Last week, a conference was held by Facebook to discuss the future of the company and the direction that they were preparing to take for the social media giant. According to Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook were planning to become more of a media hub and have established partnerships with Spotify, the Guardian, Netflix, and other media companies; this would allow users to read up on media stories without ever leaving the Facebook website (1). These changes will allow Facebook users to share their interests even more and to let all of their friends know what music/movies/television are most important to them. (This would also be used to target specific advertisements to users.) The Washington Post has also just revealed a Facebook version for the newspaper, and users can share stories and see what their friends are reading.
One of these media companies, Netflix, had a social media element as a part of is own website, before Facebook, but the feature was unpopular with users, and the company stated that it was "ahead of its time" with this feature as the users felt uncomfortable sharing this information online (2). However, current legislation in the United States, dating from the late 1980s, prevents users from sharing this information on Facebook as it is a breach of privacy, and they are current trying to get new legislation passed.
In addition to offering media and entertainment sharing through Facebook, Facebook also announced that it would be adding a TimeLine feature to a user's profile to document important aspects of the user's life. Mark Zuckerberg called this feature "the story of your life" (2), and it would show a better picture of its users lives through status updates, photographs, and other content shared.
More news in the social networking arena happened this week with Google launching its own social networking website, Google+. Although some feel that Google would not be able to compete with the likes of Facebook (3), I personally feel that Google may give Facebook a run for its money.
Google is widely-used and established; it already has many users signed up to its email service and manages huge amounts of data, which can be used to target marketing campaigns to particular users. Google has also been around a lot longer than Facebook, so there is an element of trust, whereas Facebook always seems to be in the sore spot for privacy concerns. Google also became popular as a search engine because of its simplicity and simplifying the search experience for users. (I believe that Facebook also obtained many of its users from the doomed and unfriendly user interface of MySpace because Facebook was easier to use, although there was no way to customise your own personal pages to the extent of Facebook.) However, Facebook seems to be making mistakes as of late with alienating users by offering radical changes. Google, however, introduces its changes slowly for minimal impact. For example, I know Google uses A/B Testing techniques to test varying changes to its website before launching the changes permanently. Google studies its user data, and Facebook just seems to force these changes, major changes, on its users. I don't think anyone should write off Google+ just yet.
At the moment, I feel that Facebook is the most popular tool for friends to exchange personal information. Twitter is popular for celebrities to keep in touch with their fan base, and it is used more by the media and as a professional tool. MySpace, which was replaced by Facebook, was widely used by its users, but they moved away due to the complexity of MySpace. (Facebook's early days mimicked MySpace with the ability to clutter up your profile pages with many applications and blinking animations, which Facebook eventually did away with, much to the dislike of its users at the time.) MySpace was became a more popular tool for musicians to share their music and generate a fan base, but as MySpace died, musicians turned to join other social media websites to promote their music.
(1) Halliday, Josh. Facebook to transform into an entertainment hub. The Guardian. http://www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2011/sep/22/facebook-transform-entertainment-hub [22 September, 2011].
(2) Levy, Steven. Exclusive: Inside Facebook's bid to reinvent music, news and everrything. Wired Magazine. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/09/facebook-new-profile-apps/ [22 September, 2011].
(3) Levy, Steven. Inside Google+ - How the search giant plans to go social. Wired Magazine. http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2011/06/inside-google-plus-social [28 June, 2011].
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