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My life's not ALL about technology!

Filed under: FaceBook

Rockmelt buddies with FaceBook?

Rockmelt-fb

Fired up the Rockmelt browser today and was presented with the Facebook login / authorization window as if I was a new user to Rockmelt.  Interesting, but I assumed it was just an update that required re-authentication.  

It was then that I saw something quite interesting.... the "Friend Request," "New Messages" and "Notification" icons were now up in the title bar of the Rockmelt browser along with my Facebook Avatar!  What the......!

So I then fired up Facebook in the browser and all of those icons in the title bar were no longer present in the web page next to the Facebook logo!  There is definitely some tight integration going on here between Facebook and Rockmelt.  Smells very much like a "Facebook Browser" to me.  Guess we will just have to wait and see how far this all goes. 

mySpace lost the battle because of Race? Seriously?

I was listening to my daily "drive-time" podcasts and as usual was engrossed listening to Today in Social Media hosted by Clayton Morris of Fox and Friends fame.  He touched on a topic, that I found a bit of a crazy notion.  There was a lady, and I forget her name and can't find it on TISM's Posterous page who threw out the suggestion that the move from mySpace to Facebook was akin to that of a "White Flight," similar to what was experienced with the movement of White people out of the Inner City and into the suburbs, while minorities remained.
 
I can't tell you on how many different levels I think this is a very inaccurate thought.  Like Clayton, I do not see any association between race and the exodus from mySpace to FaceBook.  What I see are a couple of reasons and in someways failings of mySpace to control their platform.
 
GIGO (Garbage In, Garbage Out) - When mySpace opened the door to customized profiles, all hell broke loose.  People were injecting all sorts of trash into their profiles.  More specifically embedded FLASH content.  I am pretty impartial when it comes to FLASH technology.  If it is there, fine, if it isn't I definitely do not miss it.  Why?  As we all know, it consumes memory and CPU power on your computer.  That is bad enough with one FLASH item, but when people were stacking FLASH objects all over their profiles, it essentially ground any visit to that profile to a complete halt and more times than not would completely lock up my browser.  But to many it was "cute."  Which leads me to my main point about the failings of mySpace. #fail
 
Playground for the youth - My issue with mySpace was that the popularity of mySpace began with the young.  These were the early adopters who found a new playground to hang out with their friends in.  Every profile had to out-do their friend's profile.  It had to be "cool" or "cute" and with the assistance of other youth, who made a forturne developing profile themes, things got out of control quickly.  For those of us north of thier 20's, we tinkered with mySpace looking to re-connect with real-world friends in a similar manner, not to "hang out" or be cool, but to re-connect.  That didn't go over well whith all of the "noise" going on by those "damn kids".  I used to break it down into the following social age groupings by service:
  • High School = mySpace
  • College = FaceBook
  • Adult (Professional) = LinkedIn
As you can see, there was a gap that wasn't being filled by any of the core services out there.  That is of the Adult Life.  I, as many Adults did, saw the benefit of developing and maintaining personal relationships in social networking through a foray into mySpace, but were put-off by the uncontrolled mess.  That was the key opportunity that FaceBook took advantage of when they opened the doors publicly to the masses. 
 
All or Nothing - Another interesting failing of mySpace was that you were provided with a single Friends "Bull-Pen" that allowed for no groupings or filtering by relationship type.  Everyone was contained in one bucket and the contents of that bucket changed on a regular basis with no real way to keep up with things.  People were changing their names, photos and anything else that made it almost impossible to keep track of not just who these people were, but where you knew them from and why they were in your friends list at all. 
 
Not Darwin Capable - Evolution, that is something that mySpace was never good at.  It was a victim of scope creep and things grew out of control quickly and essentially became unmanageable.  In essence, it just got away from them.  I am not sure they actually understood not just who started using their services, but who was coming in and as mySpace got older, their user base became more populated with older people.  I hate to use the term, but they had no control really over anything other than what mySpace was at that point in time, not where they needed to be or needed to get to to accomodate a truely expanding user-base.
 
Those are my main reasons why I think mySpace lost the platform war with FaceBook.  Facebook offered a level of relationship management that mySpace never got their arms around.  On top of that they controlled their environment.  It is clean, orderly, structured and does not tax the user experience with bloated embedded objects.  Thier focus is truly on the people experience and has been quite good at ensuring that all opportunties are available to satisfy all age groups with the same experience.  In a nutshell a standardized user experience supporting functionality.  mySpace just kept offing up functionality with not grip of the user experience.
 
In going back to the beginning, I am still at a loss how anyone can get any type of race association to the migrational aspects of people moving from mySpace to FaceBook.  It is more of an issue with the growing on-line population that wanted a more mature experience.  As people "grow-up" we want structure, and not a whole hell of a lot of noise.  :)   We all don't stay 16 forever.

Location Sharing Coming to FaceBook in a BIG way

Location Sharing Coming To Facebook Next Month In A Big WayFacebook will be unveiling a new full tool and feature set centered around location at its forthcoming f8 event, says Bits.

The system will focus on two main thrusts, the first allowing users to share their location with their assorted friends on Facebook, and another letting developers interact with Facebook users and their locations via new location-centric APIs.

Of course, this would raise a firestorm of controversy if Facebook had not already battened down the legal hatches. Back in November they changed Terms of Service to include several references to location-based capabilities. That means that like it or not, everyone using Facebook has already given the social networking giant permission to share their location with their friends if they state it.

That said, the terms of service do say that the service, when it comes to be, will be opt-in. That is, Facebook will not share your status without you giving it. However, once you do it is off to the races.  Facebook has declined to comment thus far.

Bringing Facebook into the location game is bad news for every location-heavy startup in the market right now. With Google and Facebook both moving into the location space with Buzz, Latitude, and the forthcoming Facebook release, startups like Foursquare and Gowalla are going to find increasing difficulty in convincing users to adopt their products over the offerings of the giants.

Facebook and Google can offer better location integration into the services that users already use and have deep investments in. Of course, Facebook could commit a serious privacy error (as they are wont to do), but shy of that Facebook will become a player in the location space on April 21, at its f8 conference.

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