Facebook has posted a huge preview of the next version of its iPhone app. Due in September, Facebook for iPhone 2.0 will look and feel a lot more like the real Facebook. The News Feed will be exactly the same and profiles will use tabs and the combined Wall/Mini-Feed from the site's latest redesign. Perhaps more importantly, the functionality will be much closer.

You'll be able to search for people outside of your friends, make/approve/ignore friend requests, and search your inbox and sent folder, for starters. Notifications will also arrive in real time while the app is running. The version of iPhone for Facebook after this will deliver them to you even if the app isn't running using Apple's push notification service. Overall, it's pretty excellent, check it out. [Facebook]

credit - http://gizmodo.com/5039788/preview-of-facebook-for-iphone-20-more-like-real-facebook

Why Twitter Hasn’t Failed: The Power Of Audience

Gregor Hochmuth

61 comments »

Twitter isn’t for everyone, and you may have dismissed the service a long time ago. But regardless of your own use, it’s hard to dismiss the phenomenon itself and the passion of so many that has built up around it.

No matter how long the outage du jour, Twitter users continue to stay attached to the service despite an ever-changing backdrop of alternatives.

Blogging isn’t for everyone either. But unlike blogging, Twitter enjoys a far a greater variety of users — they include people, many people, who would never think of starting a blog and people who would never touch an RSS reader. The 140 character limit is a plus for Twitter, but it isn’t all.

What explains the Twitter phenomenon then? What produces the positive feeling and the strong attachment among those who tweet? And moreover: How can other systems learn from this?

The answer lies in understanding Audience.
Twitter has a simple premise: You tweet & the message is pushed to your friends. The actual mechanics are slightly different (messages go to everyone who follows you, whether they’re your “friends” or not, assuming your stream is public) — but from a user’s perspective, the circle of receivers consists only of the people they know. Everyone else is part of a faceless crowd that’s hidden behind the follower count.

This simple premise holds the key to Twitter’s success: messages go to a well-defined audience. In the moment you release a tweet, you know who’s on the line and you have an idea of who can catch a glimpse of your message. @replies are the best illustration for this sense of audience: Even though Twitter is not a point-to-point message delivery system (let alone a reliable one), @replies are sent with the understanding that they will be read by the intended people because they are known to be in the audience. (Imagine a newspaper article that suddenly greeted a specific reader.)

Blogging on the other hand has no such clearly defined audience. An aspiring blogger who hasn’t crossed the chasm speaks into the void. Direct feedback can only come in the form of written comments (a relatively high barrier of effort) and it’s diminished by spam and vocal trolls these days.

FeedBurner’s subscriber count only provides the equivalent of Twitter’s opaque follower count and MyBlogLog didn’t solve this problem either.

So it’s not surprising that the majority of blogs are abandoned — the most-cited reason being “No one was reading it.” No one might be following your Twitter stream either, but Twitter is designed for network effects to take hold and given the natural reciprocity among groups of friends, it’s likely that most people have at least a handful of followers they know.

Back to Twitter: Why Audience works
Twitter works and enjoys such strong attachment because it provides real-time access to a well-defined audience. The backlog of all previous tweets is a guarantee of permanence (you can even search it) and you can catch up on it anytime. As a result, people use Twitter because they have an idea of who will see their lightweight messages and this sense of audience is reinforced by @replies, re-tweets and references in future conversations (online and offline).

Designing for the sense of Audience is a powerful tool to create cohesion and a sense of utility among users of a service. This lesson from Twitter can apply to many other services too. But before leaving the current discussion, it’s helpful to look at a service that has missed the full power of Audience so far.

Facebook: Designed for Audience? Not so much.
Facebook isn’t about Audience? That’s ridiculous, you’ll say — so let me clarify. I fully agree that social network profiles are all about self-expression and being seen, but a platform for self-expression isn’t necessarily designed for the audience that does “the seeing.”

Profile Pages on Facebook can have audiences of course, but this requires that users continually roam Facebook to look for news in their network. Facebook realized this limitation and introduced the News Feed. Its intent was to move a user’s “acts and performances” from the stage of the profile page to a single and central stage, a single place for Audience.

Sharing with the News Feed: Did it ever reach my friends?
Facebook was the first major social network to introduce the News Feed concept, which has since become a standard sauce for stickiness in many places (although not StudiVZ surprisingly). But Facebook’s implementation of the News Feed doesn’t capture the full power of designing for Audience: While Twitter distributes every message consistently, Facebook decides algorithmically which update is shown to whom. Algorithmic filtering is nice in theory, but such black-box behavior is simply unpredictable for the user.

“When I post new things, will my friends actually see them?”, one might wonder. And conversely: “Have my friends posted something that I’m not seeing? The news feed is cluttered right now with people I don’t care about.” Anything that’s unpredictable produces a feeling of uncertainty — and that’s never a comfortable feeling.

Even with Facebook’s recent attempts to introduce smarter filters, users only have relative means to customize their feed (more of this, less of that). Furthermore, there is mostly just one kind of feedback that users can give on the News Feed: comments. Imagine a concert, in which you could only leave written notes as you left — no clapping, no booing.

Because users don’t really know who’s listening on Facebook and who isn’t, the platform hasn’t been embraced as a place to publish proactively. Publishing events or photos is mostly push-driven (and generates an email — “you are invited to an event” or “tagged in a photo”). But for everything else you share, do you know if it ever reached your friends?

Who capitalized on this gap? FriendFeed.
It’s the same setup as Twitter, but with more content: You know who’s listening and you choose the people you listen to. A useful premise but it also has a catch: the word “more”. Too much content, too many people — which is exactly the problem that Facebook is trying to address with its algorithmic feed. But what’s a solution then? It’s not the “middle ground” and it has nothing to do with smarter filters.

The answer is feedback loops. But that opens up another discussion. If you’d like to read more, I have a separate post on my website, in which I elaborate on how to design for Audience.

credit - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/08/10/why-twitter-hasnt-failed-the-power-of-audience/

Facebook’s iPhone App Has 1 Million Users

Jason Kincaid

35 comments »

Jed Stremel, Director of Mobile at Facebook, just announced at our Mobile Web Wars Roundtable that Facebook’s iPhone/iPod app has reached 1 million users.

Facebook is currently ranked as the 6th most popular free application on Apple’s App Store, and has been among the store’s top applications since the store’s launch on July 10. We posted initial download numbers for the apps soon after the store’s launch (Facebook had around 9,000 downloads at the time). Since then, Apple has changed its policy and no longer posts the number of downloads for each app, so we need to rely on developers to report their figures.

We’ve asked MySpace for their corresponding numbers. Off hand, John Faith, GM and VP of Mobile for MySpace was able to tell us that their mobile WAP site sees 1.7 million uniques a day (users can access the MySpace WAP site without using the native application). This is certainly a large figure, but it doesn’t provide a direct comparison. We’ll update the post when we can get more comparable numbers.

At Facebook’s f8 conference this week, the company announced that it would soon be open sourcing its iPhone application, so we can expect to see a number of copy cats in the near future.

credit - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/25/facebooks-iphone-app-has-1-million-users/

Facebook Connect Coming To iPhone This Fall

Nik Cubrilovic

19 comments »

Today at the f8 conference Benjamin Ling revealed that Facebook will be releasing a Cocoa framework for the iPhone that will allow application developers to integrate with Facebook Connect. The framework is expected to be released sometime in the fall, and will take the form of an SDK that can be used by developers of iPhone applications. Facebook Connect allows applications to integrate the facebook platform and the identity of users into their own applications.

Currently Facebook Connect is only available for web applications, but the announcement of an iPhone SDK is the first sign that Facebook is considering both mobile and desktop platforms as part of their vision.

credit - http://www.techcrunch.com/2008/07/23/facebook-connect-coming-to-iphone-this-fall/

July 24, 2008 — 09:30 AM PDT — by Paul Glazowski —

Seeing as how Web services today are becoming more and more multi-faceted and multi-functional, particularly in the social networking and social media space, it really is open to debate what is and what is not part of a specific segment of the market. Where blogging starts and where networking ends, for instance, is a gray area that has grown ever larger with time. Mobile utilities in particular have evolved to contain powerful assets that accomplish several tasks at once.

Perhaps nothing better exemplifies this fact than the items which can now be found within Apple’s App Store, where the supply of downloads for the iPhone (and its slightly-less-phenomenal sibling, the iPod touch) expand with each passing week. So we focus today on that very storefront, to determine which applications now available can help to best enable mobile blogging in all its myriad forms and purposes, wherever cellular, Wi-Fi, and/or GPS signals might be found.

Good ol’ run-of-the-mill blogging: TypePad and WordPress

If we burrow down to the core of the blogging world, there are several platforms which sport robust frameworks, and many of them are free to use. WordPress, TypePad, Blogger, Live Spaces, are just a few that sport mass userships and audiences. But only two currently reside as native, officially-released applications within the iPhone/iPod touch paradigm. They are, as we noted recently, TypePad and Wordpress.

WordPress arrived with its own utility after TypePad had introduced itself to users. Both have received good reviews so far. And why not, really. Both aptly manage the basic tasks of posting and editing blogs, and each enables the user to upload photos from a library or take new images via the iPhone’s onboard camera.

I have already offered my own impressions about both applications, and happen to favor TypePad’s application a bit more than the WordPress release because TypePad provides support for English and French, but both essentially get the same job done similarly well. Neither path will lead you astray. Quite honestly, as I said before, one’s choice of application will naturally fall to whichever platform one prefers as it appears on the desktop, and whether one has invested much time in either setting.

Micro-blogging

There are even more choices in the microblogging realm, and if photos are one’s main source of intrigue, the list is even more voluminous. So let’s dig in. To start, there are the Twitter-specific applications: Twitterific, available for free and ad-supported [iTunes]; or as a paid-for premium version [iTunes]; Twittelator [iTunes]; and Twinkle [iTunes].

My experiences, coupled with feedback from others tells me Twitterific is the most pleasant, as it has the benefit of housing a browser within.

If you’re one to click on URLs posted by friends, this is definitely a convenient feature. And in my trials, it has proven quite reliable. It is most useful due to the fact that it makes any transfer out of Twitterific and into Safari Mobile unnecessary. Once you’ve taken a look at whatever webpage you were directed to, you can close the browser and immediately carry on with reading incoming feeds. No need to repetitively enter and exit applications.

Twinkle is aesthetically pleasing, no doubt, and it adds a location dimension to facilitate conversation among users within a given area. But the application has been known to crash regularly. According to Tapulous, Inc, the creator of Twinkle, an update should arrive this Friday, July 25, to fix bugs and “other minor problems.”

Miscellaneous and (even more) multi-functional

Here’s where it all comes down to personal tastes and desires. Some applications will connect you to numerous services for easy, synchronized posting. Others will help you satisfy only your tendencies as a photo blogger. Some will help you connect with friends, micro-blog a bit, and even post duplicate hellos and how-are-yous to Twitter. That’s because… well… it all comes back to Twitter, doesn’t it? Without further adieu, here are some items for your consideration listed in no particularly prearranged order.

LifeCast [iTunes]: Manage your day’s events in organized fashion. Want to keep what you do for work and for play exclusive? No problem. LifeCast is about keeping things tidy. Also, non-English speakers will enjoy its slightly multi-lingual reach. French, German, Italian, and Spanish are all supported. Also, if you’d like to post text to Blogger, you may. The same goes for Tumblr (photos, too). Geo-tagging comes with.

Bluepulse [iTunes]: We gave this a brief review some days ago. And while it wasn’t my personal cup of tea, it’s something that others have shown an affinity for. If you’d like something Twitter-esque (with a Twitter connection, to boot), albeit in a way that allows you to message multiple people of your choosing — rather than, say, everyone on your friends and followers list(s) — this one’s a treat. The layout may take some getting used to, though. It appears designed to make existing Bluepulse users comfortable when making “the switch.”

ShoZu [iTunes]: If this one were to be described in a single word (not yet recognized by the grammar police), it would no doubt be “awesomeness.” You need only look at the list of supported sites and services to get a grasp on what this ShoZu is all about. It is the Swiss Army knife of online social interaction (so far as photo uploads and status updates and things are concerned, anyway).

Pownce [iTunes]: Despite what the heads at Pownce say, this one’s original intent was most definitely to give Twitter a little slap-slap. Which seemed like it might’ve been possible, until it didn’t. For what it’s worth, it’s still a nifty service. If you want it on your iPhone, the download is available.

Kyte [iTunes]: Mobile photo blogging is super cool, for sure. But mobile slideshow blogging is exponentially more kick-ass. Kyte makes that happen. For this one you might need to take a few minutes to craft something nice, but it’s worth it.

Clowdy Photo Blogger [iTunes]: The name says it all. It also lets you see photos taken “nearby” to where you stand. A number of downloads currently available in the App Store do this as well, but Clowdy works the photo realm exclusively. It’s free, and it’s all of 0.1MB large.

Graffitio [iTunes]: This operates with the same location-based concept as Clowdy, but it’s text-based. The best way to explain it is to offer an example. Say you’re at a restaurant. You can check Graffitio to see if a Facebook-like “wall” has been created for the place. If so, you can post a public message to it. If a wall doesn’t exist, create one. If enough people participate in the experiment and visit various locations regularly, it starts to become a rather interesting series of whiteboards.

Speaking of Facebook, the Web’s largest social network (arguably) has its own application [iTunes], as many have already learned, and in some respects, it’s about blogging, too. If you’re one to routinely update your status, and your friends do too, what’s to say you all aren’t blogging? And with the recent update to the application, introduced late last week, you can post to your own wall as well as those of friends. Upload photos seamlessly too.

credit - http://mashable.com/2008/07/24/iphone-blogging/