Is Facebook still “Like” able?

July 18th, 2012 3 Comments

 Is Facebook still “Like” able?

Facebook Google Plus report card 

According to a recent report by the American Consumer Satisfaction Index (ACSI), more people are satisfied with Google Plus than Facebook. This is surprising as Google Plus still does not have as large a user base as Facebook.

The ACSI compiles its report from interviews with approximately 70,000 families across the United States on the quality of products and services available to them. All scores are measured on a scale of 0 to 100. The report spans across  more than 230 companies in 47 industries and 10 economic sectors, as well as over 100 services, programs, and websites of federal government agencies.

ACSI Score table for social media

[IMG SRC: American Consumer Satisfaction Index]

Getting down to the numbers, in the social media category, Google Plus scored an impressive 78 on its debut tying with Wikipedia, a three time leader. It was followed by YouTube, another Google product which scored 73 points, and preceded another debutant, Pinterest, which scored 69. Twitter and Linkedin scored 64 and 63 respectively, with Facebook finally making an appearance at the lower end of the table with 61 which was 8% lower than last year.

Facebook doesn’t seem to have had much to cheer about this year, with a dismal start to their IPO, people annoyed at it replacing their primary mail ids with Facebooks in house mail id and now this report. On the other hand, Google plus seems to be on a roll with their new events feature, improved UI’s and constant updates to their mobile apps and an ever increasing user base logging on through mobile as revealed at Google IO.

While Facebook still might have nothing to fear right now, it should be prudent to acknowledge these reports and start making up for lost ground. Similarly Google plus should not rest lightly on its laurels, but be ready to counter whatever Facebook has to reveal next.

So which Social platform is your favourite and why? Let us know in the comments below.

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Recent updates to Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Instagram

July 14th, 2012 9 Comments

Recent updates to Twitter, Facebook, Google Plus and Instagram

Quite a few social platforms received new features and minor changes recently. Read on to find out who got what updates.

Twitter:

twitter username autocomplete suggestions

The twitter mobile app got an upgrade which enables it now display expanded tweets from partner sites. You can watch YouTube videos, read a summary of news articles or check out images from within the mobile app itself. Push Notifications have also been activated. So if you would like to be notified when some celeb or family member tweets, you will be notified instantaneously. Also twitter.com received search autocomplete and “people you follow” search results. Now when you type something in the search box, twitter will suggest terms that you are most likely to type. You can select the term that you want from the drop down box. The other feature that twitter introduced is to allow you to restrict our search results to people that you follow only. So you can now see what only your friends are discussing about a certain topic.

Facebook:

Facebook updated its event tab to present information in two views that are more useful than earlier. The list view shows you the upcoming events in chronological order, coupled with suggested events based on your interests and what your friends might be planning to attend. You can accept or decline events and also wish friends for their birthday without leaving this tab.

Facebook updates event list view

The calendar view shows all the events in a grid with small thumbnails. Clicking on the thumbnail takes you to the profile of the user or page concerned. Hovering over the thumbnail triggers a pop up that will allow you to accept or decline the event or go to the event page.

Facebook events calendar grid view

Google Plus:

Google plus cameraman app

Google Plus launched the cameraman app for their Hangouts which allows you to control which individual appear to other viewers. This is aimed for professionals to allow them to introduce someone before they appear on the Hangout or hide someone after they are done talking. Using this app is as simple as introducing up to 10 people to your hangout and clicking the video mute icon below the person’s video feed that you want to hide. To make them visible again, just click on the video mute icon again. You can also select that new guests who join your hangout are hidden by default.

Instagram:

Instagram web view updates

Instagram finally introduced some flexibility for users by allowing them to like or comment on photos from the browser. While you still won’t get a feed like in your mobile app, clicking on the Instagram URL of any photo will load that image in a new window. You can comment or like on the image and even follow or unfollow the user. Hopefully this might be a hint for more changes that will allow greater functionality on the desktop.

So go check out these new updates across your favourite social networks and let us know if they have made changed your browsing experience for the better or for worse.

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