Twitter And The Time Dimension

Image by luc legay via Flickr

Twitter is real time search. That is its functionality.

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Facebook is more about space, the human space, the "social graph," as the Facebook people call it.

The next Twitter does not only text and links and photos but also video. And that might be a hardware and connectivity challenge more than a Twitter challenge. But it is only a matter of time before that video part also seeps in. But I don't wish to emphasize that too much. Text and links are enough for the most part. Photos are a plus, but not all that essential.

The next Twitter is not necessarily richer features, it is a Twitter that has 10 times more users and so is more useful to the existing users. An internet with more computers linked in is more useful. A Twitter with many more users will be more useful. A few Twitter users in every town on earth, and we will really have tipped the scale.



And it can't just be about real time search. The search functionality will have to get much better. Users should be able to dig into the archives and make sense. So Twitter can't be just about real time search, rather it has to be about snapshots in time and space.

Facebook will benefit from switching to real time status updates, but it will make a mistake in thinking it is competing with Twitter. They inhabit two quite separate spaces. The biggest lesson Facebook could learn right now is that just like to the Eskimo there are many different kinds of snow, there are many different kinds of friends. There are family, relatives, close friends, classmates, colleagues, acquaintances. Right now Facebook is at the one snow level of sophistication. And that is not good enough. Inner circle interaction should feel different from outer circle interaction. Facebook is not there yet.

How about adding a Hello function to Facebook which would be like the Follow function on Twitter? I can follow anyone I want on Twitter. On Facebook if we are not friends we are not friends, but I think I should be able to say hello to anyone I want to say hello to. They should see I said hello, and they should have the option to check out my profile, maybe they want to say hello as well. And maybe we talk. And decide to become friends down the line.

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Now That Instagram Has Been Bought By Facebook

FRANKFURT AM MAIN, GERMANY - OCTOBER 06: A picture in remembrance of Steve Jobs, founder and former CEO of Apple Inc is pictured at an Apple Store, on October 6, 2011 in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. Steve Jobs, 56, passed away after a long battle with pancreatic cancer. Jobs co-founded Apple in 1976 and is credited, along with Steve Wozniak, with marketing the world's first personal computer in addition to the popular iPod, iPhone and iPad. (Image credit: Getty Images via @daylife)GigaOm: Here is why Facebook bought Instagram

I want Facebook to push Instagram to come up with a web version of the product. And I want to be able to do the Instagram effect thing to my Facebook photos. Not all of them, but those I choose.

That would be awesome.

Instagram: A Billion In Two Years

Facebook buying Instagram is Facebook admitting it is essentially a photo sharing site.

What is most remarkable about the Instagram story is that it has essentially been an iPhone app. That's it. I guess it is possible for one iPhone app to end up worth a billion dollars.

This transaction is a tribute to Steve Jobs.

Pinterest Competes With Twitter, Instagram With FourSquare

Another important thing Facebook could do is give each photo its own unique URL that is not a mile long. And the ability for anyone to embed that photo, if the photo is publicly shared.

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Facebook's Next Major Breakthrough

Image by Getty Images via @daylife(Article first published as Facebook's Next Major Breakthrough on Technorati.)

Facebook's next major breakthrough is not going to be some nifty new feature, or yet another higher valuation, but its push for HTML5. It is going to be a major breakthrough for the industry at large when Facebook is not a native app on your smartphone or tablet but rather still a browser experience. That would be Mark Zuckerberg going toe to toe with his icon Steve Jobs.

Steve Jobs felt snubbed by Mark when Mark did not play along with some kind of a "social" idea Jobs had for his music offerings. Jobs retaliated by integrating Twitter into his very operating system. Snub to Facebook. Mark retaliated by thumbing HTML5 in Jobs' face.

Does Path Stand A Chance?

Path is a new social network - much talked about - that has some of the early, key Facebook people on board. Facebook limits you to 5,000 friends. Path limits you to 50 friends. Facebook does photos plus. Path does photos only.

My first reaction is I agree with Robert Scoble.

Facebook Going After Disqus Now?

Image by skidder via Flickr

Caroline McCarthy: Facebook's next big media move: Comments: Facebook is planning to launch a third-party commenting system in a matter of weeks ..... This new technology could see Facebook as the engine behind the comments system on many high-profile blogs and other digital publications very soon....... it's an obvious and direct competitor to start-ups that provide commenting technology, like Disqus and Echo. With Facebook Places adopting much of the "check-in" methodology that smaller competitors Foursquare and Loopt offer, and Facebook Questions operating in the same space as Quora

Facebook Places did not kill FourSquare. Actually the day Facebook Places launched, FourSquare had its biggest day to that date. I expect something similar to happen to Disqus.

On the other hand, I really like the idea of comments sections at blogs where people necessarily have to use their real names. I think that would enhance the quality of comments.

Facebook's Financial Woes Are Unnecessary

Image via CrunchBase

LinkedIn makes a ton of money off of your resume there even when you don't log in for weeks, months. Because your resume is data. Facebook has a larger user base, a more engaged user base. It is constantly collecting data. But it is not monetizing it like LinkedIn is monetizing it.

Facebook's monetization so far has been like if Google had run banner ads like Yahoo back in 2002. That would have been such a dud.

The top mobile app on all smartphone and tablet platforms - Facebook - struggles with mobile. That's pathetic. The top site to collect data on human behavior struggles with monetization. That's pathetic.

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I Am On Facebook Messages Now

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Image by Getty Images via @daylifeI just got a prompt from Facebook to activate Facebook Messages for me and I promptly did. I am exhilarated.

I have been ranting and raving about the inbox for a long time now. Google might have navigated the web, but no one had tried navigating the inbox. And now I think Facebook has taken a great step in that direction. This is as fundamental a departure as Gmail was from email services before that. This is huge.

A Case For A Facebook Phone

Latin America and the Caribbean (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

This Techcrunch post makes a great case for a Facebook phone. Super convincing.

Facebook Phone International, Bringing The Developing World Online Social-First

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The Facebook Skype Integration Is Huge

Image via CrunchBaseMy number one gripe with Skype is it does not have all the people on it that I wish were on it. This Facebook Skype integration takes care of that problem. Now you don't need a phone number of that person who is in your Facebook network. This is huge.

This is bigger than Google Plus, a service I am not in yet. A friend sent an invite today but Google says they are so full of it. They did not let me in.

A Sophisticated Like Button

ReadWriteWeb: I Like to Dislike! Facebook Introduces Comment Voting, Threads: now allows users to up- and down-vote other comments ..... comments are not only threaded, meaning each user can reply directly to another user, but more information is shown on each person, including their job and company, or network, and their comment record. The system also allows for up- and down-voting ..... Each comment begins with one point and a vote up or down raises or lowers that rating by a point. .... your comment stays at the top, so you can manage your comment and conversation ..... the move certainly encroaches on the territory of commenting systems like Disqus, Echo and Intense Debate. .... with more active posts rising to the top and negating the usual newest to oldest order. Allowing users to vote on posts and on individual comments could really alter the entire dynamic of Facebook.

It was only a matter of time. I knew something like this was bound to happen. The like button was going to be more sophisticated. And it is getting there. The open graph just became more useful. Facebook comments just became more useful. Now it has become more possible to navigate updates that might collect hundreds of comments. This is called scaling.

The Facebook Blog: More Ways to Stay Secure: If you have any concerns about security of the computer you're using while accessing Facebook, we can text you a one-time password to use instead of your regular password. ..... Simply text "otp" to 32665 on your mobile phone (U.S. only), and you'll immediately receive a password that can be used only once and expires in 20 minutes. ..... the ability to sign out of Facebook remotely

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The Web Lifestyle And Company Cultures

Image via CrunchBaseThese three articles below are great reads on the web lifestyle and the company cultures of Google and Facebook.

BBC: Cult Of Less: Living Out Of A Hard Drive: Chris Yurista, a Washington, DC resident who lives out of a backpack, claims digital technology has replaced the need for his home and his possessions ..... Mr Sutton sold or gave away most of his assets, apart from his iPad, Kindle, laptop and a few other items ..... a "few" articles of clothing and bed sheets for a mattress that was left in his newly rented apartment. ..... credits his external hard drives and online services like iTunes, Hulu, Flickr, Facebook, Skype and Google Maps for allowing him to lead a minimalist life. ..... the internet has replaced my need for an address ...... Yurista has taken to the streets with a backpack full of designer clothing, a laptop, an external hard drive, a small piano keyboard and a bicycle - an armful of goods that totals over $3,000 (£1,890) in value ...... spends much of his time basking in the glow emanating from his Macbook, earns a significant income at his full-time job as a travel agent and believes his new life on the digital grid is less cluttered than his old life on the physical one. ...... he no longer has to worry about dusting, organising and cleaning his possessions ...... his new intangible goods can continue to live on indefinitely with little maintenance. ...... replaced his bed with friends' couches, paper bills with online banking ...... "you never know where you will sleep". ...... And like a house fire that rips through a family's prized possessions, when someone loses their digital goods to a computer crash, they can be devastated. ...... some people have gone as far as to threaten suicide over their lost digital possessions and data. ..... He says if a complete map of our brains was uploaded to a computer and a conscious, digital replica of ourselves was created, we could, in theory, continue to live forever on a hard drive along with our MP3s and e-books.
GigaOm: The Early Facebook Employee Exodus:Employees who leave are often emboldened by their work on such an influential and widely used product, and want to start their own companies. Others are burned out. Still others feel stifled by the company’s management structure......And just last week Ruchi Sanghvi, the company’s first female engineer who wrote the blog post announcing the then-radical Facebook news feed back in 2006 (and in doing so became the target of subsequent user outrage), left as well. ....... Others are getting engaged and married (sometimes to each other) and starting to have kids. They’re far removed from the early days of Facebook Proms ...... One frustration of early employees is that they’ve had limited upward mobility as Facebook has matured. With the exception of VP of Product Chris Cox, Mark Zuckerberg’s management team consists of outside hires, a good number of them from Google. ...... receiving avid investor interest in their new projects ..... Some leave to found startups that are related to Facebook, but aren’t priorities internally ..... examples of Facebook employees leaving to work at Google and Twitter ...... Facebook has chosen a distinctive method of regenerating the young startup mojo that it may be losing in this early employee exodus: buying young startups. ..... efreshes the company’s stable of 4-year stock option vesting cycles, along with delivering a fresh dose of entrepreneurial chutzpah.
GigaOm: Google Is From Mars and Facebook Is From Venus:The search company is like graduate school, filled with big brains working on complicated problems, while the social network doesn’t think as much about the deep implications of things; it just does them......Google is more technically focused, in that staffers there “value working on hard problems, and doing them right… things are often done because they are technically hard or impressive [and] on most projects, the engineers make the calls.” ....... when projects are undertaken at the search company, “the code is usually solid, and the systems are designed for scale from the very beginning. There are many experts around and review processes set up for systems designs.” ..... engineers and technical specs rule the day at Google ..... Zuck [CEO Mark Zuckerberg] spends a lot of time looking at product mocks, and is involved pretty deeply with the site’s look and feel

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Apple Going After Google's Cloud? Facebook Going After Apple With HTML5

Image via CrunchBaseJust yesterday I was reading this post and found myself shaking my head.

TechCrunch: “It Just Works.”: Apple is now going all-in with their cloud strategy. But they’re not doing it by simply tacking on cloud storage to their existing arsenal of products. They’re attempting to redefine what the “cloud” is..... With iCloud, Apple is transforming the cloud from an almost tangible place that you visit to find your stuff, to a place that only exists in the background. It’s never seen. You never interact with it, your apps do — and you never realize it. It’s magic. ....... Amazon, has essentially turned it into one giant server/hard drive that anyone can use for a fee ...... Apple’s belief is clearly that users will not and should not care how the cloud actually works. ...... You’re working on a document in Pages on your iPad, you move over to Pages on your Mac, and there it is. It even remembers where you were last editing. You download a song to your iPhone, you pick up your iPad, there it is. ....... With iPad/iPhone and now OS X Lion, you don’t save documents anymore. They save automatically — but an easier way to think about it is that they just exist, as is, in realtime on all your devices. ....... Files are something Microsoft worries about. Files in the cloud are something Google and Amazon worry about. Apple’s iCloud is about opening an application and the thing you want to access being there. ...... Chrome OS is perhaps the closest thing to Apple’s iCloud vision. When you boot up a Chromebook and enter your password, everything appears. Again, like magic. ...... this is the point where we may really start to see some truly fundamental differences between Google and Apple after the past few years going head-to-head with feature matching. Apple is going after consumers who have absolutely no idea what the cloud is, and don’t care. ........ Apple has rethought and rewritten their apps — including their desktop apps — from the ground up to be woven with iCloud fabric that a user won’t see. ..... And Apple doesn’t believe that Google can match them even if they wanted to because they don’t have complete control of their ecosystem in the same way that Apple does. ...... Apple is now more clearly than ever betting that will not be web software, but native software backed invisibly by the web.

Steve Jobs is a living legend, and rightly so. At one point I compared him to Mozart, although it was an impulsive move on my part, I would not do it again. But I have some fundamental philosophical differences with the guy. I am not big on native software and that is why I think HTML5 is such good news.

The Facebook Revamp Is Heartwarming

Image by bsimser via FlickrEarlier I listened to a few tunes that Facebook informed me my friends had listened to and it was a good experience. I greatly liked it. And I am also noticing that Facebook now does a much, much better job of letting visitors to my page see all my activities. You get a time stamp next to each action on my part. It is now so much easier for anyone to stay in touch with me.

The subscribe thing is the best thing Facebook ever did. I don't think you should be one person to your friends and another person to your fans. And we all deserve to have a few fans.

I have not fully experienced the full set of new features, but I am reporting here to say the new Facebook has had a good start with me. It has been so good I might even seek out and watch the Zuck keynote. I already watched the Zuck parody that preceded it. Mark Zuckerberg, funny guy.

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No Facebook Phone

Image via CrunchBase

Coming straight from the horse's mouth.

Zuckerberg: It Wouldn't Make Sense For Us To Make A Phone

Facebook is the most-used app on all platforms, so there's little need to get into hardware.

Iterating on the app, keep building a better app, encouraging the use of Facebook Connect as the way people sign into apps: those are better things to be doing.

It is better to be the top app on all platforms than to descend into hardware.

But this might not be Facebook's last word on the topic.

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