Category — Social Networking

Over-sharing the minutiae of your life is already difficult, so why complicate things with Twitter, Facebook and Foursquare when you only need one service to rule them all? That’s where Google Buzz comes in and makes annoying your friends with news about your snacking habits that much easier.Google Buzz is rolling out today, and over the next few days it should appear in everyone’s Gmail accounts. With Buzz, you can share status updates, images and videos like you can on social networking sites like Facebook, but it’s more streamlined in Buzz. Videos play within status messages and images pop open into a gallery for quick stalking browsing. It might seem overwhelming and unnecessary when you’re already using so many other social networking services, but Buzz allows you to integrate Picasa, Flickr, Twitter and your Google Reader so you can be as transparent as ever right in one place. And, of course, I’d imagine that the bulk of our sharing takes place while on the go, so there is a mobile version, too. For now, let me step aside and have Google explain the new service along with how the mobile version works.

I love chatting. In fact, I met my special someone through chat. I think that most people engage in it because its the most accessible and easy way to meet people whom they’d like to spend the rest of their lives with. What is more exciting is that, you can now choose chat sites with “topic themes” encourage people sharing a common interest. Recently,I happened to watch New Moon a month ago. I was one of the few people who seemed to get in to catch the premiere screening. I can’t afford to hear people at work talking about it when I still haven’t watched it myself. My friends at work are notorious at that. Right after I watched the movie, I joined an online forum where you can read and share what Twilight enthusiasts have in mind about that the latest movie. Chatting and forums are fun especially if the topic speaks about your interests and passion. For vampire chat city wannabe like me, probably a vampire knight chat would be a good doze.

Earlier today, we wrote about Google forgoing its usual holiday gifts to its ad partners and instead giving $20 million to a group of charities. Now it looks like Facebook is doing something similar. In an email sent out to various friends and members of the press, Facebook’s Communications and Policy team notes that rather than having a holiday party this year, it is giving out $25 virtual tokens that you can use for a donation. Here’s what the message says, “In lieu of a party this season, we are making a $25 donation on your behalf to U.S. classrooms in need. Please go to DonorsChoose.org, enter the code in the token above, and select a project to support.” Again, a nice gesture from a one of the big Silicon Valley players. And certainly better than yet another holiday party (there is seriously one just about every night out here right now).

MySpace CEO Owen Van Natta will make a number of announcements on stage at the Web 2.0 Summit in San Francisco this afternoon. Among them are two major changes to MySpace Music. The service will now have a full historical archive of music videos from the major labels and independents. And they are also launching an artist dashboard to give musicians deep analytics into profile views, music streams, and friend information.

Music Videos:
MySpace Videos attracts 11 million or so worldwide visitors per month (Comscore, August 2009), but has lacked comprehensive music video licensing rights. Tonight the service will launch a deep archive of music videos from all the major labels and independents. You can see the video homepage atmyspace.com/music/videos .
Users will have the ability to view videos and purchase the audio song and ringtones for the song from either Amazon or iTunes. MySpace is including pre-roll, post-roll and overlay ads on the videos.
Videos will also now be included in the music player widget on all artist pages, if they have music videos available. And users can track videos from artists they are watching, as well as videos their friends are viewing.

Artist Dashboard:
Until now, artists with a presence on MySpace could only view aggregate numbers for profile views, friends, total song plays and songs played today. Tonight, though, they’ll launch an artist dashboard with significantly more analytics data. Artists can view their fans by age and location demographics, and see total plays, friends and profile views over time. The dashboard is available in 17 languages. And it also includes similar information for the artist from iLike, which MySpace acquired earlier this year.

Nearly two weeks after submitting the app to Apple, Facebook’s totally revamped 3.0 application is finally live on the App Store, according to the app’s developer Joe Hewitt . You can download it now here . The store currently shows that the app is version 2.5, but if you click the Download button anyway you’ll get the new version. The new self inking stamps application brings a slew of new features, making it what may be the most useful app on the App Store (be sure to read this post) for our full review. Among the additions are Events, which have frustratingly been omitted from previous versions. Now you’ll be able to look up where your Events are, and you can also respond to them and see which of your friends are attending (for anyone who has ever had to boot up the web version of the site just to look up an Event address, this is a big deal). You can also post video directly to the site if you have an iPhone 3GS — a feature that will likely see the number of videos on Facebook increase dramatically. Smaller changes include a News Feed that more closely reflects the feed you’ll find on the main Facebook site, as well as the ability to “Like” items your friends have created. One feature that users will be missing is Push Notifications, which we suspect will be rolled out in version 3.1, which Hewitt is already working on. There will also be support for landscape mode in the upcoming release, and we may also see support for the ability to watch Facebook videos from the phone (right now you can only upload them). It’s worth noting that the 11 day wait since Facebook originally submitted the application was enough to raise Hewitt’s ire (and justifiably so), leading him to condemn the App Store approval process and call for its removal entirely.

Google launced a new feature, which is capable of blocking the users from exporting their Orkut contacts and Google calls this new feature as “bug”. I read a latest information from a blog that, when Google was in the process of adding additional security measures to Orkut Friends Export, it inadvertently broke the entire functionality. Google is trying to improve Okrut Friends Export by adding new security features to it, But, Google failed to test the functionality after adding the above the feature. If they had tested immediately, they would have realized that it was broken, Which was realized by many users immediately. Google seems to be a bit odd now, because it is a company meticulous about its testing of things. Google is adding additional security measures immediately because, Facebook promotes a tool in India, which allows users to easily import their Orkut friends. But, I don’t know whether the importing toll in Facebook is still working. According to me this wasn’t a “bug” and it doesn’t seems that, Google very much cared to create a “bug”, in the aim of stopping the hemorrhaging of its Orkut users over to Facebook in India. Sometimes, even the bugs may be convenient until we get called out on them.