In an age of smartphone addiction, you'll find a Facebook user checking and updating from pretty much anywhere. But what about from the car itself?
Six months ago, the Mercedes-Benz engineering team began developing a Facebook app. The new product offers a way for drivers to access Facebook friends who are close, or nearby restaurants that their friends have "liked" on Facebook. The feature will be available in the 2012 SL-Class Mercedes this spring as part of the mbrace2 telematics system, which includes cloud-based apps, traffic and navigation assistance, speech recognition and Internet browsing. mbrace also features a smartphone app, which allows drivers to send information to their vehicle before actually stepping into it.
Last week, news broke that Kodak was preparing to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection after a long battle with digital photography and the proliferation of photo-sharing apps on the iPhone 4. Lest it be defeated, today at CES Kodak announced two new cameras that integrate with Facebook for easy photo sharing. The cameras also have two anti-social media applications for printing images from Facebook profiles. Kodak is banking on the idea that Facebook users may have a secret desire to print hardcopy photos from their Facebook profiles. Judging by digital-to-print image app Postagram, among others, they might be right.
Path 2.0 is the first newfangled social app I've been able to get my friends to use since Facebook complacency set in. I had my reservations at first, when I was worried that Path would turn out to be nothing more than a pretty mirror for gazing at oneself. For a while, it was pretty lonely in there, but after using Path to document my week on jury duty, I knew the app could offer something meaningful.
As it turned out, the Path experience wasn't only compelling to me because I'm a professional nerd. Over the holidays, I showed Path to a bunch of my best friends, and they all fell in love with it. Now that I have close people there, Path has become important to me. It's on my home screen, and Facebook is not. Path is not on the Web; it's a place in itself, and that's why it matters.
A new report out from Sitel on social media and consumer trends implies that social media is key to reaching Gen Y (those born between 1980 and 2000), but the numbers don't add up. While the Gen Y, or people born between 1980-2000, are in fact "digital natives," that doesn't mean they are actually most reachable via social media marketing.
You've seen MOO cards, those adorable half-the-size of regular business cards that have a pretty image on one side and your info on the other. Today MOO.com announced a big step toward social business, integrating with Facebook to create real business cards that use images from your Facebook Timeline. The customizable cards are available now for purchase. MOO social business cards fit into the Timeline mission, which hardly differentiates between online and offline identity. With MOO business cards, Facebook wants you to move one step closer to imagining your identity on social media less as you and more as "you," also known as your very own personal brand of yourself.
Tumblr just announced a new private messaging feature called Fan Mail. It's a more personal means that's not email, which requires you to know your favorite blogger's email address (do you?) or the handwritten form of the 20th century, snail mail. That leaves two social network-y means of contact: Facebook private messages and Twitter direct messages. Depending on the blogger's comfort level, however, they may not make Facebook messages on profile pages an option. Similarly, not every blogger follows fans back on Twitter.
Amidst all the Iowa noise from last night and today's announcement about the end of Michele Bachmann's presidential bid, something else happened: President Obama quietly joined social photo sharing app Instagram. Obama joined with the username @barackobama and has since posted two photos. The first one is of him speaking via videoconference to Iowa caucus-goers. The second is a photo of people watching the videoconference and is captioned "You guys inspire me every single day."
This is yet another instance of the president using social media to reach and engage with the younger demographic that helped him get elected four years ago. With the GOP edging in on social media, however, will this same strategy help him win in 2012?
Storify users have voted Josh Stearns' story tracking journalist arrests at Occupy protests as their story of the year. The social Web storytelling tool has grown up this year, finding itself in the right place at the right time to transform the way news gets made.
Stearns, journalism and public campaign director at FreePress.net, used Storify to keep track of the arrests of credentialed journalists at Occupy Wall Street and other affiliated protests. He collected stories of journalists being cuffed, tackled and trapped, even as they shouted that they were members of the press. We highlighted his efforts in our article, "How Storifying Occupy Wall Street Saved The News," and we're thrilled that the Storify community is celebrating his great work.
Today GetGlue, the service that lets users "check-in" to watching TV shows, reading books, listening to music and even thinking about products, announced major updates for its website and iPhone app.
If you haven't heard of GetGlue, don't worry. Here's how it works: After you've checked in to the entertainment you're experiencing, GetGlue tells you who else is thinking about it, how many times you've checked-in, where it is trending on the site and how many others are currently checked into it. It connects people around entertainment, a trend that is increasingly becoming more mainstream as social TV expands. GetGlue saw an 800% increase from the beginning of the year to September.
Today the Q&A site Quora announced the debut of boards, which function a lot like stacks do on social bookmarking site, Delicious. Boards organize information around a specific topic, making it simpler for users to follow related content. You can collect similar questions that are already up on Quora and grab links from outside the sites. Considering that Quora is all about questions, why would it choose to go this route?
