Chime.in
UberMedia starts its own social network: Chime.in, a Twitter, Digg, Reddit, Facebook clone; http://eicker.at/Chimein
Tagged: Microblogging RSS Toggle Comment Threads | Keyboard Shortcuts
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Gerrit Eicker
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Gerrit Eicker
Diaspora Communications
Diaspora social communications: superusing Diaspora, the federated Web, the early days; http://eicker.at/DiasporaCommunications
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Gerrit Eicker
Diasporial: “One of the first things I fell for in Diaspora was its neat marriage of two posting methods: a unidirectional ‘blasting’ option to reach the general public and a two-way ‘sharing’ model for more intimate exchanges… sooo basically a Twitter and a Facebook. Through the proper use of aspects, posts could now either spark a conversation among select friends or publish a message to the entire Internet. … With the recent introduction of Markdown formatting, I’ve noted a increase in longer, well thought-out posts more resembling blog entries than status updates begin to appear in my activity stream, which tickles me pink… You can actually use this system to pre-publish a thought and gather comments on it before full out blogging about it… ‘But I’m a famous celebrity. What does this mean for me?‘ The benefits are surreal. You don’t have to rely on some lame ‘fan’ or ‘group’ pages: people can connect to the real you, and you can control what your subscribers see simply through carefully watching what you post as ‘Public’. Your real friends can be put into their own specific aspects where you can tell them all about your new yacht or perfume line, while the rest of the Internet will receive your public updates about book signings or that new charity you’re promoting.”
Diasporial: “I’m pretty sure that everyone on the Diaspora platform has their own story about how they found Diaspora, made friends, and got into the network. Some of us have enjoyed it more than others. Regardless, the fact of the matter is that this is a very opportune moment for a community to come together and really shine. … [T]he biggest thing about Diaspora is not its features, but the community that surrounds it. Several times a day, I’ll check in and notice great conversations going on by people that originally didn’t know each other at all. In fact, I’ve made a good handful of friends there, from all walks of life. The best part is that it’s not just a bunch of Linux nerds. There are people there that are passionate about film, technology, art, philosophy, literature, you name it. It is a community of passion, and it continues to grow on a daily basis.”
Diasporial: “The early days of Diaspora – a personal story – While writing this I realise how hard it is to put the pre-alpha experience into words. I am sure that those who were there with me at the time feel the same nostalgia and the same enthusiasm as I feel. Having been an early adopter on pre-alpha Diaspora is definitely something I am proud of. The whole look and feel of Diaspora was just great and the people I met were all very kind and loving. The software iterated with the speed of lightning and every time your account got reset you just knew that something had changed. Rather than feeling bad about the data loss, you would just sign up again as quickly as you could to find out what’s new.”
- Follow Diasporial: via RSS, on Diaspora, on Twitter
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jo jmatic
»[T]he biggest thing about Diaspora is not its features, but the community that surrounds it. Several times a day, I’ll check in and notice great conversations going on by people that originally didn’t know each other at all. In fact, I’ve made a good handful of friends there, from all walks of life. The best part is that it’s not just a bunch of Linux nerds. There are people there that are passionate about film, technology, art, philosophy, literature, you name it. It is a community of passion, and it continues to grow on a daily basis.”«
Sehr gut gesagt. »Gefällt mir« :)
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Gerrit Eicker
Indeed, Diasporial is definitely a must read. ;)
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Gerrit Eicker
Social Freedom
The Diaspora Project, a fun and creative community for social freedom; http://eicker.at/SocialFreedom
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Gerrit Eicker
Diaspora: “We are happy to announce that DiasporaFoundation.org is now live. DiasporaFoundation.org will be the home of the Diaspora* project, a place where our community can share information, learn about cool new features, and information about where they can get an account. – This new blog replaces blog.joindiaspora.com (WordPress FTW), and will be updated with news from the community and announcements from the core team.”
Diaspora: “Social freedom. – Ever wanted to to share something with just a certain group of people? Diaspora* pioneered Aspects, the original system for sharing things with just the people you want. Of course, you can still tell the whole world too, if you want to. – Diaspora* lets you stay connected with your friends, even if they’re not on Diaspora* yet. Simply connect your account to other major services, then use Diaspora* as your home base to post to your profiles on these other services too. Diaspora* currently supports cross-posting to your Facebook, Twitter, and Tumblr accounts, with more to come soon. … Own your data – Now you don’t have to settle for having your data on someone else’s server. Since Diaspora is completely free software, you can grab the code and host it wherever you want. We’re constantly making it easier for individuals to host their own pods on Diaspora*. – Coming soon: Download all of your data in standard formats that can be used in other places. – Get started on a community pod and then move all of your social data to a pod you control. Diaspora*’s distributed design means that you will never have to sacrifice control of your data to stay connected.”
Diaspora: “Join the movement. – The future of the social web starts with you. – Diaspora* is already in the top 2% of all open source projects ever. The codebase has received over 800 forks, over 5000 followers on GitHub, and over 300 Grassroots Volunteers… Open source is about individuality, transparency, creativity, and destiny. It is about having an idea, and making it reality. Diaspora* was founded to fulfill a passion for fun, and for making the Internet a better place. Open source is what enables us to change the world, for ourselves, and let our friends across the web benefit from our exploration. … We all make Diaspora*. We might not know you just yet, but we think you’d be a great fit for building the future of the web. You’re fantastic, and you’re ready to change the world. Contributing to Diaspora* comes in all different shapes and sizes. Whether you’re a user helping us find bugs, providing feedback on our mailing lists, or contributing code or design, we need you.”
Diaspora: “Roadmap – These are things that are in our plan, but haven’t yet come to the front of the priority queue. If you’re looking for a feature to implement, and any of these strike your fancy, come talk to us in IRC first. We may have thoughts about how we want these implemented, and we can help you get started…
- Data portability: allow people to Oauth to a new seed and move their entire account to the new seed, and then notify all of their contacts of the change, so people can move around seamlessly.
- Twitter-style API for posting and searching public posts.
- Services integration: attach services to particular aspects.
- Server to server authentication: Right now Diaspora is push-only. We need servers to authenticate with each other to pull data in.
- Refining aspects – having people only in the public group, a Twitter-style follow model, etc.
- More standards compliance: for instance, we have a salmon implementation, but it’s not tested against the spec yet. It should be made compliant with the salmon spec.
- Events
- Photo tagging
- Mentions and tags should work in comments and captions.
- Software Update Framework for folks running their own pod.
- An administrator interface that would do the entire update automatically, like the way WordPress can be updated through its admin interface.”
Diaspora: “We’re building the future we want to see – a new social web that keeps you in control of your data, giving you the freedom to do what you want and have fun. We’re a tiny core team of developers working our tails off, and we’re also a huge community effort, with more than 150 people having contributed code to our open-source software, hundreds of others engaged in community organizing and spreading the word, and thousands of people providing feedback and financial support. We can’t do this without you. Please give what you can. Thank you.“
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook News Feed: Relevance?
Facebook redesigns its news feed for more relevance: resistance is futile; http://eicker.at/FacebookNewsFeedRelevance
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “Starting today, it will be easier to keep up with the people in your life no matter how frequently or infrequently you’re on Facebook. … Now, News Feed will act more like your own personal newspaper. You won’t have to worry about missing important stuff. All your news will be in a single stream with the most interesting stories featured at the top. If you haven’t visited Facebook for a while, the first things you’ll see are top photos and statuses posted while you’ve been away. They’re marked with an easy-to-spot blue corner. … Ticker shows you the same stuff you were already seeing on Facebook, but it brings your conversations to life by displaying updates instantaneously.”
Guardian: “‘Lame,’ snarks Brandi Genest Weeks on the Facebook blog. ‘Quite frankly I don’t want Facebook deciding who is most important in my life. I want my news feed to just go chronologically and if I want to hide posts from someone, I will. Stop changing. You’re becoming MySpace and I left there for a reason.’ – Ouch. And 845 people ‘Liked’ Brandi’s comment. Almost 500 disgrunted Facebook users concurred with Fiona Robinson, who blasted: “NOOOO! I STILL want ‘most recent’ at the top like it used to be, so we have the OPTION of seeing what has been posted most recently instead of what Facebook deems a ‘top story’. This is total garbage. … Once the ticker is populated with my friends’ Spotify tunes, Vevo videos or Wall Street Journal stories, then I’m interested. How about you?”
RWW: “Whenever Facebook launches a major re-design, there is a user outcry. Partly that’s because Facebook is known for its clumsy and confusing design, partly it’s because people are resistant to change. This time round though, the main issue is that Facebook is trying to be something it is not: a newspaper. … Don’t get me wrong, I applaud many of the changes that Facebook has recently made and is about to make. … Lists for friends, media sharing, filtering information that you see on your homepage through the Subscribe button. All of those are features that enhance Facebook’s core purpose: to be asocial network. And just as importantly, all of those features are directly controlled by the user. Not by Facebook’s software.”
GigaOM: “The repeated use of the term ‘newspaper’ makes it obvious that Facebook wants this new feature to be about more than just seeing updates from your friend’s birthday party – and it could become especially interesting when combined with another new Facebook feature: the launch of the ‘Subscribe’ service, which allows users to follow and get updates from people or sources they are not friends with, in much the same way that Twitter does. Facebook has been promoting that feature as a way to stay connected to what celebrities and journalists are doing, and it seems likely that many of those items could wind up on the top of your ‘personal newspaper‘ thanks to the news feed changes.”
GigaOM: “The new updates show that Facebook is still in the midst of the ‘launching season’ CEO Mark Zuckerberg first discussed in June, when it announced a new video chat feature with Skype. With the company’s f8 developer conference coming up this Thursday, something tells me that Facebook still has a few more big announcements up its sleeve.”
AF: “Lest any of us mistake the redesigned news feed and official ticker launch as Facebook giving away the goods before the f8 developers conference this week, Schact said that the company has plenty of other things to announce at the annual event on Thursday. – Of course, users of Facebook will likely grumble about the changed formatting and then decide they like this layout when the next one comes through – that happens every time the site revamps its layouts.”
Gerrit Eicker
Diaspora’s First Year
Diaspora: from 4 to >100K users, from 0 to >7K commits, from alpha to beta soon? http://eicker.at/DiasporasFirstYear
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Gerrit Eicker
Diasporial: “[September 15th] is a very special day for the Diaspora project. It has been exactly one year since the guys released the Diaspora source code! For a year now, people have been able to contribute to this project and set up pods. And so they did! Till date, 7371 commits have been made by the contributors and the four founders. In only a years time, the amount of Diaspora users has grown from 4 to over 100.000, spread over lots of pods! … It is rumoured that Diaspora will hit beta in November, on its Alpha release anniversary.”
Diaspora: “We know that if you’re not a contributor and don’t follow us on Github, it’s hard to see Diaspora grow and evolve. Now that Diaspora is moving into its second year and a new phase of development, here are some numbers on the progress we’ve made. … Our developer community is growing. Diaspora has had over 100 unique code contributors and countless others have edited our wiki and updated Diaspora’s translations in over 51 languages. We have over 4,600 followers and over 840 forks, which means that tons of developers are checking out our code. That makes us the sixth most popular project on GitHub, right behind great open source projects like JQuery, Ruby On Rails, and Node, just to name a few.”
Diaspora: “There’s been big news in the social networking world recently, and we can’t help but be pleased with the impact our work has had on two of the biggest developments. We’re proud that Google+ imitated one of our core features, aspects, with their circles. And now Facebook is at last moving in the right direction with user control over privacy, a move spurred not just by Google+, but more fundamentally by you and tens of thousands of community members, as well as hundreds of thousands of people who’ve lined up to try Diaspora* – that is, by all of us who’ve stood up to say ‘there has to be a better way.’ We’re making a difference already.”
RWW: “There are things about Diaspora that still are unique among its competitors. Not only is it open-source, it’s decentralized and distributed. Users are encouraged to set up their own servers. But these are not features for normal human users. In that category, the social networking superpowers seem to have Diaspora cornered. … Diaspora has been called the anti-Facebook for its strong privacy stance, and it had ‘aspects’ before anyone knew about Google Plus and its circles. … If Google Plus has taught us anything, it’s that normal people don’t feel like leaving the social networks where they already feel settled. … Is there anything Diaspora can do? I think so, but it’s a departure from it’s current incarnation, which is an awful lot like Google Plus (or vice versa, or whatever). It’s unrealistic to expect a mass exodus from one social network that works to another of which no one has ever heard. Diaspora’s potential is in its ability to syndicate to our other services (currently Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr) while still allowing us to own our data. … If Diaspora is built as a publishing platform that lets us own our content and direct it to our existing networks – and especially if we can read from them, too – it would be an awesome, welcome tool that even Dave Winer could love. But if the launch of Google Plus wasn’t splashy enough to start a mass Facebook exodus, a later launch of a service that looks the same is not going to do it.”
TNW: “Diaspora has never pitched itself as direct competitor to the likes of Facebook – more an alternative model for how social networks could be designed. However, it’s gained a reputation from observers as ‘that quirky Facebook alternative that never quite made it.’ Whether there’s a need or desire for its product or not, it seems there’s life in the Diaspora team yet.”
Some ‘historical’ Diaspora posts here on Wir sprechen Online:
- Diaspora rockets on Kickstarter, 15.05.2010
- Diaspora gets funded with $200K, 03.06.2010
- Diaspora’s first month and first progress, 04.07.2010
- Diaspora works! 27.08.2010
- Diaspora Alpha, the developer release, 16.09.2010
- Joindiaspora.com opens its doors in private alpha, 24.11.2010
- Diaspora summary, 20.07.2011
Gerrit Eicker
Facebook Subscribe Button
Facebook joins Twitter, Google Plus: allows non-reciprocal connections, aka following; http://eicker.at/FacebookSubscribeButton
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Gerrit Eicker
Facebook: “In the next few days, you’ll start seeing this [Subscribe] button on friends’ and others’ profiles. You can use it to: Choose what you see from people in News Feed – Hear from people, even if you’re not friends – Let people hear from you, even if you’re not friends”
AF: “This option seems geared toward making sure there are still public status updates going up – now that the Facebook has made the privacy controls more visible to the average user, these settings ought to increase in usage. … To encourage the use of the new feature, Facebook suggesting people for you to subscribe to, based on your friends’ activity. These prompts show up in the right-hand column of the homepage. You can click on the upper right-hand corner of these suggestions and they will disappear, plus subsequent prompts will take a different direction.”
IF: “These new options will add user preference to Facebook’s EdgeRank algorithm for determining what’s relevant to surface in the news feed. Users will no longer have to suffer the annoying stories about high scores or new items earned by their little brother in social games. Another example Gleit cited was that if a user has an acquaintance who is a great photographer, they can select to just see their photo updates, not status updates about their daily lives. – Users will no longer have to use multiple services in order to handle different relationships such as those based on real-life friendship, interests, or acquaintanceship. Twitter may have already built up a graph of 100 million people based on connections, but Facebook could bring the knowledge accessible through assymetrical following to the mainstream while improving the quality of the news feed.”
GigaOM: “Should Twitter be afraid of Facebook’s subscribe feature? – It’s not just that Twitter is an asymmetric network. Facebook is much more of a full-fledged social network in ways that Twitter is not; its focus is on connecting you with your social graph so you can share thoughts, photos, games and so on. Obviously, it’s also an information platform, and it seems clear network wants to boost that aspect of its business, but I think most users still see it as a place they go to get information and/or news primarily from their friends. … But if Facebook seems to have a lock (at least for now) on the status of leading social network for connecting with family and friends, Twitter seems to have become the defaultinformation network for getting real-time news from a wide variety of sources, whether they are friends or not.”
RWW: “Does Facebook’s Subscribe Button Betray What the Company Was Built On? – Facebook evolved around the notion of ‘balanced following.’ You couldn’t be friends with me unless I was a friend to you. At the start, Facebook held tight to that rule. As time went on, that started to evolve and erode where you could see updates of people you had sent a request to even if they had not yet responded. Later, Facebook instituted sharing options where ‘friends of friends’ and such could see your posts if you so chose. … The subscribe button changes that.”
Gerrit Eicker
Active Twitter Users
Twitter: 100 million active users around the globe turn to Twitter to share their thoughts; http://eicker.at/ActiveTwitterUsers
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Gerrit Eicker
Twitter: “Five years ago, Twitter came to life when @jack sent the first Tweet to his seven followers. Now, 100 million active users around the globe turn to Twitter to share their thoughts and find out what’s happening in the world right now. – More than half of them log in to Twitter each day to follow their interests. For many, getting the most out of Twitter isn’t only about tweeting: 40 percent of our active users simply sign in to listen to what’s happening in their world. – Twitter’s global reach gives a voice to people around the world and as far away as the International Space Station. After launching Hindi, Filipino, Malay and Simplified and Traditional Chinese in the coming weeks, Twitter will support 17 different languages.”
RWW: “If this news sounds vaguely familiar, it’s because the five-year-old microblogging service reached 100 million user accounts awhile ago. These new numbers refer to active users, which CEO Dick Costolo defines as people that sign into Twitter and use the site at least once a month. … In April, Twitter publicly confirmed that it had surpassed 200 million user accounts, a number that has presumably grown since then. This means that at least 50% of Twitter accounts are sitting dormant, according to the company’s own numbers. … The service is being used to publish an average of 230 million tweets per day, which works out to more than a billion tweets every week.”
TNW: “55% of Twitter’s active users are active on mobile, which is an increase of 40% quarter over quarter. Twitter is also getting 400 million unique visitors a month total, this points to a huge number of users that visit Twitter just for information without participating. … Twitter has experienced massive growth this year, bolstered by popular public events like the Womens World cup as well as unrest like the London Riots and disasters like the earthquakes and Tsunami in Japan.”
VB: “Microblogging social network Twitter is in the process of closing a new $400 million funding round, reports CNN Money. – The new funding is the second of two $400 million rounds that puts the startup’s valuation at an estimated $8 billion.”
Gerrit Eicker
RSS is Not Mail
1. RSS is not mail. 2. RSS is not mail… Use Fever to effectively filter your filters; http://eicker.at/RSSIsNotMail
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Gerrit Eicker
ARS, Cheng: “On the surface, RSS seems great for those of us who want to keep up on everything happening on the Internet—and I mean everything. … Twice in as many weeks during the month of August, I was forced to go without my precious RSS feeds. … Dare I say it, but the quality of my life and work improved when I went without RSS. And I think it might for you, too. … Making a conscious (or unconscious, as the case may be) decision to scan through 20-something RSS items a few times per hour means that you’re constantly interrupting what you were doing in order to perform another task. Even if it’s a brief task, the very act of breaking your concentration means it will impact the focus and flow of whatever got shoved to the background, and it takes longer to resume that task later when you’re done with the RSS scan. … Forrester Research told Ars that, according to its most recent RSS usage numbers, only six percent of North American, Internet-using consumers used an RSS feed once per week or more. … I highly recommend taking a break for a few days to find interesting content the “old fashioned” way. You might find that RSS is slowly nickel and diming your time away, one feed at a time.”
Arment: “RSS is a great tool that’s very easy to misuse. And if you’re subscribing to any feeds that post more than about 10 items per day, you’re probably misusing it. … RSS is best for following a large number of infrequently updated sites: sites that you’d never remember to check every day because they only post occasionally, and that your social-network friends won’t reliably find or link to. – I currently subscribe to 100 feeds. This morning, I woke up to 6 unread items: one each from 6 of my feeds. Granted, it’s a Sunday on a holiday weekend, so this is a pretty low-activity day. On high-activity days, I usually wake up to about 25 items.”
Winer: “I read yet-another article about how RSS readers do it wrong, and reward people for using Twitter as their feed reader. This pains me, because it’s not RSS’s fault, it’s the fault of people who designed RSS readers to work like mail programs. RSS is not mail, and when you try to make it mail, you make something that doesn’t work. … If you miss five days of reading the news because you were on vacation (good for you!) the newspaper you read the first day back isn’t five times as thick as the normal day’s paper. And it doesn’t have your name on the cover saying ‘Joe you haven’t read 1,942,279 articles since this paper started.’ It doesn’t put you on the hook for not reading everything anyone has ever written. The paper doesn’t care, so why does your RSS reader?”
Gerrit Eicker
Yammer Goes Salesforce
WSJ: Yammer and Salesforce start collaborating regarding activity streams; http://eicker.at/YammerSalesforce
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Gerrit Eicker
WSJ: “Today Yammer will announce that it will work with another application, and it’s a big one: Salesforce.com. The folks at Yammer used Force.com, Salesforce’s development platform, and Yammer’s own API, to grab activity stream data from within Salesforce. Sales leads, deals, marketing campaigns and all sorts of other activity that gets entered into Salesforce.com become objects that can appear directly within a Yammer stream, which is essentially as easy to keep track of and interact with as a Facebook stream. … In fact, a Facebook stream is exactly what Yammer CEO David Sacks compares it to. ‘A few months ago we released an activity stream API that lets any application push activity stories into Yammer, the same way that Zynga can push items like the latest Mafia Wars score into your Facebook stream,’ he says. … The comparison to Facebook is no accident: Yammer’s technology is based on Facebook’s Open Graph protocol.“
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Gerrit Eicker
RWW: “Yammer combined its APIs and Force.com to grab the activity stream information from within Salesforce, so that these objects can now be a part of the Yammer activity stream. … Now, those astute readers may realize that Salesforce has its own activity stream microblogging thing called Chatter, doesn’t this duplicate the function? Yes it does. But the bigger issue here is that Yammer is integrating things like crazy, before other software tools put their own activity streams inside their apps, just as Salesforce has done. Yammer is adding 200,000 customers a month, according to some press sources, and now stands at three million total customers, with half a million paid ones.”
VB: “Yammer is taking a shotgun approach to gathering data through partnerships instead of building up internal tools. Box.net, another enterprise 2.0 company, fleshes out its cloud storage product by integrating applications from the likes of Salesforce.com and Google to make its software more useful for enterprise companies. Yammer still intends to integrate with other enterprise companies that also have open APIs. …Yammer, which has 3 million verified corporate users. Around 80 percent of the largest companies in the world on the Fortune 500 list have deployed the enterprise social network. It’s one of a number of stars in the enterprise 2.0 space – along with companies like collaboration service Huddle and cloud storage provider Box.net – that are taking lessons learned from Web 2.0 applications like Twitter and Facebook to the enterprise.”
Gerrit Eicker
Skype Acquires GroupMe
Skype acquires group messaging service GroupMe, to help users stay in touch and make decisions; http://eicker.at/SkypeGroupMe
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Gerrit Eicker
Skype: “I’m delighted to announce we’re acquiring GroupMe, a provider of mobile group messaging services that helps users stay in touch and make decisions. – This acquisition is another step towards our vision to provide a global multi-modal and multi-platform communications experience. It complements our existing leadership in voice and video communications by providing best in class mobile text-based communications and innovative features around group messaging that enable users to connect, share locations and photos and make plans with their closest ties.”
GroupMe: “Today, we have entered into an agreement to be acquired by Skype. Over the last few months, we had been in talks with Skype that started with discussions about potential commercial partnerships. As we got to know the core Skype team better, though, and as our conversations evolved, it quickly became evident that our visions were perfectly aligned. Both companies are focused on changing the way the world communicates, and helping people stay in touch with the people they really know. With a shared vision – an ambitious one – we decided our efforts to own real-time communications and the real life network could be best executed as one company.”
VB: “Both Facebook and Google recently released their own offerings targeted at group messaging with Facebook Messenger and Google+’s Huddle. Skype’s decision to buy GroupMe shows it wants to make sure it also has its group communication bases covered. It should pair well with the services it already offers, including video calling, global calling, instant messaging, and text messaging services. – Skype is still in the process of being acquired by Microsoft. The big M said in May that it would buy Skype for $8.5 billion and as soon as the deal is completed, we will likely see Skype integrated into Xbox 360, Kinect, Windows Phone and Office 365. GroupMe’s application and technology would also help Microsoft flesh out its mobile offerings as it continues to expand Windows Phone 7′s presence and capabilities.”
pC: “Far from being a messaging service aimed only at enterprises (like Yammer, for example), GroupMe has been making some strides into the consumer market by linking up with brands and events to increase its profile and relevance there as well: earlier this year it announced that the music event Lollapalooza and the TV show Dexter would both be using GroupMe’s APIs in their apps for their respective audiences to add more social features and to connect with each other via those platforms.”
GigaOM: “Skype so far has been reliant on its instant messaging and voice (and video) call offerings to engage its hundreds of millions of users. However, the mobile phone changes that behavior – shifting the focus to more instantaneous services such a GroupMe in addition to a combination of other communication mediums – SMS, mobile phone, Beluga, Twitter and Facebook Messages in addition to email. – Skype, which has been one of the earliest beneficiaries of the iPhone boom, has seen lightweight group messaging clients like GroupMe gaining in popularity and it is right to be worried. … The fact remains that the sands of time were against GroupMe. The oncoming competition from Facebook Messenger, Google’s Huddle and most importantly Apple’s iMessage were going to fundamentally increase the pressure on GroupMe, which in turn decided that it was better to find comfort in the arms of a much larger company. … From a long-term perspective, Skype as an entity is going to have an identity crisis. It cannot figure out whether it wants to be a friend to the consumers or whether it wants to be a corporation- focused collaboration company.“
Gerrit Eicker 08:28 on 18. October 2011 Permalink |
VB: UberMedia CEO Bill Gross isn’t dodging the fact that his latest app, Chime.in, is a patchwork of other successful apps. – ‘It’s an amalgam of blogging and Reddit and Facebook – there’s aspects of each in there,‘ he told VentureBeat in a phone interview last week. – ‘We’re definitely borrowing those good ideas. But this is a deeper dive into their interests and intelligent conversations around [users'] passions.‘ – The Chime.in site will launch tomorrow, but the app is available now in the iTunes App Store. – As Gross mentioned, it has a lot in common with other social media tools. It gives users and brand-oriented publishers a public, online forum for sharing text and picture updates, just like Twitter. You can also share videos and polls, just like on Facebook.”
TC: “A tipster informs us that UberMedia, the company behind social networking apps like Echofon and UberSocial / Twidroyd, has unintentionally pushed its new iPhone application onto the App Store… This is plausible, because the Chime.in website isn’t accessible yet at the time of writing, although the support pages appear to be live already. – So is Chime.in the oft-rumored challenger to Twitter, which UberMedia has had run-ins with in the past? UberMedia has always denied that it had plans to launch a competing social network, so it’s a question worth asking. And the answer is no, not really. – Chime.in is described on the support pages as an online and mobile network organized around interests, or an ‘interest network’ to keep it brief. Still according to the support pages, Chime.in was ‘was created for people who are active in social media and looking for a way to engage in conversations and more deeply interact with content related to their interests’. … ‘All other social networks are all about connecting with people. Chime.in is about connecting with interests and people – it’s an interest network. It lets you tailor the content you see and search for to the topics you care about, so you aren’t bogged down sorting through posts you aren’t interested in.’”
GigaOM: “Bill Gross wants to take on Twitter, Facebook and Google+ – [H]e is launching a content-focused social network called Chime.in that will compete not just with Google’s new social platform Google+ but with Twitter and Facebook too, and link-sharing sites like Reddit and Digg as well. Does the world need another social platform for sharing content? Gross says that it does, and that his connections with content companies will help Chime.in succeed – but the odds are stacked against him. … Chime.in may not be a direct competitor to Twitter, but it is clearly a shot across the bow. According to the support pages for the service [which have since been taken offline], it will allow users to post to Twitter or Facebook or Google+ as well as to the Chime.in network, and is therefore not competitive but ‘additive to the ecosystem.’ … [T]he biggest hurdle for Chime.in is the simple fact that Facebook now has 800 million users and Twitter has 200 million or so, with Google+ in the 50 million range. Useful features aren’t always enough for a social network to flourish, especially when there is so much competition. In the end, even if you build it they might not come.”
ATD: “Serial entrepreneur Bill Gross’s latest effort is called Chime.in, a social platform for writing about and discussing common interests. What makes it different from other social network and social news sites is that Chime.in wants to pay people for their contributions. … Gross argued that the Chime.in community will police itself against gamers and crappy content – the kind of stuff that’s plagued sites like Digg and content farms like Demand Media – because users won’t recommend Chimes they don’t like. – ‘The breakthrough that’s happened is if you let people have the flexibility to share, they’ll get the message to the right people and do the dirty work for you,’ Gross said.