Tag Archives: Facebook

Google+ launches to rival to Facebook: a round-up of reports

Google has launched a social network with some Facebook-like features. Google+ (plus) is open by invitation only to a very limited number of people while it is in the field test stage but Google has released details on its blog as to how it works.

One of its features is called ‘circles’, which allows users to categorise contacts and only share items with particular groups such as close friends and family but opt to exclude work contacts.

According to the New York Times, this is the “one significant way” in which Google+ is different from Facebook and the way “Google hopes will be enough to convince people to use yet another social network”.

It is meant for sharing with groups — like colleagues, roommates or hiking friends — not with all of one’s friends or the entire web. It also offers group text messaging and video chat.

A post on Poynter points out the most interesting area for news organisations are the ‘stream’ and ‘sparks’.

The stream functions a lot like Facebook’s news feed — a flow of information shared by your friends. If Google+ grows to critical mass, news providers could find it very important to get their content into the stream.

The ‘sparks’ section is a bigger innovation. Essentially, sparks are topics that users designate an interest in. Google uses Google+ sharing activity and +1s, as well as its famous search algorithms, to recommend personalised content for each spark, according to Mashable.

Poynter’s post suggests the Google +1 button, which has received a less than lukewarm reception from news sites, could now come into its own.

Suddenly the +1 button makes more sense. Google announced +1 in March as a way for users to express approval of any web page. Now it seems the +1 button will infuse not only search results, but also sparks, with social recommendations. TechCrunch interviewed Google officials about Google+ and reports: “You’ll see a +1 button on all Google+ content — the +1 button clearly ties deeply into all of this. It is going to be their Facebook ‘like’ button.”

So Google appears to have released its tweet or like button before the social network to share it. A case of the cart before the horse?

Poynter’s post goes on to assess the potential usefulness of Google+ and how it could affect news consumption and delivery. It also states that there has been much scepticism about its success, following less successful attempts with social projects Google Buzz and Google Wave, but author Jeff Sonderman suggests there is hope for Google+.

It’s fair to say that Google+ appears to be different, more comprehensive and more well-planned than any previous effort. The design is great, the ideas sound good and the company is making a large commitment to success.

Marshall Kirkpatrick from ReadWriteWeb has tried it out – and he is impressed, describing it as a “smart, attractive, very strong social offering from Google”.

It is well worth reading his post after he spent a night with the new social network.

But the New York Times argues its Google+ project, which has seen huge investment, may have come too late

In May, 180 million people visited Google sites, including YouTube, compared with 157.2 million on Facebook, according to comScore. But Facebook users looked at 103 billion pages and spent an average of 375 minutes on the site, while Google users viewed 46.3 billion pages and spent 231 minutes.

Advertisers pay close attention to those numbers — and to the fact that people increasingly turn to Facebook and other social sites like Twitter to ask questions they used to ask Google, like a recommendation for a restaurant or doctor.

The article goes on to explain why Google+ has now come at this time, long after Facebook’s creation.

Larry Page, Google’s co-founder, regrets Google’s failure to lead in this market and has spent time working with the team since he became chief executive in April, people at the company say. He promoted [Vic] Gundotra to senior vice president this year, placing him on an equal level with the heads of Google’s core products like search and ads.

Part of the blame, analysts say, falls on Google’s engineering-heavy culture, which values quantitative data and algorithms over more abstract pursuits like socialising.

The consensus of blog posts seems to be another positive cultural shift for Google is strong design, as the Next Web reports.

Google+ and all that falls under its umbrella looks good — really good. The trademark minimalism is still present, but it’s been done with style (is that contradictory?) and is something to be appreciated.

That’s because interface designer Andy Hertzfeld, member of the original Apple Macintosh team, was given free reign over design decisions, AppleInsider reports.

Despite the headline, Hertzfeld is quoted in the piece describing the process and it seems he was not so much given free reign as he took it. “Better to ask forgiveness than permission” and so on.

Hertzfeld was worried that Larry Page wouldn’t like it with its animations and drag-and-drop fanciness, but “he loves it”.

A video overview from Google explains how Google+ works

What other news outlets have reported:

Telegraph: Google+ explained

Telegraph: Google+ takes on Facebook

Mashable: Google+: first impressions

Mashable: Google launches Google+ to battle Facebook [pics]

Gigaom: Why Google+ won’t hurt Facebook, but Skype will hate it

Guardian: Google+ launched to take on Facebook

Poynter: Google+ sparks interest in new system of news discovery

TechCrunch: That was quick: Chrome extension adds Facebook, Twitter sharing to Google+

The Drum: Google+ launched as fresh rival to Facebook

ReadWriteWeb: First night with Google Plus: This is very cool

NY Times: Another try by Google to take on Facebook

TechCrunch: While we await the native app, the Google+ iPhone mobile web app is pretty solid

The Next Web: Wondering why Google+ actually looks good? Thank Andy Hertzfeld

Google +1 button is coming to AdWords – but how useful is it?

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Google is to introduce its +1 button to AdWords, the internet giant’s main advertising product, so users can recommend adverts to their friends and contacts.

The button was made available to news sites earlier this month and has been adopted some web publishers.

Google’s button was added to AdWords on Google.com at the end of March and is now coming to Google.co.uk, according to an announcement on the AdWords blog.

Users who are logged into their Google account can click the button and their friends and contacts will see that news story or page promoted in their search.

In its US announcement, Google explains how the button works for Google AdWords.

Let’s use a hypothetical Brian as an example. When Brian signs into his Google account and sees one of your ads or organic search results on Google, he can +1 it and recommend your page to the world.

The next time Brian’s friend Mary is signed in and searching on Google and your page appears, she might see a personalized annotation letting her know that Brian +1’d it. So Brian’s +1 helps Mary decide that your site is worth checking out.

But almost a month on from news outlets adding the +1 button next to Twitter’s tweet button and Facebook’s like button (including on news stories on Journalism.co.uk), the button is very much third in line in terms of generating clicks.

So why are readers not using Google’s +1 button?

Unlike Twitter or Facebook where users post a link, those who click the button get little out of it in the same way they do by tweeting or liking a story – although that could change with the launch of Google +, a new social network dubbed Google’s answer to Facebook.

Making a recommendation is not immediate and there are several hurdles to overcome. For a contact to see a recommendation it relies on them searching for a keyword that the +1 user has shown interest in and the contact must also be logged into their Google account.

The button’s less than lukewarm take up also suggests people do not want their searches sorted by the choices made by their friends and contacts, but organised by relevance to what the wider online community is reading.

News sites get little out of +1 and although they may get a few more hits as a result, few would claim it has made any impact.

After a month on the article pages of news sites who opted to adopt +1, it is unlikely those who have not added the button will follow suit unless Google+ takes off in a big way. Those which have the button may decide to replace it with the LinkedIn share button, which has been gathering pace and is now coming in ahead of Facebook as a sharing mechanism on many sites, such as in this example from Mashable.

What do you think about Google’s +1 button? Let us know in the comments section below.

Digital Trends: LinkedIn launces aggregated news service

#Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk – using LinkedIn for reporting and job hunting

#TfN: Twitter for Newsrooms launches – is it useful?

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Twitter for Newsrooms has launched a best practice guide for journalists. But do newsrooms need a guide? Is Twitter not preaching to the converted? Or as TechCrunch states, Twitter for Newsrooms!? Twitter is a newsroom, quoting Mediagazer founding editor Megan McCarthy.

Along the lines of Facebook for Journalists, Twitter for Newsrooms aims to help journalists by acting as a resource for research and reporting.

As Twitter’s announcement states:

We know you come from different generations. Some are native to the pilcrow, others native to the hashtag.

Mashable states:

The guide, titled “Twitter for Newsrooms,” is a little bit obvious for anyone who uses Twitter on a daily basis. There’s no new info here, just tips on how to report, engage with other users and followers and how to use tweets in the process of reporting. But the fact that Twitter has launched an official guide for journalists is indicative of the impact of social media on the news.

TechCrunch adds:

#TfN is Twitter’s official nudge to old school reporters, a heavy handed reminder to get with the program and embrace Twitter as media production and consumption device.

The 10,000 Words blog is a little more positive on its usefulness for all journalists:

While much of the information won’t ring fresh for reporters already knee-deep in social media sourcing, it’s a comprehensive and helpful resource for journalists of all levels hoping to gain some insight into Twitter’s potential for journalists.

So what does Twitter for Newsrooms involve?

There are four areas: #Report, #Engage, #Publish and #Extra.

As Mary Hamilton says on her blog:

This is basic stuff – tools, examples, glossary, links, support. That’s as it should be, I reckon. The newsroom denizens who understand Twitter well enough to build their own techniques are still vastly in the minority. This is about bridging a gap.

#Report gives advice to journalists on when and how to use the following four tools, plus advice on finding sources, and mobile tips.

On the subject of the advanced Twitter search, Hamilton writes:

I’m glad Twitter is making more of its advanced search tools. They’re immensely useful for journalists, but unless you already know about them they’re next to impossible to use. Including them here, prominently, is smart. And it’s wise to explain there’s a difference between Top and All tweets, even if it’s still not clear what “most relevant” means in this context.

#Englage has advice on effective tweeting, with good examples;

#Publish explains how to follow, retweet, favourite and reply, and how to use BlackBird pie, which displays tweets in WordPress;

#Extra, as you might have guessed, includes all the other facts a Twitter beginner may need to know (though can probably be worked out simply watching a stream and trying it out).

Another point well made by Hamilton is:

Twitter is protecting/building its brand. Some of these guidelines are about making sure the platform gets credit for quotes and information shared there. Others offer ways to embed Twitter functionality on news sites. It reminds me of Facebook’s Open Graph plugins, in a nascent and very specific way – proliferating its own platform while performing useful functions. Aiming to become needed, where it isn’t already.

Do you think Twitter for Newsrooms is needed and a valuable resource? Have you found Facebook for Journalists useful? Let us know in the comments section below.

Reuters: Athletes can tweet at 2012 as long as ‘not in manner of journalists’

Tip of the day from Journalism.co.uk: brand your tweets using a WordPress plugin

Facebook lessons: from Paul Bradshaw and PageLever

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Yesterday Paul Bradshaw shared his experience of running a blog entirely through a Facebook Page for four weeks, offering his thoughts on the month-long project in a post back on his Online Journalism Blog.

In the early days of the experiment he had already started noticing the pros and cons of the platform, from the impact of the 400 character limit on what he could write, to the possibilities presented by being able to post from a mobile phone via email.

So a month later here are his main reflections:

Facebook suits emotive material

The most popular posts during that month were simple links that dealt with controversy.

It requires more effort than most blogs

With most blogging it’s quite easy to ‘just do it’ and then figure out the bells and whistles later. With a Facebook Page I think a bit of preparation goes a long way – especially to avoid problems later on.

It isn’t suited to anything you might intend to find later

Although Vadim Lavrusik pointed out that you can find the Facebook Page through Google or Facebook’s own search, individual posts are rather more difficult to track down. The lack of tags and categories also makes it difficult to retrieve updates and notes – and highlights the problems for search engine optimisation.

It should be part of a network strategy

So, in short, while it’s great for short-term traffic, it’s bad for traffic long term. It’s better for ongoing work and linking than for more finished articles.

And his overall conclusion: Facebook should be used as “one more step in a distributed strategy” not in isolation.

Usefully in his post he offers a list of apps he used to integrate his Facebook content with his other online presences, which might a good reference point for others looking to use Facebook in a similar way:

RSS Graffiti (for auto-posting RSS feeds from elsewhere)

SlideShare (adds a new tab for your presentations on that site)

Cueler YouTube (pulls new updates from your YouTube account)

Tweets to Pages (pulls from your Twitter account into a new tab)

There’s also Smart Twitter for Pages which publishes page updates to Twitter; or you can use Facebook’s own Twitter page to link pages to Twitter.

There was also some interesting research published this month which looked at Facebook fan pages and engagement. According to the 10,000 Words blog a study was carried out by Facebook research company PageLever which suggested that as a fan page’s membership grows, engagement and page-views-per-member actually decreases.

From a purely aesthetic perspective, looking at the Fan Page and seeing that 10,000 people like your business on Facebook has its benefits. It makes you feel good.

But when it comes time to talk value, it can be a bit more difficult to find the silver lining. You might have 1,000 Likes on Facebook, but if you’re averaging around five Likes or comments per post, then only 0.005 per cent of your users saw the post and cared enough about it to respond.

Flurry: Mobile app use overtakes web browsing in US

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People in the US are spending more time using apps on smartphones than browsing the internet on a desktop computer or mobile, with the average user spending 81 minutes per day using apps compared with 74 minutes per day web browsing, a new study has found.

Out of the average one hour and 21 minutes per day consumers are spending using mobile apps this month, 47 per cent of time is spent on games apps, 32 per cent using social media apps, and 9 per cent using news apps, which comes in ahead of the use of entertainment apps standing at 7 per cent.

Flurry, an analytics firm which carried out the study, said this is the first time native mobile apps have taken more consumer time than web browsing:

This stat is even more remarkable if you consider that it took less than three years for native mobile apps to achieve this level of usage, driven primarily by the popularity of iOS and Android platforms.

Although these figures are based on app use and browsing in the US, it is worth bearing in mind recent stats on the increasing importance of mobile in the UK and the fact mobile browsing in the UK will overtake desktop browsing by 2013. It is particularly relevant to news sites deciding whether to opt for mobile sites or apps.

The article on Flurry’s blog goes on to say:

This growth [in the use of native mobile apps] has come primarily from more sessions per user, per day rather than a large growth in average session lengths. Time spent on the Internet has grown at a much slower rate.

As a note of interest, Facebook has increasingly taken its share of time spent on the internet, now making up 14 of the 74 minutes spent per day by consumers, or about one sixth of all internet minutes. Considering Facebook’s recent leak regarding Project Spartan, an effort to run apps within its service on top of the mobile Safari browser, thus disintermediating Apple, it appears Facebook seeks to counter both Apple and Google’s increasing control over consumers as mobile app usage proliferates.

With a better understanding of how consumers spend their time across app categories, Facebook’s Project Spartan makes even more sense. As a category, social networking – which is Facebook’s core competency – commands the second largest allocation of consumers’ time. Games, which typify the most popular kind of app played on the Facebook platform itself, are also the top categories on both Android and iOS platforms. As interactive media usage continues to shift from the web to mobile apps, one thing is certain: Facebook, Apple and Google will all expend significant resources to ensure that no one company dominates owning the direct relationship with the consumer.

Flurry’s full blog post is at this link and ReadWriteWeb’s article on the study is at this link.

comScore: Social media accounts for one out of every six minutes spent online in US

Economist reveals download numbers for iPhone and iPad apps

comScore: Social media accounts for one out of every six minutes spent online in US

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New figures from comScore, which measure digital use, show that Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Tumblr “reached new heights” in the US in May.

comScore’s blog on the “network effect” shows social networking accounts for almost 14 per cent of the time people spend online – or one in every six minutes.

The new stats show social blogging site Tumblr has grown by 166 per cent in the past year, reaching 10.7 million visitors in May, its first month surpassing the 10 million visitor mark.

A post states:

Today Facebook is the fourth largest US web property in audience size with 157.2 million visitors in May, representing its all-time high and a gain of 3.2 million visitors vs. the previous month. While other reports have been circulating that Facebook witnessed a pronounced user decline this month, comScore data shows quite a different story. Given that Facebook now reaches 73 per cent of the total US internet population each month, one thing we should anticipate is that the site’s audience cannot grow forever. The law of large numbers says that once a site has penetrated the majority of a market, each incremental user becomes that much more difficult to attract. So given its size, Facebook’s future US growth is likely to come more from increasing usage per visitor than its ability to attract new users in perpetuity. One impressive stat to note is that Facebook’s average US visitor engagement has grown from 4.6 hours to 6.3 hours per month over the past year, so it appears to be succeeding in that regard.

The author states:

Upon the release of comScore’s May US data, I immediately noticed that it was not just a banner month for Facebook but also for several other leading players in the social networking category who also reached all-time US audience highs: Linkedin (33.4 million visitors), Twitter (27.0 million) and Tumblr (10.7 million).

Twitter also had a particularly strong month in May with 27 million US visitors, representing an increase of 13 percent in the past year. (Note: while much of Twitter’s usage occurs away from the Twitter.com site, past comScore research has indicated that approximately 85-90 per cent of Twitter users visit the website each month). Twitter’s success in May can likely be attributed in part to the exceptionally buzzworthy news story of Osama Bin Laden’s death, as well as ongoing discussion of the Royal Wedding.

The full post is at this link

Livescribe pen now shares notes with Facebook, Evernote, Google Docs and email

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A pen that can upload handwritten notes to a computer while recording audio notes that play along side them? Now there’s a thought.

It has been around for a while – since 2007 – and has been updated regularly, the latest being Livescribe Connect, which means you can share notes, by clicking the pen on the page of a special notepad, via Facebook, Evernote, Google docs or email.

Could this be a way of sending shorthand notes back to a newsroom? You can certainly send shorthand notes back, but you will still need a computer to do so.

So how does the Livescribe pen work and how is it of use to journalists?

A media release explains how the pen works:

Livescribe smartpens digitally capture everything you hear and everything you write in your special Livescribe notebook, notepad or paper that you can print out yourself. To play back important information you simply tap anywhere on your handwritten notes in your Livescribe notebook, and you can replay exactly what you could hear when you wrote them.

Your written notes can then be reviewed on screen as well as on paper. When you plug your pen into your Mac or PC, the pen strokes and audio get transferred together to your Livescribe desktop. And they stay in sync. You can then click any part of the on screen pen strokes to play the audio from that moment.

“There is an app called MyScript that will convert your writing into text, which can be purchased as an extra feature. along with lots of other news apps,” UK spokesperson for the US company, Charlotte Priest, told Journalism.co.uk.

An easier way of understanding how the pen works is to watch the video:

The compatibility with Facebook, Evernote and Googledocs certainly sounds appealing but there are a few draw backs.

The pens are not yet wifi or 3G enabled so require docking and, therefore, the journalist needs to be near a computer; the pdf created requires the latest version of Adobe Reader, which many people will not have.

A free pdf reader is available in the App Store to allow iPad owners to view and hear notes on the device. Although notes are searchable, this is not the case with shorthand so the pen does not offer a new way to search pages of a shorthand book.

The Livescribe pen starts at £99 for a 2GB model which can store 200 hours of audio.

‘Like’ and ‘tweet’ buttons – what news sites need to know about dropped cookies

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What is not to like about the buttons that drive traffic to your site from Facebook and Twitter? Quite a lot if you consider a study commissioned by the Wall Street Journal published in May.

‘Like’ and ‘tweet’ widgets, which appear on one third of the world’s 1,000 most-visited websites, enable Facebook and Twitter to track and follow the sites a user visits by dropping cookies – small text files placed on a user’s computer.

New EU cookie law, which came into force in the UK on 26 May, requires websites to confirm they accept cookies before they can be dropped. So what is the legal position of websites that use ‘tweet’ and ‘like’ buttons, how should they act responsibly and can anything be done to stop this happening?

How Facebook and Twitter ‘follow’ your readers

The WSJ article explains how the ‘tweet’ and ‘like’ buttons on your site track readers:

For this to work, a person only needs to have logged into Facebook or Twitter once in the past month. The sites will continue to collect browsing data, even if the person closes their browser or turns off their computers, until that person explicitly logs out of their Facebook or Twitter accounts, the study found.

Kennish’s study examined more than 200,000 web pages on the top 1,000 sites. He found Facebook obtained browsing data from 331 sites, and Google obtained data from 250 sites, some of it from its Buzz widget. Twitter got browsing information from about 200 sites.

This all may sound a little ‘big brother’ to some Facebook and Twitter users but cookies are dropped by almost every website you visit and collect all sorts of data. One of the major uses of cookies by news sites is to gather audience data and display targeted advertising. They can also be dropped by any third-party with links on your site, such as Facebook and Twitter buttons.

So what can news sites do to prevent their readers being tracked by Facebook and Twitter?

Nothing, according to Julian Evans, an information security expert with his own blog on online security, who said all ‘tweet’ and ‘like’ buttons, even if they are made by third-parties, drop cookies.

The legal position of ‘tweet’, ‘like’ and cookies

However, websites are not liable for cookies dropped by third-parties, such as Facebook’s ‘like’, Twitter’s ‘tweet’ or other buttons and links on your site, according to the Information Commissioner’s Office, an independent public body which polices the new EU cookie law and can fine websites up to £500,000 for non-compliance.

Katherine Vander from the ICO told Journalism.co.uk that websites must, during the next few months, concentrate on getting their houses in order to make sure they comply with the new EU directive that came into force in the UK on 26 May which states users have to confirm they accept cookies before a website can drop them. Before that date internet users merely had to opt out of receiving cookies if they did not want their data collected.

What should sites do to act responsibly?

Although there is no legal requirement for news sites to get readers to opt in to agree to allowing Facebook and Twitter to drop cookies and track their reading habits, the ICO is encouraging news sites to act responsibly and inform readers what is going on.

“If you’re encouraging people to come to your site to use those facilities and you’re making a deliberate link there – which obviously [sites which have ‘tweet’ and ‘like’ buttons] are – you may well feel some sense of responsibility in terms of, at the very least, providing people with information about what might result in that happening,” Vander told Journalism.co.uk. She also asked news sites to keep up-to-date with Facebook and Twitter’s privacy policies.

She suggests sites which want to be really responsible should “put a note next to the link” to tell readers this button drops cookies.

That may not sound like an attractive solution to many as it may scare or confuse readers, many of whom think a cookie is just something to dunk in a cup of tea.

“Consumers don’t understand what cookies are. People don’t want to know what [a cookie] does, they just want to know it’s safe and their privacy is safe online,” security expert Julian Evans said.

He also pointed out that news sites should remember users willingly share their own information through login authentication sites like Facebook and Twitter.

What users can do to prevent cookies

Log out of social networks when you are not using them. Use a separate browser to log on to Facebook and Twitter;
Amend your browser’s privacy settings (preferences > privacy);
Clear out your cookies;
Clear out your ‘evercookies’, a persistent JavaScript API, which you can learn how to get rid of here;
Use a service like Disconnect;
Security expert Julian Evans, who runs ID-Theft Protect, recommends Firefox users install No Script, a script blocker that shows where your data is going.

Editors Blog | Journalism.co.uk

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Tag Archives: Facebook

Flurry: Mobile app use overtakes web browsing in US

Livescribe pen now shares notes with Facebook, Evernote, Google Docs and email