Posts Tagged ‘Foursquare’

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Social Media Digest: Teenage Tweets, Facebook Charges and MTV’s Movie Hero

Friday, April 12th, 2013

Welcome to this week’s Social Media Digest! Let us know your thoughts and if there’s anything we’ve missed in the comments. Thanks for reading!

1. Despite the promise that ‘It’s free and always will be’, Facebook has controversially started charging around £10 / $15 to message some users on the site. It seems that the charges apply to messaging popular users such as celebrities, and people that you aren’t friends with – although BuzzFeed’s report has found that the charges are hit and miss. For example, it costs $15 to message Snoop Dog but messaging Justin Bieber is free (well played, Facebook). The company is reportedly quietly testing a sliding scale of fees to contact certain users, however if you choose to send your message without paying the fee, the message will slip into Facebook’s ‘Other’ messages section which goes largely unchecked by most users. Facebookers under the age of 18 will not be able to send paid messages.

2. Former Youth Crime Commissioner Paris Brown has this week stood down from her position over tweets posted as a younger Paris Brownteenager. The 17-year-old resigned only a week after announcing her position following reports of tweets featuring homophobic, racist and drug-glorifying content posted when Brown was between the ages of 14 and 16. Brown apologised for her tweets, saying that she had ‘fallen into the trap of behaving with bravado’ and asked that she be left alone now that she has resigned. Police and crime commissioner for Kent, Ann Barnes, said that the media should not have put intolerable pressure on to Brown and Barnes knew that she was ‘not recruiting an angel’. Brown is not the first to lose her job following posts on social networks – should Brown have been allowed to put the tweets down to teenage bravado, or should there be no excuse for tweeting such content?

3. Foursquare updated its iOS app this week, turning the app into more of a discovery and recommendation engine rather than just a tool to view check-ins. A blog post by the company explains that the new app’s recommendation engine is designed for users who are looking for a quick place to have lunch, without having to search through dozens of reviews. Have you found lunch via the new app yet?

Cinemagram4. Cinemagram has launched its rival to Twitter’s Vine for Android, despite this week’s news that Vine is the top free iPhone app in Apple’s App Store. Cinemagram has beaten Vine to the Android market, although Tech Crunch reports that the app is still quite buggy and feels more like a beta version than the real deal. Are you team Vine or team Cinemagram?

5. MTV has announced this week that users will be able to vote in its upcoming 2013 Movie Awards via Instagram for the first time ever. MTV launched the awards’ Best Hero category with live voting via Twitter last year, but this year the winner will be decided using the photo-sharing app too – users can vote by posting a photo using the hashtag #Vote… and their chosen hero. Bilbo Baggins, Snow White, Iron Man, Batman, Catwoman and Hulk are all up for the public vote – calculated in real time, the votes show that Bilbo is currently in the lead. MTV was the first brand to reach one million Instagram followers back in November and is now capitalising on the app’s 100 million monthly users. The MTV Movie Awards ceremony takes place if you’d like to see who wins!

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Social Media Digest: Linkedin Leaks, Twitter’s Bird & Starbucks Fail

Friday, June 8th, 2012

Welcome, welcome one and all to this week’s round up of what’s going on in the world of social media.

1. First on the agenda is LinkedIn, and for this platform the week’s events have been, well – not good. A slight issue has arisen with the opt-in calendar feature of LinkedIn’s iOS mobile app. Yes just a slight issue with this ‘great feature’. Oh it’s only been collecting and sending the company full notes and details from your devices calendar in plain text – no biggy. Ah, no they didn’t get your permission to do this – oops must have slipped their mind. Tsk tsk, slap on the wrist for you LinkedIn. But don’t worry they intended to make it up to us all, as Joff Redfern, Mobile Product Head at LinkedIn assures us they are ‘going to make this great feature even better.’ Well as long as they pinky promise. And while they’re at it, better add upping their user account protection to that promise. Reportedly 6.5 million LinkedIn user passwords have been leaked by Russian hackers. Official advice is to change yours now, but you can check if your account is one of those affected.

2. On a lighter note Twitter and Foursquare have both undergone a revamp this week. After six years Twitter has given its logo representation an overhaul. Gone is the ‘need for text, bubbled typefaces, or a lowercase “t” to represent Twitter’ – now it is just simply the little blue bird, which has also had a makeover. A nice design feature of the new bird ‘Twitter’ is that it is made entirely from circles, reflecting the nature of real life and online social networks – very fitting. Foursquare has been a little more drastic with it’s revamp, as it launches its new app for iOS and Android. Where the old version fell short on exciting user experience, the new app has much more to offer. Now Foursquare is about discovery, suggesting new places for you to go, making the real world easier to explore.

3. This week coffee company Starbucks should have been shown the Fail Whale but for different reasons than its usual purpose. Starbucks made a bit of a blunder when trying to get in to the Jubilee spirit. Starbucks Irish twitter account asked it’s followers why they were proud to be British. An apology was eventually made, but it serves as a perfect example of how not to manage multiple social media accounts – as well as the importance of geography and history.

4. The Queen’s Diamond Jubilee proved to be a spectacular four day event – even if we simply made the most of having a four day weekend – and it certainly made a spectacular stir on Twitter. The BBC has been awash with complaints this week regarding their coverage of the Jubilee. Apparantly led by Stephen Fry, Twitter was a hotbed of criticism from viewers, yet the BBC did not engage with them. One can question whether this was the best course of action since the Jubilee sparked such volumes of activity on the site. More than a million tweets were posted about the event, thats more than 300,000 more than the Royal Wedding. In the end, whether they were complaints or celebratory, the social media activity reflected the feeling and enthusiam of the public for the Jubilee.

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Pinwheel: Umpf’s review

Monday, March 5th, 2012

Pinwheel is the latest social media site to launch, with invite-only testing on the cusp of finishing as we speak. Fresh from Caterina Fake, the lady who bought us Flickr and Hunch, the platform has quite a pedigree, so what to make of the latest addition to the rapidly expanding roster of platforms?

In essence, Pinwheel incorporates elements of Foursquare’s geography, with Instgram’s photo-sharing and the hints and tips functionality which is sure to make it of interest to the social media conoscenti and, Caterina hopes, lots of members of the public.

PinwheelThe idea is that you find and leave notes around the world, pinning your text and photos to various geographic locations. It’s like a large-scale geo-diary, with mementos and musing shared either with your select band of followers or with the general Pinwheel populace.

As you can see, users can scan the map, zooming in and out to see where others have left notes, whilst also updating their profiles with more notes as time goes by.

Here’s what happens when you want to share a post:

Note leave

It’s easy to leave a note – using the auto-complete geographic locator which syncs up with Google Maps you can choose any location across the world and then entitle the note and leave some more details about what happened there. You can also attribute a photo to the note and select whether you want the note to be shared publicly or just amongst your followers.

Here’s what the personal profile page looks like too:

ProfileYou can easily see where you’ve posted, who you’re following and who follows you. It’s simple, easy to navigate and fairly intuitive too – anyone with a vague awareness of social media platforms should be able to get their heads around the interface without difficulty.

So, now you’ve seen the platform itself, the real question is, do we think it will prove to be a popular platform? Whilst it’s too early to tell, the sharing notes function is a nice device that makes the platform feel a little bit more ‘human’ than Foursquare. Without the added financial incentives of checking-in or the badges function, Pinwheel feels that little bit less tainted by commercialism and perhaps more appealing as a result. We really like the way the platform integrates Google Maps smoothly and effectively, along with the simple following/followers function too.

All in all, it’s a nice platform that should gain a good following, but we’re not sure it will really set the social media world on fire. The functions it offers aren’t really unique to the platform, nor does it bring a radically new twist on existing platforms. That said, it’s a great platform to look at and really slick and easy to use.

But what do you think? The first two people to retweet our blog will get an email invite to suss out the platform themselves. We’re looking forward to your feedback.

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Social Media Digest: Facebook’s disaster prep, Twitter’s wedding and Timeline arrives

Friday, March 2nd, 2012

Here’s our round-up of some of our favourite stories floating in the social media ether this week – as always, don’t forget to let us know your thoughts. Happy Friday!

Facebook Disaster Message Board1. It was reported this week that Facebook has recently trialled a new feature which allows users to notify family and friends that they’re safe during a disaster. The Disaster Message Board, which was trialled in Japan, features a ‘mark safe’ option which can be selected to show a ‘Safe’ icon on your profile. Facebook only briefly trialled the new feature, asking users to test it so that they’ll know how to use it should a real need for it occur – the ‘mark safe’ option will only be visible during times of emergency. The message board also features emergency-preparedness tips and the ability to share info that might be useful to others during a disaster. We think that this feature has the potential to be incredibly useful, but we’re not so sure about the ability to mark others as safe – false news spreads fast on social networks.

2. In similar ‘social network to the rescue’ news, Twitter is responsible for saving a couple’s wedding after their chosen venue went bust. Just six weeks away from their wedding when the hotel’s parent company folded, the couple lost their £4,500 deposit and took to Twitter in the search for help. Their SOS was retweeted by celebrities Davina McCall and Dannii Minogue and not only did they find a new wedding venue, they also received offers of jewellery, clothing and three-tier cakes while a magician, a wedding planner, a make-up artist and a photographer who all saw the cry for help donated free or reduced-price services. The blushing bride, Laura, said: “It just goes to show the power of Twitter. As soon as I posted my message on the website everything just went crazy.”

3. You may have heard a little bit of noise about a new gadget set to be unveiled on 7 March – the iPad 3. The internet is abuzz with rumours and guesses about its new features – we reckon the iTV speculation is the most exciting.

4. Back to Facebook – Timeline for pages is finally here! As of Wednesday (29 February), brands have been allowed to fill inFB Timeline Smalland update their pages to the new Timeline design. Featuring a slick cover photo, redesigned app tabs and the ability to add Milestones in your brand’s history, a few early adopters are already taking advantage of the new layout. We really like The New York Times’ use of Milestones to outline the paper’s history, as well as Red Bull’s clever Timeline scavenger hunt. All pages will be bumped over to the new layout on 30 March and Facebook are encouraging page owners to fill in their blanks before the cut-off date. It’s yet to be seen how the new layout will affect interaction with users – what do you think? Will the new Timeline design be more engaging? One problem that’s already been flagged is that Timeline only rolls back to 1800, so bad luck if your brand’s heritage extends further back in time.

5. Foursquare has this week left Google in the dust and has switched to using startup MapBox partnered with OpenStreetMaps after Google raised the price on its Maps API. OpenStreetMaps, which VentureBeat likens to a Wikipedia for geography, was chosen by FoursquareFoursquare for a number of reasons (outlined on its blog) including continuously-improving data and design flexibility – so we should be seeing prettier maps on Foursquare! Foursquare’s Dennis Crowley also announced this week that he wants the app to become a recommendation engine, letting you know where friends have eaten or recommending restaurants based on where you’ve eaten in the past.

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Social Media Digest: Foursquare Search, YouTube Growth and FB Apps

Friday, January 20th, 2012

Welcome back to our weekly instalment of what’s hot in the world of social media. In case you missed what happened over the past week, here’s our top 5:

Foursqure logo1. Foursquare is rolling out its own search engine, called Explore, as the location-based social network looks to expand its audience. The firm descibed Explore as a product to add “an ‘interesting’ layer to the whole world, tailored just for you. In a statement, the firm explained how the search engine would be tailored to each user:

“Most real-world searches are one-size fits all. You search for pizza, and it gives you the same list of pizza places, whether you like deep dish or thin crust, whether you want a slice or a sit-down meal, or whether your friends would love it or hate it. But not with foursquare Explore, because you are your friends’ (along with 1,500,000,000 more from the foursquare community) help us personalize our recommendations for you. Ever you time you check in, we get better at finding places you’ll like.”

2. A study by Hitwise in December has shown that the UK accounted for 606 million Internet visits to YouTube. The study shows that video sharing sites, citing YouTube and BBC iPlayer as examples, received 936 million visits last month. This figure has been steadily increasing, and in October, we saw a 36% increase in visits to online video sites. But YouTube is clearly ahead of the pack. The site  is one of the fastest growing according to Hitwise’s data, and accounted for 65% of visits to video sharing sites in the UK in December 2011.Youtube Logo

3. Facebook, following a year of whirlwind growth, overtook Orkut as Brazil’s most-popular social network in December. Orkut is a social network that Google launched in 2004. Its popularity in Brazil, where 60% of Orkut’s users are based, led to it being hosted and managed by Google Brazil from 2008 onwards. Facebook’s user base increased 192% during 2011, according to a comScore report released Tuesday. In December 2010, 12.4 million Brazilians visited Facebook.com. One year later, that number skyrocketed to 36 million Brazilians.

4. A lot of the web went ‘black’ yesterday in response to the US governments prospective anti-piracy laws. Sites like Wikipedia downed tools and stopped visitors from viewing pages in an attempt to raise awareness of what they believe will be dangerous legislation for freedom of speech and freedom of internet use. Google and Craiglist also draped their pages with protests about the legislation. The New York Times has an interesting round-up of the day’s events.

Facebook apps5. Facebook is adding a series of new applications to let users share such things as photos, travel or fashion. The online social network firm unveiled more than 60 new apps that users can share on their Facebook profiles, known as their Timeline. Users can already share the music they are listening to or news articles they are reading. But this latest development expands the number of apps significantly.

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