Facebook Mail Facelift

You may be one of the lucky ones to get the new Facebook inbox. They’ve been testing out a more easily navigable interface by rolling it out to a few thousand users at a time. TechCrunch believes they’re trying to make Facebook mail competitive with heavy hitters like Yahoo! and gMail.

Huffington Post Integrates Facebook Connect

You can now use your Facebook identity to log in to Huffington Post, see what your friends are reading and share stories you like with your friends. Arianna Huffington announced the integration through Facebook’s blog.

Try it at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/social/. The signup process is not very intuitive, and I haven’t found it particularly useful yet, but it’s a very interesting experiment. Expect more publishers to start adding similar functionality.

This week on Twitter

FCC Launches Twitter Account

Follow them at @fccdotgov. They got 1,200 followers within 24 hours of launching and have received quite a few mentions throughout the Twittersphere, largely due to Internet users’ vested interest in broadband and mobile phone policies.

Twitter to Provide Location Data on a Tweet by Tweet Basis

From the Twitter Blog:

We’re gearing up to launch a new feature which makes Twitter truly location-aware. A new API will allow developers to add latitude and longitude to any tweet. Folks will need to activate this new feature by choice because it will be off by default and the exact location data won’t be stored for an extended period of time. However, if people do opt-in to sharing location on a tweet-by-tweet basis, compelling context will be added to each burst of information.

Exciting!

This week elsewhere

Army Using Wikimedia

The NY Times reports:

In July, in a sharp break from tradition, the Army began encouraging its personnel — from the privates to the generals — to go online and collaboratively rewrite seven of the field manuals that give instructions on all aspects of Army life.

Looking forward to seeing how this works. Wikimedia is a great piece of software, and we’ll be looking for case studies to find out how the Army is training personnel to use it.

MSNBC.com acquires EveryBlock

Adrian Holovaty announced it on the EveryBlock blog. By way of background, Holovaty is something of a genius hybrid journalist and programmer. He worked at the Washington Post before starting EveryBlock which is described as:

EveryBlock is a new experiment in online journalism, offering a news feed for every city block in 15 cities. Enter any address, neighborhood or ZIP code in those cities, and the site shows you recent public records, news articles and other Web content that’s geographically relevant to you. To our knowledge, it’s the most granular approach to local news ever attempted.

A very ambitious project. We’re glad to see it getting some attention and funding.

The Latest Mobile 311 app iBurgh

We’ll eventually stop covering these kinds of tools, but here’s a quick writeup on Pittsburgh’s newest iPhone app: http://www.engadget.com/2009/08/17/iburgh-complaint-department-for-iphone-gets-to-the-heart-of-city/

Described by city councilman Bill Peduto as “the first mobile application for city government,” the app lets iPhone owners snap a picture of their favorite eyesore or attractive nuisance, attach a quick note, and send the geotagged information to the city’s 311 operators.

Editor’s Note

We hope you’ve noticed how common it is for organizations to make large announcements through simple blog posts. Press releases still have their place, but a conversational blog post is becoming the de facto way for online organizations to make big announcements.

Facebook Rolls Out Real-time Search to Everyone

This may be old news to you, as Facebook has been rolling this functionality out to users gradually over the past month or so.

As Inside Facebook reports:

With the new Facebook Search, which is still accessed by entering search terms in the box on the top right of any page, users will now see the latest status updates and shared content from both friends and all users who have made their profile open to everyone – in addition to more static types of results like applications, pages, notes, and groups.

This is kind of a big deal. Twitter search has revealed the power and demand for real time search, and Facebook realizes that its massive audience can yield broader search results than Twitter.

If you want to ensure that your content and status updates do not appear in people’s search results, visit your Facebook Profile Privacy Settings and make sure that none of your profile sections are set to be visible to “everyone.”

Facebook Lite

Facebook is testing yet ANOTHER new interface called Facebook Lite. It’s looking like it will be provided as an optional way to use Facebook, possibly intended for users in developing countries who are less computer literate and have slower Internet connections.

Let us know if you’ve received an invitation to test out Facebook Lite!

Read more at Inside Facebook.

Facebook Buys FriendFeed

Cute

Facebook acquired FriendFeed. The announcement was made on Monday. They paid ~$50 million, $32.5 million of which was paid in stock vesting over “several years.” The general consensus is that the deal was structured to give Facebook access to FriendFeed’s remarkably talented team of engineers.

This week on Tiwtter

Project Retweet

From the Twitter blog: Twitter is making re-tweeting a formal feature of its service.

Many people avoid retweeting because they can’t be bothered with all of the copying and pasting it requires—something particularly vexing for Blackberry users. Twitter is now in the process of figuring out how to make re-tweeting easier, more prevalent, and more useful to users.

This is another case of Twitter letting their users create conventions and then formalizing them. The practices of addressing people with @username and #hashtags are examples of other Twitter features that emerged informally through user innovation and adoption.

This week elsewhere

Google adds social functions to iGoogle

Now you can use Facebook app style applications within iGoogle. We’ll be keeping an eye on uptake of this.

• Read the announcement on their blog
• Watch a demo video

Google to release a new version of Google Search

There’s not much to it, but it’s faster, supposed to search deeper, and attempts to return real-time results (noticing a trend?).

• Try it out at http://www2.sandbox.google.com/ (yes it looks exactly like normal Google)
• Reporting from Mashable

Tr.im is Dead! Long live Tr.im!

Tr.im shut its doors on Monday, only to reopen them on Wednesday. We’re not sure how long they’re going to stick around, but their troubles indicate that all is not well in URL shortening land. Maintaining a single URL shortener to serve the entire world seems to be prohibitively expensive, and we have yet to see a viable business grow out of URL shortening.

Female/Male Ratio Hits New High

Nearly 10 million American women 26-34 are active on Facebook every month, compared to under 7.2 million men. Almost 8 million women 35-44 are active Facebook users, but just over 5.7 million men in that range. And amongst users 45-54, women outnumber men 5.3 million to 3.3 million.

Read the full report at Inside Facebook

Video Guide to the Facebook Help Center

Facebook just created this video to let wants you to know that its Help Center is the place to go for Facebook troubleshooting.

New Facebook Page Widgets

Facebook is now offering widgets to page owners. Distribution of these widgets throughout the Internet will dramatically increase Facebook’s search engine rankings.

This Week in Twitter

Twitter Denial of Service Attack

Chart from Arbor Networks

In case you noticed a slowdown on Thursday, Twitter, Facebook, Livejournal, and a number of sites were gummed up fighting denial of service attacks. All appears to be back to normal now.

Supposedly, the attack was launched by a group of Russian hackers attempting to silence a Georgian blogger.

Nielsen: Tweens Don’t Tweet

Twitter’s lack of adoption by people under 24 isn’t exactly news, but it’s nice to have some fresh Nielsen numbers to lean on as we plan content for our audience.

ESPN’s Draconian Twitter policy

The hammer just came down, tweeps: ESPN memo prohibiting tweeting info unless it serves ESPN. Kinda figured this was coming. Not sure what this means but…

from ESPN’s @ricbucher

Essentially, ESPN employees are only allowed to tweet about ESPN now. I’m confident this untenable policy will be tempered before long. Full story at Mashable.

Twitter Transforms Language

The NY Times highlights how language has been influenced by posting a sample of “The Anglo-American Telegraphic Code,” a strange shorthand created in response to restrictions imposed by telegraphs. The obvious parallel being how Twitter is introducing terms like “RT” and strange things like hashtags into interpersonal communication.

On that note, enjoy this cartoon:

This Week Elsewhere

DoD weighing social networking pros and cons

Price Floyd, the military’s new social-networking czar, weighs in on the chatter about DoD’s plans to block access to social networking sites from military computers, particularly from computers used by Marines:

“[Internet] security is important,” Floyd said. “Opsec [operational security] is paramount. We will have procedures in place to deal with that. The DoD is, in that sense, no different than any big company in America. What we can’t do is let security concerns trump doing business. We have to do business… We need to be everywhere men and women in uniform are and the public is. If that’s MySpace and YouTube, that’s where we need to be, too.”

He added, “I don’t want to minimize security [concerns]. But this is not a DoD-only issue. It’s not a question of total security or total access to everything. There is a place we need to find [in the middle] where we’re able to go where we need to go and people can come in and see us, and yet we’re also protecting the network.”

Read more at Wired

Smithsonian Publishes their Web and New Media Strategy on Wikispaces

Read the Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy here. Thanks to Michelle Chronister for this one.

Advanced Google Search Options

I’m not sure how new this is, but it’s news to me. Google search results now include an expandable options column that allows users to easily refine their searches by content type and time.

Unauthorized usage of profile pictures in advertisements

Many have voiced concern over the past 2 weeks after a woman’s profile picture appeared while her husband was using Facebook in a Facebook advertisement saying “Hey Peter: Hot singles are waiting for you” (the woman’s first hand account). The advertising network that ran this ad has since been shut down, as it was in violation of Facebook’s terms of service. Additionally, Facebook has further tightened rules for Facebook platform advertising networks.

Nonetheless, Facebook’s terms of service allow it to use your name or image in its own advertisements.

Example Facebook ad using a user’s name

If you do not want your face or name appearing in ads, you can turn off this setting by logging into Facebook, going to https://register.facebook.com/privacy/?view=feeds&tab=ads, and selecting “no one.”

NYC Political Aide Resigns Over Facebook Comments

NY Times reports that a young political aide has been compelled to resign her post over her comments about the Gates arrest scandal. Long story short: be civil when communicating in public or semi-public forums online or face the consequences. That’s not to say you shouldn’t always be polite.

This Week in Twitter

Twitter has a new Homepage!

Twitter launched a new homepage on the 29th, with a strong emphasis on real-time search.

Key features:

• Prominent search field with call to “See what people are saying about…”
• Bars of popular topics broken down by “right now,” “today,” and “this week.”

Their new value proposition is “Share and discover what’s happening right now, anywhere in the world.” Much more to the point than the old “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co–workers to communicate and stay connected through the exchange of quick, frequent answers to one simple question: what are you doing?”

511NY Twitter Strategy

511NY has set up 21 different Twitter accounts for traffic and transit updates throughout New York, New Jersey, and Connecticut.

Two New Twitter Guides

Twitter released Twitter 101 for Business and Neil Williams, head of corporate digital channels at the UK’s Department for Business, Innovation and Skills released a template Twitter strategy for Departments (PDF).

Both are excellent guides, and I’m happy to report that USA.gov and GobiernoUSA.gov are already executing many of the recommendations they contain.

GovTwit is Advertising on Google AdWords

I came across this ad for GovTwit this week.

This Week Elsewhere

Pew Finds Rapidly Growing Uptake of Online Video

Fully 62% of adult internet users have watched a video on these sites, up from just 33% who reported this in December 2006. Online video watching among young adults is near-universal; nine in ten (89%) internet users ages 18-29 now say they watch content on video sharing sites, and 36% do so on a typical day.

Read the full report.

NIH Staffers Trained in Wiki Editing

In an effort to ensure that its health information is as widely and easily accessible as possible, “NIH is encouraging its scientists and science writers to edit and even initiate Wikipedia articles in their fields.” To that end, NIH hosted a “Wikipedia Academy” in Bethesda on the 28th. About 100 NIH employees were trained in editing Wikipedia pages and encouraged to use their expertise contribute to existing articles and create new articles. More info on NIH’s Wikipedia Academy from the Washington Post.

WebContent.gov Recognized

Congrats to WebContent.gov for being listed among Government Computer News’s “Great .gov Web Sites” of 2009!

To Block or not to Block Social Media Sites

Much ado has been made from Robert Gibbs’s statement to C-SPAN that Twitter is blocked on many White House computers (video).

Mark Drapeau wrote a piece on O’Reilly Radar saying that the disparity of access to social media tools in the White House is an apt metaphor for the inconsistent social media policies across federal agencies and goes on to argue that government blocking of communication tools may frustrate employees and cause the government to “lose some of its most creative and talented young people.”

Matthew Burton has also chimed in on Personal Democracy Forum in response to US Strategic Command’s plans to “ban the entire military’s access to social networking Web sites.”

One Cloud to Rule them All?

Andrea DiMaio wonders if a single cloud infrastructure could serve the entire government beyond the storefront to be offered by GSA, citing a Nextgov article citing NASA’s Nebula platform as a possible candidate. He doubts it will happen any time soon.

Conference 2.0 Blues

A staffer at the National Institute of Standards and Technology has struck a chord with the govt 2.0 blogosphere with her GovLoop blog post called Mixed Feelings About OGI Conference. A few salient points:

All web 2.0 conferences are all starting to look exactly the same. Many speakers come from agencies that are boldly using social media in a new and exciting ways, and many more “believers,” who are not allowed to use those same technologies, come to hear about it. But the status quo remains the same.

…

We need specifics: case studies, business case stratregies that succeeded to support any/all of these tools, etc.