The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘mainstream’

Since its launch almost exactly a year ago, Foursquare’s website has largely had the same basic design. Tonight, it looks like that’s finally getting updated.

While it looks like the update is still in the process of rolling out to all the pages, Foursquare.com now clearly has new system-wide toolbars, a brand new sign-up page, as well as some new settings. You might also notice a new, name-only logo.

While it’s been clear for a while that Foursquare has been working on a site redesign, only in the past few days have signs started to show that it was coming. For example, a completely revamped History area showed up a few days ago, one allowing for venues to have categories as well as show which friends you checked-in with at places.

The biggest part of the changes currently rolling out is to the sign-up page. The new step-by-step process looks highly influenced by Twitter’s sign-up page (which they too tweaked a few times over the years). The process now allows you to sign up, easily find friends already using Foursquare via Twitter or Facebook Connect, as well as link up to those aforementioned networks. After you do that, there’s a one-page rundown of what you can do with Foursquare (such as download one of the mobile apps, earn badges, and explore cities).

These sign-up pages are important for convincing new users to not only sign up, but also showing them what to do. With Foursquare signing mainstream deals left and right, they’re going to need this.

Something else that appears to be new: an option in the setting page for  letting local businesses see that you have checked-in at their venue. When you click the link to learn more, it says:

We allow verified venue owners to see statistics about checkins at their venue. These stats include recent visitors, most frequent visitors and most popular checkin times. You can always opt out if you’d rather not share this data with the venues you visit.

Sadly, with the redesign, there is still no way to check-in from the site itself. You have to use one of the app, the mobile web, or text messaging to do that.

Speaking of mobile apps, Foursquare is about to launch a completely redesigned iPhone app as well. All of these moves are necessary if Foursquare is going to keep up with its better-designed rival, Gowalla (which also just revamped its website).

Something else interesting from tonight: apparently the concept of “checking-in” made its onscreen debut on the popular TV show Gossip Girl. Co-founder Dennis Crowley noted the move and tweeted out a picture of it captured from the show. While there is no specific mention of Foursquare, it seems obvious (at least to Crowley) what they’re paying homage to. And Foursquare actually has paid homage the other way, with its “Gossip Girl” badge.

The move towards the mainstream continues — or maybe Elizabeth Fisher was just actually checking-in to that hotel. Hard to know for sure.

You may remember Akoha, a startup which launched at the 2008 TechCrunch50 conference which uses “mission cards” that friends pass to each other along with a mission ( i.e. give someone a book or buy someone a meal.) The idea is that users will socialize their missions, using your social graph to compete against friends and determine how your missions performed. Akoha has been played in more than 65 countries since the company’s launch.

Today, Akoha is launching an free iPhone app and a redesign of its site. Akoha’s iPhone app. With the new app, Akoha has increased the number of missions that can be played. A now Akoha is rewarding players for completed missions with badges, similar to Foursquare’s badge model. Akoha is also allowing users to socialize missions by integrating with Twitter to allow users to broadcast completed tasks.

Akoha was founded by Austin Hill and Alex Eberts, who together co-founded Zero-Knowledge Systems (now Rdadialpoint) in 1997. In 2008, the startup received $1.9 million in funding from David Chamandy (co-founder, Lavalife), Ron Dembo (founder, Zerofootprint.net), film producer Jake Eberts (Chariots of Fire, Ghandi), and seed fund Montreal Start Up.

The explosion of casual gaming over the last few years, primed by companies like PopCap and touched off by Nintendo’s incredibly accessible Wii, has put gaming firmly in the mainstream. Halo, Grand Theft Auto , and other AAA games, while not by any stretch of the imagination “casual,” end up selling in the tens of millions of units, resulting in billions of dollars in revenue. Nintendo employees were said to generate more money per employee than Goldman Sachs , and the growth of the industry was barely hampered by recession

See the rest here: 
The DSi XL shows once and for all that gaming is no longer just for gamers

There’s been a lot of criticism of Microsoft’s alleged lack of innovation lately, but they’ve got an excuse: the lethargy of the mega-corporation. Apple’s no nimble startup, but they’ve made a point of doing just a few things well, and innovation and refinement have been their strong points. The iPad seems to be merely refined, and that’s a relief to Bill Gates.

More:
Gates weighs in on the iPad: nice, but not real nice

According to this weeks issue of Amateur Photographer, Canon will not be attending PMA 2010. The company is apparently shifting focus away from niche trade shows in order to focus shows like CES that reach more consumers. After all, that’s the way Canon’s products are going anyway.

The rest is here:
Canon will not be attending PMA 2010

FuelMyApp is a new site launching now which is a platform for iPhone app developers to reward users for reviews. Here’s their pitch: Developers get reviews about their apps, while users get free apps in return for reviewing them. Now, before you cry Pay-Per-Post read on and let’s figure this thing out.

A lack of reviews on very new apps is a common occurrence when you hear about an app that’s potentially awesome it hasn’t hit the mainstream yet.

So how does it work? Developers submit their app’s iTunes reference to the site and select how many reviews they want. iPhone users sign up with their Paypal email address and iTunes nickname. As soon as the review is published in iTunes, fuelmyapp automatically credits back the app fee to the user via Paypal.

Now, let’s look at those potential problems.

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When it comes jumping on new trends in technology, CNN, like most other mainstream media sources is usually fairly slow to act. Sure, they’ve been hyping up Twitter non-stop for the past several months, but that was only after everyone in the tech world had already been talking about it for a long time. But one thing that hasn’t yet caught on in the tech sphere, but apparently has on CNN, is the use of “Bing” as a verb.

Check out this article about the most dangerous celebrities to search for on the web. The opening line: “Be cautious if you plan to Bing Jessica Biel or Google Brad Pitt. A new report says you might get a virus.” Um, “Bing Jessica Biel”? Aside from it sounding oddly sexual (insert badda-bing joke here), it’s a little odd to see that on CNN.com before it has really entered the tech lexicon. Sure, Microsoft wants everyone to use it as a verb to be like Google, but there’s obviously a big difference between a company wanting something to happen for branding, and it actually happening.

CNN.com’s search is marked as very clearly powered by Google, so it would seem there is no real ulterior motive for CNN to hype Bing, maybe they’re just trying to get ahead of the curve. The problem is that when you’re a mainstream media publication, you have to stay in touch with your audience — which is a nice way of saying that sometimes you have to “dumb it down” a bit, or fall back to things people will understand. For example, if my mom is reading that article right now, I guarantee you she has no idea what Bing is and is quite confused about what CNN is implying there.

If you Bing Jessica Biel, you’ll get a virus? Now just imagine you had no idea what Bing is and tell me how you read that.

[photo: FHM]

[thanks Andrew]

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How do you know if someone’s online profile is real? The question has plagued us for some time now, but is become increasingly problematic as vast swatches of the mainstream of society goes online and joins a social network, whether is be Twitter, Facebook, or whatever. The problem is of course rife on dating web sites.

One of the ways celebrities who arrived early on Twitter verified their profile was to Twitpic themselves in front of their Twitter profile. But now a new startup has taken this verification idea to its logical conclusion. CheckedProfile launches today in the US, but is actually the brainchild of long-time UK entrepreneur Ben Way, who is now based in Fort Lauderdale, Florida.

Here’s how it works.

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It’s over. Facebook is now as large as MySpace in the U.S., according to May data released today by comScore. Facebook actually passed MySpace by a smidgeon, with 70.278 million unique visitors compared to MySpace’s 70.255 million. While Facebook passed MySpace on a worldwide basis last year, as recently as last March, Facebook was still trailing MySpace by 9 million unique visitors.

In May, Facebook gained another 2.8 million unique visitors in the U.S. MySpace, which has been stagnating lately and as a result now has a new CEO, lost about 700,000 unique visitors during the month. A few months ago, it looked like it might take Facebook until the end of the summer to catch up to MySpace, but it has already done so.

Don’t expect MySpace to reverse this trend and regain its top spot anytime soon. Having just successfully launched its “vanity URLs,” Facebook looks to be on the verge of another hype cycle. Just 15 minutes after the launch, a half million people had signed up for vanity URLs. And as of sometime today, some 6 million users will have apparently signed up — just three days after it launched. Practically everyone is talking about the company once again, from blogs to the mainstream media.

And all this stems from a feature (vanity URLs) that MySpace actually had from the get-go. That itself seems to speak to how over this game is. And when you reverse the situation —MySpace recently launched a site-wide IM toolbar, that looks a lot like the one Facebook had — basically no one talked about it.

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For a service that is all about concise messaging, it’s humorous how the manner in which Twitter writes its blog posts is anything but. For the second time in as many days, we have yet another post today about the supposed Twitter TV show. This one is a clarification of the clarification from yesterday. It’s similar to how Twitter needed no less than 4 blog posts on one topic a few weeks ago to explain something (the changing of the @replies).

Here’s what the latest says: Twitter is not making a TV show. Instead, some “Hollywood folks” are, but Twitter has “little to do with their efforts but we wish them success,” Twitter co-founder Biz Stone clarifies. Of course, this is exactly what he said yesterday, as I outlined, but he said it in a very indirect way. So now we get a second post. The problem is that a massive number of Twitter users are still tweeting out that Twitter is basically developing its own show. The power of the retweet is keeping this story going. And now even CNN is covering super-celeb-user Ashton Kutcher threatening to boycott if they go through with it.

So let’s be clear once again:

What Twitter is doing: Lending its support and probably branding to at least one television show produced by Reveille and Brillstein. Others are in the works as well.

What Twitter is not doing: Making its own show, starring anyone from Twitter, or really distracting it from anything else it’s working on.

Why this matters: First and foremost, this is a business deal. And Twitter will make money from this — though it doesn’t state that. Long term though, Twitter thinks its platform can be leveraged beyond web applications, and can be the backbone of entertainment experiences, among other things. Basically, Twitter is thinking of itself as a new communication medium (which has been noted several times in the past) and a TV show totally built around Twitter is an interesting step in proving/disproving that with the mainstream public.

That is all. At least until the inevitable post tomorrow further clarifying the situation.

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