Who the F needs another Social Network? @Microsoft -Seriously?
Morgan Stanley’s report ” How Teenagers Consume Media ” talks about the impact, reach and relevance of different forms of media on the target section of the population – the teens. The importance of this paper is the very fact that today’s teenagers will be evolving into tomorrow’s workforce and the ones who will be shaping tomorrow’s consumer market. This in itself means that the behaviour of the teenagers and their reaction towards media cannot be overlooked.
However, the report is written by a teenager, 15 year old Matthew Robson. The report reflects how a normal teenager perceives media of the current world spanning across traditional media like TV, radio and print, to new-age media like social networking websites, cellphones, game consoles etc. Although the discussion provided in the report does reflect teenage behaviour in a lot of sections, it has its shortcomings.
After the redesign of the social networking website giant Facebook went live on the 14th of March, the entire blogosphere as well as the users went berserk. The initial reaction was totally negative, with forums and groups on facebook itself showing negative poll results. ( In a poll on a ” Hate the New Facebook Look” group, out of 800,000 members who participated in the poll, 94% gave a thumbs-down to the new design, and only 5% liked it) The new design is being termed as “Twitter-look-a-like”, and indeed with the new news stream on a users home page showing updates which is very much like Twitter’s own followers page, there are some similarities between the two. No one can deny that Facebook is certainly bothered by the phenomenon that Twitter is turning out to be. And certainly because of CEO Mark Zuckerberg failed to buy out Twitter, Facebook’s new mission seems to be undermining Twitter.
But now almost after a week, when the smoke has faded away and users have already got accustomed to the new look or redesign of Facebook, here’s some reason to cheer up. Here are 5 reasons why I like the new Facebook and possibly you could as well.
1. The News Feed can be filtered.
In the Home page, where we see the Twitter Like feed of the activities of the friend of a user, it displays all the activites of friends. This display can be filtered as well, based on Filters available, such as : Photos, Links, Videos etc. I have some more filters in my profile viz. YouTube, Twitter, Flixster, LivingSocial etc. If you have grouped your friends ( I have grouped them such as :-Social Network Contacts, University, School, Work etc.), then the NewsFeed could also display feed from only the members of those group.
I found this picture of Facebook Poke on some website which I don’t remember. But it is surely worth a giggle.
Hopefully you all will enjoy this one. Have a blast!!
Awright!!! It is finally here. Facebook IM. It is cool, it is handy and it’s almost non-existent, at least by the looks. It is really cool , coz you don’t have to actually browse away to some other application to chat with your buddies. And this is what you get. On your Facebook page, on the bottom right corner, you’d have noticed a change today. Yes, it is IM integrated into Facebook. See the screenshot below.
Unlike orkut, which just shows who’s online on GTalk, with that green dot beside your profile pic, Facebook IM is what it is!! A simple and functional IM within the social networking giant. It is very easy. You can check who among your buddies are online and well go ahead and strike a conversation. The functionality doesn’t work with IE 6 or below. But then, who’s using that? Works on Firefox and Flock just perfectly. Haven’t checked on Opera or Safari.
If you are facing any problem seeing Facebook Chat, here’s the official help page.
Inside Facebook has the details in their story here.
Check out Nick O Neill’s post as well on the new Facebook IM .
And for those who are still hungry, here’s the Official Facebook Blog Link titled “Now we’re talking“.
So you chat hungry people, enough reasons to throw around those emoticons. Oh did I mention, it is Emoticon READY!!! *wink* *wink* ;D
Orkut walks the Facebook Way. Adds the Opensocial Apps
Posted on: 16-04-2008
Okay, I will not wrap this up in any form of introductory bullshit. Lemme get this straight and right to the point. The Apps on Orkut are ALIVE..finally. I was buzzed on my GTalk today by my friend Praxy, who told me that he noticed certain changes in Orkut, right as we were speaking. It was a bit hard to digest coz I had just logged out of my Orkut account a few hours back and I had noticed nothing. So, what was next? I logged in to find the first surprise. My account Homepage showed the following pick.
Just like the introductory Facebook message which invited us to install more and more apps. Well, for me, it was high time. Remember OpenSocial Alliance had been formed and announced way back in the 1800s, I mean in November last year. And now, it’s more than 3 months over of 2008. Still, I hadn’t seen any signs of anything to do with OpenSocial out here on Orkut. (A brief tutorial for all those who do not know about Orkut. It is one of the most visited Social Networking sites by Google, on which the entire online society of India, Pakistan and Brazil resides. And that means, it has a HUGE user base. It’s true that Facebook has invaded a space which was ruled previously by MySpace, and arguably still is. But then, Orkut is HUGE in this part of the world, much like Bebo is still much larger in the UK than any other social network.) The brief ask the question addition was at best an annoying and minuscule addition which didn’t even qualify as an application. But the wait is now over. The apps are here for you , and this is where they are. The page is called the App Directory, and the list looks like the following:
As Bill Gates gets dethroned from his spot as the World’s richest man, Microsoft has launched the new version of Internet Explorer ( aka the IE 8 ) at the MIX08 conference. The beta is out for download for testing purposes. Though at the MIX08 conference, the browser has been shown to have passed the Acid2 test, some users aren’t still happy about it. Phillip Lennsen writes :-
You know you’re installing an important program when you need to reboot your computer to finish the setup. When you need to reboot twice, you know you’re installing something really important. Well, that was what happened when I just installed the new Internet Explorer 8 Beta on Vista.
Neither do I have Vista running on my laptop, nor do I have any affinity for the new IE8. Especially after hearing of the dual rebooting requirement. The interface from the pictures available online doesn’t seem different from its predecessor.
So what’s new about it?
