Facebook Engineer Builds Google+ Inspired Facebook Hack
techcrunch.com
techcrunch.com
If you want to make change, build something.
There's one and only one way to make this work with an already existing social graph: show the user a clustered view of their friends. To see examples, do an image search for 'vizster'. http://vis.stanford.edu/papers/vizster
This is certainly the impression I've got, though when I first signed up, it would ask you "how you knew" somebody, and if you said "I don't know them" then it would disable the continue button. That's something.
In general though, the more people add friends, no matter how trivial, the more information Facebook has, which is why they don't explicitly discourage friending less-meaningful relationships. So even if you probably won't talk to Bob Smith more than once a year, it's still valuable for Facebook for you to add that connection and let it rot: that's added value for them.
I've got several hundred FB friends, but I only follow a few dozen of them in my FB news feed.
Of course this is some kind of improvement already for Facebook's standards.
Zuckerberg: “Guess What? Nobody Wants To Make Lists.” http://techcrunch.com/2010/08/26/facebook-friend-lists/
Of course, they're a HUGE pain. I mean really, I use them.
I thought the whole meaning of "hacking" was to let more people do more things easier. Instead, we need the world to be a more "open place" (in a huge walled garden), that sounds like someone sticking too much with his PR.
Facebook has already started looking messy (every time a new service comes out it has to be built in the "Social" Network apparently) and will continue to do so now that Google has started giving a serious approach.
I'd be glad to see Facebook "pivot" over Circles so I might KEEP using it instead of a address book.
I left for 2 reasons. First I couldn't manage the lists without a lot of pain. They have implemented lists and selective posting grudgingly, and obfuscated it out of the reach of most users.
Secondly, after 3 years of my handing them huge swathes of personal data they still fail to effectively advertise anything to me that I'm remotely interested in. I get that the price of a 'free' service is my personal data, I'm fine with that, I'd just like it to be used in a manner that's actually relevant to me.
As g+ stands, still in inimitable Google beta mode, has hit the nail almost entirely on the head for what I want a social network to do, and I can rest assured that when the advertising finally turns up it might be for something I'm interested in.
So here's to this staying only as a hack, FB not catching up, and to talking everyone I know onto g+ :)
I started to post it here but I thought he had made it and the ui isn't great so I didn't bother
Leave it to Alexia to write an article about it the next day...
What does everyone else think?
Going all the way back to the Founders, U.S. law has encouraged copying competitors' (publicly-known, unpatented) useful features.
The rationale is that society benefits as a whole when better ways of doing things get put into practice as widely and as quickly as possible.
A second-order benefit is that the prospect of being "ripped off" encourages innovators to keep innovating instead of resting on their laurels.
A worthwhile read on this point is the Supreme Court's 1989 decision in Bonito Boats v. Thunder Craft Boats [1], in which the Court unanimously struck down as unconstitutional a Florida statute prohibiting plug-mold copying of boat hulls. The Court said, in part, that "imitation and refinement through imitation are both necessary to invention itself, and the very lifeblood of a competitive economy." The only permissible restrictions on copying of publicly-known useful articles, said the justices, are those of federal patent law, which have been crafted by Congress to strike a nationally-uniform balance between the interests of inventors and those of the rest of society.
The problem is, Facebook has continued to move the Friends lists feature in more and more obscure places. It used to be easy to see the list and the posts from people in that list, but now they've hidden in the account menu.
With Google+ Circles, you put them in those Circles, and share what you want with them, and most people are using them like that.
If you don't want to be part of it, you can leave the group.
Most people I know now use Facebook Groups, but it's in a different way to how people use Circles – it's more to coordinate, plan and discuss things with a small, clearly defined audience.
That said, I also don't think Facebook is going anywhere any time soon. But it'll certainly be interesting to see Facebook's first moves in response to G+.
Remember how Facebook was going to be a walled garden web 2.0 platform, and how Facebook then effectively killed it?
No one is forced to use any of Google's products - Bing and Facebook are only a click away.
A monopoly born from having a superior product is not the same as a monopoly gained through the practises of price fixing or forcing people to install your web-browser with no way to disable it.
I say "generally" because there are weaknesses. For instance, I don't think you can export your search history or the archive for a google group. You can export your "contacts" but not all of your social connections (at least I haven't found a way). I also haven't found a way to export saved maps or other geo data.
If they expand this policy to all (or essentially all) of your data, they are pretty much immune to anti-trust. And more importantly, it's just better for users. Google has nothing to fear giving your data back to you, anyway -- the only companies that are afraid of that are the less competent ones.