Posts Tagged ‘facebook’

An introduction to the subscribe button from Facebook

Published: September 21st, 2011

Facebook is extending its strategy to dominate Twitter and Google + by now making it possible for Facebook users to “subscribe” to other user’s public status updates, without even necessarily having to be accepted as a friend on the social network. This very much replicates Twitter….

This new “subscribe” button is the latest in a string of attempts from Facebook to prevent Twitter and Google + overtaking it in the technology stakes. This new button has been launched this week simultaneously with a couple of other new features from Facebook. One being the new smart lists feature – a direct response to Google +’s “circles” – which creates lists for you depending on who you work with, where you live and who you have approved as a family member. The second new feature is their instant messaging mobile app which competes with Blackberry. Facebook Messenger allows Facebook users to instantly message friends using their mobile phones.

The new “subscribe” button, which appears next to the “friends” and “message” buttons at the top of each user’s profile, allows you to subscribe to status updates from any user who has their privacy settings set to public. This allows Google to index the updates and store them so that everyone can see them, meaning that users will now be able to subscribe to feeds of celebrities and other famous figures and view all updates in their news feeds. This definitely represents a Twitter-esque functionality of being able to see what celebrities and political figures are doing without actually having to connect with them as a friend. It also means anyone can subscribe to statuses that you publically display, so always check your privacy settings if you do not want users you are not connected with viewing them.

This new button is being seen as a direct challenge to Twitter by technology experts and changes Facebook from being solely a place where friends can connect with each other, to being a network where information can be displayed and shared easily.

The most interesting thing about the subscriptions feature is that when a user on Facebook adds someone as a friend, as soon as they are accepted they instantly become a subscriber to each other’s public updates.

What next? Well Facebook is expected to announce the launch of a music service that will make it truly different and keep it way ahead of its competitors – watch this space!

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Is Social Media to Blame?

Published: August 10th, 2011

With the recent riots in London, Manchester, Liverpool and other parts of the country, it has forced people to ask how these groups of people were able to organise such mass rioting.

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Would a Facebook/Myspace help button do its job?

Published: November 18th, 2009

The topic of the day on the office radio is not the flooding that has prevented one of my colleagues from reaching work. Oh no. It is the question of whether or not a ‘help’ button should be added to Facebook and Myspace in order to prevent online bullying for children. So why is this topic so important?

Well, according to i-safe, 42% of children in America have been bullied whilst online (I couldn’t easily find any statistics for the UK - though interestingly a page titled ‘where is all the UK bullying statistics’ ranked quite high up in the SERPs, but that’s another blog post!) so the issue seems to be prevalent in many young lives.

The debate is therefore: would the addition of a ‘help’ button reduce this percentage?

My view is…well…no, probably not. The belief that a ‘help’ button would prevent bullying rests upon the belief that children would use it. I’m not so sure this is the case. Research on bullying over the years has shown that the majority of victims are too scared to get help for fear of making bullying worse. And the internet is a bigger place than the playground, where anonymity rules and children access a range of social networking tools. The fear of making it worse is still very real in the virtual world.

Is online bullying any different?

Is online bullying any different?

However, as mentioned in many reports, the button is very small and it can’t harm to add it, even it only prevents/aids a very small number of cases. One life saved or one happy child should be worth a small amount of screen space.

My warning is that those that expect it to work miracles are making a distinction between online and offline bullying culture that doesn’t exist. Offline, the victim is often too scared to tell their teacher, parents, the police. Would a help button somewhere in the playground make any difference?

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