Facebook is about to unveil a feature that will help you protect your account and manage where you are logged in. The new service which is placed under the heading “Account Activity” in the “Account Security” section of the account settings page will allow you to view all of the…
This morning when I woke-up, I found a huge brouhaha around Ping and Facebook. Apparently, these two aren’t BFFs anymore. There was some talk earlier that Facebook and Apple were working closely on a version of Ping. It was rumored that Facebook would provide the social layer to power the next generation iTunes experience.
Well, those rumors proved to be baseless. Apple decided to go with its iTunes membership as a way to jump-start its music social network. Yesterday, Steve Jobs told Kara Swisher there were issues between the two companies.
And Facebook is nowhere on Ping too. Currently, there is no linking, sharing or participation of any kind with Facebook–or Twitter or MySpace either–on Ping, which will work only on the iTunes software on computers, iPhones and iPods. When I asked Jobs about that, he said Apple had indeed held talks with Facebook about a variety of unspecified partnerships related to Ping, but the discussions had gone nowhere. The reason, according to Jobs: Facebook wanted “onerous terms that we could not agree to.”
Jobs did not elaborate on those troublesome terms and also would not say if Ping would incorporate Facebook Connect–which would make it much easier to find friends to share music with.“We could, I guess,” he shrugged. (AllThingsD).
I’m assuming this is about a bigger deal between the two companies and not just the problems many (including me) have observed with Ping and Facebook Connect. Last night before going to sleep, I downloaded iTunes 10 and set up my Ping account (more on that later.) As part of the set-up, I signed up with Facebook Connect so I could find my social graph, ready to recommend songs.
I wonder what happened last night — metaphorically speaking — of course! I woke up this morning, and expected to see Ping activity in my Facebook account, and well let’s just say, nothing is going on. The funny thing is, my Ping is still connected to Facebook Connect, though none of my actions are being sent to Facebook. There are no updates, no mention of artists I am following and absolutely nothing on the app’s wall. I see that I have 26 Facebook friends who are on Ping, but on Ping I find only one of those 26. The emptiness of the Ping’s application on Facebook is sort of like the stuff you leave behind when you break-up with someone and move out of their life.
I’m hoping that the Facebook Connect problems are temporary and a glitch. Otherwise, Ping would really suck and the big losers in this game of corporate one-upmanship are the consumers, who probably — like me– just want recommendations from our friends, then buy those tunes. As a long-time customer of Apple and its iTunes store, I’m severely disappointed that I can’t bring my pre-configured social graph to Ping. I hope Apple and Facebook both come to an agreement and kiss and make-up.
At its core, Twitter is a “recipient-driven medium,” said CEO Evan Williams in a public conversation tonight in San Francisco, Calif. What does that mean? Williams, an unusually theoretical CEO, is happy to explain. Given the opportunity, he will extemporize at a high level about the ideas that drive his company (which is now up to 145 million users). Williams contended that the medium of Twitter is (gasp!) actually well-suited to handle information overload.
Williams, speaking at a Girls in Tech event at Kicklabs, compared Twitter to email, where information overload can be incapacitating. “The problem with email is that it’s sender-driven, and sender-driven media doesn’t scale,” he said. On the one hand, the recipient hates email because “the sender is motivated to send as much stuff as possible because it’s free.” On the other hand, the sender may be dissatisfied because she’s not reaching the right audience for whom she may not even have email addresses.
Blogging (Williams was previously the founder of Blogger) and Tweeting are different (and better) than email, he said, because people who have something to say can find their audience. That’s a much better situation for both the publisher of the information and the consumer of it. So recipient-based media can scale better “in a world of infinite information,” he said.
That’s also a contrast to Google, said Williams, which serves more purpose-driven needs versus Twitter’s focus on “an interest-based world.”
“Google is very good at ‘I need to solve a problem, I need to buy something, I need an answer,” he said. “Twitter is more ‘I’m interested in many things, I don’t know what I need to know.’” Where Google is more likely to be gamed by a company like Demand Media, Twitter is a different beast.
However, there’s still the problem of filtering information on Twitter. “What we need to get much better at is scaling that system so you don’t have to pay attention to everything, but you don’t miss the stuff you care about,” Williams said. He said more such products were on the way.
Williams cited Google CEO Eric Schmidt, who said recently that more information is now produced in two days than was in all of time before 2003. Williams said automated streams of information from services like Fitbit and Blippy — in addition to the proliferation of media — will only add to that problem.
Williams also said to expect forthcoming products that would help filter relevant tweets around events, similar to what it’s doing with location. This would go beyond the user-developed convention of hashtags, he said, though he didn’t elaborate.
FitBit is backed by True Ventures, a venture capital firm that is an investor in the parent company of this blog, Giga Omni Media. Om Malik, founder of Giga Omni Media, is also a venture partner at True.
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Electronic Arts’ new Medal of Honor game — expected to be out in October — has been getting a lot of negative attention recently. The UK defense secretary said publicly that the game should be banned and now GameStop has decided not to sell the game in stores located in…
Mobile use of Twitter has climbed by more than 60 percent since April, when the company introduced its official iPhone client, Twitter CEO Ev Williams said in a status update posted to the company’s blog. The Twitter founder also said that the microblogging service has 145 million registered users, up almost 40 percent from the number it had four months ago.
Williams said that 16 percent of all new users to Twitter start using the service via a mobile device now, compared with five percent before the first official mobile client arrived in April with the purchase of Tweetie — which was renamed Twitter for iPhone (the company now has official clients for BlackBerry and Android as well). Almost half of all users access the service via a mobile device regularly, Williams says, and the Twitter CEO argues that the decision to develop and/or buy official Twitter clients played a big part in this growth:
We did iPhone user tests and confirmed that even though there was a plethora of third-party Twitter apps, people were having trouble finding and selecting one because none were called “Twitter.” This kept them from using Twitter at all.
What’s interesting is that based on the statistics provided by the Twitter founder in his post, almost as many people use the Twitter mobile website as use the iPhone or the BlackBerry apps put together. This could be because new users of the service prefer the website when they are just starting to get a feel for Twitter, and then develop a need for dedicated apps once they become more frequent users.
Twitter’s purchase of Tweetie was controversial at the time, because the company was seen by some as targeting third-party developers and applications — or “hole-fillers,” as they came to be called after a post by Union Square Ventures partner and Twitter backer Fred Wilson. Some of those tensions were smoothed over at the company’s Chirp conference for developers in April, where Twitter made a point of reaching out to the third-party app community. The company has also worked with app developers to implement the recent switchover to using OAuth as authentication for the service.
Twitter recently launched a new app for the iPad — the first app that the company has built from the ground up — which Liz wrote about and James reviewed.
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Post and thumbnail photos courtesy of Flickr user Spencer E. Holtaway
