In the world of social media, it seems Facebook is making more moves forward in a push for supremacy over your social life. Facebook announced a slew of changes at their annual F8 conference and implemented some of them during the week before the conference. One of the largest changes is the Profile page, which now appears to be branded the Timeline. Instead of listing the most recent 20-30 actions a user has performed, it displays a user’s history in a timeline format with wider, larger stories. It has a little date chooser on the right to pick between years, so friends and stalkers alike can jump to a date in history easily and read whatever you did at that point in time.
The Timeline lets you insert milestones at will between your stories, in case there’s something in your life you felt would benefit being added to Facebook’s directory of you. It gives you suggestions under the five categories (Work and Education, Family and Relationships, Living, Health and Wellness, Milestones and Experiences) of life events you may want to add or you can add your own in as you see fit. It also separates when you got your friends, put up photos and liked pages into clusters, that make it easier to see, for example, how many friends you got in September 2011 or how many photos were put up in 2007. To top off your new profile, you can add a cover picture, which it appears is supposed to represent something different than your profile picture. Whereas a profile picture is meant to be a picture of you, it seems the cover picture is a picture that represents you or your life, or that you just find cool.
In an attempt to promote higher-level sharing, some applications will now provide “experiences” which let users listen to music, watch TV and read articles together. Multiple music services, Netflix, and Hulu have partnered with Facebook to post articles to a user’s News Feed or Ticker when they listen to music or watch something. Friends can click those activities and listen or watch things in real time together with the original poster. The Ticker is a little box most of you have probably seen in the right side of the News Feed, which provides real-time updates of what your friends are doing.
While I’ve always been behind most of Facebook’s changes, the Ticker seems like a little too much. It constantly tells me when someone likes something, gets a random friend, comments on a post written by someone I don’t know or anything else they’re doing on the site. This wouldn’t bother me so much if I had a good way of filtering the content so it didn’t read like a narration of everyone’s life. You can individually hide stories, and if you go to the user’s profile you can unsubscribe from types of updates, but it takes too long to do this for all your Facebook friends. It also feels a little creepy seeing the stuff pop up the second someone makes a post or likes something.
The new Close Friends list gives me that uncomfortable feeling to a lesser degree. When you add people to the Close Friends list, it gives you a notification any time they post or do anything. This is much like how the Ticker displays everything friends do, but the Close Friends notifications pop up along with your other notifications in the top bar. Yes, this is an easily solvable issue if you just don’t add anyone to your list, but my concern is more with how you could end up on other people’s lists. If I’m on a list of a good friend of mine, I wouldn’t mind, but if a weaker friend decides to follow my every move I’d find that a little weird. I guess they could always just go to their victim’s profile when they want to creep someone, but the notifications could make it easier for those more lazy stalker types.
While Facebook announced these new changes, Google made an attempt to keep their social network somewhat relevant by opening the doors of Google+, its social networking site, to all users. I’m not sure how many people want Google+ that didn’t get an invite already through the closed beta program, but apparently there’s been a spike in activity after Google removed the sign up restriction. I was one of the early adopters that believed it might actually catch on, but I feel Facebook has creatively borrowed enough of the good Google+ concepts (minus the physical circles) that there is less of a reason to move to Google+. Privacy, which is usually one of the major sticking points against using Facebook, is not much of a factor in switching considering Google has had its fair share of privacy complaints.
Social media isn’t the only big news in tech this month, as Microsoft has released a Developer Preview of Windows 8 at their Build Conference, their next version of Windows, which is expected to come out in 2012. We’ve already seen previous builds of the operating system before, so some things don’t come as a surprise, but I’ll briefly reintroduce the OS for those who haven’t followed too frequently. The biggest visual change in Windows 8 is the new user interface which borrows from Windows Phone 7, dubbed “Metro”. When Windows 8 starts, it loads a set of tiles which represent apps instead of a desktop. Think more along the lines of an iPhone or Android if you’ve never seen the new Windows design language, but instead of icons, they’re squares that change according to what the app would like to show. A mail application, for example, could show part of the most recent message received as its icon.
The Metro interface runs apps (referred to as “Metro Apps”) that must be downloaded from the Windows Store, except for developers and enterprise users. Legacy Windows apps (referred to as “Desktop Apps”) will still run on Windows 8 in an environment reminiscent of Windows 7, and can still be downloaded the old way. Another interesting change in the Metro side of Windows 8 is that Internet Explorer 10 will not support plugins, including Flash. This keeps the browser running faster and more securely by not depending on third-party attachments. It also helps battery life, as devices which support Flash have been shown to have a much shorter battery life when displaying Flash content. Microsoft’s reasoning lies in the growing adoption of HTML5 animation and video, which it believes is widespread enough to satisfy most user needs. Microsoft’s stance on Flash and the Windows Store is similar to Apple’s approach to iOS, which also does not support Flash and requires apps to be downloaded through the App Store.
Another Windows 8 change that has been heavily discussed after the preview’s release is compatibility with ARM. ARM is a type of processor architecture used in almost all smartphones and tablets. Most laptops and desktops use x86 or x64 architecture, which are processors most commonly made by AMD or Intel. To branch out onto tablets, Windows 8 is ARM-compatible mostly to make it easier to push the operating system onto tablets which require low power. Part of the discussion about this feature in Windows 8 is how Desktop Apps will work on ARM devices. There have been rumours that only Metro Apps would work on ARM devices, and others that say Desktop Apps would have to be recompiled for ARM devices.
While the ARM issue is kind of murky right now, I’m sure it will be clearer once the release date gets closer. From what I’ve seen of the operating system so far, I’m fairly impressed with the direction they are taking Windows in, which is unusual coming from me. Between Microsoft and Apple, it seems that traditional operating systems are shaking up the standard pattern and design they have followed for the last 20 years. Laptops and desktops seem to be making the transition to the simpler, more connected computing we get with smartphones and tablets. Like it or not, it seems like this is the future for our devices, and it looks promising.
Even if you don’t agree with what Facebook and Microsoft have announced, their respective paces of development are anything but stagnant. The competition they’ve received only accelerates these kinds of changes, which turns out better for us in the end. Most may not agree with what is updated at once, but when you step back and look at the long-term vision, you may find the alterations helpful in realizing a better service.
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