Corporate tools take note: You can tell Twitter exactly what you're doing, and it'll tell LinkedIn too.
Chalk one up for the cringe-worthy marketing term "personal branding": there is a new partnership between Twitter, hub for informing the world exactly what you're doing and thinking at all moments of the day, and LinkedIn, the business-networking tool on steroids. In an announcement Monday, the two companies explained that LinkedIn status messages can sync with Twitter.
"The business use case of Twitter is turning out to be very important, and more and more people are finding that the persona they create for themselves on the Web is part of their resume in many ways," Twitter co-founder Biz Stone said in a joint video with LinkedIn founder Reid Hoffman that was posted to the LinkedIn blog.
So, in short, LinkedIn's "status" feature now syncs with Twitter with an optional check box--a feature that the two companies say should be rolling out over the next few days. Likewise, can set your Twitter status as your LinkedIn status by using the hash tag #li or #in, so that you can rest assured that your tweet about "watching Gossip Girl and eating cold pizza" won't immediately show up to potential clients or employers trawling your LinkedIn profile. (Full disclosure: This was my Twitter status tonight. If you believe that it renders me professionally unsound, please feel free to let me know.)
All snark aside, this is probably a very good bet for LinkedIn, which continues to grow fast and make money but which hasn't yet really jumped into the latest social-networking trend of real-time, streaming information. Inking a partnership with Twitter is much easier than launching some other kind of initiative to get members to update their statuses more often. Tweets sent to LinkedIn, presumably, could also be grouped in with LinkedIn status messages to form some kind of business-intelligence live stream. The sort of information that people want to share specifically with colleagues and professional associates could be of interest to high-end advertisers or the market research community.
Twitter, meanwhile, is going to want to stay in the limelight of the business community as it considers a long-term business model--one of the microblogging service's potential moneymakers has been launching a "dashboard" of analytics for people and companies who use it primarily for professional purposes rather than, you know, filling the world in on which beer was just discovered in the back of the fridge.
Also for Twitter, this is yet another potential source of tweets as it attempts to become the world's foremost repository of real-time information. Earlier this year, MySpace announced an official way to sync Twitter and MySpace status, and in a matter of weeks its link-shortening service had become the second most popular on Twitter (trailing Twitter's preferred Bit.ly).
Facebook, meanwhile, appears to have been more reluctant: a Twitter app on its platform has pulled tweets into status messages for some time, and an unofficial app lets members tag selective tweets with the hashtag "#fb" to cross-post them to Facebook, but the only time that Facebook has put out a big, official announcement about syncing with Twitter was when it added an easy-sync feature for "fan pages," profiles for brands and marketers.
Not surprising. Twitter is a hot name in marketing these days, and in order for Facebook to establish fan pages as an ideal spot for brands to build a presence, an easy Twitter sync is a selling point. But in the long run, it's an advantage for Facebook, which once tried to buy Twitter and was snubbed, to keep its treasure trove of what-the-world-is-thinking somewhat to itself. After all, it can get away with it: with well over 300 million active users, Facebook is significantly bigger than Twitter, and could be diluting its own product by openly sourcing status messages out to Twitter. LinkedIn, better known for its networking features than any kind of status updating, isn't running that kind of risk.
Until then: "At SFO airport at bookstore. Deciding between @gladwell and @tferriss. Need real, serious insights. Thoughts? #li."
(Credit:
OfficeMax/Elf Yourself)
It's that time of year again, when you trawl the Web for unflattering mugshots of your boss to embed on the bodies of dancing elves with the "Elf Yourself" holiday card promotion, going live for the fourth consecutive year on Tuesday. They're the brainchild of OfficeMax, which teams up annually with online animation shop JibJab to bring forth what might be the most successful social-media marketing campaign that the Web has yet seen.
Last year, a total of 35 million "Elf Yourself" cards were sent, and OfficeMax says that since it launched in 2006, the seasonal site has chalked up 284 million visits. So what's new this year? Well, there are two new elf dances! Yay! You can now, in addition to "Disco Elves," "Country Elves," and "Elf Classic," choose to model your creation off the "Hip-Hop Elves" or "Singing Elves" dances.
More importantly, OfficeMax is playing up how the latest edition of "Elf Yourself" ties into Facebook and Twitter, with an option to tweet out your video creation or to share it on your Facebook profile or a friend's. Additionally, it uses Facebook Connect so that you can source your embarrassing headshots from your photo albums or your friends'--that's clever.
It's not actually clear whether "Elf Yourself" drives up OfficeMax sales at all, but it does make some money on its own: you can pay to download the video, which normally expires once the holiday season has ended, or to order a hard copy.
Now go forth and tick off your human resources department.
(Credit:
Xobni)
A few months ago, e-mail search app Xobni told us they were creating a version for BlackBerry. At the BlackBerry Developer Conference in San Francisco on Monday, we got a look at it.
Xobni on the Windows PC is an Outlook add-on that quickly finds e-mail messages and attachments. On BlackBerry, Xobni will integrate with your e-mail account, where it will extract addresses, phone numbers, and social networking details to automatically create a secondary address book for your phone. You'll be able to use Xobni for BlackBerry to quickly find contacts--including those you have not physically added to the native address book yourself. That expanded address book goes for everyone who has ever sent you an e-mail, been cc'd in an e-mail, or even mentioned in a message.
With the premium Xobni Plus Outlook add-on, you can access this secondary address book by typing into the Compose field. Integration isn't quite so tight in BlackBerry. On the Bold, Tour, and new Curve 8900s, you'll access contacts by flicking up on the track pad to get to to the stylized Xobni address book.
Then search by a contact's name, domain name, or by a keyword to speedily find the person you're looking for. As with Xobni on the desktop, you'll be able to send your calendar availability to a contact, get Facebook to supply contacts' Xobni profile picture, and view Twitter feeds and LinkedIn and Hoovers information from the BlackBerry.
In creating its own address book--instead of adding contacts to the native address book--Xobni makes a statement. Unlike Gwabbit, which adds the information from a signature block into a new record, Xobni finds e-mails and phone numbers anywhere in the message. Besides that, Xobni CEO Jeff Bonforte believes that inserting contacts into your native address book means "you've already lost the battle." Instead of adding contacts one-by-one, Xobni builds you a social roster behind-the-scenes, and adds social networking plug-ins in the process.
As far as time lines go, Xobni is looking at a closed alpha release sometime in December. Bonforte expects a beta early next year, and the final release a few months after that. The pricing model is still undecided.
Xobni for BlackBerry will first be available on the Bold, Tour, and Curve 8900. Storm users will have to wait a little longer.
Google and groups representing authors and publishers have asked for more time to revise their controversial settlement over the rights to scan digital books.
Judge Denny Chin approved the request to extend the deadline to Friday, which was submitted ahead of a Monday night deadline for the parties to submit a revised settlement after the U.S. Department of Justice objected to the settlement as previously worded. After it was sued in 2005 by The Author's Guild and other groups representing the publishing industry over its decision to scan certain types of books without explicit permission, Google reached a settlement a year ago that would grant it unique rights to scan books that have gone out of print but are still protected by copyright laws.
However, that settlement has been met with objections from authors and privacy advocates almost since it was filed, and Google has faced a long and difficult road in getting it approved. Monday's delay comes after a Friday meeting with the Justice Department, according to a copy of the request filed with the U.S. Federal Court for the Southern District of New York.
Google refused to comment on the subject of that meeting, but it's not too hard to imagine that the Justice Department was not ready to give the new draft its blessing. It had previously objected to provisions of the deal that it felt "serious in isolation, and, taken together, raise cause for concern." However, in recent weeks Google has sought to downplay the proposed changes as "targeted and surgical."
The patient apparently needs more time.
When the long-expected development of smartphones and handheld devices into primary computers reaches maturity, Google wants to make sure it occupies just as strong a position on the small screen as it does on the big one.
Google set the stage for that future Monday when it announced a $750 million all-stock deal to acquire AdMob, which is considered one of the strongest ad network providers for the mobile-computing world. It's a familiar strategy; just as Google bought DoubleClick in 2007 to blend search ad expertise with display ad expertise, so it plans to add AdMob's network of partners to its own mobile search ad efforts.
For all the work Google does in other areas--Google Apps, Android, Google Voice--advertising has always been, and will likely remain, its most important source of cash. It dominates the most lucrative segment of online advertising (search) and wants to expand its efforts in display advertising as well with a revamped DoubleClick Ad Exchange and increased efforts to court the major advertisers of the world.
But unlike the PC-based Internet, the mobile Internet-advertising business is still very small and very fragmented, with dozens of companies claiming to play a leading role. AdMob founder and CEO Omar Hamoui said he had no idea how much market share his company had in the business of providing mobile ads to Web site publishers, although AdMob is considered by outsiders to be one of the strongest companies in this area due to its work with ad units for iPhone applications.
Google's AdMob deal is about blending the respective advertising strengths of the two companies in a fast-growing market.
(Credit: Google)Few doubt the staying power of mobile computing, however. Even with mobile advertising accounting for just a fraction of overall online advertising in 2009 ($416 million out of a total online spend of $24 billion according to eMarketer figures quoted by Google), AdMob has been cash-flow positive for about a year as advertisers show increasing interest in trying out mobile ads on smartphones like the iPhone and Android-based devices.
Google said it thought getting AdMob's 140-person team inside its company was "a pretty unique opportunity," said Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering at Google, in an interview following the announcement of the deal. Gundotra and Hamoui both cited the cultural fits between the two companies as helping to streamline a deal; San Mateo, Calif.-based AdMob counts three Google veterans among the 10 executives listed on its management page.
It's not clear yet how Google will integrate AdMob into its existing structure. Google already operates DoubleClick Mobile, an ad delivery service that allows publishers to sell mobile ads directly to advertisers through a variety of ad networks, including AdMob's. What it doesn't have is its own display ad network with the reach and heft of AdMob's 15,000 and growing name-brand advertisers, which allows mobile publishers to essentially outsource their ad sales.
AdMob's success with iPhone ad sales has gotten it to this point.
(Credit: AdMob)It's also not clear whether AdMob will now become "the" ad network for DoubleClick Mobile customers, but that might exclude a lot of business: Google lists its own AdSense, the MBrand and Decktrade networks from Millennial Media, and AdMob as just some of the ad networks if offers for DoubleClick Mobile customers.
In addition, Hamoui said AdMob would continue to sell ads across many different types of phones, rather than focusing on Google's Android. The whole reason AdMob has grown to the level it has was because it was able to separate its technology from specific phones like the iPhone or Android, which gives advertisers a much broader reach than if the ad network focused on any one phone, he said.
Google is now positioned to offer a one-stop shopping experience for companies interested in online advertising, combining search and display ad possibilities on both regular Web sites and mobile sites and applications. As has been the case for so many Google products and initiatives this year, that will likely raise an eyebrow among federal regulators.
As such, Google said while it doesn't expect to encounter significant regulatory issues with the AdMob purchase, "closer scrutiny has been one consequence of our success. On that basis, we wouldn't be surprised if there were some regulatory review before the deal closes." Google said it hoped to wrap up the deal "in the next several months."
Google took great pains Monday to point out how small a deal this was in the grand scheme of the advertising market. It created a Web site devoted to the deal where it quoted competitors in support of its point that mobile-ad budgets are tiny at the moment compared to the overall amount of money spent on online ads.
But Google's willingness to cough up $750 million in stock--making this its third-largest acquisition once it's finalized--shows just how important it thinks this market will become over the next decade.
When asked how quickly Google might see a return on this deal, Gundotra emphasized the future possibilities over short-term financial concerns.
"Getting that group of talented people into our company is an unbelievable return," he said. "It's likely lead to products and innovations we haven't even thought of yet."
Every book project is a series of deadlines. Google's faces an important one Monday.
Google and representatives for author and publisher groups are due to submit a revised Google Book Search settlement in New York federal court Monday. It's been a long year since they first reached a settlement they deemed "historic," which would have granted Google unique rights to continue scanning out-of-print yet copyright-protected books as it builds out a digital library containing more than 10 million books, which also includes public domain works as well as books scanned through partnerships with publishers.
However, opposition to the settlement grew in the months following its release, and the intervention of the Department of Justice in September forced the parties to rework the settlement. Google has sought to downplay the changes that are in the works, but the filing will showcase just how much Google and author groups have had to bend in order to satisfy the government.
It's not clear how widespread the changes will be. The Justice Department objected to several items it found "serious in isolation, and, taken together, raise cause for concern." The principal objection seemed to concern the Books Rights Registry, a nonprofit organization set up by Google and the author groups to distribute royalty payments from Google Book Search to authors. The group's directors will be picked by the parties, and while Google insists that anyone else who wants to scan out-of-print books can negotiate with the Registry, some objectors are concerned that they won't be able to get the same deal that Google has received.
The main problem, however, is that the settlement effectively sets copyright law precedent by affirming Google's position that it was, and is, allowed to scan books that are out of print but protected by copyright under fair-use rights. This does not sit well with many, and ahead of the revised settlement's release, Google's loudest opponents made their case that Google and author groups should defer to Congress on this issue.
"Congress must retain the exclusive authority granted by the U.S. Constitution to set copyright policy," declared the Open Book Alliance, a group that includes the Internet Archive, Microsoft, Amazon, and Yahoo.
The revised settlement is expected to be filed with the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York late on Monday. It's believed that Judge Denny Chin will order some sort of waiting period for interested parties to review the settlement before holding a final hearing, perhaps in early 2010.
Updated at 9:53 a.m. PST with additional details. See subsequent story for more analysis on the buy.
Google's back on the acquisition front, spending $750 million in stock Monday to acquire mobile display ad company AdMob.
AdMob founder Omar Hamoui
(Credit: AdMob)AdMob is perhaps best known for serving display ads on iPhones, but it also recently started a business unit focused on ads for Android phones. The start-up would appear to fit well into Google's advertising business model, giving Google a leg up in the still-small but fast-growing world of mobile advertising.
"I'm excited because I believe this will be an important moment for everyone involved in producing, consuming, or monetizing engaging products on mobile," wrote AdMob founder and CEO Omar Hamoui in a blog post Monday. "The truth is that the mobile industry has had no shortage of creative energy, amazing products, and talented entrepreneurs. But until now, it has always felt like those of us involved in this space played second fiddle to our online brethren. I believe that time is over."
AdMob was founded in 2006. The company runs its Mobile Advertising Network across thousands of Web sites, serving up ads from big names such as Ford and Coca-Cola. It also collects and publishes data on mobile trends gleaned from the traffic it manages.
"Despite the tremendous growth in mobile usage and the substantial investment by many businesses in the space, the mobile Web is still in its early stages," wrote Google's Susan Wojcicki, vice president of product management, and Vic Gundotra, vice president of engineering, in Google's own blog post. "We believe that great mobile advertising products can encourage even more growth in the mobile ecosystem. That's what has us excited about this deal."
Representatives from Google and AdMob are expected to talk about the deal in greater detail later on Monday. This is a friendly takeover, as both companies have already approved the deal, they said in a press release.
It should come as no surprise that Google is back in a buying mood, after several weeks of talk from CEO Eric Schmidt and other company executives about Google's renewed prospects now that the company believes the worst of the advertising recession is past. At $750 million, the acquisition would rank as one of Google's largest deals, trailing DoubleClick at $3.1 billion and YouTube at $1.6 billion but edging out Postini's $625 million selling price.
Google's stock was up 1.81 percent to $561 on news of the deal.
Five years ago, Mozilla made it clear that the browser wars weren't over after all.
In the 1990s, Netscape had lost its dominance in the browser market to Microsoft's Internet Explorer, and the Netscape-spawned open-source project called Mozilla had sunk into obscurity. Even a federal antitrust suit accusing Microsoft of anticompetitive practices with its browser and Windows was not enough to turn the tide.
But on November 9, 2004, Firefox 1.0 emerged to fight back again.
The project, originally named Phoenix to symbolize rebirth from Netscape's ashes, has now clawed its way back to account for nearly a quarter of the browser usage today. Microsoft may not be on the run, but it's on the defensive, gradually building its browser development effort back up into fighting form.
... Read more"Come on, Flixster. We know you can do better than that."
Those are the words I wrote on Friday to sum up a review of Flixster's movie app for BlackBerry phones. The trouble is, I goofed. I was apparently a day early, reviewing the previous Flixster for BlackBerry, which did deserve the critiques I dished out, and not the Flixster update that was set to release on Saturday (we still don't see it in the BlackBerry App World as of Sunday, but keep checking the store and this post for an update). A re-review--or rather, a preview of the forthcoming Movies app, version 1.1.6--is only fair.
The updated Movies app by Flixster for
(Credit: Flixster)Flixster's free Movies 1.1.6 for BlackBerry is a pronounced improvement over version 1.0, which served more as a shortcut to Flixster's mobile-optimized Web site than it did a native application. The movie app's navigation looks similar to the previous version, but is now stylized and fixed in place, with only the content refreshing as you move from tab to tab, not the entire screen as before.
As with many mobile apps that sync content from a master Web site, the application's speed is still contingent on the quality of your data connection. If you have a slow connection, the showtimes and theater lists will load slowly. This is especially true when it comes to launching previews. It appears that movie previews call on the browser to initiate a download, and then play on the BlackBerry's built-in media player--at least in the case of my test phone, the BlackBerry Bold 9700. An error message that the wireless connection broke appeared after each trailer finished playing. Pressing the phone's "back" arrow key twice restored Flixster's app.
While the guts of the Flixster app are identical to the previous version, and mostly still linked to the main Web site itself, the updated visual wrapper transforms the user experience from basic Web browsing to a cohesive launchpad where you can read reviews, scour showtimes, and buy tickets by way of Movietickets.com. Flixster's Movies app is one I'd now readily, not reluctantly, use on BlackBerry when that urge to stare at the silver screen sets in.
Updated 11/8/09 at 9:15 pm PT: This post evaluated Flixster's Movies 1.0 app for BlackBerry phones. It turns out, we got a little bit ahead of ourselves on this review--but here's the hands-on review for the update to the app described below, Flixster's Movies 1.1.6 for BlackBerry.
Flixster 1.0 sure didn't look this good on our BlackBerry Bold--but the next version will.
(Credit: Flixster)We were excited to hear that Flixster's popular iPhone movie app was making the jump to BlackBerry. Unfortunately, not all apps dive as elegantly into other mobile platforms. Flixster's Movies app is one of them.
The free Movies by Flixster app for BlackBerry has all the essentials: a tab for box office hits, an area to enter your Zip code to find movies near you, a list of upcoming titles, and movies that have come out on DVD. You can even purchase movies via movietickets.com. Yet this movie "app" is not so much a native application as it is a shortcut to a BlackBerry-optimized version of Flixster's mobile Web site.
While a nicely formatted mobile site routinely delivers a better experience than navigating the site through a browser, winding up with a not-app after downloading an application feels like a cheap trick. To top it off, Flixster Mobile looks like a mobile site on BlackBerry and reloads every screen as you navigate. In contrast, the iPhone version, pulls show times and theater information into a stylized interface that in no way resembles the Flixster.com site, apart from the information it downloads.
Users aren't fooled by the bait-and-switch, either. Flixster's movie app on BlackBerry rates 2.5 stars out of 129 votes at the time of writing. The program's average iPhone rating scores higher, with a 3.5-star average for the current version out of about 16,000 user reviews.
Come on, Flixster. We know you can do better than that.
