Facebook Social Readers Are All Collapsing

According to BuzzFeed the Washington Post social reader for Facebook has proven to be a miserable failure.  Apparently the failure is not limited to Washington Post as many top brand news sources that have a social reader for Facebook are also seeing their subscriptions plummet this year.

This is a disaster for WaPo, but they were always an odd fit for Facebook autosharing anyway. How’s everyone else doing? Not so well, apparently. This week’s loser list on AppData.com is full of social reader apps:

This is an interesting predicament though I can’t help but wonder if their numbers aren’t dwindling because there are that many people shutting down their Facebook accounts after so much controversy over the privacy issues they’re having to deal with now.

I shut down my Facebook account two months ago. Not because of privacy issues but because I just don’t find the service all that useful. Of course I was never one of the power users that had thousands of friends on Facebook. I kept a close knit group of actual friends which was under 100. I have no problem ditching that service and moving over to Google+ because I figure anyone that is really a friend still will also find me here on Google+.

What do you think?  Do you still use Facebook?

Web Squad,

Web Design Las Vegas

Social Business Is More Than Just Facebook And Twitter

I’m not “pro-IBM”, I just happened to be digging through the IBM site (actually because I’m looking for a firmware update), but found some really cool stuff on their site.

When I ran across this article it made me think about how the culture at the office had changed since the advent of social networking and I realized how important this media is now to the way we think and act.  Especially as of late with terms like “flash mob” and “crowd sourcing” becoming a regular buzz word in the media more and more society is tending towards random congregations at the “drop of a hat” because of something we heard on Twitter or Facebook.  Of course the most recent event which caught my eye was the story about a “flash mob” appearance because of a posting on “Reddit”.

The following article really sums up how effective this media has become in recent years and I believe underlines one of the key principles which successful technology companies in the last 30 years have already proven to be effective corporate cultures like Microsoft, Lucas Arts, Google, etc.  The key to being successful these days is to be socially engaging and foster communication and a sense of community.  At least that’s what I got out of it.

A social business isn’t just a company that has a Facebook page and a Twitter handle. A social business is one that embraces and cultivates a spirit of collaboration and community throughout its organization—both internally and externally.

Read more on the IBM site, “Social Business“.

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Web Design Las Vegas