Sprout, developer of a unique drag-and-drop widget creation service, announced today that its development platform now supports the Facebook Platform, Facebook Connect, and OpenSocial. According to the press release, this will "enable brands and agencies to focus their time on the creative campaign development and still reap the rewards that social networking applications offer.." Which means, if you are using Sprout for your ad campaigns already, you now instantly have access to three more social platforms to deploy on. If you aren't using Sprout, why not?
A new online community site called Lunch.com has just launched into private beta here at the Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco. The site, essentially a recommendation network, aims to bring the sort of casual conversations you would have with friends over lunch to the online arena. Using a proprietary "Similarity Network Engine," Lunch calculates what you have in common with other site members so you can share recommendations with those who have your same interests and perspectives.
Click through for an exclusive invite code to this new site!
By making available databases of human genomic data, US census records and other data of public interest, the Amazon Public Data Sets are an incredible resource. They're like a 21st century Public Library for robots to patronize. In this emerging era of flourishing data-centric applications, though, the state of the art never stands still.
Forty year old British technology platform Talis (background) announced this week that it now offers free, perpetual storage and keyless API access to semantically marked-up large data sets. The offering is called the Talis Connected Commons and it's the kind of thing that anyone with a geekish imagination can get excited about.
Tinker, a new service that aggregates Twitter conversations around topics, came out of private beta today. Unlike services that merely attempt to track Twitter hashtag trends or attempt to describe what context a hashtag brings to a tweet, Tinker lets its users select popular events that are already being tracked, or create their own event stream by choosing a keyword or hashtag and adding a few filters, such as 'no swear words' and selective blocking of individual Twitter or Tinker users.
MySpace today announced a partnership with Citysearch that will bring Citysearch's database of local businesses to the social network's new MySpace Local service. Users on MySpace can now review, rate, and share content about businesses on MySpace Local, and reviews and ratings will appear in users' activity stream. MySpace will launch this service with support for restaurants and bars first, though it plans to include a wider range of businesses in the near future. MySpace Local will be available as a private beta today, and should become available to all users in the next few weeks.
Over the last few weeks, Facebook has been rolling out its latest redesign. Within days of the first changes, a polling application on Facebook showed that 94% of the 634,484 users who took the poll hate the redesign, and some 1.7 million users signed a petition to bring back the old design.
Author: Ravit Lichtenberg is the founder and chief strategist at Ustrategy.com -- a boutique consultancy focusing on helping companies succeed. Ravit works with CEOs, marketing groups, and Social Media managers to craft customer-centric engagement strategies that result in higher customer value, stronger customer community, improved monetization, and higher profitability. Ravit authors a blog at www.ravitlichtenberg.com.
Over the weekend, you may have heard the news about how Google finally assigned their standalone Gmail Contacts page a proper URL. Although the independent site has been available since fall of last year, it was previously somewhat hidden through an obfuscated URL. Now the site is online at google.com/contacts, a web address that's sure to encourage more people to use Google and/or Gmail to organize and maintain their address lists. What you may have not known about this special contacts page, however, is that it's actually the only usable place to organize your contacts within the Gmail system.
Ribbit, the VOIP platform that was bought by British Telecom last year, announced the winners of its $100,000 KillerApps challenge today. The contest was obviously meant to stimulate interest in Ribbit's APIs among developers, and judging from the line-up of winning applications, a lot of developers came up with highly creative ways of using Ribbit's platform in their apps.
AdMob, one of the world's largest mobile advertising networks, released its Download Exchange today. In return for running ads for other apps, developers can now promote their own apps across AdMob's network of over 1,000 applications. At its core, Download Exchange is basically a more sophisticated version of the many banner and link exchange services that are very common on the Web.
I had about 3 story options on my plate to write about tonight. But I found myself constantly returning to the iTunes store and searching for Skype, over and over again. Finally, there it was: As promised by no less a personage than Om Malik himself, the official Skype iPhone client has arrived. Although video streaming is a no-show, both full IM and voice communication is supported directly over wireless networks. Plus there are a few additional touches specific to this client that make it really great.
