Facebook re-design the feed

“In a move that shouldn’t surprise anyone, Facebook is re-organizing users’ homepages. The new look homepage will allow users to “see the things they’re most interested in.” The main elements that will power the new layout are, the revamped Friend Lists, the new Subscribe button, and a real-time ticker.

One notable change is that the verbiage “post” seems to be completely removed from the Facebook vocabulary. All mentions of content-formerly-known-as-posts are now labeled as “stories.”

The rationale behind the new layout ironically takes after newspapers, the very form of media that Facebook is slowly replacing. The release states that:

“When you pick up a newspaper after not reading it for a week, the front page quickly clues you into the most interesting stories. In the past, News Feed hasn’t worked like that. Updates slide down in chronological order so it’s tough to zero in on what matters most.

In order to achieve this, some posts will be labeled as a “Top Story” with a blue mark the left hand corner”

Images will also be much larger and easier to view from the homepage. For those avid Facebook users, new stories will show above the “Top Stories” section”

See more at Search Engine Land

Facebook ‘planning new buttons’

“The cat is out of the bag that Facebook is going to launch something big at its developer conference f8 this week. We’ve heard about the social music services that could be debuting in a few days, but as the New York Times conveyed this past weekend, Facebook is planning for ways to surface personal content better. And we’ve heard from a source that Facebook will introduce new buttons on the wall that will begin introducing some granularity to the “Like” concept. We’re told these new buttons are “Read,” “Listened,” “Watched.” The network will also soon launch new social commerce buttons like “Want” following the introductions of the aforementioned buttons.”

See more at TechCrunch

Twitter announce new analytics

“Today we’re announcing Twitter Web Analytics, a tool that helps website owners understand how much traffic they receive from Twitter and the effectiveness of Twitter integrations on their sites. Twitter Web Analytics was driven by the acquisition of BackType, which we announced in July.

The product provides three key benefits:

• Understand how much your website content is being shared across the Twitter network
• See the amount of traffic Twitter sends to your site
• Measure the effectiveness of your Tweet Button integration”

See more here 

The future of Twitter ads? Some interesting thoughts from John Battelle

“As I posted earlier, last week I had a chance to sit down with Twitter CEO Dick Costolo. We had a pretty focused chat on Twitter's news of the week, but I also got a number of questions in about Twitter's next generation of ad products.

As usual, Dick was frank where he could be, and demurred when I pushed too hard. (I'll be talking to him at length at Web 2 Summit next month.) However, a clear-enough picture emerged such that I might do some "thinking out loud" about where Twitter's ad platform is going. That, combined with some very well-placed sources who are in a position to know about Twitter's ad plans, gives me a chance to outline what, to the best of my knowledge, will be the next generation of Twitter's ad offerings.

I have to say, if the company pulls it off, the company is sitting on a Very Big Play. But if you read my post Twitter and the Ultimate Algorithm, you already knew that.

In that post, I laid out what I thought to be Twitter's biggest problem/opportunity: surfacing the right content, in the right context, to the right person at the right time. It's one of the largest computer science and social engineering problems on the web today, a fascinating opportunity to leverage what is becoming a real time database of folks' implicit and explicitly declared interests.”

See more here

Twitter claims 100m active users

“Twitter has 100 million active users logging in at least once a month and 50 million active users every day, CEO Dick Costolo revealed Thursday.

The microblogging service has a total of 200 million registered users, but how many of those are actually regulars has been open to debate for some time. Costolo, in an informal chat with tech reporters he called his “state of the union,” revealed that exactly half of them log in monthly — a number he says is up 82% since the beginning of the year.

The CEO offered a whole raft of statistics to prove that Twitter is healthy and growing like a weed — especially on mobile platforms. Some 55 million users log on to Twitter from their phone or tablet every month. Web-based users are on the rise, too: Twitter.com now sees 400 million visitors a month, up from 250 million at the beginning of the year, Costolo says.”

See more here