Foursquare making waves?
Aug 7th
It seems like hardly anyone has heard of Foursquare, but I have a feeling this is going to totally change by the end of the year as the service starts to gain traction. Foursquare reminds me of where Twitter was in 2008, a few people had heard of it but it hadn’t really made any impact as people kind of struggled to see the point in its existence.
Foursquare is on the cusp of making it big, there is no question. Signs are appearing in businesses all over Brighton promoting offers for members, from the smallest independent coffee shops to giants like Domino’s – who are seeing it really beginning to effect the bottom line.
The company has taken on large amounts of investment from some very smart people, founders of Facebook and Twitter amongst them. For a while it seemed like there was a battle emerging, a social media equivalent of Betamax vs VHS. Foursquare in one corner, Gowalla in the other. Gowalla doesn’t have so many active users as their main rival, they do however have one thing – beautiful design. Everything about Gowalla is stunning, from their iPad & iPhone apps through to the site, its all fantastic. Foursquare on the other hand is a lot more functional, it just kind of gets the job done.
You get the feeling the battle was won at SXSW this year, since then Foursquare seem to be taking the lead, with Gowalla being pushed more and more to the fringes. However, there is a huge, enormous brilliant white elephant in the room. There is one company who threatens to snuff out the two young upstarts. It’s no secret that Facebook is imminently going to release a ‘check in’ feature based around the idea of ‘Places’, this could either represent a threat or an opportunity to Foursquare, depending largely on how open Facebook is willing to be with its data.
The web is crying out for a open source database of places, and Facebook could be potentially be the best place to make this happen, pulling together from other services like Gowalla, Foursquare and HotPotato. The real question is how open are Facebook willing to be with the data, while they claim to be the home of the open social web, a lot of the data they collect is not publicly accessible.
It will be interesting to see if Foursquare can grow rapidly enough to fend off Facebook on its home patch, or whether there is life in a partnership between the two, sharing their data and giving users a better experience.
The rise of the nano network.
Jul 28th
I’m a huge advocate of niche social networks, they’re not only great fun to run, but deliver a great experience to users. It’s easy to get lost and not have your voice heard on sites like Facebook, with people now having hundreds of friends, the latest news feed changes pretty much every second.
Niche social networks are quite different to the established social network monoliths. Places like Facebook are all about getting to know the people you’ve already met, there’s no real way to connect with and engage with new people. This is where smaller social networks can come in to their own, with a newsfeed that shows the activity of all users, not just your friends, public galleries, forums and groups there are a huge number of way to connect with and engage with people who are passionate about the same things as you are.
The software that allows you to do this has come on leaps and bounds over the last year, my personal favourite being Buddypress, funded by WordPress owner Automattic. Other hosted services such as Ning have been growing in popularity, showing niche small size communities based around a specific interest can be profitable. There is a huge opportunity for businesses to ride on this trend, creating custom communities for their users. And now with Twitter’s xAuth and Facebook Connect, users don’t have to go through the hassle of creating a new account, they can simply chose to login to the site with their existing credentials.
There are also huge opportunities for crossover between niche and established social networks, with the open sharing of inform across platforms – allowing users activity on one service to be published on another. It’s an exciting time for the social network, and there are lots of opportunities to become part of the next wave of great services.
Sony Piiq – Beautiful Design
May 4th
It’s not often I am so impressed with a beautifully well thought out and realised range of products than the new Sony Piiq headphone family. It’s rare to see such innovative, engaging and progressive design, especially from a global giant like Sony.
They come in several styles and sizes, and what’s more – they come at a fantastic price point, starting at only $14.99.
Head on over to the official Sony Piiq site, which itself is beautifully designed and presented.
Ben Folds’ Chatroulette Piano Genius
Mar 22nd
This is quite possibly one of the best ideas ever. Sit at a piano and play along making up songs about the people you come across in the weird and wonderful world of chatroulette! It’s heartwarming, and hilarious.
AOL to Shut Down Bebo.
Mar 11th
AOL is set to make its first big move since their expensive divorce from TimeWarner, in shutting down the Bebo social networking unit. In a strange tax situation, AOL will be in a position to write off $380 in tax if they shut the operation down completely, in comparison with what they would likely get for it in a sale, $100m is an optimistic figure, this really is a clear cut decision.
AOL snapped up Bebo for the bargain price of $850M in 2008, however, after a continued lack of investment and focus user levels have been sliding and are now a shadow of their former selves. If AOL does decide to go ahead and shut the unit down, rules state they can not salvage any assets at all, technology or staff, so this will be a big decision.
I guess it depends on AOL’s vision for their future, I disagree with their board in that it lies in search. I see them more as a content provider, along the lines of their successful Weblogs Inc unit, only time will tell!
Microsoft Pivot
Mar 8th
Seeing Microsoft outline their new Pivot technology has got me more excited than I have about anything from them in a long time, well since courier at least.
Pivot offers a really intuitive way to view huge amounts of data in context. Whether it’s the big picture, or drilling down to the detail, showing data in this new format makes great sense, and really does make the resulting experince greater than the sum of it’s parts.
For me watching this, the first thing that came to mind is that this has the potential to blow Google out of the water. Nobody really uses Bing search, it’s ugly, has pretty useless results and is too cluttered. Bringing in Pivot to the offering, could totally change this. It’s beautiful to watch, the presentation is faultless and the functionality is pretty magical.
Head over to TED to hear Gary Flake introduce the product and show how it works, this is going to be very big indeed. http://bit.ly/bAXQr4
Pantone Nail Varnish
Mar 4th
Absolutely love this, Pantone based nail varnish. In beautiful minimalist packaging, seems like an antidote to the over complicated, pseudo-science of most cosmetics.