups/chat are the bases of conversations – quite well defined spaces. In Twitter, the stream is the base, you start from anywhere. There are different clients that can be used to log into Twitter, Facebook (with a couple of exceptions) has to be accessed from its own homepage.

    Also, from a new user point of view, Facebook provides more ways to interact than the one size fits all approach of Twitter’s ‘What are you doing’?  When you log on to FB, you most likely already have friends who’re there, and you find more friends (who you know in real life), therefore the context and common interests already exist.  You have a base from where to start. Twitter perhaps works in reverse, since you have to make friends (common interests and therefore conversations) on Twitter. Maybe all this contributes to why you have to explain Twitter to people, and they still say ‘Yeah, but what do you DO there?’, and people automatically take to Facebook. Even if thats not the case, relatively, ‘learning the ropes’ is easier on Facebook than Twitter. Thats generalisation and debatable too.

    Facebook’s redesign and policy changes have sparked off user outrage in the past, Twitter (except for the whale) is smoother, perhaps it hasn’t deviated from the original approach much – even the new set of changes doesn’t affect the user much, only adds value to his usage. Is it a difference of intent – Facebook being pure social networking, and Twitter being on a meta plane – higher? Or are the differences merely a function of time in the market and user base? Interestingly, in a recent research with 200 social media leaders on which service they were willing to pay for, Facebook came first with 31.2%, Twitter was third with 21.8%, behind LinkedIn. (via TechCrunch)

    Users are one side of the story, the other side is made up of advertisers. In the survey I mentioned above, when the same social media leaders were asked which service they would reccommend businesses to pay for, Twitter topped with 39.6%, Facebook was third at 15.3%, LinkedIn separated the two again. Every week, developers bring out a new tool that augments/complements Twitter usage and helps the service cater better to users, and perhaps brands too. Meanwhile, Facebook is working on a combination of Facebook Connect and Facebook Ads, to create a social ad network. It seems quite possible that just like users, brands also will differ in their usage of the two services. Some might adopt the same practices, some might vary, and use each to complement the other. It could also be that they would cater to different kinds of advertisers altogether, just like my friends list. More on that next week.

    until next time, never the twain shall meet?