Tonight Facebook will debut an entirely new Facebook Profile during an interview on 60 Minutes (which explains why Facebook was weirdly encouraging all Facebook users to watch the show late in the week).
The update itself is a welcome overhaul of the look of the basic profile, drawing the viewer into a more image-related experience (such as your favorite authors rendered as their Page icons rather than words – thankfully you can edit the priority of the images shown now, not just a random sample of “Liked” elements as before).
It also brings a few new tricks – or at least tricks new to Facebook that might remind you of a few other social sites. One such feature: “Highlighting” your top connections. As they say themselves:
Relationships with close friends can be just as important as family. Now you can highlight family members and the other key people in your life, like your best friends or coworkers — all right on your profile.
Sounds an awful lot like MySpace’s Top 8, eh? I can imagine the arguments already as we shuffle our best friends, kids, spouses and drinking buddies in a furious drive to avoid conflicts…
This “highlighting” comes from a tweak to the Friends List feature, allowing you to share your Friend Lists more like Twitter Lists. This makes your curated personal lists to potentially become a way for you to find similar interests, people, etc. (The new Facebook List features are well profiled at the blog Stayi N’ Alive.) Of course, you can never share your Lists and there’s a bevy of privacy controls to go with the new options.
There are lost of other smaller changes. My particular favorite is the “Projects” you can add under your employers – drawing attention to what you’ve worked on and who with, giving an interesting kind of due and credit to a particular idea or execution.
To see the new features and immediately update your own profile, visit: http://www.facebook.com/about/profile/
See the Facebook video on the changes here:
And to see the 60 Minutes Interview, see the two parts embedded here at Business Insider with some comentary on how Zuck came across.
03
A foundation is laid for “Selective Connection”
by FeedbackLike any other member of the early-adopter subset of users out there (yes, I count myself as one), I try to get my name onto as many social networks I can just to get to know the latest up-and-coming technologies. I sign up, test ‘em, then continue on or throw them out after a few weeks. Each network – and there are dozens – gets a fair shot at earning my approval.
I’m presently putting a new social network, Quora, through its paces. So far, so good. It’s all part of my interest in seeing what works for people and businesses/clients -and what doesn’t.
I recently reviewed a social network called Path that bills itself as an “anti-social network” of sorts wherein it limits a user to 50 friends. I like it and continue to use it, and recommend you do, too. And after a few weeks of use, I’ve come to realize that digital services that require a user to selectively limit their friend list to a small number of connections must be getting the idea from other networks, where such friend-limiting activity happens naturally.
At Feedback, we call this phenomenon “Selective Connection.” Take LinkedIn, for example.
Where Facebook has now become the primary network that enables friends to find each other after losing touch with one another over time, LinkedIn has become a quiet network for business professionals.
Most users typically keep their personal profiles on other social networks separated from their LinkedIn profiles for good reason: it’s a professional network for the purpose of being professional. Nowhere on LinkedIn do you ever anticipate that photo of you doing a kegstand to appear. Instead, it’s the place where you can share your talent and skills, learn more about others, and make recommendations and engage in meaningful professional discussion.
The limitations that a user has come to expect on LinkedIn were welcomed in business world much faster than Facebook’s more casual usage and customs. Sure, LinkedIn has integration with Twitter accounts to allow for cross-posting of content that might have something to do with your job. But overall, LinkedIn is kept pretty civil.
So you might start to wonder, why hasn’t Facebook come in and taken command of the online business networking scene? Can’t Facebook flip a switch and do that?
Of course not. Well, not presently, anyway.
A recent conversation that I had on Twitter concluded with the revelation that the social graph online has been replicated from what has long existed outside of the Internet: Some people keep work at work, while some might want to keep home at home.
How Facebook operates right now on a fundamental level is drawn straight from the actions of promoting someone that you just met to a level of friendship. As Facebook continues to grow, the assumed action and reaction of sending and accepting a friend request is slowly solidified as the proper etiquette.
A separate network, LinkedIn, exists for those who feel that they don’t want to share what might appear on their Facebook profile with those at their workplace or potential employer. For those who don’t want to share every particular photo with all of their Facebook or Twitter followers, there is a network like Path.
And there will be more to come, as closed-circle networks and selective connection becomes one of the latest darlings of the new media industry. While it seems like a niche market, closed-circle social networks continue to grow and become successful. LinkedIn might be a closed or specialized network with the most amount of visibility, but smaller online venues could influence the direction that networks are taking in 2011 and beyond.
-Brad (@bcarr)