With HTC's upcoming crop of Androids, you'll be able to separate people into two distinct groups: those who spring for the brainier, better-specced Desire, and those who get bowled over by the beautiful, yet lesser-specced Legend.
The Desire (or Nexus One) is the final word in the Androidsphere—it's a mark of someone who knows what they're doing, who wants to show people they NEED that extra computing power. If you compare it to the Legend, you could be justified in saying Legend-salivators are more shallow, ignoring the might of a Snapdragon processor in lieu of a unibody aluminum shell and slim build.
You'd be wrong, however.
The internal upgrades are minor, when you consider it next to the HTC Hero, but like the Empire That Strikes Back, sometimes sequels are far better than the original. While we found the Hero "tragically flawed" in its slugginess, the Legend's slightly more powerful 600MHz processor behaved—well, like a legend. The 3.2-inch screen has the same amount of pixels as the Hero, but swaps the HVGA for a more superior AMOLED. The 5.0-megapixel camera is still the same quality, but has the much-welcomed addition of a flash. You get the picture—the Legend is building on the Hero's quality in incremental upgrades, but every change, however minor, radicalizes the experience of using the Legend.
It's running Android 2.1, which as any Hero owner knows should be released as an over-the-air update soon. One day. The jump from 1.6 to 2.1 is impressive—it's a lot faster, the multitouch is better, there's greater integration of social networking profiles with contacts, and HTML5 support, amongst other—admittedly small—changes.
Plain and simple—the Legend is the most well-built phone I've ever had in my hand. You just know when you feel the weight of it, the cool curved exterior of the unibody aluminum shell, and touch the ultra-responsive touchscreen. It's that sensation when you first tenderly held the original iPhone, which has been long-missing in the market.
The bottom and top of the back is actually made from rubberized plastic though, so there are no issues with wireless signals—unlike the first generation of the iPhone. Removing part of the case reveals a very thin battery and a touch-sensitive catch which keeps the SIM and microSD cards encased. It's a small point, but it's also the most polished example of a phone's innards that I've ever seen.
Just like BlackBerry, HTC is migrating its trackballs to optical trackpads. This is a relief, but in actual fact I barely had to use the trackpad—only when having to make an edit when typing out messages or emails. The screen is just so responsive, with nary a wrongly-actioned command made, that you can imagine HTC forgoing the trackpad altogether at a later date.
Only eight buttons reside on the Legend's body. The on/off button up top, the two volume controls on the top left, and then on the lower face, home, menu, back and search. They all worked well, though the home, menu, back and search keys did feel a bit cheap in comparison to the high-end feeling of the rest of the handset.
HTC's used the same 5.0-megapixel camera as we saw on the Hero, but the addition of a flash is a new and exciting step for them—strange as that sounds. As you can see from the two photos below, the flash is very strong—too strong, I'd say. However, the quality is decent in lowlight conditions—noisy for sure, but I've seen worse.
Lowlight in a cinema before Alice In Wonderland 3D
In daytime I had a lot more luck. Testing it out on some cakes in my kitchen in the late afternoon sun retained the nice rays of sun across the cakes, with the yellow of the flowers showing up bright. But even at 5MP, the general image performance isn't enough to ditch your point and shoot just yet.
Testing indoors with daylight
Most manufacturers are skinning Android with their own proprietary interfaces...MOTOBLUR, Mediascape, S-Class, they're ok, but I'd almost rather use Android in its natural flavor than have to put up with some of their issues.
There just ain't no Android phone like a HTC Sense Android phone. It's simply the best skin an Android could ask for, even without the minor improvements seen in the Legend. By far the pick of the bunch is the new "Leap" view—or "Helicopter view" as it was known in-house when designed. It works much like Mac OS X's Exposé function, bringing all seven homescreens up as thumbnails. The feature is very useful, particularly if you just can't remember which screen your mail, or the weather widget, is listed on. The pinch command takes some getting used to, but once you've got the gesture down-pat, it's a godsend.
Leap—or helicopter—view
But with ever feature that will be used often comes one with no point at all. FriendStream is a nice enough widget, which collates all your friends' updates from Twitter, Facebook and Flickr into one feed, but for anyone who's a purist and likes to see every form of update on each social networking site, it will be removed quickly from the homescreen. I preferred using HTC's own brilliant Twitter widget, Peep, for the full Twitter options, and the Facebook app to see every form of action. The Flickr integration is handy, being able to see when my contacts upload photos, but not necessary if you get email notifications already.
Plus, FriendStream just felt slow sometimes—in fact, on a very speedy phone, it felt incongruous in comparison to everything else, often updating with tweets quite a few minutes later than the Twitter widget did. It's not a big problem, but for someone who relies on Twitter heavily as a source of entertainment, it became a source of frustration.
FriendStream
The Legend ran 36 hours before it died on me. Not too bad, considering I had an hour-long call plus about five shorter ones, sent and received around 20 text messages, and spent almost a whole day browsing the web, checking Twitter, and showing it off to my friends. After the horror of seeing my G1's battery deplete in half a day when I first bought it, the Legend's 1300mAh battery ran to my satisfaction.
True, other phones may be better specced, but with that premium build it's like comparing a Sony Vaio (not a bad laptop, sure) to a MacBook. Sometimes there's just no contest. While the extra horsepower and added touches of the Nexus One and Desire are nice, I found the Legend more than satisfactory.
It wasn't sluggish, certainly didn't have bugs or issues like the G1 and Hero, and while it'll inevitably slow down and have you cursing the fact you didn't spring for something with a Snapdragon chip, I'm going to award it possibly the highest accolade a reviewer can gift a device: I'm going to upgrade to one.
It's not the best Android phone. That badge still belongs to the Nexus One, or possibly the Desire, when we review it. But it's one of the best all-rounders, when you consider the hardware—and the feeling you're left with once it leaves your hand. I feel bereft without it.
Superb hardware quality
HTC Sense is better than ever
Addition of camera flash
Super-fast and responsive
FriendStream could be faster
Camera flash isn't perfect
The HTC Legend hasn't been announced for the US market yet, with the European launch sometime this month.
First launched back in April 2009, TweetPhoto has been steadily building out its service with multiple useful features, including Foursquare integration and a partnership with Kodak. Today, the site is getting a huge overhaul with more social features and a new iPhone app.
TweetPhoto has now added the ability to sign in with Twitter OAuth, Facebook Connect, MySpace OAuth and Foursquare OAuth so that a user of any one of these social networks can use TweetPhoto as a stand alone photo sharing service. The site will also be rolling out LinkedIn support in the next few weeks. In addition to login capabilities across all four of these services, TweetPhoto users can also link these social networking accounts together. Once you link your Facebook, Twitter, MySpace , or Foursquare accounts on the site, your photos uploaded to TweetPhoto can be simultaneously broadcast to all of the networks. Third party applications that use TweetPhoto as the default photo uploader such as TweetDeck and Seesmic’s BlackBerry app, will also include this functionality.
TweetPhoto’s new, free iPhone app, called TweetPhoto Pro, is a suped-up version of its sister iPhone apps. The app allows users to upload photos, see their friends photos, the public photo stream, popular photos (usually celebrities or breaking news), and can link their social network accounts. The startup has also submitted similar apps for Android and Blackberry platforms.
In connection with the new social broadcast features, TweetPhoto is rolling out a new API to include over 35 new API calls. And as we wrote last year, TweetPhoto got into a bit of a pickle over its logo. That combined with Twitter’s trademark of the word “Tweet,” is resulting in TweetPhoto completely rebranding its service. The first step of this effort is a new logo, which we’ve attached above. A new name is forthcoming, says TweetPhoto, and its focus will be much more on the mobile side of things.
While TweetPhoto is still not getting the same amount of traffic as the leaders in the space, TwitPic, the site is edging out fellow competitor yFrog, according to January’s Compete numbers. But as TweetPhoto, which met with a little bit of scandal last fall, makes its offerings more social and interactive, the site could even give TwitPic a run for its money.
Advertising regulator the Advertising Standards Authority (ASA) will take over the regulation of companies' social networking pages by the end of the year, according to advertising industry proposals.…
Mochi Media, which helps indie game creators monetize Flash games, is launching a platform today that makes it easy for Flash game developers to create, monetize and distribute social games.
Mochi Social will enable developers to build games with social features, such as the ability to invite friends, send gifts, or post to a news stream. The company, which was acquired by China’s Shanda Games in January for $80 million, is announcing Mochi Social at the Flash Gaming Summit that it is sponsoring today in San Francisco. The idea is to let Flash game developers enjoy the benefits of social networking without being locked into a single social network.
“We are making social games distributable across many sites,” Jameson said. “They have been locked social networks. Now we are letting them out.”
San Francisco-based Mochi Media has been a key player in the democratization of game development. Flash game developers use Mochi to insert ads into their Flash games. Mochi collects game play data and charges advertisers for the number of times their ads are viewed. Mochi then shares most of that money with the developers. On its network, Mochi says it can reach 150 million monthly active gamers who play 15,000 games across 40,000 different web sites. That’s a pretty big empire.
But social games on Facebook have been so successful that advertisers and developers have moved in that direction. To save Flash gaming and adapt to the new world of social games, Mochi has added new ways to monetize beyond ads. Last July, the company launched its Mochi Coins virtual currency to enable Flash game developers to make money from free-to-play games, where users play for free but pay real money for virtual goods. Mochi is moving to build an Xbox Live style service around Flash games.
In doing so, it has been in a kind of leapfrog race with rivals such as Heyzap and Hooked Media. Now Mochi Social is an attempt to duplicate a lot of the functions on Facebook. As Facebook puts more restrictions on what game developers can do, Mochi is trying to court indie developers to move back in its direction for the sake of more independence and better monetization, said Mochi founder Jameson Hsu.
The good thing about Mochi Social is that the social features can be tapped by a user regardless of what Mochi Social-enabled site they play on. Mochi Social gamers can post updates on their game achievements to Twitter, Facebook or MySpace. All of the Mochi Social components are embedded in a game file, so they follow the game wherever it is distributed. A gamer playing a game embedded with Mochi Social can send a notification inside the game to friends, regardless of what platform they are using.
Mochi Social is in private beta. The first Mochi Social-enabled game is Kingdoms at War, a social game from developer Thinking Ape that has been a success on the iPhone and now debuts on the web. Wilkins Chung, co-founder of Thinking Ape, estimates his company will be able to use the social features to reach millions of new gamers with no advertising cost.
If you’ve been watching my Twitter feed, you’d know I’ve been playing with the Motorola (NYSE: MOT) Devour. The Devour is Motorola’s second Android phone for Verizon (NYSE: VZ) Wireless and it’s the first to bring MotoBlur to Big Red. The handset is a decent mid-range smartphone for social networking fanatics, but it is underpowered and is nowhere near as good as Verizon’s other Android offerings.
Hardware
While the Devour may be the younger brother to the Droid, there’s nothing “little” about it. It’s a chunky phone that feels very weighty but good in the hand. The aluminum unibody construction is sturdy as hell and it feels well-constructed. You could throw this thing down the stairs and it would probably be no worse for the wear. There’s a power/unlock button and standard headphone jack on top, and there’s volume controls and a dedicated voice command button on the right spine. One cool thing is that that you can open the left spine to remove the battery or insert a new microSD card. It’s neat but there’s a dingy hinge that looks like it could snap off if you’re not being careful.
The 3.1-inch screen is pretty vibrant and is generally extremely responsive to touch. Unfortunately, it’s way too small for the device. Even without comparing it to the Droid, there’s just seems to be so much wasted space on the face of the device. You can use the on-screen keyboard (or Swype) but I found some issues with getting a quick response when hitting letters near the edge of the screen.
The three backlit touch buttons under the screen really pissed me off. These were very unresponsive, there’s no dedicated search key, and Motorola changed the layout from the Droid so the back button is now on the right side. There’s also too much wasted space between the screen itself and the buttons. There’s also an optical trackpad that works pretty well, but I would have liked it to be a bit bigger and less recessed.
The sliding mechanism is done well and it feels like it will hold up for years. Once you’ve popped the screen up, there’s a weird sharpness on the edges. It’s not like the cheese-cutting Pre, but it is odd. The Devour’s physical keyboard is far better than the Droid’s because there’s more space between keys, there’s a full row for numbers, and the tactility is great. A few quibbles: I’d prefer the function key to be on the left and the space bar is between the v and b letters. Despite these niggles, it’s easy to blast out e-mails or status updates but I’m miffed that there’s no auto-correct for the physical keyboard. I’ve become adept at relying on the software to fill in the gaps for me, so it’s not that much faster to type with the hardware keys. Still, if you’re a physical keyboard fan, you won’t be disappointed with the Devour.
One issue I had with the overall look of the Devour is that it just screams text-happy teen – you wind up looking like some Twilight-reading teenybopper if you’re whipping this out in public. I’m shallow though, so you may not have the same experiences.
Software
Devour’s Android has Motorola’s and Verizon’s hooks all over it. The first thing you notice is MotoBlur, which is a user interface layer that is supposed to make social networking easier and more intuitive. I still think MotoBlur is a good idea but the implementation still needs a lot of work. First of all, the screen is way too small. If you don’t customize it, your main home screen is utterly filled with the Happenings, Messages and Status widgets. I’m a big fan of ambient information on your home screen – I have Slide Screen set up on my Droid and love it – but MotoBlur is just too much clutter without much benefit. Let’s take the Happenings widgets, which is supposed to show the latest status updated from your friends. Cool idea, but I don’t want to have to manually swipe through every single tweet because it’s just tiresome and inefficient. The News widget is cool and I imagine MotoBlur could be really cool on a big-screen device like the Dell Mini 5 or a tablet.
Big Red also has its hooks into the handset, as it comes packed with the carrier’s music, video and navigation apps. There’s also a big, gross “Verizon Wireless” in your notification bar in case you forgot who your carrier is. Like many Android phones, the Devour suffers from too many logos on it.
The Devour is only Android 1.6 but you’re not really missing much. The crown jewel of 2.0, Google (NSDQ: GOOG) Maps Navigation, can be used on the Devour once you download a text-to-speech app from the Android Market. It’s not as smooth as on a Nexus One but it works just fine, and the GPS is darn accurate and quick. There will be some apps that may not work like Google Gesture Search and the whole pulling-up-drawers metaphor needs to die, but you could do a lot worse than this OS. You also can’t have multiple Gmail accounts set up without jumping through hoops, which is an immediate non-starter for me. While Joe Overalls may not care what version of the OS is on the phone, there are real questions about if and when this device can gain multiple new features over the years.
Like all Android phones, you need to know how to manage your device or it will become sluggish. I’m not sure if it’s the processor or MotoBlur but things just seem a half second slower than I’d like it. It’s still better than most of the same phones in this range though.
Web browsing, Multimedia, Camera
The Webkit-based browser has a few tweaks from other Android devices and I like it. There’s an extra zoom button on the bottom left that gives you a larger view of the overall page while keeping the section you’re looking at in focus. Big Red does have a solid network, so I had no trouble finding and staying connected on 3G in San Francisco and San Diego. Connecting to WiFi was easy and done the same way as other Android devices. I didn’t have any trouble hopping on to private or public networks.
It’s the normal Android media player, so it’s more than adequate, but don’t get your hopes too high. There’s Verizon’s music app, if you’re into that. Just download Listen and the tunewiki app and your multimedia experience will immediately improve.
The camera sucks. It’s weak at 3 megapixels, things look fuzzy when you’re trying to snap pics, there’s no flash, editing is limited, and the photos looked dark. The Picture Gallery app is better than the standard picture viewer in Android 1.6 and it gives you some cool slideshows. Video recording is fine but nothing to write home about.
Call Quality, Battery Life
Verizon’s network is still pretty darn good, so I had voice coverage nearly everywhere I went. Voice calls sounded a slight bit muffled and I would have liked a bit more volume. People on the other end of the phone said I sounded clear, even when I was talking in the rain.
I thought MotoBlur would destroy the battery life because it’s constantly pulling in news and updates but I was pleasantly surprised that I could get through the day on a single charge. That’s all you can expect from a smartphone nowadays.
The Final Take
I have an appreciation for devices that aren’t bleeding edge but do what they intend well (I dug the HTC Snap). The Devour is a solid device for what it is, and it wouldn’t be too hard to recommend the Devour in a vacuum because it’s a decent smartphone that could appeal to those who love a good physical keyboard. But when you consider that the Droid can be found for nearly the same price and it has a better processor, screen and will be updated more often, I’d have to say it’s safe to pass on the Devour.
Related News from IntoMobile:
I don’t remember what Microsoft’s search engine share was, when I left the UK in the summer of 2000, but I’m pretty sure it was a lot better than the current anemic 3%.
According to the Guardian, Microsoft would love for Bing to recapture those glory days and is willing to spend the rest of its natural life next 3 months trying to claw it back.
The three-month campaign, which includes three TV ads created by the agency JWT, starts on Wednesday and uses the strapline "Bing and decide". The ads aim to show that Bing simplifies the "information overload" that accompanies the results of many searches.
The TV campaign will run solidly for a month and then in two-week bursts until mid-June. It will be backed by a digital campaign across Microsoft’s network and on media including social networking websites.
Three whole months, huh? Way to lay it all on the line Microsoft. You lose market share over a 10-15 year period and expect to win it all back by reaching consumers while they’re watching Coronation Street?
Of course, I know that Bing’s ad campaign won’t run for just 3 months–just this particular push–but consider this: Google achieved 90% share in the UK via word-of-mouth. Bing has been available to UK users–albeit in beta–since June. If they felt that Bing was truly revolutionizing search, they would have pushed the needle already. Right?
Apple’s iPad is the subject of no fewer than four panels at the upcoming South by Southwest Interactive festival next week despite the fact that it won’t be out until two and half weeks after the show ends. No matter — the iPad is one of the hottest memes welling up in advance of the show. A quick glance at tweets, panels and a few conversations with hopeful attendees reveal that the others will be Android, location and real-time anything.
Sure, Ev Williams of Twitter is keynoting and will hopefully provide us with Twitter’s revenue model, and Spotify’s CEO Daniel Ek is up for a talk as well (perhaps to tell us when the rockin’ music service will be finally available in the U.S.?), but it’s the iPad — and the mobile experience overall — that’s underpinning South by Southwest Interactive this year. The iPad is the most visible symptom of the mobile trend, but the underlying cause of the iPad excitement is the search for the best mobile experience for users.
That theme is exemplified with Google’s all-day Sunday Android Hackathon going up against Facebook’s Developer Garage (among the gathering’s hottest events in 2008 and 2009) on Sunday. The SXSW “who’s attending” function appears to be broken, so it’s hard to know which event will have more participants. But my guess is that the promise of building mobile apps for multiple devices will win out over social networking.
Other indications that mobile is taking over are the panels which focus on iPads, location (one that focuses on both), new user interfaces for phones and several on augmented reality. In a very cool way it’s like South by Southwest Interactive has realized that the interactivity the began with blogging and progressed to social media is now ready to invade our gadgets, thanks to smarter, more power-efficient chips and ubiquitous wireless. So even as attendees scratch their iPad itch, the true cause of that excitement isn’t just a new tablet, it’s the opportunity for mobile computing that’s, yes, interactive.
Related GigaOM Pro Content (sub. req’d):
5 Tips for Developers Targeting the iPad
Something peculiar happened yesterday.
I was sitting in a coffee shop near work as I often do between sessions when one of the baristas sheepishly approached me. I go in there all the time, so most of them know me by face, if not by name. She said, “Are you Jeff?” I answered in the affirmative and she goes, “There’s someone on the phone for you.”
My first thought was that it must be work calling to tell me that there’s been a schedule change. AT&T has spectacularly terrible coverage and this cafe could be a dead zone. One look at my phone confirmed that I was five-bars strong and I had no missed calls. She looked as quizzical as I felt. I took the cordless phone from her and the conversation went something like this:
Me: Hello?
Stranger: Is this Jeff?
The voice sounded hesitant and I definitely did not recognize it. I was slightly discombobulated that someone was calling me at this location, but curious and attentive.
Me: Yeah, who is this?
Stranger: This is your neighbor. Did you just check in on Foursquare?
Now before I go any further, let me just explain what Foursquare is in case you don’t know. It’s a GPS-enabled Web application that allows users to “check in” wherever they have cell phone coverage. It’s an extension of social networking media and really the only point to it seems to be showing other users the lame places you go. Depending on how you have your account set up, the app will post your global position on Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare or all three. My check-ins typically show up in the latter two.
I once explained Foursquare to someone, her response was: “Why would you want do this?” I thought for a second and said, “Because all my other friends are doing it?” We both laughed, but I realized that I didn’t have a real answer to that question. Why would I want to enable my smart phone as a tracking device? Like so many other of my online activities, there really is no point to it.
So back to the story, already in progress:
Me: Yeah, I did [check into Foursquare] …who is this?
Stranger: My name’s Roy, your neighbor. I just saw four black guys try to break into your apartment.
The first tip-off here, other than the fact that some stranger from is contacting me, is that he’s identifying himself as my neighbor. Like any true city dweller, I don’t know any of my neighbors. Sure, I might have names from lobby mailboxes filed away somewhere in my subconscious, but I’m pretty sure Roy isn’t one of them. I never met a Roy in my life.
Me: Uh, who is this?
The incredulity was rising in my voice and I kept expecting at any minute “Roy” would identify himself as someone I knew and that this was all a prank.
Stranger: I’m just a concerned citizen.
It was more than evident something wasn’t right here. Who the hell says things like “concerned citizen” outside of an episode of Dragnet? The hesitation in his voice seemed to grow with every question I asked and there was a faint, subtle bit of reverb, as if the conversation was being recorded.
Me: Okay, who is this?
Stranger: Aren’t you worried about the break-in?
Me: If you’re my neighbor, then where do I live?
There was a pause, more stuttering and finally he says something like:
Stranger: Let me look, I’m sure you were stupid enough to check in there too.
Me: Actually, I never check in with my real home address. Man, you sure are going through a lot of effort to be a dick.
And then he hung up. So much for being a “concerned citizen”.
It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that “Roy” wasn’t who he claimed to be. If he thought he was being a clever thief, he failed completely. A smarter criminal would have done more research and better rehearsed his spiel.
Immediately after he hung up, I recalled a Twitter exchange I had not too long ago with a user calling himself @pleaserobme. This Twitter account (which has since been suspended “due to strange activity”) was connected to a Web site of the same name.
The folks at Please Rob Me (PRM) claim to be privacy advocates, saying that their goal is to raise awareness on the dangers associated with using sites like Foursquare, Loopt and Brightkite. By telling everyone on the World Wild Web where you are, you’re also telling them where you’re not — namely, home. You might think that PRM is well-intentioned in its quest to keep people safe, but the means by which they do it are highly questionable.
Before Twitter disabled their account, PRM would re-tweet Foursquare check-ins, seemingly at random. The tweets would look something like this:
@pleaserobme: @KirstieAlley just checked in at Krispy Kreme, 1111 Wilshire Blvd, Hollywood, CA.
With the Twitter account gone, they now have a live feed of Foursquare user tweets streaming directly on their homepage. It’s a smorgasbord for the would-be criminals PRM claims it wants to protect you from. In fact, they have a disclaimer which says “our intention is not, and never has been, to have people burgled”. But they sure have a funny way of showing it.
Their tactics aren’t the way to prevent victimization, but quite the opposite. It’s like causing a car collision to prove a point about auto safety or running a third-party candidacy for President. These all have unintentionally calamitous outcomes causing harm rather than good. I’m not really sure what the true motivations of PRM are, but whatever it is, it stinks.
Be that as it may, and I’m loathe to admit this, I think they may have driven their point home with me. I have no way of proving that “Roy The Concerned Citizen” is affiliated with PRM, but he was an effective messenger. This whole has actually made me re-think using these kinds of applications. Maybe it isn’t such a good idea to let the entire world know where I am at any given second. Other than it being used as an alibi in a criminal trial, I can’t see much real advantage to being a walking GPS unit.
Before my interaction with “Roy”, I think I had a healthy amount of cautious paranoia. I have an unlisted telephone number, I don’t make my home address available online or in print. I thought I was as private as the next guy. But the truth is, I don’t usually shred all my papers before throwing them away. The only secrets someone rooting through my trash is likely to discover is that I eat way too many Hot Pockets.
I refuse to let this situation turn me into some black helicopter-fearing, tin foil hat-wearing, irrational kook who thinks everyone is out to steal his stuff or identity. Honestly, I don’t really have much stuff worth stealing. And as far as my identity goes, I think I’d actually feel sorry for someone trying to use my Social Security Number. I doubt they’ve have any more luck with it than I have.
Like I said, I think there was something more than a poorly planned caper going on with “Roy”. There was definitely some recording taking place and I suspect I was not the first person to get a phone call like this. I wonder how many people actually fell for this bit. How many overly excitable victims, in a moment of panic, blurted out their home address to a stranger on the telephone? I suspect these are the same sorts of people who get caught up in those Nigerian email scams.
Facebook founder, Mark Zuckerberg, recently remarked that “the age of privacy is over”. It’s an infuriating statement but it’s essentially true. In all fairness, privacy is a two-way street. No one made us join Facebook or Twitter or anything else. We willingly became the coal for these data miners.
For those of us who came of age, technologically speaking, in the Web 2.0 Era, it may be too late to cancel, delete or otherwise redact what’s out there. Basically we have to deal with cards we’ve dealt ourselves. One could argue that if you choose to live your life in public you don’t get to control what other people do with this public information. You can, however, choose how much of it to put out there.
© 2008 TwiTip Twitter Tips.
Private Eyes Are Watching You: Twitter Oversharing and Its Bizarre Real-World Consequences
Continue reading William Shatner Starts Sci-Fi 'MyOuterSpace' Social Network
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Faceboook recently overtook Yahoo as the second most visited site in the United States. And in doing so, Facebook along with other social networks set the stage for a confluence of social and search that fundamentally changes who we, as a society, discover and share information, and in turn, where our attention is directed and driven.
Source: Mashable
Make no mistake, attention is shifting away from traditional destination sites and instead, it is fixated on personalized attention dashboards that funnel social feeds, the activity and focus of social graphs into one clickable view. It is, for all intents and purposes, changing how we discover and share information. In fact, Nielsen observed that 20% of social consumers today, use social networks as their primary navigation hubs, relying on contacts and trending themes to point them in the right direction.
For media properties and brands, optimization combined with targeted and enterprising social networking now plays an instrumental role in capturing the attention and essentially defining the action of our customers, peers, and the trust agents and authorities who influence them.
Referral traffic is quickly migrating away from traditional search to social networks, and in some cases, at alarming rates.
In November 2009, Compete observed that some of the top media properties were already realizing a dominant effect in traffic from social networks. For example, USAToday receives upwards of 35% of its referral traffic from social networks and just over 6% from Google. People Magazine receives 23% of its referrals from social networks and 11% from Google. And, CNN earns 11% of its referral traffic from social versus 9% from Google.
Referrals from social networks will only continue to soar over time as we’re introduced to new information where our attention is focused and when our attention aperture is open to clicking through to new, socially-influenced content.
If the socialization of search and commerce is driven by any one behavior, it is that of sharing. If it wasn’t worthy of conventional appreciation and recognition before, the share economy is now certainly worthy of contemplation and analysis. In the share economy, currency is defined by likes, retweets, updates, comments and shares on Facebook, Twitter, Google Buzz, MySpace, et al. And, its impact only grows as Social Media becomes pervasive. This is why providing the necessary means for individuals to not only discover your content, but also readily share it across the social web is paramount to the survival of brands in the era of social search and also social media.
In a recent article, TechCrunch editor Erick Schonfeld reviewed the state of social sharing based on data provided by Gigya, which powers sharing widgets on more than 5,000 content sites, including ABC.com, NBA.com, PGA.com, Answers.com and Reuters. In the study, it was revealed that almost one million items were shared over the Gigya network within 30 days. Facebook ranked at the top of social sharing, but Twitter wasn’t far behind.
Distribution of shared items
Facebook: 44%
Twitter: 29%
Yahoo: 18%
MySpace: 9%
But that’s just the tip of the iceberg. Facebook alone counts over 5 billion pieces of content shared within its network each and every week.
According to AddThis, a sharing network installed on more than 600,000 Websites, Facebook also ranked on top, but email ranked second, with print, yes print, and Twitter placing in third and fourth respectively.
Top 10 Services, Overall
Facebook: 33%
Email: 13%
Print: 9%
Twitter: 9%
Favorites: 8%
Google: 6%
MySpace: 6%
Digg: 3%
Live: 3%
Delicious: 3%
At 400 million global users strong, and rapidly growing, Facebook is a mandatory content and engagement play for any brand and media property.
In February 2010, Nielsen reported that Facebook users are averaging seven hours per month, up 10%, sharing and connecting within their social graph. If we used Compete’s numbers, Facebook would rank #2, just behind Google.
Gigya recently published a white paper that documents the shift to and the resulting importance of social search and its dependence on crowd participation.
As a result of its research Gigya recognized that online businesses must optimize in order to earn referral traffic from social networks.
With the advent of social feeds—a live stream of friends’ activity shared on social networks like Facebook and Twitter— consumers can more easily rely on trusted personal relationships to determine what’s worthwhile to read, watch, play and buy online.
Information is already socializing.
The difference between our present and our future is defined by the roads and bridges we build between relevance and prevalence.
Publishing content is no longer enough. Wiring search systems to deliver consumers who hunt for information in social networking to our existing static Web sites is outmoded. And, earning friends and followers is only as effective as our ability to return value to their feeds and online and ultimately, real world experiences. We are confusing our elementary steps towards digital and social significance with the illusion of progress.
It is now our responsibility to create and connect meaningful content directly within the places where our audiences communicate with each other and also interact with the social objects that compel them to share and react. In parallel, we must optimize that content to improve findability and also integrate the tools and services that simplify the process for sharing within the networks where people engage today and tomorrow. By creating a connected social experience, we activate our content and community and empower a new genre of branded information catalysts.
Everything begins with enhancing and optimizing connections and experiences for the social web. The key is to incite participation and sharing…on our site as well as across the most active social networks that are material to our business strategy.
10 Steps for Optimizing the Brand for Social Search
1. Modernize and socialize your site to complement the experience visitors expect in 2010
2. Optimize the site and all social objects for traditional, social, and real-time search
3. Create meaningful and personable social profiles where consumers are active today (pay attention to where they will be tomorrow as well)
4. Establish an editorial calendar to produce and distribute relevant content for each and every network with cadence
5. Add social connectivity to the home site to facilitate maximum engagement (Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, MySpace, Google, Yahoo) – eradicate proprietary login systems
6. Integrate social sharing functionality at the source of engagement – keep them on the page
7. Enable the social syndication of that content within one step
8. Manually introduce content and social objects to stakeholders and social beacons
9. Create paths that define and engender the experience you desire with destinations and calls to action integrated to close the loop
10. Monitor the activity and find ways to improve the experience and also sharing
Bonus: Give them a voice to make sharing more personal and contextual
Indeed, the future of search is social. Better said, the future of information discovery and dissemination is social, now powered by the very people who were once fed information as dictated by mainstream media and brands.
The rapid evolution of search fuses traditional search algorithms and destinations with new formulas and services defining social graphs, social networks, semantic and real-time. As social becomes the axis for which all search is predicated, advanced SEO/SMO and a maturing human algorithm reinforced by the stature of one’s social capital will ultimately contribute to the hierarchy, placement, and findability of the content and social objects we share online.
Google and Bing are already implementing sweeping changes in their algorithms and reported results to include activity from the social and real-time Web. It’s also the reason why Google rushed Google Buzz into the spotlight. Information and activity are now influenced by the greater collective of social contacts with whom we forge relationships and relations in each and every network where we engage.
How does this information change your Web strategy for the year?
Connect with Brian Solis on Twitter, LinkedIn, Tumblr, Google Buzz, Facebook
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Do men and women take different approaches to social networking? Interested in your thoughts. http://j.mp/bScYrL
[Direct Link]LG Cookie Fresh GS290, the new touchscreen phone that we first saw last week, has just been officially announced.
Like the LG Cookie Plus GS500, the LG Cookie Fresh GS290 builds on the success of the first Cookie phone (sold in 12 million units until now).
Feature-wise, the Cookie Fresh is somewhat similar to the Cookie Plus. It has a 3 inch WQVGA touchscreen display, “cartoon UI”, social networking integration, FM radio and a 3.5mm headset jack. The handset doesn’t have 3G and its camera is only a 2MP one.
Both the LG Cookie Fresh and the LG Cookie Plus will be available in Europe starting this month, in lots of color versions. LG plans to launch them in more than 50 countries by the end of the year.
The phones’ prices have not been announced, but the Cookie Fresh should be slightly cheaper than the Cookie Plus.
Via Press release
Microsoft's 'Bing and decide' campaign, starting on television this week, attacks 'information overload' of rival's results
Microsoft is to launch a multimillion-pound TV ad campaign for its search engine Bing, as part of a major marketing push designed to challenge Google's dominance of the UK search market, MediaGuardian.co.uk can reveal.
The campaign to promote Bing, the so-called "decision engine" that Microsoft is backing with $2bn, begins with a series of TV ads this week.
"This is a big moment – we are taking out our slingshots and taking on Goliath," said Microsoft's UK managing director, Ashley Highfield, adding that he believed Bing met a real desire from both consumers and advertisers.
The three-month campaign, which includes three TV ads created by the agency JWT, starts on Wednesday and uses the strapline "Bing and decide".
The ads aim to show that Bing simplifies the "information overload" that accompanies the results of many searches.
"People feel overawed by the internet and what they turn up when they are searching," said Highfield. "We are also in a world where people have forgotten there is an alternative search engine."
Microsoft will certainly have its work cut out winning over consumers – it currently holds about a 3% share of the search market while Google controls about 90%.
The ads feature ordinary people asking for information and receiving nonsensical, "speaking-in-tongues" answers; one early spot has a woman seeking directions to Euston station.
The TV campaign will run solidly for a month and then in two-week bursts until mid-June. It will be backed by a digital campaign across Microsoft's network and on media including social networking websites.
Highfield said that a key aim of the campaign was to contrast the "visually rich" Bing with the relatively austere-looking Google.
"It is a battle not just of mind but of heart as well," he said. "We are wanting to make an emotional connection – we are ploughing a different furrow here."
• To contact the MediaGuardian news desk email editor@mediaguardian.co.uk or phone 020 3353 3857. For all other inquiries please call the main Guardian switchboard on 020 3353 2000.
• If you are writing a comment for publication, please mark clearly "for publication".
I don’t know if this item from Gizmodo is accurate. I will leave its veracity to you. Navigate to “Israeli Raid Cancelled After Very Stupid Facebook Post.” The alleged incident involves a soldier, Facebook, and a post. The upshot is that the soldier revealed information about an upcoming military action. In the context of the azure chip outfit Datamonitor urging banks to use social media and the US military relaxing its rules, the alleged Facebook post underscores how easily a single person’s actions can compromise a much larger group. I know the azure chip crowd and the poobahs are avid social media Kool Aid drinkers. Make sure that Jim Jones has not prepared the beverage. The posting was not stupid. The posting underscores how a command and control system does not work if one assumes social media is just super. One more example of a person who can make a browser work assuming he or she can navigate the information ecosystem. Clueless.
Stephen E Arnold, March 8, 2010
No one paid me to write this. I am not going to report non payment to anyone.
Someone needs to sit down and talk to folks about social networking,
and things that people should just not do. The New York Times leads off
with a note that an Israeli Defense Force raid was called off because
of an entry on Facebook. There is going to be pain involved with the
debrief. The Israeli newspaper Haaretz explained that the soldier posted a status update letting friends know that his unit was preparing to go to a West Bank village near Ramallah: “On Wednesday we clean up Qatanah, and on Thursday, god willing, we come home,” the soldier wrote. Haaretz added that the soldier, who has been relieved of combat duty, “also disclosed the name of the combat unit, the place of the operation and the time it will take place.” After noticing his indiscretion, Haaretz reports, “Facebook friends then reported him to military authorities.” Source: NY Times
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
As has been made abundantly clear to me over the past two weeks, just about every location-based service is planning big things for the SXSW festival, which starts later this week in Austin, Texas. A few of the players have already started rolling out small changes, such as aesthetic upgrades. But a new, subtle update by Foursquare may have much larger implications.
As we noted last week, Foursquare has begun revamping the “history” area of its website. This is likely part of the larger goal to completely revamp the website itself (which isn’t very useful right now), and this data also ties in to the new Foursquare iPhone app set to launch later this week. But another update makes the history area show not only where you checked-in, and the category of the venue, but also who you checked-in with.
Basically, Foursquare has just turned on a new layer to your location history data. And this layer is very interesting because it goes back in time to show you who you were with at a certain venue when you were there.
Now, to be clear, it only shows you the friends you were with — not all Foursquare users. (But this means that they have that data as well.) Still, this data paints a clearer picture around your location history and potentially enriches your social graph. It’s one thing to say you’re “friends” with someone on a social network, but another to have checked-in to the same venue at the same time over and over again. Either you’re torturing yourself, or you really are good friends with that person.
This is a huge part of location as the bridge between social networking and actual social activity.
Foursquare has highlighted similar data for a while on the stats page, showing you who you check-in with most often. But this new history data takes that to the next level. And while the data right now only seems to go back to last December or so, Foursquare plans to implement it all the way back to 2003 — yes, 2003.
That’s because before Foursquare, co-founder Dennis Crowley ran a similar service called Dodgeball, which Google bought in 2006, and deadpooled last year. But users were able to import their old Dodgeball data before it went under, so Crowley now hopes to build a full location history social graph going back that far for long-time users.
“We gotta backfill some of the data (easy, but for those who imported their Dodgeball history before Google took the site down, we can give you a good idea of the trends around who you’ve been hanging out w/ going back to 2003.) It’s awesome awesome awesome,” Crowley writes in an email to us.
Something else Crowley is excited about is the potential for the visualization of this data. While this location history + friends isn’t yet in the API, it definitely will be, he notes. Depending on how that data is shared, that may raise some privacy issues, but Foursquare has made it clear that they’re well aware and very serious about the issues surrounding the sharing of location data.
Even on the most basic level, this new layer of location history data should be interesting to people. It’s great to look back and see not only where you were on a certain date, but who you were there with. That’s what social data is all about.
Foursquare Just Made Your Location History A Lot More Interesting
- FredericFoursquare Just Made Your Location History A Lot More Interesting
- LouCypherFoursquare Just Made Your Location History A Lot More Interesting
- Eric JohnsonFoursquare Just Made Your Location History A Lot More Interesting
- (jeff)isageekTwitter enthusiast Ashton Kutcher recently launched Tooter, the world’s first Flatulence Networking System.
This is a blog post from Laughing Squid, subscribe via RSS, Email, Twitter & Facebook.
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Continue reading 'Twitter: The Criterion Collection' Turns Tweets Into Cinematic Masterpieces
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Digital Trends did a Motorola Devour Review Quote from review: "For social networking addicts, there s no better cellphone interface than Motoblur. Motorola s innovative Android overlay aggregates all your social media accounts, and delivers the lat...
In my previous post, I wrote about our traditional social life, vs. the expanding world of social networking. I promised two follow up stories about each, but Monday is International Women's Day. I couldn't resist. In some places like China, Russia, Vietnam and Bulgaria, IWD is a national holiday. I decided to roll both stories together - tied with a big bow to celebrate our ways as women.
As most men can attest, women are changelings. We love to change our hairstyle, our nail color and our fashions with the turning of the seasons. We do spontaneous things - like grab and hug each other in the grocery store. We love to laugh with Julia Robert's style whoops. We love to talk, and talk - and talk. When someone we love gets a "boo boo" of the physical or emotional kind, we are always there - usually with food.
Women are experts at surviving - picking up the pieces, throwing on some lipstick and getting back out there, in our careers, personal lives or physical health. Erica Tannen is one of those changeling women everyone wishes would be their best friend. Fabulous, loud, funny, and savvy, Tannen has been in the fashion retail world for over 30 years. She knew what women wanted, and how to deliver.
After having a daughter and moving into a tiny town in "the country" she let go of her bustling career, and reinvented herself as a full time mother. "I loved it - for the first year or so," Erica laughed. "And then I was soooo bored! I had no idea what to do after I cleaned the house and went to yoga class! I didn't want to go to lunch, and realize I have zero skills as a housewife."
Tannen realized she had been spending a lot of time sending emails to girlfriends about her favorite new restaurant, a cool skirt at a local shop, or great scone at a bakery - and had an idea. "I decided my skills as a buyer could translate into skills as an editor, to find the nice things in life women like to buy and put it out as a weekly eblast."
The "E-list: an Excruciatingly Opinionated Guide to the CT Shoreline" was born, and quickly became a local sensation for women. Bound by our shared obsession with email and shopping, women eagerly waited for her weekly smorgasbord to hit the Inbox featuring the cutest sandals down the street, favorite fish entree, or cool art exhibit. Local ads made it self-supporting.
Tannen now has over 4,500 'friends,' yet they were invisible tendrils in cyber land. Social networking was exciting, yet vacuous. Tannen reflected, "I have created a wonderful life for myself out here, but I spend so much time on screen, I forgot the daily interactions with women are what keeps me going."
Tannen's latest reinvention to balance what women really want, came this winter by converting an abandoned showroom into an "Insane Inside-Sidewalk Sale." Local merchants brought sale items, and over 900 women showed up to shop, giggle, show-off something new - not to mention celebrate the simplicity of gathering together. Eblasts are ok, but parties are better!
I am convinced women must have regular social interactions to feel healthy and alive. After investigating the impact of social networking, Facebook reminds me of shopping at the mall; fun, mindless, and satisfying in some weird sort of way. Browsing the various stores is similar to 're-connecting' online. Maybe you take the time to stop in a store and actually try a few things on, and maybe you check out someone's profile and leave a message - but the point of "going to the mall" or hanging out of Facebook is mostly to merge in to the mindless mass of humanity for awhile.
Larissa Lytwyn a 28-year-old freelance writer, agrees. "Facebook is a great way to stay in touch, but it is not a substitute for real life, and remembering what really matters." Lytwyn felt many women her age are not investing enough time in physical connections. Recognizing she was getting too obsessed with Facebook, so she took a month off to go out to dinner and movies with friends instead. "I was amazed at how much time I had!"
You know when women's gift for connecting and "being there" really kicks in? When the shit hits the fan. As a final nod to International Women's Day, here's a tribute to the true survivors: those who looked the face of cancer in the eye, and are still here to talk about it. Beth and Leslie are two breast cancer survivors, and fast friends - who scoff at Facebook and emails as a way to "stay in touch."
"I need the touch of your hand, and the white's of your eyes," smiles Leslie faintly.
Both women knew each other through their children, and were "friendly" in that general sort of way - until both fell to the terror of breast cancer, one after the other. They found a deep intimacy of discussing the gore of drains, knowing that Carnation Instant Breakfast is all you can eat, silk scarves feel best after the hair falls out, and coolers of food placed at the front door spares having to force a gracious chat.
"No one truly understands what it is like, unless you go through it yourself," muses Beth. "Being a survivor does not end after your hair grows back, and the women who have been through it bond together forever."
I ran into both women at the grocery store one day - pushing a cart together, sporting freshly grown hair styles and gigging about a new clinical trial they are in that involves going to a gym three times a week. Of course I hugged them, laughed uproariously with them and drove home touched in the deepest place inside. I love being a woman, love my friends, and am so grateful they are still here.
In honor of International Women's Day, take a break from Facebook and get out there to hug and giggle with the women who mean the most to you. Tell me a story about a special woman in your life in the comments below.
