Posts Tagged social-networking
Harnessing the power of social networks
Posted by Matt in Social Networks on December 5th, 2008
If ever you’ve wished for a way to connect all 120+ million Facebook users with your business or community website, wish no longer–the solution is here. Facebook Connect promises to link any Facebook user’s existing account with a website which implements the service and integrates it with a new or existing database of users. Basically, this means that with a site visitor’s approval, you can access certain information from their personal profile on the popular social networking site. The uses for such information are practically unlimited, providing businesses new ways to target ads to specific users–making them even more relevant than Google’s own advertising system, which displays ads based on the analysis of each search.
Facebook Connect is hot on the heels of Google’s own “Friend Connect” system, which similarly allows anyone with a Google, Yahoo, AIM, or OpenID account to login to a partner site using the credentials of their choice. I suspect that Google’s program is probably a bit more open at this point, but it remains to be seen which service is the most effective.
While Google is by far one of the most popular sites on the web, with more than a billion searches performed each day, it certainly has a significant user base. Unfortunately, not nearly as many people have a Google Account or supply that account with personally identifiable information as they would on popular social networking sites. Facebook has the edge here in collecting users’ favorite books, movies, TV shows, music, hobbies and more, so if a site like Amazon partnered with Facebook Connect, it could offer pinpoint accurate suggestions to shoppers. You like Lord of the Rings? Here’s a set of books and movies in the same genre. The possibilities really are endless.
Ultimately, I believe that APIs like Google’s OpenSocial will be the key to linking each social network site into one global peoplenet. It’ll be crucial for the average user and consumer to be able to login to any site, whether using Facebook Connect, Friend Connect, or the older MySpace Data Availability initiative. It shouldn’t matter which service I prefer–I should be able to access my information from Facebook while logged into Google and vice-versa. It only makes sense!
All things equal, this opens up a huge can of worms in the privacy arena and it’ll be up to users and social networks to come to an agreement on what information is sharable without violating privacy rights.
It’s exciting though, and I can’t wait to see how things progress from here!
Facebook update now arriving, but not without a few bugs
Posted by Matt in Social Networks on July 23rd, 2008
If you haven’t seen it already, the long awaited Facebook makeover can now be viewed live and in full color! At the moment, it’s an opt-in thing–use it if you want to get used to it, but if you’re not ready for the change you can still stick with the current layout.
In my opinion the new look provides a much needed layout to an already successful social network. It should attract even more people than before. Also, in listening to their users, the crew over there at Facebook has moved the profile pics back to the left-hand side of the page among a couple other minor tweaks.
My browsing wasn’t without difficulty though. Many times clicking a link or button resulted nothing happening. Either the browser would just act like it was working but never came back with a new page. Other times clicking a link just didn’t do anything–as if the link wasn’t programmed to go anywhere. My guess is that Facebook’s servers are getting hit fairly hard at the moment with everyone checking out the improvements and I’m sure the development team is actively working to make the transition as smooth as possible. I don’t foresee too many problems come mainstream launch day.
In a few weeks (my guess is sometime toward mid-August) the new Facebook site will go live for everyone and you won’t have a choice but to use the new UI. It’ll take a bit of getting used to at first, but all in all it’s for the better and I think you’ll like it a lot. Go take a look!
If Facebook ran our lives…
Posted by Matt in Information, Social Networks on July 11th, 2008
SitePoint Blogs has an excellent article on Facebook and the crossroads it faces. Still trailing MySpace it needs to take action in order to continue the growth it has experienced in the past. How the site leverages the brains of its developers, the lives of its users, and the robust social platform it already has in place could make or break the popular networking web hotspot. Read SitePoint’s take on it here.
Change is good – Welcome to Facebook 2.0
Posted by Matt in Social Networks on May 24th, 2008
If you hadn’t heard (like myself until just a short time ago), you’ll probably be interested to know that Facebook is getting ready to unveil a major redesign of its member’s profile pages and more. Featuring tabs, better organization, and new grouping functionality, this update promises to be one of the most drastic ever for the site. Most people would agree that the ability to develop and add applications to user profiles has caused the site to become slightly cluttered as of late. Certainly not as badly disorganize as MySpace, but just the same the simple and clean interface from the past has slowly slipped away. This upcoming release–dubbed by some as ‘Facebook 2.0′–promises to return the site to its well-kept and clearly organized appearance. Whether or not members accept the changes remains to be seen.
Read more at CNET News.