Ashton Kutcher now has more subscribers on Twitter than any US newspaper except USA Today and Wall Street Journal has for its paper news.
He's closing fast on those two that one. (In the one day since I started writing this blog, he's surpassed the Wall Street Journal).

If you don't think the comparison counts, I wonder how many of his 2 million followers buy or read paper news as regularly as they check Twitter?

How does this flocking behavior work in social media? Kind of like this (RT @aplusk):

I've been behind in my blogging, and I was worried that today's post might be moot before I wrote it. But logging into Facebook this morning, I see that the new interface is still there.

It's been thoroughly thrashed by Facebook users, and I'm expecting it to go away soon, but you never know.     Maybe Facebook is in The Bubble.

It's not just a subjective thing. In short time I'm seeing people report that they can't find features that you'd expect to be more easily found. "How do I find new groups"?

I'm also seeing for the first time people writing to their status messages that are obviously meant for someone else's wall.  I don't know if this is because of a change in the interface to write back on the wall of someone who wrote on yours, or if Facebook eliminated the ability to comment back to a post someone made on your wall. But a status like: "Let's check our schedules and see what works out. Meanwhile, love to you both." is clearly a one-to-one reply and not a "status". This isn't the user's fault here; I'm seeing it often enough to blame the new interface.

I'll be interested in the stats, but I'm anecdotally hearing about (and also sensing) frustration enough to drop off or away for a while.

I've seen independent versions of my suggestion that Facebook is pulling a QWERTY. A popular legend has it that the odd layout of the typewriter keyboard was designed to slow typists down so as not to jam the fragile mechanism of the newly invented typewriter. Maybe the new layout is to shed enough users or usage to allow the servers to catch up with the growth of the Facebook population.

Is the move made to make Facebook more Twitter-like, and if so this a defensive move against the migration of attention cycles from Facebook to Twitter?  Facebook could do better than to lame up its interface as a defense. Could Facebook by this type buy Twitter without ruining it?  Or could they better integrate Twitter using Twitter's APIs?  TweetDeck shows that you can integrate the two streams.  I use Facebook status to send more ephemeral updates among my friends and networks, and I use Twitter to enter my thoughts into a larger and more persistent and searchable universe.  I could see an interface within Facebook that could feed both.

On the positive side, I've appreciated better integration of messages from pages as well as friends into my newsfeed. So far.

Maybe the old Facebook interface will soon be resurfaced as "Facebook Classic",  and after about 25 years they can drop the "Classic".

I don't usually post about other people's posts, but this was just too good to pass up.  Especially because it directly implicates the work I was doing while at Clear Ink: developing CI's social media offerings.  It's From The Head of Zeus Jones (quite literally), and although it was written back in October, I (re?)discovered it today and attribute it with utmost blogworthiness.  Per the subject line, it discusses the role of the marketing agency in providing social media services:

"If, as I believe, the adoption of social media by all companies is inevitable, what role does the communications agency fulfill?...Clients may not need help talking to their customers but that doesn’t mean they don’t need help. After the channels of communication are established and after the pleasantries have been exchanged, customers will want something to talk to companies about. The best things to talk about are things that the company is doing to make their products, services or experiences better. It seems to me that there’s still a lot of demand for help in improving our clients’ core services and making them more marketable. For applying marketing thinking to operations. Personally I find it’s actually far more rewarding to do this kind of work because you’re actually collaborating with your clients on things that are lasting and have unquestioned (rather than questionable) value within their organisations."

This last bit is why I added "refreshingly shifting" in the subject line - shifting from working with clients on things that have questionable value to things things that have lasting/unquestioned value and actually improve their core services (ooh!  actual product development!) sounds, well, refreshing.  But this means CI might have to change its approach to providing social media services; at least, as I articulated them.  Helping companies implement a blog and produce content for it is part of the story, yes, but only in the beginning.  Helping companies improve their products, so that they actually have something to blog about, will have to be part of the story too.  If you're still intrigued, check the entire post.