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LinkedIn Offering External Apps

techconsumer — Thu, 30 Oct 2008 10:10:09 +0000

LinkedIn is now trying to provide a site that is somewhat lighter by offering applicatons that are created by other companies.

8 such external programs debuted on Wednesday. By using these, linkedIn is hoping to become a more attractive place to keep in touch with business contacts or further one’s career options.

More than 30 million people worldwide have created a LinkedIn profile. LinkedIn is now trying to imitate sites such as Facebook or Myspace who allow games and media sharing with fellow members.

Clearly the applications still have to be of a professional nature and are being screened to prevent the loopholes that negatively affected MySpace and Facebook applications.

Some of the initial LinkedIn external applications include a file management system from Box.net, a business presentation software from Google, a Tripit travel itinerary tool, and an Amazon application for sharing book recommendations.

Still Having Scrabulous Withdrawals

Charlie Jones — Wed, 27 Aug 2008 00:37:39 +0000

Thanks a lot, Mattel. Although, I can’t really blame you – it was an obvious intellectual rights infringement. However, that doesn’t stop me from pining for Scrabulous.

One of the few Facebook (third party, of course) apps worth having, is now blocked in pretty much everyone’s neck of the woods, seemingly permanently. Scrabulous, which was already blocked last month for North American users, has now been cruelly banished from most international Facebook sites – due to a warning Facebook received from Mattel.

Scrabulous creators, the Argwalla brothers, have produce a some-what less-addictive clone called Wordscraper. The new app has a few tweaks such as circular tiles and the possibility of earning triple points in some cases. I suppose they feel Wordscraper is different enough to avoid further legal issues, but that’s yet to be determined – so try not to get too addicted, as the rug could be yanked out at anytime.

Hasbro, the American rights holder of Scrabble, have gone ahead and released their own scrabble-themed app, which is receiving mixed reviews. The main drawbacks appear to be an abundance of bugs, and the inability to play along with users outside of North America. We’ll see which of the apps wins out in the end.

Blockbuster Online & Facebook: No Longer My Friends

Marion Jensen — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 04:32:15 +0000

Bite me, Blockbuster Online. Oh, and you too, Facebook.

About three years ago, I signed up for Netflix, Walmart DVD Online, and Blockbuster Online. I wanted to see which interface was better, and who was quicker about sending me DVDs in the mail. Netflix won, hands down.

Blockbuster has recently come out with an interesting idea, however, where you can rent online, as well as in the store. They have been pestering me to “come back” for years, and yesterday they sent me a free month. So I thought, what the heck. I’ll sign up, rent a few, and then cancel after 29 days.

I canceled after one. Here’s why:

I put Enchanted in my queue, because the kids have wanted to watch it. I thought it would be a fun surprise. It was a surprise, all right.

I wandered over to Facebook sometime later, and there in my newsfeed is a proud proclamation, “Marion Jensen added Enchanted to his Blockbuster queue!”

WHAT?!

I’m glad I didn’t add what I wanted (Beaches, Sense and Sensibility, and Pretty Woman).

Now, I’ve gone through the settings of Facebook long ago and have turned notifying all actions from external sites (nobody is so bored that they run to the web to see what I’ve been doing), but that didn’t stop Facebook. Even though the default to Blockbuster Online was “notify me first,” it posted this breaking story to my newsfeed. My co-worker logged in and saw that I had added Enchanted to my Blockbuster queue.

I’m pretty ticked.

So, the lesson? Screw Blockbuster, go with Netflix. And as far as Facebook goes, BACK OFF.

As soon as I see an alpha version of Justin Ball’s app that brings social networking to blogging, I’m bailing.

*Update* Several readers have asked why I added the Blockbuster app if I didn’t want my queue broadcast to the world. The fact is that I didn’t add the app. The app was added for me, by Facebook. I can only assume that the two systems talked to each other because I login with the same e-mail address.

Marion Jensen

My First MySpace Friend: SPAM

Bob Caswell — Mon, 10 Mar 2008 17:51:45 +0000

So I joined MySpace about a week ago and was already annoyed at the way they sent me my password over email. But then, just a few days later, I got an email with my first MySpace message / friend request from someone named Riley whose profile picture is a girl in a swimsuit. Originally, her (or his?) profile showed the same city and state that I live in, though now it’s been changed to Greenville, Ohio. Here’s the text of the message:

“Heya sunshine!
I recently broke up (9 months ago) and am ready to date once again. I’m not looking for a serious relationship though. It’s too soon. A little about me: I’m adventurous, outgoing and open-minded. I’m pretty good-looking and healthy. I like going out but also dont mind snuggling! If you make me laugh, you’re half way into my heart. I was browsing the site; my best-friend. After figuring out how things worked I came across your profile. I’m interested! I hope you’re not shy and that you’ll respond. Please dont reply directly though, this is really not my profile, I’m just borrowing it. Send your reply to my real email address instead: kate_cannon_x@yahoo..

Thanks and have a nice day!”

Interestingly enough, I’ve used Facebook and LinkedIn for years now and have never had this problem (or the previous password problem I discussed). But MySpace, for being the most popular social network out there, continues to disappoint. And it’s only been one week!

Perhaps I’m the exception rather than the rule, but if anyone joining MySpace for the first time should expect spam posing as a wannabe friend within one week… Wow, it just seems like one more issue to fuel the lack-of-privacy fire.

In MySpace’s defense, they do have some spam settings in the privacy section of your profile. I suppose it’s nice to be able to customize those settings, but I wonder why the default setting gets me spam? I suppose that’s the catch-22 of social networking and privacy: default openness vs. default privacy. What should those defaults be?

I’m personally a fan of “opting in” to the “my profile is accessible to everyone in every possible way” configuration rather than having to “opt out” of it. But I get the impression that, in general, the default demographic for social networks may prefer it the other way around. And that can make implementing decent privacy settings all the more tricky…

Coincidentally, MySpace updated both their terms of use and privacy policy this past week. Of course, it’s not like I read that relatively long legal verbage every day (if ever). So I have no idea what might have changed recently.

Twitter Review: Waste of Time or Extremely Valuable?

Bob Caswell — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 15:41:51 +0000

So I finally gave in and started using Twitter this past weekend (if you’re on Twitter, follow me at twitter.com/bobcaswell). What is Twitter? It’s a mix of instant messaging, email, Facebook, and text messaging. It’s a network of users that follow each other. Here’s how it works:

It’s quick and easy to sign up; you just need a username, password, and email address. Once in, you can have it scan your email contacts to see if you know anyone already using Twitter. Or, it allows you to quickly send invitations to anyone you’d like. One way or another, you need some friends before getting started. The whole point of Twitter is to answer the question “What are you doing?” in 140 characters are less. Your friends instantaneously see a trail of your answers, and you see a feed of their latest answers as well.

If none of your real life friends are using Twitter (which is mostly the case for me), you can start making friends by following anyone who seems interesting. For me, it wasn’t hard to quickly find and follow 150 or so pseudo- friends (that is, people who I already know from their blogging online even if I don’t know them in person). And each time you add someone to your following list, they get an email from you. If you don’t know where to start to find friends, check out the Twitter public timeline, which is a running list of all “tweets” (messages) updated every four minutes.

Some people like to keep their following list limited and won’t follow you just because you follow them (which is just fine). But others will add you as a friend (i.e., follow you) after you begin following them (like entrepreneurship celebrity Guy Kawasaki who added me within minutes of me adding him). So, in short, Twitter relationships can be summed up as follows:

I can follow you, and you can follow me.
I can follow you and you don’t follow me.
You can follow me, and I don’t follow you.

Twitter can also be setup easily for your cellphone. In fact, that’s what it’s designed for (the tweet limit of 140 characters is so that it works well with cellphone text messaging). This makes for a lot of tweets that read something like, “bored, waiting in line at…”

So what’s the purpose of Twitter? The Twitter FAQ states it as, “Twitter is a service for friends, family, and co-workers to communicate and stay connected.” But from what I’ve seen, people use it more for other reasons. Marshall Kirkpatrick explains how he uses it to find the latest breaking tech stories. NBC, CBS, ABC Family and MTV are using it as a marketing platform. And of the 150 friends I’m following so far? A good chunk seem to use it almost exclusively for alerting everyone when they have a new post on their blog.

Not that there’s anything wrong with any of these uses, mind you. In fact, I’m inclined to be one of the users that adds most anyone who either seems at least mildly interesting or has already added me. I don’t think Twitter should be confused for email (i.e., a service where you generally scan/read every message). I’m inclined to use it as more of a zeitgeist or snapshot of the latest happenings of those I follow. Overall, I like it and will likely contribute / check others’ contributions frequently.

But it’s interesting for me to see how some have already claimed it to be a wasteful addiction that should be bridled. Well, true, but couldn’t that be said of anything used in excess? If you need it, here’s a 12-step program for email addicts that can just as easily be applied to any technology addiction. Incidentally, Twitter is already popular enough to have had a third party (Twitterholic) create a list of the top 100 most popular Twitter users.

Overall, I think I like Twitter. Is it a waste of time? Maybe. Is it useful? Maybe. However you’d like to classify it, it’s at least an interesting experiment in communication.

Facebook Marketplace 2.0

Tyler Reber — Thu, 07 Feb 2008 01:22:58 +0000

I was perusing the Facebook Marketplace this morning (for those unfamiliar, the free classified ads section of Facebook) and was hoping to find some deals on cheap computer hardware being sold here at my school when an interesting idea popped into my head. Why doesn’t Facebook use this marketplace as part of its advertising system? Here’s how it would work:

In my hypothetical system, as users post a new item for sale in the marketplace, they would be prompted to attach a few keywords to the sale listing. Next, these keywords would be used to create ads for this particular sale listing. These ads would then be shown (in the usual spot in the sidebar) to other Facebook users whose interests are similar to the keywords the seller selected.

Thus, a Facebook user who otherwise may not be looking in the marketplace would be presented with ads for something on sale by another Facebook user. Being that the ads are targeted towards that user because of his/her listed interests, the user may suddenly find some money burning a hole in his/her pocket. Facebook users also win because they wouldn’t always have to look at the other, sometimes annoying, ads that are presented in the sidebar and in the feed. The seller wins because they get their item sold, likely at a much quicker rate than it would have sold otherwise. The only potential loser in the deal is Facebook itself.

Now some may say that Facebook already makes plenty of money through advertising, and they can afford to take a hit for a simple user convenience such as this. Honestly, I would agree with that assessment. However, Facebook could be a winner in this situation too. Say, for example, that Facebook charges a small fee to cover ad space, a dollar or two at most. I would suspect that a lot of users, in the interest of selling their item quickly and making some money, wouldn’t have much of a problem with paying Facebook a few dollars to advertise their item for sale.

Seeing that advertising space on Facebook doesn’t cost much of anything (the minimum is $.10 per 1000 impressions in a CPM model), I would imagine that this would be pretty good business for them as well. Facebook would obviously be in charge of determining how many impressions the ad got. With that said, I know that users could already do this themselves through Facebook’s general advertising system, but it requires some extra work and a little knowledge of advertising. It would be much easier and probably more effective if Facebook took care of it for the seller. It would likely be appealing to the company anyway, because it is just one more way that they can integrate with their users.

Personally, I do not check the Facebook Marketplace very often. However, if I were to be surfing around Facebook and saw an ad for someone selling a stick of DDR2 RAM for $10, I would probably be pretty inclined to check it out and possibly buy it right then and there. I would suspect similar results from many users. I’m sure there would be some users who would scream “invasion of privacy,” but it’s no more an invasion of privacy than the targeted ads that are already displayed on the side of your profile. The difference is that these are items being sold locally, and you may actually want to buy!

This model is similar to Amazon’s, in that it sort of recommends items to users. We’ve all seen how well Amazon has done in the retail business, so who’s to say that a similar idea wouldn’t work for Facebook? If nothing else, maybe items won’t sit in the marketplace for four months, unsold!

Beyond Poking: eCommerce for Facebook

Tom Caswell — Mon, 14 Jan 2008 22:06:36 +0000

Facebook applications are no longer a new thing, and many users are getting tired of clutter added each time an application is installed. According to Adonomics, 13,677 Facebook applications are now installed. Sites that used to review each new application now require that the application developer pay to avoid being ignored. Many of the applications have only a few users and are really nothing more than recycled versions of other Facebook applications.

In fact, in response to complaints regarding an over abundance of apps on user profile pages, Facebook itself announced a few days ago that a “profile clean-up” tool will be implemented so that users can hide unused applications. Profiles can look cleaner and have a link at the bottom to “Show Extended Profile,” which will allow visitors (with a click) to see the otherwise hidden applications users have running.

While most current applications are focused on a simple survey, game or “poking” friends, we found one business sponsoring an ecommerce application that sells house plans. They seem to indicate that one of their primary goals is to generate more traffic to their website. This is an interesting strategy and could be compared to the SEO organic / paid traffic efforts that plenty of websites engage in.

Facebook offers a relatively cheap method of advertising, and adding an application that provides some interesting value could be an avenue to free marketing in the social networking space. They don’t have an insane number of users yet (1300), but it will be interesting to watch and see if they are successful with this effort. In any event, it’s definitely time for new Facebook applications to do more.

Data Privacy & Portability: Who owns what? Who can see what?

Bob Caswell — Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:24:55 +0000

The privacy and portability of your online data may become more of an issue in 2008. News is out today of a Federal case which will investigate whether the use of a false identity could be considered Internet fraud under federal statutes. This was originally triggered by the October 2006 case in which a 13-year-old named Megan Meier committed suicide after receiving “cruel” messages on MySpace (messages allegedly received from the mother of a school rival who was posing as a 16-year-old boy).

Take this news and mix in this BBC piece which discusses how Facebook will have an uncomfortable year due to privacy issues, and we’re back to question of who owns what data online? And who should be able to see what? These are not easily answered questions. After all, there are different types of data (email address vs. phone number, for example) and different types of decision makers (13-year-olds, twenty-somethings, baby boomers, etc.).

But even if more control and ownership were given back to the user, we’d still see conflicting opinions. For control, how granular should it be? While I may want lots of levers to pull for sharing and unsharing tidbits of my information differently with different people, someone else may find that confusing. And for ownership, how will we deal with the viral nature of information spreading? Even if you “own” something, what stops anyone with whom you’ve shared from doing whatever they want with your theoretically “owned” data?

It’s a big mess that many don’t care about (or are perhaps in denial?). But 2008 is shaping up to be the year where online data control and ownership will be in the spotlight.

LinkedIn Releases New Features, Wants You to Visit More

Bob Caswell — Mon, 10 Dec 2007 15:33:28 +0000

A few months back we asked the question, “LinkedIn – What’s the big deal?” TechConsumer author Marion Jensen hadn’t signed up and was excited to get started, only to find out that the site offered little to do. It seemed like Facebook without the fun factor, a social network for professionals. You create a profile, describe your professional history, and connect with others. In turn, you can see who your “friends” (or is that business associates?) are connected with. The idea is to build your professional network. But to what end?

Well, today LinkedIn has released a bunch of new features in an attempt to boost usage of the site. You’ll be able to find connections to people on LinkedIn while you’re using other websites. As an example, Business Week now has a feature that shows you how you’re connected through LinkedIn to people and companies written about in its articles. Click on a name in an article, and a popup window will show how you’re connected through LinkedIn (see screenshot below). Business Week will also let you send the article to your LinkedIn friends. The LinkedIn friend you send it to will see it the next time he/she logs in to LinkedIn.

Another new feature: LinkedIn has introduced “modules” (like Facebook applications). One example module is a calendar that can appear in LinkedIn, which shows upcoming events in your industry. The application automatically knows your industry based on your LinkedIn profile. It lists other people who will be attending these conferences and links to their profiles for you to connect.

LinkedIn will also provide a news aggregator, which will automatically show you articles about your industry. The company hasn’t released the algorithim it uses, but the idea is to give you relevant and personalized news. You’ll also be able to see the most popular articles about your company or your competition.

LinkedIn has trimmed down its homepage design by eliminating a bunch of buttons on the top menu. Now there are only five buttons: People, Jobs, Answers, Services, and Inbox. In short, LinkedIn wants to be easier to use and, more importantly, wants to be used period. The company has more than 16 million registered users and claims it is gaining more than one million new members per month.

All the features listed above seem like good ideas. But I already handle my calendaring and news through other services at this point, though the unique integration with sites like Business Week isn’t something really offered elsewhere. Perhaps I’ll use LinkedIn a little more… Will you?

Facebook’s Never-Ending Movie Quiz: Your mom was wrong, follow the crowd.

Marion Jensen — Mon, 26 Nov 2007 15:36:50 +0000

We’ve all heard the line: If all of your friends were to jump off a cliff, would you do it too?

Well, there is a good chance all of your friends are not jumping off a cliff. Because they know better. In fact, if you have a large enough crowd, there is a good chance whatever they think is right. Sort of.

I’ve been playing around on Facebook. There are all sorts of interesting things going on there, but I wanted to write about something called the Never-Ending Movie Quiz. The basic premise is that you answer a whole bunch of questions and the more you answer right, the higher you are ranked.

The interesting part is that after you answer the question, you are shown the correct answer. You are also shown, as a percentage, how other people are voting. I’ve answered 201 questions (it was over Thanksgiving and a bit slow). For all 201 question, the crowd has never been wrong. In other words, the majority of users have always picked the right answer, usually by 70 or 80 percent. So while I’m not perfect, all of you are. At least when taken all together.

This obviously doesn’t work all the time (you can point to many a political election and make a case that the crowd is often wrong). But when there is a reasonably well known fact, or even a less-than-reasonably well known fact, there is an excellent chance that if you poll enough people, whatever the crowd says is right.

It would be interesting to run this same experiment but with more challenging questions. Does this hold true for difficult questions? Little known trivia? Maybe only 1 in a hundred know pi to 20 decimal points, but if you polled 50,000 people, you’d be able to discern pi, because 500 people would all be picking the same numbers.

So, next time somebody asks you if you would follow your friends off the cliff, you can reply, “Yes. Yes I would. Because there must be something really interesting there at the bottom.”