Linkedin Today has a new look and new channels to make it easier for people to follow news in their fields. See — LinkedIn Today Introduces Content Channels (EContent May 9)
You’ll see “Your News”, Influencer Posts, All Influencers, All Channels.
Delicious has connections with Twitter and Facebook. Sign in through one of those and have links you’ve tweeted or liked or entered there be captured in your Delicious collection. Good idea. Also some smaller improvements. Every bit counts. See the Delicious blog — Springing Forward at Delicious (Mar 28)
Welcome news – LinkedIn’s New Search Aims For More Engagement With Autocomplete, Unified Results And Improved Alerts in TechCrunch.
… one of the first big overhauls that the search function has had in years, with new features including improved autocomplete and suggested phrasing by way of a new algorithm; unified searches across different product categories; and an improved ability to save searches.
Would you like to know what your Facebook Likes reveal about you? Hard to resist. YouAreWhatYouLike can tell you this with a one-click personality test. Tina Sieber at MakeUseOf describes the work of UK researchers behind in You Are What You Like on Facebook [Weekly Facebook Tips] (Mar 20)
The program selects Likes that it has determined have predictive qualities. Overall I thought its analysis of me was somewhat true, although it may be what I want to present. I agree with Sieber in her assessment: “To be honest, in part my results reveal more how I would like to be perceived, rather than how I really am.”
You Are What You Like picks from Facebook Likes
Conclusion points out that:
The study is a reminder that habitual data collected online, including Facebook Likes, browsing histories, search queries, or online purchases, can reveal a lot about us. The researchers draw a positive conclusion and say that these data can be used to automatically customize and thus improve services, marketing, and product recommendations. However, they also caution that the data could easily be used without the user’s consent and without them noticing.
Rash of news about Facebook’s changes to the news feeds to make content specific feeds possible. Good.
News Feed’s design finally catches up with Timeline, VentureBeat (Mar 7) – described the before situation.
As founder and chief executive Mark Zuckerberg just announced at his company’s headquarters this morning, he wants Facebook’s News Feed to be each user’s “best personalized newspaper you can have” with social and local updates on a variety of topics.
We’ll be able to define the kind of feed.
An “all friends” feed to give you a full firehose of updates. It also has a “following” feed to show only branded content from news organizations and companies you’re following — a much-requested feature from people. The “music” feed shows music-related sharing and activity, plus photos or updates from musicians’ Pages. And the “photos” feed shows off the visual side of your network.
Facebook Launches Feeds For Photos, Music, Friends-Only, And More by Josh Constine, Techcrunch (Mar 7) has a video to prepare us for when the rollout arrives.
Marc Sullivan at PCWorld prepared this guide to the new navigation – Hands on with Facebook’s new News Feed
Pew Internet did some digging into how attached Facebook users really are to this social network. Coming and Going on Facebook (Feb 5)
Two thirds (67%) of online adults in the United States are members of Facebook – it is the most popular social networking service. But 61% of those users said they have taken extensive breaks from it for such reasons as they were too busy (21%), content was too boring or gossipy (at least 20%), and they were worried about security and privacy (4%)..
Of those who don’t use Facebook at all, 20% said they used to but quit for much the same reasons existing users took breaks.
A substantial number of people, including younger users, said they intend to spend less time in the coming year. “Some 38% of Facebook users ages 18-29 expect to spend less time using the site in 2013. “ However, the majority in all age brackets anticipate no decline in their visits to Facebook.
Facebook reported having 1.06 billion monthly active users at the end of 2012 ( from The Next Web, Jan 30) , with 618 million daily active users and 680 million monthly active mobile.
At Bing you can tag pages as being related to you or your friends – do this at Bing Tags – then those tagged pages show up in Facebook timelines. Barry Schwartz described it in Bing Linked Pages Now Called Bing Tags (Dec 21, 2012). Bing has said that these tags can be public – though this depends on your privacy settings. Danny Sullivan describes all the pieces involved in this tagging process –
Bing Tags Expands, Makes Pages Linked To Your Profile Public (Jan 22). You may conclude as I have that this is far too much bother and will probably flop.
Facebook Graph Search Is A Disruptive Minefield Of Unintended Consequences
by Anthony Wing Kosner, Forbes (Jan 20, 2013)
This is a thorough and skeptical examination of Facebook’s Graph Search – it may alarm people by what it exposes more than attract. Facebook’s search will not be a threat to Google – Facebook is socially personalized and Google is “contextually” personalized.
Kosner makes a perceptive distinction between Facebook and Twitter.
My Facebook friends are people I actually know. I don’t necessarily agree with (or care about) their taste in music or food or technology, but I have an affection for them that I want to maintain. On Twitter, on the other hand, I follow people who are into all of the kinds of things that I like to write about. Very few of the 374 people that I follow do I actually know in person, but that’s not the point. I consider them my “content friends.” We’re into the same stuff. They tip me off about new things way before they appear on Mashable. It’s like mainlining pure, early adopter tech intelligence. So when I use sites that filter or curate the content I see, I’m much more likely to use my Twitter account as the starting point.
Phil Bradley, writing as an information professional, finds much to value and exploit in Facebook’s new Graph Search. Facebook has started with places, people, and photographs – mainly friends – but eventually it will be a way to be found and to find others.
So – the library needs to have a Facebook presence; it’s becoming vital. However, that’s only stage number one. Stage two is that library and other professional staff also need to be on Facebook, so that they can be found. For example – I have an interest in American History (the Civil War to be precise) and if I’m going to the States to speak at a conference, I’m going to be keen to see if I can pop in some visits to places that will interest me about the Civil War. Yes, of course I can do a general search and get some stuff, but that’s still very clinical. However – if I can see who is going to the conference, and they’re friends of mine, I can use Graph Search to find out if any of their friends are into the same interests, or work at a useful library and maybe I can get an introduction to hook up to an expert quickly. Because of the friendship element, I suspect that I’ll have a much richer experience than if I just wander into the local museum or library.
Valuable read – Why the new Facebook Graph Search is important for librarians by Phil Bradley (Jan 17)
The Internet is abuzz with news about Facebook’s new Graph Search for people, photos, places and interests across subscribers’ networks. At present, this is only available by invitation in the United States, but many have seen enough to describe it and run some screencasts.
Facebook Search for People, Places, Things
Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, announced the new search -
““We are not indexing the Web,” Zuckerberg said. “We are indexing our map of the [social] graph.” Users can navigate through the 240 billion photos on the network, the trillions of user “likes,” and the connections between users. But they can only see content that users have specified as either public and/or viewable to others in their network. Users “want a search tool that can help you get access to things that people have just shared with you,” Zuckerberg said.”
[Source: Facebook Radically Revamps Its Search Engine by Brad Stone (Business Week Jan 15) - page links to several related articles.]
Examples of questions – restaurants friends in San Francisco like, movies any friends have liked, music liked by people who like John Lennon.
Where there are no results, Facebook pulls in Bing for a web search.
Matt Miller speaking at Bloomberg found it couldn’t handle a lot of questions yet. (Video – Facebook’s New Graph Search ‘Has a Long Way to Go’ 2:13 min) Good for finding pictures of friends and the restaurants and music they like, not so good for details. He agreed with the interviewer it could be good for dating, and concluded that he had too much information in the public domain.
Reuters Video at Globe and Mail shows how it works Facebook unveils new search functionality and points out that it may threaten services such as Yelp, and maybe Google (likely Google Plus).
Danny Sullivan delivered a full description with screenshots in
Up Close With Facebook Graph Search (Search Engine Land Jan 15)
Steve Ladurantaye, Globe and Mail, takes us inside a Facebook Search in Inside a new Facebook search – the good, the bad and the creepy (Jan 16)
Tip: “Canadians are also eligible to join the beta testing, provided their language preference is set to “American English.””
Think about Facebook’s Graph Search the next time you “like” anything or upload a photo.