7 posts tagged “six apart”

I took a blogging break for Turkey, so this social media and mobile round-up includes the most interesting news in mobile and social media since November 21:

Apple:

• Apple is changing the App store to show a broader range of top apps in each category and separated free from paid apps.  Hopefully this will discourage developers from arbitrarily lowering prices of their apps to make them turn up closer to the top of the listings. 
  
• Apple gives developers the ability to deliver promo codes for their iPhone apps.
  
• iTunes App store results, 5 months in.
  

• Bebo launched “Social Inbox” on December 10.  It “combines e-mail, social networking and media recommendations in one easy-to-use interface. “ 
  

• Facebook is reportedly running A/B tests on its sign-up process. I think this is great. Testing is a very important part of improving customer experience, and more companies should test UI regularly. Here’s more on the test.
  
• Facebook announced the 5 grand prize recipients of its fbFund of $225,000 each: GroupCard, Kontagent, Mousehunt, by HitGrab, WedSnap created the Weddingbook application, and  Wildfire
  
• TechCrunch interviewed Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg here.
  
• Facebook Connect is now generally available.  TechCrunch reports “Now any third party website that wants to pull personal data about visitors from Facebook - and send back activity reports to their news feeds - can do so by first filling out a self-service application.”
  
• Good article from NY Times. Facebook Connect attempts 2 turn around dismal performance of social media ads.
• Oodle will power the Facebook Market (classifieds)
  

• MySpace launched its new MySpace Toolbar for Firefox and Internet Explorer.  It enables: auto login, alerts, updates, Myspace Search by Google, quick links and user links from your browser.
  
• MySpace announced DataPortability Project  with new data portability standards.
  
• MySpace launches streaming mobile video.
  

• Mobile / Android:
• The Open Handset Alliance announced that the following 14 companies joined the Alliance: AKM Semiconductor Inc., ARM, ASUSTek Computer Inc., Atheros Communications, Borqs, Ericsson, Garmin International Inc., Huawei Technologies, Omron Software Co. Ltd, Softbank Mobile Corporation, Sony Ericsson, Teleca AB, Toshiba Corporation and Vodafone. 
  
• “Google's Android Open Handset Alliance Project unveiled the Android Dev Phone 1. The Android Dev Phone 1 is hardware and sim unlocked G1 in black with a special skin aimed at developers.  The Android Dev Phone 1 sells for $399 in 18 international markets. “
  
• The Phandroid blog speculates that Google will soon introduce Ringtones and Wallpapers to the Android Market.
  
• Google advertisers can now “show [their] desktop text and image ads on the iPhone, the T-Mobile G1, and other mobile devices with full (HTML) Internet browsers.”
  
• The Kogan Agora is the latest Android phone. It’s now available for pre-order and will be released Jan 29, 2009.
  
• Here’s an interesting summary of Android Market performance from MediaLets.
• HTC raised G1 sales forecasts for 2008 to 1 million devices.
  
• Chrome:
• Google’s new browser, Chrome, exited beta on December 11.
  
• Gmail:
• Gmail adds to-do list management (“tasks”) to its list of features.
  
• You can now SMS through Gmail’s new task manager. You can activate it here.
  
• Search:
• Google released zeitgeist 2008, a summary of the “big events, memorable moments and emerging trends that captivated us in 2008”.  The fastest rising global search terms? That’s right folks, it’s the ever frightening, “Sarah Palin” at #1 and “Jonas Brothers” at #10.  Obama falls in at #6.  In the UK, Google reports: “From BBC's iPlayer to Facebook to YouTube, many of the top searches in Britain this year have been for our favourite websites. We also see three web-savvy politicians come tops in searches”.  Check out all the stats here.  Very cool stuff.
  
• FriendConnect is now open for all websites.  As TechCrunch reports “Google Friend Connect is OpenSocial’s answer to Facebook Connect. It lets other websites accept a member’s OpenSocial OpenID username and password to log into their sites. More importantly, it also lets websites access users’ social data, which includes friend lists, profile information, feed messages, reviews, ratings and the like.”
  
• YouTube:
• YouTube launched an enhanced abuse and safety page.
  
• YouTube is tightening its standards on content.
  

• CrunchGear speculates that Microsoft may announce a Zune Phone at CES 2009.
  

• MOTODEV’s Widget Developer Challenge underway. Be one of the first 100 unique submissions received by December 18, 2008, and win a $250 gift card to Amazon.com.  Click here to learn more.
• Motorola introduces Rokr EM35 with WebUI widgets & Windows Media support & music player with virtual surround sound.
  

• Nokia announced the N97, which looks like a very cool phone.
  
• Nokia announces “Point and Find” mobile image recognition technology. It allows users to point their camera phones at poster or billboard and get more information on what’s being advertised on their phones. I’ve seen technology like this before from companies like Pongr and Kooaba.  It’s great to see a big mobile OEM embrace it.  Check out a demo of Point and Find here.
  
• Nokia released a new email platform for Ovi. Check out the beta here.
  

• Flickr launched a new mobile site, which allows video streaming.

• Recent Layoffs:
• CBS Interactive: CBS Interactive laid off workers at LastFM, but rumor has it that CBS Interactive isn’t reporting the extent of layoffs across CBS Interactive.  CBS isn’t confirming the extent of the layoffs, but TechCrunch is speculating: “According to a source inside Cnet, the buzz is that the total number of employees asked to leave today was “275-ish.” A CBS spokesperson wouldn’t confirm that number. So take it as a rough estimate.”
  
•  Microblogging platform, Pownce, closes doors & founders including Digg's Kevin Rose join Six Apart

• Industry News:

• Mobile ad rates drop as inventory increases. Experts say mobile CPMs are ~$15 compared w/ ~$23 earlier this year.
• Blogging platform, Tumblr received $4.5M in series B investment from its Series A investors in a new round of funding this week.  They also announced that they’ll be releasing premium services. 
  
• VC firm, Accel Partners, announced two funds worth $1Billion.
  
• Industry Events:
• LeWeb08 took place in Paris December 9-10.  
• While I couldn’t make it to Paris, I enjoyed watching some of it on UStream.  
• The interview with Marissa Mayer, Google’s Vice President of Search Product, was particularly good.
• In particular, the closing session on the main stage with the Gillmor Gang was entertaining.  I don’t see it up on the Gillmor Gang site yet, but fingers crossed they’ll post it when they’re back from Europe.   
• Seesmic founder and organizer of Le Web, Loic LeMeur apologizes for “organizational issues” at LeWeb08.
  
• Technology announcements:
• Hi5: Announced virtual gifts on December 10.
• Opera: The alpha of the Opera 10 browser is now available for free download.
  
• TechCrunch reports that “Netvibes Founder Building iPhone-Like Operating System For Netbooks” called Joliweb.
  
• TechCrunch reports that UStream is entering the race to dominate the live mobile broadcasting market (other players include Qik, Kyte, and FlixWagon).  See a video and analysis here.
  
• New Start-up, “Give Real” encourages people to forget about giving virtual gifts in favor of giving “real drinks redeemable at any bar or restaurant.”  Check it out here and as an app on Facebook.
• Misc.
• Itsmy released a mobile social networking study of 15,000 active users. Results here.
  
• In her November 21 BoomTown blog Kara Swisher summarized the Astia Awards Dinner, which celebrated venture capital firms that support women-led companies. I’m not a fan of awards dinners so I wouldn’t normally mention one, except that for this one, Venture Capitalist, Tim Draper, who couldn’t make it to the event in person, sent in a very funny video of himself taking off a piece of clothing for every woman-led company he’s invested in.
  
• Vodafone buys European mobile location and navigation services company, Wayfinder.
  
• Sling.com, which, like Hulu, allows you to watch TV shows online, launched in beta.
  

At Ryan Kruder's suggestion (http://ryankuder.vox.com/), I decided to give "Blog It" a try. Blog It is SixApart's Facebook app that allows you to update your various blogs, Twitter, and Facebook Status.

BlogIt is an interesting idea... Being able to broadcast your thoughts from one place outward is great. And, yet, doing it from within Facebook is a painful proposition on several fronts - mainly because Facebook itself is slow but also because the app lacks the WYSIWYG functionality of the blogging sites I've used before. Sure, I could use HTML, but why bother, when Blog It says, "Some services may remove tags that are not allowed."? I also haven't figured out how to tag posts from Blog It.

Ryan brings up a great question in his most recent post, "Do you think of Facebook as a destination for things other than interacting with your friends? What makes something a good FB app v. a stand alone destination site? Would you think of going to Facebook as the place where you write your blog posts?"

I've tried to use Facebook as a destination for other things before. When I consulted for SocialMedia Networks, I loaded and played with a ton of Facebook apps. The more apps I added, the slower Facebook got. And, it seems like the more apps I have on my profile, the more regularly the apps crash (which could be perception as opposed to reality). Regardless, performance probably won't always be the case... As with all web services, I'm sure Facebook will only get faster as it evolves towards improved scalability.

For now, believe that any complex web services/ apps should remain stand alone destinations with the ability to somehow link to Facebook and other social sites. I'd like to see a bookmark mechanism within Facebook that allows me to click to my favorite sites and, ideally, add a button to them that I can press (or an automatic setting that I can establish) to let my friends know when I've been active on those sites. Having to go into Facebook to post a note that lets my friends know that I've updated my blog is one more step that I'd rather not go through.

Speaking of steps I'd rather not go through... BlogIt has gotten me to thinking... If SixApart can create a Facebook app that can simultaneously publish to Vox and TypePad, why can't it create an upgrade mechanism that allows me to transfer my Vox blog into TypePad? I've been asking about this for a while, and no one has been able to suggest a way forward besides manual cut and paste, which would, after a year and a half of blogging, take forever. When I started blogging, I didn't care who was reading or what posts generated the most interest. Now, I'm curious. I would love to transfer my account to TypePad and pay for extra features, but I don't want to lose my existing posts or my URL.

Fingers crossed that since SixApart has demonstrated that it can push text up to multiple blog sites at once, they'll soon offer vox users the opportunity to transfer/ upgrade their existing content to new platforms.

Blurb-beta

Web 2.0 is changing the way that people publish, access, and spread news.  Newspaper subscriptions are down, and the number of bloggers is up.  Six Apart and other companies are making it easy for everyday people to self-publish on-line “blogs”.  Gone are the days when journalists and authors were the only ones who could voice their opinion.  Now, anyone can do it.  At the same time that conventional newspapers are struggling to keep up subscriptions and bloggers are growing in numbers, the book market remains stable.  There’s something special about books beyond the words printed on their pages and the stories they tell.  For me, it’s the way that they look together on a shelf, their unique smell, their simplicity and tangibility. Laptops and Sony Readers haven’t replaced coffee table books.  Bookshelves still sell well, and bookstores are still profitable.  The problem with books is that until now, it has been difficult and expensive to self-publish books.  San Francisco-based start-up Blurb is changing that. 

Blurb is capitalizing on the rising interest in on-line self-publishing (e.g. blogs) and the continuing popularity of books.  In their beta release, they’ve made it simple and inexpensive for people and businesses to self-publish hardback and paperback books in both small and large quantities.  Blurb allows people to self-publish all types of quality books up to 440 pages– blog books, photo books, text and picture books, cookbooks, poetry books (coming soon), personal portfolios, novels and dissertations (coming soon), and more.
 

My favorite Blurb concept is the "Blog Book".  Bloggers, who use TypePad and WordPress (and soon Blogger, LiveJournal, and Moveable Type), will find Blurb’s “Blog Slurper” technology particularly useful.   Blog Slurper imports and maps blog text, comments, images, and links into a draft book, which can then be customized. I sent a note to Blurb yesterday asking whether VOX will be a supported platform for their Blog Slurper, and I’ll update this entry if/when I hear back.

Blurb-blog-book

I also like how easy it is for everyday people (non-bloggers) to easily create books with full-color pictures using Blurb’s BookSmart application (compatible on both Mac an PC).  Blurb offers templates for a variety of different types of “ready made” books – baby, dog, cat, and more.  Imagine what the ease of self-publishing means for families, friends, students, professors, small businesses, and more!

The best part about Blurb from a Social Media perspective is that it offers users the ability to promote and sell their books to others via Blurb’s on-line bookstore. Blurb is making it possible for aspiring authors to leverage the Internet to start their own publishing empires – just like musicians Clap Your Hands Say Yeah  and others did on MySpace.   I wish there was more of a community aspect to Blurb, where users could join “groups” like Vox and Gather and talk about their favorite “blurb” books written on specific topics.  Who knows, since the current version of Blurb is a beta, that functioanlity may come in time. In the meantime, I like how easy Blurb makes it for everyday people almost anywhere in the world to self-publish books, inexpensively.  Pricing starts as follows, with 10% discounts for 25-199 books, 15% discount for 200-400 books and larger discounts for even bigger quantities:

Blurb-pricing

As many fellow VOXers know, there is no way to tell how many hits your blog gets (or how many people read or talk about it)... Six Apart doesn't provide a counting utility to bloggers. (If they did, the bloggers generating the most traffic on VOX might be tempted to leave to start revenue generating blogs of their own.)  I often wonder how many people actually read my blog, besides those that add me to their VOX "neighborhood" or leave comments.  As far as I'm aware, no one has developed a way to accurately automate the combined measurement of blog traffic, quality of content, links from other blogs, etc.  Technorati does a good job of identifying who is talking about which bloggers, so for now, it is what I use to gage how I'm doing in the blogging universe.  But, Technorati only tells part of the story. 

This morning, I took a look at the rating of my blog on Technorati.  When I first checked the rating score several months ago, my blog was ranked somewhere around 900,000th. The next time I checked it (weeks later), it jumped to around 300,000th.  This morning when I looked (gasp) it jumped to the 125,511th top blog.  That's over 700% improvement!  Unfortunately, that's not at all impressive when you explore what it means.  Technorati's rating score indicates that socialmedia.vox.com was linked to by 52 other bloggers 30 times.  The more bloggers that link to this blog, the higher my rating score goes. 

When I dug a little deeper into who was talking about my blog, I realized that the links to my blog included:

• Legit mentions from other blogs (though there was a duplicate mention, which counted twice - both the original post and then the archived, permanent post).
  
• People who added me to their VOX neighborhood (My hyperlinked image appears on their vox home page.)
  
• Multiple links from fraudulent blog sites... By this, I mean links from websites formatted to look like blogs but lacking in their own content.  Take, for example, "MySpaceRIP.com".  (I won't hyperlink the URL because the undesired result would be an improvement in Myspacerip.com's Technorati rating.) This appears to be a holding page for a domain name for sale + advertising space for sale.

If any of you out there know of a better tool than Technorati for measuring the impact and popularity of blogs, please post a comment or, if you're a non-voxer (and can't leave a comment), email me, and I'll post your comment manually.

Today, I got a very nice email from the Marketing Manager at Indeed.com.  She wanted to provide clarification on a few of the comments that appear regarding my December 30th posting about job trends in social media.  However, as a non Voxer, she couldn't provide comments. She says she tried to enroll for Vox, but she ran into problems registering, so she emailed me instead. 

I'd love to see a couple of new features added to Vox - including the ability for non-Voxers to comment on posts without registering for the service.  Just because you want to respond to a blog doesn't mean you want one yourself.  One of the greatest features of Vox is the ability for users to make their posts public or private. Those of us who choose to make our posts public, want to see members of the public comment!  I'd love to see public commenting incorporated as a feature.

Don't get me wrong. I love Vox...

• It is free and easy
  
• It is organized well
• It is easy to find people with similar interests
• There is a sense of community
• I got a great address for my blog
• etc.  

For now, I'll stick with Vox, but if any of you great folks at Six Apart are reading, I'd love to see the following incorporated into Vox:

• The ability for non-Vox users (members of the public) to post feedback on Vox blogs
  
• A counter tool.  Right now, it is impossible to know who is reading your blog without getting comments/email.  And, since members of the public can't comment, that makes the number of comments limited.
  
• The ability to incorporate HTML code into blogs (for things like buttons, etc.)
  
• The ability to hyperlink photos/logos in blogs
  
• Tracking back on comments - allow bloggers to respond to comments that appear on their blog without having to post a new comment of their own
  

As always, if you're a non-Voxer and have feedback, please email me at socialmediablog@gmail.com.

When I'm curious about what particular companies are up to/ the strategic direction they're heading, I often look on their careers web pages and scroll through the open vacancies.  It is hard for companies (especially those in high-tech) to find what they're looking for in candidates without getting specific about the specific skills they're after. 

I recently found another great resource for getting a wider sense of where the market is going - Indeed.com's job trends tool.  Indeed crawls the web looking for millions of jobs and provides a one-stop-shop for job searchers.  In 2005, the site posted over 35 million jobs culled from thousands of websites. They've recently opened up their archive of jobs allowing people to search this archive and plot job trends over time.

Today, I did a search for the most popular social media keywords. The results (below) are really interesting.  They indicate that companies everywhere are beginning to realize the value of social media and the importance of hiring staff with social media skills:

Web-2.0

Socialmedia

Social-networking

Blog

Podcast

I was reading my daily dose of social media press releases when I came across a Social Media company based in Los Altos, CA called - Five Across (founded by ex Apple and Adobe developers).  Five Across provides social media and community building software.  Today, Onstream Media announced a series of "teaming and services agreements" with Five Across. "Ho hum" you say?  This is actually pretty interesting. 

What the agreement means is that combined service of both companies will allow Five Across' customers (companies, sports teams, etc.) to add multimedia experiences to their on-line social networking facilities.  Developing their own social networking platform is just one way that organizations etc. are keeping in touch with their customers and fans.  Adding the ability to upload user-generated content to their websites will positively increase the way that Five Across' clients reach out/ market to their constituents and the way that those constituents interact with each other.

If anyone else out there besides me was wondering, "Could Five Across somehow be related to Six Apart?"  Six Apart's name was derived from the number of days between the co-founders' birthdays, so I'm guessing the answer is no.