The Facebook facelift and how it fires back at Google

Wednesday, 05 October 2011 09:09

Written by Resti Reyes. Jr.

There’s never a dull moment in cyberspace. Just when everyone was getting settled in their seats to watch how Google will slowly creep into Facebook’s territory with the launch of Google+, Mark Zuckerberg announces dramatic new features in Facebook and in the process reminds the world that social media is his kingdom.

The changes introduced into Facebook surely must have been in the works for quite a while, but they are nevertheless clearly meant to address concerns highlighted by the recent entry of Google into Facebook turf with Google+, the social networking project of Google. There are conflicting reports about how well Google+ is doing, so we do not yet know if Zuckerberg’s fears were well founded. Let’s just say the jury is still out.

The most significant new product feature would be what is called “timelines” – a feature that allows Facebook users to set the various photos that they have uploaded into a timeline of their lifetime. This facility extends the relevance of Facebook to way before it was created. You could have posted your baby pictures before, but now you can arrange them along with all your other pictures into the proper chronological sequence, thereby showing the whole world how your image has changed from time to time, every moment your image was captured in a photo and uploaded on Facebook. Not content with getting you to share your present situation to all the world, Facebook wants you to share your past as well, and it will plot your past for you, step by step, so that everyone will know what you’ve been up to your entire lifetime.

Another feature, the Ticker, is a lighter version of the news feed that shows activities, commenting and liking. When a user brings the mouse curser above a friend’s recent activity in the Ticker feed, a canvas app opens over the user’s home page—enabling someone to read full articles without ever leaving Facebook. The Huffington Post, The Guardian and The Economist, among others, have already adapted a canvas app. The ticker is like a mini news feed – a Facebook within Facebook, if you will.

We can expect more changes in the very near future. Facebook is evolving, it is not standing still. The last thing Zuckerberg wants is for it to become another MySpace or another Friendster.

So what happens now to the war with Google+? Is it suddenly over? There have been comments that the new Facebook effectively repositions Google+ as no longer the hot new stuff it had set itself up to be. The improvements Facebook has introduced can be said to more or less wipeout whatever advantages Google+ had in its early stages. The new classifications in your friends list more or less does the same job as Google+’s “Circles”, although maybe not in as cool a manner.

Google+’s biggest move in retaliation has been opening the doors to the masses – changing its membership requirements to “open”. While Facebook continues to grow its population, today numbering more than 800 million subscribers, Google+ has languished in near-obscurity with maybe 20 million members. That was by design, of course, as Google had followed its tried-and-tested formula of rolling out its products “by invitation” only. That had worked very well for Gmail – it had a kind of “snob appeal” when you needed to be invited by a previously accepted member before you could become one. But when you are playing catch-up – and catch-up in a really big way, then you may want to rethink this approach. The move to open membership without the need for invites has made the single biggest difference so far -- the latest word is that membership has suddenly zoomed into the hundreds of millions level.

One thing is for sure: this war is far from over. In fact, it has only just begun.

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