<h1 style="margin-bottom:2px"><span style="font-weight:normal"><font>Interesting article <font>on the news today, see below:</font></font></span><br>
<span id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_news_title"></span></h1><h1 style="margin-bottom:2px"><span id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_news_title">Has Facebook just unfriended its users?</span></h1>
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<a id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_authorlab" href="http://www.telecomtv.com/go/?ct=9&id=e9381817-0593-417a-8639-c4c53e2a2a10">TelecomTV One</a>
,
<span id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_posted">16 January 2013</span>
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<p>
<span id="ctl00_ContentPlaceHolder1_Subtitle">Facebook
spooked many of its users within minutes of its “major” announcement
yesterday of the company’s new Graph Search, which will delight
advertisers but risk scaring the hell out of Joe Public. Guy Daniels
reports.</span></p>
</div>
<p>
</p><p>
Facebook needed to do something. It was facing increasing criticism
that it was no longer cool, whilst also trying to appease shareholders
post-IPO over its revenue generating potential. And so it made its move.
Could it satisfy both camps – its users and its shareholders?</p>
<p>
The answer appears to be “no”.</p>
<p>
During a press event yesterday evening, which (based on the countless
live tweets and blogs) veered from baffling to incredulous and then to
underwhelming, Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg took to the stage to inject
some coolness back into the social networking site. His definition of
cool: graphs. That’s right, graphs. Social graphs to be precise, which
were lapped upped by the math nerds who instantly understood the power
of this new search tool – it’s not web search, it’s Graph Search. It’s
like a gigantic SQL query right there in your Facebook page. Orgasmic!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
But hang on, this ability to search and filter your friends likes,
photos, locations, timeline – heck, entire social history – is a little
bit intrusive, isn’t it? It certainly is, but Facebook was at pains to
highlight that only information that you share with your friends will be
included in searches. Still, best to check your privacy settings just
in case…</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
Of course, you and I won’t be the only ones using the social graph for
filtering our connections – it will also be used by advertisers to hit
us with extremely targeted advertising. It’s an incredibly powerful, and
potentially lucrative, tool. But will Facebook users really want
multi-national corporations knowing so much about you? The only way to
truly prevent this is to close your account and go elsewhere, which is
too much of a doomsday option for most users – for now. At least, that
will be what Facebook is hoping. There’s no point having the world’s
most powerful ad service if there’s no-one left to reach.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
There’s also not much point having this advanced functionality if users
only spend part of their time on Facebook. What’s needed is for them to
spend 100 per cent of their time on the site. Everything they do, from
messaging to photo sharing, and even browsing, must be done on Facebook
for this to truly be effective. Yes, I added browsing. This after all
was one of the identified areas that Facebook needed to address if it
was to compete better with Google, and now they have finally done it –
sort of. Facebook was signed a deal with Microsoft to add its Bing
search engine to the site.</p>
<p>This was Zuckerberg’s attempt to steal Steve Job’s “one more thing”
moment away from Apple – as towards the end of the press conference he
uttered that famous phrase and the fans went wild with expectation.
Could it be the Facebook Phone? Don’t be silly, it was only Bing. And
great as Bing is, a partnership announcement is simply not cool.
Zuckerberg is many things, but he is not the heir to Steve Jobs.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
As for those wild predictions about a Facebook phone – baseless.
Zuckerberg had gone on record to say there wouldn’t be one. Do analysts
really believe there is room in the market for another phone OS?
Certainly not one that could hope to challenge Apple and Google in the
short term.
</p>
It’s not happening, Facebook didn’t make a hardware announcement, so get over it.
<p>Richard Windsor was one of the few analysts to guess right, commenting on his blog before the launch that:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p style="margin-left:40px">
<cite>“Whatever Facebook announces today, the chances are that most
commentators will get the wrong end of the stick. I do not believe for a
second that Facebook wants to be like Apple. Instead I think this is
about directing and keeping internet traffic for the benefit of its
ability to sell targeted advertising.”</cite></p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
Despite yesterday’s announcement, Facebook remains uncool to many of
its users, especially the influential ones. They will no doubt have
uttered a socially-correct “Meh” at the news. But does it matter? Even
if Facebook doesn’t grow any larger than its current billion-strong
community of active users. Even if many of its users wise up to the
privacy issues and start purging old timeline data, or refuse to relax
their privacy settings, does it matter? Facebook can start to capitalise
financially on those who remain, and that’s still a huge community of
users. Make cash while you can? It badly needs to improve on last year’s
$4.2bn of revenues.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
The markets didn’t appear that impressed though, closing after hours
trading down 2.7 per cent at $30.10 (remember, it opened back in May at a
disappointing $38.23). Looks like the recent uptick since Christmas has
come to an end.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
Here is how Zuckerberg described social graph during the event:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p style="margin-left:40px">
<cite>“This is one of the neatest things we've done in awhile. Graph Search is a completely new way to search for information.”</cite></p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
He added that: “it’s going to take years and years to index the whole
Graph,” and that there would be a limited beta launch now, rolling out
slowly in the months to come. He also very briefly touched on mobile,
but only in the sense that social graph needs to expand from its
English-only and website-only launch:</p>
<p>
</p>
<p style="margin-left:40px">
<cite>“In the future there are obvious things we need to get to, like mobile.”</cite></p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
Bottom line of all this – is this the right way for Facebook to
encourage its users to increase its use of the site, by searching and
divulging more information? The more they use the site, the more the
social graph will learn about them and their habits, and the more the
results of Graph Search will appeal to advertisers. So Google.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>
If it can persuade its users that there are no privacy concerns, then
maybe it will succeed. Does it have to be “cool”? Google isn’t all that
cool (Google+ anyone?), but that doesn’t bother it. Cool is over-rated –
but try telling that to a teenager. And there’s the rub – Facebook
still thinks it needs to be cool and appealing to teens. If this target
group starts to think it’s being exploited, then that’s not cool and
they will walk away from the service. In attempting to encourage
(force?) its users to do more on the site (“more” being activity that is
advertiser-friendly of course), Facebook risks shooting itself in the
foot. This could backfire badly. Time to unfriend.</p>
<p>
<br></p>Source: <a href="http://www.telecomtv.com/comspace_newsDetail.aspx?n=49873&id=e9381817-0593-417a-8639-c4c53e2a2a10&utm_campaign=DailyNews160113HasFBJustUnfriended&utm_medium=email&utm_source=TTV-Daily-News-Alert">http://www.telecomtv.com/comspace_newsDetail.aspx?n=49873&id=e9381817-0593-417a-8639-c4c53e2a2a10&utm_campaign=DailyNews160113HasFBJustUnfriended&utm_medium=email&utm_source=TTV-Daily-News-Alert</a><br clear="all">
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