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Posts Tagged ‘Mobile Website’

MySpace Launches New Mobile Website with Built-in IM

Social networking site MySpace has just launched a new version of their mobile website designed for iPhone, Android, and Palm WebOS users. The now improved site at m.myspace.com offers quick access to your profile, including comments, your activity stream, your status, your inbox, and more. Also available is a dedicated photos button which makes it easier to browse through your photo albums. However, the most notable of the new features is the built-in instant messaging functionality which makes the new mobile website a communication tool in addition to being just another social networking app.

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New Features

Although the mobile site at m.myspace.com is available from any mobile web browser, the newly updated version only displays to users of select smartphones. That’s because the new site is specifically designed to take advantage of features present in the advanced web browsers present on those devices. Users visiting from other phones will still encounter the older site, which itself was revamped at the beginning of the year with a new look designed to make it more closely resemble the original, desktop-based website.

In addition to real-time updates from MySpace, the new mobile site introduces a built-in instant messaging client which displays a web-enabled version of MySpace IM, the company’s own instant messaging service. By tapping on the “IM” button under the “Me” tab, you can instantly go online and chat with friends just as if you were using a standalone instant messaging software application.

Mobile Website Now Outperforms Native Apps

What’s most interesting about the new web-based IM functionality in the updated site is the fact that this is (for now) the only official tool provided by the company for IM’ing from your mobile device. Believe it or not, the dedicated mobile applications built for the iPhone, Android, and Palm do not include an IM client at all. This has been a much-requested feature from MySpace users who have had no other choice but to use third-party applications like BeeJive IM, for example. In fact, a quick Google search on the topic leads to multiple MySpace forum posts begging for this feature as well as this user-created YouTube video demonstrating how you can get MySpace IM on your iPhone via other methods.

According to the company, 75% of their user base accesses the mobile web site, which could explain why they’ve focused on updating the site first before updating the native apps. However, it’s likely that the majority of their mobile web visitors are those without expensive smartphones who are being redirected to the older site instead. Without detailed statistics from the company itself, this is only a guess, but given outside demographic studies that show how MySpace is dominated by younger users while it also (perhaps not coincidentally) registers as the social networking site whose users have the lowest income levels, it seems probable that the network’s mobile website visitors don’t own very expensive mobile devices. That makes the smartphone mobile website update and any forthcoming native app updates somewhat of a nonstarter for a good many MySpace users anyway.

It will be interesting to see if MySpace soon updates their native applications to include this new functionality as well or if they’re more sold on the idea that the mobile web is – or at least should be – the app of choice for their users.

If you’re interested in visiting the new site, you can do so via m.myspace.com using your phone’s web browser. The new changes have gone live for everyone as of now.

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Nurphy Wants to Replace Email with Conversations

The beta launch of Google Wave has once again put the spotlight on the shortcomings of email. Wave tries to be everything for everybody, but others, like the recently launched Nurphy, have opted for a more focused approach. Nurphy, founded by Paul Horsfall and Neil Cauldwell, wants to be a replacement for email conversations with multiple recipients. The result is an interesting mix between email, Twitter, Yammer and IM that is aimed at both business and casual users.

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Conversations Instead of Email

To initiate a conversation, you first have to sign up to the service or sign in with your Twitter credentials, which doesn’t take more than a minute. On the website itself, Nurphy looks a bit like a cross between Twitter and an email client. After you have signed up, you can start a conversation with anybody who is on the service already or by email. Recipients who don’t want to sign up for Nurphy can continue to reply to messages by email.

Conversations on Nurphy are shown in a Twitter-like timeline in reverse chronological order. Conversations can be public, private or by invitation only (though still visible to the public). Public threats – like Nurphy’s own customer service site – look a bit like forums and Nurphy recommends that you post links to these public conversations on your social networking profiles so that you can have a ‘real’ conversation with your friends. Without threaded conversations, however, it can be hard keep track of conversations. Instead of using sub-threads like Yammer, Nurphy borrowed Twitter’s @reply structure.

It is clear that Nurphy’s designers paid a lot of attention to detail. If you ever registered for a Gravatar in the past, for example, it will automatically choose this picture as your profile image in Nurphy. The service also offers a nifty mobile website, which looks especially good on the iPhone.

Needs some Fine-Tuning

The service, however, also still needs a bit of fine-tuning. You can’t edit messages once they have been posted – the only option is to delete the whole message. It can also take a few minutes before an emailed message actually appears in a conversation. There are also a few small design flaws that take a user out of the experience. When you add a message, the whole page reloads, for example, even though the system seems perfectly capable of adding incoming messages to the conversation without a reset.

It almost seems like Nurphy is trying to keep things too simple in its current iteration. While we understand that the company is trying to make it as easy as possible for new users to get started, it would be nice if you could set up a private Yammer-like network for your friends or colleagues, for example.

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About a Quarter Of Facebook Users Connect Via Mobile Phones

Facebook’s quest to become the social operating system of the Web is driven by how many how many other Websites and apps tap into the social network through Facebook Connect. The mobile Web is a big target for Facebook. Back in March, it made Facebook Connect available to iPhone apps, since those are the most fully featured and popular. Today, it took another step in expanding the reach of Facebook Connect to any mobile phone with a Web browser.

Called Facebook Connect For Mobile Web, it will let any mobile site accept Facebook IDs for sign-on, grab social data from Facebook with permission from the user, publish items into their Facebook stream, and more. (Developers can get more details here).

The mobile Web is already a big deal for Facebook. Across all of its mobile apps (iPhone, Blackberry, Nokia, etc), its mobile Website, and SMS, a full 65 million members reach Facebook via mobile devices every month. That comes to 26 percent of the 250 million total active members that Facebook puts out as its official number, or 18 percent of the 370 million monthly worldwide uniques that comScore measures.

Either way it is a significant and fast growing chunk of overall Facebook usage—between a fifth and a quarter. Back in December, only 20 million people were getting to Facebook via mobile devices.

http://developers.facebook.com/connect_iphone.php

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Facebook Connect Expands: Next Stop, Mobile Web

Facebook used Nokia World, the mobile conference taking place now in Stuttgart Germany, to make a major announcement about the expansion of their Facebook Connect platform. According to Henri Moissinac, head of Facebook’s mobile operations, the company is launching a new program called “Facebook Connect For Mobile Web.” The Connect platform, which originally launched in 2008, is already available for traditional websites as well as Apple’s iPhone. With this update, it can now exist for any mobile platform, too.

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Facebook for the Mobile Web

Mossinac describes the implementation of “Facebook Connect for Mobile Web” as simple. With only four lines of code, developers can add a Facebook Connect button to their app in order to make it more social. The only requirement for implementation is that the handset has to have a web browser. In other words, “any site, any application, and any platform” can now tap into Facebook’s APIs.

During the speech, Mossinac revealed how successful mobilizing Facebook’s website has been for the company. In the past month, Facebook saw 65 million visitors accessing the site from mobile phones. This includes access via the mobile website itself as well as from SMS and other specialized mobile applications. It also represents a dramatic increase from December when only 20 million mobile users were counted.

Currently, the company has deals with 180 mobile operators worldwide. The U.S., U.K., and Canada are the biggest markets. However, Mossinac said emerging markets are growing fast. For example, “Facebook Indonesia is on fire,” he noted. “The metrics are amazing.”

Facebook’s Goals

The announcement of the new mobile platform isn’t just a play by Facebook to get more users to visit their site. The company’s overall goal is to make applications – both mobile and otherwise – more social. “What we did for photo sharing, we are going to do for mobile applications,” said Mossinac. He’s referring to how Facebook introduced a way to make sharing photos a more social process. No longer do you have to visit a separate website and plow through photo after photo to find the ones of you and your friends. Instead, with Facebook’s ability to “tag” photos, the addition of new and interesting photos to the social network are announced via messages posted to your News Feed.

By socializing mobile applications, you’ll be able to share more about your off-site activity with your friends in much of the same way. This will be especially helpful for the mobile games market, as it allows you to invite Facebook friends to play with you while also sharing scores, stats, and other information to your profile. For game developers, it means one person playing a mobile application can spread the word about it among hundreds of their friends. In addition, Facebook Connect eases the sign-in process for apps by using your Facebook identity instead of forcing you to create a new account.

“Facebook Connect for Mobile Web” is only one way the company is expanding to other platforms. They plan to integrate their technology on every screen, including that of your TV (already available thanks to Verizon FiOS’s new widgets) and your game console (another new arrival via Xbox 360’s recent update).

Mossinac also announced the introduction of a new Facebook app for Nokia’s Series 40 devices. The app will allow for status updates from a homescreen widget.

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