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Posts Tagged ‘Social Media’

Which apps are using the new Facebook APIs?

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

This past weekend’s announcement by Facebook that the company would be opening up its APIs to allow for posting of notes, videos and more has left some companies scrambling to add new functionality to existing applications. Below we’ve highlighted a handful of the ones that let you post to Facebook from a desktop client, be it standalone or something that plugs into your browser.

We’ve talked to the people at each one to see when you should be expecting to be able to make use of the new API in each app:

“Blogo already supports Facebook status updates through its integration with Ping.fm,” says Benjamin Jackson, Blogo’s technical director. “As for more robust Facebook integration, you can be absolutely certain that we’ll be running to integrate this as quickly as possible. We’ll be shooting to send out a beta next week.”

Friendbar creator Edo Segal says “we love the fact that facebook [is] opening up more services,” and “definitely plan to include support for these API’s in upcoming versions.” Segal also says he wants a higher level of access to that data. “For example, to be able to post comments to users photos and status updates, and to directly send a Facebook message to a user via the API.”

Posting of notes through Ping.fm is up and running. “We’re still assembling some other ideas on how to use their new features,” says founder and CEO Sean McCullough. Worth a mention is that many of the services on this list go through Ping.fm to re-syndicate user messages.

“Sociagami has always been committed to deep integration with social networking sites like Facebook and Myspace and we will definitely be taking advantage of the new API features in 2.0,” says Charlie Robbins, director of social network integration for Sociagami. “Unfortunately, using an API based implementation will mean that Sociagami 2.0 will not have the messaging and wall posting features that came with 1.0.”

Working on it for an upcoming build. “The video part will be an important one!” says Loic Le Meur, CEO of Seesmic which acquired/owns Twhirl. The latest version, which was released on Monday added in Ping.fm support, letting you cross post messages to your Facebook profile.

“Yes, we are actively working on implementing the new Facebook API and rolling it out ASAP,” says Regan Fletcher, Yoono’s VP of business development. Our overall objective really is to maximize our use of the Facebook API in order to allow users who have added Facebook to Yoono to have the best possible experience and functionality.”

“It does look like some of this new functionality is available via the REST API which we use and we can run FQL queries (which we do),” says AlertThingy creator Clive Howard. “We will be revisiting this prior to the next version and if we can do then I’m sure it will make it into 3.x.” Version 3 of AlertThingy was released on Monday morning.
Apps that we pinged but have not yet responded: Flock, Feedalizr, Moodswing/blast, and Gwibber. We’ll update this post if we hear back.

Which apps are using the new Facebook APIs? | Webware – CNET.

Tags: apps, Business, facebook, internet, Marketing, media, Social Media, Software, tech, technology, tools, twitter
Posted in Mobil Computing, Resources, Science & Technology, Social Media, Software, internet | No Comments »

Whee! New numbers on social network usage!

Wednesday, February 11th, 2009

(Credit: Compete.com)

The blogosphere simply loves to slurp up social-networking traffic stats, and on Monday we got a nice tasty serving of them with some new numbers from Compete.com for the month of January. The results? Facebook is in the lead, with about 68 million unique visitors, well ahead of MySpace’s 58 million. (The two are pegged at 1.1 billion and 810 million page views, respectively.)

This may be the first survey we’ve seen that puts Facebook ahead of the News Corp.-owned MySpace in U.S. traffic. It also puts Twitter as the third-biggest social-media site in the country by total page views, with only about six million unique visitors but a whopping 54 million views.

Compete’s numbers are interesting, because they often are pretty different from other analytics firms’. Here are some clarifications, explained to CNET News in an e-mail sent by Compete’s Andy Kazeniac: These are numbers stemming entirely from Web browser data in the U.S. That means that you won’t be pulling in any international numbers, where most of Facebook’s users are now, or data from widgets or third-party applications, which are how many avid Twitter users access the service. That means that it’s likely that Twitter’s reach is bigger than the numbers indicate.

What’s also intriguing is that there are a few social-media sites, like Flixster and LiveJournal, with relatively low unique visitor counts but proportionally very high page view counts, indicating that they probably have smallish bases of very loyal users.

Also pulling in notable numbers are LinkedIn, with about 11 million unique users, Classmates.com, with about 17 million, and Reunion.com, with slightly under 14 million. On the other end? AOL’s Bebo, an $850 million purchase, which Compete.com clocks in as having just shy of three million unique visitors. True, its biggest user bases are in the U.K. and Ireland, but that’s not good considering the price tag.

Still, statistics are like tequila shots. Always take ‘em with a few grains of salt and a slice of lime, and be warned that they may give you headaches.

Whee! New numbers on social network usage | Webware – CNET.

Tags: facebook, internet, media, MySpace, social, Social History, Social Media, stats, tools, twitter
Posted in Science & Technology, Social Media, Software, internet | 1 Comment »

Twitter Fast Growing Beyond Its Messaging Roots

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

Thanks to its open-ended design and a thriving user community, Twitter is fast outgrowing its roots as a simple, easy-to-use messaging service. Enterprising hackers are creating apps for sharing music and videos, to help you quit smoking and lose weight — spontaneously extending the text-based service into one of the web’s most fertile (and least likely) application platforms.

Hardware hackers have set up household appliances to send status alerts over Twitter, like a washing machine that tweets when the spin cycle is through, or a home security system that tweets whenever it senses movement inside the house. Others have incorporated Twitter into their DIY home automation systems. Forgot to turn off the lights? Send a tweet to flip the switch by remote control.

“It’s so simple and easy to access, people are thinking of more and more uses for the platform,” says Dan Wasyluk, creator of the Twitter-based Snipt service. Wasyluk launched Snipt last week as a way to let programmers share short snippets of code over Twitter.

Launched in 2007, Twitter quickly became a darling of the life-and mind-casting interneterati. But some saw boundless possibilities in the 140-character limit, and what was a slow trickle of innovation is now quickly elevating what is essentially a micro-blogging service into one of the internet’s most important technologies, along with instant messaging and e-mail.

Though it’s main use — sending and receiving short messages to your social network — is often dismissed as time-wasting trivia, Twitter’s potential as a broad internet platform is just beginning to be fully realized. Twitter has grown into a ubiquitous presence — you can send tweets from your phone, your desktop and your browser — that has potential to not only facilitate communication among humans, but even to make machines do your bidding.

Businesses are starting to be built around it. Botanicalls, for example, sells a Twitter-enabled hardware kit that lets your neglected house plants alert you when they’re thirsty.

The company has developed a tiny moisture sensor attached to a circuit board with an Ethernet port. You stick it in your plant’s soil, and when the moisture levels drop below a certain level, your plant sends you a tweet begging to be watered.

Using Twitter’s application programming interface (API), a programmer with even a modest amount of experience can create a web app that gathers public data from Twitter, or uses it to send links, commands or bursts of information.

“[Twitter's] open API is a huge reason it has grown into such a platform,” says Wasyluk.

File sharers were the first to rush in. The photo-sharing service TwitPic, one of the oldest Twitter mashups, lets users send pictures to their followers by storing a photo on its servers, then passing the link around on Twitter. Now there are newer apps like Tweetcube and Twittershare, which let users share larger media like MP3s and videos.

Twitter’s limited format of short, text-based announcements are a natural match for sites like TrackThis, which you can use to get status updates on FedEx and UPS packages, and Tweetajob, which job seekers can use to get real-time updates about new job openings.

Anyone who needs help quitting smoking can use Qwitter to monitor their progress. Those looking to lose weight can turn to TweetWhatYouEat or TweetYourEats.

Hardware hackers have put a new spin on the Twitter mashup — as it turns out, just about anything that can be plugged into the internet is capable of talking to Twitter.

Programmer Ryan Rose rigged up his washing machine to send him a tweet when his clothes are done. He just follows his machine’s twitter account (it’s PiMPY3WASH) and he knows when to go downstairs and move his undies to the dryer.

Linux hacker Shantanu Goel set up a video camera and some motion-sensing software on a PC connected to the internet. If anyone breaks into his house or goes snooping through his room, the software detects the movement and sends out a tweet.

Tech-savvy environmentalists can install Tweet-a-Watt, a gadget that plugs into your wall socket and connects to your wi-fi network. Once a day, the pocket-sized device broadcasts stats of your daily energy usage to Twitter.

Whether that sort of transparency results in embarrassment or bragging rights can be determined by a system like the one created by Justin Wickett. The Duke University student wired up his home so he could turn his lights on and off remotely, just by sending a text message to Twitter from his mobile phone.

Twitter Fast Growing Beyond Its Messaging Roots | Epicenter from Wired.com.

Tags: internet, media, Social Media, tech, technology, tools, twitter
Posted in Business, Science & Technology, Social Media, Software, internet | No Comments »

Twitter starts to talk up the charging companies plan

Tuesday, February 10th, 2009

Sometime soon, Twitter is expected to unveil its plan to make money. Based on comments made by Twitter co-founders Biz Stone and Evan Williams recently, it seems likely that plan will involve charging companies for accounts with special privileges.

In New York Magazine this week, both Stone and Williams said that charging companies for brand verification is something that the company was looking into. This makes a lot of sense, especially given the rise of fake profiles, like the one that was recently taken down for the Dalai Lama. They note that a paid corporate account could have features like a prompt when a new user joins a company’s feed.

Then today, Stone made similar comments to the UK-based Marketing Magazine. “We are noticing more companies using Twitter and individuals following them. We can identify ways to make this experience even more valuable and charge for commercial accounts,” Stone told the publication. He went on to note that other ideas of charging companies to use Twitter to market products and/or provide customer service were on the table.

The latter part is something which companies like Zappos and Comcast have been doing for a while. They have employees that scan Twitter (something much easier now with Twitter Search) to see who is saying something about their company. If it’s something negative, or there is some kind of problem mentioned, these Zappos or Comcast Twitter users send messages to the user having the problem. I’ve experience this first hand with Comcast’s Twitter rep, Frank Eliason, who tweets from the account ComcastCares.

Marketing products on Twitter is a potentially more interesting idea from a revenue perspective. Late last year, Dell reported that it had made over $1 million in revenue thanks to Twitter. More recently, Dell announced that it would start offering deals exclusively to users who follow its accounts on Twitter. With Dell using Twitter to spur sales and clearly making money off of it, it makes sense that Twitter should be getting some of that. But the question of how much, is a tricky one.

“If it becomes complicated and costly, our instinct would be to move elsewhere,” Bob Pearson, vice-president of communities and conversations at Dell told Marketing Magazine. Other companies Marketing Magazine asked about the idea of Twitter charging businesses to market on its service, said similar things.

This idea of charging for corporate accounts, has been around since at least October, when CNET reported it was hearing whispers about such a plan. Since then, we’ve heard the exact same thing from a few other sources. In November, Williams started to float that idea out there publicly. But now, with talk about this plan clearly picking up, I think it’s a safe bet that it’s coming sooner rather than later.

Twitter has raised over $20 million in funding. Recent reports suggest that it’s looking for another $20 or so million, which could push its valuation close to a quarter of a billion dollars.

Twitter starts to talk up the charging companies plan » VentureBeat.

Tags: internet, Social Media, tech, technology, tools, twitter
Posted in Business, Science & Technology, Social Media, Software, internet | No Comments »

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