This Friday marks the beginning of SXSW and with the lead up to the event there is significant buzz surrounding the two leading location based services: Gowalla and Foursquare. While many are questioning the value in sharing their location, most SXSW attendees used Twitter as a way to let people know where they were at past events. Instantly hundreds or thousands of people would descend on parties as they learned from popular users where the hot spot was. Will Gowalla and Foursquare reignite the flashmob revival at this year’s SXSW?
While Twitter is great to let people know what your listening to and occasionally where you’re located, location based services are great because everything focuses around where you are at. Yes, I love filtering through the latest content, but when I’m at an event or out to socialize there’s only thing I’m really concerned about: where people are at. That way I can meet people face to face. While social media enthusiasts love to be part of the conversation, humans, especially extroverts, have a strong desire for face-to-to face interaction.
While you can post numerous updates on Twitter as part of a “conversation”, location based services are far less noisy. That’s because updates are limited to when people change location. I could be following hundreds of people and only receive a few updates over a 24 hour period, making it much more manageable to keep up to date.
At large events it’s very easy to become overwhelmed with everything going on simultaneously. SXSW is one place where becoming overwhelmed is normal. Often times you’ll see attendees spending more time browsing their phone while at an event than actually interacting with other people who are around them. It’s not because they don’t want to network but because there could be something better going on right down the road.
After a few times at SXSW you tend to give up on always trying to find the “most happening” spot. In 2008, Gary Vaynerchuk drove people to a hotel lobby party rather than dealing with the lines at parties and Twitter was a key tool that was responsible for flash mobs like Gary’s.
Gary Vaynerchuk is a unique case however. Not all people want to let people know where they’re at, which is why Gowalla, one of the leading location based services, errs on the side of privacy. Rather than publicly broadcasting your location, Gowalla leaves the user to make their whereabouts public via Facebook and Twitter. This means an event promoted on Gowalla is completely through word of mouth.
Once the event is on Twitter however, everybody knows about the event, not just “friends”. While each location-based service tends to have a different position on privacy, it’s clear that an event promoted on Twitter will result in a massive number of attendees in a short period of time. While location-based services have not been thoroughly tested at an event like SXSW (the “Foursquare phenomenon” only began to spread at last year’s events), this year appears to be shaping up to be a big one for Foursquare and Gowalla.
For now we’ll have to wait and see if the two services take off at this year’s event. After using Gowalla for a few days I finally “got it” and realized the value of location-based services. I have a feeling that other attendees will finally begin to indulge in the LBS phenomenon at this year’s SXSW. Do you use any location-based services like Foursquare and Gowalla? Do you think these services will take of at this year’s SXSW? Are you willing to share your location with others?
Directory: 140 tech experts on Twitter (updated for 2010) | http://j.mp/9nAGjn
[Direct Link]
Looking to book a cheap flight in the next few hours? Then check out JetBlue. The airline is saying "Happy 10th birthday" to itself with $10 fares from NYC to 10 other destinations — but only until 11:59pm CST tonight.
You can fly for only $10 from NYC to Fort Lauderdale, Tampa, Orlando, West Palm Beach and Fort Myers, Florida; Buffalo and Rochester, New York; Oakland, California; Burlington, Vermont; and Salt Lake City, Utah. But the catch is you have to book the flight today and you have to travel on Tuesday or Wednesday, March 9 or 10.
This is apparently just the beginning in a series of deals to celebrate JetBlue's 10th anniversary. NYC-based customers are being told to check out the airline's Twitter account on Wednesday for some giveaway offers.
US troops have finally gained access to social media sites like Facebook and Twitter, with a new policy passed by the Pentagon on Friday last week.
NoSQL Live, which will will focus on NoSQL databases in production environments and be sponsored by MongoDB backer 10gen, will take place March 11th in Boston. Session topics will include scaling with NoSQL, NoSQL in the cloud, schema design with document-oriented databases, the evolution of graph data structure from research to production, enterprise adoption of NoSQL and web standards for NoSQL. Panelists from Twitter, AT&T, LinkedIn, StumbleUpon and others and will cover a wide array of NoSQL technologies including MongoDB, CouchDB, Cassandra, HBase, and more. Although NoSQL Live is sold out, a live webcast will be provided.
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.
Fresh of an $80 million acquisition by Shanda Games, Flash game advertising network and payments platform Mochi Media is launching a social gaming platform and a $10 million fund to invest in game developers.
Mochi Social allow developers to build social features into their games such as inviting friends, sending gifts, or posting to an activity stream. Mochi Social allows for the ability to broadcast in-game notifications to deliver news about game updates, friend activity or challenges.The aim of incorporating these features, allows for a game to transcend one social network by plugging into users social graph across all of their social media identities. The platform currently integrates with Facebook, MySpace and Twitter with more sites to be added in the near future. Currently in private beta, Mochi Social will be rolling out its first enabled game “Kingdoms at War” by A Thinking Ape next week.
A joint effort between Mochi Media and parent company Shanda Games, Mochi GAME Developer Fund is a $10 million fund that will help promising Flash and social game developers support their games through sponsorship, licensing and publishing deals. The fund will be used to assist indie Flash game development studios and game developers. Participating developers will gain access to technical, design and testing resources from Shanda Games, as well as development tools and distribution to nearly 40,000 websites from Mochi Media. Initial investments will be as much as $100,000 per game title.
It’s nice to see Mochi using its backing from Shanda to good use. And the addition of social features to Mochi’s development platform will no doubt be useful to game developers. As of June 2009 100 million people were playing games that included Mochi Media. The company also launched a payments platform for game developers last year.
WASHINGTON — (pound sign)wanttospinWHreporters?
If you're PressSec – White House press secretary Robert Gibbs' username on Twitter – you join the powerful social media platform and push your message across the Internet, 140 characters at a time.
Blending behind-the-scenes nuggets with a defense of President Barack Obama's record, White House and administration officials increasingly are communicating through Twitter.
The popular social network is operating as a Web-based clearinghouse for public statements on weighty subjects (the federal budget) and the mundane (personal grocery lists). It's similar to a bulletin board where anyone can post short notes and users cull the pieces they see by choosing to "follow" individuals' account.
Forget press releases. Gibbs and his deputy, Bill Burton, are now sharing news in Twitter messages. So far 33,000 people have signed up to follow Gibbs and more than 6,000 are tracking Burton. Those two officials have a ways to go to catch actor Ashton Kutcher and his 4.6 million followers.
"Wow unreal game... POTUS watched OT in his office right off the Oval Office – all of us are so proud of our great team," Gibbs tweeted during the men's Olympic hockey finals last Sunday, when the Americans lost the gold medal game to Canada in overtime. POTUS, of course, is the acronym for president of the United States.
Burton offered a midgame, inside-the-Beltway joke: "Tied! White House response, on bgnd, from a low- to midlevel administration official: USA! USA! USA!" (He was referring to a favorite administration request when talking to the press "on background" means the official won't be identified publicly.) After the U.S. loss, Burton noted that America still led the overall medal race.
These are hardly the pronouncements one expects from the president's top spokesmen. But as Obama's team continues an online strategy set in place during the campaign and imported to Pennsylvania Avenue, it seems only natural that they would make it a piece of a broader communications plan that extends across the government.
U.N. Ambassador Susan Rice tweets about diplomacy, Assistant Secretary of State Arturo Valenzuela tweets about the Western Hemisphere and Commerce Secretary Gary Locke tweets about trade.
"Welcome back, furloughed DOTers!" Transportation Secretary Ray LaHood tweeted recently to his employees.
With a news cycle now measured in seconds rather than days, administration officials recognize they must embrace this rapid pace and use the same tactics as the critics who assail them and the reporters who cover them. Gibbs, who is Obama's chief defender, has signaled that the White House won't cede any ground online.
Twitter began four years ago as a microblogging site to follow the activities of celebrities such as Lance Armstrong, the bicycling champion whose account was the first one Gibbs followed.
Since then, it has proved to be a powerful tool for mobilizing causes and protest movements by allowing people to use common phrases to link subjects by theme. In Washington, that translates into hashtags – key words preceded by the symbol for a pound sign – such as (pound sign)whitehouse or (pound sign)gop that users key in to find connected nuggets.
"There's a whole language, obviously, and typing with numbers and symbols that has evaded me," Gibbs said. "I'm sure my son could teach me that far better than I could pick it up."
Twitter also lets users communicate directly with each other, either through public messages using (at) symbols or through private messages. In many ways, it can be used as an e-mail system in which messages are completely public but limited to just 140 letters, numbers or symbols.
Obama's aides are fast students of Twitter's etiquette and uses. The White House announced Obama's first news conference on Twitter last year. Burton has been known to clarify Gibbs' comments while Gibbs is still speaking from the White House podium. Officials share with their followers news reports the White House views as positive.
Burton explained – in a tweet, no less – the approach.
"(At)PressSec is using this new medium in a way that gets information out quickly and effectively tracks what is on the minds of our press corps," he responded to a tweet from this reporter, PElliottAP.
Obama's campaign team built an Internet-based direct engagement model to win the White House and adapted the plan once in Washington. At the Democratic National Committee, aides continue to update the political BarackObama account, which operates separately from the White House tweets. Those are treated as formal communications and will be filed away as part of the presidential archive along with legal memos and policy documents.
In tandem with their quick bursts of information on Twitter, the online White House routinely turns to its blog, Facebook page or YouTube channel where Obama now posts his weekly address.
"All of these things are basically entirely new to government, but have become a standard part of White House operations, with top White House officials recognizing their value and placing them as top priorities, giving the public equal footing in a world where, for most of history, government has had to engage and communicate with them through the press or interest groups," White House spokesman Nick Shapiro said.
For instance, 60,000 people went to the White House Web site last fall to watch Obama speak to a joint session of Congress on health care, and one-third of them stayed on the site after it was over to talk with administration officials about the speech.
Macon Phillips, the White House new media director who tweets as macon44, said the online chat allowed officials to get "a taste of what questions the actual public had in raw form – rather than simply the questions cable news and Beltway pundits have."
This is my weekly project update, where I tell you what I’ve been up to this week in my business and share what’s on my mind.
I’m fresh back from Continuity Summit, an event hosted by Ryan Lee up in Stamford, CT.
All in all, great event. Ryan did a great job in delivering a lot of content. In many conferences, I’ll be in and out of the room. A lot of networking happens out in the hallways, after all. However, I attended almost every speaker this time because they were all good. I have a lot of notes sitting in Evernote to go over and process.
Continuity Summit is an internet marketing event. I’ve been to several of them and they are always different than a blogging event. The crowds are very different. The people in attendance are generally running internet businesses – real businesses like the kind I talk about on this blog. They weren’t so much interested in blogging. They weren’t that active on Twitter. They were just making money.
At blogging events, the level of Twitter activity is usually quite high. Everybody is blogging (obviously). But, most of them are trying to figure out even the most basic business strategies, and often don’t think much beyond banner ads.
It is interesting being in the middle, with one foot in each world. The power really is in the middle ground. In fact, this is pretty much the very definition of the Third Tribe, as those guys have defined it.
The power of this business lies in creating a relationship with your crowd and providing tons of value – and charging money for some of it. But, the relationship is key. Proof of that is the fact that Ryan Lee himself filled this event with over 1,000 attendees and did it using only his own blog and his email list. No JVs. He got 1,000 people to hop on planes and fly to Stamford. That’s the power of a relationship. It’ll KILL PPC advertising anytime, as far as I’m concerned.
I would love to see more bloggers showing up at events like this. I met a few. In fact, I met up with several readers of this blog there in Stamford (nice meeting you guys!). But, bloggers who are interested in monetizing need to get out of the blogger bubble.
What do I mean by the blogger bubble?
The word “blogger” usually denotes a person who writes a lot, shares their thoughts. When it comes to making money, most bloggers never leave the paradigm of “writing a lot”. They look for indirect ways of making money from their work – banner ads. It leads to this self-contained little bubble of limited thinking. Because they think their product is blog posts.
This bubble even extends outward. In this crowd of internet marketers, when I told them what I did, many of them asked me how I make money and automatically assumed I did it by way of banner advertising. So, even THESE guys think banner ads are the only way to go.
What a bubble!
We have to burst that bubble, guys. Blogging is just a medium. It isn’t a business.
When it comes to monetizing a blog, blogging is not a unique business model. Instead, it is just another promotional medium where all the same stuff internet marketers talk about apply. In other words, there shouldn’t be two different camps here. There’s only one, really.
I’ll be flying to Washington DC on Thursday to attend Yanik Silver’s Underground Seminar. This is another internet marketing event. As usual, I expect I’ll find very few bloggers there. But, you know what? I probably will find several marketers with blogs – they just don’t define themselves by the medium.
And they’re banking.
Think about it.
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Doing their best to connect with (and perhaps even make peace with some!) customers nationwide, Rogers (NYSE: RCI) has launched something they call ‘RedBoard’. The name of course is a metaphor. With whiteboards lining office scenarios all over the world (ok, maybe not-so-much anymore), the Rogers ‘RedBoard’ is a place for Rogers customers and employees to post new ideas, collaborate, ask questions, get answers, and ‘mingle’ with one another.
Rogers has promised to deliver the following via the ‘RedBoard’
To check it out for yourself, pop on over to the Rogers RedBoard.
Note: If you’re on ‘the Twitter’, you can also follow Rogers @RogersBuzz and @RogersHelps.
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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.
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Drake By The Numbers
click on image to enlarge
First, let's look at the conversation volume around Drake on Twitter. Beginning to buzz in the middle of 2009, Drake has remained at the center of the hip-hop conversation, hovering around 5,000 Tweets per day for the second half of 2009. He has edged out hip-hop heavyweight and current label mate Lil' Wayne with buzz and recently benefited from a post-Grammy bump of over 60,000 Tweets in one day.
A Close Look At The Data -
A glimpse at the real-time Trendrr dashboard suggests Drake's top geographic markets include New York, Atlanta, Toronto, Las Vegas and London. The demographic data suggests Drake's audience is skewed towards women, with 57% of the conversation deriving from females and 43% of the conversation deriving from males.
click on image to enlarge
The Trendrr data sets reveal two findings. The first is that Drake has been an item of popular and trending conversation on Twitter, increasing rapidly since his Grammy performance. Second, listening behavior for Drake is increasing in frequency and volatility, consistent with the increase in conversation. Together, the data shows appearances at seminal media events such as the Grammy’s pay dividends in social media and reap rewards for the artists in terms of consumption, further proving the interconnection between television and social media.
Drake has developed a budding musical career without the release of a full-length album and initially without the backing of a major label. He has already affiliated himself with hip-hop's most popular stars and is making money from concerts and brand endorsements.
This brings us to a final question worth considering:
Well that didn't take very long. In just under four years time, Twitter bolted past 10 billion tweets, serving up its 10 billionth message last week. So what did the milestone message say and who posted it? Nobody knows, as it belongs to a protected user.
Visible or not, the message underscores the continuing popularity of the microblogging service, which doesn't appear to be losing any steam (sorry Google Buzz). According to Mashable.com, Twitter posted its one billionth tweet back in November 2008, and five billion tweets only four months ago.
As it stands now, Twitter says its service pumps out about 50 million messages every day, up from 2.5 million about a year ago, the Wall Street Journal reports.
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
The long awaited, oft rumored Twitter for BlackBerry app has been released in beta form for a while now. Granted, not everyone was able to get their hands on a copy due to the invitation only nature in which the app was released. But that also hasn't stopped others from taking their own avenues in getting the same version released to those with invite codes. In fact, it's been in enough hands now to have generated quite the amount of feedback I assume considering RIM has placed the feedback URL right within the application itself.
So with that said, how come there have not been any updates released so far? Surely Research In Motion is working on the "beta" app. And if so, wouldn't they want the latest bug fixes and implementations tested? Many of you may not have noticed when installing Twitter for BlackBerry but the EULA (End User License Agreement) clearly stated the terms and conditions of the Pilot program end on March 31st, 2010 (shown above). So it should be fairly safe to assume we'll see a full on roll out shortly before or shortly after that and let’s hope by then they'll have pushed out some updates to the already existing users to check out and test.
CrackBerry.com's feed sponsored by ShopCrackBerry.com. Twitter For BlackBerry - Where Are The Updates?
The Oscars are long, and although people across the world watch it, even the attendees are bored to tears. (Did you see George Clooney?)
If you missed Hollywood’s biggest night of self-adoration all year, here’s a handy crib sheet for the most notable moment’s from last night’s show.
That’s pretty much everything you need to know, if you hear all the chit chat in your cube and have no idea what happened. You’re welcome.
If you can believe it, we are rapidly approaching the 1 ½ year “anniversary” of the election of Barack Obama as the President of the United States. This event was historic and monumental on many different levels and not the least of which is how candidate Obama utilized social media to get into office.
Now, before I get started here please relax and understand that this is not a political post. It is more about a lesson about how social media can be a real double-edged sword. Why? Well, I have heard more than one social media “expert” express disappointment in the President’s relative abandonment of the medium after he was elected. I have postulated elsewhere that he may have actually set back the usage of social media for political advantage. Why? It’s a matter of trust and many feel it was violated to some degree. If you feel the urge to argue this please leave me out. I am just parroting what I have heard more than once. So you know where I stand personally, I am not a trusting sort of any politician at any time of any party.
Fox News reports on the uptick in social media usage by the White House
Blending behind-the-scenes nuggets with a defense of President Barack Obama’s record, White House and administration officials increasingly are communicating through Twitter.
Forget press releases. White House press secretary Gibbs and his deputy, Bill Burton, are now sharing news in Twitter messages. So far 33,000 people have signed up to follow Gibbs and more than 6,000 are tracking Burton. Those two officials have a ways to go to catch actor Ashton Kutcher and his 4.6 million followers.
Ok, let’s stop here for a second. Maybe the bigger question is why in the world 4.6 million people are following Ashton Kutcher? Anyway, as the White House now becomes more aggressive in its social media efforts how do those who have been left feeling a little jilted after the run up to the election react?
I suspect this is more a matter of opinion than a measurable event because there is little hard data on any of this other than number of followers of any political figure. So the question to you is do you feel that Twitter is a political messaging force to be reckoned with or a potential land mine for those in public office? It works both ways in business but is it potentially more dangerous in the political arena? God only knows it doesn’t take a politician from either side of the aisle too long to say something that makes the rest of us scratch our heads. Do you trust 140 character versions of messages from any politician from any party at any time?
Go ahead and let’er rip. Let’s face it, whether we want it or not this technique / tactic is likely to increase exponentially as we here in the states approach an important political season this fall. Could its use be as much of a referendum on social media as it is on the potential political impact of social media? Do tell.
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Monday's Signal round up is light. The news was a bit boring over the weekend, and I'm OK with that. We all watched the Oscars and enjoyed the suspense of disbelief. I tweeted that it feels like, as a culture, we're closing in on One Big Mass Media Event each month. Oscars, Super Bowl, New Year's Eve....What's the next one?
Meanwhile, I am doing a lot of writing/producing right now. The theme for Web 2 this year is really, really interesting (it centers on points of control and strategy across the Internet), and we're also a few days away from unveiling the new CM Summit site (the theme this year is "Marketing in Real Time" - and the speakers are extraordinary). Not to mention some deep stuff I'm working on for FM and the future of its business (off to NYC this week for more on that). Oh, and yeah, I want to update that Database of Intentions post I did last Friday. Lots of great input from all of you - in comments, Facebook, Twitter - and I've decided that for sure, we need to add a Signal for Commerce. Health, Music, others - I am not sure about yet. More on that soon.
Meanwhile, the links I did find worth digging into over the weekend:
Why Ad Blocking is devastating to the sites you love (Ars Technica) Finally, a publisher (one who was with FM until our pals at Conde Nast purchased them) sounds off about ad blocking. Ken, the founder, created a program that blocks content from folks who block ads. He didn't run it for long, but read the piece. He learned a lot, and engaged with his audience as a *publisher*. Well done. I love that Ken did this, and can't wait to read all 1400 comments. Money quote: "Imagine running a restaurant where 40% of the people who came and ate didn't pay. In a way, that's what ad blocking is doing to us."
Drafting a New Blueprint for the Client-Agency Relationship (Jones&Bonevac) This topic ain't going away, it seems, in fact, it's coming to a head.
Clorox App Gives Consumers Content They Want (eMarketer) All marketers are publishers. Who said that?
Monopolies, Retransmission Fees, and Screwing Customers (AVC) Fred puts one more story into the ongoing narrative of traditional media coming to terms with the Internet.
18 Use Cases That Show Business How to Finally Put Customers First (MarketingProfs) Always a sucker for case studies....
If @johnbattelle says so ;) Block Those Ads! http://bit.ly/9wQjxV
- Tac Anderson
While you may be aware of WPP in general it may be worth a look to see just how big this media conglomerate is. Last week the company stated that digital will account for 2/3 of its business over the next three to four years. Considering they did about $13 billion in revenue in 2009 this is no small statement.
Those of us on the Internet marketing side of the fence tend to see this kind of announcement and scoff by saying “No kidding! You finally figured it out, huh?” which can be fun for a moment of over time starts to sound childish. The world has moved at breakneck speed to the digital side of the ledger and in the process is undoing how media has been bought and sold for the past 60 years or so. Nothing that big and entrenched changes overnight.
In the paidContent section of The Guardian is some more data to wrap your head around:
New media sales accounted for 27 percent of the advertising and marketing group’s revenues, or $3.6 billion. This is already a big step: to compare, one competitor, Havas, last month said that digital accounts for 16 percent of its revenues to account for one-fifth of its revenues by the end of 2010.
WPP appears to be pegging its own digital revenue share to stats that are coming out on how much time people are spending online. Sir Martin Sorrell pointed out that recent figures show that this too is currently hovering around the 27-28 percent mark.
Mark Read, director of strategy and CEO of WPP Digital, touted the company’s specialist digital expertise in the earnings call: “We have to have digital in all our businesses.” The company is continuing to integrate technology platforms into the business, and industry partnerships with companies like Google (NSDQ: GOOG), Yahoo (NSDQ: YHOO), Microsoft (NSDQ: MSFT), Facebook, MySpace (NYSE: NWS) and Omniture (NSDQ: OMTR), now owned by Adobe.
A curious omission (probably more of an oversight) is no mention of Twitter but hey they are still trying to figure out this digital thing, right? I suspect that WPP being this aggressive in their statement is sending a message to their competition that they are going to be a leader in this area. Of course, this has not come easy thus far
Digital is a blessing and a curse, says Read: “Technology is shaping our industry…however this is confusing for our clients and extremely complicated to manage.”
OK, as any good agency guy is going to do he is going to push the “confusion” to his clients. It may be more confusing to clients as to why it has taken WPP this long to figure all this out. Read set up a nice “out” as well by saying this is extremely complicated to manage. Isn’t that why you are hired as an agency for these things? Oh well, like I said earlier, this is a process.
Well, if you want to learn more keep your eyes open for WPP’s “Digital Day” on April 23 where they will share more information on their digital strategy. Sounds more a class trip so maybe they’ll supply a box lunch too!
As with many bloggers, we’ve been using royalty free images for many years. Many bloggers make use of images from Flickr and we have too but you can’t always find the right image there. I’ve even made a point to take more photos of people, places and things while traveling for later use in blog posts like the one to the right.
The stock photo site we’ve been using for several years recently decided to essentially double their prices (no matter how they spin it, that’s what they did) and it prompted me to ask the excellent people I’m connected with on Twitter for their suggestions on royalty free photography and image web sites. Here is a collection of 9 such sites that were suggested via Twitter or researched by TopRank. Which leads us to our poll for the most “blogger friendly” royalty free stock photo site:
Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.For a list of over 100 free stock photo sites, visit this link.
© Online Marketing Blog, 2010. | Poll: Best Royalty Free Stock Photo Sites for Bloggers | No comment | http://www.toprankblog.com
It is not really often that I am actually impressed by the tool (this is because I come across 2-3 new ones weekly so it is not really easy to surprise me already). But today’s one is truly awesome.
AlertRank is a free web-based tool that helps to make sense of your Google alerts.
Most of us use Google Alerts to keep an eye on our keyword or brand mentions but few of us are actually satisfied with the tool… Until you try AlertRank.
Step 1: Tell Google to send alerts to your AlertRank address
Step 2: While signed-in to this new account, go to Google Alerts and start creating alerts to track your keywords and brand name:
Once you have created as many alerts as you need, let the tool collect and analyze the data.
Google Alerts on Steroids
From now on, all Google alerts sent to you will contain “Alert Rank” – each site in the alert will be rated based on the internal algorithm that takes into account:
Enhanced alert statistics:
All the results sent by Google are compiled in a handy table containing the following columns:
You can customize the columns to hide any of them or add new ones (like comments, nofollow links on the page, trackbacks, top level domains, Delicious bookmarks of the page, etc):
You can also click through SOURCES tab to see domain stats that got into your alerts:
Alert Analytics
This section displays handy charts that sum up the following:
Daily Email Reports (Excel and/or PDF)
These are actually ready-made reputation management report for your client!
What are your thoughts?
Check out the SEO Tools guide at Search Engine Journal.
AlertRank: Google Alerts on Steroids
Section: Computers, Security, Features
A new wave of scareware hitting the net has nearly taken over the field. On February 8th and 9th the attack pumped out enough malware to end up accounting for over half the total malware distributed for the entire month. In other words, it’s huge.
The malware is called Security Tool and is distributed via spam and through poisoned search results and Black Hat SEO techniques. Unlike the fake anti-virus programs that have been glutting the net, Security Tool has a very nasty twist. It takes over the computer and locks down the apps and all data. The only way the user can get their access restored is to pay via the one app that’s not locked down-Internet Explorer. This goes beyond scareware and into the realm of ransomware.
The botnet responsible for this new malware wave is Cutwail/Pushdo, one of the largest botnets around. Cutwail is also responsible for the recent DDoS attacks on Twitter, Paypal, the CIA and the FBI.
How do you protect yourself? It is crucial that you keep your anti-virus software up to date at all times. Don’t click on links or open attachments in emails that come from people you don’t know or that come from people you do know but seem suspicious (emails with no subject and a message body with a link and nothing else are a huge red flag, especially if the link looks like gibberish.) When using search engines, stick to results that come from familiar, reputable sites. Don’t click on banner ads or pop ups, and
think twice about downloading from Bittorrent sites which are often infested with malware. Limewire is one of the worst!
Read [PCWorld]
Full Story » | Written by Sue Walsh for Gadgetell. | Comment on this Article »
Filed under: Utilities, Freeware, Social Software, Web
Twilk is a simple site that looks at either your Twitter follower list and/or the list of accounts that you follow, and creates a tiled background image that is then applied to your profile page. The people whose accounts you refer to most often via @ replies, re-tweets, or mentions will show up in the first two columns going down the page.
Although Twilk is primarily a free service, they also offer a paid subscription that will automatically update your background daily.
The idea of Twilk is clever, but it doesn't make for the most visually appealing profile page. It would be nice if Twilk offered to add a screen, or to slightly darken the images uniformly, so that the resulting background didn't look so chaotic. However, if you're looking for a way to pay homage to the folks that you follow (or those that follow you), Twilk isn't a bad way to go.
Twilk uses your followers' icons to make a Twitter background for you originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 08 Mar 2010 08:10:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.
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