Image by -= Bruce Berrien =- via Flickr
Apple dropped a small bomb on the social networking world yesterday. In the midst of its announcements about new iPods and a $99 Apple TV box, it announced the launch of Ping, a music-based social network, that at some point could be Apple’s social networking trojan horse.
Read my full post on Internet Evolution.
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Image by Raelene G via Flickr
My newest blogging gig is at Internet Evolution. In my first post, I look at Diaspora, the Facebook alternative from 4 recent NYU grads. Could some upstart kids from NYU give Facebook a run for its considerable money? You never know.
Read my full post on Internet Evolution.
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Welcome back to the Friday 5, my choices for the best links in social media. This week we didn’t have any dominant social media news like last week’s Facebook Places announcement, so I thought stick to some practical tips and a bit of interesting news from Diaspora, the Facebook alternative being coded by four NYU grads.
Here we go:
Photo by The Truth About… on Flickr. Used under Creative Commons License.
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I wrote about Paul Adams’ presentation on social networking best practices on FierceContentManagement. The presentation could provide some insight into what Google’s social networking tool could look like.
See my full post on FierceContentManagement.
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This flowery bit of fluff from the minds of Facebook marketing gives you a rosy view of the Places app. I’m not so sure I share their optimism about this, but its a well made video.
Cross-posted on ‘by Ron Miller.’
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Image by miss:anthrope via Flickr
Mashable reports this morning that FourSquare has had a record number of sign-ups in the wake of the Facebook Places launch, a launch that some suggested could mark the death of services like FourSquare (I know I was going to avoid those death sentences, but you know, sometimes it’s appropriate. See Death Becomes You).
The interesting thing is that FourSquare was not actually threatened by the Facebook Places launch, at least their CEO wasn’t letting on if they were. In an interview with the LA Times, FourSquare CEO Dennis Crowley had this to say about Facebook’s entry into the market:
“That’s the thing. Everyone keeps saying, “Oh my God, you guys must be so stressed with Facebook getting into this.” Not really. We spend a lot of our time telling people why location is important and why people want to check in. Facebook now gets to do that for us. We can focus on the stuff we want to do.”
So in their view, if Facebook is getting involved that will mainstream geo-location and be good for them. You might see that as putting a happy face on a bad situation, but it turns out that’s exactly what happened, at least for the short-term.
Instead of competition swallowing up the smaller stand-alone services, it boosted them via the positive pull of competition. Suddenly everyone was aware of geo-location instead of just a few people. Seems rumors of FourSquare and Gowalla’s deaths could have been greatly exaggerated after all.
Cross-posted on ‘by Ron Miller.’
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Welcome to this week’s Friday 5, my five favorite links in social media. The big news this week was the release of Facebook’s geo-location service, Facebook Places, and that has dominated the news (as we wrote here in Facebook Foray into Geo-location Not a Slam Dunk), but it was not the only thing happening, even in the height of summer vacation season. Let’s have a look at this week’s Friday 5:
Photo by Theilr on Flickr. Used Under Creative Commons License.
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Facebook is expected to join the geo-location game today, at least according to many published reports including this one from Kara Swisher on the All Things Digital Blog. Swisher and just about everyone else I’ve seen write about this subject believes it should effectively mark the beginning of the end for established geo-location services like Foursquare and Gowalla.
Conventional thinking goes if Facebook is doing it, it will basically muscle out any competition and it makes sense, right? Facebook is big and has hundreds of millions of users, so why not use the Facebook tool if it’s there. But conventional wisdom doesn’t always hold.
The same could be said for Google‘s foray into social media, which so far has not been a dazzling success or how about Microsoft‘s adventures in mobile where the market share numbers seem to be rolling backward instead of forward.
Every time an established player makes a play for a piece of an existing service, it doesn’t guarantee they will do it well or that people won’t simply prefer the established services over the new offering. It may come to pass that Facebook annihilates Foursquare and Gowalla and they both go away or get absorbed by other larger services like Facebook, but just because Facebook gets into the game doesn’t make them the automatic winner, not by a long shot.
Cross-posted on ‘by Ron Miller’ Blog.
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By now, you’ve probably seen the trailer for the Facebook movie, aka The Social Network. The folks at Rated Awesome decided to make fun of the Social Network trailer and Twitter at the same time, and the result is very, very funny. Check it out.
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Been on an extended vacation and consequently so has the Friday 5. It’s good to be back and share some of my favorite social media links from the past month or so.
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