Tag Archives | Facebook

New Facebook Messages: I’m Intrigued! And Apprehensive!

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 15, 2010 at 1:00 pm

Facebook's Andrew Bosworth and Mark Zuckerberg at today's event

I spent this morning at Facebook’s press event. As expected, it involved the transformation of Facebook’s Messages feature into full-blown e-mail–except that Mark Zuckerberg kept saying that the new service isn’t e-mail. Depending on how you look at things, either he’s right or it’s both e-mail and a whole lot more.

I shared some initial details and impressions over at Techland; now I’m sitting back and wondering when I’ll get to try the new service. (Facebook said that it’ll roll out to users over the course of the next few months, but that those of us who were at the event should get it soon; I tried e-mailing myself at harrymccracken@facebook.com, but it got bounced back.)

(Update: My friend Rafe Needleman has a spare invite and says he’ll send it to me. Bless you, Rafe.)

As I tweeted the proceedings, I was somewhat surprised at the (mostly) negative feedback I got from people who were following along at home. Here’s one representative example:

I wasn’t trying to egg on the doubters–okay, I admit that I did mention Google Wave in one tweet–and I have an open mind about the whole thing. But one of the things I like about Facebook Messages in their old form was the utter simplicity–no spam, no messages I’d rather not deal with, no Gmail-style feature overload. I concede that I’m not one of the teenagers who Zuck said inspired these changes, but I hope that new Facebook Messages retains the no-nonsense personality of old Facebook Messages. Like Zuck, I don’t want Facebook Messages to turn into e-mail–but I also don’t want it to stop being Facebook Messages…

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Coming on Monday: Facebook Does E-Mail?

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 12, 2010 at 7:50 am

Monday morning at 10am PT, Facebook is holding a press event in San Francisco. TechCrunch’s Jason Kincaid reports that he hears the subject is a full-blown Facebook e-mail service that gives every member an @facebook.com account. Inside Facebook, they supposedly consider it to be a Gmail killer.

If that does turn out to be the news, it’ll confirm a months-old rumor about a Facebook project code-named “Titan.”

I’m always up for an interesting new twist on e-mail, and am intrigued by the idea of an ambitious, brand-new Webmail service–at this point, Gmail, Hotmail, and Yahoo Mail are all hobbled a bit by their sheer venerability and deep roots in traditional ways of doing things. But as I mentioned when “Titan” scuttlebutt first surfaced, I also like the fact that the Facebook inbox isn’t a traditional inbox. It’s simple, nearly spam-free, and focused on communications with people I already know and like.

If “Titan” is real, I hope it doesn’t mess up all the things about Facebook communications that don’t need messing with.

I’ll be at Monday’s event–I’ll tweet highlights as they happen, then report back here once we know the upshot.

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A Politician’s Facebook Friends a Bellwether of Electoral Success?

Posted by Ed Oswald on November 3, 2010 at 6:51 pm

Facebook seems to think that if you’re a politician running for political office, the number of friends you have may correlate to your electoral success. In statistics provided by the social networking site on Wednesday, it found that among 98 hotly contested races, in 69 of them the winner also had more friends than the losing candidate.

In the Senate, the correlation appears even more strong: in the 34 races in which a winner had been declared, 28 of them also won the Facebook friends rate. Such evidence may point to the increasing power of social networking when it comes to voter outreach, and more importantly “GOTV” (Get Out The Vote) efforts.

While I used Facebook in my own run for local office — it was such a tiny sample that I can’t really speak from experience that it actually worked to help me win. What I can say is that I certainly believe my online presence — even for a hyperlocal political office like borough councilman — certainly helped me to get the word out.

Either way, in an age where political campaigns are becoming ever more expensive, and probably even more so in the wake of the Citizens United decision, GOTV efforts through social networking become a quick and inexpensive way of getting the word out.

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The Facebook Phone is…Every Phone

Posted by Harry McCracken on November 3, 2010 at 12:19 pm

Okay, it sounds like we can stop wondering if Facebook is about to launch a “Facebook Phone.” At this morning’s press event at Facebook headquarters, founder Mark Zuckerberg kicked things off by saying that the company has no interest in doing so. What it does want to do, he said, is to make everything more social–including all phones.

So all of today’s news involved stuff that applies to multiple existing phone platforms, and most of it was totally platform-agnostic. A quick recap after the jump.

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Tango, the Little Video Calling App That Could

Posted by Laura Locke on October 13, 2010 at 4:45 pm

Have you noticed?  Facebook, the world’s favorite social networking tool, has been jockeying for position lately. So have Skype and Twitter. These giants lost their lead after an unprecedented run-up from newcomer Tango, a new free mobile-to-mobile video calling service. Hours after launching on September 30, Tango became the #1 free social networking app—knocking off Twitter, Skype and Facebook in the App Store—in nine countries including the United States, Hong Kong, France, Taiwan, Spain and South Korea. And, just yesterday, Tango announced its 1 millionth download from the App Store and Android Marketplace. (At the moment, it’s slipped to the #2 spot, after Facebook.)

Without any cheerleading by Apple or any existing brand awareness or installed user base to speak of, Tango’s explosive rise is a feat of virality that every app developer dreams of. “It’s unheard of,” says Patrick Mork of GetJar, the world’s largest independent app store. Clearly, there is pent-up demand for free, two-way video calls that work reliably across platforms (Android and iOS) over 3G, 4G and Wi-Fi.  Yahoo is moving in fast, too, with its newest version of Yahoo Messenger, announced Monday, which does video chats on iOs devices over 3G and Wi-Fi and allows users to place video calls to and from desktops: it’s already #4 in the App Store’s “Top Free” social networking category, just behind Tango (#2) and Skype (#3).

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Bing Gets Facebook-ized

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 13, 2010 at 12:57 pm

I’m at an event at Microsoft’s Silicon Valley campus, where a bunch of Microsoft and Facebook executives (including Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg) just finished showing some new Bing features that should start rolling out shortly. The two companies (which first established a partnership four years ago) are working together to integrate stuff Facebook knows about you and your friends into Bing search results, using Facebook’s Instant Personalization feature.

Mostly, what Bing is doing is looking at which Facebook Like buttons your buddies have clicked around the Web, then inserting a module into search results that spotlights pages they’ve given a thumbs-up. We saw examples involving searches relating to cars, San Francisco steakhouses, and the movie Waiting for Superman.

When you search for a person, Bing will also use your Facebook friendships to try and return relevant results–the example we saw involved a search for “Brian Lee” that returned a module with Brian Lees who were friends of the user’s friends.

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Facebook: How to Love It (or Leave It)

Posted by Harry McCracken on October 12, 2010 at 6:47 am

Hey, it’s Tuesday, the day that TIME.com publishes the original Technologizer column which I write for it each week. The new one is titled “A Five-Step Program for Facebook Happiness,” and  I was moved to write it after Facebook introduced a new Groups feature last week that managed to be simultaneously neat and annoying. It dawned on me that while I sometimes grouse about the site–especially its chaotic approach to introducing new features–I’m ultimately a fan, because I’ve figured out how to make it work for me. In this column, I share some tips for making it work for you. (Or acknowledging that it doesn’t work for you: Quitting Facebook is a perfectly defensible decision, although there seem to be a lot more people who say they will leave than actually pull the trigger…)

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