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iMedia Connection: Context is the new king What do the microwave oven, Amazon.com, and the hula-hoop have in common? For one thing, each of these was a game changer in its particular category. Each is also a consumer product or service that you may have never known you needed until you saw it. Predicting consumer trends is tricky, particularly in a time when rapid technological advancement is changing our world. In the last 15 years, technology has changed the way we communicate, play, shop, relate to one another, consume music, view movies and, fundamentally, how we access information. Five years ago I was not thinking, "Damn, I wish there was some type of web-based social networking service that would allow people that I have not seen in the past 20 years to connect with me and send me status updates on what they had for breakfast."
Towards a Value-Added User Data Economy - ReadWriteWeb Every week it seems like the debate over access to, portability of and privacy over user data on the social web has reached new heights. It's only going to get louder though, just as discussions about other forms of economics will never be resolved. That's a part of what's going on, economics. This is an information economy, after all, and user data is clearly one of the most important currencies in circulation. User data has been sold by ISPs, leveraged by ad networks and horded by social networks for years. Now, users are storming the castle to recapture their own booty.
The New FriendFeed Looks A Lot Like Twitter FriendFeedFriendFeed reviews has rolled out a new optional beta today, featuring a cleaner real-time interface, plus some much requested features like the ability to send people a direct message. My first reaction to it (which you can access at beta.friendfeed.com): it feels a lot like a web-based TwitterTwitter reviews client, with the added goodness of seeing your friend’s activities from the dozens of different services that FriendFeed supports. Your FriendFeed homepage now includes a box to post an update, with the option to cc it to Twitter.
Business plans, business models For a long time I have wanted to write a post about the irrelevance of business plans. Twitter got VC funding with no business plan and no business model. Three years later they still have no revenue model, but their investors are very happy. I confess it took me a while to figure out Twitter. Is Social Networking Good for Companies? : Buzz Networker - Soci Social networking is growing in importance within the business world. Emarketer has published social networking research showing that a third of CEO’s are on Facebook, almost a third also see it as important as are using it to build their brands. There are risks with social networking though as the research shows. Social networking can be bad for your brands health!
Why the iPhone will never be the biggest money generating platfo The iPhone will not generate significant mobile revenues Tomi Ahonen has written a very long post about the history of mobile phone development in Europe and the United States. Tomi is a well known authority in the Mobile space and is the author of the well known Communities dominate brand book. His post contains a number of provocative and thoughtful observations. The post itself is as long as an e-book, but I urge you to read it all the way.
Why Facebook Connect is a Big Deal: Workstir’s Winning Implement Workstir is a relatively new site you might not be immediately familiar with; it’s a service for submitting work requests for everything from home repairs to web design, where people looking for work can then browse those listings and submit bids. The site just implemented Facebook Connect, and it’s a great example of what makes the portable identity service so intriguing. First is the obvious – you can sign up for Workstir without creating an account, but instead using your Facebook login info.
Three Reasons You Need to Be on FriendFeed *Now* « I’m Not Actually a Geek May 26, 2009 by Hutch Carpenter FriendFeed has got to be one of the most innovative companies around these days. It seems every week, it’s hatched something new with its service. That alone makes it worth being there. Top Twitterers: US, Canada, Norway, Au Sysomos has just released extensive research on Twitter use, filled with all sorts of fascinating information, such as 72% of Twitter users have joined since the beginning of this year, 53% of Twitterers are women, and marketers are 50 times more likely than normal people to follow over 2000 people. I am always interested in comparing countries, so I pulled out and analyzed their statistics on where Twitter users are located to calculate the proportion of the population that are use Twitter. I used the Sysomos data on Twitter usage, the ever-handy Nationmaster for population figures, and a combination of the recent combined with Sysomos data on recent growth, as well as our own estimates.
Redirecting... Seesmic has been acquired by HootSuite and as of March 2013, the Seesmic website is no longer supported. But HootSuite welcomes all Seesmic users into our nest! Here’s how you can start using HootSuite today. Opera "Reinvents the Web" with Unite, Makes Every Comp Opera has been buzzing up our inboxes lately with rather vague press releases on how it planned to "reinvent the web." Well, we've just received concrete confirmation of exactly what that means. Their new product, Opera Unite, "turns any computer into both a client and a server, allowing it to interact with and serve content to other computers directly across the Web, without the need for third-party servers." Opera Unite aims to make hosting and sharing data as simple as navigating around the Internet. It purports to give users greater control of their data while still allowing for easy sharing of files and information between all web-enabled devices.
Forget Open Standards Forget Open Standards… Well, sort of. To date, the DataPortability project has often referred to its vision as “Open Standards based Data Portability”. The problem, though, is that people don’t get why Open Standards are so important. CoverItLive Now Lets You Add Qik Mobile Video to Your Live Blogs Live-blogging toolCoverItLive has released an upgrade this week that is truly helpful for bloggers in the social media space. If you've got one of those handy phones that supports Qik, or you do live video blogging with Mogulus or ustream, you can now drop your feeds into your CoverItLive window and broadcast it to the world, along with your live blogging coverage. This builds on CoverItLive's existing option for dropping a YouTube video into your CoverItLive window, though the formatting has been improved (with the video appearing in the top right corner of the window) and users can expand the video with a separate window if they'd like. The major benefit of being able to include these videos into your live blogging coverage is the streamlining for the blogging multi-tasker, which is what CoverItLive has always been good at.