Facebook starts grouping items in your News Feed by topic

Posted on August 8, 2011 by Mathilde Piard

I noticed this over the weekend and thought I’d missed an announcement about it or something, but it turns out Facebook only announced this earlier today (Monday) and Mashable just posted something about it two hours ago. Facebook has started grouping items in your News Feed by topic, and is linking them to the most relevant Facebook Page too. It’s pretty rad.

As you can see in these example from my News Feed, the algorithm is smart enough to figure out you’re probably referring to Kanye West when talking about Kanye (ditto with Britney & Britney Spears, a slightly more common name):

The algorithm also seems to be looking at the content and/or metadata of links you’re sharing too to figure out what topic to associate it with, like in this example from the News Feed of coworker David Pait at Cox Media Group Orlando:

Next step, letting admins of those Facebook Pages (that are being linked to with each topic) see those updates (where privacy settings would allow it)? That would be pretty cool for social media listening & monitoring purposes.

And just so you don’t think everything in my News Feed is about singers ;)

 

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Google+ Circles: lots of potential, lots of questions

Posted on June 28, 2011 by Mathilde Piard

The news about Google’s social project, Google+, has me pretty excited. I’ve been mostly off Twitter today because I wanted to crank out some work, so I haven’t seen the chatter there. All I’ve read so far are the TechCrunch, Wired and Reuters writeups about it that people have already emailed and IMed to be (UPDATE: if you’re looking for a good quick read to catch up, start with the TechCrunch one; for deeper analysis, head to the Wired one; and the videos in this Engadget post are a great way to get a good overall feel for the whole Google+ project), but I’m already really stoked, in particular for the potential of Circles. It could be the answer to something I’ve been yearning for for ages. Or, maybe I’m just wishfully hoping it is. And I still have many questions. Namely:

  • The Google+ demo makes it look like you can only add a contact to a single circle, which doesn’t seem right. It seems obvious you’d want to add people to several circles, like my coworker who’s also a bike buddy and a foodie friend. So I’m assuming this is just bad user experience in just the demo.
  • Related to that: oh please please make it so that the concept of circles is like tags – from the demo and the videos it doesn’t seem that way unfortunately. One thing that drives me crazy with Facebook lists and Gmail contact groups is that I have to sloth through my entire list of friends and contacts each time I want to create or edit a list or group – and I inevitably end up leaving someone out accidentally. Instead, I should also be able to go to my coworker’s profile/contact, and add them to my circles of coworkers, bike buddies and foodie friends from there. It may seem like a small detail, but I often feel like the world has not fully grasped the concept of organizing and managing taggable objects. Sigh.
  • Suggested Circles based on contact metadata: it would be awesome Google+ could autos-suggest circles, but I haven’t seen any mention of this yet. In it’s most basic form, it could suggest Circles based on people’s addresses for example – so like, suggest a Circle for all my friends who live in Atlanta or New York.
  • I pray that one day Circles might access contacts beyond Gmail and Google Contacts – from what I’ve read, that doesn’t seem to be the case yet. To take the address/geography example again: I travel a fair amount, and when I’m in a city, I love to connect with people I know there. But it’s so damn hard, pretty much near impossible, to easily track down which of my friends from Facebook or Twitter live in a particular place. Imagine if Circles could auto-suggest groups based on their data from Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, like where they work, live etc. Circles could even auto-suggest adding some of my contacts to my bike buddy circle because they’ve listed biking as one of their Facebook interests/Likes for example. I’m constantly discovering I have common interests, musical tastes etc with friends that I never suspected, but right now I discover those things so serendipitously.

Anyway, that’s why I think Circles has so much potential – am I totally off base? What do you think? I can’t wait to try it out for myself and see what becomes of it and how it integrates with the core Google product. Let’s just hope it lives up to at least some of my expectations.

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Social Media and Mobile Internships at Cox Media Group

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Mathilde Piard

Cox Media Group’s Digital and Strategy Team is looking for two summer interns with a passion for social media and mobile. In this role, you’ll be working closely with the folks who handle the strategic direction for Cox Media Group’s 100+ television, radio and newspaper properties from a social (that’ll be me, as well as our Social Monetization Manager, a new position Mashable described as an industry first) and mobile perspective. You’ll very likely end up working with other folks in our team who handle email, contesting and analytics too. You’ll be helping out with everything we do, from research, deploying new social and mobile products (like our mobile web sites, app development, community tools and social media initiatives), supporting our properties with their efforts to engage their audiences with social. You’ll also be encouraged to explore and come up with your own projects and ideas for experiments.

Here are some of the things we hope you’re looking for:
• A paid internship (that’s right, paid!) for eight weeks in Atlanta, one of the best cities in the country for college grads
• A place where geeks can be themselves and learning abounds (we organize our own lunch & learns on subjects ranging from Django programming for non-techies to bicycle maintenance, internet advertising 101 to wilderness medicine)
• An fun-loving team environment (office pranks are common)

Here are some of the things we’re looking for:
• You’re actively engaged in social networks and use mobile apps regularly (you’re pretty much addicted to both)
• You’ve got a passion for how media sites should work and an understanding of the content publishing business
• You’ve built an app for Facebook, iOS or Android (a plus for this position)

Interested? Send me a resume and a cover letter/email explaining why you think you’d rock this internship, and why social media and mobile are so important today. The deadline to apply is basically to get in touch before I find the people I’m looking for, which I’m hoping to do as soon as possible!

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In the Tumblr vs. WordPress debate, I decided to go with… both

Posted on April 15, 2011 by Mathilde Piard

I’ve been putting off creating a blog for far too long, and this week I decided enough was enough. I needed somewhere to post this internship opportunity with us at Cox Media Group (please spread the word!) and I was tired of keeping my 141+ character opinions to myself, or having to guest post them elsewhere like a homeless person.

So yes, up until now, I haven’t had a blog. I haven’t even updated mathildepiard.com in the year and a half I’ve moved to Atlanta, so it still says I work at the Palm Beach Post (and it’s still more or less the same lame thing I designed years ago in Dreamweaver before I knew better). And now that I’ve set up matpiard.com on WordPress here (I signed up for matpiard with GMail and parked @matpiard on Twitter months ago because people just can’t seem to learn how to spell Mathilde), it doesn’t even have a theme or anything pretty like that. Yes, it’s embarrassing, I know, so don’t judge and please just move on.

Anyway, back to the actual topic: I was torn between a WordPress and Tumblr account. I know it’s like comparing apples and oranges (actually, the same day I was having this conversation with folks on Twitter about this, Paul Bradshaw actually posted excellent run down of which platforms are best suited to each blogging purpose). But in my case I could have gone either way: I wanted something where I could react to stuff I read with more than 140 characters (Tumblr suitable), but once I get going, I can get pretty verbose (not so Tumblr suitable). So I asked folks on Twitter. Predictably, the geekier folks were proponents of WordPress, while the self-avowed lazier types recommended Tumblr.

I decided to go with WordPress for some things, in part because of SEO. For example, had I had this blog last week, I might have posted my revised list of the top 25 newspapers on Twitter on it – and I would have wanted it to have every fighting chance against the inaccurate versions posted over at The Wrap and Forbes. I’m a perfectionist with a procrastination problem however, so I hope the upkeep and maintenance for WordPress won’t became too much like it did with Emma Carew, who said she lost interest in hers.

Meanwhile, I also set up a Tumblr account, mostly because I wanted to post this video that I loved, and so I could start dipping my toe into that community as well.

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Tumblr vs. WordPress, the debate on Twitter

Posted on April 14, 2011 by Mathilde Piard


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