Social Media: Facebook, YouTube and FriendFeed Say Real Time is Where it’s @
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Written By Esther Assaad | May 5, 2009 | Share This
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The spike in success for sites like Twitter and Digg make it clear - the real-time web is here and its seems like just about everyone is jumping on the bandwagon.
Let’s take a look at some of the recent events that are bringing the web closer to the here and now.
Facebook Gets a Face Lift
In March Facebook rolled out some major changes to its homepage. Along with the new look and feel – the main modification was News Feed updates in real-time. Users are now able to see up to the minute status updates, comments, and links from friends. In addition Facebook is rolling out a new feature that allows users to update the page without having to refresh it in the browser – another way to make what happens on the site in real time more accessible to users.
YouTube RealTime
The trend continues in April with YouTube now in the testing phase of bringing real-time streams to its site. The new feature allows users to see which friends are currently online, what videos they are watching, and the comments they leave. The features were extended to 100 users during the testing period. Each of those 100 users are able to extend an invite to 25 additional users. YouTube is already viral, but the changes make it even easier to share, interact, and engage.
FriendFeed Revamps
Right behind Facebook - FriendFeed rolled out a redesign first in optional beta in early April – now applied site-wide. The redesign offers some new features such as greater control over who can see your items, navigational changes, improved search capabilities, and FriendFeed via email, but again – the main offering is updates pushed out in real time – no need to hit that refresh button. Though the changes were met with some backlash from FriendFeed users for being somewhat annoying by moving too fast – you do have the ability to pause the live feed so items you’re browsing don’t disappear when new items enter the feed.
Digging the Bar
Speaking of backlash, One of Ad: Tech SF’s opening keynote presentations was an interview between Wired.com editor Evan Hansen and Kevin Rose - founder of Digg.com and all around web celeb. The interview left one wondering what Digg has up its sleeve as Rose referenced an upcoming product release, but provided little further detail.
Rose also addressed the recent launch of the DiggBar. The tool bar was created as a way to create a more seamless process for users to Digg content, allowing for a faster, more real-time experience. However it received a great deal of backlash, not for being too fast like FriendFeed but for its SEO implications due to URL shortening and the effect on traffic that Digg’s iframe will have. Despite the backlash, Rose stated that the product has been well received with Digg registered users and that roughly 45% of Diggs are occurring via the DiggBar.
Rose noted that they are continually tweaking and improving the toolbar based on user feedback and Digg has already made some changes to the product based on user concerns. April 22nd marked the re-launch of the DiggBar. The main change is that now the bar will only be visible to registered users. Registered users will now have the option to turn the DiggBar off if they so choose from the settings panel. The bar has also shrunk in size a bit in order to take up less space on the sites a user visits. It seems, though, that Digg still hasn’t managed to please everyone. The re-launch also came with the removal of the ‘view count’ feature on the bar which counts the number of times a site has been visited via the Digg bar and which many saw as a key feature. Digg sites that the reason for “temporary” removal of this view counter is that it is no longer a true representation of the global views for content since only registered users are utilizing the DiggBar.
Twitter Blows Up
The April 17th Oprah episode pretty much sealed the deal - not only do your friends and coworkers know the answer to “what are you doing?”, but so does your mother’s book club. I’m not sure why Oprah loves it (other than her “famous friends” are all over it), but Twitter is a great way to get up to the minute news or find out what your favorite celebs and (non-famous?) friends are doing right now.
Since Twitter has already mastered the real time game – they are just working on ways to improve the experience. Two new features - Search and Twitter Trends - have been available to a select few test groups for a few months now and as of April 30th – have been rolled out to all Twitter users.
Twitter seems to see where this is heading. With all the information and content being pushed out onto the web in real-time – improved ways to organize and navigate it all to find the things you’re interested in is the clear next step.
So What’s Next for Marketers?
For marketers the question is, what are the implications of this real time behavior for our brands? Skittles tried to capture the real time nature of Twitter by turning their homepage over to a Twitter feed but this backfired when jokers hijacked the feed with Skittles profanity.
Fast moving messaging and updating means, by necessity, an ongoing presence in social media. When brands already have resources ready and dedicated to outreach and conversation monitoring they can be ready to respond to both good and bad without delay. Domino’s Pizza saw recently how a lack of social media presence slowed their response to a negative social media story. Even a delay of a few hours is enough to do serious harm to a brand’s reputation in the fast moving environment of the real-time web.
Questions or comments? Feel free to leave them here or check out Reprise Media folks on Twitter.
Topics: Facebook, Social Media, Technology, Twitter, YouTube |
Ester,
Nice post. Keep up the good work. Good luck.
Dan Shea
In some ways time is where it’s at. Real-time is awesome for seeing breaking information, but if you could then dive into time slices for particular kinds of content … that would be killer. Of course, it would also present a very different kind of marketing challenge.