Posts Tagged ‘Facebook’

There’s been a few interesting developments and further discussions on some of the topics we’ve been covering recently, as well as the odd bizarre web-related story in the past few days, all of which I’ve decided to compile into this bumper miscellaneous post. It might be somewhat of a scrambled mish-mash of incongruent pieces – or a perfectly digestible round-up of key opinion and news from the past few days: I’ll let you be the judge…

First up, it’s worth mentioning that the massive gaming expo that is/was Gamescom 2010 went off this weekend with excellent attendance figures, leaving the blogosphere buzzing with anticipation about some of this autumn’s forthcoming titles. By the looks of it, the last quarter of the…

Continue Reading »

You might remember a few months ago that there was rather a lot of fuss and hype about one of Google’s latest products – its real-time communications application, Wave. You probably also remember feeling slightly confused about what it actually did, and how you could benefit from it, and for that reason Google has decided, after just five months, to cease development on Wave – which is somewhat of a shame I feel, but must admit that I also reckon Google probably made the right call on it.

The reason for Wave’s failure is simple – user adoption was far too slow due to the tool being perhaps too versatile, and therefore tricky to market effectively. All in all, it’s probably a…

Continue Reading »

There’s a very conclusive report over at TypePad about the benefits of adding Facebook’s ‘Like’ button to your web site. In short, it boosts traffic from Facebook by around 50%, which is not at all bad considering how easy it is to integrate into your design (check this instruction video at Social Networking Weblog to learn how).

The results are derived from an experiment in which roughly 1,500 TypePad bloggers installed the button (launched by FB last April) on their blogs and then recorded the ensuing boost in traffic. Full graphical data of the results can be found at either TypePad or Mashable.

Whatsmore, once TypePad added the like button as a post footer, bloggers saw a 200% boost in referrals from Facebook,…

Continue Reading »

There’s been a few really top bits of reporting from Techcrunch over the past day or so concerning the developing spat between Mahalo CEO, Jason Calcanis, and Facebook. In short, Calcanis has been extremely public in recent weeks with his dissatisfaction over Facebook’s account termination policies and procedures, claiming that his data continued to be online even after his account deletion.

Facebook responded with some excuse about third-party sites keeping this data online, and re-iterated that they themselves had actually deleted the data. Anyway, with both parties basically calling eachother liars, Techcrunch thought they’d do some actual research rather than merely report the mud-slinging match – and hence tested Mahalo’s policy on account termination.

Surprise, surprise – it’s actually harder to quit…

Continue Reading »

Four New York University students have raised over $200k to launch their privacy-conscious social network, Diaspora, intended as an alternative to Facebook for those becoming increasingly unhappy with the latter’s privacy policies. While it still very early days for Diaspora (they’re unlikely to overtake Facebook’s 500 million user mark any time soon), there can be no question that there certainly is a viable niche in the social network market for such a network as Diaspora – as their remarkably effective fund-raising efforts have shown (initial targets were a paltry $10k, exceeded 20 times over by the actual sum raised).

Furthermore, with the ‘Quit Facebook Day’ (organised by disaffected former users of the network) on May 31st seemingly attracting a reasonable number of…

Continue Reading »