Tapulous, the developers of the highly popular Tap Tap Revenge game for the iPhone and iPod touch, released a native, location aware Twitter client for the iPhone tonight. Twinkle (iTunes link) already existed as a native application on jail broken iPhones before, but Apple only added it to the official iTunes store tonight. While there are some oddities in the way Twinkle works, the location awareness makes it a worthwhile addition to the ever growing pool of Twitter clients.
How would you feel if you spent more than $1 million throwing a party and less than 100 or even 1,000 people showed up? That sinking feeling is spreading over corporate boardrooms around the nation, according to study performed by Ed Moran, a director at consulting mega-firm Deloitte.
It may be all the rage, but are company-built social networks for customers to socialize in really smart?
There have been various sightings of a new design for Twitter this afternoon, though by now, Twitter has reverted back to its old design. Possibly, Twitter is testing this new design as it prepares to integrate Summize's search into its current look. The new design moves the navigation bar away from the top and to the right side of the screen, making the overall look of the site more coherent and modern.
Today online music service last.fm released the new design they've been working on since May. At first glance it looks quite different to the Facebook-like UI that we saw in the beta in June. However as we noted in our review of the beta last month, the beta UI was much criticized - so the fresh lick of paint is probably due to that user feedback (and, as you can see in the screenshot below, the new header literally looks like a lick of paint!).
How An Unknown Artist's Work Became a Social Media Brand Thanks To the Power of Community
Twitter users are very familiar with the iconic image of the Fail Whale. This social object has been latched onto by Twitter fans not just as a representation of Twitter's downtime, but also as a representation of the community's love for the service and their hope for its triumph over their many struggles. Despite Twitter's troubles, most of its users stayed true, watching and waiting as the team began the long process of recoding the application in order for it to scale up. As Twitter succumbed to the strain of running their under-provisioned service, the Fail Whale "over capacity" image would appear. And this image began to take on a life of its own. This is the story of the Fail Whale.
Traffic analytics company Hitwise released search market share numbers for dating websites in June today and two things were striking about the data.
Ad supported free site PlentyOfFish is trouncing everyone in the dating game and huge numbers of mainstream users are still afraid to navigate there directly using their browser's address bar. The economics of user ignorance are serious and could have big implications for online innovation. Update: Check out the great discussion on this in the comments below - we may have been convinced that this isn't such a bad thing after all.
Amazon's original video store, Amazon Unbox, is a lot like iTunes - you shop online and the files must be downloaded to your computer in order to view them. For many people, the service wasn't worth the effort. After downloading the large files, they could only be watched in Amazon's proprietary media player which restricted their use. It wasn't until a partnership with Tivo was announced that the service gained popularity, but even still, it lags behind iTunes. Now, Amazon is taking another shot at the video marketplace - this time with a streaming service instead. Will this be the winning ticket?
Our digital lifestyle blog, last100, has an analysis of this news.
According to Andrew Fogg from kusiri, Google will start rolling out offline support for both Gmail and Google Calendar through Google Gears within the next six weeks. Google enabled offline access to Google Docs earlier this year, after they had already been using if for Google Reader for over a year. Fogg also found out that Google will start supporting SyncML for synchronizing contacts in Gmail around the same time.
Enterprise 2.0 is a rapidly growing trend that takes the concepts and tools of social media (social networking, RSS, wikis, blogs, etc.) and re-purposes them for business use, wrapping them up into applications that make the tools at work seem more like the tools we use in our day-to-day lives. While these enterprise 2.0 apps give us that web 2.0 feel, it's rarer to see actual Web 2.0 services like Facebook or Twitter used by businesses. And although we've seen many people promoting the business use of Twitter, we had not yet heard about anyone actually going so far as to integrate Twitter into a non-consumer focused application. However, that's just what Joint Contact has done. Their PM tool now shows how tweeting can actually be a productive activity.
In the introduction to his book,
Linus Torvalds, creator of the Linux operating system, wrote that life is about entertainment.
He might seem the last person you'd imagine as focused on entertainment, until you
realize that Linux started as a hobby.
Entertainment is increasingly the center of our lives, and we also want work that challenges and entertains. With the rise of the Social Web and new forms of communication like Twitter, iPhone, YouTube and others, entertainment is just a click away. In this post we look at today's Web through the prism of both entertainment and utility.
