Twitter isn’t the most social site by nature, though it has some very social features that allow you to create some semblance of a community around your tweets and the tweets of your followers. But even with this inherent Twitter community it’s difficult to take that community outside of Twitter and use it to your benefit. An application called Twitter Remote displays which Twitter users have recently visited your blog or website. This essentially creates a MyBlogLog for Twitter-specific use.

The good thing about this application is that it comes with a widget that you can post on your blog or website. The widgets themselves are customizable in the basic dimensions. You’re able to change the color scheme, number of rows, and other parameters before placing it on your blog or website.
Read the rest of this entry »

Drop.io has a new Firefox browser plugin that makes i even easier to share files with friends and, more specifically, with friends on Facebook. With the new plugin, you can create new drops from items you find from across the web.

It’s got a convenient drag’n'drop option for text, links, files and HTML that you’d like to share, as well as drag’n'drop tabs to the drop.io logo for creating a link to that particular tab in that drop. You can even continually drag’n'drop files to the same drop or different drops, even while other files are uploading. Drop.io has also added some keyboard shortcuts to make the sharing process even simpler: hit control + shift + D in order to create a drop.io link to the tab you’re currently viewing.
Read the rest of this entry »

MySpace announced its support of OpenID earlier this year, with certain hopes for its potential alongside its own Data Availability initiative. Such an integration makes sense, especially in light of Facebook’s ongoing efforts to become the central platform for online social interaction. So how can MySpace hope to stay ahead? Deeper OpenID integration.

This time, a partnership with the Flock browser and Vidoop’s authentication solution will provide a more seamless experience for cross-network applications but for a user’s browsing experience as well. Called the Identity in the Browser open source project, this is an opportunity for all three companies to push OpenID into the next realm.
Read the rest of this entry »

I have been holding off on buying the Ocarina application the iPhone despite it’s rise to the number one application as I couldn’t get myself to spend the 99 cents for an unknown application. After seeing Mike Arrington’s post on it this afternoon, I had to download it. The application is spectacular in that it enables users to play any song in any tone and has all of the features of a standard wind instrument (aside of course the lack of a place for air to exit to increase reverberations).
Read the rest of this entry »

If you are like me, there’s a good chance you are frequently looking for a great place to eat but don’t want to spend much time searching. You may also want to have an easy way to review sites in a simple manner right after you finish eating at a restaurant. If you are knowledgeable of all things web then you are probably aware of other services offering similar services.

Numerous Competitors

Yelp, for example offers a robust iPhone application for finding restaurants, bars, banks, drugstores, and more. You can then filter each of the stores or restaurants based on their rating, price, and distance from you. It’s a pretty useful application aside from one thing: you can’t review restaurants after you’ve visited them from the application.

A couple weeks ago I also wrote about the LivingSocial iPhone application. One of the many features that the application is the ability to write reviews on the go. This was immediately an open void in the market as Yelp has yet to fix reviews on the go. The additional benefit of LivingSocial is their integration into all the existing social networks which offer developer platforms.

The social recommendation space is rapidly getting crowded and as we rush to fill data into the system, there are going to be some serious challenges. One of those challenges includes consistency of recommendation engines within your personal networks. If half your friends are on one network and half on another, it’s difficult to determine which one to use.

Thummit and Simplicity

While numerous competitors exist in the mobile food recommendation space, Thummit is attempting to simplify things by limiting users to 140 characters, the same way Twitter does. The focus is to build out a robust SMS service and then extend the service to support as many communication platforms as possible. You can tweet your Thummit recommendation, text it to text it to the service, or update it from the Thummit website.

While the initial beta test is focused on the D.C. area, you can currently use the service anywhere in the country. For example I just ate at “The House” in San Francisco for lunch and was able to post a review directly to the site. The service then pulls in other reviews from around the web so that no sites appear to have a lack of content.

When I saw the demo at the LaunchBox Digital offices in D.C. last week, Sean Greene, the brain behind this new product, emphasized that the company is working to integrate many more features that make it easier to review restaurants. That includes automatically determining whether or not someone likes a place automatically via sentiment analysis.

It also appears that they want to take recommendations and simple voting beyond just restaurants. Food is simply the first place to test it out. For now the service is limited to restaurants but they may expand beyond that in the near future. I think keeping the service as simple as possible will be their key to success. What services to you use for social recommendations and social voting?

Also, if you’d like to register for the site, visit the Thummit site and use the invite code “hamburger”. Let us know what you think!

kontagent, one of the leading social analytics tools who also one of the recent winners of the fbFund, has announced that they are rolling out a refined version of their platform. The new version includes more streamlined instrumentation, a refined user interface, improved social user segmentation, improved viral channel usage and limits tracking, and improved account management.

kontagent is one of the leading social analytics companies, their primary competitor being Sometrics who provides less in depth analytics but does provide a platform which provides metrics for advertising. While the company is not willing to provide us with details on their traffic, a quick look at the company’s Compete.com statistics shows that they are being dominated by Sometrics.

Compete.com reports that Sometrics had over 1.7 million visitors last month and kontagent had almost 5,000 (see update below). Regardless of traffic, the company most definitely provides the most in depth analysis for any social analytics company and many developers are beginning to pay attention to them for that sole reason. The company is also preparing to announce details of partnerships with a few large companies.

What are those companies exactly? We have no idea because they have yet to release details but Albert Lai, CEO of the company (and speaker at our Social Ad Summit), says that there are a number of large applications and brands. Beyond that, we aren’t sure who the company has locked in. We hope to release more detail on that in the coming weeks. For now feel free to go check out kontagent for your in depth social analytics needs.

Update
Albert Lai contacted me to point out that Compete is tracking Sometrics ad calls in addition to webpage visits. This would account for the large discrepancy.

kontagenet Dashboard

kontagent Cohort Analysis

kontagent Engagement Analysis

kontagent Viral Analysis

Not long ago an interesting phenomenon was sweeping Silicon Valley: the yet another social network (YASN) phenomenon. There’s a new phenomenon sweeping the Valley: the yet another messaging service (YASM) phenomenon. As soon as one popular service launches a whole slew of copycats typically follow. Some of these businesses obtain funding and at least one of them ends up getting acquired typically.

Yesterday all of the buzz was about one of these new messaging services: Yammer. It ended up receiving the award of winner of Techcrunch 50. A pretty user interface and a great presentation was all it took to impress the judges. Honestly, Techcrunch did themselves a disservice by awarding this company best in show. It’s essentially a Twitter for the enterprise.

Mark Evans cries “Don’t Hammer Yammer!” and goes on to explain that “it’s easy to use and could be an effective communications tool if employees need and want a Twitter-like instant messaging tool.” Hold on there Mark, I have a great new messaging system for your employees, it’s called e-mail. I have digital messages practically coming out of my ears at this point.

From instant messages to emails to direct messages on Twitter to messages on Facebook, it’s unmanageable. Now Yammer things that they have the great idea of throwing another messaging service my way. Their solution for cleaning out my inbox? Go use another messaging service! Are they serious? The key to efficiency is not building more nonsensical systems and pile them on top of inefficient systems.

You still have an inefficient system at the core (email). So if you are going to sing praise of Yammer, keep it out of the comments. Every comment on my blogs ends up as an email and the last message I need to be replying to at this point is one about Yammer.

Yesterday, after checking out the classic video intro that John McCain completed for his new social network, I decided to go searching for a free screen recorder. The reason? Just in case somebody decided to take down the video there would still be a copy. Honestly, I’m surprised that the video has not been taken down yet but after embarking on a search through Google I found an amazing screen recorder that you cannot live without.

Prior to yesterday I had been using Camtasia, a paid screen recorder software tool which I stopped using after my 30 day trial demo. The new free screen recorder that I found is called Jing. If you haven’t heard of it, you have to check it out. Jing enables you to easily record what’s taking place on your screen with audio included. I’ve included an example of the McCain video that I recorded yesterday.

The software integrates into Screencast.com and enables users to upload and store their videos for free making it embeddable anywhere on the web. I honestly never knew this existed but this has literally saved me a ton of money and a ton of time looking for other tools as it is extremely intuitive. If you wish to capture images as well and have them immediately uploaded to Flickr that is possible as well through a few quick steps.

The one thing that I have not been able to figure out yet is how to resize screencasts that I’ve created. I’ve modified variables within the embed code but that still doesn’t seem to work. Enough of my technical mumbo jumbo though. If you need a free screen recorder, then you have to go check out Jing which is available for both Mac and Windows. Seriously, this is a must have application for any serious blogger or other content creator on the web.

As a quick heads up, the video below takes some time to load because it is highly video intensive but most screen recordings take up an extremely small amount of space.

Yesterday, Adam Ostrow wrote about a new tool which combines Userplane’s chat technology and Converdge’s white label social network platform to enable websites to include chat within their websites. The new instant message chat client mimics the functionality of the highly popular Facebook chat application.

While chat on your website is not really a new thing, the similarities between this design and the design of Facebook’s instant message client are striking. As Adam points out though, the functionality of this new client is a little more full featured than what Facebook currently provides. “Beyond simple text messaging, there’s video chat, VoIP Voice over Internet Protocol calling, and games, for example.”

For those looking to integrate this new chat on your website, you are going to need be running Converdge for it to work unfortunately. This new platform looks pretty slick and I’m guessing that we’ll see more of this type of chat interface in the near future. Have you found chats that are integrated into other websites to be of use?

Yesterday I spent an absurd amount of time exploring a new social media site called Plurk. The buzz started a couple nights ago when Leo Laporte tweeted out that sites like Plurk show that there is a lot of opportunity for innovation in the microblogging space. The end result was that thousands of users flocked to the site. Robert Scoble then popped up in my FriendFeed and I suddenly knew that there would be a bunch of people checking it out.

Not until I read a blog post by Muhammad Saleem yesterday on ReadWriteWeb did I decide to go check it out. I signed up and immediately started using the service which provided a whole new interface for the same thing that Twitter provides. The only difference is the way that conversations are grouped ultimately providing for much more dynamic conversations.

The majority of my conversation revolved around the act of “Plurking” but in the process I did notice that a lot of the people that I currently follow on Twitter are also on Plurk. One additional benefit of the service is the ability to share pictures and videos directly from within the service. Two other interesting features of the site are karma points (which grade you for your volume of activity on the site) and the reply conversations which show replies grouped together.

The real question here is how many of the microblogging solutions can we really use? I jumped on the opportunity to add a lot of friends and since then I have close to 200 but that’s really not the important thing. Are we all just testing out these systems as early adopters or are we choosing to help build the user base of the ones we like? As far as I know Twitter was sufficient but once Plurk came along there were some things we liked about it.

I’ll keep trying out Plurk for a little longer but honestly I could live with Twitter alone. Have you tried out Plurk? Do you see much value in using the service?