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Inside Facebook on the discovery of a couple of new functions in Facebook Platform’s
API (the set of hooks provided by Facebook for third-party developers
building their own applications) which hint at additional features,
which could put Facebook in much more direct competition with
professional networks such as LinkedIn, as well as eat away at the
unique selling point of social networks like Multiply, which emphasize user privacy and access controls for a user’s different social groups.

The new functions: friends.getLists and
friends.getListsMembers, suggests that Facebook may be about to roll
out the ability for users to group their Facebook friends into
categories such as ‘professional’, ‘family’, ‘close friends’ etc., from
which different levels of profile access could be applied. The next
logical step would then be to add some of the functionality of a
dedicated professional social networking site (LinkedIn, for example)
in a way that would allow for a user’s social and professional online
presence to be kept separate, but both hosted and managed within
Facebook.

From Inside Facebook:

This could dramatically simplify privacy controls. Right
now, users manage privacy settings per-feature or by managing their
Limited Profile list. The addition of Friend Lists means one can now
much more flexibly and powerfully manage privacy settings per List.
Work friends see one portion of your profile, personal friends see
another, best friends see yet another.

This will be a welcome change for everyone whose LinkedIn networks
have migrated to Facebook. Consequently, this could mean accelerated
LinkedIn attrition: per-Friend-List privacy settings could
substantially decrease the need of many to actively maintain their
LinkedIn accounts as well.

As I’ve mentioned in a previous post (’LinkedIn vs Facebook: room for both?‘)
my social network on Facebook already mirrors (and surpasses) my
professional network on LinkedIn. All that is required to negate much
of the need to ever log-in to LinkedIn again is the option to group
Facebook “friends” into defined categories, with different levels of
access and some specific professional networking features. With regards
to the latter, many third-party Facebook apps already exist which add
features designed to support professional networking or mimic key
LinkedIn features such as recruitment, Q&A, resumes etc. In fact,
LinkedIn itself launched a Facebook app
to enable company job openings to be advertised through Facebook
(although, users have requested much greater integration between the
two networks).

If Facebook does add functionality to make it easy for users to add
a degree of separation between their social and professional networks,
as well as a public-facing ‘resume’ type page (which can be viewed
without needing to be logged-in), then I find it hard to see how
LinkedIn etc. will stay relevant.

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Ping « 

Technorati Tags: design, personal, social network, man

Launching today, Boxedup is a
social bookmarking service for “things you want”. Think of it as a
universal wishlist (similar to Amazon’s wishlist but not confined to
one company’s store), with bolted on social networking to make it
easier to keep track of what products your friends are interested in,
and as a way of discovering new items for yourself through the site’s
other users. The service has evolved out of earlier effort by
co-founder Jeremy Baines, called Gigtagging, which I profiled last November.

To begin using the service, after signing up, you’re required to
install an add-on for Firefox or Internet Explorer, or if you prefer,
use the provided ‘bookmarklet’. Then when you’re browsing an e-commerce
site or product page, you can, with one click, begin adding a
particular product to you Boxedup wishlist.

I visited Freecom’s store, and added a Skype speaker phone to my
Boxedup wishlist. A bit like using the bookmaking service, delicious, I
was given the option of editing the title (which was grabbed from the
product page’s HTML title), and adding a description and keyword
‘tags’, as well as price. Boxedup also attempted to scrape any images
from the page, but on this occasion didn’t offer me the image of the
phone itself. Scraping is hardly an exact science — and a product like
Boxedup is evidence that a standard micro-format for product pages
would really benefit users. However, on most other occasions it worked
just fine. Baines tells me that improving scraping is the company’s
main priority, but without standards it’s a challenge for everybody.

Along with creating a ‘universal’ wishlist that works across any web
store or product page, Boxedup offers a number of social features. Each
user has the standard profile, with tabs taking you to their various
lists of “things I want”, and “things I have”, as well as a page of
people they’ve befriended on the site. With regards to the first two,
the idea is that you can express which products you want, but also
alert your social network when you’ve finally got them. The ‘friends’
are is where you can track other people’s Boxedup activity.

There’s quite a bit of power in the social aspect of Boxedup. For
example, if you see an item in a friend’s list, you can nominate that
you’ll purchase it for them so that they don’t receive a duplicate.
There’s also lots of opportunity for discoverability. Each profile, for
example, has a stream of activity similar to Facebook. This gives you a
way — in near realtime — to see what items people in your social
network are adding to their wishlist or have purchased etc. You can
also get a snapshot of activity across the site as a whole, via the
homepage, giving Boxedup a sort of StumbleUpon effect.

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Technorati Tags: free, web, internet, social network

It’s not unusual for Google to acquire a company and make their
flagship product completely free — it has happened several times in the
past with Keyhole (Google Earth), Picasa, SketchUp, and Urchin (Google
Analytics). Surely it wouldn’t stop there. Today Google announced that
two previously for-pay services from FeedBurner are now completely free
— they are called MyBrand and FeedBurner Stats PRO.

MyBrand lets you take the FeedBurner service to a new level by using
your own domain name as the feed URL. This has several advantages for
all bloggers, but mostly for larger blogs or blog networks by allowing
feeds to reflect your own brand. Instead of a URL that looks something
like http://feeds.feedburner.com/zdnet/Google, it’s now completely
possible to have a URL like http://feeds.zdnet.com/Google without
giving up the valuable information that FeedBurner provides.

The second feature they made free is the FeedBurner Stats Pro service. Here is how their blog describes the service:

PRO is feed analytics taken to the next level. You will
now have access to the number of people who have viewed or clicked
individual content items in your feed and “Reach,” which estimates the
daily number of subscribers who interacted with your feed content. You
can turn this on by signing in to your account, navigating to the
Analyze tab and heading to the FeedBurner Stats PRO section. Click the
“Item Views” checkbox to activate these PRO features.

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Ping « 

Technorati Tags: google, free, blog, blogger

There are a number of auto ping sites like Ping-O-Matic that will notify other sites that you have updated your pages. If you don’t have notification software built into your site, or if there are sites you want to notify that aren’t supported by your software, these can be convenient.

However, you do need to understand that many of these sites cheerfully respond to any ping with a positive response even though they have no record of your site in their database at all. Many will just as cheerfully acknowledge a ping referencing a non-existent site. Pinging them may not automatically add your site; you may need to visit them and manually add your information before that ping has any value at that site.

On the other hand, there’s some question as to whether these notifications have any value at all. Until very recently, I didn’t bother with any of this for my sites and yet when I checked my logs, I found that quite a few of these database sites were regularly spidering my pages anyway.

I suppose it can’t hurt. The better places will probably find you anyway through other links, but that may be a hit or miss proposition, so going through the paperwork and being sure you are in their databases, and then following up with pings when you update may have some value.

ping

Ping « 

Technorati Tags: google, software, man

The Ping utility is essentially a system administrator’s tool that is used to see if a computer is operating and also to see if network connections are intact. Ping uses the Internet Control Message Protocol (ICMP) Echo function which is detailed in RFC 792. A small packet is sent through the network to a particular IP address. This packet contains 64 bytes - 56 data bytes and 8 bytes of protocol reader information. The computer that sent the packet then waits (or ‘listens’) for a return ….

ping

Ping « 

Technorati Tags: internet