Immediately following my latest rantings about Facebook, this seems like an appropriate time to answer a question I get asked a lot:
“If you don’t like it, why don’t you quit?”
This morning I read Chris Applegate’s post about quitting Facebook. As much as I sympathise, I’m not quitting. Here’s why.
Another F8, another set of powerful new features, and yet I’m not surprised by any of them. I’m not saying I predicted them (I didn’t) but the announcements are typical of what I see as a clear pattern in Facebook’s evolution.
Without discussing specific features, the pattern of Facebook’s ‘progress’ typically adheres to these traits:
That’s Facebook marketing language. I interpret these traits follows:
Yes, I’m a cynic. Did you not know?
Why I don’t think Circles is Google+’s killer social feature
I firmly believe that if any company can dethrone Facebook, that company is Google. But from what I’ve seen of Google+ so far, I can’t quite imagine a MySpace-style emigration happening just yet.
I’ve recently been asking Google+ fans to give me a good reason to use it. By far the most popular answer to my question is that it provides better privacy and filtering options.
Circles is great. It’s about as simple to use as it can be, but I don’t believe it’s anything like a game-changer.
Picture the scene: I’m on the Tube and I see an attractive girl, so naturally I take a photograph of her without her permission or knowledge. Then when I get home I upload my photo to the public Internet for other men to look at. I also make a note of the location and time, and post that too. Can you imagine if a website facilitated and even encouraged that? There would be outrage, right? Read more…
For the past few months I’ve been working on a start-up with my business partner Dan Leach.
Our goal with Brandfeed is to connect brands and the media more effectively. There are similar efforts on both sides of this fence, but our approach is to provide a centralised database of pressrooms with a journalists’ dashboard all under one roof. The idea as that our pressroom format will become familiar to journalists, so they always know where to go when the they need a media contact, logo asset, or hi-res photo of a CEO. Additionally we offer discovery and notification features so journalists can ‘follow’ the brands they’re interested in, receive content and suggestions in a low-noise environment that they control.
With Dan’s experience in brand communication strategy and my background in tech and creative, we think this is going to be pretty special.
We’re not ready to launch yet, but yesterday we went public. It’s great to be out; I no longer have to say “I’m working on this thing I can’t tell you about yet“. I’m a great believer in transparency and not keeping ideas to yourself, but that’s another blog post
We’ll be giving private previews of Brandfeed to industry friends very soon. After we iterate from that round of feedback we’ll be running a more public beta programme. If you’re a journalist, brand representative or PR you can register for the beta now.
Update – 06 Aug
We are now in a public beta phase.