If Facebook offers more privacy options, it makes people feel safer sharing their information, and they would likely share more. Example: I want to share information A to group X but not group Y; I am comfortable with (or even have incentive to) revealing interest B to group T but not group U.
Facebook can then perform data mining on the information, it’s inside Facebook’s great wall anyway.
Privacy can hinder those who want to collect data on Facebook only through information visible to them. But not to those who are willing to pay Facebook for the data mining.
Facebook benefits both way.
Photo courtesy: History of Economics Playground
Strategy: Google Buzz marks a strategic shift in Google’s social effort after orkut & Google Friend Connect lost to Facebook & fbConnect. Expect more subsequent integration of Google’s products.
Product: Google Buzz is a well-engineered product, but not a well-designed one in terms of product experience
Competition: Google Buzz is a better substitute to Yammer for the corporate environment where I can share with co-workers, but it has yet proved a real harm to Twitter
Social Media
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blogger, buzz, connect, facebook, google, integration, orkut, picasa, social, twitter, yammer
- It received least resistance among users among recent changes. Partly because this design leaves the feed unchanged.
- Control items were changed. The left menu gives me the immediate impression of a Microsoft Task Bar.
- The search bar is moved in between, centralizing social search and reminding me of Google. Of course, search is powered by Microsoft Bing.
- Strategic move: high-light(er) applications and games without interfering with news feed. War with Apple apps?
- Personally I like the idea of utilizing Facebook as a news reader. Apparently it can’t replace Google Reader and Twitter, but many people I care about are on Facebook, not Twitter.
Conclusion: this is what I believe a web platform should be like.
Addendum
Point (4):
Become stronger a platform for web apps. This looks like Facebook follows the path of Apple to lock-in developers.
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This tweet was RTed by 100+ people. I don’t get it.
1. If List had been introduced earlier, organization would have been much more convenient. Now that many tweeters have followed thousands of people. Organizing is more time-consuming it takes longer.
2. Unless List slows down posting, I don’t see a reason to complain.
3. Values may be created elsewhere. To create contents for the social media world is to create values. Besides, some users elicit information from Twitter without (re)creating information, but carry the information onward to create values elsewhere. i.e. financial observers. The benefits of getting organized by lists may not be visible on Twitter itself, but are realized in the society.
4. Lists is new and evolving, why not let people have more fun with it?
Social media begins to look less social and it need to be so because:
Major online communities usually start with a small group of smart, motivated, everybody-knows-everbody contributors. After crossing critical mass, such communities start to attract more users which is a good thing. The bad thing is that trolls also jump in. What’s more, noise and irrelevant information start to emerge from clueless or, worse, malicious posters.
Two types of community are somewhat immune to such annoyance:
- Social networks, led by Facebook , with which you determine your social graph of those you care about
- Services which you determine the content you want, led by Twitter. Others may include Tumblr, twine, squidoo. Addendum: Twitter got better with lists.
I’m sorry, Digg.
What’s the solution? Channel, possibly?
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