The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘linked’

If you’re reading this post, there’s a good chance you have multiple online profiles scattered across various services, including Facebook, LinkedIn, Flickr, and Twitter. And one problem you may face is pulling all of this information together to build a single online identity — be it for personal use, or to create a professional online profile. Flavors.me is a new site launching today that looks to make this as simple as possible, and it does so with flying colors. After a three month long private beta, the site has just launched to the public.

The service is as simple as they come. After completing a basic sign up form, you link your Flavors.me page to any of 15 online services, with options that include Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, and LinkedIn (as well as any RSS feed). Flavors.me taps into these services via their APIs (you generally enter your credentials using OAuth or Facebook Connect), and within minutes you’re ready to start customizing your site.

All of your linked content is pulled into your Flavors.me page so it’s easy to access, but it’s never overwhelming — the site’s templates are minimalist, and hide everything but your name and a list of your online feeds/profiles at first. If you click on one of these feeds, the content will smoothly transition into view; it’s all very slick. You can also tweak your page’s color scheme, backgrounds, and layout to suit your taste (though there are only a handful of layouts to choose from initially).

You can get a feel for what’s possible by checking out my Flavors.me page, which took me all of ten minutes to set up — keep in mind that it’s entirely possible to make a page that looks better than this with a little more time.

There are plenty of other services out there that let you list all of your online presences in one place, with options including chi.mp, card.ly, UnHub, and even Google Profiles. But Flavors.me really makes the process extremely simple, and the results look great.

Flavors.me is free for its basic features, and will generate revenue through premium subscriptions, which are $20 a year. Premium features include the ability to use your own custom domain name, real time statistics, and the ability to include a contact form in your page (though obviously you could just include your Email address in the standard ‘About’ field).

Flavors.me was built by HiiDef, an incubator started by former Vimeo exec Jonathan Marcus and his brother, David Marcus.


Flavors.me from Jack Zerby on Vimeo.

As we first reported on Friday, Microsoft is adding some social hooks into Outlook 2010. Outlook will gain the ability to pull in profile information, photos, and update streams from LinkedIn, Facebook, and MySpace. You can try the LinkedIn plugin now in beta. The other social networks will be added later when Outlook 2010 goes on sale, probably in July.

The new social features make it look a lot more like Xobni, the social email startup backed by Vinod Khosla that Microsoft looked at buying nearly two years ago. Well, a poor man’s Xobni. With Xobni, which itself is a plugin for Outlook, you can pull in relevant contact information, photos, and social stream data from both LinkedIn and Facebook today. It also supports Twitter, and Hoover’s information on companies. Salesforce integration is currently in beta, and SharePoint is coming soon.

The idea behind bringing social streams into Outlook is that as you are reading or composing an email, you can see recent status updates or pictures of the person you are corresponding with to give you some instant context. The Outlook plugins are built on top its “Social Connector,” and was previewed last year. The Social Connector was really created for Microsoft SharePoint, which supports corporate profiles and file sharing. Getting the major social networks to write their own plugins directly for the Social Connector means that Outlook can support additional social streams down the road. Of course, these have to be written in .Net and sent out as executable files, but that’s a different issue.

The bigger issue is that the Social Connector will only work on Outlook 2010, whereas Xobni works on every version going back to Outlook 2003. Companies tend to replace Outlook at a glacial pace, but it is clear that Microsoft is trying to make Xobni a feature of Outlook. And it only took two years to announce. And even now, many of the comments on Microsot’s blog post are complaining that the beta is crashing their computers. Some examples:

SocialConnector.dll crashes my 32-bit Outlook 2010 beta on Win 7 64 bit.

After installing this, Outlook will no longer start up. I’ve have removed the connector, but it still crashes outlook, not the computer. I’m using 64bit Win 7 Ultimate, with 32bit Office 2010.

Xobni could still be doomed, but it does have a few things going for it. The plugin has been downloaded more than 4 million times, its users are rabidly loyal, and the company will eventually expand to other email systems beyond Outlook. It also does email search a lot better (at least right now) than Outlook and can resolve different identities to the same person in your contacts list.

Most people don’t sign up for Facebook or even LinkedIn with their corporate Outlook email accounts. If the email addresses of your contacts in Outlook don’t match their email on LinkedIn, Facebook, or MySpace, you won’t be able to see their profile information or stream data using the Outlook Social Connector. Xobni does a better job resolving the multiple identities people choose to have on the Internet. That doesn’t mean the folks at Xobni should be breathing easy. Microsoft has endless patience and eventually it gets things right.

Professional social network LinkedIn has been seeing a significant amount of growth internationally, 3.4 million members in India, out of 55 million members globally. That’s more than its members in the U.K., which just hit 3 million users. Today, LinkedIn is opening an office in Mumbai India, to set up shop in the area where it’s growing like gangbusters. In October, LinkedIn’s network’s CEO, Jeff Weiner, said in the post that half of LinkedIn’s membership is international, with India seeing the fastest rate of adoption of the network.

Nayan Patel, LinkedIn’s current director of strategic partnerships will be the new director of operations at LinkedIn India. Hari V. Krishnan, country manager of LinkedIn India said in a statement that the new office will focus on forming strategic partnerships with media organizations and other distribution channels. The new outpost will also work to gain more users and promote the use of the platform by third-party developers.

The professional social network has already formed a partnership with Indian media company Network18 that will integrate of business and finance content from its business news channel LinkedIn. UGC from LinkedIn will also be cross-posted to CNBC-TV18, a business news channel in India.

LinkedIn has has a big year. Founder Reid Hoffman recently changed the guard at the company, with Weiner taking the helm as CEO in June. While LinkedIn is a strong IPO candidate, Hoffman recently told us that he’s not in any rush to go public. The company was valued at around $1 billion in its last round of financing in 2008, and has been profitable for the past years. And last week, Hoffman told Reuters that the company plans to pursue an IPO at some point, but not any time soon.

The network also added a number of new features including Twitter integration, and released its API.

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The evolution of Twitter clients have been speeding along. While Twitter is the fundamental platform that formed a base for many applications, such as TweetDeck, Seesmic, PeopleBrowsr and Sobees, these platforms soon looked to other social networks such as Facebook, MySpace and FriendFeed for additional integration. And many have conquered all mediums, with desktop, web and mobile apps. In fact, the Twitter client race has gradually become a competition to be the first to launch useful and powerful apps that are chock full of features. Sobees, which has flown relatively under the radar, is one of the first clients to launch LinkedIn integration after the professional social network just released its API.

Sobees, which has a Windows native desktop app built in .NET and a web application built off of Microsoft Silverlight, integrates Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and now LinkedIn. Sobees will pull in a full feed from LinkedIn including connections updates, status updates, applications updates, jobs posted, groups joined, recommendations and profiles changes. You can also post status updates from the client, maintain connections, search your LinkedIn stream, and view profiles of connections.

In addition to LinkedIn, Sobees previously added a Facebook full feed, with the inclusion of profiles, friends, events, two-way status updates and your Inbox; and MySpace activities, including status, top friends and comments, with the possibility to update your status. And Sobees supports multiple Twitter accounts, replies, retweets, spam reporting, blocking users, replies to all, updates to status, posting pictures, shortening urls, and spell check.

Sobees desktop offers Twitter lists but the web client does not include list functionality yet. And geolocation will be added to both versions of the clients soon. You can also search Twitter and Friendfeed and enable the client in English, French, German, Italian and soon Spanish.

And in its first venture in the mobile space, Sobees is launching a native Android Twitter client which has support for multiple Twitter accounts, Twitter search and most of the basic Twitter functionality. While the app doesn’t yet have geolocation or lists, Sobees will be adding these features in the near future. Sobees says that an iPhone app is in the pipeline as well.

The Twitter client space is crowded, but it seems that Sobees could make its mark with its various clients. Its Windows client is particularly compelling and will face competition from Seesmic’s recently launched Windows app. But Sobees’ clients, both web and desktops, already feature MySpace, Facebook, LinkedIn and Twitter functionality, making it the most all-inclusive offering on the market. Seesmic and TweetDeck both have mobile offerings which are more expansive but Sobees hopes to boost its Android app soon. So why have we not heard more about Sobees? deskNet, the startup that develops Sobees, is bootstrapped and the company’s founder, Francois Bochatay, says that it simply has not been doing an PR or marketing outreach.

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Business social network LinkedIn has hit a milestone in the UK, surpassing 3 million registered users in these parts. Kevin Eyres, Managing Director Europe at LinkedIn, announced the feat at a London event last night and on the company’s blog this morning.

LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman attended the event as well, and told Reuters afterwards that the company plans to pursue an IPO at some point, but not any time soon.

Did LinkedIn more than double its U.S. visitors in October? A casual glance at the latest comScore data makes it look that way, with LinkedIn shooting up to 20 million unique visitors in October, 2009, from 9 million in September, 2009. The new estimate puts LinkedIn ahead of Twitter, which saw a decline of U.S visitors last month to 19.2 million.

Of course, LinkedIn didn’t really all of a sudden have a growth spurt in October. Rather, comScore was previously under-counting its reach. Now it does a better job of measuring Web usage at work, which apparently is where about half of LinkedIn’s users check in. It makes sense, since LinkedIn is a professional network and you are more likely to be looking for contacts at other companies during work hours.

While the fish-shaped chart above suggests that LinkedIn is now about as popular in the U.S as Twitter (or at least Twitter.com), the two are complementary. On Tuesday, LinkedIn gave users the ability to link to their Twitter accounts so that their Twitter stream shows up as status updates in LinkedIn as well. Since Tuesday, LinkedIn has witnessed a 25 percent increase in status updates. Long live the stream.

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A not so well thought-out feature – or defect – allows any LinkedIn user to indicate the company they work for has acquired, merged with or become a division of another company without any third-party verification whatsoever. Worse, when a user falsely claims company A has e.g. purchased company B, this will actually show up on company B’s public profile as such. Needless to say, this could cause quite some confusion.

For examples, head on over to the LinkedIn profiles of Yahoo! and Google, which are both apparently owned by a Pakistani web hosting firm with about 10 employees. Or take a look at the public LinkedIn profile of Internet commerce giant eBay, which is seemingly a subsidiary to collector community and marketplace operator Colnect, whose founder and sole employee Amir Wald tipped us about the ‘feature’.

The only thing you need to make false pretenses about the relationship of a company with another, is indicate you work there as well as obtain full access to the profile settings – I couldn’t make Google the parent company of say, Skype, even if I pretended to work there because I don’t have a valid e-mail address and/or the necessary rights.

But you can definitely make any company you have editing rights to the owner or subsidiary of any other company without as much as a hitch.

All you need to do is go to the part of the LinkedIn website where you can edit a company’s profile and click on the ‘Related Companies’ menu item. There, you can indicate your employer – true or not – is a Division, Subsidiary, Parent, Acquisition or Merger of any company that has a profile on the popular business social network.

Always dreamed of owning Apple or Microsoft? Here’s your chance to pretend you do, and it’ll take you only about 5 seconds.

We can’t be sure how long this has been possible already, but we’ve contacted the company about it, so we expect to see a quick fix to this anomaly.

In the meantime, please behave yourselves. Okay? Okay.

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LinkedIn has hit 50 million users, according to a blog post today, growing from 45 million users two months ago. And according to the latest comScore data, LinkedIn is steadily growing in terms of unique visitors. For September, LinkedIn had 9 million unique visitors in the U.S. compared to 8.7 million unique visitors in August. But it appears that LinkedIn’s growth is mainly attributed to a burgeoning international user base. Worldwide, LinkedIn grew from 18 million unique visitors in July to 20 million unique visitors in August.

The network’s CEO, Jeff Weiner, said in the post that half of LinkedIn’s membership is international, with 11 million users in Europe and 3 million users in India, which is seeing the fastest rate of adoption of LinkedIn. Weiner added that it took just 12 days for the network to accumulate the latest million users.

Founder Reid Hoffman recently changed the guard at the company, with Weiner taking the helm as CEO in June. While LinkedIn is a strong IPO candidate, Hoffman recently told us that he’s not in any rush to go public. The company was valued at around $1 billion in its last round of financing in 2008, and has been profitable for the past years.

Rumors have been flying around about LinkedIn potentially buying German social network Xing, which Hoffman told us that this wasn’t happening. But if LinkedIn is growing so fast in Europe and other international markets, perhaps they don’t need Xing to add more users.

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While Facebook continues to grow, and some companies are getting more comfortable with using it for things like Pages, LinkedIn still fills the gap for users who want a more professional setting for social networking. A new service launching in public beta today at TechCrunch50, Radiusly, wants to take the idea of Twitter and put it in more of a professional setting, as well.

But unlike Facebook and LinkedIn which exist as two totally separate networks, Radiusly wants to integrate its service with Twitter. Users will be able to publish an update they leave on Radiusly to Twitter (and Facebook, as well). But the key selling-point is that in the Radiusly environment you can also do much more, such as have a professional profile, resume, sample works, and photos.

Ideally, a Radiusly users would be someone who loves the concept of Twitter, but wants to be able to maintain their work-related tweets in a separate environment, where they could also share other professional information. As more and more companies wake up to the idea of using Twitter as a means of communication, a service like this could be compelling to them.

Of course, there is a lot of competition out there for the business Twitter market. Aside from startups like CoTweet, (TechCrunch50-alum) Yammer, and Blellow, Radiusly could be looking at both LinkedIn and Twitter itself making more moves into this arena shortly. We already know that Twitter is gearing up some professional tools for businesses to use, but whether those will be things similar to what Radiusly offers, no one is sure yet. Meanwhile, if LinkedIn wanted to, it could easily make itself Twitter-centric. It doesn’t appear that they are going to do that, but you never know.

Radiusly plans to using a subscription/freemium model, offering some services for free, while charging a subscription fee for others. There will also be sponsored search listings, job listings, and banner ads to bring in revenue.

CEO Chris Sel and VP of Business Development Adarsh Pallian presented it today at the conference.

Expert Panel Q&A (paraphrased)

The experts: Robert Scoble, Sean Parker, Dick Costolo, Reid Hoffman, Mike Schroepfer, Chamillionaire

RS: I think you’re aiming at the right target, but you hit the wall. Brands tell me they won’t want to advertise on Twitter. You’re just not there yet, I’m not sure why.

Q: Reid your thoughts?

RH: In a rare position, I agree with much of what Robert was saying. The real key is how do you exchange information on Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn, not that they need a new way to search for some of this.

DC: I agree with Robert and Reid, I don’t really get why I would go there. I kept trying to figure it out, to be fair when Twitter first launched I didn’t get it either, now I work there.

C: I gotta be Simon Cowell too. I can’t see why someone would need this.

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Starting to feel like Android’s “Cupcake” update (v1.5) from May is getting a bit stale? Google’s got a new treat for you. They’ve just launched version 1.6 (which, under Google’s pastry-oriented naming scheme, is known as “Donut”) of Android to developers, which packs a hefty handful of new features and polishes up much of what was already there.

The bit that plays best to our geeky-blogger side (rather than our geeky-consumer side) is whats been added for the sake of lineup expandability. Namely, we’re talking about CDMA support - which, while not immediately awesome, opens the doors to Android handsets on the likes of Verizon, Sprint, and Virgin Mobile. Beyond that, they’ve also bumped the supported resolutions list to include screens all the way up to 800×480 - in other words, Android can now push much prettier images to higher-end screens.