Tag Archives | Facebook

Reveal More, Consume More: Facebook’s Big Changes

Posted by Jared Newman on September 22, 2011 at 7:45 pm

Facebook’s f8 conference started off on a light note, with Saturday Night Live star Andy Samberg doing his best Mark Zuckerberg impression, but the conference quickly got down to serious business with some big changes for the world’s biggest social network.

With a huge smile on his face, Zuckerberg showed off a new kind of Facebook profile, called the “Timeline.” Think of your Timeline as a digital scrapbook that builds itself automatically through your activity on Facebook. Photos, app updates and other Facebook activity assemble in reverse chronological order, forming what Zuckerberg described as the “story of your life.” Whatever details are missing, you can add manually.

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Facebook’s F8 2011 Keynote: Live Coverage on Thursday

Posted by Harry McCracken on September 21, 2011 at 3:40 pm

I’ll be attending Facebook’s F8 developer conference tomorrow. It kicks off at 10am with a keynote by Mark Zuckerberg, who will apparently talk about new media-sharing features, presumably among other topics. (I’m still holding out for a great Facebook app for the iPad.) I’ll liveblog the keynote at technologizer.com/f8, and hope you’ll join me…

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What Was Facebook’s Best Redesign, Anyway?

Posted by Jared Newman on September 21, 2011 at 3:25 pm

Over at PCWorld, I had fun looking back at the fruitless nature of Facebook redesign backlash. No one is surprised anymore when a redesigned Facebook home page–such as the one that rolled out today–causes an outrage.

But that made me wonder: what design, exactly, do people want? Was there ever a single home page layout to which Facebook users, given the choice, would happily revert? In other words, have we cooked up in our minds some ideal vision of an “old Facebook” that never really existed?

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Adventure World: A Zynga Game With a Goal

Posted by Jared Newman on September 1, 2011 at 11:00 am

At a glance, Adventure World looks most other Zynga games — colorful, cartoony, isometric, with lots of things to click on. But Adventure World has a rare quality among Zynga’s social games: you can beat it.

Zynga is best known for open-ended simulations. In Farmville, for instance, you cultivate an ever-expanding plot of land. In CityVille, you cultivate an ever-expanding metropolis. In Mafia Wars, you cultivate an ever-expanding criminal empire. Whereas these games provide a sandbox, Adventure World offers structure — and a break from Zynga’s usual theme of resource management.

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Fugitive’s Foolish Facebook Statuses Gets Him Caught

Posted by Ed Oswald on July 31, 2011 at 10:25 am

Mark Victor Burgos up as one of the world’s most stupid fugitives. The 29-year-old apparently found it amusing to taunt law enforcement over his Facebook page, even going as far as to say in a post “Catch me if you can, I’m in Brooklyn.” Well, guess where cops found him.

Burgos, a Brooklyn resident, was wanted by the Utica, N.Y. Police for questioning surrounding charges of domestic violence and harassment against an ex-girlfriend. Seemingly thinking he could play games with the police over Facebook, he posted a series of taunts, even going as far as posting a video of him walking into what is believed to be an NYPD police station.

Police say that Burgos’ Facebook page was open when they finally tracked him down to an apartment in the Bedford-Stuyvesant section of Brooklyn. U.S. Marshals and representatives of the NYPD made the arrest, and was transferred back upstate to face a judge on the charges Tuesday.

No word on what Burgos has plead or if Facebook assisted in tracking him down, but he did delete his taunts before police busted through his door — probably realizing they could be used as evidence against him. Probably the smartest thing he did in this whole mess, don’t you think?

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Music To Google’s Ears: Facebook Sucks, Say Survey Respondents

Posted by Ed Oswald on July 20, 2011 at 5:21 pm

If you’re on Facebook, chances are that you don’t think it’s anywhere near perfect. At least that’s the findings of the American Consumer Satisfaction Index, which released its results for 2011 yesterday. Facebook scored a 66 out of 100. While that may not sound that low, it comparison to other sites it is.

Not only is Facebook the lowest ranked social networking site, but it also scored the lowest of any company in the technology business that ACSI studied. Can you say ouch?

Leading the pack in the social media category was Wikipedia, with a score of 78. YouTube came in second at 74, and a category called “Others” at 67. I guess it’s pretty bad when you’re even losing to unnamed services. Social networking in general doesn’t garner high satisfaction overall among consumers, ACSI says. With a group rating of 70, only airlines, newspapers, and subscription television services score lower.

It’s really too early to say whether Google+ may turn the fortunes of this sector around — the survey results were compiled before the site launched. However, researchers believe it may score high. “We do know is that Google is one of the highest-scoring companies in the ACSI,” Larry Freed, president and CEO of ForeSee Results, creator of the ACSI said.

“An existing dominance of market share like Facebook has is no longer a safety net for a company that is not providing a superior customer experience,” he argued. In other words, 2012 could be interesting.

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Bloggingheads.tv: Let’s Talk About Google+

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 18, 2011 at 9:46 pm

I had fun this morning recording a Bloggingheads.tv discussion about the techverse’s hottest topic of the moment, Google+.  My conversation partner was Slate’s Farhad Manjoo–and here we are. (Farhad’s a bit more of a Google+ skeptic than I am–but both of us see both promise and pitfalls in the service.)

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Katango: Your Facebook Friends, Grouped Automatically

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 12, 2011 at 9:46 am

When Google+ arrived at the end of June, it made a splash in part based on its defining notion: you have different kinds of friends and don’t want to share everything with all of them all of the time. This week a new iPhone group-messaging app called Katangoo is debuting. And its defining feature–which it came up with a long time before Google+ went public–is that people have different kinds of friends and dont want to share everything with all of them all of the time.

Katango’s distinctive feature is that it uses artificial intelligence to analyze all your Facebook friends, identify common attributes, and then automatically sort them into groups of people with something in common. The more friends you have, the more time this approach might save compared to you trying to organize them by hand.

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