Simon Willison’s Weblog

A new Buzz start-up experience based on your feedback. Buzz is switching to the more obvious model: use existing Gmail behaviour to suggest a list of people to follow, rather than auto-following them. It feels pretty clear to me that this is how following recommendations should work.

# 14th February 2010, 10:12 am / buzz, follow, following, google-buzz, privacy

Four reasons why public Facebook status updates won’t kill Twitter. Mike Butcher highlights the importance of “follow” rather than “friend” in social software.

# 9th February 2009, 7:04 pm / facebook, follow, friend, mike-butcher, socialsoftware, twitter

Go Get Yer Shiny New Yahoo Profile... And Make Some Connections! I’m surprised to see Yahoo! going with mutual friendships as the core of their new social platform—I’ve personally found social sites which support a one-way “follow” relationship far more useful.

# 16th October 2008, 7:05 pm / connections, follow, friends, social, techcrunch, yahoo