• Ross Fadner, Mar 25, 2009, 11:15 AM
  • Facebook Forced By Angry Users To Change Redesign VentureBeat Facebook was forced to respond to widespread criticism over its latest redesign by saying it will make yet more changes in an attempt to appease angry users. As VentureBeat's Eric Eldon points out, the scale of the dissatisfaction with the redesign hasn't been clear, although more than 1 million users have expressed opposition. Facebook has nearly 200 million users worldwide.

    Yesterday's announcement doesn't mean that Facebook will revert back to the previous design, however. But, as Eldon says, the changes "should make some new features more accessible to most users." Significantly, Faceboook will refine what information appears in users' news feeds, emphasizing photos that they are tagged in, for instance. Users will also have more control over what kind of information appears in the "stream" (as Facebook is now calling it) from both users and third party applications. Real-time updates are also coming soon, Eldon says.

    Other minor changes include more highlights in the "Highlights" section, and moving friend requests and event invites to the top of the right-hand column. One thing the company is sticking by is its bottom navigation bar, which has aggravated some users, including VentureBeat's writers. "Guess we'll get used to it," Eldon says. Read the whole story...
  • Facebook Shouldn't Fold To User Backlash TechCrunch Michael Arrington wonders about the wisdom of crowds in his reaction post to Facebook changing its redesign because of user backlash. He and other bloggers argue that many great products would never have been built if the designers had asked for customer input. Robert Scoble, for one, argues that a Porsche would be a Volvo if the company let its buyers decide the features.

    Says Arrington: "The bottom line is, when you listen to your users, you get vanilla. Feature creep. Boring. It takes a dictator to create the iPhone and change the course of an entire industry. Imagine if Steve Jobs let other people add features to that device." As such, he's surprised that Facebook is folding in the face of user backlash to its latest redesign. He notes that the company has stood tall in the face of such backlashes before; remember the news feed? Nowadays, most people can't imagine Facebook without it.

    If the company wanted to keep these changes, Arrington said it shouldn't have titled its blog post "Responding to Your Feedback," because that just invites more feedback. "Someday, if they're not careful, someone is going to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace, who in turn did it to Friendster," he says. "Making users happy is a suckers game. Pushing the envelope is what makes you a winner." Read the whole story...
  • Twitter, The Medium Los Angeles Times Last year, TWiT.tv founder Leo Laporte quit Twitter. Soon, he found that "walking away from a megaphone that big" just wasn't good business, so he begrudgingly returned. "They kind of have you," Laporte tells the Los Angeles Times' David Sarno. "The same way that Facebook has you: because you have to go where the community is."

    Sarno argues that Twitter, which grew more than 1300% last year, has essentially become its own medium, "taking its place alongside Web pages, e-mail and maybe even television." And while the company may not exactly be Fortune 500 size, "one company shouldn't have a monopoly on an entire medium -- even if it invented it," he says.

    Laporte and others agree. "Those of us who are participating are pumping value into this closed system and trusting that Twitter will do the right thing with it...but what they ignore is that there's a dark side to all of that, which is that these companies have a huge amount of control over what's going on." Adds Dave Winer, a Web entrepreneur: "It's a very dangerous network because it's all centralized," he said, "not only on a technological level, where it goes through one set of servers -- but it also goes through one set of business interests that's anything but transparent." Read the whole story...
  • Pixazza, AdSense For Images BusinessWeek Pixazza, a startup founded by Netscape veterans, wants to turn Web photos into cash. "It might just work," says BusinessWeek's Rob Hof. On Wednesday, the company unveiled a service that lets publishers apply tiny yellow-and-blue price tags to photos on their sites. Mouse over one of the price tags and a box appears that lists the product, like a coat or a pair of shoes, along with the price and the retailers that offer the product. Click on the box and you head directly to the retailer's site.

    Pixazza is basically an ad network, albeit a small one at present. But the idea, Hof says, is like an e-commerce version of Google's AdSense, which runs contextual text and display ads on content sites. Pixazza CEO Bob Lisbonne says the company's platform will help Web sites make money from a commission on product sales.

    Incidentally, Google is one of the company's investors, along with venture capital firms August Capital and CMEA Capital and a series of individual investors, including Facebook CFO Gideon Yu. As Hof says, "Google may be as interested in the system behind Pixazza as much as in the similarity to AdSense," because the company uses a network of people to identify the products in photos, instead of an algorithm. These are not volunteers, mind you: Participants in Pixazza's people network share a piece of the product sale for matching products in photos to the nearly 2 million products in the Pixazza's retail database. This database includes products from Amazon.com, Zappos, Bluefly, Macys and many others. Read the whole story...
  • IBM Study: Media Companies Struggling To Keep Up With Consumer, Advertiser Shifts World Screen A new study from IBM says there's a "growing rift" between advertisers, consumers and content owners, fueled by media companies' struggle with new digital demands from users and advertisers. As such, report author Saul Berman, IBM's global leader for strategy and change consulting services, is calling on content owners to "fundamentally" change the way information is delivered to audiences.

    He writes: "To succeed -- especially in the current economic environment -- media companies will need to develop a new set of capabilities to support the industry's evolving demands which include micro targeting, real-time ROI measurement and cross-platform integration." Berman cites consumers' adoption of new platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook as being particularly disruptive to the media business. Some figures: between 2007 and 2008, consumer adoption of social networking tools soared to 60% from 33%; the penetration of mobile Internet data plans nearly tripled to 41% from 15%, and access to mobile music and video quadrupled to 35% from 7%.

    These are huge changes, so how can advertisers benefit? According to Bill Battino, co-author of the IBM study, "consumers are willing to trade knowledge about their usage and preferences for content and associated targeted marketing offers. Companies that excel in permission-based advertising will take share of marketing dollars." Read the whole story...
  • Yahoo Rebounds To $14 Per Share Silicon Alley Insider Read the whole story...
  • YouTube Blocked In China The New York Times Read the whole story...
  • Top Google Trio Loses $26 Billion The Associated Press Read the whole story...