The Social Media Minute

By John Conroy | Published Sep 12, 2008

Social Media moves so fast, its hard to keep up. Here's the weeks news from the trenches in scan-friendly format.

This week:

Facebook Flip-Flops Over New Design
Enterprise Microblogger Yammer Scoops Techcrunch50 Top Prize
New iTunes is Genius. Especially for those with half a brain.
Google Apps on Blackberry (as discovered at RWW for Pastors)
Google Mobile Search with My Location
The Best of Friendfeed

Facebook Flip-flops Over New Design

The new Facebook UI is splitting opinion down the middle. Half of all users despise it. The other half merely really hate it. So it comes as no surprise that the company has postponed plans to impose the new design on all users from this week, and has murmered something about D-day being postponed for 'a few more weeks.'

While Facebook tries to figure out whether they are going to make the new design mandatory for users or not, developers are left wondering just how this thing is going to play out and whether they are going to have to support versions of their products which were designed for the old Facebook indefinitely.

Yammer scoops Techcrunch50 Top Prize

The Techcrunch50 event ran from September 8th to 10th, offering a high-profile platform for 50 startups to launch and showcase their products. There was also an awards dohickey bolted on to the VC orgy, and Yammer took home first prize of US$50,000.

Erick Schonfeld of Techcrunch calls Yammer 'Twitter with a business model', and says it 'takes the familiar Twitter messaging system and applies it to internal corporate communications.'

We've said before in this column that Twitter should expand the platform to fit organizational needs: ie enable multi-author accounts and enable ringfenced account groups, so we have the satisfaction of knowing that we're awesome and that a cutting-edge, award winning startup also had similar ideas. And that, you'll agree, is the real news here. We're great. In Twitter's defense, they've been busy with operational problems for the past few months, and have probably not been in a position to clamp on new organization-friendly features.

Other notable launchees at TC50 were Fitbit, which builds gadgets which clip onto your clothes and analyses your movement and fitness patterns, interfacing with an online service; and Swype , which builds a 'radical new gesture-based way to input text on touch screens'. Swype's technology was apparently developed, in part at least, by the same guy who came up with the innovative but generally infuriating T9 predictive text entry system on cell phones.

New iTunes is Genius

Steve Jobs looked pretty good for someone who had just risen from the cold embrace of the grave when introducing the new iPod the other day (Bloomberg jumped the gun a bit recently by proclaiming the great man dead and publishing his obituary). He also introduced a few new features to iTunes, and announced that the platform is now the number one distributor of music in the United States.

A cool new feature at iTunes is 'Genius,' which is a sort of semantic, cloud-based tunes dictator which decides which songs go well together, and can autoplay song after song which it thinks you will be in the mood for. Cool for everyone, but particularly for those who have recently undergone a lobotomy.

Google Apps hits Blackberry - Discovered at RWW for Pastors

There's a dedicated online resource for Pastors, Clergy etc. who want to keep up to date with Web technology, and a great review of the new Google Apps on Blackberry facility can be found there . It's called Healyourchurchwebsite.com, and it's basically ReadWriteWeb for those few among us who haven't spent their twenties and thirties running full-bore towards the fiery furnace.

As the author there says about utilizing the new Blackberry/Apps tie-in :
“Think of it in these terms: you get an idea for a sermon, study, budget, and/or praise song while standing in the line at the grocery store. You start your outline document on your trusty BlackBerry - then email your wife, your co-teacher, your committee chair that you’re now sharing this new document with them and that you’ll be able to work on it in about an hour.”

For readers at the other end of the spiritual spectrum, if you can't relate to that kind of talk, substitute words like 'sermon', 'praise song', and 'co-teacher' for 'scam', 'phish' and 'dealer', and you will see why consolidated Google Apps on your Blackberry is a very good thing indeed.

Here's the official Google announcement, where you can get the download link.

Google Mobile Search with My Location

Google announced on Thursday its new geolocation service for Mobile devices. My Location interfaces with Maps and search to bring a bunch of new functions to mobile search, returning weather, businesses in the area and so on, based not on an area which you manually input but your actual real-life location, as figured out with Gears Geolocation API. The mobile Web just got one input variable quicker.