Jesse Pickard

Oct 24

Brave News World by Pat Bagley of the Salt Lake City Tribune

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Oct 4

Very cool, but if you’ve tried out an augmented reality app on your mobile, you know that walking around arms extended looking at everything through your phone feels and looks really awkward. I almost got run over by a car while using Yelp’s Monocle.

That said, I believe slicker implementations will eventually come out and we’ll see some great things from augmented reality.

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Sep 30

Old Chumby vs. new Chumby. No contest.

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Sep 25

I know Facebook ads are pretty terrible across the board, but this one is pretty damn creepy.

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Sep 5

peteinakl:

50 things that are being killed by the internet.

#true

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Aug 28

Ford gives out Fiesta hover carts on OMGPOP

While perusing the virtual good store on gaming site OMGPOP, I found a Ford Fiesta hover cart for sale. Once purchased, the item can be driven within the Hover Kart game. It’s nice to see OMGPOP forgo banner ads and pursue more interesting monitzation strategies.

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Jul 17

How Facebook Connect and Other Technologies Are Weaving the Social Graph Throughout the Web

Here’s a piece I wrote up a little while back that I neglected to share on this blog. It’s a tad dated, but I think the implementations below are still some of the most interesting out there.

Most of us have heard, read and experienced the phenomenon of the social graph, which can be defined as the network of personal connections through which people communicate and share information online.

When used correctly, the social graph is an immensely powerful data set that can provide significant competitive advantages for a wide range of products. Only three years ago, leveraging the social graph was nearly impossible because accurate social graphs were the domain of leading social networks; they could not be influenced by products and services, which made failed attempts to build out their own. This resulted in widespread social network fatigue, as consumers and advertisers tired of building out already existing social networks.

Then, Facebook famously created its application platform in June 2007. This allowed developers to build applications that could leverage the social graph on Facebook, but it was limited because these apps couldn’t live outside Facebook’s walls. Today, developers are more fortunate — through technologies like Facebook Connect, MySpace ID and Google Friend Connect, social graphs are available on any platform — Web, desktop and mobile, and more and more sites are leveraging them for better engagement and traffic. CNN’s collaboration with Facebook Connect for the inauguration, for instance, resulted in 136 million page views and 21.3 million live video streams by mid-afternoon on the day of the event.

Tens of thousands of other Web sites have integrated social graphs into their interactive experiences and the initial results are quite positive. According to Citysearch CEO Jay Herratti, in the four months the site has been testing Facebook Connect, 94 percent of reviewers have published reviews to Facebook, where an average of 40 people see them and 70 percent click back to Citysearch, all translating to a tripling of daily registrations. Gawker Media has also reported positive numbers; three weeks after implementing Facebook Connect, user registrations were up 45 percent and comments were up 16 percent.

Despite these successes, we still feel that most of today’s implementations are scratching the surface of what’s possible. Here are five examples that showcase some innovative uses of Facebook Connect.

Rethinking registrations

Example: HerHotSpot, an online community for female 20-somethings

How it uses Facebook Connect: Facebook Connect is the one and only registration system for HerHotSpot, allowing the site to guarantee that all members are indeed female by checking the gender listed in their Facebook profile. Previously, HerHotSpot had difficulty convincing its users that the site was a safe place for women to talk amongst themselves.

Personalized entertainment experiences

Example: Prototype game trailer, a promotional movie for a video game

How it uses Facebook Connect:

Prototype, a video game for PS3 and Xbox 360, uses Facebook Connect to create personalized game trailers for each visitor of their promotional website. Once connected, the Prototype trailer seamlessly integrates photos and basic profile information from Facebook into the movie being shown, creating a highly compelling and personal experience.

Promoting brand content

Example: Joost, an Internet TV service

How it uses Facebook Connect: Joost knows that content from a user’s social graph shouldn’t be hidden deep within the site. It aggregates the most recent Joost-related actions of user’s friends and displays them prominently on the homepage in the familiar news feed format.

Providing a cross-platform gaming experience

Example: Scrabble, the popular word game

How it uses Facebook Connect: The Scrabble iPhone app allows users to find their Facebook friends and play live Scrabble games with them — no matter how they are connecting to the game. It offers a perfect cross-platform experience, allowing friends to participate both through the iPhone or on their computers using traditional Facebook applications.

Collaborative shopping with friends

Example: Fluid Social, a provider of social shopping software

How it uses Facebook Connect: Fluid Social users are treated to the following social enhancements while they shop:

· The ability to automatically see reviews or comments from friends on product pages.

· The opportunity to easily solicit opinions by posting a public request or personally messaging select friends.

· The chance to chat about the product in real time with any friends currently logged into Facebook — without leaving the product page.

Tapping into the social graph from the desktop

Example: iPhoto, Apple’s photo management tool

How it uses Facebook Connect: iPhoto ‘09 uses Facebook Connect so users can easily publish photos to Facebook without ever leaving iPhoto’s desktop application. Users of iPhoto can even tag their photos with their Facebook friends and apply privacy settings, allowing only certain groups to access the pictures.

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Jul 10

Pretty neat. There are plenty of cool uses for this.

staff:

Introducing: Submissions

There’s an interesting genre of blog that is more about the community than the author.

At some point you’ve probably seen Eat Sleep Draw, This is why you’re fat, or Cute Overload.

The author starts posting about a topic they care about, the readers start contributing, and before you know it, the author has become a curator.

Tumblr has always been uniquely suited for this type of blog. In fact, 6 of them have gone from Tumblr blog to book deal in the last year.

So today we’re very excited to release Submissions, a feature to streamline community-driven blogs. You can enable it from your blog’s Customize screen to let your readers submit posts via web or email.

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Jul 2

peteinakl:

The American Dream: A Road to Riches [Infographic]

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May 13

“ Social media is like teen sex.
Everyone wants to do it.
Nobody knows how.
When it’s finally done there is a surprise it’s not better. „

Avinash Kushick - Analytics Evanglist, Google

Quote posted at 10:59

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May 8

Tumblr’s new recognition system / dashboard thingy. Pretty awesome if you ask me.

staff:

Introducing your new Activity page (and “Tumblarity”)

Two big things:

We’ve added a new link on your Dashboard labeled Tumblarity. This will take you to your new Activity page where you can see cumulative and trending stats about your activity on Tumblr.

For the past few months we’ve been using an internal metric called “Tumblarity” to sort and filter content on the Search and Popular Content pages. Tumblarity is derived from every blog’s activity and popularity across our network. We’re getting ready to start using it to organize the boss new Tumblr directory (which should be done next week!).

For the first time, you can view your Tumblarity on the Dashboard and Activity page.

Please ignore the fact that I’m less popular than fuckyeahparamore.

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May 1

My free business card from Google

In an effort to promote their Profiles product, Google is giving away 10,000 sets of business cards. Get yours here.

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Apr 29

Best chart ever.

peteinakl:

The most accurate advertising chart I’ve seen.

(via http://tinyurl.com/ckxdo2)

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Apr 27

Forrester’s Five Eras Of The Social Web

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Apr 26

How good is Tumblr?

Very.

I used to consider blogging to be a pretty simple online activity. I’d just go to this one blogging service (which felt the same as the rest) and I’d sign on, write a post and then leave. It wasn’t a bad experience, just a very simple and unimaginative one.

Tumblr has made blogging much more than that for me. Through awesome design and strong features like “reblogging” and “loves,” I now spend a healthy amount of time digging through random Tumblogs, trying out new themes from the community and generally connecting with a lot of cool people outside of my work-related geek universe.

It’s inspiring to see a company take a concept like blogging and dramatically evolve it. I can’t wait to see what comes next.