It’s easy to think of Facebook as this powerhouse that churns out update after update to socially addicted users. Sure, people might complain about the latest change, but we tend to get used to it all fairly quickly, right?

Well no, not really. Several of Facebook’s launches have crashed and burned. Remember Facebook Gifts? Facebook Places, their attempt to rival FourSquare? Facebook Lite? These are all ventures Facebook has invested in, and later closed down.

The new iPad app has had a decidedly quiet reception too. Perhaps the company waited too long, with apps like MyPad and Friendly dominating the market for a while. The infographic below suggests that the app’s lack of interesting new features worked against it too.

I’m sure Google is feeling quietly smug about the slow take-up of Facebook Messages, which was touted as the Gmail killer. Although Google’s not really in a position to be complacent really, considering its current problems with a downturn in activity on Google+….

Source: Mashable

It’s been a bad few weeks for Blackberry. Several days without email or BBM has had Blackberry users up in arms. The company hasn’t really helped matters by making little apparent effort to communicate with customers, leaving many feeling neglected.

Unfortunately, this all happened in the same week the Apple iPhone 4S launched, leading to inevitable articles about whether users should abandon their loyalty to Blackberry for the latest Apple product. And the new iPhone certainly outdid itself: even with update issues on iOS 5, the phone reached a record one million sales in its first 24 hours on sale.

Anyway, for those stuck in a contract with Blackberry for a while longer, this video from Ronnie Corbett and Harry Enfield may cheer you up.

Just picked up this simple video which clearly explains how social media changes the way businesses have traditionally communicated and the need to empower staff to respond via social media platforms.

Might be worth sharing the link with a senior exec who is a bit of a laggard!!

It’s refreshingly simple…

I have read a number of pieces lately suggesting that we are not Facebook customers. Instead we are their products for their advertising masters and that they care more about our social graphs than anything else. While they make our data open, they are not open about how they use our data and so on.

Douglas Rushkoff has an interesting piece about the key commercial drivers of the Facebook board.

And The Guardian has highlighted data issues that Facebook is facing including the launch of a European online campaign, calling for Facebook to be more open about the data it is holding on us and what it is doing with it. This was set up by someone from Ireland who discovered that Facebook still had controversial personal data which he had consciously deleted.

The Europe online Facebook campaign site is here.

Facebook is going to be have to be careful on the data issues. Even my teenage daughter (a Facebook diehard) complained the other day that it changes too much. I asked her if she would ever leave Facebook and she said no because everyone is there.

I like Facebook – it is changing the world in so many positive ways – look at some of the events in the Middle East, for example. I enjoy the easy connections with other people. It was great to get birthday greetings recently from old school friends around the world via Facebook.

However the extent to which our data is being used by all these exciting new social technologies needs to be explored and monitored. We are busy using it and there needs to be proper protection in place.

Facebook wants us to be open with our data. Then it should be open too about how it is using our data. Sounds reasonable to me.