I Beg Your Parton - Filed under 'facebook'

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Bad news for Turntable.FM as Facebook launch collaborative music listening

Long time readers will remember that I raved about Turntable.FM last summer. It truly changed my music consumption habits within a week.

Of course the music industry quickly identified it as a threat, rather than a solution to solve their fucked business model, and forced Turntable.FM to block all traffic from the US. As I wrote at the time, these actions are pointless as it is easy to spoof a US IP address. Still the hassle eroded the group I was regularly DJ'ing with and my usage dropped off to near zero.

What a huge missed opportunity.

I've been keeping tabs on Turntable.FM's attempts to secure the licensing they need to re-open to non US customers, but so far silence.

Then the news I'm sure they were dreading. Facebook announced on Thursday that they were launching "Listen with" which basically does exactly what Turntable.FM does, except of course you are locked into the Facebook platform.

The blog post says it is rolling out now, and I assume that Facebook have enough lawyers, muscle and money to make the music labels play nice. Its amusing reading the comments on the blog post praising Facebook for coming up with such a cool idea.

Whilst writing this post I checked in on Turntable.FM for any news and the site was down. I'm not sure if that was scheduled maintenance, or coincidence, but their Twitter account hasn't posted for 48 hours either. There is no mention of the Facebook announcement in their stream.

I can hear the biting of lips in New York from here.

Tagged Music facebook social turntable.fm

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New Facebook Timeline Style Profile

Annoyingly only fellow Facebook developer accounts can see the new style profile, so here is a grab to show you what it looks like...

Tagged facebook

Posted

Weekly Wrap inc. #f8 #twitter #google #uncrunched #yam

This post is a wrap of this weeks stories in tech, social and mobile that caught my eye...

Facebook F8

The biggest event was of course the annual F8 Facebook conference.

New timeline profile view, and deeper interaction via new verb buttons were the highlight announcements. You can read about it here, here and the Spotify bit here.

F8 also inspired me to write my first ever tweet that anyone seems to have cared enough about to retweet it a whole bunch of times! If you know the developer hack, you can see my new Facebook timeline style profile page here.

Michael Arrington launches UNCRUNCHED

The fall out at TechCrunch continues with Michael Arrington launching his own site, UNCRUNCHED. You would have though he could have found a higher res photo ;-)

How to throw a REAL party

Call Scott Parker! Check out his recent Forbes cover story.

Google+ API

Lets hope finally exposing an API gives Google+ a shot in the arm, becuase frankly I think its the biggest pile of over hyped doo-doo since, er, Wave? Already a few services I use [Empire Avenue and Klout] have adopted the API, although judging from the results I'm not sure how useful the first version is.

CANT miss event in London

I hear a rumour that Jason Calacanis is the latest to sign up for this.

and to end...

Not one, but TWO shameless BlueVia plugs...

Firstly the rather exciting, some even called it seminal, news that Twitter has integrated into BlueVia's MMS API to allow O2 UK customers to upload photos into their Twitter timeline. Secondly if you are a developer in the UK, make sure you get involved with London Mobile Week. Over The Air 2011 kicks us off, and we are giving away £10,000 worth of free advertising spend as first prize. Yes we ARE that awesome!

Tagged Google bluevia facebook news twitter weekly wrap

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Facebook pulls daily deals service after four-month trial

via brandrepublic.com

Kudos to Facebook for taking a tough decision. Like Google with Wave and Video, a key to agile innovation is not just launching new stuff 24/7, but also knowing when to kill stuff. Story here:
http://www.brandrepublic.com/bulletin/digitalambulletin/article/1087461/faceb...

Tagged Marketing facebook

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Mark Zuckerberg interview from 2005

via youtube.com

Continuing on my Sunday nostalgia trip, check this interview with Zuck's before he was the CEO of a community larger than most countries...love the bit at 2:51 where he is impressed two people in a London internet cafe were on the site.

Tagged facebook social

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Google Will Take Only 5% Of In-Game Sales

via businessinsider.com

According to a Business Insider article yesterday Google will offer a 25% lower commission rate compared to Facebook for in game transactions. Whilst this sounds like great news for developers, in comes with a huge asterisk and slug of small print - the 5% rate is only a promotional offer, and at the moment there is no detail on the length of the promotion or the standard commission rate once the offer has ended.

You can read the Business Insider article here: http://www.businessinsider.com/google-will-take-only-5-of-in-game-sales-faceb...

Tagged apps business models developers facebook google

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Grab your vanity Facebook email while you can!

I'm not sure why, but Facebook offering @facebook.com addresses kind of passed me by. There has been an upgrade to the Facebook message functionality and you can now receive email into your Facebook inbox. All part of Mr Zuckerberg's ploy to keep your eyeballs firmly fixed on his site and not Gmail or Hotmail, who could be putting advertising in front of you instead of him! Anyway, just a quick post to point out that with 500 million plus people on Facebook now, you are going to have to move super fast to have any chance of grabbing your preferred vanity address, rather than being left with some crappy combination of name and numbers. Kind of like Facebook's 2009 release of vanity URL's for your Facebook profile - did you get yours? I did :-) So despite me missing this completely, and there being way too many 'James Parton's' on Facebook to shake a stick at, I was kind of amazed to see jamesparton@facebook.com sitting there waiting for me to grab. So I did. Just now in fact! If you haven't already, you can reserve your preferred moniker by clicking "Messages" in the left hand menu of your "Profile" page view. First time round you should see something like this:

Click on "claim your Facebook email' at the top of the page, and cross your fingers that you still have something nice left to grab while the pop up loads...

Once you have reserved it, any email sent to your @facebook.com address will now appear in your Facebook inbox.

The official Facebook blog post announcing this is here.

Good luck!

Tagged facebook

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2010 through the eyes of the digital giants

All the big online sites are releasing their wrap up's of 2010 ahead of the new year. Here is a selection of the best...

Facebook publishes it 2010 Memology: Top Status Trends of the Year Twitter provides a comprehensive run down in it's "Twitter 2010: The year in review" covering Who's new, Top trending topics, Most powerful, Most retweeted, with the final instalment coming soon! Google: Zeitgeist 2010: Year in Review

YouTube Rewind 2010: Year in Review

Happy New Year!

Tagged 2010 Google facebook review twitter you tube

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Friends Electric or Billy No Mates?

What I noticed this last weekend was just how much of my online time I now spend managing lists of friends I have scattered across the various sites & online services I use. Every time I update my personal website I have to remember to post in four different places to ensure the people that have indicated they are interested in what I'm producing get to hear about the update.

I don't know about you but I feel I'm at breaking point and now refuse to join any other social networking type service, not because I don't enjoy exploring a new innovative product, it's simply I just don't have the time to invest in building up yet another isolated island of friends. It will have to be a one in one out policy from now on.

I'm not the most prolific online friend maker, but here's an idea of what I'm faced with managing, by service and number of friends / contacts:

LinkedIn (686), MySpace (505), Outlook / Blackberry / SIM Card (383), Twitter (202), Plaxo (187), Facebook (160), Hotmail / MSN (118), My Forum mailing list (25), YouTube (12)
That's a total of 2,278 people.

How many of these are duplicates? How many of them are "engaged" and regularly contacting me or visiting my site? How many of them are connected to other contacts I know? How many could introduce me to the killer contact to achieve my next business objective? I have no idea!

This isn't an exercise in "how many friends have you got?", just to request for someone smart to come up with a way of managing this mess from one simple interface, a one stop friend shop in essence.

Islands without interoperability have been proven to hold back the potential of great ideas time and time again. The internet has brought great innovation and services to the mobile industry, but the mobile industry has some learning's to share back.

We got some pretty basic things right. Going on a business trip? Well I can travel around the entire world and my phone will just work, however to charge it I need a bag of power adapters because the folks in the power companies never sat down to work out what a plug should look like.

Phone calls, text messages, and increasingly picture messages (but admittedly we have some work to do there) wouldn't be as useful or as prevalent if you could only communicate with people on your own network. It's the crossing of boundaries and universal communication that drives adoption.

So there's the tip. Feeds, RSS, mash up's are only the first step in making this stuff easier. FriendFeed is a step in the right direction, aggregating together various service updates and feeds, however it's the friend management that is burning all my time and limiting what I can do with these services.

I need a single site that can aggregate all these islands of friends together, which can be manipulated to show different views like "service of origin" e.g. Facebook, YouTube, plus handle updates and messaging from a single interface.

Taking it a step further can we achieve a single online address book serving all of our digital needs, accessible from your mobile phone, PC, online services, car, TV / set top box? I suspect technology is not the issue here, probably more an issue of trust, security and ensuring provision of consistent, reliable network connectivity.

Get this right and suddenly your "friends" become a really invaluable tool and asset to get stuff done. Friends become electric. If it carries on like this I can't afford the overhead and would prefer to be Billy no mates!

Tagged facebook hotmail linkedIn msn myspace plaxo social twitter youtube

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New Facebook Timeline Style Profile

Weekly Wrap inc. #f8 #twitter #google #uncrunched #yam

Facebook pulls daily deals service after four-month trial

Google Will Take Only 5% Of In-Game Sales

Grab your vanity Facebook email while you can!

2010 through the eyes of the digital giants

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