The press releases and corporate blog postings have been flowing out of Palo Alto faster than the site's newly introduced "ticker".Automatic friend grouping, updated privacy controls, music, movie and news integration, Timeline and the aforementioned ticker have all transformed the look of the social network.Some users have reacted with anger, demanding a return to the "old" Facebook. Many are simply befuddled - struggling to make sense of the whirring, buzzing modules that have suddenly appeared in their electronic lives.n his F8 keynote yesterday, Mark Zuckerberg said that as many as 500 million people used Facebook in a single day, with the total Facebook tribe approaching 800 million.According to Experian Hitwise, Facebook had a 10 percent share of Internet visits in the U.S. for the week ending Sept. 17, followed by Google at 7 percent. Among social networks, Facebook garnered more than 65 percent share of visits, compared with YouTube at 19.5 percent for the same time period.With the new features announced yesterday at F8, Facebook is poised to cast a bigger shadow over the Internet of people and things.
At the F8 Developer Conference yesterday, Facebook announced a new way to view user profiles, dubbed as the Timeline. Facebook also announced closer integration with apps and social apps within Facebook for reading books and listening to music. The Timeline view will be rolled out to users over the next few weeks(you can sign up for the same at this moment) and once the rollout is complete, new apps would also be made available. Facebook timeline is a chronically arranged visual representation of a user's status updates, photos, and other activities on Facebook marking the various events of his life. A user can share and highlight memorable and important moments from the past - posts, photos, videos, and events - and make them visible for others.
It is true that the ticker looks a lot like Twitter, as does the subscription system. But then Twitter looks a bit like an RSS feed, which resembles a journalist's newswire system, which has elements of the stock ticker about it.In fact, the technological mechanism is a red herring. What Facebook is learning, is what any TV executive will tell you - if you are unlucky enough to be stuck talking to one at a party - that "content is king".Twitter is a virtual blizzard of opinion - from Joey Barton's pop philosophy to Kim Kardashian's perpetual exclamation fest!! Google+ has become the default hangout for tech geek information exchange, with Robert Scoble and Jeff Jarvis presiding over matters. Both feel like an exciting place to be.
By comparison, Facebook has seemed a little quiet of late. "David is at Pret A Manger", I see.Hence Mr Zuckerberg's plan to make it the central hub of all consumption. In his vision, the site will become the Grand Central Station on everyone's daily commute.Just because you have a cool house and maybe even a swimming pool, doesn't mean anyone is going to come to your party. But if you can get the cool kids to come along, everyone else will be beating a path to your door.
The plan: if you care at all about broadening your horizons - seeing a new video, hearing a new song - this is the place to be.No longer are the Wall, photos and poking enough. You need to leverage the might of news publishers, TV, cinema, anything and everything that is of interest.That is what will bring in the crowds and keep people engaging with Facebook.Ironically, it is the lesson that every wealthy young geek learns the hard way.
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