Facebook users with accounts from Berkeley and Stanford were given access to a new beta social bookmarking feature today that could roll out soon to all Facebook users. The site began offering a blog-like notes feature in August and implemented a controversial news feed feature last month. The new social bookmarking service is less likely to generate controversy.
Users can submit items to share with others through their Facebook pages or with a browser bookmarklet. URLs from off site and pictures, notes or user profiles from inside Facebook can be tagged. Tagged items include the URL, a text excerpt and any notes a user cares to add. They can be either sent to your public profile or sent privately to particular friends. Users with access to the feature right now do not appear able to send items out to non beta users with the bookmarklet.
It may be unnecessarily cautious to beta test this among limited users, but given past controversy you can hardly blame the company. The most interesting part of this to me? Imagine MySpace providing a way for users to share links to off site pages of interest. Not very likely.
Just like the company’s limited API release in August, this is another good faith move in the direction of openness and usability.
Comments
Did I just read the word “shit” on TC???
There’s really no other way to describe it.
If you want this site to be taken as a serious piece of journalism, and want to be taken seriously as a journalist, refrain from using phrases such as ’shit storm’. Very unprofessional.
Marshall, good review. I’ve also posted a review and more screenshots here.
Facebook is gradually slipping away from a successful niche market it carved itself.
The placement of the newsfeed is killing Facebook off completely. People click around the website to discover new people and the quickest and most addicting way of doing that is having the Interest, Favorite Movies, and About Me sections located higher on the page for people to quickly read through. With the newsfeed in the way, it has completely ruined this. Putting videos of stupid stuff from YouTube will completely kill Facebook off. Just watch it happen. Facebookers are smart college students, and putting dumb crap from around the web in place of their profiles is idiotic.
A replica of Facebook in China just got sold. Can’t believe people are willing to buy stolen designs:
http://pulse2.com/2006/10/24/o.....iaoneicom/
“shit storm”? Ah, no.
I agree with marshall, “shit storm” was a good way to describe it
This new move, I dunno. I think Facebook is losing their UI edge a little bit. I’m a veteran of social bookmarking, and this didn’t seem intuitive at first.
Facebook is trying to play catch-up - after several years of virtually no improvements, now they are trying to add as much as they can to hopefully get some company to buy them out.
Yes they might be playing catch up, but is that a huge problem? Not really. They already have all of their users.
A solid portion of their users will also already know how to use the social bookmarking feature because they have used it on other sites. These people will start using the feature with no learning curve required while the average internet user will be able to see it in action.
This could actually mean that social bookmarking could expand beyond the techie crowd into mainstream. Facebook is probably the perfect avenue to get average internet users to adopt these types of technologies that have been dominated by the tech crowds.
http://www.socialdegree.com
I think facebook totally lost its mind when they decided to expand so much. The best part about it was the small market it targeted to. I read weekly warnings in college newspapers across the US about the dangers arising in facebook, and with the feed toy they crammed in there not long ago, things got stalker’ish, just as all the articles had suggested. Facebook has a majority of non-savvy users, they just need to be really careful as to what they open up to them. Most of the college students I am around just ignore the warning letters about how to control your privacy settings, and probably couldn’t figure out how to set them if they did read all the mumbo-jumbo at the top of their page when they log in.
Anyways, I removed my account. The damn thing was killling my social life! not helping it…haha
ahh, did you remove the word shit?
l
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