Sweet
Monday, December 28, 2009
Wednesday, December 16, 2009
Facebook Testing Reply by E-mail Feature
Finally, all of those e-mail notifications you get from Facebook might become useful, as it appears that the social network is testing functionality that lets you reply to status updates (and conversations you’re involved with via others’ updates) via e-mail.
The feature’s not enabled for everyone yet, but DownloadSquad has seen it and says “it works seamlessly and it’s fast.” We’ve contacted FacebookFacebook
to try and get some more details on when it’s being rolled out to more users, and also if it might apply to Facebook messages (we can dream, right?).
In addition to being a useful functionality, this is actually a fairly significant strategic move by Facebook, as essentially they’ve decided to sacrifice pageviews (by not forcing you to log in to comment) for conversation. In the long-term, that’s probably a smart decision, as it makes the Facebook social graph even stickier and alternatives (like TwitterTwitter) less necessary.
Update: A Facebook spokesperson tells us: “We are testing this feature and hope to roll it out to all users soon.”
Saturday, December 12, 2009
Thursday, December 10, 2009
Compare the Meerkat
Meerkat toy sells for £920 on eBay
- Thu, 10 Dec 2009
- Web User
- Comment on this article
A limited edition Aleksandr Orlov Meerkat toy has been snapped up on eBay for £920, with proceeds going to charity.
One of the first Aleksandr Orlov meerkat toys to be auctioned off on eBay has been sold for a staggering £920.
The item had 46 bids and the proceeds from this auction listing will go to The Shooting Star Children's Charity.
A limited edition run of the toys, based on the star of the Compare the Meerkat adverts, were due to be sold exclusively in Harrods in the run up to Christmas.
A reservation list on the department stores website had to be closed the day after the announcement because all 1,500 talking Aleksandr Orlov toys had been sold.
But, because demand was so high, Harrods released a statement earlier this week saying that chairman Mohammed Al Fayed had decided to give all the toys to a select number of children's charities.
These charities have since put a number of the donated toy meerkats on eBay. Other similar listings will be ending this weekend.
Great Christmas savings when you subscribe to Web User magazine. Order now and save up to 30%.
via webuser.co.uk
Simples.....
Thursday, December 3, 2009
PetVille Launches on Facebook: Like FarmVille for Cute Pets
Just a couple of weeks ago, popular Facebook games maker Zynga trademarked the name PetVille, hinting at the theme for their next wildly popular casual game on the social network and other platforms (Myspace, iPhone, etc.). Today, Games.com reports that PetVille has launched.
Zynga is also the maker of FarmVille, which just yesterday was touted by a FacebookFacebook
spokesperson as being bigger than Twitter in terms of an active userbase. The company followed up on the formula early last month with an aquatic-themed title dubbed FishVille, and now PetVille joins the ranks of of other popular pet simulation games like PlayFish’s Pet Society, which borrow mechanics from popular casual Nintendo titles like Nintendogs and Animal Crossing.
In PetVille, you create and customize your own sugary cute animals, feed and care for them, and earn through gameplay (or buy) the resources to decorate your home, buy better food, give gifts to other players and so on. In the tradition of other Zynga titles and other casual social games on Facebook, MySpaceMySpaceand elsewhere, the game mechanics are relatively simple to learn and the titles are easy to pick up and play for short stretches of time — leading to that addictive quality of reinforcement and reward that characterizes frequent revisitation of your virtual domain.
Check out a demo video of PetVille below and let us know your thoughts. Are you hopelessly drawn to any of these casual titles? It’s okay to admit it: You’re among friends here. Friends who may help you on your FarmVille farm.
Another one......
Monday, November 30, 2009
5 Big Changes to Watch in Facebook’s Upcoming Redesign [Screenshots]
Just over a month ago, Facebook rolled out a new homepage redesign. Now it looks like the social network isn’t completely satisfied with the results, as it’s now testing yet another homepage redesign.
We don’t know when the new design will launch yet, but we have analyzed several screenshots of the new FacebookFacebook
that were sent to us. While most of the changes are minor, there are a few that really stand out and reveal Facebook’s strategy and future direction.
Here are our top five observations about the upcoming Facebook homepage redesign, along with screenshots:
Changes to Facebook’s Redesign
1. All of the notifications have been moved to the top left. Notifications, requests, and inbox are prominently displayed next to the Facebook logo. Chat remains on the bottom, however.
2. Search is far more important in this redesign. As my fellow usability experts can attest, placing the search box in the middle of the page instead of the right hand side increases the number of searchers users make. Facebook wants to focus on its real-time search engine as it prepares to compete with Twitter.
3. Your profile picture and status appears on the homepage. If you look on the current homepage design, you’ll find the updates of all of your friends, but yours isn’t constantly there, reminding you to update your old, outdated status.
This is a problem Facebook has needed to fix for a while. Now it’s addressed with a new section at the top left of the homepage with your face and your most recent status update, along with a prompt to update your status.
4. There’s a new border around the main content. It separates your left-hand navigation and notifications from your Facebook news feed.
5. The ability to see your inbox from the homepage. We want to stress how important this change is to the new Facebook design. It gives you direct access to your most recent messages without leaving the homepage, which should increase engagement.
Facebook’s Goals
Facebook hasn’t changed all that much with the design. To us, it’s more like a tweak to help improve engagement numbers that have probably been lagging.
The reemphasis seems to surround search, the inbox, responding to notifications, and status updates. Moving the search box is a very smart move as the company looks to make search a core experience, like it is currently with TwitterTwitter
.
Being able to view the inbox from the homepage should also spur more messages. Finally, prompting users to update their status, something present in older iterations of the Facebook homepage, will likely increase the amount of content users generate.
We’re going to investigate this design and find out when it launches. In the meantime, let us know what you think of the new Facebook in the comments.
Thanks Matt Schlicht for the tip!
Thursday, November 26, 2009
Wednesday, November 25, 2009
Thursday, November 19, 2009
Sunday, November 8, 2009
Zynga’s FishVille Sleeps With The Fishes For Ad Violations
Zynga’s FishVille Sleeps With The Fishes For Ad Violations: "
"
Zynga’s most recent Facebook game, FishVille, has temporarily been taken offline by Facebook for advertising violations.
This is a relatively light slap on the wrist since the game only launched two days ago and had a couple of thousand users (Update: Zynga says FishVille had 875,000 users yesterday. wow). Zynga’s other games, including FarmVille with 63 million monthly users, remain online, despite the fact that they were showing the same ads.
But this does send a clear message to Zynga and other game developers that Facebook isn’t ignoring the problem. Whether it’s a real concern over the user experience or simply embarrassment from the press suggesting Facebook is a haven for scammers is somewhat irrelevant.
Facebook has also shut down a total of four ad networks in recent months for ad violations, including Tatto Media and Gambit. Other networks, such as SendMe Mobile, which was founded by ex-CNET executives, have largely taken their place by offering similarly questionable offers that trick users into mobile subscriptions.
This is also a bit of an arms race. Zynga may be specifically filtering Facebook employees from seeing ads that violate Facebook terms and conditions, making it difficult for Facebook to enforce the rules.
And the relationship between the two companies is complicated. Facebook battling Zynga on the advertising scams. But Zynga is also one of Facebook’s largest advertisers, probably accounting for between 10% and 20% of total Facebook revenue.
Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.
Friday, October 30, 2009
Thursday, October 29, 2009
Friday, October 9, 2009
Update to Google Sites Demonstrates What the GDrive Could Look Like
Update to Google Sites Demonstrates What the GDrive Could Look Like
Written by Frederic Lardinois / October 9, 2009 9:23 AM / 1 Comments
We have been hearing rumors about the Google Drive online storage service for years now. This mythical GDrive would give users the ability to easily store and access all of their files in the cloud. Lots of other services already offer this, of course, but few of them are at the center of our online lives as much as Google is. Yesterday, Google Sites, a service that lets users build their own websites without ever having to touch the HTML or CSS code, just launched an update to its unified 'insert' dialog. This dialog brings together all of your files from almost all of Google's services and looks a lot like we would imagine the GDrive to look like.
Even more interesting, as Alex Chitu at the Google Operating System blog point out, is that you can use this link to access the 'document picker' used in Google Sites directly - though most of the items in it are meant to be inserted somewhere else and don't open in the standalone dialog (yet?). Internally, according to Chitu, Google calls this service OnePick, though we weren't able to find any other references to this so far.
What makes this dialog interesting is that this is likely the first time Google has brought all of these services together and also made it easy to search for documents across all of these services. Of course, in the context of Google Sites, it makes perfect sense to see all of these assets in one dialog, but until now you couldn't directly access Picasa's albums from Google Sites, for example.
We can't be sure if this is really a harbinger of the Google Drive, but hopefully Google will bring this interface to other services like Gmail or even Google Wave.
Posted inGoogle, News and tagged with
google, google drive, google sites
Print This Digg Share
Related Entries
Comments
Subscribe to comments for this post OR Subscribe to comments for all ReadWriteWeb posts
Perhaps Google should just buy Dropbox. I find it be a great product and Google could really scale it to millions of users. Moreover integrate into gmail and more.
Posted by: Anthony Batt
RWW SPONSORS
FOLLOW @RWW ON TWITTER
RECENT JOBS
POPULAR TAGS
- iphone
- search
- microsoft
- mobile
- social media
- yahoo
- trends
- music
- apple
- video
- myspace
- advertising
- youtube
- social networking
- amazon
- firefox
- rss
- semantic web
- friendfeed
- android
- security
- social networks
- mobile web
- blogging
- privacy
- digg
- politics
- data portability
- enterprise
- marketing
- wikipedia
- adobe
- news
- api
- apps
- browsers
- chrome
- developers
- flickr
- lifestreaming
- gmail
- app
- mozilla
- cloud computing
- ebooks
- obama
TEXT LINK ADS
Friday, October 2, 2009
Twitter Labs Coming Soon: Productivity Booster or Unnecessary Clutter?
First, Twitter announced it would be bringing a new Lists feature online to build groups right into the popular social networking site. Now it’s going a step further towards making the service more professionally relevant by introducing a Twitter Labs feature, according to The Next Web.
Like Google Labs and Facebook Prototypes before it, Twitter Labs will allow developers to test out new features for the site with a voluntary beta community prior to their official release. Not only that, but Labs would allow outside developers to create and work on add-ons and other features that could then become deeply integrated with Twitter itself, instead of just being relegated to external clients that use the API.
The news comes via the Future of Web Apps conference currently taking place in London, where Twitter engineer Britt Selvitelle made the announcement earlier today. Based on the announcement, it sounds like Twitter is planning something in between Mozilla’s Firefox add-ons and Google’s Labs playground for experimental features.
While this is undoubtedly good news for people looking to get something more out of Twitter, I’m wondering if it doesn’t run counter to the core idea behind the service’s success to date. What I like about Twitter is its simplicity, as opposed to the layers and complexity of Facebook. While browsing Facebook is a time-consuming, involved process for me, it’s easy to keep Twitter active in the background all day, popping in and out when the mood strikes while still easily disengaging when necessary.
Twitter add-ons and apps threaten to complicate the process. I dread the day when my tweet timeline is cluttered with survey results and invitations to try out such-and-such disguised personal data mining application. Perhaps I’m being overly fatalistic, but Facebook’s track record shows that such things are possible.
On the other hand, with enough oversight on the part of Twitter, and with responsible API usage, Twitter Labs could open the door to making the service perfectly suited for each individual user. Until evidence proves otherwise, though, I remain skeptical.
What do you think of this announcement?
Everyone's at it !
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)