Editor's note: we offer our long-term sponsors the opportunity to write 'Sponsor Posts' and tell their story. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.
Having an online presence today is far more than having a website. Social media is the order of the day, and everyone agrees that companies have to reach consumers through these innovative channels. What few people are talking about is how companies should be reaching each other using these same tools.
Twitter just announced its new home page redesign complete with trending topics and search. Publicly launched at the 2006 South by South West interactive festival, users first flocked to the site as a way to communicate with friends and festival attendees. However, as we've seen in the past few years, the site has evolved into a multifaceted real-time tool. The community has given timely updates on earthquakes, the Iran election and we've even seen professional poker players bluff in real-time Tweets. Twitter has evolved into a community where users can discover breaking news and trends and the new home page certainly matches that.
It's a common fact of life that many work-related conflicts can be solved over a drink. Thousands of secrets have been divulged under the tawdry yellow light of an Amstel Light promotional sign. Low-grade alcohol and smoke-stained pleather booths make for amazingly soothing corporate confessionals. In some dark and magical way, the siren's song of happy hour coaxes coworkers into revealing the real reasons they smite you in the workplace. Messy divorces, deaths in the family and financial turmoil - I've heard it all. If you can uncover the truth you might just be able to save your team. And if your team doesn't need saving, then happy hour is a great reason to get together with friends. In addition to the obvious bar finding tools like Yelp and Citysearch, below are a couple resources to help you enjoy your off-site work excursions:
Multiple reports tonight say that Microsoft and Yahoo! will announce a deal tomorrow wherein Microsoft's Bing will become the new Yahoo! search engine and Yahoo! will sell ads against those search results on its site. There's a whole lot of money in play, but as users we don't think that's the most interesting part of this story. There may be some very interesting consequences, both positive and negative, for innovation - our favorite part of the online experience. Our guess is that it will be a net negative for forward-looking web users.
Bing's new substantial market share will put new pressure on Google to step up to the plate and wow us again, but the likely loss of Yahoo's own search work could be a major loss for the web at large. There are some awesome projects underway at Yahoo! Search and the people who work on them have to be concerned about the future of their jobs and work. We're worried too, we really like the things they've made for us to use.
Apple recently countered against the Electronic Frontiers Foundation's request to the US Copyright Office to make an exemption to the DMCA and permit iPhone jail breaking. Apple claims an exemption would leave a phone's baseband processor (BBP) open to malicious hackers. From here, hackers could then circumvent data and call payments, make anonymous phone calls "desirable to drug dealers" and even initiate commands to render cell towers inoperable. The argument that phone hacking is particularly "desirable to drug dealers" and corporate terrorists is an amusing one given that Apple's co-founders are themselves known to have experimented with phone phreaking in their youth.
Microsoft just launched Page Hunt, a game that presents web pages to players and asks that they guess key words to hunt them down. In the past, RWW has covered a number of search relevancy projects that incorporate human computational power including Semanti. But few projects have been presented to volunteers in such a fun and easy way.
69% of respondents to a new poll performed last month say they don't know enough about Twitter to have an opinion about its future. That might sound pretty dismal after all the media attention the social network has received, but who amongst us could blame a person for not feeling qualified to comment on the future of an emerging communication paradigm? Twitter is complicated! It seems just as remarkable that 31% of people think they do know enough about Twitter to have an opinion about its future.
Check out these survey options below and tell us which of those answers you'd have given if asked.
UK government officials won't have to rely on randomly tweeting without any official guidance anymore. Neil Williams, the Head of Corporate Digital Channels at the Department for Business, Innovation and Skills just published a first draft of an official guide to using Twitter for UK government officials. The guide clocks in at 20 pages, 5,392 words and 36,215 characters - or approximately 259 tweets. The guide explains what Twitter and related social media tools are and how to use them at a very basic level. One section of the guide also explains third-party tools like bit.ly, monitter, and tweetbeep.com.
New York based video startup, blip.tv made a series of partnership announcements this morning at a live press conference held in the company's offices. Today, blip.tv is expanding their distribution network thanks to new partnerships with YouTube, Vimeo, NBC Local Media New York, and Roku while expanding their current relationships with other current distributors. Along with these deals, the company also revealed their completely revamped content owner dashboard, the central hub for managing media using their service.
Yesterday, Swedish music service Spotify announced their application's submission to Apple iTunes App Store. Spotify, which already boasts over 6 million users in Europe, is somewhat of an iTunes alternative - albeit with streaming tracks instead of downloads. However, the similarity between the two services leads some to believe that Apple, notorious for booting apps that duplicate iTunes functionality, won't approve the new Spotify iPhone application. And in another example of Apple's totalitarianism, the company also just pulled Google Voice and other third-party Google Voice applications from the App Store.
Luckily for jailbreakers, problems like those above are less of an issue. There's currently an open source Spotify client app available for download and the third-party GV Mobile app for Google Voice is coming soon.
