Cascaad on the iPhone
Cascaad is the social filter that helps you find information you didn’t know you were looking for. What’s most interesting about the service is that it doesn’t take into account how much @replies, retweets or clicks a story has gathered, it has its own unique set of algorithms which takes on the challenge of making it a more personalized service.
Cascaad starts by using your Twitter and Facebook profile to determine your interests. Then it sifts through all the noise within your friends updates to find what’s most likely going to interest you. It reminds me a little of Facebook’s “Most Popular” news feeds feature, only with more metrics (apparently millions).
I believe Cascaad or a similar algorithm would be VERY valuable to Twitter TODAY. I’m very interested to see how popular the browser edition of this service will get.
How to get Cascaad:
Download the free Cascaad app, sign in with your Twitter and Facebook accounts, then you’ll get a pop telling you it’s analyzing millions of algorithms to discover the most relevant stories to you (not sure I believe that one). The progress bar seems to stop at 31%, and I assume as you click on and “thumbs up” more stories the progress bar will rise.. Let me know how far your progress bar gets.
The app is still new and I’m very much looking forward to seeing more features unfold.
If you’ve used Cascaad let me know what you think of it in the comments below.
The Age of Privacy, Over?
Last year people were still saying “Oh my god, I Googled myself last night and you wont believe what I found..” Well this year people are saying “Oh my god I can’t figure out whats public about my Facebook page anymore!” Even I lost track of how many times Facebook changed its privacy settings and left my profile more public then I’d prefer it to be.
The un-privacy you should be aware of:
- By default a lot more of your information is public.
- The pages you Fan cannot be hidden, this isn’t too serious.
- You can no longer hide your activity (eg. comments on friend’s updates and links, relationship status and activity you perform while making changes to your profile) now, you have to manually delete this stuff. Again nothing major.. but why do this?
- Your friend list is public, and there is nothing you can do about it, this bothers me. Facebook shouldn’t be making this choice for their users.
The fact is now you have less privacy then you originally signed up for and Facebook has certainly risked losing their users confidence by this move.
Although the web is changing to a more “public” environment, I don’t think Mark made the privacy changes to benefit his users. If we can agree he didn’t do it for the users then the question is; how does the public accessibility of our information fit into Facebooks upcoming revenue model?
I do understand that just like business, Social Networks need to adapt to their users [where MySpace failed] or force the users to adapt to it, as Facebook is continually asking us to do.
Only time will tell how these changes will affect the largest social network it’s 300,000,000+ users.
Facebook Marketing
Today Facebook has announced improved Facebook Group communications. When you are marketing on Facebook, it’s best to know what to use for what use - a Fan Page or a Group? Facebook states “Groups are for fostering member-to-member collaboration, while Pages remain the best way to broadcast messages to your fans if you are a business, organization, public figure or other entity.”
