Luckily, I don’t play poker. It’s one in the long list of addictions I’ve been lucky not to get infected with over the years. But if I did, I’d be all over Zynga’s new game for the iPhone: Live Poker.
Zynga creates games for Facebook, MySpace and other social networks. They usually don’t waste time reinventing the wheel; they go with good old ever-popular games like Texas Hold’Em, BlackJack, Scramble and Sudoku. They also have a number of action/fantasy titles such as Special Forces, Mafia Wars, Vampires and so forth. All of these translate into 4.5 billion page views, which makes Zynga the largest social gaming network around.
Their latest offering, Live Poker, allows iPhone users to play poker with their friends from social networks such as Facebook, MySpace, Bebo and Hi5. It’s the first iPhone game that leverages Facebook’s Connect platform; for the end user, it means that not only can you waste your entire workday playing poker, you can also do so on your iPhone on the way home. Goodbye, free will; hello addiction.
You can get the application in the iTunes App store; the basic version is free, while an advanced version, with a larger chip package and access to tournaments, will cost you $9.99.
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iLike and TuneCore may be a bit late to the monetizing music party, following sites like Grooveshark, but they have now arrived in full force. Today TuneCore and iLike announce that indie artists will be able to earn money from people listening to and sharing their music via iLike.
iLike is poised for great leaps in success right now. They are rumored to be the favorite music application for FaceBook to endorse as its preferred app for a FaceBook music integration. Not only that, just this past summer iLike made several improvements by offering free streaming of full tracks and integrating an ad platform into their service, showing a keen eye for monetization and long term growth.
Why partner with TuneCore? iLike is more of a social discovery service for music, and TuneCore is a music distribution service. Together they have the ability to help artists make money off of the songs that they write and sing when people listen to them.
More and more services are going to this new digital revenue model in the music industry. Instead of waiting to be picked up by a label, going to the studio, going to press, advertising and going on tour, this new model allows artists to make money in real time, simultaneously with a tour, merchandise sales, CD pressing and more. No more waiting for big business to catch up. It also offers a bit of real time feedback - if you aren’t going to be popular, your level of digital revenue will reflect that immediately instead of waiting to release a CD that might fail.
What does the this proliferation of turnkey music monetization services mean for musicians? It allows them to basically be their own label. Artists submit their music via TuneCore and then it is played via iLike, and everywhere iLike is found. This includes FaceBook, embedded playlists on blogs, and more. TuneCore also gives artists access to iLike’s entire network, including hi5, Bebo, Orkut and more. TuneCore also serves music to sites like Rhapsody, Yahoo, MTV and Amazon. Artists then keep 100% of the money they make via the service.
Ali Partovi, CEO of iLike, said “As the music industry continues to reinvent itself, we believe it’s critical to offer independent musicians equal opportunity alongside major-label artists.” And he’s right - this online network created for artists by combining the reach of iLike and TuneCore enables a band or artist’s music to be heard in as many places as it would be it released by a major label. That’s a huge advantage for an artist to make money doing something they love, and isn’t that every musician’s dream? To get paid to do what they love?
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Company
20-Word Description
People use SocialCalendar to get their social life together - birthdays, anniversaries, holidays, get-togethers, other social occasions and associated gift-giving.
CEO’s Pitch
SocialCalendar makes it easy to manage and remember important social occasions like birthdays, holidays, and other get-togethers through event reminders, and allows users to share these dates with friends and family. In association with Amazon, SocialCalendar also takes the guessing out of gift-giving, helping users give (and receive) the perfect gift for any occasion. Users can browse for millions of gift ideas and items can be one-click added to wish lists without ever leaving the SocialCalendar page. Friends and family who receive event reminders can select the gift they want to purchase directly from the included wish lists without having to navigate to a new site – or go to the mall.
Almost 3 million Facebook users have added the application, and tens of thousands more sign up every day.
Mashable’s Take
SocialCalendar is a Facebook and Bebo application that pretty much does what you think: manages your social activities, birthdays, parties and appointments. However, there are some nice unexpected features that pop up. For example, the app doesn’t just list scheduled dates of events, but actually allows you and the other people involved to collaborate on the best time and date that works for everyone’s schedule. This reduces the need for excessive emails and phone calls back and forth, as well as the risk of miscommunication, ensuring higher attendance for the activity.
There’s also a wish list feature (from Amazon) that lets you know what presents others want, which helps a lot when it comes to gift giving ideas. This eliminates guessing games and reduces the odds of giving bad gifts. It helps your chances of getting what you want too. There’s an option that lets you see which gifts your friends and family will get for you, but you can turn it off if you like surprises.
SocialCalendar does a lot more than I expected from a social networking application. The only complaint I have is that in order to make full use of its services you have to connect to Facebook or Bebo. While that isn’t a big deal for most apps and games, that isn’t the case when it comes to time management tasks. In these hectic times with crazy schedules we need to be able to access this information anytime, anywhere.
Being tethered to any social networking site isn’t convenient. However, maybe that will change thanks to mobile devices such as the iPhone that allow us to access services we couldn’t access previously. Ultimately, I would have liked SocialCalendar much more if it were a full-blown service outside of any particular social network.
Editor’s Note: This post is part of an ongoing series at Mashable - The Startup Review, Sponsored by Sun Microsystems Startup Essentials. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here.
Sponsored by Sun Startup Essentials
Were you bullied in school or out of school by classmates or students from warring institutions? Would you tell a parent or guardian about it?
Some of you would answer Question #1 in the affirmative, and would give a “probably not” or a “definitely not” to the followup. In part because the only thing worse than dishing those details to your folks is to have your folks talk to their folks about their unruly kid. So let us begin by saying that a study published in The Journal of School Health is telling you much of what you already know. Which is that you just don’t mention that stuff.
Most don’t mention it, anyway. This has long been the case on the playground, in the cafeteria, in the gym locker room, on the athletic field, and the lavatory. As well as for the last few years in which teens have come to call the Internet their digital home, where friendly faces meet taunts and teases and out-and-out venom and aggression that inevitably gets tagged as the classic war amongst peers. The problem is that the graffiti is particularly hard to erase on the Web.
The study was organized by Jaana Juvonen and Elisheva F Gross, a fellow and a professor at UCLA, respectively, and the core finding is that bullying is prevalent among teens (at least 41% of the 1,454 surveyed). Go figure. Also, Juvonen and Gross found that teens think slander is only being directed at them.
The first point I can accept, with some duh for garnish. But I imagine the second is misinterpreted. Or has simply been taken too much at face value. For one, students today, as I imagine students of years past, have largely been groomed to be self-absorbed. Not anti-social or anything of that sort, but focused inward. Instead of cultivating interpersonal relationships with others, its been about “fitting in” to a particular bloc. Which gives peers in general the perception that there are social rules and barriers where there really are none. Hence the tribal, not communal and productive nature of the classroom and all things beyond that generations have tried to achieve. So to be effective in stopping bullying, online or off, has hardly anything to do with placing restrictions or limits or parental controls on matters. It has much to do with uprooting long-held behavioral norms and conventions. How does that happen?
Well, making such changes is harder to do the advent of free online tools, and tools that essentially do away with physical barriers. Users cannot only just connect with people within their own communities, but with the world at large. Which on the one hand is a phenomenal convenience, but alternately is something that can carry a measure of permanence and inescapability. There’s no easy way to whitewash MySpace, in other words.
Which brings us to an item that the researchers responsible for the survey about cyberbullying reveal, something that warrant heaps upon heaps of attention. And that is that parents and educators alike need to get in tune with children’s lives, online and off. That is what can initiate a stop, or a least a major decrease, in “nastiness,” for lack of a better word. (Feel free to contribute better phrasing in the comments.)
No, no, none of that “my Mom and/or Dad want to be my friend on MySpace and Facebook” stuff. That’s borderline nonsense. Rather, elders need to be familiar with such services to the point that a conversation, a real-world, kitchen-table conversation, can be established about them.
Some adults may have no desire to do so, but children naturally recognize this disinterest, and it only makes it less likely that if problems do occur, children will have the inclination to bring them to parents’ view. Given enough time, fixing a situation can be a major undertaking. With plenty of pills in the middle. If parents swallow some of their pride and their fear of their offspring, a psychological jump can be made there. If the jump proves successful, on the other side of the divide is trust. And trust dictates behavior.
There then is the start of a “trickle down” effect that happens not only in family life, but that can eventually permeate the educational and social ecosystem. Of course, it’s a far more complex picture with Internet activity involved, but it may well be possible that, with the availability of online networks, a shift to the positive will be accelerated rather than taken asunder. That’s an optimist’s view for you. Any takers? Any dissenters?
(Image credits: top: Current.com; middle: Sperryclass.com)
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Should There Be a Law Against Asshats Like Me? [smcb]
Friendster might not be the first name in social networking in the US, but in Asia it’s the dominant player in many countries, with a userbase totaling more than 60 million across the continent. Today, the company is announcing that Facebook applications can now be easily ported into Friendster – who already has its own developer platform and also supports OpenSocial.
This could be attractive to Facebook developers for a number of reasons, especially considering the negative impact that the site’s recent re-design is having on usage for some applications. For the most part, Friendster’s audience has little overlap with that of Facebook – only 22% according to the companies – meaning there are about 45 million potential new users for developers to target. Further, for the moment the Friendster developer community is far less competitive than that of Facebook – its directory features only about 600 applications as opposed to the tens of thousands that have already been built for Facebook.
Thus, the challenge for developers who port their applications over to Friendster is not necessarily the competition – though Slide, RockYou, and other big widget makers own many of the most popular apps – but making them attractive to a largely different audience.
To that end, developers would be well served to utilize Facebook’s tools for translating applications into foreign languages as part of their effort to gain Friendster users. Friendster does not currently offer its own translation tools, though Jeff Roberto, the company’s Director of Marketing says that “If the application currently works in multiple languages and has been translated we will support it.”
As for monetization, Friendster gives most of the control to developers. In a statement, the company writes: “Ads are allowed anywhere in an application, including the user profile page, providing the potential for a dramatic increase in page views and corresponding ad revenues.”
Meanwhile, this launch would seem to indicate that Facebook will continue to push its own platform and steer clear of joining Google’s OpenSocial for the foreseeable future. To enable developers to port their Facebook applications, Friendster made use of the open source version of the Facebook platform known as fbOpen.
In addition to Friendster, Bebo also leverages fbOpen to allow developers to import Facebook applications (while simultaneously supporting OpenSocial as well). In turn, Facebook can claim to offer a developer community with access to hundreds of millions of users – on par with that of OpenSocial, whose members include dozens of sites such as MySpace, hi5, and LinkedIn.
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If the feelings of the most outspoken Bebo users are any indication, Bebo IM, the relative equivalent to Facebook Chat, has few fans. Very few.
What was introduced nearly one month prior to today to a notably negative reception by network members, Bebo IM was, according to employee Mike Watts, temporarily removed for maintenance 9 days ago. The same message was delivered 5 days ago. And hardly a peep has been made about the disruption. A look at recent talk on the Bebo Backstage shows why. The consensus might best be summed up in words of commenter Ross: “don’t bring it back, it sucks.”
Though the reasoning for the verbal opposition to Bebo IM may not encompass all users, it seems to be the case that users would tolerate the option of an instant messaging system, if it could be put in place or removed as the individual user sees fit. But of course if respondents were to keep the service off, Bebo, owned by AOL, would see quite a number of members disregard the development. Bebo then gains little love for IM no matter the direction it takes with the component. (A Bebo App by the name of Live Chat, alternatively, lists 24,770 users.)
With that in mind, is an IM service on board a social network purposeful on the whole? Or is it a needless distraction? Is it all about implementation? How does Facebook Chat stack up? Is the way MySpace IM functions more appealing?
How much do you miss Bebo IM?
( surveys)
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Remember Bebo’s open media platform initiative? In short, it means that Bebo users can include premium music and video content in their profiles. At launch, Bebo had a long list of media partners, including BBC, Yahoo, Last.fm, MTV Networks, and ESPN.
Now, the partnership with ESPN is actually visible to users, who can access ESPN’s short videos, including highlights from sport events and short clips from ESPN original programming, through Bebo’s open media platform. The simplest way to find it is to go to this address: www.bebo.com/ESPNVideoSC; unfortunately it all works only if you’re located in the US.
Specifically, this content includes “SportsCenter Right Now, a twice-daily capsule of top sports stories, highlights and breaking news; clips from ESPN programs such as Mike and Mike in the Morning, Pardon the Interruption and Around the Horn; and breaking news and game clips from major professional and college teams and sporting events.”
It’s all nice and dandy, but I always have the feeling that users are being given scraps instead of the real thing: full shows, entire sporting events. This deal certainly won’t hurt Bebo’s Open Media Platform, but from the user’s perspective, it’s really not all that big of a deal.
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I first saw it over in a post by Andy Beal at Marketing Pilgrim, but in the post he lays the tracks to a whole epidemic of unauthorized name changes by top social networking service Bebo. It appears, at least from the mountain of bewildered queries on random web forums as well as Twitter that at least hundreds of folks are having their usernames changed, and are being refused any explanation whatsoever.
Andy and others who’ve documented this have said they’ve received emails that encourage folks to go check out the Bebo documentation for more information, but our scan of the help section offers very little helpful information on the matter.
It’s not a particularly harmful change, and in many cases, all that’s being added is an underscore to the name (at least in most of the cases I’ve seen documented). It is odd that it’s going on, and the oddity is further compounded that no readily available information on the matter is available and that Bebo is offering no explanation when asked.
We’ve put in a word with Bebo to get a comment, but we don’t expect any comment until start of business tomorrow.
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If it’s Bebo that you prefer to the larger social networks of the world, but want to enjoy the equivalent of Facebook Chat within your own friendly circle, how’s this. Bebo’s Emma Carlsgaard let it be known that a feature dubbed Bebo IM is now live. You can interact with contacts much the same as you would with a standalone instant messaging service.
The functions involved are simple enough. Chat with one or more persons. Block people you dislike. Report vagrants. All that fun stuff. Some words of warning, though. Site members who’ve responded to the announcement are largely unimpressed. A number of users complain of its being dysfunctional. Others want it shut off. Only a minority of respondents appear to enjoy what’s come of Bebo developers’ labor.
The IM option is relatively inconspicuous. It’s open by default and and sits in a partially collapsible box in the lower right corner of your browser window. Simply click on the miniaturized icon representing an IM contact list and you’re shown a summary of your friends. Click a name and start talking. Close any open windows when you’re done.
If the initial user commentary is anything to go by, you may encounter buggy operation. But you may not, so give it a try, we say. Nothing to download, after all. There’s definitely merit to the popular suggestion of keeping with your preferred IM service for the simple fact that it is what’s known. Oppositely, Bebo had to deliver an answer to Facebook’s own service one way or another. Whatever the case, it seems some extra time in the cooker likely would’ve ensured a more celebratory debut.
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A new series called Model.Live is debuting this week on Bebo (see here). As you may have guessed, the show is about models. Produced by IMG Media and Vogue.TV, this made-for-Web series follows three female models, Austria Alcantara, Cato van Ee and Madeline Kragh along their journeys from their homes to the catwalk.
The show will premier on Vogue.TV tonight, and will be redistributed on Bebo, where each model will also have a profile for updating their blogs, video diaries, text messages, photos, schedules, and more. This format is rather typical of what we’ve seen for webisodes, especially those that are syndicated on networks like Bebo and MySpace, as they leverage the multi-faceted capabilities for sharing and spreading content throughout a community in hopes of engaging viewers on a higher and more integral level. It’s worked for the most part, carrying on the legacy of EQAL from LG15’s success on YouTube into the Bebo-specific KateModern series.
Model.Live’s sponsor, Express, has found some sensible branding opportunities with this very targeted content, providing featured merchandise available for purchase on its retail website. It seems like a prime opportunity for the inclusion of interactive video ads such as those offered by Overlay.tv and others, especially as such Web-only series begin to provide improved traction for brand marketing, and potential content for mainstream media outlets.
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