The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘make-it-easier’

When it comes to user discovery, the best way for services to do it is to use your profile information. Basic things like your name, location, bio, and email are all helpful ways for other people to find you on a network. The problem is that a lot of users don’t bother to fill this out when they sign up for a service. So Twitter is now prompting existing users to do so.

A new overlay has started popping up on the service called “Be found on Twitter.” This randomly appears (it did for me a few minutes ago) when you load up twitter.com. It reads, “We were hoping you could help us make it easier for people to discover their friends and colleagues on Twitter. Review your settings below to make sure the people you care about can easily find you.” It then asks for your name, bio, location, email, and phone number. If you’ve already filled these out, it includes what you previously put down.

Both the bio and location fields are optional, but everything else, you need to fill out (unless you click on “Ask me later” which presumably will bring up this prompt again). You can also decide whether or not to let people find you by your email address or phone number in searches.

Looks like Twitter wants to tighten that social graph a bit. With site growth in the right direction again, and tweeting at an all time high, it’s probably a good call. Now, if only they had a tool like this to help you sort through the people you no longer want to follow.

SteelSeries continues to work that IP license with Blizzard by announcing two new products aimed directly at gamers: a Zboard StarCraft 2 keyset, and a World of Warcraft: March of the Scourge mouse pad. The Zboard keyset is a limited edition product, customized to make it easier to play the game and includes exclusive artwork. The keys are labeled with commands and shortcuts, allowing the player to pick up the game faster then someone using a normal keyboard

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SteelSeries announces StarCraft 2 keyset, March of the Scourge mouse pad

AdWhirl is a mobile advertising service that allows app developers to easily switch ad networks without being a hassle to the end users. They were acquired by the ad network AdMob back in August, but that hasn’t stopped them from doing what they do. And today, they’re making their offering even better by open sourcing the whole thing.

With the new AdWhirl iPhone SDK, developers can now customize which ad networks they’d like to use, rather than being forced to include them all. This can significantly cut down the size of app, the company writes on its blog today. But the open sourcing of the project means that developers can now also use ad networks that weren’t previously supported by the service, and can let other AdWhirl users how to do the same. AdWhirl notes that developers currently using the service won’t have to change a thing to accomodate this new SDK.

The other announcement today involves their AdWhirl Server. This the the backend infrastructure that makes the whole system work, not only serving up the ads, but allowing users to monitor statistics. AdWhirl says it has redesigned this server from the ground up and it’s now using Amazon Web Services EC2. And beginning today, the company is providing the code so that developers can run their own AdWhirl servers. The move to EC2 should allow running their own servers to make it easier to scale as well, they note.

You can find all the new code on Google code.

Earlier this month, .App/Ads launched its own open ad platform.

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Qik is a service built on the premise of being able to stream videos from your mobile device to the web as they’re happening live. But many videos that get streamed are short (1 to 2 minute average), and if you’re sending them out over a service like Twitter, their APIs can be slow. This is obviously a problem. So Qik came up with a faster solution.

Their answer is Qik-in-Touch, a new desktop application that runs on Adobe Air. Once you start this app, it resides in the background until one of your Qik contacts starts recording a live video. When that happens, Qik-in-Touch pops up on your screen to show you the video as it’s happening live. It’s a much more direct, and more importantly, faster way of connecting you with live Qik videos.

The application, which is launching today in private beta, also allows you to easily favorite videos, browse your own videos, and watch other live videos happening around the web with QikTV. And this app requires no new mobile software of any kind — it will work with all the existing mobile clients just as they are. The only difference will be in your viewing experience, through the Air app rather than the website.

Qik co-founder Bhaskar Roy also made it clear that Qik-in-Touch is part of the service’s strategy to make it easier for mainstream users to utilize Qik. He notes that thanks to many of the deals they have struck with mobile companies to pre-load Qik onto phones, there are seeing more of these types of users. And he notes that they often share differently then the early adopter crowd. Whereas the early adopters were all about sharing their videos with as many people as possible, the mainstream users care more about just sharing with a small group of family or friends.

I also asked Roy about the Qik iPhone app, and he confirmed that they have submitted it to the App Store, and now they’re just waiting to see if it gets approved. Seeing as Ustream’s similar app was just approved, he anticipates that there will be no issues with their’s.

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As a blogger, sometimes the most difficult part of writing a post is contacting the company it is about. First, you either have to search your contact list, or the web, to figure out who to reach out to. And then you might not get a response right away. And finally, if you do get a response, it may include misdirection or less information than you’d like. All of these things led to the idea for a new startup, Plato’s Forms.

To be clear, the communication problems run the other way too. Sometimes companies would love a better way to talk to journalists before they publish a story. Plato’s Forms would offer that communication pipeline. The idea is to make it easier for the two sides to communicate on any given story, so the correct information is shared with the readers.

And this communication isn’t meant to be necessarily be filtered through a PR agency (unless the company wants it that way), it’s more about direct interaction. This is meant to cut out all possible noise and just get to the signal of what trying to be communicated, in a timely manner.

Plato’s Forms would charge the companies a subscription fee to use this service, but it would be free to journalists. And this isn’t just meant for big enterprises, they envision that startups would use a tool like this as well.

Since the product won’t launch until next Spring, co-founders Darryl Siry and Ben Metcalfe didn’t have a demo to show just yet. But I’m told that the method of communication will not just be another email or IM tool. And the core of the product is the communication platform, so it will work with a number of different applications, presumably.

The company’s name is derived from the philosopher Plato’s Theory of Forms, Siry tells us. Basically, the thought is that humans can’t understand the true nature of things, but can only interpret it. And different humans have different interpretations. Plato’s Forms (the company) wants to get those more in sync.

Plato’s Forms has just closed a seed round of funding to the tune of $545,000 (but the note has been left open to accept up to $750,000). The round was led by a group of angels (including Sifry) and Zelkova VC.

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Today at the RealTime CrunchUp we saw the launch of VideoLobby, a new service founded by Peter Urban that’s looking to make it easier to create professional-looking webcasts, complete with custom branding. The service is an extension of Urban’s “sales software for real people” service Smibs.

Urban says that while some other services offer embeds, you’re generally responsible for building your own branded site to insert those in. That’s where VideoLobby comes in: the site helps you build your own custom video portal, and then allows you to include streams from services like Qik, Ustream and Justin.tv. The company calls itself the “Blogger for real-time video”.

The service doesn’t just make your page look nicer, though — it can automatically pull in comments from Twitter and Facebook, and also allows users to submit questions directly from the show’s page. Stream administrators can use a management system to heck off their questions as they answer them. And the service is completely free.

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Reality Digital, a provider of white-label social media platforms for brands, is introducing a new spin-off service today called Spotlight. With the new offering, the company makes its entry into the market of online video management and distribution platforms.

This is growing into quite a saturated field with players like Ooyala, Brightcove, MIG69 and Swarmcast fighting hard for pieces of the pie.

Spotlight is an entirely SaaS-based platform that wants to make it easier for businesses to maintain a social network for video or channel campaigns, make money on their library of professional content via video advertising, distribute videos in playlists through a brand’s library of content with a custom design that fits their brand specs, and more.

In essence, the software is designed to allow businesses to create a micro-community around content and utilize a feedback mechanism which allows them to publish content across various destinations but see and evaluate that feedback in one centralized location.

Pricing is unclear but it will be based on usage and consists of a monthly fee that includes storage and a bandwidth delivery fee. There’s a free 30-day trial for you to give it a spin.

Update: pricing details came in: the monthly fee is set to $1,000, delivery fee is variable and based on usage (per GB) and 100 GB is included.

Reality Digital is venture capital-backed; it has raised $8.3 million to date, most recently closing a $6.3 million Series B round back in March 2008. It has signed up an impressive roster of clients the past few years, including Nokia, MTV, Pepsi, NFL and Hyundai.

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Streaming music startup Spotify has confirmed that its CTO has left, effective today. Andreas Ehn tweeted about his departure this morning, in a move which has taken observers by surprise. The company is currently prepping a big launch in the U.S., a watershed which would normally suggest that this is a moment to have all hands on deck. Losing your CTO right now is probably not the best timing, to put it mildly.

However, a Spotify spokesperson has told me that they’d “like to thank Andreas for all his brilliant work” and “everybody at Spotify wishes him well in the future as he seeks out new and, no doubt, extraordinarily complex challenges!” I’m sure this isn’t meant to sound back-handed but Ehn’s tweets paint a slightly less rosy picture.

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Orkut continues to undermine Google’s Data Liberation Front, whose singular goal is to “make it easier for users to move their data in and out of Google products”. Earlier this month the Orkut friend exporter, which makes it easy to export your friends’ contact information to a standard CSV file, was mysteriously broken due to a bug. The timing of the bug was more than a little suspect — Orkut has been hemorrhaging users lately in India and Brazil as people flock to Facebook, which takes advantage of Orkut’s friend export tool to help users make the switch. Now Julio Vasconcellos over at Armchairfounder has noticed how Orkut managed to fix their bug while still making it harder for members to switch to Facebook: the tool works, but it no longer includes your friends’ Email addresses.

In other words, now when you export your list of friends from Orkut, all you’ll get is a list of their names, location, birthday, gender, and links to the Orkut profiles. Which means it’s basically useless. Facebook can’t use the data to invite your friends, and you can’t use the data to actually contact and share with your friends, which is the whole point of a social graph.

We reached out to Google about the issue, and a Google spokesperson gave us this statement:

“Mass exportation of email is not standard on most social networks — when a user friends someone they don’t then expect that person to be easily able to send that contact information to a third party along with hundreds of other addresses with just one click. In order to protect user privacy, we now exclude email addresses from the CSV export file. Of course users can still export their friend lists in the CSV file. In addition, Google Contacts syncs with Orkut, so users can export their Orkut friends’ email addresses from Google Contacts. We support web standards such as OAuth and are working on ways to help users share their data more securely between social networks. We believe strongly that users own their data, and we’re committed to finding ways to make it easier for users to export data.”

Google is right in that this isn’t a standard feature on most social networks, but most social networks aren’t busy touting things like the Data Liberation Front and reaping all the positive press associated with it. And if this is really a privacy issue, it doesn’t make sense that Google would let you export Email data through Google Contacts but not Orkut itself. Spammers looking to figure out how to harvest Email addresses will doubtless figure out the process. Of course, Orkut users looking to make the jump to Facebook probably won’t.

Vasconcellos also points out that Orkut’s tool is unncessarily hard to use, and he’s absolutely right. When I went to test out the friend exporter, I was fairly certain that it simply wasn’t working at all. That’s because every time you click on the ‘Export Contacts’ button the site kicks you back out to your homepage, and only shows the “take your contacts with you” section below the fold. It took me way too long to figure this out (I even tested the feature out in two different browsers). And I doubt most people will put in that much effort.

It’s understandable why Orkut would want to handicap the feature and make it hard to use, but Google can’t have it both ways: it’s either open, or it isn’t.

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Earlier this year, Polar Rose got some headlines when it applied its nifty photo tagging technology to Flickr, one of the most popular image sharing services on the Web. Cleverly, it used Facebook Connect as a way to identify people that were named and tagged on images hosted on Flickr.

Now the Swedish company is taking it up a notch with the release of a Facebook application that should make it easier for people to discover in which other photos on Facebook, Flickr or 23hq.com they (or any of their friends) appear, whether they’re properly tagged or not.

I installed the application, and after importing all the photos from my account – which took quite a while – Polar Rose let me tag persons in photos that hadn’t been labeled yet. It let me view and edit tags for photos from people I’ve added to my account, as well as those uploaded by persons I’m connected to and are also on Polar Rose (e.g. Mike Butcher, see screenshot below).

When you tag people, Facebook automatically posts about this to the named person’s wall (something that can’t be controlled from the outside), so take that into account before you start mass-tagging. And in case you’re wondering, the application only fetches photos with privacy set as “friends only”, “friends of friends” and “everyone”.

In the future, Polar Rose aims to support more social graphs, like the ones from your Twitter account and Google Contacts.

Face.com is another facial recognition startup, although they’re currently limited to Facebook only, while Polar Rose works across Facebook, Flickr and 23hq. Polar Rose also says it differentiates from Face.com because it isn’t exclusively focused on the tagging part but also about the ‘viewing and sharing experience’.

In case you haven’t heard, Facebook is huge in photo sharing. According to its latest statistics, it hosts about 20 billion photos, of which 5 billion were added in the last 6 months alone. The social network’s public stats claim 2 billion photos are uploaded to the site each month at present time.

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