Some of us at Nurenu are old enough to remember what computers were like before the Macintosh. Others can barely remember a time before the iPod.
We are an Apple shop
All of our work is done on iMacs or MacBook Pros. We communicate on our iPhones and use our iPads in meetings and at demonstrations (or just to play Angry Birds, we admit it).
But in many ways beyond the way we work and use technology, Steve Jobs had a tremendous impact on all of our lives.
He had the vision to see the future when computers were still big boxes that filled entire rooms in universities. He saw how technology could enrich our lives in countless ways and had the courage (some say stubbornness) to drag us along for the ride.
Oh we complained plenty when he took away our serial port and floppy drive (iMac), our optical drive (MacBook Air) or keyboard (iPhone). We wondered why we would ever need an iPod or an iPad and then we complained when the iPhone 4S launch didn’t meet our expectations. But then we realized he was a few steps ahead of us and right all along.
Jobs was found of quoting a line from the Whole Earth Catalog that we think fits his legacy perfectly. “Stay hungry and stay foolish.”
Photo Credit: Robert Koehn provided this poignant photo.
Don’t say we didn’t warn you but Facebook has changed yet again.
The other day we all checked our Facebook pages and found that everything was different. The first and most obvious change is the real-time feed of your friends’ updates on the upper right-hand side of the page. Some are calling this the ‘real time Facebook’ while others are calling it distracting.
Facebook has also eliminated the links for “Top Stories” and “Most Recent,” changing the News Feed to adjust its content based on the last time you checked it. You also have the option, via a pull-down menu at the top of the Feed, to change what stories actually appear
But Facebook saved the biggest changes for yesterday’s F8 Developers Conference.
The Timeline – Your Life Online
The change that’s getting the most attention is the Timeline. This is a radical rethinking and redesign of the profile page. Visually and functionally, it’s a whole new profile. Facebook is calling the Timeline the place “to tell your story from beginning, to middle, to now.” Users will love the new layout options and the new class of apps that lets them share the music they are listening to, the food they are cooking or the movies they are watching. Privacy advocates will no doubt hate it for the exact same reasons.
Open Graph – More Than Just Likes
Along with the Timeline, Facebook introduced a new version of Open Graph allowing for deeper and more meaningful connections between users and the things they do and like. Now you can connect to anything in any way that you like. You don’t need to ‘like’ a song, you can just ‘listen’ to it.
This makes possible a whole new class of apps to share lifestyle and media (music and images) and new ways to help you discover new things through your friends’ connections. For example, you can play and share your friends music though the new Spotify app and watch movies from the movie link through the Netflix app. If you see one of your friends is listening to a song on Spotify, you can click on that update in the ticker and listen along with them.
In short, it’s all about verbs – like, listen, read, cook or run instead of just like.
The Future of Search is Social
What does this all mean? Discovery is moving from a search function to a social one. What started with Amazon reviews and tagging has now grown into a whole ecosystem of recommendations based on what our friends and relations have chosen to like, watch, buy, listen to or read. This is what Google is betting on with its +1 button on Google+ and Facebook is right there next to them.
As always, if you have any questions or concerns on how you can use Facebook to promote your business, we are here to help!
If you are feeling a bit overwhelmed with all of the changes Facebook is rolling out lately, have no fear, we are here to help you.
Privacy Improvements
A few weeks ago Facebook added stronger privacy controls, giving users the ability to control who can see each individual update to their feed – friends, friends of friends or the whole world. This was in response to criticism of its previous system where the default setting shared each user’s updates with the whole world unless they changed their privacy settings.
Many privacy advocates pointed out that the typical Facebook user may not realize that while they are sharing updates with friends, they are in fact sharing those updates with the World. These changes, offering more granular control over who sees what, are in response to those concerns.
Subscriber Buttons
The latest change allows users to subscribe to other users’ feeds without having to friend them. You might have noticed ‘subscribe’ buttons popping up on some users’ profiles. This allows you to follow that user without having to be their Facebook friend. It also means the old 5,000 user limit on the number of friends anyone can have is no longer meaningful to high profile users who get hundreds of friend requests a day.
Only posts that are marked public can be shared this way. Anything you post that’s only for friends will only go to your friends. To start sharing, go to your profile page and under your picture there is a “Subscriptions” tab. Click it and follow the directions to start allowing users to subscribe to your feed.
Merging Your Page ‘likes’ into Subscribers
If you are an individual who is maintaining a Page (not a personal profile) for yourself, Facebook will now allow you to merge your Page into your personal profile and maintain all of your old likes as subscribers to your public feed.
This is a subtle shift for Facebook. Previously all sharing on Facebook was synchronous or one-to-one. I can only share with those who I have agreed to be friends with, and vice versa. This model is more like Twitter and Google+ where I can follow other people who choose to make their feeds public, without any obligation on their part to follow me back.
We expect further changes to be announced in the run up to Facebook’s F8 conference next week. And of course we’ll always be here to explain them and make sure you understand how they impact you and your business on Facebook. And of course you should always double check your privacy settings on your personal Facebook account to ensure you are only sharing with the world what you want the world to see.