The Danosphere.

Facebook, the monolith social network currently in charge of the social networking scene, needs to make money… like… really needs to make money. With an impressive 200million users you’d think the site would be churning out profit hand over fist, but it’s not. In an attempt to monetize and keep up with the explosive growth of Twitter, Facebook redesigned last month to look more like twitter, or did it? 

When you look closely at the redesign, the real emphasis is more about ‘pages’ and less about ‘trying to be like twitter’. But Facebook doesn’t want to shock it’s userbase with this new emphasis, it wants a slow dip in the pool, as opposed to a splash. 

And so it begins. If you haven’t noticed yet, your “highlights” column is probably about 50% page-based activities… your friends liking brands, ‘fanning’ brands, commenting etc. Facebook’s next move was relocating ‘People You May Know’ above the fold… previously it was underneath the ‘highlights’ column, generally below the fold. While the location change didn’t seem to be a big deal, the next move certainly is- “People You May Know’ is now ‘Suggestions’. These newfound ‘Suggesstions’ extend beyond freinds… to brands. Finally the Facebook vision is coming full circle, as it actively ‘pushes’ brands at you based on the activities of your friends. It pulls this off in a cunning way, by mixing in the brands with your friends.

Here is a great example of this, Facebook’s ‘Suggestions’ for me (and a bunch of people I don’t know):

Don’t get me wrong I love the office, but for me Facebook is about connecting with friends NOT about beomcing a poster child for a brand just because i may use/like them. I like “The Office” I watch it every week, but I am not a Facebook Fan of the Office. 

As Facebook pushes forward with it’s plans to monetize the question becomes “at what cost?”. Is Facebook alienating users by putting so much emphasis on brands and activities centered around brands? What do you think?

This week Digg released their “Diggbar” which also seconds as a URL shortening service. What this means for the end user… or more importantly the content generating users whose content is submitted to digg by other people is that- now Digg is stealing your traffic!

Mashable was quick to give Digg the ole’ reach-around, making it sound so soft and cuddly! But the truth is that Digg is milking traffic from other sites, without their permission at all. How much traffic are they stealing? Enough to boost their 20million unique visitors by about 20%. On top of all that (as if that isn’t enough) they also inject ads into the diggbar frame, so they are stealing views AND revenue from the sites that are shared via their shortened URL.

I could go on for ages about how much that sucks for the sites losing traffic and ad revenue to digg, or about how crappy shortened URLs are for the web, or about how the diggbar is killing SEO for sites framed by it, but luckily someone has already done that for me.

Want the truth? Here is it:

The Truth about Digg’s DiggBar

While I was having lunch with my buddy and fellow twitterer @wittyphrase we got to discussing twitter, and that naturally led to discussing tweetdeck, one of the most popular twitter clients to date. Tweedeck is a great tool for organizing and managing your twitter life, but it could be better, here are a few suggestions.

Replace “Mystery Meat” Navigation

What do these buttons do? Can you tell? I couldn’t, and it took me about a week to get used to the fact you have to roll over each button in order to discern its function. I think useability would increase by making the functions of the buttons more apparent, even if that means adding a label to the right of the button or whatever (or replacing the icon with a label).

Time Format

I am not in the military, and thus 24hr time does not instantly correlate to 12hr time for me. Also, I don’t like doing math. It would be nice if the time format were configurable so I could choose between 12 and 24hr time formats.

Group Memory

I use tweetdeck both at home and at work. It is pretty annoying that when I get home, I need to “regroup” all the tweeps I had seperated into groups at work. If there was some persistence of the groups across machines that would be incredibly useful.

Drag and Drop

Because I am a Flex Developer, I can tell you right now tweedeck was built in Flex, which is cool. I can also tell you drag and drop is very easy to implement in Flex and would be a huge useability plus for tweetdeck. Being able to drag columns around and drag users to and from groups would be much easier than the current process which involves clicking alot of buttons and checking a lot of checkboxes.

Filtering

If I have created a group and added tweeps to it, I don’t need to also see their tweets repeated in my “All Friends” column. If a person is in a group, omit their tweets from the main timeline, or at least make it an option, its rather cumbersom seeing the same tweet in different columns.

More About Me

Tweetdeck doesn’t tell me much about myself. It would be nice if it showed my avatar in the top right along with my API stats. Information on following/followers for my account would be nice as well, especially if it were realtime updated along with the rest of the UI. Right now I have to switch to the Twitter web interface to see new followers and that to me is a nuisance.

Make Tweetdeck Web Accessible

Tweetdeck is built on Flex and AIR, so it should be pretty easy to implement a straight web interface without the AIR wrapper. This would be especially useful if they implemented persisting groups, that way i could use tweetdeck from a webpage at the library and still have all my tweeps neatly organized into groups, and I wouldn’t have to download any executables or runtime environments!

Conversation View

It would be nice if tweetdeck allowed you to break conversation out of the main column somehow. Not really sure what the best way to implement this would be, but tracking back through a converstation using tweetdeck is not always the easiest thing. Showing a conversation similar to the way twitter search does would be very useful.

——————-

That’s all I got, if you have more ideas please post them up in the comments. I really like Tweetdeck, but its the lil things that keep me waiting for “the next great client” that will address all these issues and truly serves as my one stop twitter shop.

Oh, Kevin Rose told me to do this: Follow me on Twitter!

I use alot of social networking sites, and most of them load pretty fast. I decided to run a little test to see which sites loaded the fastest (this is a gotta-have-it-now culture right?). The results are pretty interesting, here they are, with the screen captures of the full tests.

I performed these tests on a weekday around 4:40pm- I figured that’s when everyone would be browsing the web while awaiting the end of the day.

Summary:

Fastest: Linkedin.com

Slowest: Digg.com

Google.com – 0.7s – Control
Linkedin.com – 2.7s
Myspace.com – 2.8s
Facebook.com – 4.6s
Reddit.com – 4.6s
Stumbleupon.com – 6.1s
Twitter.com – 11.5s
Digg.com – 12s

———

Google.com – 0.7s – Control

Linkedin.com – 2.7s

Myspace.com – 2.8s

Facebook.com – 4.6s

Reddit.com – 4.6s

Stumbleupon.com – 6.1s

Twitter.com – 11.5s

Digg.com – 12s

Snipt.org is a nifty little tool for developers / everyone. It’s like twitpic but for code and long text. Punch in some code or a long paragraph, select the language type (“text” for long text), and then snip it! Snipt will give you a short URL to share your content with people via twitter.

Here’s my little snipt for you: http://snipt.org/63