The Good NET Guide

Posts Tagged ‘stream’

When Chomp launched eight weeks ago in the iTunes store, it launched as an app for reviewing other iPhone apps. The app shows you a stream of realtime reviews, which you can filter by everyone or just your Facebook freinds. The app is showing some traction and should hit 300,000 active monthly users sometime tomorrow, according to co-founder Ben Keighran.

While it started out as an app, today Chomp launched a complimentary Website with full app search capabilities and links for each app. There, users can also see the stream of reviews, as well as dedicated pages for each app and vanity URLs for each reviewer. Developers can now link to the Chomp reviews directly from inside their apps using Chomp Connect, which also launched today in private beta. Chomp Connect lets developers add Chomp review buttons right inside their apps without forcing to go anywhere else.

Keighran contends that reviews on iTunes tend to have a more negative bias because people are prompted to submit a review every time they delete an app. With Chomp Connect, developers can ask their most engaged users to submit reviews.

He hopes to make Chomp a social alternative to iTunes reviews. By driving reviews straight from their apps, developers can promote their apps in the Chomp review stream. The more reviews, the more often it appears in the stream.

Do not expect UFC to look the other when it comes to online piracy of its various pay-per-view events. Dana White, the company’s president, recently told the Vancouver Sun that he and the UFC will do whatever it takes to eliminate piracy

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UFC’s Dana White throws down, vows to go after Internet pirates no matter the cost

The show floor is open, and we’re going live. First thing up is an announcement (upcoming) by someone named Lady Gaga, something about becoming some sort of bigwig at Polaroid. I know! What will she do next? I’m thinking Ponzi scheme. So we’re streaming that live right now, and then we’re live from the show floor for the rest of the day.

Also: if you missed last night’s Digital Experience broadcast, check it out here. We saw a ton of products that were just announced yesterday or are yet to be announced, including a really cool new podcasting service, some extremely small and capable HD camcorders, and a pair of DLP pico projectors. We’re working hard at digging up the hidden gems of CES or, at the very least, keeping the stream fresh, so tune in.

The last 100 seats to attend Friday’s Crunchies Awards are on sale now. Act fast!

Reminder, the Crunchies Awards start at 7:30 pm Friday night at the historic Herbst Theater in San Francisco (seating opens at 6:45, and we encourage you to arrive early.) Along with our co-hosts, GigaOm and VentureBeat, we’ll announce the winners to our 18 award categories from over 125 finalists. Voting concluded at midnight last night.

The Crunchies Awards celebrate the best technology achievements of 2009.

The Richter Scales will make a repeat performance. Scott Meltzer and Katrine Spang-Hanssen from Comedy Industries will help us laugh about 2009. Other special guest appearances too, they’re a surprise.

Once these sell out, we’ll also release 100 tickets to attend just the after party. We’ve been getting non-stop requests to find a way to open up more tickets, so this will bring us to full-out party capacity.

There’s lots of good stuff to enjoy at the after-party, co-hosted with Microsoft BizSpark and award benefactor Founders Fund. DJ Inertia (aka Ryan Jeffs) is flying in to spin music for us. Ryan is one of us, a tech engineer by trade. He leads a double life as an electronic music DJ with a new startup label Republik Records. He’s been featured in the playlists of artists like Paul Van Dyk, Paul Oakenfold, Pete Tong and countless others.

Grey Goose Vodka has designed some custom celebratory cocktails for us to enjoy. Cannonball is hosting wine, and LewisPR is providing embargo-free beer. The North Light Court of City Hall will have casino games: thanks to Armor Games, Betfair, Kosmix, Outcast Communications, SecondMarket, SGN and Zong. Stop by the DailyBooth photowall. We’ll also have start-up demos for you to enjoy from SGN, Tap11 and select fbFund companies. Big thank you to Solana and the talented team at DesignAboutTown for making us look great.

We hope to see you there. If you can’t attend the event in person, please join us for the live stream, hosted by Ustream and filmed by Future-Works. Plymedia will provide live captioning of the ceremony.

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Steam has been running a  huge sale the last few days, (Bioshock for $5, oh yes) but a Reddit user is urging gamers to look past the six headline titles and to indie games . He’s right. There are a bunch of games I’ve never heard of for only a few dollars right now. If you’re like me and already played-through MW2, Borderlands, Batman, and L4D2, spend $10 and pick up a couple of these.

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Don’t forget Steam’s indie games are on sale too

At our Real-Time CrunchUp today in San Francisco, we are hosting a panel titles “Media Streams: Are These The Utlimate Marketing Vehicle?”

Panelists include Sean Rad, CEO of Ad.ly; Ryan Amos, co-founder of DailyBooth; Jesse Engle, CEO of CoTweet; Robin Bechtel, a celebrity agent and Philip Nelson, SVP of strategic development for NewTek.

Below find my live notes (paraphrased):

ES: What are celebrities doing to leverage the social streams?

RB: I oversee Britney Spears’ digital properties and we are using Twitter to build up buzz around her concerts. Using Twitter, we were able to get 8,000 people to Times Square all by herself.

PN: Fans can feel like they are an intimate part of your lives. For example, Heidi and Spencer did a live webcast, that we did, from the Bahamas from their hotel room. They had over 50,000 people watching that.

ES: To what extent is Twitter a Marketing vehicle and to what extent is it an entertainment and marketing vehicle itself?

RB: One thing that’s interesting is that we work with Facebook to sell virtual charms for Britney. We just Twittered that we were doing and it was in the press within a matter of hours.

JE: Twitter is the focal point where a lot of elements come together. Twitter is a focal point to stay connected to the public.

ES: To what extent can ads and promotions appear within the Stream. Sean?

SR: Publishers in Ad.ly don’t feel like they are just marketing their own message, they feel like content producers.

ES: But more often than not, that’s just promotion.

SR: With Ad.ly we monitor what content is appropriate for consumers. If you are tweeting things that is not valuable to your audience, your value as a content creator goes down. We limit to one ad per day to each publishers. The cool things about Ad.ly and Twitter is that when it comes to advertising, you can get creative and experiment with it.

PC: Retweets don’t seem like a metric of success, it seems like a metric of idiocy.

SR: If you look at Twitter as an ecosystem, its about sharing information and discovering information.

ES: What are the types of content that works?

RB: It has to looks like it isn’t an ad, that’s its real.

PC: Twitter is unique because its a conversation which makes putting any advertising in the stream hideous.

ES: Marketers are experimenting with different ways to use this channel. Until we hear about how Twitter is going to advertise, there’s definitely a feeling that Twitter doesn’t want to pollute the stream.

Video: Recording can be seen here.

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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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At today’s Real-Time CrunchUp, Mozzler launched its real-time search engine based on Twitter. Mozzler, which has real-time functionality, searches Twitter for the most popular content in the last six hours based on retweets.

You can search Mozzler by keyword, similar to searches you can do on OneRiot and other search engines that include Twitter results. Results can include videos and images as well. Mozzler has also created numerous categories of searches under technology, entertainment, sports, business and more.

What differentiates Mozzler is the ability filter the stream. You’ll be able to create customized streams by keyword, which are updated in real-time. You can share links to streams on social networks and users can also subscribe to streams.

And one particularly compelling feature is Track (which should be sure to make TechCrunchIT editor Steve Gillmor happy), which is like Google Alerts for Twitter. Twitter has yet to implement Track yet, but it’s a very desirable feature to help filter and “keep track” of the stream.

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We’re just two days away from our Realtime CrunchUp in San Francisco. The CrunchUp agenda is chock full of goodness. Since our first event back in July, the momentum around realtime has accelerated. We find ourselves awash in realtime streams of data, and these realtime streams are becoming the new center of attention on the Web. During the conference we’ll be drilling down into what’s next for realtime in terms of making this stream manageable, adding new tributaries to the stream such as geolocation data, and building businesses on top of it.

As if the amazing lineup of speakers (from Twitter, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Foursquare, Seesmic, Brizzly, Hot Potato, Tweetmeme, DailyBooth) and startup product launch demos were not enough to drop everything right now and buy a ticket, I am going to give you one more reason. We’ll be giving away a half-day sailing excursion to one lucky ticket holder at the event.

Event sponsor ekoVenture, which is an OpenTable for active travel, is providing the half-day sailing trip in conjunction with OCSC SAILING. The winner can take five friends on a high-performance vessel in San Francisco Bay, with a professional skipper and instructor on board. The trip is worth $750, which is almost twice as much as a ticket.

And remember, you can justify taking a half-day off to go sailing as a “team-building” activity.

I love this kind of sponsorship because not only is it an awesome giveaway, but it highlights what the sponsor does in a very effective way. There are still a few sponsorship spots left for start-ups and brands to reach both conference and networking attendees. Please contact Heather Harde or Jeanne Logozo to learn more about sponsorship packages and custom opportunities.

Also, as we announced already, anyone who buys a ticket can opt-in to pitch your own realtime product on-stage.

Friday, November 20, 2009
Main Agenda: 9 am – 5:45 pm
After Party with StartUp Demo Tables: 5:45 – 7:30 pm

InterContinental Hotel
Grand Ballroom, 3rd floor
888 Howard Street, San Francisco CA

GET CRUNCHUP TICKETS NOW, courtesy of Eventbrite
$395 all-inclusive pass through midnight pst, Wednesday, November 18
$495 through November 20, subject to availability

Enter for a chance to *RealTime Pitch from the Audience*.
Purchase a CrunchUp pass and enter the RealTime Pitch. Two CrunchUp attendees (subject to opt out, of course) will be randomly selected Friday morning at the conference and will have 5 minutes each to pitch their start-up to attendees as part of our main agenda demo sessions, at 11:45 am and 2:00 pm.

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We’re here today at the Facebook Developer Garage being held at the company’s headquarters in Palo Alto, CA. The point of this rather large meetup for developers and the press is to talk about the future of Facebook’s Platform. As such, they’re calling this event the “Roadmap Edition.” As we noted earlier, big changes are expected to be announced today that will alter the way developers interact with Facebook’s Platform; this is D-Day.

Below find our live notes (paraphrased):

Mark Zuckerberg: Thanks for coming to our first ever edition of the roadmap developer garage. The Platform and Connect are quick becoming the most important part of our strategy today. We hope what we’re doing will help foster innovation. The first key is a really good team. We’ve added some really good people recently to our engineering and Connect teams.

We want to build out a real middle structure for our platform. It’s all about “eating our own dogfood.” This will take a while to complete, but it will improve speed and stability.

On the product side, Bret Taylor (from FriendFeed); he’s now the director of product management for Platform. There’s a lot of cool stuff coming out. Some of which we’ll talk about today.

This is the roadmap for the next few months. It’s progress for us to do a roadmap (laughs). Ethan (Beard) has been bugging me to do this for a while now. We knew we needed to do this for the developers. Ethan is one of the real stars at Facebook, he came from Google and runs the developer network now. We couldn’t think of a better person than Ethan to do this. The roadmap is the next step for all of this.

Ethan Beard: Some of our biggest developers are here, and some of our smallest. All of you are totally kicking butt on platform today. We have over 1 million developers now, the growth is incredible. Over 350,000 applications, and 10s of thousands are sites. 3 of the 10 ten iphone games now use Facebook Connect.

Our goal today is to reduce the amount of anxiety, despite what you heard in the press – “the death of Platform is greatly exaggerated.” 70% of Facebook users are touching the things you guys build every month.

You guys are building businesses, so you need a roadmap. Facebook is very fast moving and dynamic, so it’s challenging to nail down what exactly is coming out in the future and tell you guys. But Platform is so important to us.

Today: Communication Channel, Discovery and Engagement, and New Things. This is a 3 to 6 month roadmap. These are mock-ups, not final designs. We’re not launching any new products today, we’re just talking about what we’re launching in the future. This is a discussion we want to have with you and the public for what we should be doing.

First up:

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Communication Channels

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When users come to Facebook, they struggle to understand where they should go to get messages. There are too many places to go. This is one thing we want to fix. And from the developer perspective, there is also confusion. In Notifications we know that bad messages drown out the good ones. So which ones do you want to get across.

First important one to use is the Stream. This is the best location for one to many broadcasts. Nothing will changes about the Stream other than small things.

Second one is User-to-User communication. This is the source of some confusion. We’re going to consolidate all the various ways you do one-to-one in the inbox. You should send messages directly to users with attachments as you can now.

But you should also be able to send out a mass message (this is still user-to-user). We’re experimenting with how to have these in the inbox without blowing out the other one-to-one messages. We need better selectors for multiple users. Maybe if you’re talking about Scrabble, it only shows your friends who play the Scrabble app.

Third, we are going to make available to developers user email addresses. This will allow developers to prompt users and they can share their email with you. No longer will this be about ‘who owns the user.

These will allow you to future-proof your business.

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Discovery and Engagement

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Users struggle to find applications – we know where it is but they don’t. We’re moving navigation from bottom to the left side, we think this will be a big improvement. In the left side there will be notifications to let you know if there’s a new message to see. This will drive user re-engagement.

We will also have a one-click bookmark button to allow users to easily find the apps they want.

Another new thing: Dashboards. There will be an applications and a games dashboard. Our users love games, so this is for finding their existing games, and find new ones. We’ll use Dashboards for our own products as well.

User Interface updates. We’re working on changes to the top navigation – we’re going to downplay that it’s a Facebook page, and show that it’s your page (for apps).

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New Products And Programs

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We’ve spent a lot of time developing new products for developers. There’s an entirely new developer website. developers.facebook.com – there will be all new documentation, better collaboration and community features.

This will be all on the public-facing developer roadmap shortly. And we’ll keep updating it.

There will also be a new Platform Live Status area. It’s hard for developers to know if it’s on their side or our side – we get that. This should help.

Platform Policies – ours are exceptionally confusing now. We have over 14 pages on Platform policies – no one knows them all. Our goal is that everyone should understand them. Key ones: Be Trustworthy – Create a great user experience

14 pages have been reduced to 3 pages now. It’s much more simple. This is all about ‘what can i do, what can’t i do?’ This will be much easier.

Enforcement is another key focus now. We’re ending the verifications as a stand-alone program. Platform will still be free to use and open to everyone, but we’ll be checking. If we see something we don’t like, we’ll work with those developers to get their apps right.

Analytics is something we’re improving a lot now too. There will be a new Insights tool, and it will be available through an API, for the dashboards you guys use.

An entirely new API – Open Graph API – This allows any page on the web to have the same features as a fan page inside Facebook. These web pages can post info into that users News Feed. This is a continuation to the move to add objects and people into the graph, but now the graph can be anywhere on the web. And we’re opening this up – you guys can help build out the core social graph.

Go here now to learn more

F8 will be happen in the first half of 2010. This will be a return to our roots. Building great tech and providing you with the building blocks.

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Q&A

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Q: Can we vote on the features?

EB: We’re not launching any voting tools on the site. But you can voice your opinion. We expect to see that happen, but no voting.

Q: Can you speed up mobile SDK?

EB: Absolutely.

Q: I don’t get Open Graph API, more details?

EB: We think the graph is more than just people – also objects, products, and things. This shouldn’t all have to be in Facebook proper. So we want the functionality on any URL. This will be good for brands like Coke.

Q: The distinction between applications and games, is there a difference between the two?

EB: No difference in privacy settings. Our goal is just to make it easier to find games. But it’s all the same.

Q: Is the Dashboard for apps the same?

EB: Yes.

Q: Where does Facebook Currency fit into this?

EB: Nothing to announce today. But Facebook Credits today are used to purchase items in the gift store – and we’ve been running some tests to use those credits with developers and good they’re selling. That’s as far as we’ve gotten.

Q: Will developers be able to store email addresses?

EB: Yes. It will be valid and up-to-date for the users. We’re not sure about the names, but I think that will be ‘yes.’

Q: Other changes for permissions?

EB: This is something we hear a lot – frustration with the variety of authorization dialogues. We’re spending some time investigating how to simplify that. There will be more granular controls for users to see what they’re sharing with developers.

Q: Will Open Graph site owners be able to interact easily?

EB: Through the API, yes.

Q: Will there also be age-verification?

EB: Nothing to announce now, but we have some APIs for age verification already.

Q: Are Notifications going away.

EB: For applications, yes.

Q: So what if users don’t feel comfortable giving the email address?

EB: That’s like saying I want to get a phone call from you, but don’t want to give you my phone number (laughs). It’s important for developers to be able to email users, but users have to see what is going on.

Q: Can users choose which email to give them?

EB: We haven’t decided that yet, but we’ll figure that out.

Q: Will there be proxy emails for these notifications?

EB: Email addresses will be actual real email addresses – like Gmails.

Q: Talk a bit more about the counters thing in the new sidebar.

EB: It shows up next to the bookmark, if a user has bookmarked an app. Developers can set the counter for any reason they choose. We expect it to be for good reasons, we’ll be watching it. It should be obvious to the user. The counters shouldn’t always be on.

Q: What about publishing to the wall now?

EB: That hasn’t been addressed yet, but I don’t think we have plans to take that away from the Stream perspective.

Q: With verified apps, are you killiing that program, and just raising the standards across the board?

EB: The program as you know it now will be ending. We’ll be using the same tools broadly across the platform.

Q: Will search results be effected?

EB: Not sure yet, I don’t think so though.

Q: Will you be verifying apps below a certain size?

EB: Our goal is to extend our policies very broadly. We’ll obviously focus on the bigger ones more, but we care about all of them.

Q: What are you thoughts on all these changes for developers?

EB: There are very few platforms that are this open about the changes, like we’re doing today. Our goal is not to break backwards compatibility. We want to maintain it whenever possible, but Facebook as a product changes very quickly – and somethings maintaining compatibility is impossible. So we provide warning – at least 30 days, for major changes, more. And we want to offer a clear path to help developers.

Q: In Open Graph API

EB: There are no specific changes to announce, but the on and off-Facebook should be the same or similar.

Q: What about location? With Twitter doing it?

EB: We have nothing specific to announce at this point.

Q: What about profiles? Anything new coming up?

EB: We are making some changes to the profile. We think it should be a great place for users to accurately represent their identity, but we have some changes. We can’t share them right now. Some will affect developers. Boxes tab will be going away. Profile pages will be getting narrowed – 710px to 550px.

Q: So you don’t want apps to grow quickly?

EB: Not at all. We just don’t want developers to do it by violating policy. We will continue to shut down apps that grossly violate our policies, but that’s not our goal.

That’s a wrap.

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