Social Media Gets a Facelift
This Week’s Top Story:
It’s been several weeks since Zuckerberg announced the new Facebook Timeline, which reorganizes the profile page and allows users to scroll through all of their Facebook posts and data from the time they joined (and even before that, if they choose to add more milestones). So it’s about time that the changes, which have previously only been available to developers (or anyone savvy enough to pretend), have finally begun to roll out. This week, the beta timeline was released, with the first reports coming out of New Zealand. The full launch of Facebook Timeline was temporarily put on hold when the social media giant was hit with a lawsuit from Timelines.com for copyright infringement. However, Facebook proved it wasn’t going to be pushed around by moving forward with the release this week and firing back at Timelines.com that the term is “generic.”
Newsworthy Tidbits:
Cyber Week bought in a staggering $6 billion this year but Amazon will keep the deals going until Christmas with their new Flurry Deals section.
Facebook acquired location service Gowalla. The tech company is also opening engineering office in NYC.
Twitter.com and the associated Android and iPhone applications underwent a major redesign on Thursday that cleaned up the navigation and made room for new Twitter brand pages.
Crunch Base put out a report this week about the locations of startups over the past two years. It comes as no surprise that Silicon Valley leads the pack with 46 companies. However, shockingly New York came in second with 24 in New York, and 11 apiece in Boston and Los Angeles.
Bloggers are not considered journalists according to most recent ruling by a U.S. district court in Oregon, where Judge Marco A. Hernandez stated that blogger Crystal Cox was not protected by media laws because she lacked affiliation with “any newspaper, magazine, periodical, book, pamphlet, news service, wire service, news or feature syndicate, broadcast station or network, or cable television system.
Apple chose Instagram as the 2011 iPhone App of the Year.
The new OS from Blackberry will officially be called Blackberry 10 after copyright issues with the previous name, BBX.
Facebook is adding functionality for websites to have a “Subscribe” button, which would allow users to follow their feed.
Be on the Lookout:
We’ve heard wind of another major HP Touchpad fire sale scheduled for Dec. 11.
Google launches Schemer, a service for offline activities, in private beta, as is typicallly Google’s style.
Verizon planning an online movie streaming service to rival Netflix in a major partnership with $1 movie rental service, Redbox.
