Simon G's Blog

John Battelle raised a discussion on his blog on the connection between Twitter and Facebook for status updates , and that Twitter is a Facebook Application but Facebook is not a Twitter application (but should be). I totally agree. I update my Facebook status with my Twitter updates and have found that it has generated some good discussions on Facebook. This is however a one way update and conversations do not span across both systems which is not ideal. I predominantly have a different set of people on Facebook than Twitter, so find that sharing the status works well for invigorating discussion. It would however be nice to be having one conversation, and not conversations independently on each platform. The thread based approach of comments on Facebook aids in providing more structure that Twitter could benefit from, and for conversations to nicely span across both platforms, I think this needs to be addressed. Between this and Facebook Connect, I think there is a solution if the v...

The end of my Summer vacation has come to an end, but it is interesting to think back on how this holiday was different from others, primarily due to the use of Social Media. Social Media applications are based around the concept of user-generated content and include the likes of Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, Photo sharing and Review sites, all of which I utilised this holiday period. We spent the holiday period in the middle of the North Island of New Zealand in a few different locations (the Waikato, Whitianga, Napier & Taupo). At these locations we often did not know what restaurants and cafes were good, so other than just using the Internet for what to do in an area, we used http://dineout.co.nz (a restaurant/cafe review site with user-generated content) extensively to validate or find what restaurants and cafes we wanted to try. I also submitted my own reviews for a large number of the places we visited to dineout (see here for my reviews). Jane & I also wrote a number of ...

I have used Facebook Chat a few times now and think it is only an update away from disrupting the incumbent Instant Messaging products (MSN, Yahoo!, GTalk, ...). With the introduction of Facebook Chat I have found myself in discussions with people that I do not currently have on any of my IM clients and haven't chatted to in years other than very asynchronous messages now and then. Due to the large community of Facebook I think this has the potential to therefore really be useful to many. Facebook Chat currently relies on a user having Facebook up and this being the current focus, but as soon as: a) the web client is unleashed from this constraint, b) Facebook provides an alternative desktop client and/or message alert, or better yet c) Facebook opens up the API for all then I think we will see a decline in IM client use or IM client vendors rapidly trying to provide a frontend for Facebook. With Microsoft's investment in Facebook, perhaps there is already work going on behind...