The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘seesmic’

We’ve written about Twitter client Sobees, which is working to create the best social media client on the market, competing with both TweetDeck and Seesmic. Today Sobees is releasing a new version of its Windows native desktop app built in .NET, complete with realtime search, a redesign and more.

The new client includes support for Facebook, Twitter, MySpace, FriendFeed and LinkedIn (which was added late last year). The most significant addition is the availability of realtime search on the client, with the ability to search Twitter, Friendfeed, OneRiot and FacteryLabs from within the application. Sobees integrated elements of its newly launched realtime web dashboard to power search in the client.

Sobees has also added drag and drop technology for columns in order to change the place of a column within the client. Other technical updated include the ability to preview Tweets and maps, translate messages, and see pictures posted on TwitPic from within the Tweet. And Sobees will break out threaded conversations you have with friends.

Sobees is competing in a crowded space where each client continues to innovate and offer users more options for managing their social media accounts and the reealtime web. For example, Seesmic has incorporated Ping.fm, to allows users to update more than 50 different social networks at the same time. And TweetDeck now incorporates YouTube and Flickr within its client. For now, Sobees doesn’t have any mobile clients but we are told that iPhone and Android apps are coming soon.

When Seesmic debuted its Twitter clients for Android and BlackBerry devices back in November, we wrote that the two apps were probably the strongest offerings out there for each mobile device. Seesmic just updated its Android app, bringing it closer to the the Twitter apps for the iPhone. Today, Seesmic is rolling out a powerful new version of its BlackBerry app.

The new version includes support for multi-accounts, Ping.fm integration (Seesmic acquired Ping.fm earlier this year) and the ability to choose your photo uploading size. So if you have more than one Twitter account, you can set Seesmic to remember all of your accounts, and easily switch between them. You can also cross-post messages between different accounts at the same time. The app allows you to set up default account which will be generated each time you open Seesmic for BlackBerry. You can add up to ten accounts with the new feature.

Ping.gm integration allows for you to post your updates to 50 social networks at the same time. In order to engage the feature, you’ll need to start a Ping.fm account. Seesmic for BlackBerry also includes the ability to share pictures through Tweetphoto now. You’ll still be able to post photos with yFrog, which was the photo app the client launched with, but Tweetphoto is now the default. And now you can also select the size of the photos you wish to post. You’ll be given the choice of opting between small, medium or large images.

Sessmic made updates to its BlackBerry client in December but multi-account and Ping.fm support is huge for the client. This latest update should make Seesmic’s client the most feature-rich app out there. Of course BlackBerry has launched the private beta of its Twitter app which is missing a few key features and has been receiving mediocre reviews.

TechCrunch editor Michael Arrington is an investor in Seesmic but I am not.

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.

There’s a pretty good indicator that a service is evolving from its early-adopter base to the mainstream: if there’s a rap song about the service. It’s happened numerous times with Twitter as it evolved. And now Foursquare has its own rap too.

“Badges Like Us” finds Mr. Silva (@borismsilver) and “Newby” (@thenewb) rapping about checking-in all over cities and earning badges. It also features the lyric, “I hope this hits TechCrunch or else I’ll be sad,” so of course, we had to oblige. Other choice lyrics include:

• “This is Foursquare bitch! Gowalla aint the same!!”
• “Cant use an iPhone, AT&Ts a piece of shhh”
• “Checkin w/ the groupies eating lotsa sushi”
• “Dont checkin to your house, thats just really lame”
• “And whats up with all these randos trying to friend me?”
• “Im checked in off the grid like TIGER WOODS B!!!!!”

Foursquare is quickly gaining mainstream appeal as they are signing major deals left and right with television channels, schools, and publications. In fact, Bravo even made a TV spot for them this week. And while the service only has around 450,000 users right now, it’s growing fast. And they could well have another coming out party of sorts at this year’s SXSW festival in two weeks.

Find the full lyrics below the video:

Mr. Silvas in da building
Checkins by the hundreds, thousands, trillionz

Ayo I know its my first stop
Look at that leaderboard and see me at the top

Bouncin to new places, adding em quick
I know all the TO-DOs and I got all the tips

Show up at the Bar and I check in Right Away
Sent it to my Twitter cuz Im here to stay

Looks like you got ousted welcome to the game
This is Foursquare bitch! Gowalla aint the same!!

Now that Im the mayor, now that Im here
Gimme my free breadsticks AND my cold beer!!

La la la la
How it feel to wake up and be the mayor of the city!
La la la la
Tryina get that Crunked badge, drinkin like P Diddy

[Chorus]

Got a rock like this
Cant use an iPhone, AT&Ts a piece of shhh

No one on the corner had an app on this
So I used my mobile web, wasnt very quick

You can learn where to eat just by checking my feed
Checkin checkin my feed checkin checkin my feed

Follow my lead its the road to success
Never need a reservation, they always say YES

But I cant teach you my swag
You can pay for a coffee but you cant buy a badge

School of social media Imma grad
I hope this hits techcrunch or else Ill be sad

Its Newby
Checkin w/ the groupies eating lotsa sushi

Newwwbyy
Bet you didnt know we could flow like thiiiiis

[Chorus]

Lets talk about the knockoffs, they just imitating
They cant even compare and no were not even hating

Copyin foursquare cuz you lack innovation
How could you turn down Googles valuation?

So let me say it now, let me be clear
Foursquare is the app that all you should fear

Hockey stick growth, all star investors
Lots of passionate users, all beta testers

I add lots of value, Im a superuser
You cant spell your top venues, super abuser

Dont checkin to your house, thats just really lame
Ill snatch up all your badges, call me David Blaine

Your checkins are fake, theres no way those are true
20 stops in one night? IM GONNA CATCH YOU!!

And whats up with all these randos trying to friend me?
Im checked in off the grid like TIGER WOODS B!!!!!

Google has just turned on a nifty location feature in search. Now, you can refine search results with a “Nearby” button, which will filter your results that cater to your location. So if you do a Google search for Italian restaurants, you can click the “Show Options” button to access a “nearby” filter to see results for Italian restaurants in the city/area you live in. You’ll also be given local business results as well.

Google says that it will shows you Nearby results according to your IP address or your preferred location, if you customized your location in search settings.

Do you follow more than 100 people on Twitter? If so, have you ever tried to manage them on Twitter.com? It’s awful. Really awful. They make you go through page after page of names in no real order (other than how recently you added them). If you want to remove some people you followed years ago, it’s a huge pain. Seesmic has just made a much better way.

The new Seesmic Web app, launching today, brings with it a new main tab: Contacts. As you can guess, this is a contact manager for Twitter that makes pruning your Twitter contacts a breeze. It also gives you plenty of other interesting information about your followers, those who follow you, and all your Twitter Lists, on the fly. For example, for each person you can not only see all their Twitter profile information, but also their Twitter stats from MrTweet which tell you how often they tweet and who they contact the most (publicly) on Twitter.

And all of this is wrapped up in a way that looks very similar to Google’s contact manager that is built into Gmail, so it should be familiar to many of you. But it’s actually better because they show Twitter icons next to each users name, which is an easy way to sort through people.

Another new contact management feature Seesmic Web has added is the ability to drag and drop any user to add them to a list. Again, this is about 1,000 times easier than doing it on Twitter.com. As you might imagine, Seesmic Web also now has the ability to make, delete and alter Twitter Lists.

Other new features include better conversation threading (if you click on the “in reply to” portion below a tweet, you’ll see an overlay with the entire back-and-forth). Also new is Tweetmeme retweet data for each link in a tweet. Simply click on the “+” button next to a link to see an overlay with that data (including a text snippet and image). The ability to upload pictures directly from the app, and tag tweets with your geolocation (assuming you’re using something like Google Gears that can add that to the browser) has also been added. Other, smaller UI tweaks have been made as well.

With the addition of Retweets and Lists over the past few months, Twitter.com has become a very useful client itself once again. But other web-based Twitter clients like Brizzly and Seesmic Web clearly believe they can still do a better job than Twitter itself. And with this contact management system, Seesmic Web just gave me a definite excuse to start using it.

If you run a Website that uses DoubleClick’s DART ad server or Google Ad Manager, those products just got a major upgrade and rebranding. The DART brand is being retired and it will now be called DoubleClick For Publishers. Meanwhile, Google Ad Manager (which targets smaller Websites) will now be called DFP Small Business. With the rebranding, DoubleClick is rolling out a new dashboard to manage the ads served on a publisher’s Website, improved ad-serving algorithms, and a new set of APIs.

Google is consolidating all of its ad serving products for display ads under the DoubleClick banner, and turning DFP Small Business (formerly Google Ad manager) into a feeder system for DoubleClick for Publishers (formerly DART). Google details some of the new changes on its main blog:

• A new interface that has been completely redesigned to save time and reduce errors.
• Far more detailed reporting and forecasting data to help publishers understand where their revenue is coming from and what ads are most valuable.
• Sophisticated algorithms that automatically improve ad performance and delivery.
• A new, open, public API which enables publishers to build and integrate their own apps with DFP, or integrate apps created for DFP by a growing third-party developer community (apps under development today include sales, order management and workflow tools).
• Integration with the new DoubleClick Ad Exchange’s “dynamic allocation” feature, which maximizes revenue by enabling publishers to open up their ad space to bids from multiple ad networks.

There is more detailed info on the DoubleClick blog.

Approximately 11 million new domain names were registered in the fourth quarter of 2009, an eight percent increase in new registrations from the third quarter of 2009.

The increase has brought the total of registrations across all of the Top Level Domain Names to 192 million, an increase of nearly 15 million domain name registrations since the close of 2008. That means we’ll likely cross the 200 million milestone this or next quarter, provided growth continues.

The numbers come from VeriSign’s latest Domain Name Industry Brief (PDF).

In Q4 2009, the base of domain name registrations grew by two percent over the third quarter of 2009 and eight percent over the fourth quarter of 2008.

According to the Industry Brief, the base of Country Code Top Level Domain Names (ccTLDs) rose to 78.6 million domain names, a three percent increase quarter over quarter and a 10 percent increase year over year. In terms of total registrations, .com unsurprisingly continues to have the highest base followed by .cn (China), .de (Germany) and .net.

VeriSign’s average daily DNS query load during the fourth quarter of 2009 was 52 billion per day with peaks as high as 61 billion per day, jumping 48 percent for the daily average and 31 percent increase for peak daily queries as compared to fourth quarter 2008.

(Via press release)

As one of the few BlackBerry users at TechCrunch, I’ve been insanely jealous of my colleagues as they test and use the plethora of nifty apps for iPhone and Android. So when RIM announced that it would be launching a native Twitter app for the mobile device, I was ecstatic. I was expecting Tweetie for the BlackBerry. This morning, I started testing out the beta version of the app, and here are my initial thoughts.

Similar to Seesmic or UberTwitter’s BlackBerry apps, RIM’s app features a timeline of your Tweets, and separate streams for you @mentions, direct messages and trending topics. You can also see your user profile and search topics and people. You can see lists of your Tweets, followers, and those who are following you. And the app features integration bit.ly to shorten URLs.

The interface is mediocre; but it’s tough to make anything as pretty as an iPhone or Android app on the BlackBerry. My biggest complaint is that the app is slow. Really slow. Slower than the Seesmic Blackberry app that I currently use to Tweet from my mobile device.

The app is missing lists and geolocation, which RIM plans to add in the future. The next versions will also include profile editing and multi-account login. But I’m confused as to where all of these features will be placed within the app considering that the interface is fairly crowded at the moment.

As I wrote above, these are my initial thoughts and I’ll continue to play around with the app to see if it has any additional compelling functionality. That being said, the app is still in beta, so hopefully RIM will fix some of the bugs and clean the design up a bit to make the app easier to user with the added features.

Perhaps the main problem I have with Android is that the apps (aside from the excellent Google-built ones) are simply not as good as the apps on the iPhone. Nowhere is this more apparent then with Twitter apps, since there are so many for both platforms. On Android, Seesmic was clearly the best one, but it still paled in comparison to the top Twitter iPhone apps. But with an update today, it just got a lot closer.

The latest version brings a few new features, but none is bigger than multi-account support. Finally, if you have more than one Twitter account, you can set Seesmic to remember both, and easily switch between them. Perhaps more notably, you can also cross-post messages between different accounts at the same time. Even my favorite Twitter app, Tweetie for the iPhone, doesn’t allow you to do this. And if you’re worried that you’ll be bombarded by notifications, whatever account you set as your default one will be the one you just get notifications from, we’re told.

Another new feature allows Seesmic to remember where you were in your tweet stream when you exit or switch out of the app. That way, when you open it again, you can resume where you left off. Again, this is a feature that’s pretty standard on many Twitter iPhone app, but has been lacking on most of the Android ones.

Perhaps most impressive to me are two subtle changes though. The scroll speed of the tweet streams has been greatly increased and seems much more fluid. Also, Seesmic has added the ability to double-tap the top of the app to auto-scroll back to the top — again, another feature that’s pretty standard on iPhone Twitter apps.

Here are some other new features that have been added:

• Adding an Extra Large text size option
• Your profile information (avatar, number of following and followers,…) will now be updated automatically
• Changing your Twitter account password will now be handled by the application
• Composer now auto-corrects and auto-capitalize your words and sentences
• Notifications are now cleared when the application is accessed from Launcher
• Easily changing default account from the application’s Settings
• Can remove a Twitter account simply by pressing on it

Seesmic recently noted that it was a featured app alongside some Nexus One advertising by Google. Thanks to that, the app is closing in on 100,000 downloads founder Loic Le Meur says.

This update is scheduled to hit the Android Market any minute now. Watch more in the video below: