The battle for your social attention has been kicked up a notch over the past month. You would have to be hiding under a rock not to read all the press about the ‘gaggle’ of new social features Google are pushing out with GReader and IGoogle, let alone their current development on Wave. Meanwhile Facebook are reinventing themselves as they slowly ‘twittify’ their newsfeed and integrate the additional technology and skills from their purchase of FriendFeed.
Many Friendfeed purists are outraged over what they perceive is Friendfeed selling out, but they must have had their blinders on if they thought Friendfeed was going to make it alone. Friendfeed is a great aggregator, but lets face it, the average person wasn’t going to use the incredible filtering and collaborative power of the interface. They obviously recognized the need to grab a bigger demographic, so what better way than to plug your technology into a network 300+ million strong. It really is a no brainer. Google are still dragging their heels getting into this game, but they have certainly turned things on with all the latest features embedded into GReader. However in my opinion, it is still the ‘techies’ playing around with the still somewhat awkward GReader features.
Right now GReader is still my number one source for info gathering, Facebook, where the bulk of my community reside, is my sole collaborative platform for personal contacts, but I share my professional collaboration between Linked-in, Facebook and Twitter. I’m still not the greatest fan of Twitter, but it certainly beats the rest when it comes to real time information. However the more I play around with linked-in, and the larger the community of people I’m connecting with on that platform, the more invaluable it is becoming. We have found it to be a much better platform to collaborate as a department with Students and industry than Facebook. However this goes back to the perceived culture of Facebook as being strictly personal and consumer based.
Anyway, it’s exciting times watching the almost daily changes in these apps. I love where it’s going and look forward to investigating further opportunities to integrate social media in the classroom.
