Facebook announced today at its mobile platform event that it is opening up its Places API. That means that any outside application can now post check-ins, photos, links and more to the Facebook Places database. It also means that any outside app can read the same info from the Facebook database to incorporate into its app.
In other words, Facebook Places has positioned itself as the central hub for all check-in apps. That news, and the launch of Facebook Places Deals, could help check-ins scale up fast enough to support more meaningful and sustainable innovation than the small and scattered group of check-in apps has to date.
New data from Strategy Analytics out today clearly shows Apple's dominant position as the leader among tablet PCs - during Q3 2010, the company's iPad has captured 95% of the global market share for tablets. That leaves everyone else - Windows, Linux, Android, etc. - with only a 5% share, combined.
But it won't be this way for long, says Strategy.
Facebook announced this morning that it is launching a new feature, the Friendship Page. The Friendship Page will display public Wall posts and comments between two friends, photos in which both are tagged, Events they RSVP'd for together and other information. You'll be able to see Friendship pages between yourself and a friend, or between any two other people in which you have permission to view both peoples' profiles. In other words: you'll now have a special page that displays all the things you've done with each particular friend.
This feature is a great example of the kinds of things that are possible when rich social graph and user activity data is cross referenced and analyzed for patterns. There are countless different ways this could be done - but Friendship Pages aim right at the heart of why people use Facebook, for the connections it facilitates between family and friends. As with other changes made to Facebook, though, it's logical to ask: will this surface friends' activities that were always publicly available but become controversial once they are centralized in one convenient place?
Social shopping has been a big trend over the past year and there have been few more successful startups in this domain than Groupon. It's a relatively simple concept: offer daily shopping deals to groups of consumers. The details are a little more complicated, in that a deal only eventuates if a pre-set number of people take it. But that's what makes Groupon attractive to businesses, as usually they can only afford to offer low prices if items are bought in bulk. So the service has been a win-win for consumers and businesses.
I caught up with Groupon CTO Ken Pelletier, who has been with the company since it was founded in 2007, to find out how Groupon began and what's made it such a success.
Apple is holding a Mac-centric press event on its Cupertino campus this morning. The rumor mill is pointing towards a preview of OS X 10.7 Lion, as well as a refresh of the MacBook Air line and possibly a new version of Apple's iLife and iWork suites. Given that this is a Mac event, we don't expect to hear anything about the Verizon iPhone or other iOS devices today.
To see what really happens, read on to see our live blog, which will start at 10 a.m. Pacific/1p.m. Eastern.
As part of our ongoing series of premium reports, we're announcing today our newest report: The Age of Exabytes: Tools & Approaches For Managing Big Data. Thanks to HP for sponsoring the report and making it available as a free download.
We are experiencing a big data explosion, a result not only of increasing Internet usage by people around the world, but also the connection of billions of devices to the Internet. Eight years ago, for example, there were only around 5 exabytes of data online. Just two years ago, that amount of data passed over the Internet over the course of a single month. And recent estimates put monthly Internet data flow at around 21 exabytes of data.
"Twitter will get to a billion members," Twitter co-founder and recently displaced CEO Evan Williams told the crowd at a San Francisco INFORUM event yesterday. With only 145 million-plus users at present, reaching that lofty goal is still a long ways off for the 4-year old company.
To get there - or at least to aid in getting there - Twitter is planning a new feature called "Events." Unlike Trends - which track currently popular words, phrases or hashtags (a keyword preceded by the pound sign) - events would track a number of keywords that auto-associate themselves with the event.
Yesterday, Facebook rolled out an update to its "Groups" feature, revealing a completely revamped experience that now offers collaboration capabilities, email subscriptions, group chat and more. You can create a group of your own, as always, but you can't necessarily join any group out there on Facebook - unless the group is set to "open," you have to be invited by a current group member.
Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg says the Groups feature was designed to allow the 5% of people who actually use features like this to do the job of building the groups for the rest of Facebook's user base. Are you among the 5% who wants to create and manage groups of your own? If so, here's how.
The advent of the iPad has triggered a new round of innovation in the startup community. And few startups have utilized the iPad's touchscreen UI to create a unique user experience more than Flipboard, a magazine reading application built specifically for the iPad.
As part of our continuing product innovation interview series, I spoke with Flipboard co-founder and CEO Mike McCue. We discuss how he came up with the idea, before the iPad had even been announced, then rapidly developed and launched Flipboard. We also talk about how people are using Flipboard (hint: it's more than just for reading magazines) and its future plans to expand beyond the iPad - including to smartphones.
People use Facebook a lot already, but the addition of the new Groups feature today will lead them to use it even more - and in different ways.
Facebook's addition of a far more sophisticated Groups feature than was previously available will increase the time users spend on the site, the number of different ways they use Facebook and the importance of the already very important social network in the lives of those who use it. There are three thematic reasons why this is true: the new feature offers an improved signal-to-noise ratio, increased context for communication and a big improvement in user privacy, thanks to respect for the contextual integrity of conversations. The new feature runs some risk of being too complicated, though.
