Two social media companies are in news today, Facebook released the new Paper app on iPhone, and Twitter announced the user growth is not as fast as the Wall Street liked. Maybe the 3rd, LinkedIn announced not so spectacular quarter after market today.
I tried Facebook Paper app. To be honest I have been Facebook user for about 5 years, not heavy user in terms of posting news feed or pictures. But I did use Facebook to communicate with a few friends, and did post some of my daughters’ pictures: fewer and fewer as time goes. The main reason for “fewer” is two folds: 1) Fear of privacy, I saw this “tag” feature there and never liked it; 2) Baby grew up. Btw, as I talked about the picture, by now most of us knew about the Facebook “yearbook” feature which automatically puts together some of the uploaded picture, and I saw Google+ was doing the same thing recently.
Back to Facebook Paper app, “slick” is the first word I would describe it. It tries explain things when I first installed it. I am a Zite user, and I only used Flipboard briefly. In terms of the news feature in Paper app, I think they are similar. And I heard one commentator on Bloomberg saying the “twitter of news” feature. But the commentator likes it too. It may have some impact on the competing news media curating services/apps.
About Twitter, personally I always liked Twitter better. I have 3 Twitter accounts (out of 250 million Twitter users). I used it because when I started using Twitter, I found it’s popular among geeks and iOS developers, the hash tag thing. I feel this quarter or near term is just a bump of the road, Twitter basically does a lot news service now. I recall refreshing twitter feed when important events fold. In terms of their business, I liked their integration with Amex (AmericanExpress card).
I will talk about LinkedIn sometime later.
(Update 02-07-2014) Used Facebook Paper couple days now, one annoying feature appears to be the fast flicking of the news feed for each news section. For now I am using google news and Zite for news and geek stuff.