RSS
 

Archive for the ‘Social networking’ Category

Flipbook – the future of magazines?

02 Jan

It is that time of year again when everyone looks back at the old year and starts making best-of lists. Well we are no different and have been looking at the best App out of 400,000 in the Apple store.

Enter ‘Flipbook’. This is an amazing free application that collects links, articles, images from your twitter feeds, facebook or any other  RSS feed you subscribe to and then cleverly puts it into a beautiful magazine layout for you to ‘flip’ through. It is perfect for the iPad as there is plenty of space to lay out the pages.

It has won the ‘App of the Year’ award from Apple. Wired magazine have also voted it the best in 2010. We have got to agree – there is something fascinating about seeing photos of your friends party from facebook mixed up with interesting tech articles from your RSS subscriptions. And it is never the same twice, as your feeds update.

Perhaps this is the way magazines will go in the future. You subscribe to their feed, then it gets put together with all your other interests into a personal magazine.

Have a good year everyone!

Can be download from here

 

 
Comments Off

Posted in Applications & software, Entertainment, Social networking, Web 2.0 tools

 

Where there’s snow

24 Nov

This is a fascinating use of twitter and geo mapping. Snow is coming to the UK from the North tonight and so Ben Marsh decided to ask Twitter fans to tweet the first half of their post code with the tag #uksnow. His app then scans Twitter every minute looking for the tweets.

These then get mapped on to an UK graphic, thus showing in real-time how the snow is progressing across the country.

Track snow The app can be found here.

This kind of social interaction could be used for all kinds of surveys. Such as bird migrations, first signs of spring etc.

It just needs enough people to get involved and clever use of geo mapping.

 
Comments Off

Posted in Social networking

 

The PDF is dead, long live the PDF

22 Oct

I don’t know about you, but I thought the PDF file format was one of the things that made printing easier. And indeed it does. But of course, when it was a simple set of commands designed for classic postscript printers there was no way it could be used for anything else.

But Adobe, the owners of the PDF format have followed the trends and made the pdf format able to handle multimedia such as Flash and other file formats. This has the effect making the file format much more active in terms possibly affecting the way a computer runs.

This article summarises some of the issues. Don’t get paranoid though – pdf is still a wonderful way of creating printed copy.

 
Comments Off

Posted in Social networking, Standards, Uncategorized

 

Google ponders on the social Internet

19 Oct

The search giant Google is recognising a new trend on the Internet, namely that people tend to ask their online friends for advice rather than look to a search engine. For the first time according to comScore, people spent more time on Facebook than on Google sites.

The problem for Google is that fundamentally what really matters to advertisers is how many people see their ads, wherever people gather, that is where the money is going to be.

Read here for the New York Times article

For example, they turn to their Facebook friends and ask questions such as ‘Can you recommend a good baby sitter” or “I fancy going to a new restaurant – any recommendations?”.

You can see how difficult this kind of question can be for a search engine because it involves a value judgement and local knowledge.

This is an interesting case study of how people change the way they use technology and suddenly the market leader has to change the way they do things – can they do that or is the culture too ingrained to be able to change? Time will tell.

So is this the new trend? Will Facebook become the new search engine for complex questions?

 
Comments Off

Posted in Internet, Marketing, Social networking

 

Facebook unveils ‘groups’ feature and user controls

08 Oct

It seems that at last Facebook have started to listen to peoples’ concerns about privacy and how their data is being accessed and used by third parties.  They have introduced features which aim to give users more control over their personal data on the site.

The first is a ‘groups’ feature which will allow users to set up different groups and share different information with each group.  This allows people to distinguish between groups such as close friends, family and work colleagues.  Until now, whatever was posted on your page could be seen by all your friends and as we all know there are times when something you share with your best mate might just get you the sack if seen by your boss. 

Although this sounds like a good step forward there is the potential for the groups feature to fall flat on its face.  Yes, you can set up a group with your close friends but at the moment friends who are allocated to that group can add their own friends – something over which you have no control.  In some ways, whether this is an oversight or not, it almost negates the idea behind the security and privacy of the groups feature.

Another new feature will allow users to download all of the data that they have ever put onto Facebook, including photos, status updates and wall posts – something not possible until now. 

Read more here

 
Comments Off

Posted in Privacy, Social networking