The bigger (no pun intended) news here is the much bigger ads that are now in the news feed.
I personally love the G+ feed, the issue was lack of content to fill it. I was starting to get pretty tired of looking at the same old cluttered feed on facebook. I always felt that the feed column was surprisingly thin, and that the left column took up a lot of real estate for something I interacted with so rarely.
I think this will be a refreshing change for Facebook.
It seems counter intuitive, but hear me out: 1) FB events is good bc everyone is on fb, but its bad bc you never know what will be shared. It also is bad because the few people who aren't on facebook can't get the invite.
2) Google+ events is slick, really slick.
3) As a person with G+ I recently created an event and invited my friends knowing that it wouldn't be autoshared with people I don't want invited. The problem was that about 40% of my friends don't use G+.
Since people making events are the people who have most of the social power, it benefits google to cater to them. The way to do it is by allowing them to invite people to RSVP for events even if they are not google plus members.
Eventually people we see it as another reason to use google+. If you have events on there, you will go on there and probably post other stuff.
People with high social value will push the needle much, much faster.
Internet Startups: https://plus.google.com/communities/100445483815501942968
Hacker News: https://plus.google.com/communities/104388679763490357266
I'm lucky enough to know quite some people on G+ and I circled quite a group of interesting users. But until they finally implement a public API I wont use it full time. I wonder what is taking them so long.
Don't get me wrong, I can see where there could be some inspiration taken, but the News Feed looks like G+ done right.
The G+ app, on the other hand, is great. No complaints there.
This, no doubt, is a very deliberate decision -- especially after the flurry of articles recently about teens dropping out -- but I still feel it completely misses the reason why people are flocking to Tumblr in the first place. I don't know how they managed to do it, but Karp and the rest of the Tumblr team have fostered a culture there that just makes Facebook look corporateish and slightly dull in comparison. I can't put my finger on exactly _why_ it feels so, but there's definitely something going on there.
Or maybe, people simply don't like being figuratively shat on and decided to find something new as soon as it presented it self.
Don't get me wrong, I'm not bashing tumblr here, it certainly played its role well, I'm just saying that people have wanted out of facebook for a long time and a lot of their user base is just waiting for something new that has enough of their friends to move to.
Facebook made it big with the wall feature, the newsfeed scrolling down your page with your mousewheel showing you all the content and happenings of your friends. When facebook starts to mess with the wall by:
- hiding things (and charge to make them more visible, specifically after promising never to do so)
- adding ads
- filling it with game updates,
- businesses "like this 4000 times and win a prize" contests
- X liked on page A, so here maybe you'll like this page B
Is it really no wonder that people get fed up, bored, and start looking for something with the original feature that drove them to facebook in the first place. And don't even get me started on all the other problems re privacy, naming policy, and silent settings resets.
The reasons people are leaving are obvious to me.
All I can really say is: tumblr, I hope you're ready.
that and... where can I buy some tumblr stock?
> “What’s at stake is the ability to be creative and expressive on the Internet,” says Poole. “I especially worry about young people. Part of growing up is finding who you are, what you’re passionate about, what you’re interested in, and being an idiot, making mistakes. And now that we have a persistent, consolidated identity online — look at Timeline, that’s what it is — I fear that we’ve lost the ability for the youth to explore themselves and make these youthful indiscretions.”
Even when Karp is asked about FB (http://www.wired.co.uk/news/archive/2012-11/06/david-karp-on...) the one thing he mentions is it's tying to the Zuck identity:
> Consider the undertaking of taking the internet [in which] anonymity was so inherent… and Facebook [bringing] some sense of true identity to the internet and to the world -- what an impossible undertaking that they did an incredible job with, and still do.
The real battle here is between person and persona. I shall place all my chips in the second basket.
"You you know (some random person) and (some other random person)?" -- NO