Facebook's "Improved Friends Lists" are rolling out, but they're very different from Google+ Circles. The latter are like private labels; you're the only one who sees them. The former are like rooms you can invite visitors to, where they see you and each other. Google's approach is better.
Google allowing Google+ to lose momentum is so typical. It shows me that Google still hasn't learned the value of follow through. Why don't they see what they are doing to the company by stalling on so many fine projects?
You may be right, Kim. What you describe is not too different than what we saw with MySpace, which tried repeatedly to redefine and redesign itself to be more like Facebook. It failed consistently and we know the rest.
Although Google+ may have lost its initial momentum, I think the spectacle of Facebook stumbling in its wake, trying to implement similar functions in the usual clumsy way is more embarrassing. It gives the impression that Facebook's strategy for the future is "Do whatever Google+ does, more or less as well as we can while retaining our distinctive, clunky, hard-to-use, inflexible interface."
It was very difficult for me to cough up that bit of kudos for Google+, so it makes me feel better to now agree with you that the product has been in test mode too long. I think Google is doing its product a disservice and it's losing momentum. We'll see, though.
The sense I have, Nicole, is that their "lists" is just a Groups retread and so it inherits all the limitations of the past. They may be trapped in their own legacy issue set; first it's hard from a technical perspective to change how something works when people are already using it. Second, their monetization may depend on the broader socialization that their way could afford. The goal for them is buzz around a post, and they could be right in assuming that knowing the group/list context would promote that. The problem is that it defeats the whole segmentation notion of the feature.
Google+ has its own issues; as I said at one point in the past, it's been in test mode too long!
I don't understand why Facebook always follows the same pattern when it comes to new feature releases. I feel like step one in the release is unrolling something with a flaw that everyone is going to hate. In this case that flaw is the fact that Friends will be able to tell how you've grouped them. I am sure users will rise up against this, and then Facebook will be faced with the decision of whether to change it or not. This is always how it goes.
With that in mind, I noticed the option for list-making, and I am not comfortable using it as it is right now. I don't like that it's entirely transparent to everyone on Facebook who users chose to share certain content with. I hate the whole thing. In this way, you're right, Google+ Circles is better for users.
The whole Amazon.reader debate is a double-stupid. It's stupid to think that there's any e-book buyer who doesn't know Amazon's URL, and it was stupider to let ICANN launch the whole free-form TLD initiative to start with.
Subsidized handsets, rather than locked handsets, should be the focus of regulators. We're not getting good deals, not fostering innovation, and weakening our power as buyers.
50 billion household devices will be on the Internet by 2020, according to Cisco. And we're hearing foreign governments are hacking our infrastructure. Surely our refrigerators are next!
YouTube's move to a partial pay-for-view model could help relieve a dearth of good new content but it could also complicate debates in many parts of the world over payment by content providers for delivery of their material to customers.
That's what Larry Page said on Google's earnings call, referring to the conjunction of mobile and the cloud. Well, let's chart it then! We need to be thinking about an Internet where 90% of our traffic goes to 70 destinations within 40 miles of us.
Facebook's Graph Search may face some profound challenges and risks, first, because Facebook users haven't been thinking of their posts as product reviews; and second, because Facebook will now have to contend with the social-network equivalent of SEO "gaming" of results.
EU operators are considering joining up to create a pan-European network to reduce competitive overbuild and cost. This might lower costs and focus operators on higher-level, more interesting services.
Congrats to the best-selling author who persuaded Facebook to allow him to register an account as Salman, rather than under his "real" but never used name, Ahmed Rushdie.
Based on reactions in Nicole's Newsfeed, everyone hates this version of Facebook. This should matter to Facebook now that there's a real competitor on the scene named Google+.
There's a trend underway to make employee performance reviews everyone's business – letting peers, customers, and direct reports in on rating people's daily doings. Mary gives this a thumbs down.
Introducing Shopycat, a Facebook app for sort of maybe determining what to buy your friends and family for the holidays. Analytics at its finest? Not so much.
Ushering in a new era of cognitive computing systems, IBM announced today the IBM Watson Engagement Advisor, a technology breakthrough that allows brands to crunch big data in record time to transform the way they engage clients in key functions such as customer service, marketing, and sales.
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