Twitter Gets a Redesign, Brings in Brand Pages and More

Twitter Gets a Redesign, Brings in Brand Pages and More

As per a recent news update, Twitter is going to see a major redesign citing the upcoming brand pages for the various brands on Twitter. The new redesign seems to be very interesting which involves the complete revamp of the way we interact with others on the twittersphere. Yes! Twittersphere is evolving, and evolving for the good.

This major redesign and the brand pages feature comes in just a month after Google+ launched the brands feature. Maybe Twitter is gearing up for the upcoming social media war, already into it's cold stage. Closely spotting, Google+ seems not much a threat to any other social network than Twitter, which is currently rope-walking between the ends of a dreadful death and an epic success.

As the video depicts, the new re-design involves a greater emphasis on the @Mentions (@Connect in the video) and #hashtags (#Discover in the video). The current right sidebar that shows the who to follow and the trending hashtags has been shifted to the left. The design changes would also reflect upon the mobile versions and apps for specific mobile devices.

Brands will get specifically customizable pages of their own with many page-specific features like holding a tweet always on the top of other tweets, and showing the content of the photo/video attached to the top-tweet implicitly without the user taking any action.

I liked the overall design update. Would rather rate the design update an 8.5/10. Thumbs-up Twitter. Great job guys. Hope the UX update works equally great as it looks.

What do you think about the upcoming Twitter update? Drop me a tweet @ikartik90 on twitter. Till my next post, stay tuned. Cheers! :)

[Sources: Mashable & Twitter on Youtube]

Why This Kolaveri Di : Chartbuster Underdog [VIDEO]

Why This Kolaveri Di : Chartbuster Underdog [VIDEO]

Why This Kolaveri Di by Sony Music India on YouTube

"Why this kolaveri kolaveri kolaveri di..." These are the words from the underdog song from the upcoming Kollywood movie "Three" that has soared the heights of Internet celebration from nowhere in a matter of twelve days from it's release. The song that released on the 16th of November turned into a Social Media viral with over 8 million YouTube hits and over a million shares on facebook.

Google Plus : Should You Be Interested? [Slides]

Google Plus : Should You Be Interested? [Slides]

Presentation by Real Talk Design on Slide Rocket

Real Talk-Creative Communication has put up a very promising presentation regarding why we should keep our eyes on Google+ as an emerging social media (though I felt that the presentation shifts to explaining the various features of Google+ just near the end). Google has been into exploring it's place in the social media business since it's (social media's) inception. In spite of having met immense number of challenges and suffering many failures Google repels to quit. It's not the time to appreciate Google for it's bravery (we'll come to that later), rather it's time to find the answer to why isn't Google willing to quit the social media business in spite of the backlogs and suffrage.

Twitter- Faster Than Earthquakes [VIDEO]

Twitter- Faster Than Earthquakes [VIDEO]

This week as the earthquakes shook the USA from Washington D.C. to New york, it turned out a top trending tweet on twitter. As the earthquake traveled from Washington D.C. to New York City, a matter of mere 30 seconds, the twittersphere had it. So, just in order to represent it's speed, the twitter advertising team bragged about it in a video titled-"Twitter-Faster Than Earthquakes." Check it out. Cheers. :)

Twitter's Got It's Brand New Photo Uploader

Twitter's Got It's Brand New Photo Uploader

Hey hello friends. And Ah yes! Good to see you guys back after long. Have been busy with designing and blogging at another blog these days- autogranth, an autos website. Well this time I've got some news belonging to twitter.

And the news is- Twitter has finally got it's own photo uploading facility powered by photobucket. I made a brief analysis of the new facility to see how thing work in our new photo world. So here goes.

The first thing I noticed was that photos would still be posted as links just like the YouTube videos we share on Twitter, so that, when we click on the particular tweet, it gives us the preview of the specific photograph.

Though the photo uploading facility has been availed by twitter, for the time being at least it doesn't seem like it would facilitate us with creating photo albums or photo tagging facilities.

Photos are uploaded to pic.twitter.com as you can see in the snapshot to the left (By the way, that's my facebook profile photograph now. Don't spare a comment ;) ). When I tried to access pic.twitter.com directly, I was redirected to the Twitter homepage. Well this clearly shows that twitter won't at least for the time being try to create a photo farm out there.

And finally, I found the facility to be working smoothly. No glitches, no failures, and finally instantaneous upload, no delay. And a +1 to the interface. Has been designed neatly, minimal.

That was my view. What do you think? Share your views below. And don't forget to subscribe to my blog to get the latest updates directly to your mailbox or your feed reader. Cheers! :)

The Empathic Civilization [stop animation]

The Empathic Civilization [stop animation]

The Empathic Civilization is a stop animation illustrated by the RSAnimate team and narrated by Jeremy Rifkin, a bestselling author and political adviser. The video, as the title says, makes us realize about the origin of the existence of our circles, our religions, our beliefs etc. and in the process preaches us about establishing harmony, not just among the humankind but other races as well, say animal beings and further, who're mortals themselves.

What is this video doing on this social media (& design) blog, you might ask. Well, in the process of watching this video, I felt very moved with the fact that even though we tend to develop our social circles across the borders over the internet, its somewhere or the other that grudges still exist among the fellow us (me and you). For example, if we talk of Iraq or the Muslim community for that matter, the first thing that comes to our mind implicitly (at least mine) is a detest plagued by the prominent and active terrorist activities belonging to the region. Isn't that bad?

Though we're descendants of the same race deep back in time, we tend to fight for a thing, a belief, a border that perpetually doesn't exist. Does it make sense to fight for something that is not even permanent? This all sounds very much of a preaching, but needs a thought before we move on with our daily chores.

Sounds unrealistic, but even Galileo was laughed at when he proposed that the Earth moved around the Sun, and we all know today who got it right. Let's take oath that we'll all be a harmonic world now on and aid our fellow mates to make our mother Earth a better place to live in. Cheers! :)

Google Changlings: Minimal is Beautiful

Google Changlings: Minimal is Beautiful

In this past week, I've been able to see more design changes in Google more than I can ever remember to have seen in the past. Google is changing. And the change, is beautiful. This time Google seems very much focused on it's prime design motif- Minimal is beautiful. We've always seen Google's landing search page the minimalest thing ever possible way. Compare it to Yahoo! or any other search engine and you come to realize what makes it so damn successful (though it's not just design).

MySpace Sold Out to Specific Media for $35M

MySpace Sold Out to Specific Media for $35M

Citing it's continuously plummeting worth, News Corp. has finally sold out MySpace for a meager $35 million way below it's estimated bid of $100 million. News Corp. purchased MySpace, a budding social media mammoth then, for a whooping $580 million in 2005. The deal comes with cutting down the staff strength to half it's current number, i.e., from 400 to 200, including the CEO Mike Jones.

The bidders for the social network included the co-founders of the social network themselves, though separately this time, Tom Anderson and Chris DeWolfe. But the bid finally materialized in the favor of Specific Media, a digital ad service and advertising network on the web.

It is quite likely that the CEO and other higher authorities will stay for an interim period before handing over their positions. Further, estimates say that MySpace's further operations will have a greater orientation towards music-based services citing it's close relationship with music bands and music lovers.

What is your opinion regarding the deal? Will the deal be fruitful for the future of MySpace as well as Specific Media? Will MySpace be able to get back up as it once used to be- A giant social graph? Let in your comments to throw your opinions. Ciao.

Google+ Targets Taking Over Facebook as the GenNext Social Network

Google+ Targets Taking Over Facebook as the GenNext Social Network

Social Media is a dynamic quantity. It has seen so many changes since it's inception at the birth of web 2.0, that there hardly exists any chance that one can accurately predict the time period it would take the sociosphere to reach an equilibrium. This could be clearly seen with Google's steps towards taking over the sociosphere. Google, the largest search and internet enterprise had multiple attempts towards acquiring the social market with projects like Orkut followed by Buzz and then Google Wave. Though some of them saw some success at birth, they finally failed to "conquer" the sociosphere due to some prominent features they lagged in. The web 2.0 era saw many start-ups that quickly took off and acquired the social capital with their out of the box thinking and understanding of the web audience. One such prominent start-up was facebook which was started up in 2003. It took off fairly well and has till date seen enormous success as compared to any other social networking site on the web.

Facebook Spams: From Platform to Serial Disasters

Facebook Spams: From Platform to Serial Disasters

Facebook is seeing a lateral disaster in the name of Apps that spread spam across the user community. These spams work as virtual worms that simply crawl from wall to wall. These apps, once liked and approved by the user, send malicious posts to the victim's connections through wall posts, chat IMs and even messages. The latest one in the list is a spam that claims to be a YouTube video in which the user at the receiving end is said to be tagged.

Blogger is back to normal *sighs*

Blogger is back to normal *sighs*

They say- "you realize things' worth when they part off you." Well, today I really realized how much I love my blog. I could simply feel it in every bit of me- The pain of not being able to make a post when you're really eager and itchy to write down something and showcase it to you friends and everyone across the seven seas. I missed my blog like never before within these 10-15 hours when I actually thought of writing an article and tried to reach the Blogger Dashboard to finally realize that it was down without a clue for maintenance.

Why Blogger might lose it's share in the blogging platform race

Why Blogger might lose it's share in the blogging platform race

The day before drafting this article, I was simply wondering what made Blogger.com, a Google owned blogging service, lose it's share to newbie blogging services that germinated at the birth of web 2.0. And yes, I got a lot of reasons that highly favored the argument.

I hope the Blogger loyalists don't mistake me. I have no grudges against Blogger. I myself am a Blogger user and I love the service, but it's quite a fact and we ought to accept it that Blogger needs a boost to get back into the race.

The birth of the 2.0 era of the web marked the emergence of some of the most impressive blogging services such as Wordpress by Automattic, paralleled by Tumblr and Posterous recently. And Blogger, originally founded by PyraLabs, was the only dominant service then. Yet, it has either lost or has been losing it's share in the blogging space to other miniature services specified above. Why? In this article, we discuss each reason point by point towards the above argument.

Tim Stevens appointed as the new Engadget Editor-in-Chief

Tim Stevens appointed as the new Engadget Editor-in-Chief

AOL, the American global Internet services and social media company, has finally confirmed that Tim Stevens will replace Josh Topolsky as the new Editor-in-Chief of Engadget.com, AOL's technology news website.

It has now been around 3 weeks that Josh officially announced that he was resigning his job as the Chief Editor of Engadget. After quitting Engadget Josh has joined the Gang of Eight, a new tech news startup by a group of Engadget dropouts.

Things you can do to aid the earthquake victims

Things you can do to aid the earthquake victims

Japan encountered an earthquake of magnitude 8.9 Richter on Friday (11 March, 2011). The quake with it's epicenter 130km east of Tōhoku, combined with the Tsunami that followed triggered a massive disaster. To add to the scenario, multiple problems popped out, including fire in an oil refinery in Ichihara and explosions in a nuclear power plant in Fukishima. The calamity has caused massive damage in the region and has accounted for great loss to life and property. A lot of people are stuck under the debris and many have been declared missing and dead respectively. It's high time that we realize our responsibilities towards the cause and help the affected to rehabilitate their lives. If "I want to help, but how can I?" is the question that bothers you, then here are a few simple ways in which you can serve.

Warner bros. launches movie portal on facebook

Warner bros. launches movie portal on facebook

Facebook's product-as-platform feature sees another implementation, rather, yet another income opportunity, this time by one of the biggest worldwide media giants- "Warner Brothers Entertainment Studios". The company had launched an app on facebook that enables you to get movies on rent. Having launched the app, Warner Brothers Entertainment has become the first Hollywood Studio to offer movies directly on facebook.