In this post, we will identify three recent relevant news articles about social network found on popular media websites. We will later refer to these for analysis.

Social media users migrating to smaller circles (CNN, 24 March 2014)

Original article available here.

In an age when people are encouraged to collect hundreds of Facebook “friends” and thousands of Twitter followers. But over the past couple of years, it’s been smaller social sharing and messaging tools, most of them mobile apps that have gotten the most buzz and gained the most users. Some social media users, particularly young ones, are going smaller.

These services encourage users to target personalized messages to individuals or small groups instead of broadcasting posts to larger networks of people.

It is too early to say that they’re abandoning the larger social networks, but certainly the audience for those networks is now fragmented

The reasons for this phenomenon are mainly from two aspects:

First, young people are always looking for the coolest new thing, and now that their parents and grandparents are on Facebook, it’s certainly not a cool new thing in general.

Second, Younger people have truly embraced the move to apps that are a combination of visual, mobile and social. They carry phones that are set up to shoot photos and videos and they are quite conditioned — perhaps by their early years on Facebook — to sharing experiences in a way that previous generations might not be.

The most recent buzz coming out of Silicon Valley is small, anonymous social apps like secret and Whisper Those apps combine the joys of scandalous water-cooler gossip with the Internet’s ability to keep us anonymous while we do it. You’re still posting to your established social networks, but nobody knows which friend said what.

Update to the Facebook Newsfeed layout (Latin Post, 31 March 2014)

Original article available here.

The new design would have made the site look more like its mobile app while also making the News Feed’s content driven with larger photos and “more expressive stories.”

The old design was worse for many of the things we value and try to improve,” she said. “Most of the people we showed the design to told us they didn’t like more than what they previously had.”

Julie Zhuo, Facebook Art of production designer, said the redesign tested well with larger monitors but on 10-inch notebooks single stories couldn’t even fit properly. Under the revamp, site would have been harder to use for people whose computers don’t have the trackpads or scroll wheels.

Secret, Confide, Whisper, let you post thoughts without revealing who you are (The Associated Press, 24 March 2014)

Original article available here.

At a time when Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn are pushing people to put forward their most polished, put-together selves, a new class of mobile applications aims for a bit more honesty.

With these apps, friends and friends of friends can share their deepest and darkest thoughts, along with gossip, criticism and even plans to propose marriage, under a cloak of near-anonymity.

Secret joins a handful of apps such as Confide, Whisper and Yik Yak that have become popular — and in some cases, notorious — in recent months, by offering users a way to communicate while cloaking their identities.

What happens when people are free to say what they want without a name and profile photo attached? It’s an experiment in human nature that hearkens back to the early days of the web, when faceless masses with made-up nicknames ruled chat rooms and online message boards.

In the past decade, anonymity has been fading. As Facebook soared to dominate online social networks, the trend shifted toward profiles, real names and the melding of online and offline identities. But as people’s online social circles grew from friends to parents, grandparents, in-laws, colleagues and bosses, many became increasingly reluctant to share as openly as they once did.

To sign up, users can provide their mobile phone number, email address or both. When you post a secret, your phone and email contacts who are also on Secret will be able to see it. If they tap a heart icon indicating that they “love” your secret, then their friends will be able to see it too. You won’t know which of your friends is on Secret.

Whisper does not allow people to put proper names into posts unless the names belong to public figures.

Secret says it ensures security by encrypting posts and without uploading contact information to its servers. The app also offers a panic button of sorts, called “unlink my posts.” When a user clicks it, any link between them and all previous secrets they have posted is removed.