Since we last met, some of the
biggest players on web have made major changes to their biggest services.
Others closed down services, news that was received with either indifference,
or much outrage. Read on to get a low-down on the most important changes to the
web
Facebook’s Redesigned Timeline and News
Feed
Facebook has announced it will be rolling
out improvements to Timeline in a bid to make it easier for users to express
what they find important to them. Users can now see their latest posts on the
right side of the Timeline, while photos, music, and other activities on the
left panel.
“We heard from you that the current
timeline layout is sometimes hard to read. Starting today, all posts are on the
right side of your timeline, with photos, music and other recent activity on
the left,” says Facebook about the new layout.
Facebook
Timeline update hasn’t caused a stir among fans
Users can now add other apps to share more
things on the site. For an example, users can include Instagram photo stream as
a section on their timeline. Users can remove the app from their About page,
using the Activity Log.
Facebook’s new News Feed design is aimed at
preventing user fatigue, and also attracting new advertisers to the network.
The focus is on minimalism in design, and greater visibility for shared media –
photos and videos. The new design is being rolled out for the desktop version,
as well as the mobile version. The company wants a uniform look of the network,
no matter what the device or the platform.
The News Feed, which provides a running
list of updates from a user’s network, will serve as a “personalized newspaper”
for Facebook’s 1 billion users, chief executive Mark Zuckerberg said. He
mentioned that this is another step in the “evolving face” of the social
network. He said that he wants Facebook to be “the best personalized newspaper
in the world”.
Instagram Hits 100 Million Active User
Milestone
In other Facebook-related news, the social
networking giant announced its acquisition, Instagram, now has 100 million
active users. Facebook, despite owning it, calls it a formidable competitor, in
a testament to the network’s popularity. “One of the services that is, I think,
a quite formidable competitor is Instagram,” David Ebersman, Facebook chief
financial officer, told investors at the Morgan Stanley Technology, Media,
& Telecom Conference. This is a huge testament to Instagram’s own place in
the social networking services business.
Instagram
100 Million user celebrations were colorful
Google Reader Axed
Google in March announced through an
official blog post that Reader, the popular RSS reader would be shut down this
year. Google said that the shutdown was part of the second round of its ‘spring
cleaning,’ a process that was started back in 2011 to close down services in
order for Google to ‘focus’ on its more popular services.
Google’s announcement has led to a
tremendous outcry on social network services, some of which, ironically, led to
the falling popularity of the RSS reader. Some users have already started
online petitions to force Google to change its mind while others have posted
elegiac stories for the beloved RSS reader.
For a service as popular as Reader, Google
has been unusually curt in explaining its reasoning behind the shutdown.
Instead of announcing the decision in a separate blog post, Google hid the
Reader announcement right in the middle of its spring cleaning post where it
announced the closure of seven other services as well.
In the post, Google’s Urs Holzle writes,
“While the product has a loyal following, over the years usage has declined.
So, on July 1, 2013, we will retire Google Reader”. But there’s no more
information beyond that. While it’s true that the number of Reader users has
been steadily dropping, the outcry proves that there are still plenty out there
(this article’s author included) who use Reader regularly.
Zopfli: Google’s Cloud Zip
Google has introduced a new data compression
algorithm, which the company believes will make the Internet faster for all
users. According to Google, the new algorithm is named after a Swiss bread
recipe and is implementation of the Deflate algorithm, which is used in the
popular ZIP archive format, as well as in gzip file compression.
Google’s
Zopfli seems cool
“Due to the amount of CPU time required 2
to 3 orders of magnitude more than zlib at maximum quality – Zopfli is best
suited for applications where data is compressed once and sent over a network
many times, for example, static content for the web. By open sourcing Zopfli,
thus allowing webmasters to better optimize the size of frequently accessed
static content, we hope to make the Internet a bit faster for all of us,” Google
concludes in the blog post.
Google further explains in its blog that
the output generated by Zopfli is about 3-8 percent smaller as compared to zlib
at the maximum compression. Zopfli has been written in C and is a
compression-only library. Zopfli is bit-stream compatible with compression used
in gzip, Zip, PNG, HTTP requests, and others.
