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Mashable: Latest 19 News Updates - including “We Are the World 25 For Haiti Debuts on YouTube [VIDEO]” |  |
- We Are the World 25 For Haiti Debuts on YouTube [VIDEO]
- Twitter Users React to Google Buzz [STATS]
- Glitch: Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield Explains His Ambitious Online Game
- Friday Poll: TED Attendees Talk Top Technology Trends
- President Obama Wants YOU… to Twitter for Him
- Mosquito Death Ray in Action at TED [VIDEO]
- TED: Future of Mobile With Henry Tirri, Head of Nokia Research [INTERVIEW]
- HOW TO: Integrate Facebook, Twitter, and Buzz into Your Gmail
- Thanks to Mashable’s Socially Savvy Supporters
- 3 Social Media Sources for Official NBA All-Star Content
- Google: Buzz Is Staying in Gmail
- SocialTALK Helps Businesses Diffuse Social Media Clutter
- Joker Tricks TV Host Into Reading Lyrics From “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” [VIDEO]
- 5 Tips for Creating Non-Profit Online Communities
- The New York Times and Foursquare Partner for the Olympics
- How We’re Using Social Media on Our Mobile Phones [STATS]
- 8 iPhone Apps for the Perfect Valentine’s Day
- Hilarious Vintage Dating Reels From Found Footage Fest [VIDEO]
- Yahoo Launches Mobile Site for the Winter Olympics
- Opera Mini Reaches 50 Million Active Users
| We Are the World 25 For Haiti Debuts on YouTube [VIDEO] Posted: 12 Feb 2010 08:42 PM PST 
The video was directed by Paul Haggis, produced by Quincy Jones, and features a diverse array of artists including Mary J. Blige, Tony Bennett, YouTube phenom Justin Bieber, and a flashback to Michael and Janet Jackson performing the song 25 years ago in a similar fundraiser for Africa. The charitable connection here is a digital download – all proceeds from sales of the song on iTunes go to Haiti relief. The We Are the World Foundation website also offers other ways to donate, as well as more information about the song. On choosing to use YouTube for distribution, the legendary Jones says in a Q&A that "… with the stroke of a key on your keyboard or cell phone, images and messages can be transferred all around the world to hundreds of millions of people in seconds. That's an enormous amount of power. How can you not try and harness that resource to help people in need?” We imagine the results here will indeed be huge. In addition to the YouTube premiere, the song played during the opening ceremony of the Winter Olympics earlier this evening. Reviews: YouTube
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| Twitter Users React to Google Buzz [STATS] Posted: 12 Feb 2010 08:04 PM PST 
Some think Google Buzz could be the next huge social platform. Others think it's one big privacy nightmare. With its launch week drawing to an end, we pinged our friends at Crimson Hexagon for analysis of Twitter user's opinions.  The overall buzz, one way or another, has been plentiful. According to another analytics firm – Trendrr – Buzz garnered more tweet volume than Google's Nexus One launch, with a peak of nearly a quarter of a million tweets on Tuesday. Reviews: Google, Google Buzz, Twitter Tags: Google, google buzz, twitter
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| Glitch: Flickr’s Stewart Butterfield Explains His Ambitious Online Game Posted: 12 Feb 2010 07:04 PM PST 
The 2D game — called Glitch — incorporates beautiful illustrations and cutting edge game mechanics, but its most interesting features are its social aspirations and the lessons it learns from the web that its founders mastered at their previous gigs. The game itself is difficult to pin down; it’s some combination of FarmVille, MapleStory, World of Warcraft, MetaPlace and any number of other online games or virtual worlds, but it doesn’t fall anywhere on a spectrum. We spoke with Butterfield at length about the game — here are a few reasons why it’s something to keep an eye on. Rebooting the Genre Butterfield hopes Glitch will “do for online gaming what the Wii did for consoles” — greatly expand the audience for a type of product that has recently sold itself short by settling all too comfortably into a niche. For more than two decades, designers of online games ranging from the text-based multi-user dungeons (MUDs) of yore to early graphical experiments like Meridian 59, Underlight and Ultima Online imagined amazing social possibilities for online games. They pictured virtual societies run by the users, with political factions and other organizations appearing organically and giving people a way to socialize in a whole new way outside of the rigid establishment of real life. But that dream never came true, in part because a game called EverQuest introduced a less ambitious and more restrictive model that was arguably the first to comfortably support a business. It did so by appealing narrowly to a niche of hardcore gamers with powerful gaming computers and a lot of time on their hands. The great majority of massively multiplayer online games (MMOs for short) that have come to market since then have closely mirrored EverQuest’s example, including World of Warcraft, the 11-million player phenomenon that has dominated the genre for just over five years. If you watch the industry closely, though, you can see that the model isn’t working well for everybody, and it restricts the genre to a very small segment of users. “A big difference between 2001 or 2002 when the model solidified and now,” Butterfield explained, is that “there are 10 or 20 times more people online so there’s a much, much, much bigger potential audience and you can try something that wouldn’t have worked to attract the hardcore gaming audience.” The hope is that the game will appeal to casual gamers who have been introduced to gaming by FarmVille and restaurant management games on Facebook, but that they’ll like it more because it’s a much deeper experience without losing that accessibility. Butterfield also hopes that the game will appear more to women than other MMOs have. The Juicy Stuff: Integration With Social MediaOne of the most ambitious aspects of Tiny Speck’s plans (and one of the most interesting for Mashable readers) is expansive integration with social media. It’s not clear how much of this is planned at launch and how much will be added over time, but either way it’s ambitious. Tiny Speck plans to integrate several platforms and social networks, including the web, Facebook, the iPhone, SMS text messaging and eventually — maybe — Xbox Live Arcade, Wiiware, and the PlayStation Network. The initial, core experience will be the Adobe Flash-based web game, which will resemble side-scrolling games like Super Mario Bros. and LittleBigPlanet. It will not be a violent game, though; the emphasis will be on social activity, role-playing game elements, and other things typical to casual games that aren’t aimed at the young-male-dominated core video game market. Butterfield says Facebook Connect is part of the plan: “It’d be kind of idiotic for us not to work with it even if it’s just for authentication. It would be very foolish for us to ignore that.” He says he wants it to be “as permeable as possible.” Players should be able to determine how much crossover they want between their in-game socialization and their connections with real-world friends. It goes both ways, too; eventually Tiny Speck plans to offer you the ability to bring your tweets and Facebook status updates to your game profile. Flickr was a pioneer in blog widgets and badges; Butterfield said that Glitch badges could be placed on your blog, and your friends could send you a message using those badges. The message would then appear as a physical note within the game world. Mobile apps are planned at some point, but Tiny Speck’s vision is not to port the entire game to the iPhone or Android devices. Rather, mobile apps would feature mini-games. Playing them would amp up your web game avatar’s abilities. Other options for mobile apps could include managing your in-game robot servants and participating in in-game auctions. SMS interaction would be similarly focused. One example we were given: A game friend might knock on the door of your in-game home. You’d receive a text message letting you know that they’ve arrived. Then you could reply to allow them entry. Butterfield even described a feature that would make the real world a platform for experiencing Glitch. “Imagine you buy a magic box in the game,” he said. “When you buy that magic box, we’ll mail you the Glitch logo on one side and QR code on the other.” If you place that QR code sticker somewhere in your hometown, a person who finds it can photograph it and gain access to your magic box, which you can then use to exchange items with them. How Experiences at Flickr Prepared Tiny Speck for Online Game Development Flickr parent company Ludicorp was originally founded to work on massively multiplayer games, but the Flickr alums in the Tiny Speck team are informing their development of Glitch with experiences from both Ludicorp’s Game Neverending and Flickr, which has been itself described as a massively multiplayer photo sharing site. When we asked how experience at Flickr prepares key Tiny Speck employees for the online game space, Butterfield said that in addition to having vast experience with open APIs, the people working on the game are skilled in building scalable systems. “We want to make one big world, we don’t want to have shards,” he explained. That one big world will be able to support hundreds of thousands or millions of players. Another claimed advantage: “A bigger and better background in the web and online communities, and how a community can drive the product.” Butterfield finally said that there will be no scheduled maintenance for game updates in normal circumstances. Everyone from coders to writers will be able to define changes to the game and publish them live without interrupting the experience for any of the players. This is in contrast to World of Warcraft, which goes down for several hours each week to apply patches and other upgrades. Will It Be Huge?As exciting as most of the details we heard about Glitch were, we’re forced to ask a few difficult questions. Folks who’ve been following online games might remember that was another project that was all about drawing inspiration from the way the web is built to make virtual worlds — MetaPlace. Unfortunately, MetaPlace failed. It was shut down at the beginning of the year. Butterfield had several good things to say about MetaPlace creator Raph Koster, alternating between calling him a “genius” and a “super idealist.” However, he suggested that MetaPlace struggled because people weren’t as keen as Koster hoped they would be about making their own virtual worlds. “There’s not necessarily a high level of coincidence between the people who have the desire to do it and who can do it really well,” Butterfield said. He said Glitch isn’t trying to do the same thing that MetaPlace was. It’s too early to make predictions as to whether or not this project will be successful; some of the hot features we were told about sounded like they only exist on paper so far. Often games that start out ambitious get scaled down over the course of development. We’re curious to see if Glitch’s vision will be preserved to the end. There’s no doubt that there’s a vast, untapped market of would-be gamers — hundreds of millions of people who’ve never picked up an Xbox 360 controller or played World of Warcraft, but who could become absorbed in an accessible, story-driven experience. If Tiny Speck isn’t doesn’t fully exploit that massive and emerging market, someone else will. Reviews: Android, Facebook, Flickr, Mashable, iPhone Tags: flickr, games, glitch, MMO, online games, stewart butterfield, video games
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| Friday Poll: TED Attendees Talk Top Technology Trends Posted: 12 Feb 2010 05:58 PM PST 
We asked a number of TEDsters the following question: “What do you think is the most interesting thing happening in technology right now?” Below is a sample of the answers we got back, featuring a range of responses as diverse as the contributors they came from. What do you think is the most interesting technology trend today? Let us know in the comments.
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, ericsphotography Reviews: Mashable, blurb, iStockphoto Tags: Augmented Reality, Bing Maps, blurb, cloud computing, crowd sourcing, digital identity, energy, genetics, ipad, microsoft pivot, nexus one, open data, poll, QR Codes, Science, smartphones, social media, technology, TED, ted 2010, threadless
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| President Obama Wants YOU… to Twitter for Him Posted: 12 Feb 2010 04:22 PM PST 
And what exactly are they looking for over at the White House? According to the job posting:
Said person must also be willing to work hard — “this isn’t a 9-5 job,” the posting said — and be “passionate about engaging millions of Americans in advancing President Obama’s agenda and changing the country.” Yeah, that’s not daunting at all. Social media has been integral to President Obama’s career since the beginning. He launched his Twitter account back in 2007 (although he only really tweeted for the first time last month to support Haiti relief efforts after admitting back in November that he was too clumsy to use the microblogging tool), and recently used YouTube to engage with the nation after the State of the Union address. Although both the Obama and White House Twitter feeds used to read like a stream of press releases, the tweets have become much more lively in the ensuing months. Whoever fills this new position will have to continue to up the ante when it comes to engaging with the American people. Will you apply? Reviews: Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, YouTube Tags: facebook, myspace, Political, politics, president obama, twitter, White House
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| Mosquito Death Ray in Action at TED [VIDEO] Posted: 12 Feb 2010 03:55 PM PST 
Every 43 seconds, a child dies from malaria. Given the constraints of current methods for fighting the disease, Myhrvold put the scientific minds of his company to the problem of eradicating the mosquitoes themselves. The lasers recognize and track the insects, measuring the frequency of the wingbeats to determine their gender. Females are targeted specifically and zapped to prevent them from taking blood meals and breeding more mosquitoes. Intellectual Ventures’ Eric Johanson explains how the system works in the first video below. Green laser pointers are being used instead of killing lasers for safety reasons, so to witness the satisfying wisp of smoke that accompanies the pew pew-induced mosquito deaths check out the second video embed, also below: Mosquito Death Ray Demo at TEDMosquito Shootdown Sequence[img credit: Intellectual Ventures Lab] Tags: lasers, malaria, mosquito death ray, Science, technology, TED, ted 2010, video
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| TED: Future of Mobile With Henry Tirri, Head of Nokia Research [INTERVIEW] Posted: 12 Feb 2010 03:39 PM PST 
We had a chance to sit down at TED with Henry Tirri, Senior Vice President and Head of the Nokia Research Center, to talk about what the mobile landscape of the future holds. Read on to find out what we might expect from mobile technologies within the next five to ten years. Q: Can you tell us a bit about what you do at Nokia? A: I’m heading Nokia’s long-term research globally in our labs worldwide, from Santa Monica and Palo Alto to the easternmost lab in Beijing, and everything in between: Cambridge, UK, Los Angeles, Switzerland, and teams in Nairobi and Bangalore and so on. Q: What emerging technologies do you see playing the biggest role in the next five to ten years: augmented reality, voice recognition, etc.? A: Those two things are more user experience technologies, but you’re correct. We also talk about “mixed reality” — the terminology can be confusing, but there is a distinction between augmented reality, where I’m looking at reality and add information to that from the digital world, and mixed reality which means you can do vice versa also, and put things into the virtual world from the real world. To me it’s obvious that it’s such a natural way of looking at the world and interacting with it. The key question is how simple and how immersive it becomes. My prediction is it starts with rather isolated services like search and navigation but by the end of the day it becomes part of the interaction. You don’t any more find it extraordinary that you can see the real picture and you get some digital information too or vice versa. And it might be visual digital information, or in audio, or even sometimes in sensing. If you’re talking about a five or ten year spectrum, we’re probably going to have some kind of haptic and sensing way of navigating and getting feedback. All of this is a very Western view: The high end, cool things for those living in the “geek world.” But if you ask me then about growth economies and the emerging markets like Africa, India, greater China, Latin America and some parts of Russia, I would say that the experience and emerging technologies tend to have a different nature because of the constraints you have. You might not have the infrastructure to support data, for example.  So from an interface perspective, speech and gestures are very important there. But emerging technologies are not necessarily always related to the user experience, so things like energy-efficient networking are also a necessity in growth economies. Protocols like SMS are being used in these areas for things we wouldn’t dream of doing with it here because we have access to broadband. There are the “hundreds of millions” who are doing all these very sophisticated and cutting edge things, and at the same time there is emerging technology for the “billions” which can take a different track. Q: Do you think there will be an upcoming involvement with biology? Are we going to bring these devices into our bodies? Will I have a phone in my wrist? A: Yeah, chip embedding is already an old idea in computer science so we’re ready for that. I think there’s a natural continuum from biosensors — we already have heartbeat sensors connected to a wireless device and measuring you for sports and wellness purposes. So again, if you talk about the five to ten years era, the questions there are more related to the sensors. In some areas, the sensor development is slower than one would think. Mechanical sensors are faster, but chemical sensors are much slower, so even in the five to ten year domain, certain things are not so easy to do. When you talk about implantable electronics, you start having … challenges with your biological rejection mechanisms and other problems for medicine to solve. I would say in five years it doesn’t become big, but in ten years I would be surprised if we’re not seeing a lot more of it. Five years is surprisingly fast, because when you think about large scale deployment of something, there’s a delay factor involved in getting the manufacturing process to be reliable and cheap enough. I do believe health and wellness-related things will become part of our life, and may probably also merge with augmented reality too. Your body state will be communicated to somewhere, or you can start getting metadata and remote analysis on yourself. Q: How important do you see cloud computing being for mobile, now that we have an increasing range of devices we cart around with us and are looking for a more seamless experience between them? A: To me, the cloud has become, and will become, a much broader notion than a server farm sitting somewhere and doing something. So the cloud architecture will expand to more devices and the question is more of the seamlessness in actual usage. You may not even know occasionally what is computed close to you physically and what is computed far away.  There are two issues: One is energy. Sending information bits takes more energy than computing them, which means local computing consumes less energy. This is absolutely so fundamental that it will define the future of how our networks will be built. It implies that the cloud has to have a distributed architecture, because it will be too costly energy-wise for billions of people to be transmitting data. I’m not talking about the bandwidth problem — this is much more fundamental. Regardless of how much bandwidth you have in the dynamic user spectrum, you will still face this problem. The second problem is sociological, which is privacy. People are much more positive about something physically close to them and physically in their possession because they feel like they have more control over it. You believe that if your personal metadata sits in the device, it’s better than to let it go away to some nameless server. So there will still be parts of metadata and bits of information sitting close to you for these sociological reasons. But the cloud itself will expand, and I think the term will eventually disappear. It will just be our default network architecture. Q: Do you think people’s notions of privacy might change over time too? I’m thinking of Facebook pushing on people’s privacy, Google taking Gmail more public with Buzz… A: Yes, and my views on this have evolved a lot over the past 20 years. One dimension is that privacy is culturally dependent, so privacy in growth economies looks a bit different from privacy in the Western world. And even in the Western world, there are different approaches to privacy in Europe and the U.S. In Europe for example it’s very much regulatory — Germans don’t like Google Street View so they banned it. In the EU there’s a lot of regulatory resistance. In the U.S. it’s more like a community movement, “we’re going to make it public that you’re evil.” So it’s a different approach. Asia is somewhere in between. There are also very contradictory arguments that have been presented to me on whether there’s a generation gap or not. Some say young people put more things up on Facebook or publish things people in my generation would never publish. I’m not totally sure if the generation gap is the right thing to ask. I think it’s more of a question of how much the technology is a part of your life, and it doesn’t as much matter what your age is, although there might be a correlation between the two.  I think it’s complex to predict how people will react, and if there will be negative consequences. Privacy is always considered with respect to the tradeoff you get in terms of utility. If one or two people didn’t get a job or get fired because of something embarrassing they posted on Facebook, but there were 100,000 people that were recruited because of their Facebook presence, how does the judgment come down regarding privacy? Privacy is always relative to the benefits you get, so if people see enough value in sharing and feel safe enough, privacy isn’t the same question anymore. There’s no simple answer — privacy is an evolving factor. Q: What do you think of the renaissance of the tablet form factor, and will we see another range of devices occupying this middle ground between smartphone and laptop? A: I’m a computer scientist and have been hacking with computers for 40 years, so I’ve seen the development from mainframes to mini-computers to PCs to laptops to PDAs. The sarcastic comment is that all of them are “fads” to some degree, they come and go and the form factor changes. But each can be a decade or two decades or more in popularity. On the other hand, the only thing that has really disappeared is mini-computers. Mainframes still exist, PCs still exist, and so on. I don’t think the tablet will “kill” anything — I don’t think it’s strong enough. I would almost think that tablets and netbooks might see convergence. I don’t think the tablet will become so dominant that you will drop your laptop or netbook and use it as your only device. Q: How will the advent of 4G change the computing landscape? Will we see new types of applications become possible? A: This is the capacity question, and right now data-intensive applications cause bandwidth challenges. The interesting thing is we have tolerance thresholds for new features, where we want to keep doing things as long as it’s fast enough, but if the performance is below that threshold, we’ll just tinker with it for a bit and, and I think real-time online media streaming will become more prevalent.  Right now the latency time is not good enough. You can’t have 20 million people streaming their personal video streams around the world in real-time right now — that is not possible yet, but will become so. There will definitely be new applications emerging — it won’t just be the old ones getting faster. Q: In terms of online media streaming, do you think that’s going to change things on the content provider end of things? There’s a user behavior issue to confront too, and I think about how hard things like mobile TV have struggled to take off. How many people really need to watch TV while they’re walking to their car? A: That’s again extremely culturally-dependent too, looking at places like Korea that have had mobile TV for years. But for me, the real-time media streaming is more about the popularity of sharing your own personal experiences, like your kids playing soccer or when you’re out with your buddies at the bar. That’s a different thing from traditional content; for one thing it’s snippets so it tends to be shorter, but it’s also participatory and it’s human nature to want to exhibit yourself. It becomes a form of expressing yourself, and that will always be popular. And there’s always a long tail of people who are interested in you expressing yourself.  I think the most difficult thing is scale, so something like Twitter is interesting when you have few followers, and it’s great when you have 2 million followers, but if you have something like 10,000 followers it’s more like, “what do I do?” They are not my buddies anymore — I don’t know 10,000 people, and on the other hand I’m not famous like someone who has a million followers. I believe in this idea of federated local community: It’s good when you have this small audience, and federated means you have a common platform and you can actually reach things globally. There’s a certain community that is local enough in a network sense — not necessarily a geographic sense — to want to follow you. Q: That makes a lot of sense, especially considering the landscape of user-generated content on the web — that’s a lot of what people want to share. A: Yeah, they just want to share and if there’s an easy way of doing it and there’s a general platform, they will do it. Because there’s always some people who want to follow it. Q: How far along are we in terms of bringing mobile and artificial intelligence together? A: People talk a lot about intelligent agents, but I think in a computer form factor it doesn’t make that much sense. Think of the annoying Microsoft Office clip guy that no one wanted. The devices we’re talking about are much more personal, so if you can get help when doing real things and interacting in the world, it becomes more persuasive and appealing to have an intelligent agent or avatar type of thing. The greatest intelligent agent’s behavior can be specified by a good secretary, who can predict a lot of the things I do, can handle a lot of tasks and information flow, and only checks on the things which are important for me. People want to do this and there’s a lot of development around it, but it faces the same problems that any AI activity does: Any time we introduce an automized way of doing something, our own cognition changes to a different abstract level to assume that. When there’s a more intelligent layer in a device or in software, we start using that in a different way. This is very fundamental and has nothing to do with mobile devices specifically. But I truly believe there’s a good place for AI — we have elementary things in navigation assistants already that can provide intelligent traffic information. There’s actually a lot of hidden intelligence already and machine learning is already used a lot. Radio technology will be using AI techniques too, in a deep and unseen way. Dynamical allocation of the spectrum based on availability has deep machine learning components — it has to learn to predict when certain spectrum is available and so on. So there is a lot going on, but it isn’t necessarily always as sexy as the intelligent assistant everybody is looking for. Q: As location-based services become more and more popular, do you see any killer apps emerging? A: The first things that come to mind are local search, really relevant search results based on your positioning. Social search is another no-brainer, because you want to start finding people based on physical proximity because it doesn’t make any sense to go to the bar with someone far away. These are no-brainers and they will be very big.  The things people don’t usually think about with location-based systems are aggregate things like traffic information, and collective information about air pollution and other environmental data. In growth economies there’s a need for health-related and epidemic information collection. Mobile devices are key to monitoring things like this because they are globally prevalent and always where we are. They will enable us to aggregate data and get information that would otherwise be very difficult to get — I call these aggregate services. The pollution example is a very good one. You can start to get real-time information about the environment — your exposure to pollution in LA for example. We did this in traffic already, so think about generalizing it to weather, pollution, and others. The platform allows people’s position combined with something measured, and that gives us a new world. Reviews: Facebook, Gmail, Google, Twitter Tags: aggregate services, artificial intelligence, Augmented Reality, cloud computing, computing, future, Henry Tirri, interview, location, mixed reality, Mobile 2.0, Nokia, privacy, social media, tablets, TED, ted 2010, ugc
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| HOW TO: Integrate Facebook, Twitter, and Buzz into Your Gmail Posted: 12 Feb 2010 03:19 PM PST 
With over 9 million posts and comments in two days, Google Buzz has stormed the web like a swarm of locusts. An array of strong features, integration with Gmail, and lots of press have turned Buzz into an overnight phenomenon. If you’re like a lot of us, you’ve suddenly found yourself using your Gmail even more than you already were. Spending so much time in Gmail and Buzz though inevitably takes away from your Facebook and Twitter, and who wants to sacrifice their tweeting and facebooking? Luckily if you’re a Gmail user, you don’t have to sacrifice either, even while you’re browsing your email or your buzz. Gadget Integration Is Your FriendYesterday we caught a Buzz post by Ari Milner where he described how he turned his Gmail into his personal “social command center.” How did he do it? In his words:
By utilizing third-party gadgets, he transformed his Gmail into a place where he could access his Twitter, Buzz, and Facebook straight from his Gmail. Here’s how: Step By Step: Integrating Your Social Media into Buzz 1. Activate “Add any gadget by URL” in Gmail Labs — you’ll find it near the bottom of the list. 2. Now go to Settings –> Gadgets. Here you’ll find a place to add Gadget URLs. 3. Add the TwitterGadget App. Any iGoogle gadget will do actually, but the best one in our opinion is TwitterGadget, a fully-functional Twitter service for iGoogle and Gmail. This lets tweet from the sidebar or open up your Twitter with all of your tabs intact. It even supports multiple accounts.
4. Add the Facebook Gadget. In the same way you added TwitterGadget, you can add Facebook to your Gmail. While Google has an official Facebook gadget, it doesn’t play nicely with Gmail, so we suggest using the app Ari Milner users: Facebook Gadget by iBruno. It will expand into the rest of your Gmail for easy Facebook management. 
5. That’s it! Google Buzz, Facebook, Twitter, and Gmail are now all wrapped up into one. Pretty nifty, no? Let us know about your experience in the comments. Reviews: Facebook, Gmail, Google Buzz, Twitter, add Tags: facebook, gmail, Google, google buzz, Guide, how to, trending, twitter
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| Thanks to Mashable’s Socially Savvy Supporters Posted: 12 Feb 2010 02:31 PM PST 
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Influxis is an official Adobe hosting partner and resource for the Adobe Flash Media Interactive Server. Influxis provides Flash hosting plans for all levels of use – beginner to enterprise. With a reputation for exceptional customer service, Influxis provides an extremely reliable international network of FMS servers in the U.S., U.K., and Germany.  BizSpark is a program which offers new software businesses and entrepreneurs access to Microsoft design, development, and production tools with no upfront costs for up to three years. Members can also connect with a nationwide community of Network Partners – investors, incubators, service providers, and entrepreneurial organizations – who are keen to help. For more information, or to connect with a Microsoft BizSpark advisor, please visit MicrosoftStartupZone.com/BizSpark.  MailChimp is a powerful, easy-to-use email marketing service. You design, me deliver.  If you’re working for a startup, Sun can help you get it off the ground fast. We created the fee-free Sun Startup Essentials program offering deep discounts on industry leading, power efficient systems and storage products, optimized open-source software, massively scalable Web hosting services, plus free visibility via Sun’s co-marketing engine. It’s time to build your business on the kind of infrastructure that can scale right along with the skyrocketing demands of success. Find out about Sun Startup Essentials today!  MaxCDN – Content Delivery Network. MaxCDN makes it easy and affordable to get maximum global performance from your site and enable your visitors to get the most out of their visit! MaxCDN offers: resistance to the Digg effect, SSL Integration, No Setup Fee, US-based customer service, No Commitments. Get 1 TeraByte for just $10 today!  Eventbrite is an online events marketplace where tens of thousands of individuals, businesses and organizations of all sizes manage, promote and sell tickets to their events. 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As a leading provider of managed DNS services, Dyn Inc. plays a key role in keeping the Internet’s DNS infrastructure running smoothly, handling trillions of queries per day and servicing nearly four million active users. With a range of innovative solutions, from domain name and e-mail services on DynDNS.com, to failover, load balancing, traffic management and CDN balancing services with the Dynect Platform, Dyn Inc. remains committed to world class customer service and engineering excellence. Uptime is the Bottom Line. For more information about Dyn Inc., visit www.dyn.com, e-mail hello@dyn.com or call +1-603-668-4998.  ConcentricSky offers web development and strategic consulting services with a focus on emerging technologies such as Social Media and iPhone Apps. From simple websites to integrated web applications, we deliver innovative solutions that exceed your expectations – not your budget. 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| 3 Social Media Sources for Official NBA All-Star Content Posted: 12 Feb 2010 02:30 PM PST 
This year’s NBA All-Star weekend will be held in Dallas, Texas, and like all others that came before, it will be an awesome spectacle. They say everything is bigger in Texas, and this event will be no exception. The 59th All-Star Game will be played this Sunday, February 14th at the new Cowboys Stadium in Arlington. This venue has the potential to hold a large crowd and could break the all-time NBA attendance record. The old All-Star record was 44,735 people at the Houston Astrodome in 1989. In 1998, the largest ever regular-season crowd at an NBA game was 62,046 strong at the Georgia Dome to see the Atlanta Hawks play Michael Jordan’s Chicago Bulls. With a crowd approaching 90,000, the 2010 All-Star game should definitely surpass these records. Those in attendance will be a part of history. A lot of fans will find themselves navigating the Internet looking for the best information about the All-Star Game. The National Basketball Association has done an amazing job at making NBA.com a one-stop destination for its fans. NBA.com is easy to navigate, and has all the resources that you need, from schedules of events to highlights. Here are some of the other things they’re doing for All-Star Weekend. 1. Twitter With over 1.7 million followers, the NBA’s Twitter account has become a great portal for fans to get quick, accurate information about games, teams, and players. They’ve already started to talk about All-Star Weekend with the hashtag #AS10 and they’ll continue to do so all weekend long. The NBA is also retweeting players and teams who are talking about the festivities in Dallas. Along with the #AS10 hashtag, the NBA is using #SpriteSlam for the Slam Dunk Contest, which will take place on Saturday night. Further, they’ve created the @100FromAS10 Twitter account, which will capture 100 different tweets from 100 different VIPs who are down in Dallas for the weekend. Yesterday, the NBA tweeted out an #AS10 Scavenger Hunt for fans who were down in Dallas early. 2. Facebook The NBA has almost 1.9 million fans on Facebook, and they’re doing a fantastic job of putting out great content for all of those people. You can definitely expect more content throughout the weekend. Earlier today, they promoted a Dunk Contest Marathon they were hosting on NBA TV all day, to get people hyped up about the competition and the weekend in general. I expect to see more highlights, videos, and efforts to get the fans talking in the coming days. 3. NBA.com NBA.com is rich with content revolving around All-Star Weekend. Specifically, there are a ton of videos from past All-Star Weekends, as well as footage from this year’s event. With the NBA Tweetmixx, you can see what NBA insiders and NBA fans are saying (and linking to) about All-Star weekend on Twitter. The NBA also built the All-Star Weekend widgets for fans to take advantage of on their own sites and blogs. As a fan, you want to have the ability to get information the way you want it, and now. With the All-Star Weekend upon us, we all want to make sure that we don’t miss the amazing dunks and great match-ups, but most of all, we’re looking forward to a great game. What do you think about the way the NBA is utilizing its online and social media presence to cover ASW? What could they be doing better? More sports resources from Mashable:
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, toddtaulman Reviews: STAR, Twitter, iStockphoto Tags: basketball, fab five, facebook, jalen rose, NBA, NBA All-Star Game, social media, sports, twitter, video, web
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| Google: Buzz Is Staying in Gmail Posted: 12 Feb 2010 02:19 PM PST 
Google might have a made a major misstep in assuming that the people we communicate with the most in Gmail are the same people we want to automatically share the Google Buzz experience with, but new information confirms that Buzz is not being removed from Gmail. The blogosphere is abuzz over a Search Engine Land report that Google might unlink the two products. In contacting Google, however, we received the following statement:
Since the launch of Google Buzz there has been a growing backlash against the autofollowing formula of the social networking service and the assumptions it makes about our relationships. As the complaints crescendo, Google has shown that they’re not afraid to take quick action with alterations to the product. Last night Google made it easier to hide your followers/following list and block users, though Search Engine Land’s report indicated they may go much further:
That information, however, clearly contradicts what Google just told us. If you’re looking to better understand why there’s so much upheaval about Buzz working inside of Gmail, consider reading Harriet Jacob’s colorfully worded account of her experience with Google Buzz. Here’s a snippet from that post:
Reviews: Gmail, Google, Google Buzz Tags: Google, google buzz, privacy
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| SocialTALK Helps Businesses Diffuse Social Media Clutter Posted: 12 Feb 2010 02:07 PM PST 
Syncapse launched its SocialTALK social media workflow tool this week, which is designed to help companies control their presence on different platforms, as well as monitor feedback. Social management tools are slowly starting to become more relevant. ContexOptional, Vitrue SRM and Salesforce.com are all targeting this space in various ways. SocialTALK’s approach to it is to plug into various platforms that can all be managed from one dashboard. Check out this video: Right now SocialTALK supports Twitter, Facebook, WordPress and MoveableType. You can create new posts, moderate comments, schedule when posts go out and push the same content across to multiple networks at once. The organizational features are great, but the features that have the most potential are the real-time analytics. We’ve discussed measuring social media ROI before and as we said then, finding trends and tracking them back to their point of origin is the key to measuring ROI. While analytics aren’t going to do that for you, if you can get a real-time measurement of traffic, discussion points and comments as they relate to various social media campaigns — and if you can add in identifiers to track that data to either a transaction or other measurable goal — taking control of social media ROI becomes much less difficult. How does your business manage its social network presence? Let us know! Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, WordPress Tags: social media roi, social media tools, socialtalk
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| Joker Tricks TV Host Into Reading Lyrics From “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air” [VIDEO] Posted: 12 Feb 2010 11:44 AM PST 
The host went on to unknowingly read another e-mail from the prankster — this one recounting the Star Wars plot. Although this video is the most widely viewed — it has garnered close to 500,000 views in one month — it’s far from the joker’s only contribution to the crank call canon. The host of Genesis TV is a frequent target, and has, in the past, read selections from Family Guy and Taxi Driver. There are scores of other videos in the same vein on his YouTube channel. In the clip below, which is more recent than the one featured in The Telegraph, another hapless host begins reading the Fresh Prince parable before the veteran Genesis host stops her. What ensues is five minutes of the hosts trying to sort fact from fiction. The joker, however, still manages to trick them many a time, as the woman reads earnestly: “Please pray for my cousin Carlton and my Uncle Phil, who have both been having a very hard time finding jobs. Thank you so much, Will.” And, just in case you don’t know all the words to the Fresh Prince theme song (as I surprisingly do): Reviews: YouTube Tags: pop culture, television, viral video
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| 5 Tips for Creating Non-Profit Online Communities Posted: 12 Feb 2010 11:10 AM PST 
Non-profits use white label platforms like Ning to connect with their communities. Ning serves 1.6 million networks (see Mashable’s Six Ways to Use Ning post). “What we're seeing organizations and non-profits use Ning for is to develop a deeper layer of conversation and engagement with their supporters and advocates,” said Ning’s Morgan Seal. “Their memberships are those that are looking for a more contextual social experience around the things they care about most.” Here are five tips for non-profits considering their own white label community. 1. The Cause is the Purpose The cause is the purpose of the network. Don’t build a network for your organization’s website. The mission of the site needs to revolve around the general common bond a non-profit has with its stakeholder community. “I feel we may be successful because we deeply believe in the importance of community and what it does to people touched by diabetes,” said Manny Hernandez, president of the Diabetes Hands Foundation, which runs the 13,000 person TuDiabetes network. “We have seen so many people come back to us and say: ‘I have had diabetes for X many years. I felt so alone. I never knew there were SO many people who felt exactly like me.’” 2. Listen Listening to your community remains a core social media principle. When considering building a cause or organization-specific network, listening can be critical in driving community requirements for function and content. “I think it’s imperative to have a good ‘listening and monitoring’ plan in place to see what their stakeholders are doing online in public spaces — basically to figure out what their audience’s capacity is for collaboration and collective action online in general,” said Maddie Grant, Chief Social Media Strategist for Social Fish. “They should then be able to figure out whether that activity could translate to engagement in their own community site.” 3. Choose a Platform that Serves Your Community’s Needs Some networks enable privacy; others integration with larger networks. Still others offer great information sharing via wikis. When considering the many white label community options avalaible, try to understand what your community’s needs are before setting up shop. “Our community had a unique need for a secure and private space where Iraq and Afghanistan veterans could connect with one another, share stories, offer support, and know that the people they're interacting with share many of the same life experiences,” said Chrissy Stevens, Communications Director of Iraq and Afghanistan Veterans of America (IAVA). “We spent months assessing our options for starting a white-label social network, and Ning was the only platform that offered the right combination of privacy controls, quality user experience, easy administration and customization, and ongoing support.” 4. Offer Great Value to Your Network The classic community mistake is to use a network to drive information out into the public as opposed to creating a compelling experience for members. Sometimes that means getting out of the way. Providing value includes a dynamic environment where members interact and drive conversation, participate in activity they can’t find on general social networks, and receive acknowledgment. “A social network needs to deliver value. I don’t think that you should be sending the members links to your research and reports 5 times a day,” said Holly Ross, Executive Director, NTEN: The Nonprofit Technology Network. “A theater company may be able to serve its patrons by providing a social space for the patrons to discuss play writing, set design, and/or the latest shows from the company. A health organization may serve its clients by giving them a space to talk to and support one another privately.” 5. Use the General Networks as Beachheads It’s smart to include Twitter and Facebook functionality in your general strategy. In many ways, there’s a larger conversation occurring and the general networks can serve as beachheads to bring people back to your network. Conversely, integrating Twitter and Facebook allows for people within your network to talk about your activities in the larger context. “Even though we run our own niche social network, we are heavily engaged on Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn,” said Steve Ressler, founder of GovLoop. “Plus, we speak a lot at in-person events where lots of government folks attend. This draws a lot of our membership and engagement.” “They are in a way their own communities, but we are OK with the fact that not all conversations that start through our Twitter account or our FaceBook page end up on TuDiabetes or EsTuDiabetes,” said TuDiabetes’ Manny Hernandez. “Put another way, people will have conversations where it’s most convenient to them and groups creating online communities need to be mindful of this.” More social good resources from Mashable:
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, timsa Reviews: Facebook, LinkedIn, Mashable, Twitter, iStockphoto Tags: charity, communities, facebook, ning, non-profit, nonprofit, online communities, social good, social media, twitter
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| The New York Times and Foursquare Partner for the Olympics Posted: 12 Feb 2010 10:55 AM PST 
Much like the major media companies before it, the publishing powerhouse has found a distribution partner in the mobile application and is finding a way to apply the location craze to its Vancouver Olympic Games coverage. Starting today, Foursquare users can tap into the Times on Foursquare for recommendations on restaurants, attractions, shopping and nightlife — as reported by the Times’ travel and entertainment writers — in Vancouver, Whistler, and Squamish. And it wouldn’t be Foursquare without a badge to boot, so Foursquarers in those areas should keep their eyes peeled for suggested venues should they want to earn The New York Times Olympic badge. The New York Times should be commended for its avant-garde approach to serving up relevant and contextual editorial content to Olympic Games attendees, though the idea is one we’re starting to see quite frequently now courtesy of Foursquare. What’s especially interesting is that while the game elements of Foursquare are tightly integrated into each media partner’s experience, the true value is in the editorial content that Foursquare can distribute by user location. This means that while Google Buzz (for mobile) and Yelp can attempt to tackle check-ins and add a layer that serves as the voice of the people, Foursquare has managed to add the voices of trusted and high-profile resources to the mix. The game has truly evolved into a travel guide with an editorial lens that competitors simply can’t match at this point. Reviews: Foursquare, Google Buzz, Yelp Tags: foursquare, media, new york times, social media, winter olympics
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| How We’re Using Social Media on Our Mobile Phones [STATS] Posted: 12 Feb 2010 09:29 AM PST 
For Flurry’s January report, the company decided to dissect application usage based on the following categories: games, entertainment, social networking, and news and lifestyle. On both iPhone and Android phones, social networking apps were used most frequently — about 20 times per month — with news coming in a distant second. In fact, in terms of frequency alone, we’re using social networking apps at double the rate we’re using news applications, and four times the rate we’re firing up mobile games. Based on Flurry data, it also appears that the frequency at which we use entertainment, games and lifestyle apps in totality still doesn’t rival how frequently we use social networking apps each month. It’s interesting to note, however, that in terms of actual session length — duration of individual application usage — smartphone users split larger chunks of their time between news, games and social networking respectively, with users devoting nearly 10 minutes on average to news applications. What it boils down to is that we use social networking apps most frequently, but spend longer periods of time consuming information in news applications. These findings are especially striking and essentially confirm that social media has become integrated into our lives, so much so that we’re using our smartphones to stay connected while we’re away from our computers. In fact, social media has become more entertaining than entertainment itself. Reviews: Android Tags: android, Hardware, iphone, Mobile 2.0, mobile social networking, social media, social networking
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| 8 iPhone Apps for the Perfect Valentine’s Day Posted: 12 Feb 2010 08:54 AM PST 
Can your iPhone help your love life? I’ll have to admit I’ve found it’s more likely to lead to fights about whether it’s OK to check e-mail during dinner, but crafty iPhone developers have cooked up some great apps to turn your iPhone into a Valentine’s Day lifesaver. These iPhone apps can impress your valentine, provide dating advice, send virtual flowers, or even help you work out your anti-Valentine’s Day resentment. Romantic Love Note/Card1. iWrite: Love Poems iWrite features eight different Valentine’s-appropriate styles of poetry. For each one, it walks you through the process from brainstorming, to examples, to step-by-step guidance. If you really want to cop out, it’ll even generate your poem for you. I have to admit I was skeptical that an app like this could be anything but hokey, but it’s actually great. I am not a poet at all, but in about one minute it helped me create a poem I’d actually like to share with my boyfriend. For a less helpful, but more humorous version of this try the (free) Love Poem Generator. Cost: $1.99 2. Valentine ~ Postage This is a special Valentine’s Day edition of the Postage line of iPhone apps. This app has a lot of high quality e-card designs and lets you easily insert your own pictures into its templates. Customize your card with photo effects and your own message, then share it via e-mail or Facebook. A word of warning, it’s hard (read: impossible) for any e-card to be as personal as a nice hand-written one, but this is perfect for long-distance friends or relationships. If you don’t believe you should pay to make an e-card, then try StickerJam Hearts – Free. Cost: $1.99 For the Perfect Date3. Creative Romantic Ideas This app is more than a little cheesy, but it has some genuinely good ideas. It has everything from the obvious (heart locket) to the more creative (romantic crossword puzzle). I’d definitely recommend it for anyone trying to come up with the perfect Valentine’s surprise and in need of a little inspiration. The ideas are categorized by price and difficulty level and each idea breaks down what you’ll need. Cost: $0.99 4. 20 Minute Meals – Jamie Oliver A home cooked meal is often much more romantic than a dinner out. There’s no need to deal with traffic, reservations, or a crowded restaurant. This app opens up the possibility of a home cooked meal for those of us lacking talent in the cooking department. Why this app? At $7.99, it’s pricey, but it promises and delivers on two key things: 20 minutes meals and easy to follow instructions. Really, what else could you ask for? But if you’re still not convinced it’s worth the price tag try Allrecipes.com Dinner Spinner or Epicurious Recipes & Shopping List, both free. Cost: $7.99 Virtual Gifts5. Be Mine Hearts Remember Sweethearts, that candy that was the number one choice for elementary school Valentines? Well, now you can send them in virtual form with the Be Mine Hearts app (we all know they didn’t taste that good anyway). Shake your iPhone to get a different heart (and message), add your own note at the bottom, then send it in e-mail. Not groundbreaking but very easy, and definitely cute. Cost: Free 6. Send eFlowers Flowers are a Valentine’s Day classic for a reason, and this app allows you to send virtual flowers to everyone you care about (or even people you don’t) with the touch of a finger. You can send via e-mail or MMS. It’s a nice touch, and I highly recommend it for sending to friends and family. However, if you send your girlfriend virtual flowers instead of real ones, don’t say I didn’t warn you. To send real flowers on the go use the 1800Flowers app. Cost: $0.99 If You’re Single7. iFlirt iFlirt is “your fearless dating companion” and offers pickup lines and tips for dating. Definitely use it with a grain of salt, but it could be just the ticket for coming up with an icebreaker — or maybe just for realizing that you should stop staring at your iPhone and go talk to someone if you’re out. If you’re feeling lucky, check out “Get Any Girl: The Ultimate Pickup and Dating Guide.” I’m pretty sure it’s just for laughs (and some might even find it mildly offensive), but there’s only way to find out… Cost: $0.99 8. iXplode – Valentine’s Day If you’re feeling a little bitter about the whole (admittedly over-commercialized) holiday, then iXplode may be just the app for you. Watch Valentine’s gifts such as candy, a teddy bear, or roses blow up. This app also allows you to send these videos as anti-Valentine’s Day cards and, luckily for your ex-girlfriend, it clearly labels it as an iXplode card before viewing. Cost $0.99 More iPhone resources from Mashable:
Image courtesy of iStockphoto, JoeBiafore Reviews: Facebook, iStockphoto Tags: apple, apps, dating, Holiday, Holidays, iphone, iphone apps, Mobile 2.0, trending, Valentine, Valentines
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| Hilarious Vintage Dating Reels From Found Footage Fest [VIDEO] Posted: 12 Feb 2010 08:32 AM PST 
Every video is (unintentionally) funny, but those that have to do with love and romance take the proverbial cake. So whether you’re dining with your sig other at some fancy joint this Sunday or sitting at home with a bottle of … something, we would like to direct your attention to the following array of hilarity. David Seeks GoddessThe Video Guide to Successful SeductionThe Art of Meeting a ManVideo DatingCourtship vs. DatingReviews: YouTube Tags: dating, online dating, viral video
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| Yahoo Launches Mobile Site for the Winter Olympics Posted: 12 Feb 2010 06:46 AM PST 
You can also do an athlete search to see in-depth profiles of athletes competing at the games, and find detailed info about the 15 sports included in the games. The site is available in English for 13 countries, including the U.S., Canada, the Philippines, India, Singapore, Malaysia, Australia, New Zealand, France, Germany, Italy and Spain. To check out the site, point your mobile browsers to m.yahoo.com/olympics Also, check out a preview in the video below. Reviews: Australia Tags: Mobile 2.0, winter olympics, Yahoo
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| Opera Mini Reaches 50 Million Active Users Posted: 12 Feb 2010 05:46 AM PST 
While Opera was obviously making a statement with that move, in reality it can survive without the iPhone; in fact, Opera Mini is one of the most popular mobile browsers out there. The latest number to support this claim is 50 million active users. Opera Mini was launched in 2006 and had a somewhat slow start; it took it nearly two and a half years to reach the first 10 million; in the last couple of months, however, it has been growing a lot faster. According to Opera, Mini has grown 150% from January 2009, when it had 20 million monthly unique users, to 50 million monthly unique users in January 2010. To try out Opera Mini, you need a Java ME-enabled phone; you can find the latest version over at the official Opera Mini site.  Reviews: Opera, iPhone Tags: Browsers, Mobile 2.0, opera mini
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Following up on the success of the star studded TV and Internet streamed "
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Although many businesses are starting to embrace social services and networks to connect with potential customers, such tools are still by and large built for end users, not for businesses. That can make managing multiple social media accounts, moderating comments and scheduling posts difficult.
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