With the popularity of file sharing programs such as Dropbox growing, one of the bigger gripes that people have is the size limit they offer; the opportunity to increase the storage depends on whether or not you’ll stump up the cash for it.
Now file sharing company BitTorrent Inc have released a personal cloud storage app that not only allows users to transfer files without any size limit, but also to an unlimited number of personal contacts.
Share, the new program powered by BitTorrent, is designed to give users an easier way of uploading files, images and videos for their friends and family to download from. The app is designed for those who only want to share files with specific people as opposed to uploading them for the entire internet to download. Files are stored in the cloud, meaning that users don’t have to be online at the same time to complete transfers.
GigaOM have reported that the service is currently Windows-only, but that Mac users will be able to download an alpha version of the company’s µTorrent client that will offer them the same features. Future Windows versions of µTorrent will offer Share functionality.
As hosting costs tend to be the big issue with file sharing companies, BitTorrent have a great foundation to work from, already having 100 million users. The unlimited file size upload will be tempting for a number of users but if there are any catches, they haven’t been revealed yet so it will depend on how well the service is received. Either way, the heated competition can only be a good thing for those who regularly use and depend on file sharing services.
The rise of social media is a good thing for so many reasons, but a new app launched by a Vodka company pulls in some of your common online actions to see if you’re living a healthy offline social life or just spending all your time online. It is called social life audit and it pulls in lots of your Facebook data, and carries out an audit to see how much of a good time you are having.
It looks at all the places in the world that you visit, the types of photos you are tagged in and who your friends are and what they get up to. It’s a smart move by a new brand to create something that ties it back to a social life, and the nature of this app means that it will spread like wildfire across Facebook in the coming days.
How It Works
All you have to do is connect your Facebook account and it accesses all your information and pulls out some of the most important data to paint a picture of your social life.
Some Serious Technical Issues
It’s a lot of fun to look through your results as you gain points for certain actions like having group photos where everybody is smiling and the places you check into. The only issue that I had with it and it’s a pretty worrying one is that it calls me a “player” for being in photos with my sister. The idea here is that it rewards you for appearing in photos with girls, but when the girl is your sister, mom or granny, it’s best not to be called a player!
A new set of stats show that two out of every three people agree that social media should be banned in the workplace. The survey was carried out by a recruitment site and it gives a great insight into how people use social networks while at work. What the study really shows is that social networks are mostly blocked in the workplace with the vast majority of people having no access to them.
The mind set from employers seems to be that allowing any access will decrease productivity, which is something that I can’t say I agree with. As a company, we allow full access to social networks while at work, and although that is quite obvious given the fact that we are a social media agency, personally I would always allow access no matter what industry I worked in.
Clamping down on it will only make your employees resent you more, and it’s better to measure people on performance rather than how long they spend carrying out tasks. Clamping down on it doesn’t mean much anymore anyway when you take into account the fact that most people can now access it through your smart phone.There are some interesting stats here though and I have to say I’m surprised at just how much clamping down happens out there from employers.
Yesterday, I had a lovely experience at the hands of social media and technology. I’ve been trying out new app Oink for the last week and although it was created, launched and hyped in San Fransisco, it helped me to discover something amazing in my own city just 500 yards from where I live and work.
Down an alleyway, I ate one of the best burritos I’ve ever had because somebody had discovered it, recommended it and shared it on Oink the week before, and I’d marked it as a “to do” item. As I sat there eating it, I marveled at how far we have come from simple review sites and how technology is making the world a better place.
The truth though is probably very different. For me, technology is changing the world because I’m a geek, but barely anybody is using Oink in my city of Dublin. There are a handful at best, lets say 50 people, that I could find, and most of them are people who were on Foursquare in the early days.
I’ve never been a fan of Foursquare, but I do have to say Oink appeals because of the rich media and the huge focus on food and drink. It’s more or less a better version of Foodspotting with the best parts of Yelp and Foursquare thrown in and it’s a really, really nice app. I’m dying for people to start using it so that I can have more experiences like I did yesterday, but I know they won’t. A handful of geeks will use it for a while, but the general public are just getting used to Twitter on their smart phones, never mind oinking as they eat.
The technology will take off in urban centres like New York and San Francisco (I’m not sure why America embraces LBS so much faster than us here in Europe), but the vital critical mass of reviewers just won’t happen here in Europe. I’d really love for these type of apps to work because they would make life so much better, but I just know they won’t which is why in a week time, I’ll stop using it. It’s a case of great technology being wasted on the ignorant masses. That’s what I was telling myself anyway as people sat around me eating burritos perfectly happy without ever having heard of Oink.
For as long as 3D mapping has been around, Google street view has been king, but the following video from Nokia shows something that could change the way we all navigate and explore cities.
Using their NAVTEQ street imagery technology, they have created super real-life 3D maps of a handful of cities on their new N9 phones. Now most people are never going to own one of these phones, and will stick with Google maps, but what did grab my attention was the social integration that was placed on top of the maps. These social features show where your friends are in real life when they check in on services like Foursquare and Facebook.
You can also see reviews in the real world that have been left by friends as they actually hover over physical places. It’s still very early days for this sort of mapping technology, and my guess is that the social features are not massively useful yet. However, you can see how this is the start of something that we could all be using soon.
The only downside for Nokia is that you’d have to imagine Google having something similar in the pipeline that they’ll roll out to every Android handset.
As part of the Nuit Blanche festival in Toronto, Candian based bank Scotiabank decided to hold an interactive art experience FLUXe, where people from all over the world could take part. Through either their smartphone or tablet, participants could draw their own paintings and interact with a large 100ft wide LCD screen without having to download or install an app.
All people needed to do to take part was walk into the space, access a simple URL and create whatever drawings they wanted. However, instead of using colours to draw their creations, people used patterns designed by nine world renowned artists. These artists included Oscar nominated and Emmy award winner Alex Kurina, Italian collagist Lorenzo Petrantoni, and photographer film director Zara Holloway.
The end result was that numerous people enjoyed the experience as they recreated the feeling of fingerpainting through their smartphones and tablets. Also, while they were painting, they could see their creations develop in real time alongside other budding artists on the large LCD screen.
At the end of the night, the public had submitted over 1,000 paintings to the bank’s Facebook gallery, where they could view their creations online. For every ‘like’ the page gets, Scotiabank will donate $1 to the Arts for Children and Youth organization, an arts group that allows kids in high priority communities to experience grass roots art in education.
The FLUXe campaign was developed by Capital C who are based in Toronto.
I remember growing up as a kid that your football boots came in black, and if you were really lucky, you might get a couple of white stripes down the sides. Things have changed to the point where they come in all shapes and sizes, and a new pair from Adidas – which are just about to launch to the general public – come with their own on board computer that stores data and helps analyze your personal performance.
As soon as you have finished playing, the boots will transmit the data wirelessly to your computer, phone or tablet. It records your speed, distance traveled and top speeds as well as monitoring everything you do at one second intervals.
This is going to bring a whole new level to tactical analysis, even at an amateur level, and Adidas are hoping that the social element is the part that really drives the uptake. You can imagine people uploading their stats to their Facebook profiles and discussing who on the team had put the most effort in while the people not working for the team will be quickly found out. Professional players will be able to start using the boots from mid-November onwards and many of the world’s biggest stars will start sharing their stats with the Adidas community. Football is a sport that has not been massively changed by technology – the only real innovation coming at professional level – but it’s great to see a company like Adidas bringing something like this to market.
Are you participating in Twitter chats and want to archive the content? Or perhaps you want to save content that you or others share on Twitter as a list of great resources, for example when attending a conference?
Curating content has never been easier – you no longer have to take a screen shot of content and then add it to an article or blog post.
Yes Twitter has enabled a way to embed Tweets using their Blackbird Pie functionality which you can see in action here from back in 2010 when they released this tool.
You can also use these additional ways to embed Twitter into your blog or website:
However a very simple tool that you can use is called Keepstream which I came across today thanks to Richard Binhammer on Google Plus as he was sharing some content from someone in his organisation (Dell) who had captured the Tweets shared at one of their employee events.
You can watch a video of how Keepstream.com works either on YouTube or below:
Keepstream.com will let you bring in your Twitter posts, your Twitter lists, your Twitter favourites and importantly when attending conferences or participating in Twitter Chats you can search on Twitter for example for Twitter Hashtags.
Keepstream also enables you to annotate the content and reorder the content that you curate.
They have a bookmarket tool which I was able to get to work on Firefox but not on Chrome which provides a handy way to record content as you are surfing the web to add to your Keepstream curated content at a later time.
What I didn’t like was the fact I could not find a way to delete content that I had bookmarked and then had decided not to use.
Once you title your Keepstream curated content you are invited to share it on Facebook and Twitter or you can take the embed code to add it to your website. And if you want to make changes to your stream of content you can go back to edit it later.
Keepstream is definitely a way to curate your Twitter content.
ALTERNATIVE TOOLS TO KEEPSTREAM TO RECORD TWITTER CHATS AND CONVERSATIONS
1. An alternative tool you could you could use to curate a Twitter list is Publitweet
2. To record a Twitter hashtag from a conference or Twitter Chat you could apply to access the beta version of Hashtracking – note that the free version only records the last 1000 Tweets in the last 24 hours – there is a paid service if you want to access a report on a month to month basis
3. You can create a PDF document of a Twitter hashtag stream for a conference or Twitter chat using Tweetdoc – a great way to keep a permanent copy that you could then upload to Scribd.com or SlideShare.net if you do not want or can not host it on your own site.
So Google Plus has been out for a couple of weeks and although we have written plenty of factual stories about the site I didn’t want to write a straight up opinion piece on it too soon. It’s always best to let the dust settle on things like this and let the hype die down to some extent. People have been quick to write it off or say that Google + is going to conquer everything in front of it but I think the truth is a little more complicated than that. I’ve given it two weeks before writing this post but I think the real answer will only really be known after 2 months or even 2 years because this is only the start of the journey for Google +. There is certainly some early potential but the hype will die down and the real challenge is just how many people stick with this in the long term and how they choose to use the service.
More Of A Threat To Twitter Than Facebook
All the hype in this battle was about this being an effort by Google to take on Facebook but if you ask me this is a far bigger danger to Twitter. Some people are even going as far as saying that Twitter is boring and the hard core of early adopters that embraced have all pretty much jumped ship over to Google +. They are still posting to Twitter but their attention has been firmly captured by Google + and that has to be a worry for Twitter in the long run. Twitter still has the best news and content but that could change especially as the stream is far more “real time” and media rich on Google +. The big advantage that Google + has is the web presence because when you compare it to Twitter.com it is already streets ahead.
Ignore The Numbers For Now
I don’t care how many people Google say are using the service because even it were to get to 50 million people most of those users were people who wanted an invite, begged for one, had a quick look around and then left again after making one circle. I am sure there are similar graphs floating around for Quora from the start of this year and they didn’t back it up in the long run. There is a hard core of users on Google + who are mostly techies (as demonstrated by the high male bias on the site) but the mainstream users have just been curious so far rather than hanging around for any great periods of time. 10 Million users might seem like a lot but it’s still nowhere close to Facebook’s 750 million especially when you consider how many of the Google + accounts will just stay stagnant.
Of Course It Feels Clean
How would the design not be good? They started this from scratch with some of the most talented people in the world and there were no adverts or revenue generating features to take in to account when building this. There are also no brands in there yet pushing their products and crucially things like social gaming and other noisy elements of social media have yet to be incorporated in to Google +. Make no mistake though that ads will be everywhere when the time is right and that will change everything. If Google are smart they will do what Facebook did and wait as long as possible to bring ads in to the system. Everybody loved Facebook at the start for the pure social experience it offered but that has eroded over time as commercial reality has set in and the same will happen to Google + over time, don’t expect it to stay clean and beautiful forever.
Google + has won lots of praise for it's simple fast lightweight design
Google Is Winning The PR War
Up until a couple of months ago Facebook were miles out front in the PR war and could do little wrong as a brand. Google have managed to change that tide in the last month though as everybody from the tech press to ordinary punters in the street start giving out about Facebook. In some ways Google may not be winning the competition directly with Facebook in terms of winning users but they could be forcing Facebook to become far more open as a result of public demands and that could be just as valuable to Google as they seek to get their spiders on Facebook’s data. The PR battle can be as important as anything in social networking and Google are winning it hands down at the moment with little things like asking users for feedback and updating new features on the fly.
Normal People Still Don’t Want Circles
Circles are nice and they seemed like a great way of organizing your friends in to different groups. You know what though? Circles are also a pain in the ass. I used them for a day and then realized what I had about Facebook groups and Twitter lists…I really can’t be bothered organizing all my friends online. People or obsessed with the notion that your friends need organizing in your social networks but if Facebook, Twitter and now Google are struggling to do it then maybe it’s time to just forget about putting people in to groups online. People just don’t want to do it and although it’s not perfect the algorithmic version that Facebook has in the news feed is about as good as it gets for now.
Brands And Businesses Will Jump All Over This
The Hype is such at the moment that brands are jumping from platform to platform looking for the next hit of buzz from a new social platform. It happened with services like Foursquare and the appetite for the new business pages to launch is huge. You can just feel all the creative agencies and small businesses itching to be let at something new in terms of marketing. If the pages have integration with things like places, adwords, analytics and other Google products then the businesses pages could be the most compelling part of all this. What could be even more interesting is the pages that Google offers to publishers because if they can start to get content from publishers flowing through Google + then the ball game changes completely and Twitter comes under threat even more.
Lets Not Forget Google Are An Advertising Company
Reading some of the reviews about this you would think that Google had built this site for the good of mankind and to get rid of the horrible brand centric presence that is Facebook. Lets not forget in all of this that Google is the world’s biggest advertising company and they have built this platform for business reasons. There might not be any ads on the site yet but they will be coming and all that data and information that people are sharing on Google + will be delivered right in to the hands of the very same advertisers that love Facebook at the moment when the time is right.
How much integration will Google + have with advertising products?
Final Verdict
I am not going to be using it. I already have enough in my life and I don’t see the time or the desire to use Google +. As the brand and businesses pages start to open up I think there might be some potential to suggest it for clients. It remains to be seen if that is for one off marketing campaigns or deeply integrated in to everything they already do online in terms of the likes of Adwords and driving traffic to their websites. I’m not saying I won’t ever use it because things change but for now I’m happy to keep in touch with my friends and family on Facebook and get all my latest content from Twitter. Different people have different needs online though and for some Google + will be the best option. It’s not that I don’t like Google + but I already have 2 social networks in my life and don’t really have room for a third no matter how good it is. I’ll update this in a couple of months but for now Google + is not for me personally. What about you? Will you be using it?
In this video I cover two ways to reference your GooglePlus account on your business blog including using the GoogleCards plugin for your WordPress.org blog.
What other ways have you integrated your presence on GooglePlus with your online and offline marketing?
Leave your recommendations below or over at my FacebookPage.
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With the popularity of file sharing programs such as Dropbox growing, one of the bigger gripes that people have is the size limit they offer; the opportunity to increase the storage depends on whether or not you’ll stump up the cash for it.
So Google Plus has been out for a couple of weeks and although we have written 
Have you joined GooglePlus
