Facebook for Better or Worse

Facebook has made two changes to its service recently that reflect the two directions it could go in: the ability to send status updates to the entire Facebook network, and the placing of the Event feature directly in the "What's On Your Mind?" box.

The first change, the ability to send your status updates to "Everyone" on Facebook, allows you to broadcast your updates to everyone on the Facebook network. It reflects the company's desire to be everything to everyone. It's a move clearly designed to target Twitter and co-opt their design into Facebook.

The second change, the placing of the Event feature directly in the Status Update box, makes it easier to send a quick event to your network/friends, such as getting together for a drink after work that night. It's a useful enhancement of Facebook's core features, and it makes the service more useful in communicating with your friends.

The status update change has gotten more press because it's an attack on a company that Facebook sees as a competitor. It's the wrong move. Facebook is a useful collection of tools to keep in touch with your friends and organize your social life around. It's become as big as it has because it streamlined the social networking concept. (Remember how you had to go through four different pages to post a comment to your friend's wall on MySpace? Not to mention all the bugs.) Twitter is a service best used for getting news and updates from and about important people and events. Sure, many people have their friends on Twitter but I know my friends' Tweets get lost in the deluge of other stories from the celebrities and news outlets I follow. On Facebook I can get, and want, just updates from my friends about their lives.

By trying to be all the hot things on the Internet at once and attack Twitter, Facebook is losing what made it popular. Allowing me to send my status updates to everyone on Facebook does not enhance my ability to stay in touch with my friends. As Mashable points out in the above article, this change will at best be wasted man hours in programming and at worst will erode Facebook users' confidence that the network is a place for them.

Battle of the Twitterers

Recently while logging into Twitter to add a friend I noticed a small advertisement for TweetDeck, what I assume is Twitter's in-house desktop interface. Being a long-time user of Twhirl I decided to check out its features and see if it might be worth making the switch.

Positives:

• Separation of Tweets, replies, and direct messages into separate columns is a nice improvement over the occasionally confusing one-column view Twhirl uses.


• Mimics Twhirl's retweet/actions mouseover on friends' icons which is a great idea. I always like it when originators humbly integrate a competitor's superior features/improvements, such as IE's adoption of Firefox-like tabs.


• The ability to make groups of friends and separate accordingly may be useful for those users with a huge number of friends.


• You can add your facebook status updates (apparently Twhirl can do this through FriendFeed, but I'm having some trouble setting up my Facebook updates in friendfeed) TweetDeck does allow you to update to Facebook as well.

Negatives:

• It's almost too big. With all the numerous columns and the larger size of Tweets, compared to Twhirl, I feel like I need to be using TweetDeck maximized on my external 24" monitor.


• The close dialog for columns is downright frightening, asking if you really want to "delete" the column, and telling you "this action cannot be undone - choose wisely". All its doing is closing the column and you can reopen it by the corresponding button at the top.


• Facebook support is great and a good addition considering the current popularity of the service. However I prefer my FriendFeed window in Twhirl which, while certainly less widely adopted, is a much more robust addition.

In the end I'll stick with Twhirl for now. It's a more compact application, in terms of screen real estate, and I prefer its features. The one thing that could possibly make me switch is the grouping feature on TweetDeck but I currently don't have a glut of friends on Twitter to justify using it.

Do you have a preference for either program? Or another Twitter desktop interface? Leave a comment and let me know.

AmazonFail

By now those of you with Twitter have probably seen at least a tweet or two on AmazonFail. Basically Amazon employees delisted a bunch of books from their main search with homosexual content or characters by labeling them "Adult". The story was rapidly spread through Twitter by tweets tagged with the #AmazonFail tag.

There's a very rational account of the phenomenon from author Neil Gaiman, whose retweeting of the story certainly helped to boost its awareness. Notably he opines that it's really not clear whether this was an evil or simply stupid move on the part of Amazon/Amazon employees. It's such a huge company that it really could have been either one.

The power of Twitter and social networking is what's amazing about this story. Shortly after the resultant noise Amazon claimed the delisting was not deliberate but a "glitch" and took steps to list those books on their search again. Social networking was able to bring the outrage, the voice of these people, to the ears of such a huge corporation and effect change in an unpopular change. I think those looking for meaning and to define what Twitter and its purpose is have seen its a tool for political as well as commercial awareness.