Facebook Lists and Google Plus Circles

This week Facebook unveiled an improved version of their "Friend Lists." In Google parlance, this is the same as "Circles." Facebook obviously felt they needed to respond to the warm reception Google Plus received with their Circles.

While Facebook did make significant improvements to how you manage your Lists, it's still not as visual or elegant as Google Plus's Circles. With Circles, you can drag-and-drop your friends right into various categories. And while hovering over the icon of any Google Plus friend, you can assign them to Circles right away -- a very elegant management system.

Facebook does, however, hold the edge in automating the way friend management works. Facebook makes use of the way you interact with Facebook to suggest various friends into different categories (close friends, acquaintances, etc.). They call this method "Smart Lists." It's great in theory, but the people I interact with most on Facebook aren't always my friends, per se. With Circles, assigning friends is still a manual process. I'm not saying that one is better the other -- it will come down to a personal choice. If you're the type of person who wants total control over your friend management, then Circles is for you. If you want help with the process, then go with Lists.

A downside to using the new version of Lists, however, is that most Facebook users will be doing this after the fact. You'll need to spend a few hours going through your hundreds of Facebook friends to add them to one List or another. At least with Circles, the platform was new, so it was easier to add friends to Circles as you were adding then to Google Plus.

I'll continue to use both, but I'd like to see Facebook eventually get more of a visual or drag-and-drop interface.

Google Instant Previews

Google has quietly rolled out another interesting feature to their search offering. It's called Instant Previews. It allows you to hover over the list of search results and see a thumbnail preview of the site.

The thumbnail, while not small, as thumbnails go, is certainly not big enough to read any text on the site. It's even less legible than viewing a full Web page on an iPhone. It seems the only benefit it affords you is helping you with that gut reaction you get when you click on a new site. At a glance, you get a sense if the site is 'legit' or not. Instant Preview would certainly help weed out the geocities.com's of the world from the cnn.com's of the world.

One downside for these indexed websites is that it may actually cause less click-throughs. If you can glance at 10 sites to judge its relevance to you, then there's no need for you to click on those 10 sites. For Google, it would subsequently keep you on their page longer, perhaps by design.

In terms of usability, you do have to click on the little magnifying lens next to the search result, the first time, in order to activate the thumbnails for all of the results. In fact, you have to click on the magnifying lens each time you run a new search. Also, there are no thumbnail previews of the Sponsored Results -- something I'd actually like to see added.

An important point for Web developers and administrators ... some websites do not display properly with Instant Previews. Across the board, Flash sites and Flash elements to websites show up as a puzzle piece in the preview. And some sites, like Coach.com, don't work at all.

What do you think? Have you used it?

Apple-Google Throw-Down

Can you smell it? A storm's a brewin'. You can almost see on the horizon that something ugly is headed our way. It's an all-out, knock-down brawl between Apple and Google.

Business Week ran a great article last week on this, and it's evident that something's gotta give. Let's face it, as the years progress, each is encroaching on the other's sandbox.

• Apple comes out with a phone OS, Google comes out with Android.
• Apple releases the iPhone, Google releases the Nexus One.
• Apple develops their Safari Web browser, Google comes out with Chrome.
• Google acquires mobile advertising company AdMob, Apple goes after Quattro Wireless.
• Apple works with TomTom on a for-pay GPS app, Google offers their turn-by-turn directions for free.
• Google CEO Eric Schmidt stepped down as Apple board member last year.

Expect more tough back and forth between these two as the phone carrier wars heat up later this year when Apple's exclusive contract with AT&T expires.

Out of the (MS) Office

At first, I was very skeptical about cloud computing, specifically word processing and spreadsheets. I couldn't wrap my head around relinquishing access and direct control over my documents to something other than a hard drive that was no more than three feet away. I'm sure you, too, have been burned by server crashes that have wreaked havoc on your Word docs on a shared server. Still, Microsoft Word always kept a local copy that was never more than ten minutes old. To boot, the hacking of Twitter's sensitive Google Docs further justified my apprehension.

However, I'm a realist ... a pragmatist ... and a technologist. But what happens when these attributes conflict, as is the case with trusting cloud computing? First, the realist in me understands that cloud computing / online document management is where things are headed. Why fight it? 'Nuff said. The pragmatist in me knows that cloud computing introduces more points of failure (Internet connection, remote servers, hackers). The technologist in me loves the idea of real-time access to all of my documents, well beyond the benefits of a USB jump drive. Let's face it ... where do you go nowadays that you don't have at least some level of Internet connectivity. (Answer: The one place you'll need that document the most.)

I already do some level of cloud computing with Apple's MobileMe file storage service, but adding the capability to edit and collaborate on documents takes it to a whole new level. That said, I've decided to jump in and start porting my documents over to the cloud where I can both access and edit them from (nearly) everywhere. The big-player options:

• Google Docs. I've used Google Docs before when collaborating on a document or spreadsheet in my work with the ADM to some success. As with all collaboration editing, it gets a little hairy when a lot of people try to edit something. It's like five people trying to make a batch of cookies all at the same time.
• Google Wave. This is really just an expanded implementation of Google Docs, but the principles are the same. Plus, I'm really looking forward to using the collaborative functionality of Wave and its gadgets for work use. However, for personal use, I think I'll stick with the simpler tools.
• Acrobat BuzzWord. It seems like Adobe looked at the mistakes of others before releasing this slick update. They really hit it out of the park with this iteration. BuzzWord maintains the core functionality that's critical to word processing (text, paragraphs, images, etc.) yet made it so elegant and user-friendly. To look at BuzzWord and Google Docs side-by-side, I think one would naturally gravitate towards BuzzWord, if only for its design. With this (and Google Docs), you can create PDFs of your work, which is recommended for delivering a finished, uneditable version of your work. Note: with BuzzWord, you can only export five PDFs for free.
• AjaxWrite. This one can read and write MS Word files and is completely free. In fact, it feels a lot like early versions of MS Word. The two main drawbacks are that it only works in Firefox, and it's a bit slow. I often have to wait for it to load a blank document. Seriously?

For me, the only feasible options are Google Docs (formerly Writely) and Adobe BuzzWord, the former for being more ubiquitous, the latter for being ... well ... cooler. It's a shame that whichever route we go with online word processing, they all feel the need to pay homage to the Microsoft Word mother ship. Hell, I'd love to use Apple's Pages, but who else will be able to open a .pages file? Everyone knows what a Word DOC is.

Update on Friday, November 20, 2009 at 4:47PM by Matthew Snodgrass

Other benefit to plain old desktop-based word processing ... you won't ever get a message like this:

But then again, know that your computer will crash a lot more than Adobe's or Google's.

Keep It Going, Bing

As much of an Apple fanboi as I am, I must say that I really like Bing, Microsoft's latest search engine. It's simple, produces good results, and I get a kick out of the pleasant images they present you daily. After some initial critical success and a marketing surge by Microsoft, it quickly jumped to a 10% share of search, which is not an easy task, considering Google's standing dominance in that area.

However, the 6-month-old search engine seems to have leveled off, if not slightly declining. Mind you, the constant flow of Bing commercials seems to have trailed off, and Yahoo is now going some hefty advertising itself with its new (and confusing) $100 million campaign.

Source: StatCounter Global Stats - Search Engine Market Share

I can't imagine the stagnation is due to its usability. Pumping more marketing dollars behind it would certainly help to some degree. But what will it take for Bing to really make a dent in Google's market share? They essentially do the same thing, and they each have quite simple interfaces, unlike Yahoo. Even Yahoo's "compact view" is complicated.

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