Facebook unveiled the new “Timeline” feature today during their annual F8 Conference, and all I can say is WOW. Of course, I had try it out immediately on my own profile. Take a look:

Talk about a makeover. First, you’ll notice the profile cover (meet my dog Taz) — a canvas to express yourself in ways the photo windows never made possible.

Next, on the far right you’ll see the timeline, an easy-to-use “jump to year” feature that starts at birth and ends in the present. I was amazed to see some of my first Facebook posts from 2005, but quickly realized I needed to censor a few of updates from my days as an immature high-schooler.

Lastly, you’ll find the new Wall. This is where things get a bit dicey. Organization of posts appear to be chaotic (at best). Also spotting the occasional duplicate post (particularly if I liked a post, and then reposted the link on my Wall). Lastly it looks like FB is still working out some kinks, as my 2008 Wall is entirely dominated by one person. While I don’t remember exactly who I talked to in 2008, I suspect I interacted with more than one person that year… I hope.

All in all, I’m very impressed with the update. The organization will take some getting used to, but once I can overcome that, I can see myself enjoying these new pages much more. I’ll be curious to hear public reactions when the pages go live September 29th. Facebook is certainly pushing to become a bigger part of our lives, the only question is, will we let it?

Today Facebook made two noticeable additions to its platform. The first, a “subscribe” button which is now available on profile pages, has been widely reported, so I won’t delve into that.

However, the second (and surprisingly unreported) addition was far more exciting to me as a social media brand manager.

Take a gander at the image above. You’ll notice a little notification, stating the number of times that article has been shared by page viewers (in this case it’s 26).

Upon clicking the button, one is able to see what each of these sharers had to say about the story. A nice feedback tool, perhaps, but that’s not what excites me.

What makes the brand manager (and sociology minor) in me jump for joy is the potential effect this simple notification might have on share totals. It not only serves as an explicit reminder that one can share the story, but better yet, highlights how many others found it interesting enough to share with their friends. The groupthink (hypothetically) starts there.

Will simply seeing others have shared a story be enough to influence more readers to share with their friends? I think so. But I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

Check out this exciting announcement from AddThis. A huge step towards truly measurable analytics.

Twitter will be rolling out some minor changes this summer regarding links. Twitter will automatically wrapping all links using an official t.co shorter.

The size of the shortened link ID (what matters to Twitter in regards to character size) will be a predicatble 19 characters, but the link might (and often will) be an slightly longer abbreviated version of the original. The distinction here is that you will be able to see a longer URL description - and effort to prevent link spams and malware - but only 19 characters will be counted against the sender’s total.

Twitter asserted that this would have no effect on third party applications like Bit.ly or Hootsuite, both of which offer full analytics for shortened links.

How Facebook Will Put Google Out of Business

A fascinating study of how Social Search may one day put Google out of business.

Twitter has launched a Follow button, allowing websites and publishers to invite users to subscribe to their Twitter feed without ever leaving the page. All it takes is a single click.

Previously a company needed to redirect the follower to the account on Twitter.com, before encouraging them to follow. The result will likely be more “Follow Us” prompts on websites, as publishers no longer need to worry about redirecting audiences off-site.

Expect to see one up on this blog, and on my website, shortly.

TechCrunch has just reported that Google’s +1 Button for websites will launch tomorrow. The news was prematurely leaked by the PR firm representing Clearsping, Google’s partner in the venture.

“The +1 button is designed to help publisher’s content stand out in search results by giving users the ability to +1 content. The more chances users get to +1 content, the more likely publishers’ URLs are to show up in search results with +1 annotations. This helps users highlight which results are most useful and helps publishers better engage with their audience”

The arrival of the button is potentially big news for publishers, as it can potentially alter the way Google search results will be served.

As a young professional in the field this is something I’ve thought plenty about. Right now Social Media is hotter than ever, technologically, and of course financially. But have we learned from our mistakes during the dotCOM Bubble? Are we headed down the same path? Check out this Infographic Report from G+:

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Twitter officially acquired TweetDeck on Monday for the tune of $40mil, reports CNN. TweetDeck, an application for organizing the display of tweets, has been the subject of speculation about deals for months.

Back in Feburary, TechCrunch reported that the 3rd party Twitter app was closing in on a deal with Bill Gross’ UberMedia for between $25-30mil. The deal would be the finishing touches on the internet geniuses plan to acquire and serve ads on many of the major 3rd party Twitter applications. However, when news of the negotiations broke, Twitter countered a higher offer to TweetDeck, and proceeded to suspend a number of UberMedia’s Twitter clients for minor violations.

While this appears to mainly be a defensive move for Twitter, it will be interesting to see how this plays out in Twitter’s future product development.

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It’s been widely publicized that Facebook is creeping into Google turf - offering users tools like “@facebook.com” email addresses, new messaging layouts, and even reports of a Facebook web browser and mobile device in development. While these ventures may be a glimpse into the super power that Facebook hopes to become, I simply cannot imagine any of these tools bringing down the Goliath that is Google.

Enter Microsoft’s Bing. Last year, Facebook teamed up Microsoft to offer WWW search to users without ever leaving their Facebook pages. A wise idea, but the limited functionality was not enough to make a believer out of me, and sure others as well. All of that changed this week.

Mashable reported on Monday that “Microsoft has doubled down on Facebook to make its Bing search engine more relevant.” Starting on Tuesday Bing will display more data from the Facebook Like button, user profiles and official pages than ever before. Here is a recap of some of the changes, and what this means for the rest of us:

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