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Today at the #140tc Twitter Conference in Seattle, Washington (which I keynoted this morning), HootSuite CEO Ryan Holmes announced that its popular Twitter application will be integrating with both MySpace and Foursquare, starting this week at the South by Southwest Interactive conference.HootSuite is one of the more popular Twitter applications, one specifically geared towards power users and businesses. It has been on a roll recently, launching integration with Wordpress and rolling out new updates to its iPhone and Android Apps.While Mr. Holmes didn’t divulge many details about the MySpace and Foursquare integrations, we can make some educated guesses as to how they will work. MySpace integration will most likely look the same as it does in Tweedeck: You’ll gain access to your MySpace feed and gain the ability to update your MySpace status.The Foursquare integration is far more interesting. It could possibly be part of the iPhone and Android apps, as Foursquare is a mobile application and not really meant for the desktop (though we won’t discount the possibility of some web integration).We don’t know the full details yet, but being able to check in and shout via Hootsuite could be a killer use for the Hootsuite app, making it potentially even more useful than Tweetie, TweetDeck or Seesmic for mobile.We’ll be sure to ask Mr. Holmes more about these integrations soon and get you more details.Thanks to Shauna Causey for her help on this post.Reviews: Android, Foursquare, HootSuite, MySpace, Seesmic, TweetDeck, Twitter, iPhone, tweetieTags: foursquare, hootsuite, myspace, twitter
Publ.Date : Tue, 09 Mar 2010 01:28:22 +0000
The Social Analyst is a weekly column by Mashable Co-Editor Ben Parr, where he digs into social media trends and how they are affecting companies in the space.Facebook; Twitter; LinkedIn; YouTube; Wordpress: these companies, built from the ground-up, are mainstays in social media. None of them were created by a large tech company, and all but one remains independent.It’s an interesting phenomenon, when you think about it. Large tech companies have had limited to no success creating their own social media home runs. In an era where communication is increasingly taking place on these channels, the inability of these digital giants to build social networks is rather striking.Two titans in particular are making social media headlines for different reasons: Yahoo has decided not to create it own social network, but is instead striking partnership deals with Facebook and Twitter. Google on the other hand, not only bought YouTube, but it is attempting to carve out its own piece of the social media pie with Google Buzz.Partnership vs. in-house development; content vs. technology; Yahoo vs. Google: which company has the right social media strategy? What are the goals of both companies in the social realm? Do either have a chance against new and nimble startups like Facebook and Twitter?Let’s take a look, shall we?The Yahoo Strategy: Partner in Order to Drive TrafficIn 2006, Yahoo made a $1+ billion bid for Facebook. As we all know, Yahoo failed to close that deal and the story ever since has been the rise of Facebook and the slow decline of Yahoo, who was nearly acquired by Microsoft for over $40 billion in 2008.Now with new leadership (led by CEO Carol Bartz), Yahoo is trying to make a turnaround and bring back some of the authority it once commanded. The Internet portal is turning to social media as a cornerstone of its growth strategy, but it isn’t focused on acquiring a Twitter or building its own social network, but on creating partnerships that integrate every facet of Yahoo into social networks, primarily Facebook and Twitter.In September 2009, Yahoo announced that it would integrate Facebook Connect in its most popular web properties. The goal was to truly make Yahoo your portal to the web by not only delivering news, email, and finances, but also your social graph and the status updates of your friends. On the flip side, Yahoo would also benefit from the traffic bump that comes with sharing articles and content on Facebook’s news feed.Yahoo has continued to push this partnership strategy in recent months. Two weeks ago, Yahoo partnered with Twitter to give users access to their Twitter feed from within Yahoo, update their status, and integrate Twitter content into the company’s search and media properties. A few days ago, Yahoo Mail hooked up with Facebook, the first integration between Facebook Connect and Yahoo.Yahoo seems content in partnering with the major social services, rather than compete with them. Social media efforts like Yahoo Buzz, the tech giant’s answer to Digg, which hasn’t made a dent in the social voting powerhouse, have likely left a bitter taste in the mouths of its executives. Yahoo is now focused on using social media to generate traffic, eyeballs, and engagement times.The Google Strategy: DominateGoogle’s strategy goes in a completely different direction to Yahoo’s approach; its strategy is also all over the map.Like Yahoo, Google doesn’t have a good record in social media. Google Friend Connect isn’t even close to Facebook Connect in terms of adoption, Orkut never made inroads in the U.S., Blogger has nowhere near the traction of WordPress, and other acquisitions such as Jaiku and Dodgeball haven’t panned out.You’d have a very good argument if you said that Google’s only social media hit has been YouTube, and that “only” cost the company $1.65 billion. Google has a lot more social properties than many people realize, but it’s a hodgepodge of acquisitions (Blogger, YouTube, Picasa) and internally-created services (Orkut, Google Knol, Friend Connect). The company’s batting average, though, has been pretty poor, especially by Google’s standards.That was before Google Buzz, though. With the launch of its most advanced social product yet, Google’s strategy has finally begun to emerge, and it is a good one. If Google can stir up adoption for Buzz (which it has via Gmail), keep that engagement (this remains to be seen), and launch a standalone version of its social media tool, it can carve out a piece of the (very large) social media pie. Linking or integrating it to YouTube, Picasa, Orkut, Friend Connect, and its other social tools could provide a boost to those services as well.There’s no reason to believe Google will succeed with Buzz, given Google’s social media track record. However, Buzz is the most complete product Google has put out yet and has some strong engagement numbers. It’s riskier than Yahoo’s strategy, but the payoff could be be titanic.Google and Yahoo Are Very Different CompaniesYahoo’s strategy is focused around integrations with already-popular social services, while Google is focused around building and acquiring its own social media powerhouses. While Yahoo does acquire social media companies (e.g. Flickr) and Google has some strong partnerships (e.g. Twitter in Google Real-time search), that’s not the focus of their respective social strategies.The reason their approaches to social media are so different has little to do with their leadership teams or the quality of their decision-making. No, it boils down to one simple truth: Google and Yahoo are very different companies.I argue that Yahoo is, for the most part, a content company, while Google is focused on technology. There was a point where Yahoo was known for its tech innovations, but that mantle has long since passed to Google, Facebook, Twitter, and others.I explored this phenomenon in my first Social Analyst column, Content vs. Technology: What MySpace and AOL Have in Common. MySpace and AOL were also tech giants, but at some point lost their technology edge (MySpace lost to Facebook, AOL lost to DSL and Cable Internet) and thus began to focus on ramping up content creation and driving traffic to their web properties. Yahoo falls into the same camp.Because of this key difference between Yahoo and Google, it’s no surprise that they are implementing different approaches. Google’s is focused on building technology that will drive adoption, revenue, and information through its doors. Yahoo’s focus is on bringing more eyeballs to this content and keeping them on Yahoo for longer periods of time.Who Has the Right Social Media Strategy?Now for the big question: is Google or Yahoo doing better at social media? Which one has the right social media strategy?If you’ve read this column carefully, you can probably guess that I’m not going to outright declare that one company is “right” or that one is “wrong.” What I want you to take away from this week’s column is simple: your long-term plan and company composition should determine your social strategy.Yahoo is simply better at content than Google. Yahoo Finance is, in my opinion, simply a better product than Google’s version. Its array of hosted news content is bigger, and it owns properties such as OMG, which is doing well as a celebrity news hub.Google doesn’t write its own news or acquire a newspaper for a simple reason: it’s just not their focus, and they wouldn’t be very good at it. Would it make any sense for Google to focus on using social media to drive traffic to its content? The answer is no.On the flip side, Google’s technology prowess trumps Yahoo by large margins. Google can build better technical products (e.g., Search, Gmail, Buzz, Android, Chrome) in a shorter amount of time than Yahoo can, and it can iterate faster than almost any large-scale public Internet company (its rapid privacy changes to Buzz is one good example).These things are no longer Yahoo’s strength. So does it make sense for Yahoo to try to build a social network to rival Buzz, Facebook, or Twitter? Could it really keep up with any of them over the long haul? I severely doubt it.So here is my conclusion: neither company’s direction is “wrong” because each one requires a different social strategy to succeed. Based on their strengths, Yahoo and Google are implementing the right strategies.Now it’s just about executing them.Reviews: Android, Chrome, Digg, Facebook, Flickr, Gmail, Google, Google Buzz, LinkedIn, MySpace, Orkut, Picasa, Twitter, WordPress, YouTube, blogger, google friend connectTags: facebook, Google, google buzz, social media, The Social Analyst, trending, twitter, Yahoo
Publ.Date : Mon, 08 Mar 2010 23:17:21 +0000
John Gruber of Daring Fireball has an interesting story about the absence of certain iPhone apps — Stocks, Calculator, Clock, Weather, Voice Memos — on the iPad.It seems that these apps, when scaled up to iPad’s bigger screen, simply didn’t look good enough to Steve Jobs, so he decided to scrap them. Gruber writes:“Ends up that just blowing up iPhone apps to fill the iPad screen looks and feels weird, even if you use higher-resolution graphics so that nothing looks pixelated. So they were scrapped by you-know-who. Perhaps they’ll appear on the iPad in some re-imagined form this summer with OS 4.0, but when the iPad ships next month, there won’t be versions of these apps.”If true, it would be a pity, because these are quite basic, no-brainer apps that everyone uses, especially Clock, Calculator and the Weather. On the other hand, if these simple apps don’t look good enough scaled up, how will all those thousands of third-party apps look? As far as apps go, the iPad experience (at least in the beginning) might turn out to be something that Apple otherwise struggles to avoid: good enough, but far from perfect.Tags: apple, ipad, iphone
Publ.Date : Tue, 09 Mar 2010 09:17:40 +0000
The blogosphere was literally split down the middle in terms of online buzz around the 82nd Academy Awards Best Picture nominees. Both Avatar and The Hurt Locker each maxed out with three quarters of a percent (.75%) of blog post buzz across the web.The data in question comes from The Nielsen Company, who charted all blog posts since the start of February and found that The Hurt Locker’s Best Picture and Director win mirrored the movie’s rise in terms of blog mentions over time. Social media as a whole, however, told a much different story earlier in the week, as Avatar had a massive lead in terms of mentions over the film that eventually beat it out.Back on the blog front, Sandra Bullock’s Oscar-winning performance in The Blind Side helped the film slide nicely into a comfortable third-place spot.We also used Trendrr’s real-time Twitter dashboard to watch Twitter reactions during the Oscars. What’s especially interesting is that while the average tweets per minute for the awards show steadily hovered between 1,500 and 2,000 during the broadcast, there was a drastic jump — with tweets peaking at 5,000 per minute — just before 9:00 p.m, PST when Hurt Locker won the Best Picture award.Clearly the Twittersphere had an instant reaction to the news, whether shock or amusement, as soon as it was revealed that the largest grossing movie of all time would not take home the most important trophy of the year.[img credit: Oscar.com]Reviews: TwitterTags: Film, social media, stats, tv
Publ.Date : Mon, 08 Mar 2010 22:01:40 +0000
Ask any Kindle owner about browsing the web on the device, and you’ll get the same answer: Well, you can do it, but… And then you’ll hear how abysmal the browsing experience really is. Having tried it myself, it made me want to whip out my iPhone and its Safari at each turn.Now, the folks at Webmonkey have noticed that Amazon has posted a job listing (the listing has been online for quite a while, but has only now been noticed), looking for a software development engineer to “design and implement new features” on an “innovative Embedded Web Browser.”While it’s the current Kindle’s monochrome, slowish screen will never provide a beautiful browsing experience, improvements could definitely be made to the current browser. With the iPad coming to the U.S. market in less than a month, Amazon needs to do damage control in all areas in which Apple’s device is superior to the Kindle, and building a better web browser is probably a priority.The real question, however, is this: Will users prefer the readability of the e-ink screen or the more beautiful (but perhaps less enjoyable when you’re reading a book), backlit color LCD? Or will a new technology emerge, connecting the best of both worlds? For example, Kindle doesn’t have a touchscreen, but Sony’s e-readers have shown that it is possible to have one on an e-ink display, at the expense of some glare. We’ll have some (but not all) answers when the iPad finally hits the market.In the meantime, tell us what you think. Will Kindle (with its current e-ink screen) ever provide a good or even great browsing experience? Please write your opinion in the comments.Tags: amazon, browser, Kindle, trending
Publ.Date : Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:00:02 +0000
Spam and phishing have been ongoing problems at Twitter for some time, and tonight the company announced that it is stepping up its efforts to stop them with some new features, described as being able to “detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links.”In a blog post, Twitter writes that the protection works by “routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service … even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.”How exactly they do that, we’re not sure, but Twitter notes that you’ll start seeing short links using its own “twt.tl” URL shortener in direct messages and email notifications. As users who have been victimized by phishing scams (and those annoyed by the constant barrage of dodgy DMs) can likely attest, it’s a feature that’s time has most certainly come.Tags: phishing, security, twitter
Publ.Date : Wed, 10 Mar 2010 00:53:00 +0000
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