The deep integration with Facebook that Spotify CEO Daniel Ek announced at the f8 conference yesterday is now live and we've taken some time to explore how it works and where on Facebook you can expect your Spotify activity to pop up.
The new integration can be activated from within the Spotify desktop client. We were prompted to opt into it from the right column of the service, but if you're not seeing a similar call to action, you can go into your accounts settings where a new option will appear: "Get personal recommendations by sending music you play to Facebook's Open Graph."
The two Twitter users who were arrested in Mexico for "terrorism" have been freed and the charges against them dropped.
34-year-old Maria de Jesus Bravo Pagola (@maruchibravo) and 48-year-old Gilberto Martinez Vera (@gilius_22) were two of many who retweeted a rumor that narco gangsters were killing children at a school. They were subsequently taken into custody by security forces and charged with "terrorism."
In the ongoing debate over Web vs. native mobile and tablet apps, it would appear the Web just racked up a few major points.
When Apple changed their subscription rules to require that publishers fork over 30% of the revenue generated from apps sold in the iTunes store, many media companies played along, hoping that making their content available on iOS devices would help them survive the transition from print to pixels.
Online content is published so fast and furious these days that no one can read it all. Ears are burning at corporate brands, too, because much of that Web content is talking about them. What are people saying? One part of answering that question is to ask how people seem to be feeling about the things they are talking about. Scalable, automated, accurate, sophisticated sentiment analysis is a much sought-after technology that almost no one has really nailed yet.
Jennifer Zeszut was the founder and CEO of Scout Labs, a social media monitoring service acquired by social CRM company Lithium in 2010. ScoutLabs does sentiment analysis, among other things, and Zeszut spoke at the O'Reilly Strata Summit on Big Data this week about the things her company has done that she believes point toward the future of this red hot tech trend.
Netflix could hardly be having a worse week. It started with another flood of customer backlash from its decision to spin off and rename its DVD business, which came only weeks after it irked customers by raising its membership fees.
While the company expected to see its subscriber growth slow down temporarily, it didn't quite expect the outrage it garnered and is now projected to lose 1 million customers from it.
At Facebook's developer conference F8 today, a number of trends that Web watchers predicted would be defining characteristics of the future suddenly became parts of mainstream discourse. The Facebook megalith learns fast from its R&D department, what the rest of us call the rest of the Web.
Specifically: data as platform, the real-time/synchronous Web and pre-cognitive discovery. Those are things that Web nerds have said would be big and in one fell swoop today, Facebook made its move on them all. Below, some thoughts on data as a platform, and the new Timeline feature in particular. It's like a grown-up version of the much-criticized Facebook Beacon, which the company had to remove after a backlash several years ago. It will be interesting to see how people react to this - I suspect that this time it may be less a question of privacy and more a question of creepy.
Because several weeks have passed without a TWiOT update, I am making this one a straight-ahead digest, listing the latest piece of news first.
Egyptian blogger receives International Press Freedom Award. The Canadian Journalists for Free Expression awarded Mohamed Abdelfattah the award for his work coverage of Khaled Said, a young man who was brutally beaten and killed by Egyptian police officers in Alexandria in June of 2010.
Burma unblocks websites. The Burmese government unblocked international media sites as well as websites run by Burmese exiles.
Tech and music enthusiasts in the United States were overjoyed when Spotify finally launched here in July. The on-demand music streaming service had been all the rage in Europe for a few years, but its U.S. launch was reportedly delayed by ongoing negotiations with major music labels.
Spotify has been up and running in the United States for nearly three months, much to everyone's delight. Well, maybe not everyone. A few independent record labels have pulled their music catalogs from Spotify over concerns that the service just isn't lucrative enough for them, GigaOm reported earlier this week.
After months of speculation and rumors, the iPhone 5 will be unveiled in two weeks. The device is expected to launch at Apple's next media event, which will be held on October 4, according to AllThingsD.
With so many supposed leaks and rumors flying around every day for the last few months, it can be dizzying to keep track of, let alone know for sure which features the device will include. A complete, accurate picture of the iPhone 5 hasn't yet emerged, but a few details are nearly certain to be true. Others are less certain, but can't be ruled out.
Twitter just announced that users can now post photos by attaching them to simple SMS messages. The feature is available on many popular carriers, and the post says they're working to bring on more.
SMS has always been an important part of Twitter's platform, especially in places with low smartphone penetration. It's possible to follow, tweet and view account info using only SMS. Adding photo sharing via SMS lets mobile-only users in on another part of the full Twitter experience.
