Posts tagged Users
Google Hangouts On Air Live Broadcasting Ability Coming to All Google+ Users
May 7th
Google+ is in the process of a site-wide rollout of Hangouts On Air, allowing all social network users to broadcast live. Videos are automatically recorded and uploaded to YouTube and the creator’s Google+ profile for sharing.
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Facebook Privacy Controls Ignored by 13 Million Users [Report]
May 5th
A new study indicates that 13 million Facebook users in the U.S. alone do not use or are unaware of the social network’s privacy controls. Most Facebook users have no idea how much data they’re willing giving out on the social networking site.
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Google Wave Dead to All Except Chrome Users
May 1st
Google has finally shut its Wave tool and told web users they can no longer access their group discussions and collaborative projects unless they use Chrome. IE and Firefox users are told hosting servers for the service have been closed completely.
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Study: Twitter Users Believed Bin Laden Was Dead Before Mainstream Media Confirmation
Apr 27th
Last year’s biggest news story – the death of Osama bin Laden – is now a key to understanding just how deeply Twitter has affected the news universe. The Georgia Institute of Technology will release a study today about coverage of bin Laden’s killing that may be the most comprehensive yet in showing how news spreads on Twitter.
Researchers at Georgia Tech worked with researchers at Microsoft Research Asia and University of California-Davis to analyze more than 600,000 tweets sent in a two-hour period, stretching from minutes before the first rumor of Osama bin Laden’s death to tweets surrounding confirmation of his killing by U.S. forces. Among the key findings: The majority of people reading the early tweets believed they were true, even before they were confirmed by mainstream media, and celebrities played a key role in disseminating the news.
That second part may have lasting effects beyond simply analyzing the news: Two of the lead researchers are now working on software that could help analyze the mood of celebrities on social media to help marketing companies unveil products and find celebrity endorsers.
“Rumors spreading on Twitter is one thing,” said Mengdie Hu, a Ph.D. candidate in Georgia Tech’s School of Interactive Computing, who led the study. “Determining if they are true is another, especially in this era of social media and the rush to break news.”
Keith Urbahn (@keithurbahn), an aide to former Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, is credited in the study with confirming reports of bin Laden’s death at 10:24 p.m. on May 1 of last year. By that point, 50% of the tweets discussing the news had been written as fact or in “very confident” terms. CBS producer Jill Jackson (@jacksonjk) tweeted her own confirmation eight minutes after Urbahn. The news began to spread rapidly after New York Times reporter Brian Stelter (@brianstelter) retweeted both reports.
By the time network news broke into programming 21 minutes after Urbahn’s initial tweet, 80% of tweets discussing bin Laden’s death had been written as fact or in certain terms, according to the study.
“We believe Twitter was so quick to trust the rumors because of who sent the first few tweets,” Hu said. “They came from reputable sources. It’s unlikely that a CBS News producer or a New York Times reporter would spread rumors of something so important and risk jeopardizing their reputation. Twitter saw their credentials and quickly believed the news was true.”
After the initial reports and confirmations, however, something interesting happened: Celebrities became the key connectors in spreading news about bin Laden’s death. Within a half-hour of the first television reports, a group of 100 “elite users,” including comedian Steve Martin and reality stars Kim Kardashian and Paul “DJ Pauly D” DelVecchio of MTV’s “Jersey Shore,” had surpassed the traditional media’s reach in spreading the news by Twitter.
“The celebrities weren’t the first people to arrive at the party,” said John Stasko, Hu’s advisor and professor in the School of Interactive Computing. “But they stayed the longest and brought the most guests.”
The first anniversary of bin Laden’s death is Tuesday, May 1.
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Study: iOS CTR Higher than Android; iPad Users Most Likely to Engage with Mobile Ads
Apr 24th
Mobile devices have emerged as one of the major means for consumers to access, share, and manipulate information on the web – and it shows no signs of slowing down. As of March 2012, mobile traffic has already seen a 35% increase in under a year, as stated in a previous Chitika Insights study. The [...]
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Facebook Tops 900 Million Users, But Penetration Rate Slows
Apr 23rd
The biggest takeaway from Facebook’s updated filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission is that the company will not be able to rely on adding new users at breakneck speed as a way of boosting revenue.
It’s a fact that Facebook readily concedes.
“Historically, our user growth has been a primary driver of growth in our revenue,” the company said in its fourth update to the S-1 notice it originally filed in February. “We expect that our user growth and revenue growth rates will decline as the size of our active user base increases and as we achieve higher market penetration rates.”
There were relatively few surprises in the document: Facebook released more details of its Instagram purchase, saying it had paid $300 million in cash and 23 million shares. It also said U.S. and Canadian users made up 50% of its revenue on the first quarter ending March 31, down from 54% a year ago.
Facebook broke the 900 million user mark during the quarter, about five months after it reached the 800 million user mark. That pace had slowed slightly, as it took Facebook just three months to grow from 700 million to 800 million users. In the filing, Facebook said each of its 901 million users was worth $1.21, up 6% from a year ago.
Otherwise, it was business as usual for the company that may be valued at more than $100 billion after its shares start trading publicly next month (according to Facebook, it’s current share price on private markets puts the company’s value at $77 billion). Revenue in the three months ending March 31 was up from the period a year ago, but net income fell to $205 million in the first quarter, down from $233 million a year ago. Facebook attributed the dip to higher operating costs.
And if the pace of user growth and net income had dropped, the penetration of Facebook did not. The company said it had 532 million daily active users in the first quarter, up from 372 million a year ago.
The company did confirm that it would trade on NASDAQ under the ticker symbol FB, which had already been widely reported. Facebook did not, however, give a date for the IPO, which is widely believed to be set for May 16, 17 or 24.
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What Web Users Need to Know About SPDY
Apr 19th
Slowly but surely, SPDY (“speedy”) is becoming more widely used. The Google-backed protocol, a modification to HTTP, is designed to help reduce latency and bolster security. Even if you don’t manage a Web server yourself, you should know about SPDY and what it offers to you – and the Web at large.
SPDY has been in development for a couple of years, but a few things will start to accelerate its deployment.
First, Google has put out a SPDY module for Apache, which will make it much easier for organizations to deploy SPDY. Nginx is expected to have an implementation by end of May. That covers a huge chunk of the server market already.
Second, SPDY should be on by default in Firefox 13, and Chrome (and Chromium) already supports SPDY. Which means that organizations have more incentive than ever to start turning on SPDY.
What SPDY Is, and What It Offers
SPDY is a two-layer HTTP-compatible protocol. To break that down into more manageable terms, SPDY is like HTTP, but with additional features designed for today’s Web. The “upper” layer provides HTTP’s request and response semantics, while the “lower” layer manages encoding and sending the data.
The lower layer of SPDY provides a number of benefits over standard HTTP. Namely, it sends fewer packets, uses fewer TCP connections and uses the TCP connections it makes more effectively.
A single SPDY session allows concurrent HTTP requests to run over a single TCP/IP session. As Patrick McManus writes in SPDY: What I Like About You, it’s great for high-latency environments “because a resource never needs to be queued on either the client or the server for any reason other than network congestion limits.”
SPDY cuts down on the number of TCP handshakes required, and it cuts down on packet loss and bufferbloat. Says McManus, “SPDY’s parallelism, by virtue of being on a single TCP stream, leverages one busy shared congestion control block instead of dealing with 36 independent tiny ones. Because the stream is much busier it rarely has to guess at how much to send (you only need to guess when you’re idle, SPDY is more likely to be getting active feedback), if it should drop a packet it reacts to that loss much better via the various fast recovery mechanisms of TCP, and when it is competing for bandwidth at a choke point it is much more responsive to the signals of other streams – reducing the over buffering problem.”
There’s currently a lot of redundancy and bandwidth wasted in HTTP headers. SPDY compresses HTTP headers, which means that fewer bytes have to be transmitted between client and server.
All that adds up to serious performance improvements. According to Google’s initial whitepaper on SPDY, you could see “a speedup over HTTP of 27% – 60% in page load time over plain TCP (without SSL), and 39% – 55% over SSL.”
Security
In addition to better performance, SPDY is also more secure. Despite the best efforts of the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) and others, we’re a long ways away from HTTPS Everywhere – which means that most Web traffic is still sent unencrypted.
That will be a thing of the past with SPDY. Current implementations of SPDY mandate SSL, which isn’t universally liked but seems the best way to nudge the Web forward to encrypting traffic most of the time.
Push and Hint
Finally, SPDY adds two new mechanisms that will also help speed up the Web. Server Push and Server Hints.
Just what it sounds like, Server Push will send resources to clients without being asked. If you request a Web page URL, for example, SPDY might also decide to send down images associated with the page even if they’ve not been requested yet. Note that there’s a potential downside here, since servers could wind up sending redundant or unneeded content.
Server Hints doesn’t send the content, but it does send the URL so that the client can decide if it needs it. If the content isn’t cached, a browser or other SPDY client can then make the request a bit faster than it might have otherwise.
Getting SPDY
The only, or at least the major, problem with SPDY? You need SPDY support on two ends to make it work. You need a browser that supports SPDY, and Web servers that are delivering content using SPDY. If you’re one of millions using Chrome, you already have SPDY support. If you’re using Firefox, SPDY support will be the default with Firefox 13. Note that Firefox 11 already supports SPDY; you just have to turn it on manually. It’s unclear when other browsers will support SPDY, but it may be awhile before you see SPDY in Internet Explorer or Safari.
Very few websites support SPDY at the moment. Google, of course, has been rolling out SPDY. Twitter is also offering SPDY. But it’s going to be some time before most users see the effects of SPDY across all or even most of the sites they visit. But the odds are good that you’ll start seeing a significant benefit from SPDY before you’re using IPv6 at home.
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MokaFive’s Secure, Cloud-like Data Vault for iPad, iPhone Aims to Please Users and IT
Apr 17th
This morning, managed desktop provider MokaFive is launching a new approach to solving two of the most pressing issues facing IT and security professionals: the infusion of consumer devices – notably the iPad – into corporate data centers; and enterprise workers turning to consumer cloud storage services like Dropbox and Box.net to save and share corporate data – both coming without IT’s control or supervision.
As it turns out, MokaFive for iOS is not a Windows or Mac virtualization platform for iPad, as many had expected. From the IT department’s perspective, it may actually be better: a secure storage platform that enables corporate data saved from the corporate PC at work and the notebook PC at home, to be viewable and manageable on an iPad.
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As company COO Purnima Padmanabhan explained to ReadWriteWeb, MokaFive for iOS makes an iPad or iPhone into a bridge between the two clients – work PC and home PC, especially when that work PC contains a MokaFive virtual “Live PC” environment. But that bridge will be manageable by corporate policy.
“If you have the entire MokaFive solution, MokaFive Live PC contains your entire corporate desktop,” explained Padmanabhan. “So you will have user data files on your corporate desktop, which will be backed up to your data center. And the data center will contain the golden copy of all your data, which is then synced down to the iPad for viewing purposes.”
It’s the cloud… kind of. In fact, Padmanabhan uses the metaphor “bubble” to describe it instead, and it’s a word she’s chosen carefully. You can pop a bubble; and there are circumstances where either you or IT may need to pop this one.
“Let’s say I drop my iPad into a pond, or completely lose it. My data is still recovered and intact. I can just go get a new iPad, the corporation will restore the data for me, and I’m up and running… [Now] let’s say I join the company, I’ve got my MacBook Air, and my iPad. When I walk in, [IT] will provision a MokaFive Live PC with a full virtual desktop onto my MacBook Air, and then they will deploy MokaFive for iPad. Now, I can have both environments completely in sync. But they are always controlled centrally, from the management console. And the policies that they establish for me from the central management console apply to both environments. So three months later when I leave, they can just find my username in Active Directory, and say, ‘Wipe all instances of the corporate environment.’”
It’s provisioning and deprovisioning of resources accessible from the user’s choice of equipment (in this case, clients that carry big, bright Apple logos) without the IT department having to touch those clients.
The problem IT departments have had recently with Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) policies and cloud-based storage is that sensitive corporate documents persist when people leave the company (which, as Padmanabhan implied, happens disturbingly often these days). The COO tells me that the complete MokaFive environment, which now includes both the Live PC hypervisor for Macs and the new iOS document management tools, are designed to leave zero traces of corporate data, in case the proverbial bubble has to be popped.
“We wrote our own encryption, and we do not even save the encryption keys in the PC,” said Padmanabhan, citing the number of times Apple ID has found itself subject to breaches. “We presume that the device that you have could be your personal device or a corporate-issued device. We have to assume fundamentally that it’s untrusted. And if you’re presuming the device is untrusted, then you have to make sure the encryption is actually saved in a way that won’t depend on any device locks. The application itself has a built-in passcode and password locking, you can authenticate with Active Directory and, if needed, you can also tie in with two-factor authentication. You can also have application-level passcodes.”
If a new contractor comes into a company and is issued the same Mac that a previous employee had, then IT can provision a new MokaFive “bubble” on that system without the new employee potentially encountering traces of data from the old employee. “The big advantage is you do not depend any more on trying to manage the whole device in order to actually manage the records,” she continued.
“Our value proposition to the CIOs is, manage what matters. Devices are immaterial,” she asserted. “What matters is your intellectual property…
The MokaFive solution also tries to take user needs into account. “The most popular solutions for iPads and tablets in the market are mobile device management (MDM) solutions,” Padmanabhan said. “And the fundamental problem with MDM is, they take over the management of the entire device. Now, as an iPad user, I can tell you, I don’t like it if IT is seeing what books I read or videos I see or applications I’m using. I just want them to manage what is relevant to the company. So this way, there is true separation of the personal and corporate world. Really, we are able to bring those two worlds on a single device, yet keep it safe, secure and, most importantly, private.”
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Just Checking…How Many of Foursquare’s Reported 20 Million Users Are Active?
Apr 16th
On the face of it, the statistics are impressive: 20 million registered users and 2 billion check-ins. But as location check-in app Foursquare celebrates 4sqDay (16 April = 4 squared, geddit?), how many people still regularly use the service? After all, manually checking in to places is going out of fashion isn’t it? Aren’t next generation location apps like Highlight and Glancee the New New Thing in location? What’s more, Instagram grew faster than Foursquare and it is, in a sense, a location app too (you typically take photos when out and about). So is Foursquare really as popular as the statistics the company released today suggest?
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I’ve given Google+ grief over how active its millions of registered users are. It seems to me the same question should be asked of Foursquare. Particularly because many of Foursquare’s original users (this author included) have drifted away from the service over the past year. Foursquare doesn’t release active user numbers, probably for the same reason Google+ doesn’t: it’s likely a small percentage of registered users.
There is another reason to question Foursquare’s active user base: it has done a mini-pivot. Last year Foursquare released a mobile feature called Explore, which is basically a search engine for location. It turned into a Web feature in January of this year, at which point it became clear that Foursquare sees Explore as a key part of its future. Indeed, Foursquare founder and CEO Dennis Crowley told ReadWriteWeb in February that Foursquare “isn’t about points and badges anymore.”
The implication is that check-ins alone aren’t a good enough reason for its 20 million users to come back and keep using Foursquare. The company needed to find a way to entice its users back, again and again.
2 Things Foursquare Failed At Over 2011
Foursquare has clearly grown well over the past year, from about 9 million users this time last year to 20 million now. But it has also dropped the ball in a couple of areas – which I believe has directly impacted on its active user numbers.
Firstly, the initial promise of Foursquare was to make virtual check-ins and badges meaningful. Becoming the mayor of a cafe should entitle you to discounted coffees. Checking in five times in a bookstore (the ones that still exist, that is) ought to lead to some kind of reward: like 15% off your next purchase. While some of this commercial potential in Foursquare was unlocked, so to speak, it hasn’t been widespread enough.
The second ball that Foursquare dropped was automated check-ins. New so-called ambient location apps like Glancee and Highlight have taken that ball and run with it, enabling people to make new social connections via automated location tracking. Admittedly, this is still early stage and these new generation location apps are plagued with battery life and other performance issues. Also the privacy implications have not been fully explored yet. Even so, Foursquare should have led the way with automated check-in technology. It should have at least experimented with it, to head off the likes of Highlight (the most successful of these apps at SXSW last month).
Explore May Be The Promised Land
So far I’ve presented a fairly pessimistic – maybe unfair – profile of Foursquare. With over double the user numbers from one year ago, clearly Foursquare is doing very well for itself. Even if the number of active users isn’t as impressive, 20 million people registered to use Foursquare is nothing to be sneezed at.
Actually Foursquare has innovated on a number of fronts over the past year: a daily deals partnerships with Groupon in July 2011, revamped brand pages in August, tips lists later that same month.
But its biggest new feature was the one I termed a mini-pivot: Explore, which turned Foursquare into a discovery engine. Want to know the most popular nightclubs in a city you’re visiting? Explore will tell you. The reason Foursquare is even able to offer this feature is its massive database of check-in data. So the Explore product may well be the next step in Foursquare’s maturation as an Internet company. Perhaps it will even take them to the level of a Twitter, which has over 100 million users.
Wait, How Active Are Those 20 Million Users?
And yet… what motivation is there for Foursquare’s 20 million users to keep checking in? I don’t claim to be a typical Foursquare user, but my own usage of the product has tailed off significantly over the past year. I check in to my local cafe still, but only because I have been mayor there for a long time. There’s no reward for being the mayor there – in fact I have to remind the baristas to click my paper coffee card.
Explore really is critical to Foursquare’s future, because the value of Foursquare has morphed: from being a fun app to collect check-ins, to being a useful service where people can find interesting new places. Judging from the growth in user numbers, Explore does seem to be bringing in new users and reigniting the interest of users who had drifted away. Portland resident (and ex-ReadWriteWeb intern) Justin Houk told me that he started using Foursquare again “after I needed to find a lunch spot in a part of Portland that I seldom go and it came through.” Foursquare is banking on more people using its product like that, as a kind of real-time location search engine.
So Foursquare is not a sinking ship. In fact it continues to steam ahead, into uncharted and exciting waters. The big question though, is whether Foursquare can get people regularly using the service. I’m one of those 20 million users Foursquare is celebrating, but I’m far from active on it. Frankly it needs to do more, for me to become an active user again. How many of you are in the same boat? Or are you a regular Foursquare user? Let us know in the comments.
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Foursquare Hits 2 Billion Check-ins, 20 Million Users
Apr 16th
It’s April 16th … otherwise known in some circles as Foursquare Day. (Get it? 16 is four squared. And April is the fourth month of the year.) In honor of its own unofficial holiday, Foursquare has confirmed the latest numbers related to its continuing growth: more than two billion…
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