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Barack Obama Joins Google+, White House Itself Still Not There
Nov 23rd
First Britney Spears takes the top Google+ spot away from Google CEO Larry Page today. Now the President of the United States, Barack Obama, has opened an account. Not Yet Verified, But Yes, Real Is it really him? It’s actually a Google+ brand page for the Obama For America campaign, and not…
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Yahoo Site Explorer Shuts Down Today: What Alternatives Are There?
Nov 21st
With the demise of Yahoo Site Explorer today, SEOs and online marketers will be wondering where to go now for free access to the invaluable information it provided over the past 6 years. The companies that sell this information as part of their ma…
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Is There a Future For Voting on iPads?
Nov 8th
Today is Election Day in the United States and for the first time ever, some voters are casting their ballot using the iPad, the Associated Press reports. In a special primary election in Oregon, disabled residents will have the option of voting on Apple’s tablet computer, which has several accessibility advantages for such voters.
As revolutionary and exciting as this may sound at first blush, the program is pretty limited. The iPads are administered by the state and voters have to have one brought to their homes. The final votes are printed out and sent in via mail. Still, this is the first time a tablet voting initiative of this kind has been used in the United States. Is tablet-based voting something we should expect to see more of in the future?
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It’s worth noting that the United States falls behind a few other Western democracies when it comes to online voting. Aside from a few experiments here and there, U.S. voters cannot cast their ballots via the Internet, due primarily to security and fraud-related concerns. Even so, Canada and a handful of European countries have implemented Web-based voting to some degree.
Blazing the trail in online voting is Estonia, according to CNN. The small baltic state has allowed its citizens to cast ballots on the Web for four years.
If security is such a serious impediment to browser-based voting, perhaps Apple’s much-maligned “closed” ecosystem can provide an antidote to the wild, open Web.
We could imagine a state-developed voter registration and balloting app down the line, but such a solution wouldn’t be without it’s challenges. For one, the iPad still costs $500 and tablet user adoption is only at 11% in the U.S. So much for a revolutionary explosion is democratic participation.
Even though iOS is typically viewed as more secure than some other platforms, no system is free of malware or hackers. Anybody who’s had their iTunes account hacked knows this all too well. For any kind of Internet-based ballot box to work, whether its based on desktops, tablets, smartphones or all three, will need some serious security measures in place. Even the multi-tiered security on banking apps wouldn’t be enough to ensure votes are cast and counted fairly.
That’s not to say that such a challenge is insurmountable. Developers have solved so many of life’s little problems, and even a few big ones. Whose to say democracy can’t be next?
What do you think? Can you see a future in which mobile and tablet-based voting is a reality? Would you want to do it? Let us know your thoughts in the comments.
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There Is A 6-Story Windows Phone In Manhattan: Why That Matters
Nov 8th
If you happen to be in Manhattan in the near future, head over to 34th Street Herald Square and take note of the giant Windows Phone that has taken up residence there. It is huge. It is also a perfect representative of what Microsoft is willing to do to push Windows Phone on the public.
There have been concerts, shows and even a marriage proposal in the six-story Windows Phone in the middle of Manhattan. It is gaudy Microsoft marketing at its best (anybody remember the ProjectNatal/Kinect announcement?) and will be one of the first signs of wave of marketing coming from both Microsoft and Nokia. How will much will this matter for Windows Phone going forward?
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My God Simon, There Are Live Tiles Everywhere
We got a full preview of what Nokia is going to do with its Windows Phone marketing at Nokia World in London several weeks back. Nokia brought in designers to cook up color schemes that will appear to the young (green, pink, blue and black) as well as a guerilla-style marketing plan. That plan is intended to get people to take their phones out of their pockets and take a picture of some oddity, like a guy in a live tile running down the street. Think of the concept of Improv Anywhere or a flash mob singing Christmas carols, just with Microsoft marketing bent.
The spectacle is what this absurd Windows Phone is doing in downtown Manhattan. Tell me, really, are you going to walk by that monstrosity and not take a picture of it? It is all part of the climb back for Windows Phone to market relevance and it shows how important that is to Microsoft. This week marks the year anniversary of Windows Phone and if sales topped five million for the year, that would be a surprise.
“This is a long effort and will take time to unfold. What we saw in NY is the level of marketing and energy Microsoft is willing to put behind Windows Phone and the degree of investment and commitment already in the project,” said Al Hilwa, program director of application development software at IDC in Seattle.
Winning At Mobile
Apple was the first salvo in the smartphone platform war. Windows Mobile CE was actually ahead of Apple and quite a bit before Android and CE still holds a disconcerting amount of market share for a series that was discontinued more than a year ago. There is too much potential in mobile for Microsoft to not push as hard as possible with Windows Phone and the company has the money to spend to not only market it, but build the platform around it. In that regard, Nokia is on board.
“The potential phone market is a much bigger market than the PC market as it might reach several billion annual devices sold in a few short years, but there is no doubt it is an application platform war and it is no accident that the iPhone is brought to us by the same vendor that gave us Macintosh,” said Hilwa.
The Nokia Lumia 800
We were the first to report that Nokia will be bringing a variety of Windows Phones to the U.S. with unique specifications across carriers. You thought that you saw a big wave of marketing for Android phones coming from each carrier? Wait until Nokia, Microsoft and all the operators are pushing Windows Phone in the U.S. next year.
What do you think? Is persistence, Windows Phones the size of small buildings and a fistful of dollars going to be enough to push Windows Phone to relevance? Let us know in the comments.
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Sponsored Post: Any Chevrolet Volt Drivers Out There?
Nov 7th
The Chevy Volt is getting a lot of attention these days, and if you drive a Volt, you are, too! Volt drivers say they’re constantly getting stopped at grocery stores and cornered in parking lots by curious onlookers wanting to know how the Volt works. Surely, you can relate. What is your Volt story?
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This post is sponsored by Chevrolet- It’s more car than electric.
Maybe it’s about what it’s like to charge regularly and fill up rarely, the furthest you’ve driven on an electric charge, or perhaps how the Volt has made you competitive with maximizing your efficiency. Now it’s your turn to share how you have achieved these amazing feats and how the Volt has changed your life.
Please send your amazing stories to http://goo.gl/pa1Al and you may be profiled for a feature!
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Google Plus: Click This Button to See What People Are Saying There About Your Site
Oct 11th
This afternoon we wrote a short post about AJ Batac’s handy little bookmarklet for posting any link you’re visiting to Google Plus. People loved it – it’s so simple! Simple enough that I thought to myself, “What about Topsy’s new real-time search of Google Plus – couldn’t we wiggle that first bookmarklet around a little and get another good one?” And so we did.
Drag this link —-> Plus Hunt up to your browser toolbar and click it whenever you’re on a web page. You’ll be able to see what people said on Google Plus about that page, thanks to Topsy. (And thanks to RWW’s Resident Hacker Tyler Gillies, who helped me fix the javascript for that when I got stuck.)
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This Topsy index of Google Plus is just the first of all kinds of services we’ll likely see built on it. Topsy is also the best place to do archival search of Twitter, too. It’s better than Twitter and it’s better than Google.
The new Topsy feature isn’t perfect, though. There’s no RSS feed for your Google Plus search results, which is a real shame, and the “influencer search” is all based on keyword use. I’m not sure how fast the index is built, either, as Topsy isn’t using an API to build its index – it apparently is just looking at public messages directly.
Interested in archiving Google Plus messages? Check out the open source ThinkUp app from Expert Labs, which yesterday added Google Plus archiving and analytics. Very nice.
Let’s keep the cool hacks and feature coming!
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Why There Was Never Going to Be Facebook Integration In iOS 5
Oct 4th
There will be no deep Facebook integration with iOS 5 or the new iPhone 4S. The notion of Apple and Facebook teaming up for the release of the iPhone 4S has been secondary to most of the discussion surrounding the development of iOS 5. There are a variety of reasons that these rumors came up and why people believed them. None of them were believable. It would have been almost impossible for Apple to put Facebook’s Open Graph API into iOS without anybody noticing.
Yet, the rumors persisted. The final beta versions of iOS and the gold master were theoretically supposed to be released a few weeks ago. We now know that iOS 5 is coming October 12. What was the delay? Maybe to keep from people knowing the last minute features Apple instituted. Facebook could have been a part of that. There is still no Facebook iPad app and the Open Graph is not baked into iOS and the two companies are not teaming up on HTML5 development. Take a look at why after the jump.
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A History of Bad Blood
It is not like Facebook and Apple have had friendly relations in the past. When Apple released Ping, its social music sharing service for iTunes, there was supposed to be some type of Facebook integration. The relationship disintegrated at the last minute, mostly because of Facebook’s data policies.
The first bricks to Facebook’s new music sharing service through Spotify and other music services were probably set in Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg’s mind at that time. Ping has basically died without Facebook support.
http://www.readwriteweb.com/mobile/2010/11/twitter-plus-itunes-ping-is-a.php
Twitter was the initial Ping partner. Yet, Twitter was probably not mature enough or on the public conscious like it is a year later for Ping to really make a difference on the platform. Looking back though, Twitter and Ping may have been the first bricks of the deep Twitter integration into iOS 5 that was announced in June.
On Web Apps and HTML5
If anybody thought that Facebook would release its so-called Project Spartan on the world during Apple’s event, you were mistaken. There is no way that Facebook Apple would allow something as potentially disruptive as Facebook’s HTML5 Web app project make headway into its biggest announcement of the year.
Facebook Web apps will be all about sharing. That Facebook is good at. It is the company’s backbone. Facebook could help Apple with app discovery but that is a problem that Apple can tackle on its own.
Facebook may have an announcement about his new mobile initiatives later this week or next. Maybe they will not. The fact of the matter though is that Facebook’s new Web app project is going to be slow going at first. People know about the Apple App Store and the Android Market. Native apps are popular and they will stay that way for the foreseeable future. Even in the next few years, as HTML5 matures to create more powerful mobile application experiences, native will still be a major factor in the ecosystem.
The Door Is Not Closed But Apple Will Keep Facebook At Arm’s Length
At the press conference at f8, a reporter asked Facebook executives about whether or not there was iTunes service coming to Facebook Music. The question was phrased something like “there seems to be a large company missing from your music sharing roster.”
Facebook at the time said that there were no plans for iTunes or Apple. Yet, like almost every answer that was given during that press session, the door was left open. It is a smart thing for Facebook to do, because it may one day need Apple to beat back Google.
The fact of the matter is that the major tech companies (outside of the close partnership that Facebook has with Microsoft) are keeping Facebook at arm’s length. The Open Graph API has become a monster that permeates the Web and social sharing has become synonymous with Facebook. The data that Facebook controls is coveted by Google and Apple and others and it gives Facebook real power going forward. If Apple let Facebook in free reign inside iOS 5, the way it has with Twitter, that could spell trouble for the data that Apple wants to control about its users.
Facebook’s new media sharing initiative is something that Apple would have liked to do itself. Ping is the proof. Now that Facebook is on its way to a robust media-sharing project, Apple has been left behind.
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