Posts tagged facebook
TiPb Give Away: Motorola H17 Bluetooth Headset for a TiPb Facebook fan!
Feb 26th
We’re moving TiPb’s Facebook presence from the old group and page to a newer, shiner, and — soon to be — better, unified TiPb Fan Page!
The bad news: since we can’t rename the old iphoneblog.com page or transfer the group to go with new, we have to apologize for asking everyone to move over with us, but we’ll do our best to more than make up for the hassle — that’s a promise!
So, please jump on over and become a fan of our new TiPb Facebook Page — we’re waiting for you!
THE GOOD NEWS: the TiPb iPhone Accessory Store has been gracious enough to let us give away a brand new Motorola H17 Bluetooth Headset [$89.95 - TiPb Store link] to one of our Facebook fans to help ease the transition. The give-away starts now and ends Monday, March 1st, 2009 at 12pm PST so get to it!
(And this being Follow Friday, if you’re kind enough to follow @TiPb on Twitter and subscribe to our iTunes and YouTube feeds, we’d appreciate it — and you just might get in on some additional, upcoming give-aways to boot! Shhhhhh!)
TiPb Give Away: Motorola H17 Bluetooth Headset for a TiPb Facebook fan! is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.
TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog
Closed vs. Open, Control vs. Chaos — What’s Best for Apple, the iPhone and iPad?
Feb 13th
Yesterday at Macworld two events helped clarify something I’ve been discussing with Dieter for a while now — Apple, the iPhone and iPad, and closed vs. open systems, control vs. chaos. These two events were a presentation by John Gruber of Daring Fireball concerning the 10 biggest problems faced by Apple, and a brief conversation with Leo Laporte of TWiT about Google Buzz.
As part of his Round Robin BlackBerry review, Dieter departed on a rant about BlackBerry Messenger (BBM) of epic proportions. A closed communications protocol, he argued, was untenable. BlackBerry users create incredible amounts of content in BBM (yes, chat is content) but it’s all completely closed off and owned by RIM. If you leave BlackBerry, you can’t take your BBM content with you. If RIM ever disappears, all your BBM content is lost. Something like Gmail on the other hand, works across platform and if you switch from BlackBerry to iPhone to Android, you enter your Gmail account and everything is there. Since you can access it via standard protocols like POP and IMAP, you can also make local copies and upload them to a different service (i.e. upload your mail to a non-Google IMAP folder).
Laporte made a similar comment about Twitter and Facebook. If either Twitter or Facebook were to fail, all your status updates, all your wall posts, all your friends and those you follow and/or follow you would be gone.
I don’t know if Google Buzz will prove to be an open protocol and system for sharing status, location, and relationships, and certainly it’s implementation shows signs of the typical Google “release now, fix later, polish never” model, but something needs to.
And this brings me rather circuitously back to Apple and the iPhone. As much as a certain segment decries Apple as “closed”, in terms of protocols they’re remarkably open. They use IMAP for mail, and open-sourced CalDAV and CardDAV for calendaring and contacts. They use WebDAV for web directories and WebKit for Safari. iChat supports most IM protocols, including Jabber. They use BSD Linux and the Darwin kernel for the core of Mac and iPhone.
Apple is generally built on top of open technologies, and one of their core strengths is melding that open architecture with tightly controlled (i.e. proprietary) user interface layers (and developer APIs, and App Store review processes).
For some, that last part is an absolute deal breaker. But they have Ubantu and Open Moko. (Yes, even Android is closed — you can’t muck about with Gmail or Google Maps apps). For mainstream users, however, the front end, the user experience, “just works” to the point where it’s become a cliche.
I said it previously in my Round Robin summation, to use Google you must give up privacy, to use Apple you must give up control. (I don’t even want to think about what I’m giving up to use Google on Apple!)
So proprietary interfaces to open technologies — how does that work for us? What happens when we use something not controlled by Apple?
John Gruber suggested AT&T as an example. Indeed, he listed it a one of Apple’s problems. Now, some people get great AT&T service while others have connection problems that have become near-legendary. Either way, it’s hurt media and mainstream perceptions about the iPhone.
Gruber also mentioned Big Media (movie and TV studios, music labels) as a problem. They want to charge more than the market will bear (certainly enough to make free-as-in-torrent an alternative) and make less available via iTunes than via a retro 1980s corner video store.
Is it a coincidence that some of the main aspects of the iPhone and iTunes that Apple has absolutely no control over are some that cause the greatest amount of user frustration?
(The App Store and its review process mostly create developer frustration, and Gruber listed this as a problem as well, though one that’s slightly improving since the holiday shut-down).
So, we come back to and down to Apple liking to control the user-facing aspects of the iPhone (and iPod touch, and soon, iPad) but using and promoting open standards for a lot of the technology underneath. While this approach might clash philosophically with some users (and again, Android, Palm, etc. aren’t open, they’re just more open) and practically for others (power users who want the control themselves), its proved remarkably effective for casual, mainstream users, and for power-users willing to give up some control for a better experience.
Except for that part about AT&T and Hollywood, but then those are controlled with little concern for user experience…
Closed vs. Open, Control vs. Chaos — What’s Best for Apple, the iPhone and iPad? is a story by TiPb. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.
TiPb – The #1 iPhone, iPad, and iPod touch Blog
Facebook Goes Offline
Feb 3rd
People are using ‘Facebook terminology’ more and more in general conversation so it’s not that surprising that a ‘Facebook verb’ was named as The New Oxford American Dictionary’s ‘word of the year’ last year.
Brands are always keen to talk to consumers in ‘their language’ so many of them are starting to harness this trend and make use of ‘Facebook terminology’ in their ads as a result. In fact, Skive were involved in one such campaign last year for Nestlé Skinny Cow.
I’ve noticed that some brands are now taking this a step further by including what appears to be a very clear visual reference to the Facebook ‘like’ or ‘thumbs up’ in their ads. The ad below for First Direct is one such example (pardon the bad photo, but you get the idea) and I saw a supermarket (I think maybe Sainsbury’s) use a similar reference in an ad just before Christmas.
Obviously people have been using the ‘thumbs up’ sign for years as it has very old origins, but it seems that some advertisers now feel it resonates more with audiences given its use as part of the current Facebook experience.
IAB Social Media Council : Social Media Week Event
Feb 2nd
I’m going to be Social Media’s answer to Jeremy Kyle, Kilroy or maybe Trisha. I will be chairing an event at the IAB for the Social Media Council and I will do my best to uphold the humble British tradition of chat-show host.
In July 2008 the IAB launched the Social Media Council – a group comprising all the UK’s major players in this space, established to help advertisers fully understand the formats available, and how to use them.
The IAB holds regular panel discussions to work through in an open forum the pressing issues and how to make most of opportunities and to work out the best way to provide value through social media.
As part of Social Media Week the IAB will be holding a discussion entitled…
The importance of picking your battles online: when, where and why should brands respond to consumers in social media?
“Years ago if consumers were dissatisfied with a product, service or particular brand, they simply told a friend, wrote a letter to Which? magazine or participated in a ‘That’s Life’ phone-in. Now, in a digital era dominated by online reviews, blogs, Facebook groups and Twitter feeds, the consumer voice is louder than ever, and brands are being discussed (behind their backs) at length.
Social media has opened our eyes to the strengths – and weaknesses – of businesses. Thanks to the internet, bad news can spread like wildfire and, unless managed ethically, responsibly and immediately, can tarnish your reputation for good. Or can it?
This session, as part of Social Media Week, will examine the extent to which you should incorporate the digital rants of the public into your communications strategies, and at what point a minor grievance becomes a significant one. Should we actively seek feedback from consumers and how should we be interacting with them online? And should foes be listened to more than friends, fans and followers?
Our panel of experts will provide case studies and practical guidance, encourage debate and answer questions on when we should listen to unhappy customers online, when we should get them involved in our brand campaigns and whether the noise of a few vocal, unhappy customers makes any difference to the bottom line.”
The panel will consist of:
- James Turnbull, senior marketing manager, British Gas
- Ronnie Brown, marketing director, Outside Line
- Robin Grant, managing director, we are social
- Iain MacMillan, CEO, RMM
- James Bromley, Managing Director, Mail Online
- Cheryl Calverley, Senior Global Brand Manager, Axe Skin
I’d like your suggestions on which classic British chat-show host to emulate and I’m also keen to hear your the questions that you’d like to level at the panel.
tom@skive.co.uk
@ale_2point0
Former Facebook for iPhone Developer Joe Hewitt Says iPad “Everything He’s Been Wishing For”
Jan 29th
Joe Hewitt, who developed the awesome Facebook 3.0, but controversially (and some would say detrimentally) left the iPhone platform before Facebook 3.1 over the App Store review process, has come out extremely positively about the iPad:
iPad is exactly the product I’ve been wishing for ever since I wrapped my mind around the iPhone and its constraints. While the rumor mill was churning with all kinds of crazy possibilities for the Apple tablet, I mostly rolled my eyes, because I felt strongly that all Apple needed to do to revolutionize computing was simply to make an iPhone with a large screen. Anyone who feels underwhelmed by that doesn’t understand how much of the iPhone OS’s potential is still untapped.
Hewitt claims the biggest constraint he had in making the ultimate Facebook app was screen size, and the iPad removes that completely. As to the “closed” nature of the iPhone as a platform?
The one thing that makes an iPhone/iPad app “closed” is that it lives in a sandbox, which means it can’t just read and write willy-nilly to the file system, access hardware, or interfere with other apps. In my mind, this is one of the best features of the OS. It makes native apps more like web apps, which are similarly sandboxed, and therefore much more secure. On Macs and PCs, you have to re-install the OS every couple years or so just to undo the damage done by apps, but iPhone OS is completely immune to this.
But what about his concerns over Apple’s role as iPhone — and now iPad — gatekeeper? Web apps is how he sees working around Apple. Anyone can make anything they want for the iPad, provided they’re willing to run it on their own server and not gunk up the end-users machine. That, Hewitt says, is the key to total client-side freedom.
So here’s hoping the platform gets Hewitt back, if not for Facebook 3.2 or 4.0 for the iPad, then for something equally as impressive…
[Thanks to Fassy for the tip!]
This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.
Former Facebook for iPhone Developer Joe Hewitt Says iPad “Everything He’s Been Wishing For”
Facebook 3.1.2 for iPhone Brings More Bug Fixes
Jan 14th
Batten down your contacts and defend your profile pics, because Facebook 3.1.2 for iPhone and iPod touch is here and it purports to fix those bugs that have been ailing ya:
- Fixes some crashes
- Fix a bug causing incorrect matches in address book sync
- Fix a bug causing incorrect matches for contacts with the same name
Here’s hoping that what has been, prior to 3.1, one of the best social networking apps on any platform, is back on track and ready rock.
Download it, try it out, let us know if it works!
This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.
Facebook 3.1.2 for iPhone Brings More Bug Fixes
iPhone App Tells You When You Get Defriended on Facebook [Updated]
Jan 14th
The app — created by Dennis Harrison — uses
When Mashable’s
I experienced some choppy performance when flipping through a long list of friends on an iPhone 3G, but other than that the app seemed to work well. Its entry into the marketplace is well timed. “Unfriend” was the
Alternative: Facebook Friends Checker for Firefox
This isn’t the first tool we’ve seen for catching people unfriending you. A few months back we wrote about
UPDATE: Our readers report that the app is giving them the error “Invalid API key specified: The application you are trying to access does not exist or has been disabled.” We aren’t getting the error but the app won’t work for us, either.
It’s probable that Facebook has disabled the Connect functionality for the app. The
The app is still in the app store though, so there are bound to be a lot of wasted dollars until Apple pulls it.
UPDATE 2: Facebook has confirmed in an e-mail to us that the app was blocked for violating the developer agreement. “While we cannot remove an application running on another website or platform, we will ensure that applications that access Facebook user data adhere to Facebook Platform policies,” they said. It looks like Apple has pulled the app from the App Store, too, though. Sorry, folks. The show’s over. Maybe you’ll just have to count your friends by hand — though if you don’t notice they’re gone without an app, you’re probably fine without them!
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