Facebook may finally have a true rival

On Thursday Google made their first major update to Google news since 2002. The aim is to make the whole news section more relevant, personal and of course, as is de rigeur these days, more real-time. We’re wondering though whether it may be a precursor to something much bigger and could perhaps be part of the functionality development within Google Me.

‘What’s Google Me then?’ you may ask. Well it’s just a rumour, however, it’s coming from some very credible sources. By all accounts Google Me is a social service due to rival the might of the now omnipresent Facebook and frankly a competitor probably couldn’t come soon enough. It’s been argued that Facebook’s sheer scale is strangling innovation as it harvests all the best ideas and releases poor imitations of the original idea.

However the real win here is the focus on the privacy issue within Facebook. This week Mark Zuckerberg has been in the UK facing questions about the privacy issues and he and the company have assured users they are tightening up on security. However, Google have an excellent reputation for data security (despite the slight Streetview blip) and given that fact and their similar scale they could provide a real alternative to Facebook. Let’s just hope Google Me doesn’t end up being the next Buzz or Wave.

Watch the Wave

Right so first up my invite from Graeme hasn't arrived yet, but then according to @Twephanie it's going to take some time to come through which means Graeme will have to keep on waving at himself for a little while.

However I'm going to start moaning about it already. One of the key features that the development team are pushing is the ability for correspondents to see each others typing in real time.

Cool you may think, but why. How many times have you written and rewritten an email response, or written in haste and thought again or written an email and then changed your mind. Many times I'd suspect and in most of those cases you probably wouldn't have wanted the intended recipient to have seen what you were writing so far not so good.

However my key issue with this functionality and something I posted about on Amelia's blog is it effectively replicates and promotes one of the worst aspects of human communication i.e. that of not listening to what i being said and therefore anticipating what is being said and responding. Online social communications are all about listening, they're about understanding and responding accordingly. Although our browsing behaviour has become increasingly snack like we don't want it to progress to poorly communicative anticipatory otherwise what's the point. Realtime communication while it sounds like the future and may well be, may not be a great leap forward.

Twitter's down. What do I do now?

So Twitter went down about an hour ago and I felt like someone'd chopped my hands off. So how do I find out what's wrong. I go to trending topics on Twitter of course. Oh no can't do that. So I guess Friendfeed's the answer and lo and behold there they all are - the power users - wittering away and that's when I realised why I don't yet use Friendfeed.

Friendfeed's still just rammed with early adopters and they're steering every conversation that has any sort of momentum. Yes i now know what's going on with Twitter, but in my opinion Twitter has become more democratic. Yes it's getting full of bots and spammers, but if you manage your stream carefully you don't need to worry about that. The power users, say there is more scope for conversation on Friendfeed than Twitter and of course they're correct but two things here a) the conversation seems to be quite limited to the San Fran set and b) Twitter isn't about conversations so much for me, it's for research and educative purposes.

I've no doubt that I'll use Friendfeed more and more in the coming months and years, but at the moment it just isn't ready for me to be too active on there. The other thing I was wondering is with the imminent release of Google Wave will Friendfeed simply get washed away by the Google Tsunami, not only will you be able to have conversations there but you can work outside real time as well. Time will tell I guess.