Kinetik has made social discovery easier with its free iPhone app that helps users weed through the massive collection of available apps. It is designed to streamline the search for relevant iPhone apps based on users’ selected apps and other users’ feedback of apps.
“Just load up Kinetik, choose an app that you have downloaded and then you can leave a comment about the app, then share it to Twitter and Facebook,” reports The Next Web. “As you add friends via your social networks and inside of the app itself, you can see recommendations that your friends have made too. There’s even an online profile for each user, where you can see the apps that they’ve shared, commented on and the like. You’ll also see apps that are trending on Kinetik.”
Kinetik will compete with similar offerings such as AppShopper and AppsFire, but TNW likes its chances: “I’ve tried loads of different ways to find new apps. I can tell you that Kinetik is one of the best ways I’ve found yet. I’ve had the chance to play with it for the past couple of weeks while it was in beta and it’s slick, useful and really quite fun.”
The New York Giants claim to be the first NFL team to introduce live, realtime Twitter updates into broadcast TV coverage.
The team will display fans’ tweets during games via video boards and digital displays at Giants stadium, while fans watching at home will see realtime Twitter updates as part of the game’s graphics.
The Giants are collaborating with Mass Relevance, the firm that will aggregate and deliver the Twitter posts to the in-stadium displays, TV broadcasts and Giants.com website.
I saw this feature this week during NBC’s coverage of the Giants-Jets game. I found it to be an unnecessary distraction that occasionally obstructed my view and I didn’t read a single tweet that added value to my viewing experience. When I first submitted this story, I commented: “Based on my experience during last night’s game, this is my question: Who can I pay to make this go away?”
However, I understand why this may become popular. Perhaps the concept would be better served by delivering only to those fans actively seeking social interaction.
Despite having no host on Sunday, MTV’s 2011 Video Music Awards ramped up audience engagement through social media.
MTV delivered pictures and videos to their audience in realtime through their second screen application and social media channels.
Fans could track what celebrities were tweeting about, and who was tweeting the most. The application also showed which celebrities and content generated the most buzz. (Celebrities who did not tweet during the event could have missed out in a big way.)
The awards program scored its highest-ever ratings, pulling in 12.4 million viewers. “Not only was this year’s show the most-watched in the history of the Video Music Awards’ 27-year history,” reports Rolling Stone, “but it was also the highest-rated telecast in the 30-year history of the network.”
TechCrunch reports that a new startup named Joint is aiming to address the concerns of Twitter users who are “badly in need of a better way to facilitate realtime, private, and longer-form conversations.”
Twitter’s general philosophy so far has been to keep its UI simple and rely on third party developers to add features.
That’s where Joint comes in with its solution that “essentially turns any Twitter hashtag into an IRC-like chat room, which is integrated with a realtime hashtag stream,” indicates TechCrunch.
This enables different social interactions, including a front-and-center realtime group chat feature. “Joint could become a very useful resource for people looking to easily congregate and discuss ongoing situations like hurricanes, protests, or events, live, from any location,” suggests the post.
TechCrunch adds: “Joint and its team isn’t affiliated with Twitter in any way, but I wouldn’t be surprised if the social network comes knocking at their door at some point down the road.”
Twitter has released its Bootstrap platform to better compete in the ever-changing app market and renew its ongoing efforts with developers.
The platform will provide a set of CSS and HTML tools for creating apps.
“At its core, Bootstrap is simply CSS, but built with Less, an easy-to-use pre-processor that provides more power and flexibility than standard CSS,” reports Digital Trends. “With Less, a range of features like nested declarations, variables, mixins, operations, and color functions become available.”
“Bootstrap remains very easy to implement; just drop it in your code and go. Compiling Less can be accomplished via Javascript, an unofficial Mac application, or via Node.js,” explains Twitter via its blog post. “Second, once complied, Bootstrap contains nothing but CSS, meaning there are no superfluous images, Flash, or Javascript. All that remains is simple and powerful CSS for your web development needs.”
Twitter is introducing user galleries that integrate with third-party services such as TwitPic, Instagram and yFrog to display a user’s 100 most recent photo tweets.
This is the first feature Twitter has built upon its recently-launched native image sharing, launched earlier this summer.
“We think the user galleries feature will be good for advertisers, who now have greater incentive to include cool pictures in their tweets,” explains Matt Graves, Twitter’s director of communications.
ReadWriteWeb reports: “…considering Twitter’s need to monetize, bringing multimedia in-house and attracting more users to the website, rather than third-party clients, could be key to Twitter’s future business plans.”
Flingo, a new San Francisco-based startup, says its technology can watch what you are viewing on TV and with your permission present you with relevant Web content.
“Any mobile app or Web page being used in front of your TV can ask our servers what is on right now,” says David Harrison, cofounder and CTO of Flingo. “For example, you could go to Google or IMDb and the page would already know what’s on the screen. Retailers like Amazon or Walmart might want to show you things to buy related to a show, like DVDs, or what people are wearing in it.”
Additionally, social sites such as Facebook or Twitter would be able to connect viewers to a TV show’s official page or stream.
A major TV manufacturer will build Flingo’s Sync Apps into their TVs, which will reportedly retail for less than $500.
Andrew Losowsky, books editor for The Huffington Post, has released “Reading in Four Dimensions” (available as a 99-cent Kindle Single) — a fascinating essay on the future of publishing and how the Internet has impacted the reading experience.
Many of us are publishing in new ways via Facebook, Twitter, blogs and more. Readers are interacting with these “works” in a kind of social reading environment, which changes the way stories are written and read.
Physical books will get better, but there will be fewer of them. Books do not change like Web entries that become features and can travel with you like a time machine that catalogues the thinking of that time.
The TechCrunch post includes a video interview with Losowsky that addresses key points from his essay, including “how print brings permanence to digital publishing, how the concept of ‘publishing’ has translated online and the value of paper books in our increasingly digital world.”
Founder of TwitPic Noah Everett has released a new photo-sharing service called Heello (pronounced “he-low”), just in time to compete with Twitter’s newly announced photo feature.
Everett told Digital Trends that the microblogging site has been in development for the past year, and the timing of its launch is a coincidence.
“The idea for Heello for what it is now came out of hearing user’s frustrations (and even our own) of not being able to post text, photos, videos or do check-ins from one single service; they were all spread out among different sites and this confuses a lot of uses,” he explains.
The post compares Twitter and TwitPic: Tweets/updates are referred to as “Pings” while Retweets are called “Echoes” and viewing the Twitter stream is known as “Listening.”
“The jury’s still out on the future of Heello,” reports Digital Trends. “There have been a handful of Twitter clones that have been DOA, but Heello does seem to have a little more steam to ride off of for now. You do have to think that Heello is giving TwitPic some competition at the same time that Twitter introduced what’s seriously going to impact the photo-sharing platform.”
Boxee launched a free iPad app this week that aggregates video content from social feeds such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
If the user has the Boxee Media Manager client on a Mac or PC, the new app can stream video from the computer to the iPad.
The company also designed a bookmarklet that allows users to mark video content for later viewing.
“One criticism of the iPad application is that it doesn’t offer access to premium applications like Vudu, Netflix and Hulu Plus,” reports Digital Trends. “Missing premium applications is attributed to companies like Netflix preferring to keep content within its own application as well as Flash content on the Web that’s incompatible with the iPad.”
Twitter has made uploading photos possible for its users with a feature that shares images (up to 3MB).
Users can access the new feature on the Web version of Twitter by clicking on the camera icon (support for the mobile version is still in the works). Images are hosted by Photobucket and appear as links within the Twitter feed.
Hashtags can be added to the tweet to include images in Twitter’s search function. Users will also have the ability to comment on images.
“The founder of TwitPic, who turned down a $10 million dollar offer for the company in 2009, can’t be too happy about today’s feature launch from Twitter,” comments Digital Trends.
Quixey is an app-specialized search engine funded by former Google CEO Eric Schmidt.
The service hopes to make it simpler for social media users (developers and consumers) to find applications and widgets for social networks.
Last week, Quixey got closer to that goal when it added Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter and Foursquare integration.
The engine also indexes and categorizes tools and apps based on social chatter, blog posts, reviews and other third-party descriptions of their function. The search technology bypasses the clutter by efficiently mining data and app-related keywords.
Quixey co-founder Tomer Kagan explains: “A lot of apps on Facebook [for example] don’t even have a description attached — just a name. From a search perspective, if all you have to work with is like three words, it’s extremely difficult.”
The Mountain View, CA startup has raised $400,000 in seed money from Schmidt’s Innovation Endeavors.
GLMPS (pronounced “glimpse”), a new iPhone app, hopes to stand out from the growing collection of available image-sharing apps by creating a new type of media that combines stills and video.
Digital Trends describes the basic premise: “When you take a picture with your smartphone through the app, GLMPS captures a photo as well as a short, 5-second video clip of what took place just before the picture was taken. When viewing the GLMPS file, the video plays first, and is then shrunken down and superimposed as a thumbnail over the photo. The video then plays on repeat, much like a GIF file.”
All images are automatically stored to the iPhone’s camera roll. Users can then share the images through the free app, or post GLMPS files to social networks such as Facebook, Twitter and Tumblr.
Philips announced it will be including streaming set-top and gaming functions in some of its new HDTV sets.
The Philips 4000 and 5000 series, which use the CloudTV platform of ActiveVideo Networks, can access cloud-based games streamed as MPEG files.
Both lines will include Philips MediaConnect, that enables wirelessly connecting the TV and PC.
Other features include NetTV (offering services such as Netflix, VUDU, Facebook, Film Fresh, Pandora and Twitter), V-tuner Internet radio and built-in Wi-Fi support.
The 4000 series features six screen sizes, ranging from 19 to 55 inches, while the 5000 series adds another 10 screens, from 40 to 55 inches.
Jell-O has unveiled a Twitter-powered billboard on the corner of West Broadway and Grand in New York City, enabling consumers to serve as active participants in the company’s advertising.
The billboard features an enormous distorted face that appears happy or sad depending on the number of positive or negative emoticons posted via Twitter.
It is essentially an outdoor physical version of Jell-O’s Pudding Face website, and is paired with a campaign that distributes coupons to cheer up random downcast Twitter users “whenever overall smileyness dips below 50 percent.”
The billboard, from ad agency Crispin Porter + Bogusky, went up last week.