W//W is going to try something rather new, we’re going to do comparisson writing, by which me and J Shamsul will be taking sides and write about rivals, something like Android vs Iphone sort of thing. We’re going to start with Social Network and since I am the more conservative one I will be writing about Facebook while J is going to go Google+ the big clash in social network war.

taken from - www.imediaconnection.in

Recently Facebook has been adding some neat features in enhancing it’s social experience, although some may say they felt threatened by Google+ challenge on it’s dominance, truth be told Facebook have been doing this sort of thing all the while. It regularly updates itself sometimes with little notice much to the ire of it’s users who at the first few hours will moan about the new layout on their status updates but then somehow seem to blend in later.

This time around the tweaking seems quite significant and much to my pleasant surprise Facebook seems to be hitting the right notes. With the explosion of twitter, real time short updates are what people are for, people on the move have no time to browse around long ranting blogs or profile pages so Facebook, seeing the trend introduces real time updates on it’s statuses. Something pretty similar to twitter.

It somehow simplifies the social networking experience by extracting updates from the usual cluttering of the facebook wall. These days, though the amount of Farmville and Mafia Wars updates have been dropping quite significantly the usual cluttering updates are there on the wall. So it is quite a nice addition to those who want to breeze through latest news from their friends without the need to siphon through picture updates and so on.

Another tweak that I really like is the change in the way we view photo uploads. Facebook dropped the thumbnail format and focuses on individual pictures. Enlarging it and matching it according to the tags and albums which makes it more pleasant for browsing. Gives it a more personal touch to it, something similar to a scrapbook feel or a Tumblr style I would say.

I’m pretty sure Facebook programmers will deny it whole heartedly but I think the smart list is something quite similar (if not an idea they stole) from Google+ circles. Though previously you can list down your contacts from family, friends, coworkers and etc, Facebook has taken it into a whole new level by allowing yout to customize the updates frequency in your wall and privacy control so that you can set which group of people can see what.

With the recent leaks of malaysian artistes in their bikinis and swimmingsuit on online trashy entertainment portals I’m pretty sure our “Artis” would love this new addition, now if that swimmingsuit photo in Bali is leaked to the press they can narrow down the snitch this time around.

The group friend activity, though wouldn’t affect much on the normal individual users in Facebook, it is quite a nice addition to group administrators like us. Through this you can track down your group activities that is related to you, for instance W//W facebook page can track down which is amongst our posting that is most shared by our fans in facebook thus seeing a pattern and such. Which helps alot in improving the way we run the group and to a certain extent the way we run W//W itself.

Although Google+ has been making quite an advance in the social networking market, it seems that Facebook may not share the same fate as MySpace anytime soon. Not with it’s efficiency in revamping and recreating itself plus with the backing of Microsoft it seems that the battle of the ecosystem may be a long way to go. Kudos to Zuckenberg and the Facebook team for such a quick and decisive reaction and it may seem that they days of Zuckenberg sweating in front of pesky interviewers is long gone.