Filed under: Social Software, iPhone

Do you like the idea of Foursquare, but aren’t in love with the Foursquare iPhone app? Maybe Kickball is more your speed.

This new iPhone app is a Foursquare client with awesome mapping of nearby venues and friends’ locations, and it makes Foursquare both more interesting and easier to use. It’s available for free (”for a limited time”) in the App Store.

Kickball uses Twitter’s GeoAPI to handle the location data, but it brings more than just maps to the table. You also get an “I’m here, too!” button for one-click checkins at your friends’ locations, along with photos and detailed data about any spot on the map (including hours, specials, and the all-important happy hour). It’s still the same old Foursquare game underneath, though: you still get to play for badges and mayorships, and do everything else you can do with the basic Foursquare client.

Kickball is definitely worth a look, especially while it’s still free. Word is that it’s going to expand to other location-based games, like Gowalla and Brightkite, soon.

[via Webmonkey]

Kickball iPhone app is a Foursquare client with maps, photos and more originally appeared on Download Squad on Wed, 31 Mar 2010 10:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

If you’re annoyed with constant suggestions that you “become a fan” of lame and asinine things on Facebook, here’s some good news: Facebook is phasing out the term “fan,” and pushing the more general “like” into its place. I’m guessing that this has something to do with the “universal like button” we posted about last week, which will allow you to use Facebook to “like” things on other websites.

In a “confidential” email to advertisers, posted online by ClickZ, Facebook laid out the upcoming changes in language. Fan pages will still be called fan pages, but instead of asking people to “become a fan on Facebook,” advertisers are now supposed to say “Find us on Facebook” or “Like us on Facebook.” The semantic change doesn’t have much of an effect on how you’ll actually use Facebook, but you’ll likely find yourself adding more fan pages. It turns out that Facebook users click “like” about 3 times more often than they click “become a fan.”

Facebook wants big fan pages, because it increases the amount of useful metadata they can collect and monetize. They’ll profit more by knowing about everything you kind of like, instead of just the things you care about enough to call yourself a “fan” of. Also, because someone always leaves this in the comments: no, there is still no dislike button.

Facebook ditches “Become a Fan” and changes it to “Like” originally appeared on Download Squad on Tue, 30 Mar 2010 12:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Web services, Social Software

If you care who uses your Facebook data, you should get ready to change your privacy settings, yet again. Facebook Connect, which delivers your personal data to other sites that you choose, is about to start delivering it to sites that Facebook has pre-approved, too. That basically makes Facebook Connect an opt-out instead of an opt-in feature, and compromising your privacy will be the default setting.

Which sites are on the pre-approved list to get your data? We don’t know yet, because Facebook hasn’t actually released a list. All we can tell from the available information is that you might show up at a third-party website and be surprised that it already has access to information like your name, birthday, or friends list.

Here’s the exact language Facebook has used to explain the new policy (the bold bits are my highlights):

Pre-Approved Third-Party Websites and Applications. In order to provide you with useful social experiences off of Facebook, we occasionally need to provide General Information about you to pre-approved third party websites and applications that use Platform at the time you visit them (if you are still logged in to Facebook). Similarly, when one of your friends visits a pre-approved website or application, it will receive General Information about you so you and your friend can be connected on that website as well (if you also have an account with that website). In these cases we require these websites and applications to go through an approval process, and to enter into separate agreements designed to protect your privacy.

“Protect your privacy?” Facebook, please! Protecting our privacy would mean letting us opt-in whenever you decide you want to change the way you use our personal info. As part of the site’s open governance policy, the new privacy changes are available to review and comment on right now. Read them, form your own opinion, and let Facebook know what you think!

[via ReadWriteWeb]

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Facebook pre-approves other websites to access your personal info originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 09:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Security, Social Software

I have no doubt that most of our regular readers would know better than to install a site-specific antivirus app…But unfortunately for the Internet, there are plenty of people who will believe that something called Facebook Antivirus could really offer them protection from malware on the popular social networking site.

Nothing could be further from the truth, of course. Facebook Antivirus is just another piece of useless malware feeding off unsuspecting users. Facebook is a tantalizing target for the scareware pushers with an audience of several hundred million users, many of whom don’t know the difference between real and fake antivirus programs.

Like many other rogue antivirus apps, Facebook Antivirus uses images “borrowed” from legitimate software. The interface above, for example, is ripped from Panda Cloud Antivirus and the app also uses a Norton icon in certain places. The familiar yellow circle and stethoscope is all the convincing it would take for many users to install the malicious app.

Once a profile is infected, the rogue goes to work tagging your photos with 20 of your friends and then publishes the photo to your wall. Friends receive update notifications, stumble across the Antivirus, unknowingly click through, and spread the infection.

Facebook will no doubt shut down the app soon, but it’s important to remember to be careful what you click. Less experienced users who need a little extra help identifying threats should check out some of the free tools we’ve mentioned before like WebOfTrust and the list of real free antivirus programs for Windows.

The good folks at F-Secure have posted a number of screenshots of FB Antivirus and you’ll find information at Facebook Insider that will help you clean up your photos and wall if you’ve been victimized by the rogue program.

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Fake Facebook antivirus spreads through tagged photos, wall post spam originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 11:13:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Web services, Social Software

[Update: I got the details of the Apply to List function wrong, and have updated the post accordingly. For more details, please see Claudia's comment below.]

The Twitter Lists feature offers users the ability to group Twitter accounts together in any way that they choose. However, another use of Twitter Lists is to follow a list of Twitter accounts that someone else puts together. In fact, this is a fantastic way to quickly gain access to a lot of tweets on a given subject.

But how do you know what list to follow? Will you drown under the volume of tweets being posted? Who’s in charge of who is or isn’t on the list? TLists is a service that is attempting to make working with Twitter Lists a little bit easier. For readers, you can search TLists for a given topic and see lists related to that topic. Each list shows how many members the list has, how many people are following it, approximately how many tweets are generated per day by the list, and even the most commonly used words and hash tags.

Beyond just finding lists to follow, TLists offers a strange an “Apply to List” function as well. Clicking the Apply to List button on any list’s entry will send an email create an @ mention to the owner of that list, letting them know that you would like to be considered for inclusion in their list. The email doesn’t tell the list’s owner who is applying, but presumably redirects them to TLists for more information.

This doesn’t feel right to me.

Continue reading TLists indexes Twitter Lists and provides curation tools

TLists indexes Twitter Lists and provides curation tools originally appeared on Download Squad on Mon, 29 Mar 2010 14:06:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Social Software, Web

Have you ever wished there was somewhere safe, away from prying eyes, that you could ask a question about the opposite sex? I mean, what’s the internet good for if not anonymous communications? Okay, don’t answer that.

Leftos is a site dedicated to encouraging discussions on gender-related topics, with categories like being single, dating, sex, relationships, marriage, and divorce. Leftos stands for “Lessons for the Opposite Sex”, though I hope the lesson isn’t that your interactions with the opposite sex will follow the pattern of their categories in sequence.

While allowing anonymity can cause problems for some online communities, Leftos puts a heavy focus on the anonymous aspect of their site, since the point is to help people to talk about subjects that they might otherwise feel are too taboo to discuss.

Leftos uses a points system to allow its users to judge the relative merit of a given response. While there are some simple ways to accumulate points (following other users, or having other users follow you), the way to really rack up points is to offer an opinion, or ask or answer questions in a way that makes other users tag it as a “great opinion,”, “great question”, or “great answer”.

Heavily focused discussion sites seem to be really taking off, and Leftos is a good example of one that is non-technical and meets a very specific need.

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Leftos lets you anonymously discuss gender issues originally appeared on Download Squad on Sun, 28 Mar 2010 13:00:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Social Software, iPhone, Mobile

When I first reviewed Trillian for iPhone, it showed promise, but it wasn’t quite ready for the bigtime yet. I had a couple of minor issues with the 1.0 release, including a lack of landscape mode and making it too much of a pain to close a chat. Well, Trillian has fixed both of those issues, and much, MUCH more in the new version 1.1.

Trillian now supports Facebook Chat, allows you to stay signed in for up to 7 days, and includes a bunch of other tiny improvements that I can’t help but appreciate. Ignoring AOLSystemMsg when you’re signed into AIM twice? Thank you! New sorting options for contacts (by status or by name, with groups or without)? Aw, yeah! I’m now considering making Trillian my main IM app, displacing BeejiveIM. The two are basically neck-and-neck in usability, but Trillian wins on price if you don’t have either app yet: it’s $4.99, compared to $9.99 for BeeJive.

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Awesome new version of Trillian might be the best iPhone chat app originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 27 Mar 2010 15:03:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Utilities, Video, Social Software

Wow, that didn’t take long! Chatroulette, the trendy new random webcam chat service started by a Russian teenager, is so popular that a company is now selling “start your own Chatroulette clone” scripts. If you’ve got $100, CamChat will hook you up with your own private Chatroulette, with extra charges to remove branding and get professional installation.

I guess I can see why people want to jump onto the Chatroulette bandwagon, but it’s kind of hilarious to watch people shelling out money to copy something that caught on because of how universal and populist it is. Everyone’s on even footing on Chatroulette, whether you’re in America or Russia, whether you’re a cute girl or a guy in a cardboard robot costume. Mini-Chatroulettes seem like they’d just turn into diluted, filtered versions of the real thing. BORING.

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Want to start your own Chatroulette clone? Got a hundred bucks? originally appeared on Download Squad on Sat, 27 Mar 2010 16:05:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Social Software, Browsers

Facebook lays the smack down on FB Purity Userscript developer originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 26 Mar 2010 10:01:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Filed under: Social Software, web 2.0

This is a brilliant plan for Facebook, from a business standpoint. With integration across other sites, Facebook could very well become the default social presence on the web, totally obliterating its competition. Thousands of other sites will be sending data back to Facebook, which can then monetize the information in any way it sees fit. Data about your activities on the web is valuable stuff, and Facebook knows it. Let’s hope the privacy settings keep up with the new features.

Facebook plans to take over the entire web with a universal “like” button originally appeared on Download Squad on Fri, 26 Mar 2010 13:40:00 EST. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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