YouAre Blog
Social Networks: The “Dayflow” Era Begins
Last week, Facebook’s redesign (though it may sound pretentious) marked a change in social networks that is perhaps greater than what it looks like on the surface. Last week marked an “official” confirmation that the microblogging or lifestreaming interface and publishing by typology (photos, text, video, etc.) are indeed valid for the public at large. The Dayflow Era has begun.
Facebook has had its “activity stream” — a list of the users actions (logins, recommended links, etc.) — up since 2006 but it hadn’t been afforded the attention on the homepage that it has now.
We aren’t going to analyze why Facebook has become more like FriendFeed, especially since it could be said that FriendFeed was inspired by Facebook’s activity stream, which itself was inspired by LiveJournal.
For now we’ll just focus on the elements that for us have a Dayflow application.
What is Dayflow?
Dayflow is a term coined by myself and Luis Rull which we use to define services with:
- Timeline plays an absolutely essential role on the homepage (Twitter, Friendfeed, YouAre and the new Facebook…). The latest updates are the most relevant and the newest things always are seen first.
- The power of just one click.
All you need is a click to publish and mash together content. You don’t need to log in like on a blog or visit another URL to see the content you’ve published. Now all of your content and that of your contacts can be seen on one site only. This is the greatest innovation that microblogging and lifestreaming services have offered to date.
- Publishing and archiving of content differentiated by type: video, photos, text (Tumblr, Facebook, YouAre). You don’t always want to only publish messages in text form, sometimes you want to show another user a video and comment on it.
YouAre
If you look at the screenshot of the before and after of Facebook and the YouAre interface you can see how the two services have the timeline in common, with immediate publishing for photos, video and text.
YouAre has been working internally since December. Back then, we put some images of the interface up on Flickr. Lots of people tend to think of YouAre as a Twitter clone, forgetting that the focus is different and the potential of our domain name. In reality we consider YouAre to be:
Twitter + Tumblr + Linkedin + Del.icio.us (coming soon!) + our innovation = YouAre
The redesign of Facebook further cements our vision of what a social network should be like. And we feel quite proud of that.
We believe that Twitter and other services should make a move towards publishing video and photos. CEO Jack Dorsey has commented that they are analyzing the possibility.
