Thursday, September 15, 2011

Media Websites Article (Facebook Unveils Smart Lists to Categorize Friends) - Response

I read an article from the Yahoo! News website (cited below) titled “Facebook unveils Smart Lists to categorize friends” (2011) by Don Resinger. The engineers at Facebook have kept putting out new features, and with the introduction of competition from the Google+ social networking site and its use of “circles” to categorize friends, Facebook is now adapting to this idea in a much larger scale. While Facebook “lists” of sorted friends have existed for a long time, they haven’t been heavily used because all of the sorting has to be manually done by yourself, and Smart Lists are supposed to take a lot of the tediousness of it.

The social networking space continues to grow, and it’s good to see some worthy competition to Facebook. I know that I need to sort my own Facebook friends to protect what information can be seen by who, but I haven’t done it because of how much work it takes to sort through the hundreds of people into the appropriate lists for work, school, etc.

Google+ saw huge growth when it launched, and Facebook has had to respond in order to stay relevant when Google+ took over all of the technology headlines (as well as people’s Gmail inboxes). People behind Facebook have had to implement new changes like their improved messaging and chat, and elements like Smart Lists will help keep people returning to the site rather than defecting to other networking choices.

Resinger, Don. "Facebook unveils Smart Lists to categorize friends." CNET News (2011): 13 Sep 2011. <http://news.cnet.com/8301-13506_3-20105420-17/facebook-unveils-smart-lists-to-categorize-friends/>.
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1 comment:

  1. AtescheraSeptember 17, 2011 at 3:42 PM

    I think that what facebook is doing is seeing a threat to them. Facebook has really stood alone for along time on top of the social media tower, and I think now that Google+ has come out, many users seem to find themselves to be very interested in what exactly it is. I for one am one of those users, not only because its the new thing, but because you must be invited into google+ to use. So it makes one seem pretty prestigious to be invited. I for one use google+ but dont really know how to use it. But im sure once everyone else catches on, it may take over that thrown that facebook holds
    -Ateschera

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