Posts tagged hint
Twitter Tweets Hint At A Future In Music
Apr 12th
Is Twitter moving on to bigger and better things? Maybe louder, more musical ventures? That’s what it sounds like as the seven-year-old San Francisco micro blogging site confirmed Thursday that sometime last year it had acquired We Are Hunted, a music discovery service.
Welcome to Twitter! “@wearehunted: We want to share some news with you. We Are Hunted has joined Twitter. wearehunted.com”
— Twitter Comms (@twittercomms) April 11, 2013
Social music is a huge space, with social music apps bringing like-minded listeners together and exposing them to new music. This process is known as music discovery. Spotify is one such discovery service, with a freemium streaming music library valued in the $3 billion range. Rhapsody and Pandora are other major players in streaming music and discovery.
In the pure discovery realm, Shazam has become the go-to app to find out just what song is playing whenever you hear a track for which you just have to know the title. There’s countless others, with the mobile market becoming a fast-evolving sector for engagement between musicians, brands and listeners. It’s a new way to gain loyalty from fans and online exposure for artists.
Twitter’s purchase, We Are Hunted, tracks popular songs on social media, which means Twitter is likely prepping its own music app. This morning All Things D wrote that Twitter Music could launch as early as today, or by this weekend – timed to match the opening of the Coachella music festival. The new service would recommend users music based on who they follow on Twitter.
Ramping up that likely possibility, a landing page aptly titled Music.Twitter.com has gone live to help facilitate the process and get users to sign in to authorize the new music-trending app.
It’s still early morning, but expect Twitter to reveal its sing-songy plan later today, or this weekend at the latest. Now it looks like Twitter is stepping into the same arena. Are your ears burning yet?
Image courtesy of Twitter.
View full post on ReadWrite
Will Mobile Apps Be Google’s Undoing? (Hint: No)
Apr 4th
The New York Times offers an interesting story about Google and the competitive landscape of mobile. The headline is “As Web Search Goes Mobile, Competitors Chip at Google’s Lead.” The central idea of the article is that while Google is used on the PC equally to discover information and…
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Facebook Insider Offers A Hint For Brands Looking To Increase Reach
Oct 3rd
Facebook page owners and brands trying to get their content in front of customers say their reach has decreased since the company changed its Edgerank algorithm on Sept. 20. One Facebook’s employee’s response? Post better content.
EdgeRank Checker, a social media consulting company focusing on Facebook, posted a blog item about the matter and found the typical page had reach of 26% prior to the Sept. 20, meaning that, on average, 26% of a page’s subscribers would see messages posted on the page. That reach has dropped to 19.5% since Sept. 20. Similar drops were recorded in EdgeRank’s measures of viral reach and median engagement for pages in its sample, which the company conceded was “relatively small.”
Facebook made the recent change to boost the relevance of users’ feeds. “We’re continuing to optimize Newsfeed to show the posts that people are most likely to engage with, ensuring they see the most interesting stories,” Facebook said in a statement to ReadWriteWeb. “This aligns with our vision that all content should be as engaging as the posts you see from friends and family.”
Facebook’s goal, stated by founder Mark Zuckerberg, is to make sure all the content in your Newsfeed – even if it’s from a brand – works to keep you on the site longer. A Facebook employee said that the company constantly tweaks the algorithm that determines who sees what in their Newsfeed. (The employee requested to remain anonymous, citing company policy on making public statements.)
In short, according to the Facebook source, if brands are seeing less engagement and reach on their Facebook pages, it’s because they’re not creating engaging content.
“If a brand is continually putting up low-quality content that no one is engaging with, that content is going to be optimized out of the Newsfeed,” the source said.
Gaming The System
Facebook measures the quality of content through engagement: number of likes, clicks, shares and comments. Typically, a post’s reach is between 15% and 20%.
The source declined to reveal what kinds of content increase engagement. But he was quick to point out that Facebook charges brands less to promote content with high engagement rates than it does for sub-par content.
“Content that doesn’t get any play and is optimized out of Newsfeeds is more expensive to promote to more people,” he said. “That’s good for [people] because they are seeing relevant content, and it’s good for brands because we’re encouraging them to create engaging content.”
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Infographic: How To Rank For Your Name In Google (Hint: Use Social Media Sites)
Aug 7th
Want to rank better in Google? If you’re an individual, you could build your own site and hope it does well. But you might have more success by creating a page for yourself on a social media site like LinkedIn, Facebook or Twitter. Ranking On Google: The SEO Way For those unfamiliar, the…
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Apple TV’s New iOS Hack: A Hint of Things to Come?
Jan 2nd
For an Apple device, the company’s TV set-top box has had a surprisingly small impact thus far. Perhaps that’s because the product is considered by Apple to be, as Steve Jobs once said, merely a “hobby.” One of the reasons Apple TV hasn’t set the world on fire the way the iPad and iPhone have might be because unlike those devices, it lacks access to third party apps in the iTunes Store. Imagine all the things you could do on your TV if this weren’t the case.
Well, that’s what exactly two hackers were envisioning when they came up with MobileX, a modification that jailbreaks the Apple TV via the Seas0nPass hack and lets users run full-screen iOS apps on the set-top box. The hack involves rewriting the Springboard iOS app launcher.
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So how does one use iOS apps on a large screen without multitouch support? In a demo, Steve Troughton-Smith shows how he uses VPN and SHH to control apps using a combination of the Apple remote, wireless keyboard and multitouch trackpad. The solution is somewhat clunky and the use of VPN slows it down, but it manages to get iPad and iPhone apps to display on bigger screens, often just as attractive and functional as they appear on smaller form factors.
While the MobileX hack may not be something every Apple TV owner is going to have the stomach to tinker with, it may provide at least a partial glimpse into the future of what Apple plans to do on television sets. Very little is confirmed, but rumors that began circulating a few years ago about an Apple-branded HDTV were all but verified by Steve Jobs himself in the late cofounder’s recent biography.
Apple’s TV initiative is expected to go from hobby to big deal in 2012, with two different sizes rumored to be launching. In terms of its physical design, a sleek, clean form factor is a sure bet. But what about what appears on the screen? Apple is rumored to be working out content partnerships and the device will almost certainly hook into traditional cable subscriptions as well.
How Would iOS and Apps Work on a TV Screen?
In terms of its software and operating system, a big-screen version of iOS and its App Store may well be in the works, which will enable viewers to run media apps from everyone from Netflix and Hulu Plus to NBC and HBO Go, not to mention social networks and possibly even games.
Of course, porting apps from iPhone and iPad to iTV will be even more of a dramatic shift than it was porting apps from iPhone to iPad. Since the device won’t be portable, that eliminates a whole breed of potential apps for it. For example, it’s conceivable that Apple’s TV will come with a built-in Web cam, but don’t expect it to be very useful for Instagramming. Games and other apps that use the accelerometer will also need to be re-imagined or scrapped all together.
If a television-focused app marketplace is indeed part of the new offering, it won’t be the only feature worth touting. Recent rumors have included a built-in DVR, iCloud support and Siri-style voice control.
At this point, there’s little more than speculation and rumors to go on. It’s more or less certain that Apple will be launching some kind of TV-related offering later this year, but exactly how they’ll tackle it – how they “cracked it,” as Jobs put it – remains to be seen.
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Run ChromeOS with a Hint of Lime: ChromiumOS Lime Builds (Finally) Available
Dec 5th
What’s 338 days late between friends? Last year Hexxeh promised ChromiumOS Lime builds “within the next two weeks.” Unfortunately, the schedule slipped just a little, and Lime builds didn’t come out until December 2nd. Better late than never, though.
ChromiumOS, of course, is the open source release of Google’s ChromeOS. Unfortunately, Google doesn’t actually do anything quite so helpful as provide installable images of ChromeOS for folks who haven’t picked up a Chromebook.
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So Hexxeh (Liam McLoughlin, or at least that’s the name given on Twitter) has been providing automated builds of ChromiumOS called Vanilla for some time. Unfortunately, Vanilla lacks hardware support and some other niceties that users might want. There was a short-lived project called Flow, but that was abandoned.
Lime is the next step for users who want extended hardware support (for example, Wi-Fi chipsets that may not be open source, Nvidia 6 series) and things like Java with the default build.
Like the Vanilla builds, Lime ChromiumOS will be updated daily. This means some builds may work better than others. For example, McLoughlin has held up today’s Lime builds because Wi-Fi is broken in upstream Chromium.
Getting Builds
How you get the Lime builds depends on which OS you’re on. Windows and Linux users are advised to download an image and write it to a USB device. Mac users, though, can download an image or choose an image creator to select from several Lime or Vanilla builds.
If you’ve been itching to try ChromeOS, the Lime builds will let you get a sense of the ChromeOS experience. However, you probably won’t get the same kind of battery life and quick boot experience that you’d get with a Chromebook. But if you have a netbook that you’d like to Chromify, this would be a good way to start.
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What Really Keeps IT Security Pros Up at Night (Hint: It’s Not Stuxnet)
Jun 20th
Today eEye Digital Security released the results of a survey of over 1,600 IT administrators, managers and C-level executives about their top security concerns. Most respondents said that high profile malware like Project Aurora and Stuxnet were either small or very small threats to their enterprises. Slightly more were concerned about government or state sponsored hacking. But most still saw this as a low priority.
So what are they actually worried about?
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Common, day-to-day malware.
It’s been over two decades since John McAfee founded one of the first anti-virus companies. Why is it that companies still have to worry about malware?
Survey respondents cited various concerns, but a lack of resources and the inability to deal with zero-day vulnerabilities top their concerns.
So if the magic resource faery waved its wand and gave the respondents a 20% budget increase, what would they spend it on? Security reporting and dashboards, patch management and configuration compliance topped their wish lists.
Photo by Circo de Invierno
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Google Instant Provides A Hint For Local & Mobile Optimization
Apr 25th
Undoubtedly, you may have seen Google’s Instant Preview interface which provides glimpses for webpages listed in SERPs. What you may not be aware of is that they’ve added sophisticated code to make it unique on mobile devices. These Instant Previews provide compelling evidence that…
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Big Trends (Hint: Mobile) Emerging In Online Advertising’s Next Frontiers
Mar 4th
One of the most competitive and interesting sports in reporting on what’s happening in the online world is the ongoing game of predicting the future. Just as we’re seeing regime change in North Africa and the Middle East, it looks as if we’re experiencing another tectonic shift in…
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