6 posts tagged “wordpress”

This is my last post on Vox.  Today, I’m excited to launch SocializeMobilize.com.  On it, I’ll be publishing articles about social media, web 2.0, mobile, and mobile and web convergence.  You’ll also find all of the legacy content from this Vox blog, which I started in 2006, in easily searchable format. 

Why did I start a new blog when I already had one?  Read about why I started SocializeMobilize and check out the features of my new Wordpress blog here.

For those of you that disconnected during Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year, etc…  Welcome back. Here’s a summary of the most interesting social media and mobile news I read in the last few weeks:

Apple:

• 1/6/09: At Macworld….
• Apple announced tiered pricing for songs on iTunes that allows record labels to charge higher amounts for more popular songs… Their new pricing scheme, which will launch in April will offer songs at 69 cents, 99 cents, or $1.29.  When I heard this, I couldn’t help but think of the old Taco Bell commercials of the early 1990s… “.59, .79, .99”  I know record labels need to make a buck, but I’m more inclined to pay $1.29 for a taco than I am for a new song on iTunes.
• On a happier note, songs will finally be DRM free and 256 Kbps AAC by the end of Q1. Today, iTunes store has 8 million DRM-free songs. By the end of March, they’ll have 10 million.  
• And, if you’ve got an iPhone 3G, you’ll be able to download songs directly to your iPhone over the 3G network, and the songs will sync between your computer and your phone….Ahhh… Finally!
• In FY 2008, Apple sold 9.7 million Macs, and Mac sales increased at two times the rate of the overall PC market.
• The new version of iPhoto within iLife will have facial recognition software, which allows you to pick photos of a specific friend from your album without a text tag.  And, iPhoto will be Facebook and Flickr compatible!
• 1/5/09: Steve Jobs told the world that his recent rapid weight loss is due to a hormone imbalance and not a return of pancreatic cancer.

Facebook:

• 1/2/09: Facebook sued Brazilian start-up Power.com for trademark and copyright infringement, violation of the computer fraud and abuse act, and unlawful competition.  Facebook’s complain states that Power.com “is offering a product that solicits, stores and uses Facebook login information to access information stored on Facebook computers without authorization and to display Facebook copyrighted material without permission.” You can read the NY Times article that describes the suit here.
  

Microsoft:

• 12/31/08: Proving that the “blue screen of death” is alive and well, Microsoft’s 2006 30GB model Zune experienced a massive failure on the last day of 2008, and users were not amused. The bug appears to have been fixed, though users are still unhappy about it.
  

Twitter:

• 1/5/09: Twitter was hacked over the weekend, and 33 high profile accounts were hijacked. There was also a separate phishing scam through the direct message capability.  You can learn more about it on Twitter’s blog.
  

UIQ:

• 1/5/09: Symbian partner, UIQ filed for bankruptcy.
  

Verizon:

• 1/5/09: BusinessWeek reports that “The $5.9 billion acquisition of cellular carrier Alltel Corp. by Verizon Wireless will close on Jan. 9”.  This will mean that Verizon trumps AT&T as the largest US mobile operator with ~ 78 million subscribers.
  

Xobni:
1/5/09: Xobni (inbox spelled backwards), the company behind a very cool outlook plug-in that turns your email inbox into a social network, announced $7M in Series B funding from new investor Cisco Systems and Xobni’s existing investors.

Layoffs:
1/6/09: Clearspring, which plays in the widget distribution space laid off 20% of its workforce in early December, and their President/COO, Jay Rappaport is leaving.

Misc. Social Media & Mobile News:

• I just learned about Twtpoll, which lets you poll your Twitter followers.  Looks like a great idea if you’re a brand that wants feedback from its community of users.
• 1/1/09: California passed a no-text messaging while driving rule, which became legal on Jan 1. I can’t help but wonder how it can be illegal to text while driving, and yet, it’s perfectly okay to fiddle with your radio, AC, or GPS.  Not that I’m advocating texting while driving. It just seems like an inane law, given the many distracting things you could be doing while driving.
• 1/3/09 The 1.0 version of a Firefox add-on called Power Twitter launched, allowing “search, search scoped to a specific user, status history peeking on mouseover, Facebook status updates, inline YouTube, Flickr, and TwitPic, url expansion, url translation to page titles, and open web update (news feed) mapping.”  It sounds interesting to me and gets good reviews, but I’ve heard a few complaints from people I follow on Twitter, so I’m waiting until the next release.
  
• 12/31: TechCrunch did a great piece on the Top Social Media Sites of 2008, which summarizes data from comScore.  Top Social Media Sites (ranked by unique worldwide visitors November, 2008; comScore):

1. Blogger (222 million)
2. Facebook (200 million)
3. MySpace (126 million)
4. Wordpress (114 million)
5. Windows Live Spaces (87 million)
6. Yahoo Geocities (69 million)
7. Flickr (64 million)
8. hi5 (58 million)
9. Orkut (46 million)
10. Six Apart (46 million)
11. Baidu Space (40 million)
12. Friendster (31 million)
13. 56.com (29 million)
14. Webs.com (24 million)
15. Bebo (24 million)
16. Scribd (23 million)
17. Lycos Tripod (23 million)
18. Tagged (22 million)
19. imeem (22 million)
20. Netlog (21 million)

• 12/31/08: TechCrunch has an interesting article on the rise of Y-Combinator, start-up Scribd.  Scribd allows users to post and share documents online.  TechCrunch reports: “According to the comScore numbers, it has more unique visitors worldwide than imeem and almost as many as Bebo, with 23.5 million visitors in November, 2008. (In the U.S., it had about 4 million visitors).”  And, Scribd grew “218 percent from November, 2007.   Pretty incredible stats for a company that initially only raised $300,000! “
• 12/31/08 The UK loves watching the TV show “Big Brother,” and rumor has it, they may be forced to live a frightening real-life version of it in the future.  The Guardian reports,

“The private sector will be asked to manage and run a communications database that will keep track of everyone's calls, emails, texts and internet use under a key option contained in a consultation paper to be published next month by Jacqui Smith, the home secretary.
A cabinet decision to put the management of the multibillion pound database of all UK communications traffic into private hands would be accompanied by tougher legal safeguards to guarantee against leaks and accidental data losses.”

Even though the report hasn’t yet been published, critics of its rumored contents are speaking out against it including Sir Ken Macdonald, the former director of public prosecutions.

• 12/31/08: Obama’s Change.gov site is getting great use.  According to TechCrunch, “more than 74,031 people have submitted more than 53,369 questions (and counting) for his administration and voted 3,122,015 times to prioritize the questions in a Digg-like fashion.”  You can see the top list of questions here.
  
• 12/30/08: Hitwise reported 3 interesting holiday social media trends in the UK:

1. “Facebook accounts for 1 in 22 UK Internet visits on Christmas Day”
2. "Video site YouTube received more UK Internet traffic than Microsoft Windows Live Mail (Hotmail) for the first time during Christmas week 2008.”
3.  “social networks accounted for 1 in every 10 UK Internet visits during Christmas week.”

• 12/26/08: Amazon.com announced it’s best Christmas season ever with “6.3 million items ordered worldwide on the peak day, Dec. 15, which is a record-breaking 72.9 items per second.”
  
• 12/15/08: BusinessWeek reports that Palm will launch its new Nova OS at CES.  After several layoffs, many ups and downs over the years, I find it amusing that they decided to name it Nova (“no va” means “no go” in Spanish.)  Chevrolet learned how disastrous that name could be when it launched the Chevy Nova years ago.  I’m not sure if this was lost on Palm’s marketing team, if it was an inside joke, or if they knew about it and decided to buck tradition and go with the name anyway. I love Palm, and I’m keeping fingers crossed they find a way to make this work. I think it’ll be tough in to re-gain developers’ trust after several false starts in recent years.
  

In addition to consulting for SocialMedia Networks and Covered Communications, I now consult for ShoZu Inc., the leading provider of mobile social media services that connect mobile consumers with their online social networks, personal blogs, photo storage sites and other Web 2.0 properties from their mobile phone. 

ShoZu allows users to engage with social media from their mobile phone, making it easy for them to keep in constant contact with preferred social networking services from the handset.  ShoZu is a light weight, mobile application that allows users to publish photos, videos, comments, status updates, blog postings and more to their favorite online sites …in one click or less. With it, you can:

• Publish to multiple sites with one click (pictures, video, metadata, geotags, etc.)
  
• Subscribe to content feeds
  
• Blog
• Make new friends
• Discover new communities
• See what friends are up to
  

ShoZu already works with most of SixApart blogging solutions, including Vox, TypePad, and Live Journal.  (My colleague "Jambo" at ShoZu is a fellow Voxer, and you can check out ShoZu's blog here). 

ShoZu also works with Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, WordPress, BBC, Kodak Easy Share, and a ton of others (click here for the full list).  And, the app is pre-loaded onto a ton of mobile phones.  ShoZu just released a new version ShoZu 3.3, which is available for download from your mobile browser or by clicking here to go to the self-provisioning website.

I'm working ShoZu to bring more social networking properties on board.  If you're a social networking site that would like to integrate with ShoZu, please email me.

Today at 3GSM in Barcelona, ShoZu Inc., an emerging leader in the mobile social networking space, announced the addition of some great new LBS feature enhancements for GPS-enabled mobile phonw.  According to the press release:

Share-It one-click image uploading service now offers location tagging for photos and video clips sent from GPS-enabled phones to Flickr and YouTube as well as Buzznet, Dada.net, moblogUK, Pikeo and Textamerica. ShoZu is the only upload service that provides automatic geotagging for cameraphone uploads to more than one Internet destination. It also supports more GPS handsets than any other provider...The new location tag capability applies to all ShoZu web destinations that support tagging. ShoZu also enables users to upload images to sites without tagging including photo sharing communities Kodak EasyShare Gallery, MSN�s Windows Live Spaces and Webshots; personal blogging sites Blogger, TypePad and WordPress; citizen-contributed photojournalism sites CNN, the BBC and Scoopt; and any FTP or email address. ShoZu continues to add new sites on a regular basis.  

While I find ShoZu's announcement exciting, it will be a while before most of us can take advantage of this capability.  Most mobile phones in the US (including my Treo 750) are not GPS enabled.  I hope that this will change in the coming years (GPS enabled phones are certainly becoming more popular).  However, in the meantime, I'll have to do things the old fashioned way - manually (which is painful).  The good news is that once GPS becomes ubiquitous, automatic geotagging and LBS services will be the norm.  ShoZu's announcement forshadows some of the exciting things mobile social media enthusiasts have to look forward to.

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.

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:

With all my talk in earlier blogs about the benefit of companies employing a social media strategy, I thought that it would be a good idea to review a product that enables companies to build their own social media empire.  Yesterday, I had the opportunity to see a demo of a great new product from Social Platform LLC: Social Platform Enterprise 1.2.  Just released last week, this product does what it says on the tin- it is a highly extensible, modular platform which allows enterprises to build a customized social media infrastructure – complete with integration into key social media sites like Blogger, Live Journal, WordPress, and soon, YouTube and Flickr.  The platform effectively allows companies to develop a social networking hub for their constituents.

Social Platform Enterprise is highly customizable and integrates well into existing systems.  Social Platform and their clients work together to tailor a solution to meet business goals – i.e.: identifying features, branding, integration points, etc.  With the current release of Social Platform Enterprise 1.2, the average implementation usually takes between 30-60 days and costs about $15,000 for a basic site. Clients typically pay about $1,500 month for hosting and services.  The resulting product is a unique, scalable, hosted, managed social media solution, which allows an organization’s constituency to interact with each other and the organization in a more meaningful way.  The code and presentation layer are separate, so clients can make edits, using almost any HTML editor.  In the future, President and CEO Eric Schlissel tells me that they’re planning to release an “Express” version of the platform in Q1 2007, which will be an out-of-the box solution for customers who are looking for a less customized solution that is easy to set up without consulting expertise.

One of the biggest selling features of this platform is the openness and its ability to integrate well with existing systems and popular social media sites.  The plug-in architecture and open API, combined with the fact that modular software updates are included in the cost of the product, mean that that the platform is scalable and can grow with an organization’s needs.  Plus, Google Analytics is incorporated so that clients can measure what levels of traction their social media efforts are producing.
 

There are several other key advantages of Social Platform Enterprise 1.2 including:

• The ability to integrate community, ratings, and rewards: create member profiles and member groups and conduct polls of specific groups of constituents. Offer rewards to members for their participation in forums or their evangelism on other websites.  The ability to allow for member rankings.
• The ability for members to communicate and collaborate. Clients have the option of integrating content management systems, wikis, member-to-member messaging, and target communication channels (which allow client to speak to members with a specific profile. E.g. a certain number of reward points)
• Security features are built in, and clients can decide which level of security they want for their social media sites. There are automatic security updates, a secure admin area, and the possibility for secure sign on for users.  Plus, because the resulting sites are hosted and managed by Social Platform, there is a private hardware and a private network

In the next rev of the product, Schlissel expects several improvements including:

• Payment Options for All System Features
• Ecommerce, Auctions, Classifieds
• Expansion of Web Services
• Integration of Third-Party Software
• VOIP, IM
• Widgets

To see the results of Social Platform in action, check out one of their first clients: Omotion.  If you’ve got any comments on Social Platform, please post a comment on this blog. The demo looks good, and I’m eager to hear feedback from others who have interacted with Social Platform generated social media sites.

*Note: I don't get paid to endorse products. I just review new social media products as I see them, when the opportunity arises.