Real-time Search is a Big Deal, Re-Tweeting Grows up, Google Goes Social, URL Shortening Drama
This week on Facebook
Facebook Rolls Out Real-time Search to Everyone
This may be old news to you, as Facebook has been rolling this functionality out to users gradually over the past month or so.
With the new Facebook Search, which is still accessed by entering search terms in the box on the top right of any page, users will now see the latest status updates and shared content from both friends and all users who have made their profile open to everyone – in addition to more static types of results like applications, pages, notes, and groups.
This is kind of a big deal. Twitter search has revealed the power and demand for real time search, and Facebook realizes that its massive audience can yield broader search results than Twitter.
If you want to ensure that your content and status updates do not appear in people’s search results, visit your Facebook Profile Privacy Settings and make sure that none of your profile sections are set to be visible to “everyone.”
Facebook Lite
Facebook is testing yet ANOTHER new interface called Facebook Lite. It’s looking like it will be provided as an optional way to use Facebook, possibly intended for users in developing countries who are less computer literate and have slower Internet connections.
Let us know if you’ve received an invitation to test out Facebook Lite!
Facebook Buys FriendFeed
Cute
Facebook acquired FriendFeed. The announcement was made on Monday. They paid ~$50 million, $32.5 million of which was paid in stock vesting over “several years.” The general consensus is that the deal was structured to give Facebook access to FriendFeed’s remarkably talented team of engineers.
This week on Tiwtter
Project Retweet
From the Twitter blog: Twitter is making re-tweeting a formal feature of its service.
Many people avoid retweeting because they can’t be bothered with all of the copying and pasting it requires—something particularly vexing for Blackberry users. Twitter is now in the process of figuring out how to make re-tweeting easier, more prevalent, and more useful to users.
This is another case of Twitter letting their users create conventions and then formalizing them. The practices of addressing people with @username and #hashtags are examples of other Twitter features that emerged informally through user innovation and adoption.
This week elsewhere
Google adds social functions to iGoogle
Now you can use Facebook app style applications within iGoogle. We’ll be keeping an eye on uptake of this.
Google to release a new version of Google Search
There’s not much to it, but it’s faster, supposed to search deeper, and attempts to return real-time results (noticing a trend?).
- Try it out at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ (yes it looks exactly like normal Google)
- Reporting from Mashable
Tr.im is Dead! Long live Tr.im!
Tr.im shut its doors on Monday, only to reopen them on Wednesday. We’re not sure how long they’re going to stick around, but their troubles indicate that all is not well in URL shortening land. Maintaining a single URL shortener to serve the entire world seems to be prohibitively expensive, and we have yet to see a viable business grow out of URL shortening.