Remarkably, though Facebook seems as though it has been a part of our lives from the start, the mega site has only been around for just over seven years. While seven years in the tech world is a huge amount of time, Facebook has become so engrained in our daily lives that it is nearly impossible to imagine life without it just seven years ago. With every new addition or alteration made to Facebook there is an uproar of debate. People will complain, people will praise, and people will discuss every little aspect of the change.
Part of the reason these changes come with such controversy is because Facebook is very much a personal experience for its users. Though it is the number one social networking site on the web, our Facebook profiles are still very much our own personal accounts of our lives. With the social networking race at full speed in the last year, Facebook has had to roll out several new changes and improvements to keep up the speed and remain ever dynamic. Here are three new features Facebook has introduced to continue to dominate the field.
1. Real-Time Updates
This new feature has created possibly the most controversy and debate out of all of the new additions to the site. Named “the Facebook within Facebook”, the real-time Ticker shows you what your friends are doing and say as they do it and say it. This window appears at the top right of your News Feed page and has received a lot of flak. It’s fairly obvious the approach that Facebook was taking with this new addition. Applying the principles of Twitter in a very natural way to the Facebook interface, this real-time application was an obvious and important step for Facebook. Some criticize this feature as somewhat invasive because it shows people what you are doing as you do it even if it does not immediately pertain to your friendship with that person. However, the settings for this feature are alterable.
2. Improved Friends Lists
The “new Facebook” rolled out a special new feature for organizing your friends. While before you simply had one large glob of friends, now you can organize them into groups based on your place of work, school, location, and more. Obviously, Facebook is responding to the praise that Google Plus received for its “circles”. These lists seem like a simple and intelligent step for Facebook to take. They help users organize and more quickly locate information from the friends they want to see then and there and they help Facebook better optimize the information it shows you.
3. Integrated Social Apps
Prior to the update, if you were to use an outside application such as Spotify or the Nike+ application, the app would post something to your friends’ news feeds and then take them to a separate website if they were to click on it. With the update, these outside applications are integrated directly into Facebook. So, the things that facebook friends are listening to on Spotify and the runs friends are completing with Nike+ are posted directly in the New Feed page. This integration makes Facebook a one stop shop for all the information you could ever need. You can see what your friends are listening to, watching, and doing all from the opening page of your Facebook account. Notice, however, that many of these apps no longer require approval each time you share activity. So, once you install an app and authorize it to post things to your profile, it will not ask you again.
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This is a Guest post by Alvina Lopez, She is a freelance writer and blog junkie, who blogs about accredited online colleges. She welcomes your comments below !