LinkedIn launches iPad app
Reaching people through mobile devices is one of LinkedIn’s key initiatives and yet, the networking site for job-seeking professionals never had a proper app for tablets.
The number of LinkedIn members — all 150 million of them — who use mobile phones to access the site is growing at a fast clip. In Q1, LinkedIn said that 22 percent of its traffic came from mobile devices, up from 15 percent in Q4 2011.
On Wednesday, LinkedIn finally rolled out an app for iPads hoping to get more people to linger at the site longer.
Joff Redfern, head of mobile product at LinkedIn, said that they noticed specific times of the day that people would log on with their mobile devices. “What we saw, compared to the desktop usage, was huge spikes of usage during the day. One early in the morning from 6 to 9 — the “coffee session” — and the other big spike was from 7 pm to 11 pm–’ the couch session.’”
The free app, available through Apple’s App Store, has a whole bunch of features including one that syncs up to your calendar and will provide a profile of the people you are set to meet.
Facebook’s new class of apps expand the social vocabulary
Time was when “liking” something on Facebook was the standard way to recommend something on the social network.
Now Facebook users will have a whole new vocabulary at their disposal so they can tell friends they “want” tickets to an upcoming rock concert, they are “cooking” a certain dish or that they “ran” five miles in the park after work.
On Wednesday evening, Facebook announced the availability of more than 60 third-party appsthat can be integrated directly into Facebook, including apps from Ticketmaster, Airbnb, Foodspotting and Pinterest. Facebook also said that any software developer can now create their own such specialized apps for Facebook integration and submit the app to Facebook for approval.
Once you begin using one of these apps, your interactions within the app – say clicking on a dish you see in Foodspotting to note that you have “tried” it – are broadcast to the Facebook “ticker” for all your friends to see. The apps are also integrated into each user’s Timeline – the revamped version of a user’s personal profile page that Facebook has been gradually rolling out to its more than 800 million users. Now when you visit a friend’s Timeline, for instance, you might see a special section showcasing the top movies they’ve indicated that they want to see on the Rotten Tomatoes app, or the latest hotel reviews they’ve written with the TripAdvisor app.
The new apps are part of the so-called open graph feature that Facebook rolled out at its developer conference in September. The initial open graph rollout focused on integrating media apps from partners such as Spotify and Yahoo into Facebook, allowing users to notify friends of the music they were listening to, the news articles they were reading and the videos they were watching.
With the latest move, Facebook has opened itself up to a broader world of activity that can relate to just about anything an app-maker can think of. Among the initial third-party apps are ones that involve travel, food, fashion and fitness.
It’s a good bet that there will soon be open graph apps in even more categories, now that Facebook has opened the doors and effectively given software developers carte blancheto go wild (so long as the apps adhere to Facebook’s basic terms of service, of course).
anyone that hates the new facebook look.
this is what it used to look like
http://www.thenology.com/wp-content/uplo ads/2012/01/first-facebook-design.jpg
Facebook: home (at last) for the holidays
Since it was created in a Harvard dorm room in 2004, Facebook has moved its homebase around many times, relocating to the West coast and bouncing from building to building in Silicon Valley as its ranks have grown.
Now the company has finally settled down. Facebook said it had completed the move into its new corporate headquarters in Menlo Park, with the final wave of employees reporting for duty at the new office Monday morning.
Following the standard script for Web company “new office” announcements, Facebook proudly catalogued the various perks and cool design motifs on offer at its new digs in a blog post. Among the highlights: “micro kitchens;” exposed ductwork; breakaway “cozie” spaces with couches; and hallways coated in special chalkboard paint (one imagines engineers abruptly stopping mid-walk to passionately scrawl some cryptic formula on the wall, a la Goodwill Hunting).
Free dry-cleaning, a fitness center and two full-service cafes will also be available (the company is currently finishing construction on a central courtyard connecting the 10 buildings that is designed to mimic an urban street). For some reason, Facebook even made a point of noting that on-site doctors will also be part of the 57-acre campus.
The new flagship headquarters, which can accommodate far more than the 2,000 Facebook employees currently working there, marks the first of a few looming coming-of-age moments for the world’s No.1 Internet social networking site.
Facebook is expected to IPO next year, in an stock market debut that will mint at least one thousand millionaires with money to burn on new homes, cars and adventure.
Of course, spending all that money requires leaving the mothership, something which isn’t always easy at a company famous for occasional “lockdowns,” in which employees are known to work through the night for weeks at a time.
Autonomy CEO’s terrifying prediction: the rise of the surveillance society
As a general rule, senior executives at technology companies tend to try to make the public feel excited about the future and about technology’s role to improve it.
Mike Lynch, the CEO of Autonomy, must not have gotten that memo; or he decided to ignore it.
During a talk at the Techonomy conference on Monday, Lynch described a dark world in which today’s celebrated technologies, such as social networking and smartphones, become the nefarious tools of a surveillance society.
This vision, Lynch explained, is not some dystopian, parallel universe, but rather the inevitable end-product of era in which technology becomes ever-cheaper, smarter and ubiquitous.
“There are going to be sensors everywhere. We’re all carrying the most incredibly sophisticated devices that can see and hear and learn where they are,” he said. While governments have long had the resources to build an Orwellian state, Lynch said the real danger lies in what “any arbitrary group of people” will soon be able to do with the technology.
Imagine a smartphone app that automatically reads every car license plate that appears in front of it, Lynch hypothesized. Use social networking to connect a group of people wielding the same app, he posited, and suddenly that group has the ability to track almost anyone in a city.
“I can’t conceive of how privacy is going to survive the ability of the machines to actually understand the data they’re getting,” he said.
Tech wrap: Can Nook tablet take on Kindle Fire?
Let the low-end tablet wars begin. Barnes & Noble unveiled a Nook-branded tablet on Monday, the company’s answer to Amazon.com’s recently announced Kindle Fire. At $249, the 7-inch Nook tablet is a bit pricier than the $199 Fire, but Barnes & Noble is betting that consumers will pay the extra $50 for the device because it offers faster processing speeds and 16 gigabytes of storage space compared to the Amazon tablet’s 8 gigabytes. Both devices hit shelves next week. Barnes & Noble, which operates a chain of 700 U.S. bookstores, also lowered the price on its Nook e-book devices in an effort to take on Amazon’s line of Kindle e-readers, which were recently reduced in price.
Early reaction to the device was varied. One analyst characterized it to Reuters as a “wow” product, while another said it will keep “Barnes & Noble shoppers loyal.” All Things D’s Peter Kafka called Barnes & Noble’s product pitch “a bit muddled” when it came to explaining how people will access content on the device: “Unlike Amazon and its Kindle Fire, Barnes & Noble isn’t marketing its tablet with a proprietary cloud service that will get you access to music, movies and TV shows. Instead, the bookseller is leaving that up to other cloud-based services, like Netflix and Pandora. But make no mistake — these are cloud-based services,” he writes. Why then was the company so eager to play up the Nook Tablet’s extra storage capacity if it expects you’ll be streaming most content, not storing it, wonders Kafka. Engadget takes the new tablet through its paces in a hands-on video.
Google+ expanded its circles to make room for businesses who are looking to reach out to customers on the social network. Called Google+ Pages, the new service will allow corporate brands and businesses to set up a special page within the social network . Google said that 20 businesses, including Toyota, Pepsi and retailer Macy’s, have set up special pages so far, and that any organization will soon be able to join as well. Until now, only individual users have been able to sign up for Google+. Businesses are increasingly using online social services, such as Facebook, to reach new customers and to cement relationships with loyal customers through special offers and promotions.
A German court granted a preliminary injunction against Apple in a patent infringement case that banned the California company from selling some devices in Germany. But the ruling should not impact Apple’s sales in Germany as the company sells all its product there through a local subsidiary, which was not covered by the injunction, reports Reuters correspondent Poornima Gupta. The district court in Mannheim, Germany, said on Friday Apple may not sell certain mobile devices in Germany that infringe on two Motorola Mobility patents related to wireless technology. If Apple does sell the devices, it has to pay a fine of up to 250,000 euros, according to the court.
HTC said on Monday it will put equal investment weight on emerging markets next year as it does in developed ones like the U.S. and Europe, and will dip its toes back into the tablet market with a new model next year, reports Reuters correspondent Clare Jim from Taipei. HTC CEO Peter Chou told a media briefing HTC would not give up its “premium brand” image by expanding in emerging markets through cheap phones. Regarding tablets, Chou said: “Tablet is a market we would like to try and test, to see whether we can make ourselves stand out and prevent a me-too product.”
Google+ to Facebook: TMI!
Vic Gundotra, Google’s head of social, doesn’t care about every song his friends are listening to and every article they’ve read.
“We do not believe in over-sharing,” he said at the Web 2.0 conference in San Francisco on Wednesday.
Gundotra may not have said “Facebook,” but his comments were aimed directly at the world’s No.1 social networking service, which recently introduced a so-called “frictionless sharing” feature in which a user can elect to have all their online activities – such as the names of the videos they’re watching and the songs they’re listening to – automatically broadcast to their friends.
“Curation matters,” Gundotra said. “There is a reason why every thought in your head does not come out of your mouth.”
Gundotra’s fledgling social network, Google+, has only a fraction of Facebook’s more than 750 million users. And many observers have wondered whether the world really needs Google+, given that it doesn’t do anything drastically different from Facebook.
With Facebook increasingly pushing the boundaries on the amount of personal information that people share online, Google may have found a soundbyte-ready raison d’etre (that is, in addition to the strategic rationale of preventing Facebook from eating Google’s lucrative online advertising business).
“We want to do social in a way that is more like real life, where you actually take time to think about how you express your thoughts, your ideas,” Gundotra said.
“a user can elect to have all their online activities – such as the names of the videos they’re watching and the songs they’re listening to – automatically broadcast to their friends”
Wow, that’s just way beyond narcissistic. What in the world makes people think they’re so d*mned interesting that anyone gives a flying fig about what YouTube video they’re currently watching? I’ve even told my own brother to stop tweeting every restaurant he dines at. I would never annoy my friends like that. At least, if I want to keep them.
The Yahoo chronicles. Needs: new CEO. Has: new Flickr app
Yahoo opened the doors to the bunker on Wednesday, inviting reporters to its San Francisco outpost even as the company faces a barrage of questions about its future.
The event was to unveil a couple of new product announcements from Yahoo’s Flickr division, the 50-person photo-sharing product group based in San Francisco’s financial district.
The Flickr folks unveiled the official Flickr app for Android smartphones, with features such as built-in photo filters to spiff up pictures and various social networking capabilities. The other new product is called “photo session,” a real-time collaboration tool that allows groups of friends to flip through and play with online photo albums together in their Web browsers.
Yahoo executives outlined the company’s focus on mobile and social as a core part of it strategy going forward, promising an “accelerated pace of mobile offerings” and touting Yahoo’s ability to leverage what it referred to as users’ “interest graph” (which it distinguished from the “social graph” that Facebook controls and the “information graph” that Google dominates).
The elephant in the room however was the uncertain future of Yahoo, which fired Chief Executive Carol Bartz earlier this month and has retained investment bank Allen & Co as it undergoes a “strategic review” that many observers think will lead to the company’s break-up or sale.
Would the leadership gap distract Yahoo employees or undermine efforts to innovate and push forward with its mobile and social strategies?
Not according to Yahoo Vice President of applications and mobile product management Steve Douty, who said that Yahoo employees were “heads down,” and focused “on the same mission that we were before.”
Tech wrap: Bad smartphone bets burn investors
Smartphones are constantly reaching new heights in sleekness and cutting-edge technology, but investors in the U.S. wireless sector seem unconvinced. Weak results and poor growth in both major and minor telecoms firms nationwide helped spark an investor exodus from the sector, and analysts say small operators like MetroPCS and Leap Wireless have indicated they’ve simply lost faith in the promise that smartphones can boost growth. Popular with consumers and heavily subsidized to encourage uptake, investors now look to be assessing whether a future of ever-increasing costs for carriers is one they’d like to take part in.
In tech company earnings, professional networking site LinkedIn reported that its quarterly revenue more than doubled as the company endeavored to prove it can fulfill the promise of its splashy IPO. Used by professionals seeking jobs or contacts and companies seeking qualified applicants, LinkedIn was the first prominent U.S. social networking site to make its public trading debut.
The massive hack attack recently revealed by security company McAfee does much to underscore the fact that governments and companies are losing the war against cyber thieves. Security experts uncovered an unprecedented five-year series of cyber attacks on 72 organizations worldwide, including the United Nations, governments and major corporations. In this analysis, Reuters’ security correspondent William Maclean argues that it’s unclear if the unsettling disclosure will actually prompt rapid global action against cyber attacks – partly due to the reluctance of stigma-conscious companies and states to report the attacks.
After lashing out at rivals and accusing them of banding together to block Google’s attempts to bid on Nortel smartphone patents in an angry blog post, Google Senior Vice-President and Chief Legal Officer David Drummond had his claims of victimhood shot down with a single tweet by Frank Shaw, Vice President of Corporate Communications for Microsoft. In a development no doubt embarrassing for the Internet search giant, Shaw replied by tweeting an image of an email that showed that Google was offered a chance to make a joint bid for the Nortel patents, but turned it down.
In more bad news, Nokia Siemens Networks announced it began cutting 1,500 jobs from the 6,900 staff it acquired with its $1.2 billion acquisition of Motorola’s telecoms network unit in April. A Nokia spokesman said the process affects staff working in the GSM and Wimax technology divisions in several countries including the U.S. and Britain.
And in the social networking world, a new system of predicting “friends” based on the actual places individuals visit has been developed by researchers at Cambridge University in the UK. The new approach to “friend suggestions” looks at users’ regular haunts and finds other people with similar connections. Combined with the “friend-of-a-friend” method, this new system can increase the efficacy of the friend prediction system, say researchers.
Why the exodus from Facebook?
Any opinions expressed are the author’s own.
According to the Inside Facebook data service, Facebook lost about 6 million users in the U.S. in May (a claim the company disputes), dropping from 155.2 million to 149.4 million. That’s the first time U.S. numbers have dropped in more than a year.
Why the exodus from the world’s most popular social networking platform? While Daniel Sieberg, author of The Digital Diet, says it’s due to any number of reasons – from “Facebook Fatigue” to privacy issues to our inability to get the same benefits or rewards that we initially did when we first signed on – here are some of more personal, intimate reasons, according to those who have pulled the plug:
Don’t like what we’re seeing Ashley Hebert, 26, of New Bedford, Massachusetts, had seen one too many photos of her ex-boyfriend – whom she was hoping to get back together with – looking all too pleased with his new girlfriend. Painful as it was, she couldn’t stop looking and was even having her friends spy on her behalf. “I had to get off Facebook to stay sane.”
Fearful of what we’re becoming “I found myself looking at photographs from people I hadn’t been in touch with for 15 years, and didn’t particularly even care about,” says Faye Cook, a 65-year-old educational consultant in New York City. “I was becoming a bit of a snoop and in the end I thought, ‘Is nothing sacred anymore?’ It just didn’t seem right.”
Causing stress/anxiety Russ Maines, a 44-year-old attorney from Ithaca, NY, says he was becoming too preoccupied with what his Facebook friends were up to. What was everyone cooking for dinner? Who stubbed their toe? Whose boss yelled at them? Any weekend plans? He made sure everyone was aware of what he was up to as well. “Facebook wasn’t enhancing my life; it was detracting from it and causing a lot of anxiety and stress,” says Maines, who quit last October. “I’ve been much happier – and more relaxed – without it.”
For me, the desire to leave is slowly becoming greater. My only reason for still being on Facebook is the Events function. All my friends have stopped using other forms of invitations. However, as soon as G+ opens up to more people, I’ll delete my facebook account with glee. Reasons?
– Privacy: facial recognition, CONSTANTLY resetting user’s privacy settings to be wide open for new features, and the horrible preponderance of games. UGH.
First Look at the Google+ social network: The Top Secret Demo
One thing that’s clear about Google is that they’ve mastered the art of subterfuge.
At a time when leaks about product launches, acquisitions and potential hires are rife, Google resorted to extraordinary measures to ensure that word of its new social network, Google+, did not slip out ahead of Tuesday’s official announcement.
The company reached out to Reuters late on Friday about a special briefing related to some undisclosed YouTube news, even tasking a YouTube PR-man with a curious sartorial style to coordinate the meeting, to complete the red-herring.
So it was surprising to discover a grinning Vic Gundotra, Google’s head of social, and VP of Product Management Bradley Horowitz, in the meeting room at Google’s headquarters.
Clearly we weren’t here to talk about a new YouTube media partnership.
The pair quickly revealed what they had up their sleeve and proceeded to give a tour of a new social networking service that’s been one year in the making.
So what is Google+ like? And why would you want to invest the time and effort to create another social network if you’re already using Facebook and Twitter?
Promoting google+ votes is becoming a very hot business. Using these types of services could have negative or positive affects on SEO.
We just have to see how google treats them. Another place to buy google plus votes is bulkones.com
Will be interesting to see how this evolves over the next few months.
