Just Another Blog…Or Is It?

I came across an article today stating that Facebook had turned on a new feature last night that recommends branded friends, similar to Twitter’s featured friends when you first join. I was wondering why Facebook put P.Diddy as one of my recommended friends this morning. I think that this idea is pretty useless though. How are they choosing which people to recommend? I’m not even a fan of P.Diddy or like anything really similar to his music as far as my facebook profile goes. My friend got a recommendation for Michael Jordan, and she has nothing basketball-related on her facebook account. Perhaps they assume because she is a Texas football fan…she likes sports? I wonder if these profiles are paying to be put up as recommended friends. If so, I still find very superficial. If I was a huge fan or influencer that a marketing director would want, then I would have already befriended them. I think these branded friend recommendations may be just adding to the clutter of the social network and making it less meaningful. I also think it could be backlashed into the point where I don’t even notice the box anymore because Facebook isn’t recommending anyone meaningful to me. It was doing pretty good in the sense of grabbing mutual friends and old high school people that I knew, but now they might just ruin it again.

http://www.allfacebook.com/2009/04/facebook-starts-recommending-branded-public-profiles/

For MIS 375, our class has an emerging technology project in which our group has decided to analyze microblogging and see how businesses can use this strategically. While we talked about Twitter, I found out from wikipedia that a new “enterprise microblogging” tool called Yammer was introduced this past September 2008. Yammer creates a microblogging network within a corporation or organization. The basic service is free but the company charges money to any corporations who want to control their own administrative tools. It is called a “Twitter with a business model” allowing Yammer to win the TechCrunch50 Conference this past 2008.  If microblogging begans to really take off (especially when the price of the Iphone goes down), I could see Twitter giving Facebook a little bit of competition, in terms of fast status communication. In this case, Yammer has huge potential to give the professional social networking tool LinkedIn some competition.

Read the article at: http://www.techcrunch50.com/2008/conference/presenter.php?presenter=53

and the Yammer website: https://www.yammer.com/