From Denver-Communication-Skills-Examiner

Here's a great article that articulates why I no longer want to update my Facebook status. In short:

• The old "is..." inspired creative, often funny, interesting responses.
• The new "What’s on your mind?" seems invasive, too personal, vapid if asked continuously.

When you call a friend on the phone (for those of you who still do), you typically ask, “What are you doing?” This is a simple, engaging question to kick off the conversation. However, imagine if the next time you called your friend on the phone, you asked, “What’s on your mind?” There would be a silent pause, and that is exactly what I get when I attempt to update my status—if it even is a status update anymore.

"What's on your mind?" is a phrase I only want to be asked by close friends, family, or psycho-analysts. If my boss at work asks me the question, what they're really asking is "What's on your mind about work?" -- a legitimate and often productive question -- the answer to which, however, would bore most of Facebook friends and not be any of their business.

Hat-tip to rmateu for the twitter link

A professional writer at HufPo offers a thorough analysis on the Facebook Facelift. Personally I think the changes are awful, but the article correctly points out a positive: it helped me break my Facebook addiction. But now I'm starting to get a sugary craving for social media, so Twitter is becoming my methadone.
From a marketing management persepctive, New Coke is an apt comparison. Zuckerberg's team seems to have forgotten the lessons from New Coke:

[A majority of consumers accepted the change at first, according to their own market research] The research indicated great support for the new formula, but it also registered a small but vocal opposition. In light of the overwhelming positives, this segment was ignored. That was a mistake since it indicated the possibility of a major backlash among consumers, which is precisely what happened.

Source: The Power of Your Brand, a Public Relations Morality Tale
About Twitter
Read the Article at HuffingtonPost

Dear Facebook: Why the long face?  The new Facebook redesigned homepage is a flop.  Admittedly, I was looking forward to the change, since I found the prior redesign (the 'old new' redesign) was a step forward.  After trying the new new FB for a few days, I wish I could back.

The redesign promised a better user experience by streamlining the news feed, adding customized filters, and offering real-time updates.  This sounded great.  Unfortunately that's not what they've produced.  Gone are the simple news feed preferences that allowed you to adjust sliders to the kind of content (events, links, groups, etc.) that appeared in your feed.  They're replaced by friend lists.  Why is this bad?  It means that if you don't spend a lot of time categorizing and grouping your friends (I don't) then they're of no use to you.  Even worse, the friend lists are a relatively new feature, so those that have added lots of friends prior to the feature-add probably have friends they want to follow but aren't in any of their groups.

Now I don't want to get off on a rant here but Facebook looks an awful lot like Twitter, which I use and enjoy.  However I use Facebook for completely different reasons.  Here's why I think the Twitter inspired Facebook homepage is a bad move:

• Unlike Twitter, you cannot search real-time feeds for specific content.
• Unlike Twitter, you cannot subscribe to a friend's feed with one click -- say for example you see a friend in your feed that you want to add to a filter? can't do it without several steps (Ars has a good explanation of this loss of control).
  
• Facebook feeds now drastically favor real-time comments, so once a day visitors are likely to get buried (the oldest items in my feed are less than 2 hours ago).  A real-time feed is good for twitter because that's what Twitter is traditionally used for.  I think many would argue that Facebook is traditionally used for checking in with friends once in a while.  Isn't that the whole idea of a having a wall?
  
• The font is BIG and ugly.
• It's really annoying to see my own profile picture everywhere!  There's a reason why Twitter uses avatars and not profile pics.  So for now, I am going to be a monkey.
  
• The 'Highlights' feed on the right seems totally irrelevant and uninteresting -- has anyone found it interesting?
• Web 2.0 works by taking unstructured information and making it usable by adding tags, context, and intuitive connections.  Without metadata, the new feed is not web 2.0,  it's just information overload.
  
• You can no longer control the format of how posts are added to your profile feed.  You used to have the option for one-liners, small, or big stories.
• If you make a mistake or a typo, the whole world sees it.  You used to be able to quickly correct status updates and protect yourself from embarrassment.
• Public profiles (things you are fans of) now look like friend
• Facebook provided absolutely no process for change management.  It's only human to resist change, but you can manage change by making users part of the process.  Facebook didn't sell users on the need for the redesign.  In fact, the consensus on blogs echo this sentiment: if it ain't broken, don't fix it.
  

On the second to last point, I like the idea of public profiles because it puts a human face on personally identified culture, brands and products.  Unfortunately it was executed so poorly that it makes me think the sole purpose was to make businesses appear in users news feed more often.  Now when fans that I don't know comment on commercial pages, they clutter my "friend feed."  I have yet to find a single public profile item in feed that has any value to me.  Though I guess it is free advertising for them :P

In short, the new homepage offers a far less user friendly experience for people but might offer more business opportunities.  That's good for Facebook's partners, bad for users.  Boo Facebook.  I'm going to be Twittering a lot more until Facebook realizes their bad decision.  Am I overreacting here?

Google is launching Google Voice, a telecommunication service that was born out of Grand Central (which Google acquired almost two years ago).  As one of the beta testers of GC, I have been enjoying the free service which aims to simplify your communication by creating one phone number to connect to everything.

The basic idea around GrandCentral is one phone number for all your phones, for life. As we change jobs, homes and cell phones, there are a lot of phone numbers to keep track of, and keeping everyone up to date with your most recent phone number...

There are many excellent features, such as filtering calls based on contact lists, sending telemarketers directly to voicemail, SMS-forwarding, and even voicemail transcription:

The challenge with using Google Voice is similar to the problem of adopting any great new technology services: getting people to change their old habits.  Does Google Voice offer enough value that users will go through all of their contacts and change their phone number (from their personal cell, for example) to a new service?  Try it out and let me know what you think: 609-NIGHTS-9