Filed under: Web services, Social Software, iPhone, web 2.0, Microblogging

Earlier this month, Jay mentioned Favit - a great iPhone application that lets you find comedy gems from Twitter, based on the Favstar service. Hot on the heels of Favit comes Tweeteorites - an iPhone application based on the web app of the same name. Whilst Favit is more about finding humour on Twitter, Tweeteorites takes a slightly different approach - focusing on showing you “favourite streams” of what your Twitter friends are favouriting.

The application also allows you to post to Twitter, easily view your Ego Boost: a list of your tweets that have been favourited - showing you the users who’ve favourited them - and even features push notifications when your tweets are favourited.

Tweeteorites is 99¢ on the App Store (and you’ll want to visit the service’s website and sign in with your Twitier account so that your favourite streams can be generated for use in the iPhone app).

Tweeteorites brings more Twitter Favourite fun to your iPhone originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:24:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

… and I thought one online social suicide machine was enough, but I guess not: there’s another site called Seppukoo and it’s just been C&D’d by Facebook’s crack team of lawyers.

Facebook seems to be taking these ‘virtual suicide’ services rather seriously, and in a classic case of legalese-owns-you, Seppukoo is being smacked down for everything other than assisting suicide.

Soliciting users’ Facebook login details, collecting content and information in an automated manner, using Facebook’s intellectual property — you’d think that Seppukoo is guilty of some heinous war crimes rather than merely helping people shuffle off the social mortal coil.

This whole situation — instigated by Facebook’s new privacy settings — is obviously no laughing matter. Seppukoo and the Web Suicide Machine are inflicting direct damage to their primary revenue stream. The problem for Facebook, and thus for its users like you and me, is that they can’t really stop us from unfriending people.

But this cease and desist illustrates the measures they are willing to take, the might and muscles it is all too keen flex, to keep their cash cup full to overflowing. It petrifies me to think of how big Facebook is getting, and how easily we could one day wake up to a police state.

Facebook demands social suicides cease and desist originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 30 Dec 2009 11:26:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Business, Social Software, iPhone

The Facebook iPhone app is a nice little slice of mobile UI design, with those big buttons that mimic the home screen of the iPhone itself. LinkedIn must think highly of it, too, because the business-oriented social network just launched a new iPhone app that takes the same design approach.

From the home screen to the activity stream, LinkedIn 3.0 for iPhone looks blatantly, extremely Facebooky. Not that that’s a bad thing …

The new layout is attractive and it also makes navigation easy. You can quickly search contacts, read and comment on status updates, or reconnect with a former colleague.

You can even change the app’s theme to a different color, although a nice Facebook-esque blue suits it just fine. The app even includes a Bump-like “In Person” feature that lets you exchange LinkedIn info with a new acquaintance over Bluetooth.

[via Mashable]

LinkedIn’s new iPhone app looks an awful lot like Facebook originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 29 Dec 2009 09:09:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

An enterprising chap over on LiveJournal (yes, his profile is suitably emo) has written a guide on how to import Facebook RSS feeds into your feed reader!

Most of the feeds you might’ve seen before — there’s a little RSS feed button on the posts, notes, and notifications pages — but this guide includes a neat way to extract your friends’ status updates as well.

Head to your Notes page (http://www.facebook.com/notes.php), hit the ‘Subscribe to these Notes’ on the right, then change the URL to read ‘friends_status.php’ rather than ‘friends_notes.php’. Leave the rest of the URL untouched. Voila!

This is the kind of thing you’ve always wanted to do, but a) you’re not sure if you can be bothered, or b) is it really worth it? If you’re like me, you probably curse the number of unread items in your RSS reader. Lifehacker suggests it’s a good way of avoiding FarmVille and MafiaWars spam, but isn’t that what the ‘hide’ option is for on your News page?

Read Facebook updates in Google Reader (or any other RSS tool) originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 14:22:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Only in England, I tell you!

An escaped prisoner — jailed for seven years for aggravated burglary — escaped the confines of his jail back in September. He’s been updating his Facebook page on a regular basis since then.

He has almost 4,000 followers at the time of writing, so you can imagine why the British police are a little annoyed right now. It’s hardly good publicity to have an escaped convict openly parading his freedom on a large social network in front of his friends, family and fans.

A quick look at his updates reveal gems such as: “Quick question….HOW MANY COPS ARE IN HERE TONIGHT!?” or “Thinking maybe we should get some fan t shirts made. What you think mates?”

Obviously the British feds (or ‘bobbies’) are trying to track him down with cooperation from Facebook, but as yet he has managed to escaped recapture. He must be a little more intelligent than the fellow who stole an Xbox and later logged on to Xbox Live using the original owner’s account: he was located and arrested by the police soon after.

Some thieves are obviously more intelligent than others…

[via CNET]

British man jailed for 7 years escapes prison, updates Facebook status while on the run originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 28 Dec 2009 15:11:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Business, Social Software, Microblogging

Twitter’s foray into geolocation just got a lot more serious with the company’s acquisition of Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI.

GeoAPI allows developers to add geolocation features to their apps, and now it’s going to help Twitter advance its location-based capabilities. This is good news for developers of third-party Twitter apps, too, because the new API will enable them to use location data in new ways.

Twitter is pretty vague about what improvements GeoAPI will bring to the table, but it’s clear that they’re pushing for users to geotag their tweets. I suspect that part of GeoAPI’s role will be to make geotagging as easy as possible for Twitter’s userbase to adopt. As Twitter’s Ev Williams says in his blog post on the subject, “twittering “Earthquake!” alone is not as informative as “Earthquake!” coupled with your current location.

Twitter developers get new geolocation tools to play with, users get new features, and Twitter gets even more data that it can potentially analyze and sell. Meanwhile, the Mixer Labs team gets hired on at Twitter.

Sounds like a win-win-win-win situation to me.

Twitter acquires Mixer Labs, creators of GeoAPI originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 09:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Audio, Internet, Social Software

TunesBag has just opened its doors for a public beta. The idea is simple, but the execution is delightfully loophole-icious. Upload your music to the cloud — as in, music that you legally own — and then play it from anywhere in the world, as long as you’re connected to the ‘Net. You can also play everyone else’s music. . . cool!

It seems music-in-the-cloud is all the rage at the moment. I don’t know why, considering almost everyone has at least a gigabyte of storage on their cellular phone nowadays. But it’s not the cloud-surfing thing that has people excited about tunesBag, though. It’s the social-networky-hacky-YouTube layer on top that’s got everyone dribbling.

Once you upload your music, you can send links to friends. If they are allowed to stream that song (i.e. tunesBag has the licensing), they can listen to it — the original file. If they don’t have permission, tunesBag scrapes the soundtrack from YouTube, but doesn’t show you the video or the ads. Sneaky sneaky!

You can’t really see the service, as it is now, surviving very long — especially now that the public beta is here. But you might as well make the most of it while you can.

[via TechCrunch]

Upload your MP3 collection to the cloud, listen to everyone else’s with TunesBag originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 08:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software

I just stumbled across an article on FastCompany and it sheds light on something I’ve never put much thought into: unfriending. Sure, it entered the English language this year, but we don’t really do it all that often, do we? We might talk about doing it, but rarely do we go through with it. It would be a bit like committing social suicide.

Ah, suicide. A contentious topic. But let’s face it: shit happens. Sometimes it all just gets a bit too much. You’re being poked on all fronts by parents, coworkers and your local parish priest — there’s no way out. Drunken, debauched photos of you are being ruthlessly tagged. You can’t stop hitting F5 in case the boy you like updates his status — I must be first to ‘like’ his status!!! It all mixes and congeals into something truly monstrous — and addictive.

Let’s face it, social networking, in its current, vacuous, self-adulatory and time-wasting form is a bit sad. Wouldn’t it be nice to just… get away? For ever? PERMANENTLY?

Well I bring good news, there’s an app for that: The Web 2.0 Suicide Machine.

Continue reading Want to commit Facebook suicide? No, really, there’s an app for that!

Want to commit Facebook suicide? No, really, there’s an app for that! originally appeared on Download Squad on Thu, 24 Dec 2009 13:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Just released on the Facebook blog, the status trends of 2009 make for some very interesting reading. In many ways they mirror the results of Google’s search trends, but I have to admit that Facebook has the edge here because it’s personal.

Rather than simply being ‘interesting’ — great, Michael Jackson was the #1 Google trend in 2009 — Facebook status updates are juicy. It’s worth noting that these are just results from the U.S., which is probably why ‘health care’ and ‘religion’ rank so highly. But I imagine the number two trend of 2009, ‘FML‘ and ’swine flu’ at number three have a more universal appeal.

The by-month graphs are the best bit: you can see that ‘FML’ was rife during the exam period in May but much less common in the hazy, drunken summer months. Coming in at number 13 is the word ‘yard’ — the guys at Facebook are at a loss as to why ‘yard’ might have gained so much traction in the past year. The only sensible explanation is that more oldies/parent-types have joined Facebook this year — or perhaps they’re simply talking about their FarmVille yard.

FarmVille, incidentally, comes in as the number 1 trend of the year.

This might be the new Google zeitgeist: Facebook status trends of 2009 originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 22 Dec 2009 09:02:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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No, not that kind of pay-per-view — well, OK, a little of the kind of thing you’ve come to expect from Justin.tv broadcasters. No, this is actually news: Justin.tv is going to offer the option of pay-per-view for its massive army of broadcasters.

It might sound like fairly trivial news, but it’s actually huge: Justin.tv has some 800,000 users, with 40,000 of those being active broadcasters. At any one time, 1,800 of those are transmitting. That’s a lot of potential, monetizable [shoot me] content. With Justin.tv’s cut at 30%, and a minimum fee of $1 per show, you can see why this might be a very lucrative deal indeed — both for the site and its users.

Beet.tv is reporting that this is the first live-streaming site to launch a pay-per-view service and I am sure more many will follow.
This is the next stage of reality TV.

This is the evolution of Jackass. It begs the question though: what if this encourages the youngsters to be even more frivolous with their already-weak scruples? ‘Accidentally’ watching a cute teenager flash me takes on a whole new level of menace when I’m paying for it.

Justin.tv to launch pay-per-view service originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 21 Dec 2009 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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