The rush to incorporate real-time status updates has even hit IAC’s Citysearch. Starting today, business owners will be able to create and manage their Twitter accounts directly from a Citysearch page. A restaurant, bar or health clubs’ most recent three tweets will show up alongside their ratings, reviews and other info; Citysearch is also pulling in replies and other tweets that include the business’ Twitter handle.
Citysearch is only the latest company to work on back-end integration with Twitter: Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT) and Google (NSDQ: GOOG) recently brokered data-sharing deals with the service for search, and LinkedIn also added Twitter support. For Citysearch, adding remote Twitter access is part of an ongoing effort to become the most comprehensive online resource for local businesses—particularly in the face of more competition from Yelp, and now, even Google.
“This is another way for us to help businesses manage—or even just create—their social identities, because it gives them one place to respond to reviews, update Facebook and post to Twitter,” said Kara Nortman, Citysearch’s SVP, publishing.
While there’s no financial gain for Citysearch (or Twitter) from the integration right now, Nortman hinted that the company had its eyes on a potential “premium” social media offering in the future: “Down the road, we think about rolling out enhanced features—business owners could pull content out of tweets for example, and highlight it on their page,” she said. “But we’re focused on keeping everything free right now.”
I asked Nortman about potential ad clutter—since Citysearch runs ads on its local business listings, and business owners can create sponsored tweets from third-party services like 12seconds—but she said the company had no plans to “interfere or restrict” the users’ access to Twitter. Meanwhile, she acknowledged that including tweets on business pages would have SEO benefits, particularly with the big search engines making it a point to index tweets.
Source:
http://paidcontent.org/article/419-citysearch-gets-real-time-fever-lets-biz-owners-log-in-update-twitter-r/
Web Design Firms Chicago
Showing posts with label LinkedIn. Show all posts
Showing posts with label LinkedIn. Show all posts
Monday, December 7, 2009
Thursday, December 3, 2009
Facebook’s Killer Feature: The Mutual Friends List
2009 has been a busy year for Facebook. The Social Networking Service just reached a whopping 350 million users. It redesigned its site, then redesigned those redesigns (say that three times fast). And as Mark Zuckerberg, the site’s founder and chief executive, announced Tuesday, the company is getting ready to release a new set of privacy policies in the coming weeks.
Facebook has also been on the receiving end of some heavy criticism this year for an array of privacy issues and a perceived desire to look and act more like Twitter. Some of these concerns are valid, and some are just the growing pains of a five-year-old company in a market that continues to change and adapt at breakneck speeds.
All of that aside for a moment, I believe that Facebook has one important, underutilized feature that no other site can replicate or compete with: the “mutual friends” list.
When you go to an individual’s Facebook Page, the list sits in a little box on the left of the page, visually displaying who you know in common. For me, this often-overlooked feature has become an integral part of my Facebook experience. Sure, I still go to the site to update my status and peruse my news feeds, but I use Mutual Friends more than anything else.
This feature enables me to supplement the real world with additional digital information. When I go to a meeting or party, I take a minute to look up who’s attending and quickly explore friends we might share. It’s the perfect digital icebreaker. Increasingly, when I go to a conference and meet someone new, I’ll sneak into the hallway and look them up, too. Or, if they seem unencumbered by potential privacy concerns, we pull out our phones, and using Facebook’s mobile application, look each other up.
Last year, for example, I met Wired columnist Steven Levy at a conference in Boston. After a few minutes chatting about mundane tech stories, we quickly pulled out our laptops, zipped along to Facebook.com and sat for an hour discussing who we knew in common.
Of course, the “mutual friends” list has its drawbacks. Maybe I don’t want you to know we are both friends with the same political activist. Then there are the random acquaintances you’ve collected over the years — they’re not really friends, even though they send you messages that say “Hi, we have 10 friends in common so we must be friends!”
Still, for me, the Mutual Friends list has become an integral part of my digital life.
And five years after the site’s launch, this feature is something only Facebook really offers. It would be close to impossible for Twitter to do, since its service is built on a find-and-follow mentality. I follow people I’m not friends with, and in turn, people I’ve never met follow me.
What about Google’s Gmail? Its address book, although a prodigious resource, stores every e-mail address you’ve ever encountered, including those random Craigslist purchasers and every spammer who made it over the drawbridge and through its filter.
LinkedIn, the business social connection site, is Facebook’s closest competitor in the mutual-friends arena, but it generally connects people based on work affiliations, whereas Facebook tends to include personal friends, family and professional connections.
As the Facebook community continues to grow by over 600,000 people a day, there is a lot of potential for Facebook to move beyond who we know in common to what we know in common. As I update my status with movies I’ve seen, books I’m reading or news articles I like, these features could help make all kinds of conversation — not just introductory ones — a lot more engaging.
Source:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/facebooks-killer-feature-the-mutual-friends-list/
Professional Website Design Services
Facebook has also been on the receiving end of some heavy criticism this year for an array of privacy issues and a perceived desire to look and act more like Twitter. Some of these concerns are valid, and some are just the growing pains of a five-year-old company in a market that continues to change and adapt at breakneck speeds.
All of that aside for a moment, I believe that Facebook has one important, underutilized feature that no other site can replicate or compete with: the “mutual friends” list.
When you go to an individual’s Facebook Page, the list sits in a little box on the left of the page, visually displaying who you know in common. For me, this often-overlooked feature has become an integral part of my Facebook experience. Sure, I still go to the site to update my status and peruse my news feeds, but I use Mutual Friends more than anything else.
This feature enables me to supplement the real world with additional digital information. When I go to a meeting or party, I take a minute to look up who’s attending and quickly explore friends we might share. It’s the perfect digital icebreaker. Increasingly, when I go to a conference and meet someone new, I’ll sneak into the hallway and look them up, too. Or, if they seem unencumbered by potential privacy concerns, we pull out our phones, and using Facebook’s mobile application, look each other up.
Last year, for example, I met Wired columnist Steven Levy at a conference in Boston. After a few minutes chatting about mundane tech stories, we quickly pulled out our laptops, zipped along to Facebook.com and sat for an hour discussing who we knew in common.
Of course, the “mutual friends” list has its drawbacks. Maybe I don’t want you to know we are both friends with the same political activist. Then there are the random acquaintances you’ve collected over the years — they’re not really friends, even though they send you messages that say “Hi, we have 10 friends in common so we must be friends!”
Still, for me, the Mutual Friends list has become an integral part of my digital life.
And five years after the site’s launch, this feature is something only Facebook really offers. It would be close to impossible for Twitter to do, since its service is built on a find-and-follow mentality. I follow people I’m not friends with, and in turn, people I’ve never met follow me.
What about Google’s Gmail? Its address book, although a prodigious resource, stores every e-mail address you’ve ever encountered, including those random Craigslist purchasers and every spammer who made it over the drawbridge and through its filter.
LinkedIn, the business social connection site, is Facebook’s closest competitor in the mutual-friends arena, but it generally connects people based on work affiliations, whereas Facebook tends to include personal friends, family and professional connections.
As the Facebook community continues to grow by over 600,000 people a day, there is a lot of potential for Facebook to move beyond who we know in common to what we know in common. As I update my status with movies I’ve seen, books I’m reading or news articles I like, these features could help make all kinds of conversation — not just introductory ones — a lot more engaging.
Source:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/12/02/facebooks-killer-feature-the-mutual-friends-list/
Professional Website Design Services
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)