Tag Archives | social networking

Wowd: A Faster, More Powerful Way to Explore Facebook

Posted by Harry McCracken on August 9, 2010 at 5:00 am

Facebook describes itself as “a social utility that helps people communicate more efficiently with their friends, family and coworkers.” True enough, but there’s one basic problem: The more friends, family, and coworkers you communicate with, the less efficient Facebook is. That’s because it offers surprisingly few features for navigating your way through the surging sea of updates you get if you have more than a handful of connections. Once an item scrolls off the front page of your news feed, chances are pretty good that you’ll never see it again. And interesting nuggets can get lost among stuff you couldn’t care less about.

Enter Wowd, a real-time search engine that aims to help Facebook be better at living up to its own mission. It’s introducing a new version with something it calls a “social discovery client for Facebook” today. I got a sneak peek before it opened the tool up to the masses.

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Twitter Helps You Find People You Might Actually Want to Follow

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 30, 2010 at 1:33 pm

Twitter is rolling out a new feature–“Suggestions for You“–that aims to recommend Twitter users you might like based on factors such as the people you’re already following and who they follow. It sounds similar to the third-party service Mr. Tweet (which is currently undergoing renovations) and like a potentially massive improvement over Twitter’s old “Suggested Users” feature (which gave everyone the same list of people, including some pretty vapid celebs).

It’s not live on my account yet, though–do you see it on yours?

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Facebook, Done the Open Source Way

Posted by David Worthington on July 29, 2010 at 9:43 pm

Four New York University students have mobilized to produce a decentralized and open source alternative to Facebook called Diaspora that they say will give users full control over their privacy.

Today, Software Freedom Law Center (SFLC) general counsel Karen Sandler told me that Diaspora was inspired by a lecture that Eben Moglen, director-counsel and chairman of the SFLC, gave in February. The organization provides legal services to open-source projects and organizations.

During his talk, Moglen cautioned that cloud computing has moved control over privacy far out of users’ hands, and that privacy laws vary from jurisdiction to jurisdiction. “The architecture is begging to be misused,” he said.

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A Half a Billion Facebook Users

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 21, 2010 at 10:26 am

Facebook announced this morning that it has a half a billion active users–a fact that it’s celebrating with a new Facebook app called Facebook Stories.

(My favorite thing about Facebook by far: It’s helped me reconnect with dozens of people from my past who I probably would never have encountered again otherwise.)

A little context on the service’s membership milestone:

Population of earth: 6.9 billion

Number of people worldwide who live in poverty: over three billion

Internet users: 1.8 billion

Population of China 1.3 billion

Population of India: 1.1 billion

Active Facebook members: 500 million

Population of United States: 309 million

Twitter users per month: 190 million

McDonalds customers per day: 60 million

Population of New York City: 8.4 million

Sunday New York Times circulation: 1.4 million

Facebook users in December 2004: Almost a million

Unique Technologizer visitors in June: 310,000

Population of Palo Alto, where Facebook is headquartered: 63,000

Population of Monaco: 33,000

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Tangible Proof of a Facebook Backlash?

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 9, 2010 at 9:35 am

The recent Facebook privacy flap has given the world’s biggest social network its most sustained run of bad press to date. Lots of folks said they were so disgruntled that they intended to opt out of Facebook, period–like the 31 percent of respondents to a survey we did here who said they’d left the service or planned to do so. But is unhappiness with Facebook impacting the service in a tangible way?

Maybe so. Over at Inside Facebook, Chris Morrison has some fascinating factoids that show new Facebook signups collapsing from 7.7 million in May–that’s more than a quarter-million new members a day–to a total of 320,800 in June, or a little over ten thousand a day. That doesn’t represent a decline in membership, of course; it’s just a decline in new memberships. But it’s a striking one.

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Facebook Buys, Shutters NextStop

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 8, 2010 at 2:21 pm

NextStop, a cool site that let folks share information about local things to do–and which had a particularly slick HTML5 interface–has been bought by Facebook. As is often the case when big Web companies buy little Web companies, the news isn’t great for fans of the little company. Facebook wanted NextStop’s talent, not its creation:  The site is now open only to registered members, and will close altogether on September 1st.  At least NextStop isn’t whitewashing the situation–and it’s letting users export content they’ve created and is releasing everything under a Creative Commons license in hopes that it doesn’t disappear altogether.

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Kin Recriminations, Kintinued

Posted by Harry McCracken on July 7, 2010 at 12:35 pm

At the briefings I attended on the Kin, Microsoft execs repeatedly made the point that the Kin was for young, highly social people. The subtext, I assumed, was that Microsoft thought it had figured out what those folks wanted, but it was going to be hard for an old geek like me to understand. I thought at the time that I wouldn’t be wildly enthusiastic about the phone even if I was a young, highly social person. And there’s more and more evidence that the Kin represented a massive misunderstanding on Microsoft’s part about what its target market wanted.

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