With the addition of applications for the iPhone and iPod touch in the new iTunes store there are many new social apps that leverage location aware technology. Techcrunch has a nice overview of several, including Loopt and Limbo:
Think of Loopt as a simple social network to find local businesses, message friends and send status updates with where you are (using the iPhones location technology). And a key difference with Loopt and many of the other networks below: you can meet new people who are nearby, if they choose to share that information. If everyone used this, you could see who’s single in a bar before you approach them (and flirt with them by phone first), and know the first name and job of everyone at that cocktail hour at the tech conference.
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Limbo - Limbo is another geo-aware social network that behaves like a mashup of Twitter, Loopt, and Whrrl. One of the app’s most compelling features is its grid-like diagram that visually groups your friends according to what they’re doing (for example, all of your friends that are Out Drinking will be lumped together, even if they aren’t necessarily drinking in the same place). The app accomplishes this feat by forcing users to select from a predefined hierarchal list of activities (while this might sound restrictive, the list is pretty comprehensive). This categorization allows users to see what they’re friends are up to without having to sift through each of their messages.
On the geo-positioning front, Limbo allows users to interact users who are within a close radius (about a quarter mile), in a manner that is similar to Loopt.
It’s no real secret that Google wasn’t supporting dodgeball the way we expected. The whole experience was incredibly frustrating for us - especially as we couldn’t convince them that dodgeball was worth engineering resources, leaving us to watch as other startups got to innovate in the mobile + social space.
Back in 2005, Clay Shirky broke down why Google’s acquisition of Dodgeball made sense:
* Dodgeball uses the mobile phone as its native platform, someplace Google wants to further extend it’s reach.
* Dodgeball does a better job mapping to real-world social networks than Orkut, since there’s an actual reason *not* to friend someone in db, namely that you don’t want to get spammed with 100 SMSes a night.
* Google’s mapping work is good at “Where am I?” and “Where is the gas
station?” but not so good at the question “Where are my friends?” Dodgeball is really good at that.
Given that the core Dodgeball proposition — we can mix fixed information about places and fluid information about people to create new value — improves a) the more information you have upfront and b) the more people are using it, the addition of db to Google is really good news for db, and will provide a really interesting platform for G to experiment with.
Three years later, with the explosion of location aware social applications, Google sure looks like it slept on a great idea.
Although search engines already index static text and links within SWF files, RIAs and dynamic Web content have been generally difficult to fully expose to search engines because of their changing states — a problem also inherent in other RIA technologies.
“Until now it has been extremely challenging to search the millions of RIAs and dynamic content on the Web, so we are leading the charge in improving search of content that runs in Adobe Flash Player,” said David Wadhwani, general manager and vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe. “We are initially working with Google and Yahoo! to significantly improve search of this rich content on the Web, and we intend to broaden the availability of this capability to benefit all content publishers, developers and end users.”
As Michelle Turner, vice president of the Platform Business Unit at Adobe Systems, notes:
The great thing is that this is retrospective - the millions of SWF files out on the web will be indexed by this new player, and content and app developers don’t have to do anything for their Flash-based sites to be picked up. Google is rolling this out on their production servers right now, and while it will likely take a while for the impact of this to propagate into search results, improvement should start to be seen in weeks. Yahoo doesn’t have this live yet, but is committed to using the technology and releasing it at a later date.
I think this is a really exciting technology release. Dynamic content searchability has been an issue for search engines for years. Flash content is so pervasive on the web, the fact that it couldn’t be thoroughly crawled and indexed in the past kept search engines from being able to access an enormous amount of web content. This will be great for increasing search accuracy over time, particularly as Google and Yahoo apply their secret sauce to the SWF results. This also has major implications for SEO companies, and I can imagine the new work springing up around optimization of Flash content. Many creative agencies have been asking for this for a long time, so we’re thrilled to see Google roll this out.
This is terrific news for rich media content publishers. I can’t wait to read more about how it works.
Today was supposed to be a day for the record books: Mozilla hopes to set a Guinness World Record for the most software downloaded in 24 hours. Unfortunately the Mozilla site wasn’t ready for the million or so users who pledged to download Firefox 3 today. For several hours after the scheduled 1pm release the site wouldn’t even load.
And then there’s the odd moment when the Firefox 3 page was up, but still linked to Firefox 2. Read that fine print.. By 5pm EST on Tuesday, the Firefox 3 download page was down, and was back to Firefox 2. By 8pm EST they seem to have finally sorted things out.. What happened?
“Hulk. Smash!” Yes. Hulk. Smash. Yes. Smash. Big Hulk smash. Smash cars. Buildings. Army tanks. Hulk not just smash. Hulk also go rarrr! Then smash again. Smash important, obviously. Smash Hulk’s USP. What Hulk smash most? Hulk smash all hope of interesting time in cinema. Hulk take all effort of cinema, effort getting babysitter, effort finding parking, and Hulk put great green fist right through it. Hulk crush all hopes of entertainment. Hulk in boring film. Film co-written by star. Edward Norton. Norton in it. Norton write it. Norton not need gamma-radiation poisoning to get big head. Thing is: Hulk head weirdly small. Compared with rest of big green body.
Wow, I thought the full-page-take-over days were over.. but the New York times is bringing them back. I wonder what the exit rate is on this new front page.
Add this to the list of Facebook privacy issues. I assumed most Facebook users have noticed this gaping privacy loophole, but I’ve learned from conversations with a few other Facebook users that some people are not aware of the following problem. You can view photos of other users even when these users are not your friends, if one of your friends comments on the photo.
For example, I’m friends with Andrew on Facebook, so I can view his mini feed updates:
I am not friends with Rasmus on Facebook, so I cannot see his profile, but I see Andrew has commented on a photo from Rasmus and I’m able to click and view that photo from a link in Andrew’s mini feed.
Again, I’m not friends with Rasmus on Facebook, but because one of my Facebook friends commented on his photo, I can click and view every photo from Rasmus in this photo gallery. These photos are not public photos. Nice apartment Rasmus.
As you can see, I don’t have access to Rasmus’s profile, but I can still view his photos.
Clearly this is a major privacy loophole that is not accounted for in the current Facebook privacy settings.
UPDATE: As dot dot dot points out in the comments, the default privacy setting for photo albums is “Everyone” so this is not a loophole in the privacy settings or a site bug.
But I do think the way the privacy settings are setup is misleading. The default setting for everything but photo albums is “Only Friends” and the photo album privacy setting is not displayed on the profile privacy page, but on a separate page.
I would argue that most users assume that if their profile is private, their profile photos are private, even though Facebook makes a distinction there in the way the privacy settings are broken down.
I think the default privacy setting for photo albums should match your profile privacy setting and that it should be displayed on the main level profile privacy page: http://www.facebook.com/privacy/?view=profile
This reminds me a lot of the misleading mini-feed behavior. When you delete an item from your mini-feed it doesn’t actually stop displaying that info to your friends, it just hides it from you.
While it’s disappointing that the new Flickr video player looks like a cheap knockoff of Vimeo, I am happy that at first glance it appears Flickr got the integration right: videos are displayed the same as photos.
