August is certainly not a quiet month in the tech and social media worlds. This week was a busy one. On the 24th, Steve Jobs, again, successfully announced his latest “mind-blowing” product called “iQuit”… but I think everyone has already seen this news in their feeds and across the front pages, so we won’t spend too much time on that subject!
On the social network front, Facebook and Twitter both made announcements this week.
Lets take a look at Facebook first:
Facebook has made some significant changes to its privacy settings. Users now can now share to specific people or groups, essentially increasing user control over who see what.
They also updated their location services. In addition to the existing Places check-ins, users can now add location information to wall posts and photos.
From allfacebook.com
Here’s a list of the major improvements.
- The privacy settings are moving toward individual post windows and profiles.
- Users are gaining the ability to approve tags of themselves in others’ posts and photos.
- All tags will include an attribution of the person who did the tagging.
- Places no longer require physical check-ins, so people can add locations to posts, even from the desktop.
- You don’t need to be friends with someone to tag them in a post or photo.
- You don’t have to like a brand to tag it in a post or photo.
- Facebook has changed the word “everyone” to “public” in privacy settings, for clarity.
- You can customize privacy, or visibility of information, on a post-by-post basis.
- Users can edit the visibility of individual bits of content anytime after they post.
- The changes don’t affect mobile users, at least not for now.
Speaking of Twitter:
Twitter has begun its new photo sharing feature to its users. The new photo service allows users to attach photos with their tweets, which could pretty much replace the similar functions provided by 3rd party vendors such as TwitPic over the past years. It means that users can now generate richer content on Twitter than merely text. But on the other hand, the new function makes Twitter feeds resemble a Facebook wall post, which has always allowed users to share many types of media content.
Are we forgetting about Google+?
Last week at a Social Media Today Webinar, Our CEO Maggie Fox presented some of the latest stats of Google+ as it approaches its two-month birthday. Instead of going into detail on people’s reaction to functionally, I think it is better to let the numbers do the talking.
From singlegrain.com
- 74% of Google+ users are male
Top 10 Occupations of Google+ users
- 10.05% Software Engineer
- 10.77% Designer
- 13.57% Developer
- 24.56% Engineer
- 4.88% Writer
- 4.23% Web Developer
- 3.67% Software Developer
- 3.05% Programmer
- 3.05% Photographer
- 2.79% Artist
Google+ has gained over 25 million registered users in about two months. But the question is, how many active users are there? Or let me ask you this, when was the last time you checked your Google+ account and saw new feeds from anyone of your circles?
It is not hard to recognize that some of the latest changes Facebook and Twitter made align to the aesthetics of Google+. So do people really need Google+ if other platforms are offering the exact same services? I think we are all still looking forward to see what Google will do next in the social space battle.