Flock, the "social web browser" built on top of Mozilla's Firefox, has remained somewhat of a niche product despite its integrations with the most popular social networking sites on the web. Although its features should have made it a top product in our Facebook and Twitter-obsessed age, it has clearly remained on the sidelines of the web browser market.
Today, Flock is trying a new strategy. The company plans to extend itself beyond the "social" niche by trying to find a home in an entirely different one: the Hispanic web. To tap into this new audience, Flock is releasing a Spanish-language web browser in partnership with Univision Interactive Media, the top Spanish-language media company in the U.S.
Originally revealed at this spring's DEMO 09 conference, the Asurion Mobile address book stood out as one of the more memorable mobile products. Still called simply "AddressBook," this social media-infused contacts application is designed exclusively for Android handsets. From within the mobile application, you not only see the profile updates and details from your friends on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, Flickr and Amazon, you can also interact with some of the networks themselves, posting to walls, leaving comments, etc. However, if you would rather contact your friends through more traditional means, the app lets you phone them using its built-in dialer or you can text them via SMS.
The App Store could be your goldmine or simply another dead end. Or the long tail could end up being where your mobile dev shop slowly turns a corner into profitability. But how do developers know where to turn for the fine-tuning that transforms sparse user interest into a robust business?
Apprupt is a performance analytics shop focusing specifically on iPhone apps. They track the click-thrus and conversion rates for online and mobile links to iPhone applications, and they claim to help developers find the sweet spot where highly focused user targeting meets pure monetization. But how does the end-of-the-rainbow promise hold up?
Matt Mullenweg has just annouced on his blog that WordPress parent company Automattic is open sourcing After the Deadline, a natural-language spell-checking plugin for WordPress and TinyMCE that was only recently ushered into the Automattic fold.
Scarcely seven weeks after its acquisition was announced, After the Deadline's core technology is being released under the GPL. Moreover, writes Mullenweg, "There's also a new jQuery API that makes it easy to integrate with any text area."
Social Search just went live in Google Labs. Google announced that it was working on this Social Search feature at the Web 2.0 Summit last week, but at that time, Google's Marissa Mayer announced that it would only be available "in a few weeks." Social Search taps into a user's social network profiles and displays relevant links and status updates that members of a user's own social network have shared at the bottom of the default search results page. According to Google, Social Search will enhance the search experience on Google by providing users with more personally relevant search results.
3D virtual pets to hold in your hand and interact with, software that turns drawn objects into movable 3D objects subject to the laws of physics and a Microsoft hiring-coup. Those are the stories behind the hottest videos from the eye and brain-candy world of Augmented Reality, as seen at last week's International Symposium on Augmented and Extended Reality in Orlando, Florida.
Who says the web is all about pages that you view in a browser? Check out these three visions of a fast-approaching future where data is drawn from and overlaid on top of the real world around us.
Once just a browser add-on that allowed users to surf smarter across several verticals, AdaptiveBlue's Glue is now a site-centric product that acts as both a hub and a spoke of the social web.
Glue's synaptic web-esque technology is based on a user's browsing across common sites such as Amazon, Wikipedia and YouTube, and those visits and any interactions (comments, "likes," etc.) feeding back to automatically create a taste profile and a web of affinity with other users and recommendations of other items or content across about a dozen categories, including music, books and movies. So, can this be done without violating users' privacy or - worse yet - frustrating and boring them into attrition?
Joining the ranks of tools such as Tweetmeme and Digg widgets, Facebook's Share button will now be showing the number of users who share items in real time - and with a new set of analytics features.
Facebook Platform product manager Mark Kinsey writes on the Facebook Developers blog, "Today we're making the sharing experience on Facebook and off even richer by launching the next version of Facebook Share, with a live counter, as well as new ways to measure how content is being shared on Facebook."
With no fanfare or as much as an official announcement, Google has taken an important step in making users' Google Docs more open and portable.
As of today, several bloggers have reported seeing this new feature, which allows users to grab all their Google Docs and batch export them as a zip file. Files can be exported in a number of formats, including Microsoft Office and Open Office formats. Users can also choose to export only certain types of docs, e.g., spreadsheets and slide decks only.
Social networking sites are quickly becoming one of the most important places where retailers can meet potential customers and interact with their current customer base. According to a new report from eMarketer, social network users are a lucrative target demographic because they are more likely to make online purchases than any other group. About three-quarters of all the retailers in the Internet Retailer Top 500 Guide maintain a presence on at least one social network. Facebook, YouTube and MySpace are the most popular social networking sites for online retailers.
