Facebook now lets you tag pages

Facebook

Everyone loves to tag their friends in a hilarious photo of them dancing drunkenly at a party on Facebook. Well now, you can tag pages too. 

So why would you would want to do this? Say for example you took a picture at a party and your friend in the picture was drinking a well known brand of beer. You could not only tag your friend so that they and all of their friends would see, but also the beer could be tagged so it would appear on the brand's Facebook page. 

This is clearly a great way for Facebook to encourage brands to sign up and engage with customers using the network. I imagine we will start to see brands trying to encourage us not only to "like" them but to tag them in photos too. 

The feature is currently restricted to the brands & products or people categories of pages but it is likely to be rolled out further soon. You can see the full annoucement here.

 

The New Twitter

So earlier this week twitter made a big announcement. The most interesting thing is that media such as videos and images will now appear in the stream rather like Facebook.

This is important because it means no longer will you have to go off of the current page to see what tweets are talking about. It means that sponsored tweets could include the YouTube video in support of the campaign will show up there in the feed. Clever social media chap Paul Armstrong has a good post for PR Week on the significance of this.

The design is clearly based on new Twitter iPad client and from the shots I've seen looks very slick and smooth.

It just shows how quickly things are moving for the social media site, which I joined in December 2006. In those days no one had an iPhone and mobile internet was very much a fledgling technology which meant the only way to interact with the site on the move was by using SMS. Now it is possible not only to tweet directly using any number of client apps but also take photos and even upload videos directly from your phone. Basically people, the future is here.

Social Media Overload?

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I recently tweeted that I was closing my Google Buzz account. As I said at the time I was finding it a needless irritation in Gmail but my reasons were somewhat more complex than that.

I also left Bebo a while back, MySpace too is looking increasingly shaky and I recently closed my account on Dopplr. Although in this case it seems I might not be the only one. My reasons for leaving were simply that I don't travel the globe enough to justify it, but as the Guardian article says the fact that the site has been basically mothballed since it was bought by Nokia won't have helped keep my interest.

Obviously with the huge user bases of sites like Facebook, so the space has grown increasingly crowded. Being someone interested in the latest developments online I do seem to end up with profiles here there and everywhere while I try the site out and decide if it's somewhere I will keep going back to. Unfortunately there are some that just aren't going to make that cut.

Interestingly, since I left Google Buzz I've seen at least one tweet praising it as easier to dip into than Twitter. So the question is, do you think I was right to quit Google Buzz? Also which social sites have you ditched recently?