November 13th, 2008

MySpace comes to Blackberry

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 8:57 am

Categories: Mobile, MySpace, Social Networks

Tags: RIM BlackBerry, MySpace, Smart Phones, Handhelds, Channel Management, Consumer Electronics, Personal Technology, Hardware, Marketing, Steve O'Hear

It was only a few days ago that I noted how Facebook and social networking as a whole is fueling the mobile web. And news comes today that RIM have released a native MySpace client for its Blackberry line of smartphones. A move that also reinforces the company’s push to take the Blackberry brand beyond its enterprise roots to also target consumers.

Key features of the new MySpace client include the ability to:

• Send and receive MySpace mail
• Update your Status and Mood
• View and send Bulletins
• Add comments
• Post your photos

The new MySpace for Blackberry app is available at www.blackberry.com/myspace or m.myspace.com via the Blackberry’s web browser. Notably, RIM list ‘social networking‘ as a ‘device feature’ alongside email, organise, browser, media playback etc., with MySpace listed together with applications for Flickr and of course Facebook.

November 13th, 2008

Microsoft gives Windows Live a social networking makeover

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 8:15 am

Categories: Facebook, LinkedIn, Microsoft, Mobile, Social Networks, Twitter, Yahoo

Tags: Network, Microsoft Windows Live, Microsoft Corp., Microsoft Windows, Social Networking, Operating Systems, Software, Online Communications, Marketing, Advertising & Promotion

Microsoft have announced a major overhaul of its Windows Live service that, similar to Yahoo’s ‘Open Strategy’, rewires the company’s suite of consumer web-based products — e-mail, instant messaging, photo sharing, blogging and more — to turn them into one interconnected social network. To do that, Microsoft is leveraging a user’s existing Windows Live Messenger contacts to create an instant friends list across all Windows Live properties.

And in a feature that borrows directly from Facebook, which Microsoft invested in last year, the new Windows Live includes a a “what’s new” feed that aggregate a user’s activities on Windows Live and third-party site across the web. Initial partners include Flickr, LinkedIn, Pandora, Photobucket, Twitter, WordPress and Yelp — though no sign of Facebook yet, despite that hefty investment.

See also: Yahoo wants to be your social web ‘control panel’ too

The strategy Microsoft is adopting is simple and a rather familiar one. The company wants to become a user’s one stop shop for all things social on the web. And conceding that it isn’t the market leader, and will probably never be, when it comes to the majority of social web products — aside from IM where Windows Live Messenger is number one — the new Windows Live is also attacking the social networking aggregator space, putting it in direct competition with singly-focused products such as FriendFeed or the social networking aggregator features of monolithic networks e.g. Facebook Connect. Read the rest of this entry »

November 11th, 2008

Is Facebook the mobile web's killer app?

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 8:29 am

Categories: Facebook, Mobile

Tags: Web, Facebook, Mobile, Killer Application, Advertising & Promotion, Marketing, Steve O'Hear, INQ, Smart Phones, Consumer Electronics

Active users of Facebook’s various mobile products has grown from 5 million to 15 million since the beginning of the year, says the company. In particular, the ability for users to not only update their ’status’ while on the go but also to comment on their friends’ updates, has spurred mobile use of the site.

“When we recently added the ability to comment on your friends’ status updates to the Facebook mobile site, we didn’t expect that we would receive nearly a million status comments in the first 24 hours”, writes Facebook’s Wayne Chang on the company’s official blog.

While that particular tidbit is interesting, it should be no surprise that mobile versions of Facebook are proving popular. Not when you take into account that Facebook offers two browser-based mobile versions of the site — one for low-end feature phones and another for ’smart phones’ — as well as native Facebook clients for Blackberry, Palm and iPhone. Notably, the Palm version runs on the smartphone maker’s entry level consumer offering, the popular and affordable Centro. While television ad campaigns that aim to push the Blackberry beyond its business roots and into the hands of consumers pitch Facebook access as a major selling point. Ditto some of the most recent ad campaigns for Apple’s iPhone. Read the rest of this entry »

November 5th, 2008

Careful what you say on Twitter - delete option removed? (updated)

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 6:38 am

Categories: Net culture, Twitter

Tags: Twitter, Channel Management, Marketing, Steve O'Hear

Updated - see below.

It appears that the micro-blogging service Twitter has removed the option to delete a ‘tweet’ once it’s been published, making the service a haven for digital litter — the trail of information about you or things you’ve said that perhaps you shouldn’t leave lying around the web.

Publish a status update on Twitter slamming your boss - at 2am in the morning after a night out at the pub - only to regret doing so seconds after hitting the ‘update’ button, then you could be out of luck. As of yesterday (?) the trash can icon that used to reside next to Twitter updates has been removed.

A smart reader over at ReadWriteWeb suggests the likely explanation: Twitter has removed the delete function since it never really worked in the first place yet gave the impression that it did. That’s because of the hundreds of services, including third-party clients and search engines, that exist built on top of Twitter’s API. These services often cache Twitter’s content or simply store it locally - such as the numerous Twitter apps for the iPhone - meaning deleting a ‘tweet’ from the main Twitter site doesn’t necessarily ripple through to other Twitter services. If this is the true reason for deleting the delete option it would suggest that it could be gone forever. That’s unless Twitter is able to design into its API a way to force all Twitter services to respect a deletion within a reasonable time period, although I doubt this will be possible.

Update: According to the official Twitter status blog, the delete feature will be back up later today. So it was probably removed temporarily to ease the load on Twitter’s servers during election night. It doesn’t, however, resolve the issue of third-party caching of Twitter posts, in which Twitter should at least warn users that a delete doesn’t automatically take place across all Twitter clients or other services built on top of Twitter’s API. (Hat-tip: Dave Zatz)

November 3rd, 2008

MTV and MySpace partner to monetize pirated content

Posted by Steve O'Hear @ 7:20 am

Categories: MySpace, Video Sharing, YouTube

Tags: MySpace, MTV, Steve O'Hear, YouTube Inc., Viacom Inc., Games, Social Networking, Personal Technology, Online Communications, Marketing

Similar to YouTube’s most recent proposition to copyright holders, News Corp-owned MySpace is offering to identify pirated content uploaded by users, insert advertising and share the subsequent fruits with the content’s owner.

The first benefactor of the new offering, which leverages ‘finger printing’ technology from Auditude, is Viacom-owned MTV Networks, a noteworthy partner since Viacom is currently involved in a one billion dollar copyright lawsuit with MySpace Video rival, YouTube.

Under the arrangement, MTV Networks will be able to “pair advertising with clips from The Daily Show With Jon Stewart, Punk’d and other shows that MySpace users upload to the social network site, whether they have permission or not”, reports the LA Times.  YouTube launched a similar system last year that identifies clips so it can give copyright holders a choice between removing the content or letting YouTube place ads against it in exchange for a share of revenue. Read the rest of this entry »