With the millions of blogs using WordPress platform, it is not surprising if we might see some social networking facility soon. Well, actually it may be on our way if we are to take the new BuddyPress WP Suite as WordPress’ baby step towards establishing a WordPress powered social networking site. [Read more…] about Is WordPress Launching a Social Network?
Social Networks
Facebook is the No.1 Social Network in Europe, What Else is New?
As if it’s not yet a known fact that Facebook is now the no.1 social network worldwide, comScore made an analysis of Facebook’s growth in Europe for the past year. And guess what? Results of the analysis reveal that Facebook increase by 314 percent from Feb 2008 to Feb 2009. Interestingly, these increasing number of audience are not just one-minute visitor of Facebook, but are actually spending an average 3 hours per month visit. [Read more…] about Facebook is the No.1 Social Network in Europe, What Else is New?
How Many Friends are You Allowed to Have on Facebook?
Last time I checked, I’ve only got 73 Facebook friends. And probably 75% of them are what I could categorized as “active network”. If you are not like me, and has more Facebook friends than I have, then you must be asking right now, just how many Facebook friends are we allowed to have? [Read more…] about How Many Friends are You Allowed to Have on Facebook?
Hunch and Lunch Offer Something New to the Social Table
Two new start-ups have recently joined the already saturated social network market. First you have Flickr co-founder’s new venture Hunch.com which is a decision-making site akin to Yahoo Answers and the other one is the social reviews/opinions site Lunch.com. Both social sites offer something new and take the already familiar social networking route with a different minor twist. But both draw on crowd-sourcing and user participation for their activities, hence both are worthy of being categorized as social network/media/tool. [Read more…] about Hunch and Lunch Offer Something New to the Social Table
Facebook Becomes More Like Twitter Now
By now, you have probably read that Facebook is gradually rolling out its new home page. If you haven’t check out, the different features of the new home page are here, and here. While I may have discussed the different features of the new home page in those articles, I would like to focus more on the news feed feature in this post.
Like I said, the new Facebook News Feed feature which sits on the middle column of the new Facebook home page is now more like Twitter. If you have the new home page already activated on your Facebook account, you’d notice that this News Feeds contains stream of content coming from your friends, and other connections including updates from fan pages and groups which you’ve subscribed to before.
The News Feeds updates in real-time and lets you add comments and participate in conversation with the people who created the contents. Of course, if you’re a Twitter user, you’d know that this is similar to your Twitter public timeline.
What’s nice about this News Feed is the fact that you can filter the contents that you want displayed on your home page. These filters are listed on the left side of your Facebook home page. It lets you filter contents to photos, links, video, and more. You can also immediately hide/unhide updates from your specific Facebook friends. This is particularly useful if you have a Facebook friend who is fond of updating his/her status every single second. Don’t get me wrong if you’re in my Facebook contact and you do this, but sometimes it gets annoying to read those non-sense updates, especially if they become too often.
Like I said in my two other posts, I really like this new Facebook home page. It would be interesting to find out if Twitter users would use the Facebook News Feed as an alternative to their Twittering habits.
Would this affect Twitter’s popularity and usage? Feel free to tell us what you think by leaving a comment below.
Twitter vs. Facebook, Round One Fight!
Don’t look now folks, but it seems there is a new war brewing up in the social sphere (or has it already begun or might have been in existence before?). If you’ve been regularly checking Techmeme (like me), you’ll notice that both Twitter and Facebook have been receiving quite a number of coverage from various tech sites. It’s either a new Twitter app being developed that’s turning the microblogging service into a social networking site, or Facebook introducing a new feature in response to Twitter’s own features. One thing is clear – a war has begun between these two popular social web tools.
Here are some examples of the articles that reference to a Twitter vs. Facebook framework:
- With Twitter Envy, Facebook Adds (Near) Real-time Web Capabilities
- Facebook responds to Twitter, and the rest
- New Facebook follows Twitter and FriendFeed
- New Facebook = Twitter + Friendfeed. For Non Geeks.
and this is my favorite:
To think that those articles are supposed to talk about the new Facebook feature which turns the Facebook profile pages into something more like the usual Facebook member pages, and the rolling out of the new Facebook home page. But I couldn’t blame tech writers for comparing Twitter and Facebook. After all the two are the most popular social sites today. The monthly site metrics produced by various online research companies would prove this.
And in terms of site traffic and membership base, both sites are continuously growing on a daily basis. The funny thing is, while Twitter is trying to become more like a full-featured social networking site, Facebook on the other hand is trying to focus on its micro services.
Amidst all these new features and changes in their features, one can’t help but wonder whether the user’s wants and preferences were actually considered. Personally, I would rather have Facebook maintain its social networking stature rather down going towards being a microblogging service. As for Twitter, it was best when it was just a simple microblogging site and when there were fewer third-party apps that you can use to enhance its capabilities.
But then, it all boils down to one thing – beating the threats imposed by your competitors even if you belong into different niches.