Family Learning Center

Posts Tagged ‘Web Service’

Chatroulette Being Used for Marketing? Say It Ain’t So!

That didn’t long. Leave it to marketers to find a way to use any innovative new web service to promote their own ends. The latest example? A Chatroulette contest launched by international clothing brand French Connection. According to contest rules, participants are asked if they can “conquer the sinister world of Chatroulette” by charming a member of the opposite sex. (Initially, the contest was for men only, but due to protests, the rules were adjusted to permit women the opportunity to try and seduce men, too. Oh joy.)

Sponsor

According to the initial company blog post about the contest, “if you rise above the seas of failing men and charm a woman on Chatroulette,” the company promises to give you a voucher worth 250 pounds which you can spend at the company’s retail stores. The blog post then provides an example of what they mean by a “seduction attempt” by way of a screenshot of a Chatroulette chat session – and be warned, it’s not what we would consider safe for work. Instead, what French Connection is promoting is essentially a nod to the often perverse nature of the popular webcam-surfing site.

Chatroulette for Marketing: Risky or Brilliant?

Although the French Connection brand may pride themselves on their youthful, hip nature, it’s an arguably risky move to promote themselves via a service as odd, off-the-wall, and yes, occasionally very disturbing as Chatroulette. Like Casey Neistat recently explained in a charming video demo of this latest Internet craze, on any given day, Chatroulette is 71% male, 15% female and 14% pervert.

In fact, it’s the possibility of running into something odd – or rather someone odd doing something odd- that makes Chatroulette so exciting for its users. Like the game of Russian Roulette from which its name is derived, most of the time nothing remarkable happens – you run into another bored voyeur looking back and you and maybe even have a casual conversation. But every now and then…bang!

And it’s the bang that seems to appeal to French Connection. They want to send out their customers into the wild, wild west of Chatroulette to become the very sort of creepy perverts that make the site so darned intriguing. So now, dear Chatroulette users, you’ll have to wonder whether that freaky guy/gal hitting on you is doing so because they’re actually a weirdo or if they’re just trying to win a few bucks to spend at a clothing store.

Thanks to French Connection’s bravery, they have the honor of being the first brand to attempt using Chatroulette for marketing purposes. However, if the contest goes well (i.e., it generates a lot of press), other marketers will likely soon follow suit.

Is that a good thing? We’re not so sure. At least, it’s not good for us, the Chatroulette surfers. Marketers, though, may think it’s a downright brilliant move. And maybe it is – after all, who would have thought that anyone could have figured out how to promote a brand on a service like this? Still, we sort of wish the marketers would leave this one alone. Stick to Facebook and Twitter and the other straight-laced social sites of the Internet – leave Chatroulette and all its unrestricted debauchery alone.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

FourWhere Mashes Up Foursquare and Google Maps

Sooner or later, every popular web service with an API spawns a Google Maps mashup. FourWhere, which launches today, combines data from the increasingly popular location-based social network Foursquare with a Google Maps-based interface. Thanks to this, you can now easily find Foursquare venues around your current location or a location you plan to visit. The site was developed by social media analytics service Sysomos.

Sponsor

The FourWhere service itself is pretty basic. You simply browse the Google Maps interface and a right-click anywhere on the map will bring up a menu that allows you to either see nearby venues on the map or user comments about these nearby venues. In the future, Sysomos also plans to add additional services based on the company’s extensive database of social media sources.

First Step Towards Integrating LBS Analytics Into Sysomos’ Main Services

As Sysomos co-founder Nilesh Bansal told us, the company plans to bring location-based sources – including Foursquare – to Heartbeat and MAP, Sysomos’ professional social media and analytics and media monitoring applications. For Sysomos, launching a free service is just a first stop towards learning more about this space.

As services like Foursquare, Gowalla and others continue to gain momentum and slowly inch towards the mainstream, social media monitoring services like Sysomos or Radian6 need to give their customers to monitor these communities. If these services go mainstream, a bad comment on Foursquare about a restaurant could easily have the same effect as a negative Twitter message or Yelp review.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Mashery Plugs Its APIs Into $5.5 Million In New Funding From Cisco, Others

These days, APIs are a must for just about every web service. It’s no longer enough to simply be a web site, everyone wants to be a platform, and APIs are the hooks that enable that by way of data. Since 2006, Mashery has existed as a company to both enable APIs for companies and manage them. And today that vision is being rewarded again with a $5.5 million Series C round of funding.

The round, led by Cisco, is also being participated in by existing investors, Formative Ventures, First Round Capital, and 406 Ventures. Cisco, which is a key player in networking, video, mobile, and cloud services is a good investor for Mashery to pick up as the web continues to evolve to new devices and move towards the cloud. The Cisco investment should also help open new businesses to the idea of using Mashery’s services.

“It’s been interesting to see the market for API services develop. While there are still plenty of people who can’t even spell ‘API’, we’re seeing some amazing brands not just testing the waters of innovation for the sake of innovation, but actually driving significant revenue and business growth through their API,” Mashery  CEO Oren Michels tells us. He continues, “More and more companies are seeing the power of putting their services – whether they be e-commerce, media, data, or anything else – where their customers want to interact with them rather than expecting their customers to do everything at the company’s website. Opening an API is the fastest, easiest and cheapest way to interact with users on third party platforms and mobile devices, and to enable new services that they couldn’t offer themselves. I’m really excited to see how this will grow in the next few years.”

With the new money, Mashery will expand its product as well as hire more people in sales and marketing to further cement itself in certain verticals. Currently, Mashery has over 40,000 developers connected to its network which includes clients such as Best Buy, Netflix, Reuters, the New York Times, and Trulia.

Mashery had raised $8.2 million over its previous rounds, so the new money brings that total up to $13.7 million. In the space, Mashery competes with 3scale.

Read the whole story…

Why No Love for the Universal Inbox?

A couple of years ago, the new launch from Webwalks, a universal inbox, news aggregator, password manager and kitchen sink-type application would have caught my eye. I’d rush out to try it, merging my multiple accounts under its one roof then wait to see how well my life improved, how much time I saved. But today, I’m more ambivalent about these sorts of applications. The concept of a universal inbox for tracking everything under the sun now leaves me cold.

That’s not to say that merging of social networks with the inbox in and of itself is a bad idea – Google Buzz, Xobni, and Outlook’s new social connector all offer innovative ways to augment the inbox experience. But there’s a key difference between these apps and those promising a “universal inbox” – they come to you, in the inbox you already know and love.

Sponsor

The Sad State of the Universal Inbox

The idea of a universal inbox is smart. On paper, that is. In our “information overloaded” modern age, messages come at us left and right from multiple email accounts, instant messaging programs, SMS on our mobile phones and from social networking sites like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. And yet, none of the “universal inbox” applications have ever really taken off.

We’ve seen some worthy contenders though. Fuser, NutshellMail and Inbox2, for example, all merge messages from multiple platforms into one unified service. The more clever of these programs provide a way to make Facebook the interface you use to check your mail instead of forcing you into some new web service. However, even that option hasn’t attracted a large following.

Inbox2’s Facebook app “emailstream” only has 245 active users. NutshellMail’s does a little better with just over 5400 users. But when you think of the hundreds of millions of registered users on Facebook (400 million at the last count), these numbers aren’t even a drop in a bucket – they’re more like a grain of sand on a long stretch of beach.

The sites’ web destinations do a little better, but only a service called OtherInbox is doing well, with 67,000+ visitors last month. NutshellMail seems to be hanging in there, too – even growing its traffic a bit lately – and yet it attracted just under 24,000 uniques last month (according to Compete – not always the best source of statistics but good enough for this quick glance). An article on Digg’s homepage often get more hits than that! And it’s an understatement to say these numbers fall short of the millions who routinely log into online email accounts from Gmail, Hotmail and the like.

So what’s wrong? Why aren’t these services more popular?

People Want to Use Their Own Inbox, Not Some 3rd-Party Service

The answer to that question has its roots in what people expect from an email application. Email services from Yahoo, Microsoft, Google and yes, even AOL, among others are designed from the ground-up to provide that company’s vision of the best messaging experience. The applications are feature-rich with advanced options like POP3 and IMAP support, forwarding, filters, labels, auto-replies, vacation responders, spam filters and more.

Third-party aggregation-type applications don’t always have the same feature set. Plus, they typically have their own very un-email like interface – the applications tend to treat your email like activity streams on a social network, not critical messages that need to be filed, forwarded, replied to, or turned into tasks and calendar appointments. The exception here seems to be OtherInbox – they offer a real inbox complete with calendar tie-ins, stars for saving messages, spam filters and other typical email features. Not surprisingly, they’re the one doing the best out of all the other inbox applications listed here. However, they’re not actually a “universal” inbox. They don’t claim to merge all your messaging services into one – they simply help you better sort and organize your mail. So, really, they don’t count.

Socializing as an Inbox Layer

A better solution to the merging of messaging and social is, interestingly enough, exactly what Google has just launched with Buzz. Sure, that service has gotten off to a rough start with bugs, missing features and of course, the privacy issues, but the concept is solid. In Buzz, social networking becomes an additional layer to your inbox – one click and the display changes to a stream of social activity; click again and you’re back to your email. Important “social” messages (those you created, commented on or liked in Buzz) grab your attention by re-appearing in your inbox proper.

Other companies have similar ideas about socializing email. Xobni, for example, offers a plugin for Outlook that extracts social information about your contacts (among many other things). Microsoft, too, is just now launching its social layer for Outlook – the Social Connector which optionally lets you integrate LinkedIn and soon Facebook and MySpace into your inbox.

These programs all have a better shot at unifying the inbox to create a truly universal email application. They provide you with your “real” inbox and all its features while layering it with a social element. You don’t have to migrate to a new service entirely. Meanwhile the standalone universal inbox applications available today probably won’t last. They would be better off developing their service into a plugin or add-on for the webmail and desktop programs that people use now instead of trying to convince people to start checking their email elsewhere.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Too Easy: How a Simple Hack Can Turn Your Numeric Google Profile URL Back into a Gmail Address

Over the last few days, there has been a lot of buzz about how much private information your public Google profile contains if you don’t choose the right settings. The URL of your profile alone can already give away your Gmail address. To hide this address from public view, you can switch your profile URL away from showing your name to using an address that features a 21-digit number instead of your username. However, as it turns out, this isn’t a foolproof method either. By using a very simple trick, anybody can quickly figure out your Gmail address from these numbers.

Sponsor

Security blogger The Harmony Guy just told us about how this hack works. While the way to reveal these addresses isn’t obvious, you can easily follow along and try this method out yourself.

How does it work?

First, you simply copy the numbers from a user’s Google profile and then append these numbers to http://picasaweb.google.com/[numbers].

For some users who haven’t customized their Picasa page, the username (which is also their Gmail address) will come right up. If the user has customized the account and added a nickname, you simply have to replace the URL in the address bar with javascript:alert(_user.name); and a small pop-up window will show you the username.

Caveats

It’s important to note that this only works for Google users who also use the Picasa web service. This, however, is likely a large percentage of Gmail users.

How to Protect Yourself

In Picasa Web Albums, go to the settings page and add a new username. Then, select the new username for your gallery URL. As The Harmony Guy points out, you may also want to edit your nickname.

Is this a major issue for Google? Probably not. But given the ruckus around privacy, Buzz and Google Profiles these days, it is disheartening to see that it is this easy to circumvent the only way to hide your Gmail address from public view. After all, if you want to use Google Buzz, Google forces you to have a public profile.

Discuss

Read the whole story…

PollDaddy Hits 1 Billion Page Views a Month, Major Updates Coming Soon

According to WordPress founder Matt Mullenweg, poll/survey web service PollDaddy has just hit the one billion monthly page views mark.

Other than Gravatar, this makes the PollDaddy network the second Automattic web property – excluding Gravatar – to reach this milestone. Automattic’s holdings inlcude content management system and blogging software WordPress.com, spam blocker Akismet and more.

Sponsor

In this graph from Quantcast, we can see monthly impressions sliding from around 500 million in August 2009 to one billion now:

PollDaddy’s traffic, according to Quantcast, also shows a decent breakdown of regulars frequenting the site:

Our sources tell us a major redesign is underway, one that will make using the service more intuitive for end users and will promote the use of surveys.

Moreover, users of the company’s WordPress.org plugin will now be able to add PollDaddy’s rating feature. This feature allows users to place ratings on their blog posts, pages and comments, like so:

Mullenweg writes, “Watch for some other major updates coming up soon.” As frequent users of PollDaddy on this platform, he can be sure we’ll keep an eye out for news about this service.

In honor of this momentous traffic milestone, we present you this commemorative poll, powered by PollDaddy:

What other Automattic web property has achieved one billion monthly pageviews?(survey)

Discuss

Read the whole story…

Yahoo BOSS To Survive Microsoft Deal In Some Form; Details Still Hazy

After months of silence, Yahoo’s BOSS team is opening up to frustrated third party developers about the future of the powerful search platform. A few hours ago, Yahoo’s Ashim Chhabra left a post on the BOSS group forum, offering an explanation for why it has taken so long for Yahoo to relay information to developers, and giving them some idea of BOSS’s fate. The good news? BOSS will continue to live on in some form, but it’s unclear exactly how things will be changing and which services will be powered by Microsoft technology — and there may be fees involved. That uncertainly will probably leave some developers on edge, but at least they know the project isn’t being scrapped entirely.

Chhabra’s post was clearly prompted by the actions of some frustrated BOSS developers, who grew tired of being left in the dark and approached the Department of Justice to talk about how BOSS will be impacted by the Yahoo/Microsoft search deal. The DOJ heard their complaints, scheduling a conference call with them for next week. Chhabra’s post may help placate them for the time being. We’ve included his full post below:

Folks,

Thank you for your feedback. We understand your frustration. This process has been long for all of us due to the complex nature of our agreement with Microsoft, and we appreciate your patience.

Under this agreement, Yahoo! is permitted to continue offering the BOSS web service, with search results that would integrate Yahoo! services and content with algorithmic results provided by Microsoft. As always, our intention is to provide a BOSS offering as long as it makes business and economic sense to do so. We are still examining what the BOSS offering will consist of, with some services powered by Microsoft, unique content that Yahoo! currently provides, and the potential for additional Yahoo! content in the future.

Prior to the announcement of the Yahoo!-Microsoft search agreement, we’d already shared our intention to explore a fee-based structure for BOSS. We continue to explore an appropriate fee structure or other revenue model as we work through the future of BOSS.

As you know, we must receive regulatory clearance before actual implementation of the search deal with Microsoft can occur. Only then can we finalize the future shape of BOSS. Of course, we will provide additional clarity and certainty when we can.

Thanks for your attention!

Yahoo! BOSS team

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Read the whole story…

5 Very Last-Minute Gifts from the Internet Hero/Shopping Mall Zero

If you’re reading this, you already know you’re screwed.

Someone, somewhere has been forgotten on your gift list, and you’re scrambling. As per usual, we at RWW have got your back. Here are five ideas that will not only save you from certain disgrace but just might make you look a little more with it and wired than your loved ones expected.

Sponsor

1) Of-The-Month Clubs

Flowers, beers, books, even dog treats – for every hobby, there’s a club membership that will bring the recipient monthly or even weekly gifts. With this kind of gift, you’ll be the hero all year round – in fact it’ll give you and the lucky recipient added incentive to communicate more often if you don’t now.

2) Netflix Membership

For the movie buff or couch potato in your life, this gift says you condone and embrace the cinematic lifestyle. Memberships are tiered, so you can be as budget-conscious (or as generous) as you like.

3) Pro Apps or Paid Features

For all the free web apps we use and enjoy, there are often pro versions with special benefits. I’ve personally enjoyed a pro Flickr account for ages, and the RWW gang love the speedy, unlimited-HD goodness of our pro Vimeo account. If you have new parents in your life, try a kid-centric subscription model web service such as LilGrams.

4) Multimedia Gifts

Piracy is a dying art, so for the music, movie and game aficionados on your gift list, look around the web for legitimate sources of multimedia content. Gamers will love Microsoft Points for XBox Live or similar goodies for Wii and PS3. And for the youngsters and musicians, you can’t go wrong with an eMusic or similar subscription.

5) Know Thy Geek: Fonts, Domains, and Software

I’ve been lusting after a particular domain name for a few months now. If someone knew me well enough to buy it, that lady or dude would be the most awesome Santa to date. And I won some brownie points myself for buying a special person a very special font he’d been wanting for quite some time. Likewise, if you’ve heard a hobbyist or nerd enthusing about a software update that might qualify as a bit of a splurge, the holiday is the perfect time to surprise him or her with a shiny, new email notification or ZIP file.

These kinds of gifts show that you know the person well enough to understand and support his or her need to geek out. And what better gift is there, after all?

Discuss

Read the whole story…