News
Archive of all the latest news and blog posts
The new mobile device 'Palm Pre' is widely being touted as a big challenger for the IPhone. Naturally, with such a tremendous competitor already wallowing proudly in the mobile market, the Palm Pre is faced with the monumental and unenviable challenge of convincing the general public that it has a superior product. However, Im sure this will not prevent them from trying.
Apple have so far blown millions of TV advertising dollars pimping many of the applications available on the IPhone, with a clear emphasis on games and enabling software such as 'Urbanspoon'. Conversely, Palm Pre must take a slightly different approach as they do not possess the same network of budding application developers and finished archive of products to justify an advertising barrage of a similar tone. With this in mind, one has to ponder the potential application that will underpin the Palm Pre advertising onslaught. What else could it be other than 'the people's social network of choice'?
That’s right, once again Facebook has found itself slap bang in the middle of mass media frenzy, this time strategically positioned as a gigantic wooden frame inside the Palm Pre advertising production studio. Check it out:
According to the wonderful news people at CNET, the Facebook landing page has been receiving extensive hair and beauty treatment in an LA studio, in last minute preparation for its appearance in the Palm Pre mobile advert. So, how did CNET connect Palm Pre and Facebook together I hear you cry? Well, apparently, the link between the two companies is more than just rising hot air. It was a certain well known Hollywood photographer who posted the picture via Twitter with the following post below:
Unsurprisingly, both the user profile and the associated timeline have been obliterated out of the ever expanding Twittersphere. Having so eloquently provided a less than glowing review of the device, its no surprise the offending tweet was removed with unparalleled haste and efficiency. With the Social Media industry currently receiving a tonne of press, it comes as no shock to see mobile networks such as Sprint (USA) utilising Twitter feeds and jumping aboard the ship. With this in mind, it seems like a natural occurrence for Palm Pre to stand on the shoulders of the social networking giants. I am intrigued to know how this giant Facebook set will be used during the filming of the commercial, answers on the back of a postcard please...
I've just been reading about MTV’s latest offering produced by Justin Timberlake, 'The Phone'. It's an unusual experiment in hyper scripted reality television, that utilises Twitter and mobile phone technology to engage the viewer. 'The Phone' challenges four complete strangers, in teams of two, to solve a mystery and win $50,000 (in episode 1, contestants had to find a fake car bomber).
Instead of stimulating fan participation in the show, MTV and their agency Fanscape, have chosen to create a Twitter telephone game that encourages retweets of misleading clues and information.
Every week, in tangent with the airing of The Phone, the MTV Twitter account is tweeting random information and requesting their legion of followers to retweet and adapt one word of the original tweet. The goal is to emulate the original Telephone game, where a slightly adapted message is spread to new people, and the original message typically gets distorted beyond comprehension. Think Twitter meets chinese whispers...
Although on the surface this appears to be a novel and innovative concept, seemlessly attempting to mash together traditional broadcast TV with social media, it’s also a fairly transparent attempt to get tweets with the hashtag #thephone to quickly disseminate through the ever expanding global Twittersphere. The more tweets, the more possibility #thephone becomes a trending topic.
The desired result seems to be an attempt at engineering a viral Twitter campaign to raise awareness about The Phone. To this extent, the results are mixed overall, with just a minute smattering of retweets following on from the latest episode.
Is this is an innovative method by which to attract Tweeting eyeballs, or just a poorly executed game with no tangible winner? You be the judge, comments are welcomed below...
Hopefully that got your attention. Imagine living in the heart of California USA, surrounded by the most spectacular vineyards and restaurants. Imagine for a second a world with no rent, no mortgages and no rush hour traffic. Imagine being paid to write about your experiences as a wine maker and broadcasting the results to a thirsty army of Twitter followers. This is the reality of a £10k per month job position advertised in Sonoma County, California. This is definitely sounds too good to be true...
Murphy-Goode Winery in Sonoma County is offering one successful (and extremely lucky!) applicant the opportunity to live this dream lifestyle in return for updating the company Twitter and Facebook accounts. This wonderful opportunity has been labelled as ‘winery life-streaming’, and the position is being advertised from today!
According to one San Francisco citizen blog post, this is not a joke, but there is going to be some seriously stiff competition this morning, when eager applicants descend upon a busy San Francisco office block to stake their claim. However, please do not be deterred, the post is not exclusive to residents of the Californian persuasion. The forward thinking boozers at Murphy-Goode are also allowing eager potential candidates the opportunity to post a one minute video application online. You want me to provide a link? Are you having laugh?
Apparently, “Throughout the course of the job the successful applicant will learn about viticulture, winemaking, Sonoma County and Murphy-Goode wines. He or she will prepare and post dispatches on their experiences though social media tools such as Facebook, blogs, internet videos and Twitter as well as traditional media.” Seriously, where is my video camera?
Although this is being touted as a dream position, it is also an incredibly astute and far reaching public relations master stroke. A position offered by the Australian tourist board earlier in the year, gave one lucky punter the chance to make £100k per year by blogging about experiences on the Great Barrier Reef. This provided a much needed boost to dwindling tourist numbers and Murphy-Goode will be anticipating a similar response.
If you are interested, check out the website. Closing date for applications June 5th!
Waracle Ltd are proud to announce the start of a new SMART feasibility project, funded in partnership with The Scottish Government. Waracle will be spending the next six months developing its patent pending RT2 'geo-location' methodology. Without sounding too technical, this methodology will hopefully allow us to determine the geographical whereabouts of an individual computer user across a network, with a greater degree of accuracy than any other software application.
If successful, the technology will be utilised to prevent online credit card fraud, assist emergency services caller location and deliver location aware marketing content online. Watch this space for details...
After yesterdays blog, I thought it would be a good idea to lighten the mood a little. What better way to achieve this than to wax lyrical upon this weeks topical hot potato: the dreaded swine flu. Sounding like some sort of demented Russell Brand gag, swine flu has provided this years answer to SARS and the West Nile Virus. As such, I haven't paid a great deal of attention, seemingly hoping I wont be affected in any way (famous last words...).
But in the age of Twitter, hysteria over the latest potential end of humanity virus is spreading … well, like a virus. Trendrr, which tracks trends across social media sites, just sent over the numbers, and they are off the charts - literally.
Tweets about "Swine Flu" are now at an astonishing 10,000 per hour, up from an average of a few thousand earlier in the day. Of course, this is the snowball effect that Twitter can have on a given subject, whether it be Christian Bale, Susan Boyle, Ashton Kutcher or other viral phenomenons that we've seen pop up since the microblogging site crossed into the mainstream chasm.
Being a self confessed PHP-geek I’m confident about my knowledge of PHP and whenever something bizarre like this crops up it reminds of the nature of PHP being open source and something born out of community rather than a corporate affair.
This by no means implies that PHP is an underdog to such a system as this really is the first time I have ever encountered a scenario where something doesn’t really work as it should. When I used to a lot of coding using Microsoft’s DirectX platform half finished and wrongly documented functions where just the norm. You learned to live with it.
However, today I rewrote part of my application framework to contain the main application class as a singleton and avoid the necessity of passing about a reference to it like some sort of code level pass-the-handle-to-the-parcel. I wanted to keep it backwards compatible, and allow passing a reference to an object as an optional parameter into a parent class constructor. I did this using something similar to this:
public function __construct(){
func_num_args() > 0 ? $this->app = &func_get_arg(0) : $this->app = app::getInstance();
Now when this broke (springs flying out) I resorted back to the PHP documentation which shyly states that func_get_arg returns a copy of the arguments, so therefore optional reference parameters just don’t work. I can understand this except PHP5 brought about a new way of handling objects where all objects are copied by reference, and only really copied when a newly referenced version is altered. This saves memory and is quite a cute trick but should also allow me to use func_get_arg to retrieve a parameter as a reference.
To cut a long story short it doesn’t. However there is a workaround using debug_backtrace() which returns an associative array of info, one element of which is the current function arguments – which DO allow you to pass an optional reference.
I don’t recommend anyone starts using debug functions in production code so I just removed the optional parameter passing and instead took a long route round to ensure it wasn’t needed.
Perhaps this will change in newer versions of PHP, perhaps not (security issue?) but in the mean time bear this in mind.
MW.
If you can remember the Internet in the late 1990s and early 2000s, before Google, the search engine landscape had a face, and his name was Jeeves. AskJeeves.com, the predecessor to Ask.com, was a popular search engine which used the balding cartoon character as its mascot. In 2006, however, Jeeves was "retired" as the search engine’s representative.
Today, Jeeves has reemerged, but only for the UK version of Ask. What’s more, he’s diving into social media with his own Facebook and Twitter accounts.
According to SearchEngineLand, Ask found that Jeeves had 83% brand awareness, compared to 72% awareness for Ask.com - even though Jeeves hasn’t appeared on the site for 3 years. Not only is he back on the homepage, but he appears on most search pages with search query suggestions and helps answer "questions of the day".
In addition to being integrated throughout the Ask UK search engine, the company apparently intends to use Jeeves as a vessel for promotion via social media. First of all, he has a Twitter account, although he has not made any updates yet. His Facebook page, however, already has some status updates from Jeeves, as well a small group of fans.
It would seem that having a character as your mascot is a big advantage in the social media age: wouldn’t you rather befriend Jeeves on Facebook than become a fan of the Ask.com logo?
Perhaps we need a Waracle 'character'. amusing suggestions welcome...
Its absolutely official. Like it, or loathe it, 2009 is the year of Social Media. Once upon a time, not so long ago, Twitter was a place where you could read about what someone ate for dinner. Now, in certain instances, its the first place to go for breaking news. Sites like Digg and Facebook now both have an incredible impact in terms of the real world. Peoples lives are changed and important questions have been asked and answered. Benchmarks have been breached and milestones have been obliterated as the social media bandwagon shows unrelenting growth. You just need to look at the metrics to see that this is more than just a fad.
In March, YouTube reached 100 million monthly viewers in the US. 6.3 billion videos were viewed on the site. Its competitor, Hulu, is also growing fast, but not nearly as fast as YouTube. In March alone, YouTube has grown almost two Hulus in size. According to some calculations, YouTube will serve 75 billion video streams to 375 million unique visitors in 2009.
Is Google getting any money out of it? Hardly. Some reports claim that the video sharing service is costing them $1.65 million dollars per day. Is this money-bleeding causing Google much grief? Not really. According to their latest financial report, its revenue in the first quarter was $5.51 billion, a 3% decrease from last quarter, but still a 6% increase from the same period last year.
Facebook has grown from 100 million to 200 million users in less than 8 months. If it were a country, it would be bigger than Brazil. Its traffic has grown immensely in one year's period, especially in Europe where it grew 314%. According to comScore, it has grown a staggering 2,721% in Italy from February 2008 to February 2009. In other European countries, its growth was also immense: 999% in Spain, 607% in Belgium, 518% in France, 499% in Switzerland. Here's another sign of the times: Nielsen Online's latest research shows that social networking is now more popular than email. According to their study, 66.8% of Internet users have used social networks, while only 65.1% have used email.
Remember the time when Robert Scoble had a couple thousand Twitter followers, and it was a big deal? Now there's a guy with one million Twitter followers. If you type "Ashton Kutcher" into Google, his Twitter account will be the third result. Twitter itself is growing at a crazy rate; although it already has a very large audience, it grew 76.8 percent just from February to March. Its yearly growth rate? 1,382 percent. According to Nielsen, Twitter currently has 7 million unique monthly visitors. If it keeps growing at this rate, it'll have nearly 100 million visitors same time next year.
Finally, the most recent numbers I've had the misfortune to read about: The Pirate Bay four has been sentenced to 1 year of prison each, and they must pay 3.6 million dollars in damages.
Earlier today, I logged into MySpace for the first time in at least a few weeks – maybe longer. MySpace – who has fallen well behind Facebook for the title of top social network in terms of traffic – took the opportunity to welcome me back this evening, with an email promoting some of their newish features.
This brought a few things to mind. Most obviously, it highlights the fact that MySpace is struggling right now and turning to traditional marketing tactics to try and win back users. Beyond that though, it’s a reminder of the differences between MySpace and rival Facebook, and how MySpace is looking to highlight those in an effort to remain relevant.
MySpace leads their marketing email promoting MySpace Music, which the company bills as "the largest supply of songs on the Internet." Music remains perhaps MySpace’s most distinctive advantage over Facebook, and truth be told, is a fairly impressive service, though rumors that the latter will launch a service of its own or forge a tight partnership with someone like iLike persist.
Continuing on my 3-point email from MySpace, the social network promotes the option to upload your email address book to find friends. This has become standard fare on social networks, but perhaps wasn't as key to MySpace in its early days, when the site was largely about accumulating as many friends as possible versus connecting with those you already know. Now that it has mimicked a number of Facebook's features, like the news feed, it's clearly trying to bring people who know each other closer together by plugging this feature.
That said, this pitch brought back the memory of a profile of Rupert Murdoch that I read in Esquire last year, where he told the magazine that "[users of] Facebook, they tend to go in to contact friends, to look up who they are going to be in college with, to find old friends, or whatever. On MySpace, people go look for new friends."
That's very much still in play in my Welcome Back email, as MySpace pitches their "People you may know" feature, which works much like that on Facebook, analyzing friends of friends and looking for connections.
The problem with this feature on MySpace is that because of the mass accumulation of friends that took place by many users, it's harder for the social network to make quality recommendations. I only see one person I actually know in my suggested list, and it’s someone I’ve met once in my life. Mind you, Facebook’s feature is starting to suffer from a similar problem as my network becomes far less personal.
So what's the moral of the story (or email as the case may be)? Primarily, it seems, that MySpace doesn’t want to go down quietly, and will attempt to win back former users with its new features. But it also highlights the evolution of social networks over the past few years, and sheds some light on why Facebook ultimately won the most recent round of battle in the space.
However, Facebook is starting to exhibit similar attributes to MySpace, including an influx of brands with increased prominence on the site, and the broadening of user's social graphs to include very loose connections versus the once much more intimate environment. Thus, is it just a matter of time before Facebook sees a similar decline and gives rise to someone else? History says yes, but recent numbers suggest clearly not. What do you think? Share your thoughts in the comments.
In January 2009, the wonderful people at Apple announced that they would be making the ITunes service DRM (Digital Rights Management) free, thus allowing its customers to use and transfer files without any 'major' restrictions. However, this particular press release was coupled with the announcement that popular tracks within the site would be made available at an increased price level.
Yesterday, this announcement came to fruition. Single songs within ITunes now range in price between $0.69 and $1.29 for top tracks. This is an increase of 30% on those tracks positioned at the high end of the scale. As such, 8 of the current top 15 songs in the ITunes library fall within this bracket, with current household favourites such as 'Lady Gaga' and 'Flo Rida' being punted for $1.29. The remaining 7 tracks within the top 15 are being sold for $0.99, meaning that Apple can effectively alter consumer behaviour patterns and influence buying decisions for specific artists based on price.
So its the same old story really, big company gives to the masses with one hand and simply takes away with the other. Whilst the announcement of DRM free tunes comes as a welcome and open approach to music distribution in the 21st century, the implementation of a 30% price hike is certainly capable of leaving a bitter after-taste. Several 'rivals' are using this increase in price as an opportunity to promote cheaper alternatives and stimulate brand awareness, as 'droves' of users apprehensively search for alternatives to ITunes.
This is in fact a massive presumption on my part, as the effect of this increase in price on customer behaviour is still largely unknown. Few music fans have even bothered to experience 'rival' sites such as Amazon and eMusic and in many cases, customers don't even flinch at a $0.30 increase. However, over time, these numbers do add up, and an extra 100 tracks will burn a $30 hole in the pocket.
