Facebook mimics Twitter with @replies in Status Updates
by Andy on Sep.10, 2009, under Facebook
Quoted from Facebook.com’s blog:
“One of the most popular features on Facebook is tagging, which gives you the ability to identify and reference people in photos, videos and notes. Today, we are adding a new way to tag people and other things you’re connected to on Facebook — in status updates and other posts from the Publisher. It’s another way to let people know who and what you’re talking about.
People often update their status to reflect their thoughts and feelings, or to mention things they feel like sharing. Sometimes that includes referencing friends, groups or even events they are attending — for instance, posting “Grabbing lunch with Meredith Chin” or “I’m heading to Starbucks Coffee Company — anyone want some coffee?”.
Now, when you are writing a status update and want to add a friend’s name to something you are posting, just include the “@” symbol beforehand. As you type the name of what you would like to reference, a drop-down menu will appear that allows you to choose from your list of friends and other connections, including groups, events, applications and Pages. Soon, you’ll be able to tag friends from applications as well. The “@” symbol will not be displayed in the published status update or post after you’ve added your tags.”
NFL Bans Twitter During Games
by Andy on Sep.02, 2009, under Twitter
There’s one thing that will be missing from Sunday NFL games this fall: Twitter. The league brought down the hammer on the microblogging site Tuesday, instituting new, strict rules that will limit when players, coaches, team personnel, and media can tweet.
According to CNET News, the folks mentioned above must stop tweeting 90 minutes prior to a game and cannot resume until post-game interviews are complete. These limitations are supposed to protect “policies prohibiting play-by-play descriptions of NFL games in progress,” according to a statement from NFL officials. Not only targeting Twitter, the rules apply to other social networking sites like Facebook, too.
While it’s no surprise that the NFL has put the clamp down on its players, coaches and team personnel, it’s a shame that the media won’t be allowed to tweet from games. With the news that a man had received credentials to tweet from press row at St. John’s University men’s basketball games, there was hope Twitter might gain some legitimacy among traditional sports journalists. Oh well, like the old sports axiom says, “There’s always next year.”
Facebook’s Lexicon – The Answer To Google Trends
by Andy on Aug.17, 2009, under Facebook
Facebook has just launched a neat new trend mapping tool, called Lexicon. Similar to Google Trends, it allows you to create a trend graph for different words and phrases posted on Facebook Walls. It has a surprisingly useful interface, with a scroll bar enabling you to zoom in and out to get different views of the trend line. You can compare up to 5 different trends by separating words/phrases with a comma.
Although Lexicon compares favorably to Google Trends, it has some flaws. It only allows single words or words with dashes, and no support for any non-alphanumeric character. Also, to compare apples to apples, Google Trends has a wider range of data – including breakdowns by region, city and language.
Here is an example of Lexicon:
Due some some privacy concerns, Facebook announced in the blog regarding the release the quote,
“We have a cluster of computers that count the number of occurrences of every term (for example, “juno”) across profile, group and event Walls every day. The system strips out all personally identifiable information so that there is no way to track a mention back to a specific person. No human at Facebook ever reads these Wall posts, and Lexicon does not look at personal messages, invitations, or any other private user-to-user communications.”
So this looks fairly useful and has the potential to overtake Google Trends due to the extremely personal and accurate measure of each term. Will more features come soon? I hope they will release a sorting method to only include certain networks or groups of friends, but they may never happen.
What are you thoughts?
Tweet Directly From The Chrome Omnibar
by Andy on Aug.06, 2009, under Twitter
I just heard about an interesting, yet very useful feature you can use from the Google Chrome Omnibar. You can Tweet just as easily as search or typing in a URL. This takes about a minute to set up and can be very useful in Tweeting in a hurry!
Here’s how to do it:
- Add a new search engine – Click the settings button (the wrench) then click options.
- Click manage next to default search engine.
- Add a new search engine using the following url:
- Name it Twitter, then for the nickname choose something easy to remember such as “tweet”
- To tweet, simply then type into the omnibar “tweet Testing out tweeting from the Chrome Omnibar!”‘
http://twitter.com/?status=%sSo check it out and enjoy tweeting from the Google Chrome Omnibar!
