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it's like a spam. Today four applicataions? Ok, fine, but what if year after now you will receive 400 applications on every single day? What then? What if your "friends" feeds contains 100.000 new links per day. How you find something interesting then? And when someday 10 of your "friends" turn out to be pedophiles, what does this tell us about you Robert?
Facebook is becoming a network of friends and a platform for social discovery of services and interactive communications within that environment. MySpace was (is?) a game for users to 'chart' by having the most friends - this was exploited by unsigned bands which drove MySpace's exponential growth.
Facebook remains a network of much closer friends with whom you have a much closer (and therefore more reliable) relationship.
If one of your facebook friends turns out to be a paedophile then maybe you have to ask yourself if you are using it as a game (a la MySpace) or as a network and a platform?
If it is the latter, then maybe you should choose your friends more carefully...
Whether Facebook can retain this "social-relevance" as it grows remains, for me, the most interesting aspect of its future evolution.
Also not EVERY app is sent my way. Only the most popular out of my friends list.
By the way, if you have thousends of "friends" then how do you know about them anything? I only have handful and if i'd like to be on track with them it would took me a lot of time to do that.
And unfriending does not help if the significant query run before that. You can define significant by ourselves. A new job for example.
i like netvibes and facebook. but i prefere netvibes, because i am french.
But, remember, I give a LOT of speeches and am a professional networker (I've collected about 4,000 business cards in the past 10 years).
BTW, why do you still have a Hotmail account? Is this a retro thing on your part? ;-)
I just use what works best. Firefox and IE7 both allow you have multiple start pages, why not use them?
No
MySpace was a new experience for most people and so many fell into the trap of the "get as many friends as I can" game, the "animated pink and blue GIFs are awesome" game and the "subject people to obnoxious music when they browse my page" game.
I like to think that the users behind the recent surge of Facebook popularity are now aware of how the nativity of their MySpace days eventually ruined the platform.
Social networking has grown up, I imagine the average age of the user group has too, and so the result is a community thinking how only adding real friends, not spamming the various communication channels and having some imagination in profile photos will result in a nicer place to 'live'.
I think it's kind of similar to the era when e-mail was first introduced én masse to offices. It resulted in chain mails of jokes, scams and warnings being forwarded around by over eager staff. After eventually realising the hideous result of their actions, people seem a lot more mature and sensible regarding email now.
Here in the Netherlands relatively few people use Facebook, and in order to stimulate more people joining a social network is (a) to have friends already use it (not the case here in the Netherlands) or (b) to have the content available to everyone so people can see what a cool social network it is (what it does, what the interface looks like etc.). Because netvibes and pageflakes are open, I'd put my money on PF and NV.
"Do Radiators and Gas-Fires have any chance against Smoothie-Makers?"
Tell you what, stick my FB newsfeed into a NV module and i'm happy. I couldn't live without netvibes now but it's nice to have a social presence on the web too. Why do people make this comparision between tools that are for totally disperate purposes? Maybe the guys at FB would like to see it take over the internet but i just can't see it happening!
I'm a tool-geek too (though i'm sure there's a less worrying nomanclature for that!) so right now anything that doesn't fit exactly as i want into NV gets stuck into an 'anyURL' module and i still have access to it from the single tab inside the client browser; isn't FB just a tool anyway? I guess it comes down to browsing style and preference but surely the only point here is that the web has no ONE concrete purpose, it is multi-faceted and suggesting that people will implicitly choose 'superpoking' over reading news truly bemuses me.
Rant over.
That said, I have no interest in social networking aspects to my personal home page.
I go to FB for one thing (or many things) and I use Pageflakes for another! But at least as far as my usage of these sites is concerned, FB and Pageflakes are not competing at all.
And for the record (call me old-fashioned) google is still my home page :)
I don't buy that for a millisecond. Knowing someone "pretty well" isn't glad handing them at a sequence of conferences! You don't have 370 friends, in the pre-social-network sense of the word. If you were diagnosed with cancer and laid up with chemo lets see how many of these 370 "friends" do more than send you an e-getwell card via facebook.
I demand you use a made-up word if you are going to say that "your facebook friends are more interesting". Spell it Friendz or Fvriends or phriends.
Google was best place to start... for searching static pages (or single service). With following characteristics :
1. Google covers most static pages
2. Prioritizes and presents top 10 (rest are mostly useless)
3. Allows to preview
4. Just a gateway - doesn't holdup
As web is becoming more atomic (RSS, widgets...) the main challenge is have a service which can do to widget/service(web2.0) world what Google search did to Static web (web1.0).
Whether one service can become the only container or will we use multiple containers is to be seen.
I assume that openProfileTM (in lines of openID) can be the magic that will be a better glue to web2.0 world. Currently everyone (Facebook, Myspace, Netvibes...) require proprietory profile, which cannot be shared with any other platform.
How are you even invited to speak anywhere? What do you talk about? Facebook, iPhone, and Pownce? Seriously now, no one cares. Go home Scoble.
Seems to me the better question is, Page Flakes concerened about start.com or iGoogle. (speaking of which why iGoogle, is Google suddenly owned by Apple? I like how Apple sues the "iVibrator" but not Google over igoogle. Once again a two headed Apple. But that is for another discussion.
Facebook is cool, but it's going to eventually turn into another MySpace, I guarantee it. People are going to want Facebook to open up more and more, and they will end up doing it and it will be their demise.
Nearly everything on the web works this way, it's amazing at first, then it gets duplicated a 100 times, and so long cool factor.
What happened to YouTube.com ever since they were bought out I have heard almost nothing about it. It's a never ending circle, and Facebook will eventually feel it as well.
"Facebook is becoming the home page for many of us. Why? Because our friends are a lot more interesting than anything over on Yahoo News or TechMeme or other places."
So you're no longer interested in discovering new people, hearing different viewpoints?
"Micah: you should visit my Facebook Profile page. It’s becoming a place where everything flows into from around the Web."
Wow. I can't think of statements that are more likely to push away a more discriminating audience than statements like that.
Ever thought of taking a break until after the baby is born? You sound...brittle.
I don't get where you come from sometimes. It's just a fact that my Facebook profile has gadgets from Upcoming's calendar, Google News, Flickr photos, Twitter, Jaiku, Pownce, and many other places. The author seemed to think that Facebook is only about contacts. It's not. So me stating what I've learned and how the author could learn some more (visit my profile, I've done a lot of the work for you) makes me "brittle?" Wow.
Over on http://www.scobleshow.com I just uploaded a video about Plazes, which shows that I am looking for lots of different viewpoints. Friday I had IBM. I regularly bring my viewers 80 new viewpoints a day through my link blog.
If I'm brittle it's because you just aren't doing your homework when it comes to me.
Netvibes and Pageflakes need to find a way to get there users to build social graphs...not a trivial challenge to overcome.
I'm not familiar with Pageflakes, but Netvibes is my daily news distiller. Can't say that for facebook.
Netvibes isn't social networking for me, it's info-consuming . Facebook isn't news to me, ain't social networking either since Netherlands hasn't really discovered it yet. Dutchmen on Facebook are <20 K, really small compared to www.hyves.nl which has about 2.5 million (f)lying Dutchmen.
For the time being, Netvibes has my vote. Yet neither of these is gonna be the killer app. Both lack too much core functionality (for now) to really shake the web.
VeeJay
Netvibes allows me to consume all forms of content from global news to tech blogs to online deals.
Facebook allows me to see what's going on in my social circles.
They serve 2 very different functions.
Why are they being compared to one another? Neither of them are my start page.
There is one point where they would intersect, though. If Facebook allowed you to get an RSS feed of your news feed, then I could slap that onto netvibes. I'd probably still log into Facebook as the images make the news feed much richer than just text.
The real question is: Which one of these apps will be your future desktop? Will it be someone else?
Call me old fashioned, but I'll take Wizz reader and my Yahoo! homepage over a two-feed widget and wall of B.S. any day.
Like the other posters have said, news != social network.
I think Pageflakes and its users come from a very different perspective. Our users don't typically start out as "looking for another social network" or rushing into creating a public profile. They often start with a personalized homepage that they find compelling and engaging with respect to their own interests and activities, while allowing them to dig deeper into them and get engaged with new and interesting Pagecasts, Flakes and other content created by others. They aren't required to create a public profile or commit to social relationships in order to find our site useful or interesting, but they can still see the activities, interests, and contributions of thers through Pagecasts.
A lot of what we did with Blizzard resulted from users asking us questions like "Hey, I really like that Pagecast, how do I learn more about the author?" We wanted to give our contributors and Pagecasters a "face" - but only if they wanted one. We then of course thought it would be neat to connect you with people that have similar knowledge or interests - and not necessarily the same friends or social circles, as in pure social networks. We did not, however, consciously set out to create a "Facebook killer."
What has resulted, of course, is that some of our users hav discovered a whole new dimension of personalization, in which it is combined with some of the aspects of social networks - the "socialization of personalization" if you will. This is resulting in interactions and communications that to me seem largely different than those on pure social networking sites, and in fact are more likely to be complementary.
In short, "social networking" at Pageflakes seems to fit a different "application" than Facebook, MySpace, etc. - sometimes you connect with people based on what you know or want to know, rather than on who you know or who you want to know.
Facebook has a long way to go before it becomes a replacement homepage for Pageflakes. Checking out my friends or drawing silly graffiti pics, are less important than keeping up the news.
I use Facebook, but it's still a closed environment. I prefer the customisable nature of Pageflakes (I used Netvibes until recently).
Maybe they'll open up more of Facebook and allow more modification - but for me, networking comes second to information.
http://internetducttape.com/2007/07/23/howto-co...
i am also a fan of facebook and use it to check up on my friends and relatives.
so for me at least the two applications serve different purposes. facebook is great for entertainment + networking but you still have to rely on startpages like Pageflakes if you want the bigger deal (work + entertainment).
i honestly cant see facebook wooing users away from their start pages anytime soon.
we now have enough experience with additional layers of communication to realize that these different mechanisms serve different needs. Here is a question in the same vein: Given that many people use cell phones just to say banal commentary like "I am sitting on the runway waiting to take off", will twitter replace cell phones?
apples and oranges or gas stoves and smoothie makers.
Pageflakes' new release had me switch from netvibes. I don't get 'application or "be my friend" spam' on either of them though like i do on facebook.
FaceBook I use more socially to keep in touch, to find people, and informally share apps and information. I don't really see Facebook replacing how i use pageflakes nor do I see myself using pageflakes as a social networking tool.
Cheers
Chi howe
Compared to my other social networks, I've been very slow with Facebook to maintain a high-signal to noise ratio. Since this is the 4th active social network, not to mention all of the others, I've been playing with. It's time to go slow.
I think Pageflakes has lost control of their message or mispositioned themselves. Their Blizzard release has been blown out as head-to-head competitor to Facebook which I don't see.
I think traditional start pages and social networks will appeal to diferent types of people. Obviously, social networks appeal to online social extroverts which you Robert are a prime example.
In regards of whether or not Netvibes and Pageflakes should compete head-to-head with Facebook. -- No. That battle is done.
The 30 million Facebook users understats its market-share in certain demos. It is the dominant application for college students which is re-ordering the way they fundamentally experience the internet. Expect to see less communication software usage from this segment as they shift to Facebook. This is similar to what happened in Korea.
Thanks for the good question.
Here a site that looks just like netvibes:
http://www.browserstart.org