Social network MySpace has signed a promotional deal to bring free Wi-Fi to its users...but only in the U.K., and only to access MySpace-owned pages.
It's partnered with The Cloud, a European wireless provider that powers broadband access in establishments like hotels, fast-food joints, and airports. MySpace users will now be able to access the social network, which is owned by News Corp., on The Cloud's paid-subscription hotspots. The access company runs about 7,000 of them in the U.K.
Cool idea. It would've been an interesting extension of credential portability if social-network logins could be used to access Wi-Fi hot spots that would otherwise require subscriptions. But with access limited to MySpace (and what happens if something hosted on an external server is embedded in a MySpace profile?), this deal's usefulness is really limited, along the lines of having Starbucks' free wireless access limited to the iTunes Store.
But it's sort of a nifty promotion for the U.K., where Bebo and now Facebook dominate the social-network scene. The test runs until October, and will be cross-promoted on both The Cloud and MySpace.
This morning, it seems like everyone on my Twitter contacts list is talking about TweetClouds. It's an application that uses the microblogging service's API to create a "cloud" of the most frequently used words used in a given Twitter member's feed of "tweets."
It only works with Twitter accounts that are publicly accessible--some members keep their updates friends-only--and it takes a while for the app to munch through all the "tweets" and form a cloud. And like many small Twitter applications that get unexpected viral buzz, the server sometimes crashes. But when it's working, the end result can be kind of cool.
My TweetCloud.
(Credit: TweetClouds.com)Judging by my Tweet Cloud, it looks like I most frequently Twitter about hopping around the grid of Manhattan. My most-Twittered word is "going," followed by words like "getting," "home," "time," and um, "party." After that, it looks like I Twitter about my job: words like "office," "work," "writing," "coffee," and "facebook" (the company I spend the most time writing about) are on there, too, as is "boston," a city I like to make fun of a lot.
Also in the cloud are some of my favorite things, like "running," "reading," and "pizza," and a display of my propensity for words like "dude," "awesome," "omg," and "pumped."
Another new application of note is TweetStats, a more quantitative Twitter application that crunches numbers on how often you Twitter, to whom you send the most "reply" tweets, and when you're Twittering the most (3 a.m. anyone?). CenterNetworks' Allen Stern suggests it as a way to spy on other Twitter users. He's probably got the right idea there.
Now if there were a way to mash up TweetClouds and TweetStats, well, that would be creepy.
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