Customer Experience Management (CXM), Information Management, Social Business
 
 
 

The Social Media Minute (22-May-2009)

By ()   May 22, 2009   

Social media moves so fast, it's hard to keep up. Here are the week's top stories in scan-friendly format:

  • Facebook Verified App Directory Now Live
  • Flock is Updated With More Support for Twitter, Other Services
  • Facebook Accepts OpenID
  • Should You Switch Back To Yahoo! For Search?

Facebook Verified App Directory Now Live

On Facebook, there are many applications to chose from if you want to enhance your social networking experience. You can 'give' someone a beer, arrange a meeting or upload photos, all with enhanced Facebook applications.

However, among thousands of Facebook apps, how do you find the ones that are better than the rest? This is where the Facebook Verified App directory comes in to play. The long expected directory now allows application developers to submit their apps for inclusion in the new system, much like iPhone developers apply to have their applications on the iTunes App Store.

We look forward to tracking how the verified app process goes and whether it's a good experience for developers or not.

Flock is Updated With More Support for Twitter, Other Services

Flock, the more social web-savvy cousin of the Mozilla Firefox browser, has been updated to version 2.5. What's new in the Flock browser? The new version adds support for Twitter and provides a sidebar which gives you constant access to your Facebook Chat sessions. These new additions compliment the already 20+ social services Flock has supported.

With Flock, you can easily add images to Flickr, videos to YouTube and interact with Facebook, Bebo, MySpace and others. This social layer is added onto the already-fantastic Firefox browser, making Flock a web machine for active social web users.

Check it out and give us your thoughts in the comments below.

Facebook Accepts OpenID To Login

OpenID is a system whereby a user can have one login that he or she can use to log in to multiple sites — centralized login credentials. OpenID does away with the need to maintain a username and password on each website you visit, as long as the site you're visiting accepts OpenID logins.

The OpenID movement gained a huge mark this week as Facebook announced their support for OpenIDs. This now means you can log in to Facebook using your Gmail credentials or any other OpenID compliant log in system.

This move marks a major move forward for OpenID. Many big companies in the web ecosystem have pledged support for the authentication system, but few have yet to make moves to actually let users utilize OpenID.

Also, this is good news for those who wish Facebook would play nicely with third party web sites and web services. Facebook is known for being a walled garden and not embracing outside services, which goes against the "Web 2.0" mentality of openness and sharing.

Should You Switch Back To Yahoo! For Search?

People who utilize social media whether for work, keeping in touch with colleagues or staying connected with their family produce a lot of pieces of web content. Looking at Google's suite of available web tools, you can easily get consumed into the Google-verse.

If you use Gmail for email, Google Talk to IM and Google Docs for word processing, you are trusting Google with massive amount of grip surrounding your online life.

If this concerns you, as Gina Trapiani points out, you can break the cycle by relying on Yahoo for your web searches. In a recent blog post, Gina shows how Yahoo still has a great search engine that in many ways rivals Google's search algorithms. If Google's information monopoly is a concern to you, read Gina's post and consider switching to Yahoo.

 
 
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