Invision Skins » facebook http://www.invisionskins.net Invision Power Board Skins & News Fri, 21 Oct 2011 00:37:20 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.9.2 en hourly 1 Isle Of Tune Lets You Compose Music By Um, City Planning http://www.invisionskins.net/isle-of-tune-lets-you-compose-music-by-um-city-planning/ http://www.invisionskins.net/isle-of-tune-lets-you-compose-music-by-um-city-planning/#comments Sun, 19 Dec 2010 04:03:36 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/isle-of-tune-lets-you-compose-music-by-um-city-planning/



Need something to do while waiting for your copy of Farmville for Dummies to arrive? Isle of Tune is the latest in viral web distraction, built on the side by London-based interactive director Jim Hall.

Isle of Tune lets you create whole songs by building a little town using objects like streetlamps, houses and trees to make sounds. There is even a collection of pre-built loops for those of us less musically inclined.

Hall also offers a way to customize individual sounds, share your island on Facebook and Twitter as well as vote other people’s islands up or down. iPhone and iPad versions are in the works.

While a pretty amazing digitally landscaped version of Michael Jackson’s “Beat It” currently rounds out the Isle of Tune top 50, I dare you to show me something more hipster than MGMT’s “Kids,” built entirely with animated cars, flowerpots and bumps in the road.




Isle Of Tune Lets You Compose Music By Um, City Planning

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/isle-of-tune-lets-you-compose-music-by-um-city-planning/feed/ 0 Mark Zuckerberg Named Time Magazine’s 2010 Person Of The Year http://www.invisionskins.net/mark-zuckerberg-named-time-magazine%e2%80%99s-2010-person-of-the-year/ http://www.invisionskins.net/mark-zuckerberg-named-time-magazine%e2%80%99s-2010-person-of-the-year/#comments Wed, 15 Dec 2010 13:00:07 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/mark-zuckerberg-named-time-magazine%e2%80%99s-2010-person-of-the-year/

Facebook CEO and founder Mark Zuckerberg has been named Time Magazine’s person of the year. He will, of course, grace the magazine’s cover for the special edition, as the individual who has done the most to influence the events within a year.

Zuckerberg isn’t a surprising pick, considering the huge year Facebook has seen in terms of massive user growth, controversy surrounding privacy issues, and the release of new products. And The Social Network’s success also contributed to the media frenzy surrounding the company and its founder.

Here’s what the publication had to say about why they chose Zuck: “For connecting more than half a billion people and mapping the social relations among them; for creating a new system of exchanging information; and for changing how we all live our lives, Mark Elliot Zuckerberg is TIME’s 2010 Person of the Year.

Zuck will join a host of Presidents who have received the honor including Presidents Barack Obama and Bill Clinton. Other tech luminaries to have graced Time Magazine’s cover include Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates.

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Mark Zuckerberg
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Mark Zuckerberg Named Time Magazine’s 2010 Person Of The Year

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/mark-zuckerberg-named-time-magazine%e2%80%99s-2010-person-of-the-year/feed/ 0 Wu vs. Lacy Round Three: Is the Enemy of an Open Web Apple or Is it Apps and Flips? http://www.invisionskins.net/wu-vs-lacy-round-three-is-the-enemy-of-an-open-web-apple-or-is-it-apps-and-flips/ http://www.invisionskins.net/wu-vs-lacy-round-three-is-the-enemy-of-an-open-web-apple-or-is-it-apps-and-flips/#comments Tue, 14 Dec 2010 01:20:21 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/wu-vs-lacy-round-three-is-the-enemy-of-an-open-web-apple-or-is-it-apps-and-flips/

Last week, Tim Wu challenged me to another, longer debate about the future of the Web. His new book, The Master Switch, argues that every time there is a major communications innovation, a handful of big companies find a way to close it off, keeping the future spoils for themselves. That hurts incremental innovation and ultimately hurts consumer choice in the name of convenience and low-prices. His book is about all the ways the Web is no different from, say, radio and the telegraph and old Hollywood studios.

I’ve argued the Web is different because of technological reasons, community reasons, and capitalization reasons. Because of the way startups are financed this time around, there is more money on the side of the Web staying open than there is in closing it.

My evidence is simply how things have gone so far: Most of the early Web giants like eBay, Yahoo and AOL have struggled at the hands of well-funded upstarts. The fact that in just a few years Facebook has racked up one of the largest valuations of a Web company in the world and even younger Groupon just turned down billions from Google proves the Web is nowhere close to being locked up by the incumbents.

In this longer debate on bloggingheads.tv, Wu raises a few good counter arguments that concern him about the industry’s future. And they hit home because they are two things I worry about too: Silicon Valley’s increasing reliance on acquisitions for exits and apps running on top of platforms like the iPhone and Facebook for distribution. We also talk about the distinction between the computer Web and the mobile Web when it comes to openness.

The whole debate is below.

http://static.bloggingheads.tv/ramon/_live/players/player_v5.2-licensed.swf




Wu vs. Lacy Round Three: Is the Enemy of an Open Web Apple or Is it Apps and Flips?

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/wu-vs-lacy-round-three-is-the-enemy-of-an-open-web-apple-or-is-it-apps-and-flips/feed/ 0 No, It’s Not A Facebook Profile. It’s Picasso (well, almost). http://www.invisionskins.net/no-it%e2%80%99s-not-a-facebook-profile-it%e2%80%99s-picasso-well-almost/ http://www.invisionskins.net/no-it%e2%80%99s-not-a-facebook-profile-it%e2%80%99s-picasso-well-almost/#comments Sun, 12 Dec 2010 16:31:07 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/no-it%e2%80%99s-not-a-facebook-profile-it%e2%80%99s-picasso-well-almost/

If Pablo Picasso or Belgian surrealist, René Magritte, were alive and on Facebook, their profiles would probably be a terrific work of art. Yes, that’s right, Magritte is the one who did this painting. With a little inspiration from the Treachery of Images, I bet he’d also write something along the lines of “This is not a Facebook profile” or “Ceci n’est pas un profil Facebook” somewhere on his Facebook page. Yet, while Picasso and Magritte may not be around to wow us with a little contemporary Facebook art, the profile of French artist Alexandre Oudin is probably the next best thing.




No, It’s Not A Facebook Profile. It’s Picasso (well, almost).

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/no-it%e2%80%99s-not-a-facebook-profile-it%e2%80%99s-picasso-well-almost/feed/ 0 TC Teardown: Who Is Best Positioned To Win The $20 Billion Brand Advertising Prize? http://www.invisionskins.net/tc-teardown-who-is-best-positioned-to-win-the-20-billion-brand-advertising-prize/ http://www.invisionskins.net/tc-teardown-who-is-best-positioned-to-win-the-20-billion-brand-advertising-prize/#comments Sat, 11 Dec 2010 20:26:47 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/tc-teardown-who-is-best-positioned-to-win-the-20-billion-brand-advertising-prize/

Editor’s note: Brand dollars are still the biggest unclaimed prize on the interent. Guest author Steven Carpenter handicaps the players who are most likely to get them.

One of the biggest business opportunities in the consumer Internet space is to create products and services that attract a share of the billions of dollars in held-up brand marketing that has yet to find its way onto the web. With the explosion of various kinds of content and the innovative ways advertisers can segment and track users, why are marketers so reluctant to open up the floodgates? Quite simply, because the current online solutions—search, lead generation, display, video—do not provide a high enough return for these kinds of categories and are not consistent with the image these brands have invested so heavily to achieve.

Commensurate with the potential riches, there is an enormous amount of startup energy and experimentation going on in this area. In this installment of the TechCrunch Teardown, I will look at the four leaders—Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon—and how their new interactions—“like”, “follow”, “friend/check-in”, “group coupon”—are fairing with brand advertisers.

The $20 Billion Opportunity

According to Ad Age, the Top 100 Global Advertisers spent over $100 billion in 2009 across the various print, television, radio, outdoor, and Internet channels; based on data from the previous year, 39 of the 100 had budgets of $1 billion or more (see table 1, click to enlarge). Procter & Gamble, manufacturer of 50 leading brands (such as Tide, Dawn, Pampers, Gillette, and Crest), of which 23 generate $1 billion or more in sales, is the world’s largest advertiser, spending close to $9 billion annually. It should follow, then, that the Internet economy as a whole is effected by how the brand managers at these companies decide to allocate their funds online.

As you can see from the last column in the table at right, the leading marketers are only spending $1.8 billion, or 2.6% of their total budgets, online, despite the fact that consumers are spending close to 30% of their time on the Internet. Of the top marketers, only General Motors, Disney, Bank of America, and News Corp. allocated more than $100 million to the web.

So who has found the best marketing value online? Companies that market and sell financial services, insurance, automotive, communications and media, and consumer technology. It makes sense: these are companies with products that can be found easily using search, and whose customers are most likely to be acquired online because they can transact online. To date, Google and vertical content sites such as Yahoo! Finance and Bankrate have been the largest benefactors of these re-allocated dollars.

New Kleiner Perkins partner, and former Morgan Stanley analyst, Mary Meeker, estimates that closing the gap between consumer attention and ad dollars spent on the Internet to be a $50 billion global opportunity. If the Top 100 marketers bring their marketing budgets in alignment with 30% of time spent, I estimate online brand marketing to be a $30 billion global opportunity and $20 billion in the U.S. As evidenced by Google’s recent pursuit of Groupon, its traditional CPC and display advertising may not be sufficient enough to meet these marketers’ needs.

The Four Horsemen

There are four Internet companies currently best positioned to work with brands to create innovative marketing solutions that will appeal to millions of consumers—Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon. I acknowledge it is not exactly a fair comparison for two main reasons: 1) Facebook has enjoyed a 3-4 year head start on the field and 2) each product has a different use case and thus attracts a different audience with distinct revenue opportunities. Each company, though, has found its way into the mainstream and now finds itself with an attractive platform for brand experimentation.

I see the four product experiences these companies offer on a continuum of online-to-offline interaction on one axis, and requiring passive-to-active behavior on the other. The Facebook experience, for example, is largely an online one where a user can say something about herself by associating with a particular brand by “liking” it. This is an incredibly passive expression that requires a split-second action with little to no long-term repercussions. She can choose to visit the brand page and see the news feed at her convenience.

Twitter, on the other hand, is a personal tool for gathering realtime information—no one knows which feeds the consumer decides to consume or to ignore. While Twitter is similar to Facebook in its largely online-focused consumption, it is a much more “active” medium. Users are constantly reminded when they are following a brands’ information stream. As soon as the information becomes unimportant, too frequent, or spammy, she will simply cut off the connection.

Groupon (which I wrote about in an earlier teardown) is the lightest application, ironically, even though it is the only one of the four that requires a user to make a purchasing decision. Transactions occur easily online and the offline experience of presenting a coupon is consistent with decades of proven user behavior.

As of now, Foursquare asks the most of its users in relation to branded campaigns, but it is also the closest of the four to placing customers in the physical proximity of brands and retailers.

How They Are Doing

You can see how the four different interactions 1) naturally lend themselves to different brands and 2) exhibit a large disparity in terms of the sheer number of participants. And this is not necessarily a bad thing: 44,000 passionate luxury fashionistas at NY Fashion Week may be more valuable to Yves Saint Laurent than 5 million fans on Facebook.

It should come as no surprise that the biggest brand in the entire social ecosystem is Coca-Cola with 20 million Facebook Fans. Whole Foods is the biggest brand on Twitter with 1.8 million followers and the Gap, having sold 440,000 half-off coupons using Groupon, is that startup’s largest brand experiment.

Of the top 50 pages on Facebook, 8 of them are leading advertisers and brands, compared to Twitter which doesn’t have a single brand in its top 50 users. Of Facebook’s top 50 brand pages, 31 of them are food and beverage companies, while 11 are consumer products such as Converse All-Stars and Victoria’s Secret. The most important takeaway is that brands have a far greater following on Facebook than they do on their own sites. Facebook’s best move has been to convince brands to market their Facebook pages rather than driving traffic to their own websites.

The most interesting finding is that what seems to be popular on Facebook is not so on Twitter. If you click on the table at right an dlook at the top 50 brands on Facebook, the “Follower/Fan Ratio” (the result of dividing the number of Twitter followers to Facebook fans) does not get higher than 8% (Disney). This indicates that Twitter might have a more difficult time than Facebook in attracting overall brand dollars with its current product feature set.

This is evident when you look in detail at one CPG company and its portfolio of brands. I did a comparison of the differing success of P&G’s top brands using the two platforms (click on table at right to enlarge). In every case except one (Dawn), the branded experience on Facebook is more popular in terms of numbers than on Twitter. In a few cases, there does not appear to be a reason for even having a Twitter presence. It is interesting to note that the most followed P&G Twitter account is the company’s own corporate PR team.

Facebook still has a lot of work to do and it is far from a foregone conclusion that it has won. While the lightness of its interaction makes getting to scale easier, maintaining enough valuable interactions on the branded pages and engaging long-term customer interest is a huge challenge. For example, according to eMarketer, nearly 1/3 of Facebook users who unsubscribed from a branded page simply were no longer interested in it. And, more to the point, simply because Coke has 20 million Fans does not necessarily mean Coke will pay for the privilege to advertise on Facebook if it cannot see a return.

So what brands seem to be working well on Twitter and far better than on Facebook? Daily deals, such as Dell Outlet, Amazon, and Woot, and companies that place customer service and community at the heart of the brand experience, like Zappos and Etsy, exhibit the most lopsided Follower/Friend ratio. It is important to note that two companies that had horrific customer service challenges over the past few years—JetBlue and Toyota—have fully embraced Twitter as a direct communications channel. The biggest driver of Twitter success as compared to Facebook is the timeliness of the information.

Twitter, then, is well positioned to capture marketing dollars from companies optimizing for deals, retailers that have frequent specials, ticketing and events, movie studios, television shows, last minute deals, airlines, and hotels.

It is still early days for both Foursquare and Groupon in terms of working with big brands. Foursquare has seen traction with high-end luxury and media brands, likely as a result of its headquarters being located in New York and early media partnerships. Of course, Foursquare’s long-term viability as a stand-alone “check-in” company is still an open question with Facebook Places breathing down its neck. This is a strategic move on Facebook’s part to get closer to offline actions, transactions, and local commerce.

While Groupon is the defining company of next-generation e-commerce, it has a tougher road in terms of working with brands and large retailers. These companies tend to be more sensitive to heavy discounting as they don’t want to train their customers to wait for 50%-off coupons. And, they don’t like to be so indiscriminate with their offers.

Overall Assessment

I evaluated the four companies along the six different types of offers and campaigns that I can see consumer brands wanting to engage in:

  • Coupons: Simple discount off purchases
  • Location: Physical check-in or product scan
  • Loyalty: Frequency, “Mayorship
  • Time-based
  • Special Events: VIP’s
  • Inventory Close-Outs

Based on my research, while Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and Groupon are the best positioned to capture the estimated $20 billion in pent-up consumer marketing dollars, none of the four are currently optimized to execute along all of the necessary dimensions. There are considerable opportunities for startups to innovate and capture share. I look for this to be one of the most attractive areas for entrepreneurs in the consumer internet for years to come.

Bugatti teardown photo credit: Flickr/David Villarreal Fernández

CrunchBase Information
Facebook
Twitter
Foursquare
Groupon
Information provided by CrunchBase




TC Teardown: Who Is Best Positioned To Win The $20 Billion Brand Advertising Prize?

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/tc-teardown-who-is-best-positioned-to-win-the-20-billion-brand-advertising-prize/feed/ 0 IP.Downloads 2.3.0 and IP.Nexus 1.0.3 Released http://www.invisionskins.net/ip-downloads-2-3-0-and-ip-nexus-1-0-3-released/ http://www.invisionskins.net/ip-downloads-2-3-0-and-ip-nexus-1-0-3-released/#comments Tue, 07 Dec 2010 15:15:28 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/ip-downloads-2-3-0-and-ip-nexus-1-0-3-released/

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IP.Downloads 2.3.0!

IP.Downloads is our community file management platform for IP.Board allowing you and your members to upload files for sharing in an organized category listing with permissions, version control, and more. Changes and new features in this version include:

Improved Notifications: Notifications have been greatly improved in IP.Downloads 2.3.

As of IP.Downloads 2.3, users can be notified of:

  • New comments to files
  • New file updates
  • New files in categories
  • Broken file reports for their own files
  • File acceptance/denial by a moderator

Moderators can be notified of:

  • New files pending approval
  • Broken file reports

Liking Files: The new ‘Like’ system from IP.Board has been implemented into IP.Downloads 2.3, consolidating favorite and watch functionality using the central Like feature of IP.Board.

Improved Comments: The new ‘Comments’ system from IP.Board has been implemented into IP.Downloads 2.3, improving the general user experience when reading and interacting with comments, as well as improving the moderator experience managing comments.

Search Improvements: Support for searching through Sphinx has been added to IP.Downloads 2.3, and for those not using Sphinx, proper MySQL fulltext search support has been added to IP.Downloads. The search results interface has been overhauled to provide more information, and some new filtering and ordering options have been added to the advanced search form for IP.Downloads.

Sharing and Facebook: The IP.Board share strip has been added to IP.Download files, as has the Facebook Like plugin (for those utilizing Facebook integration).

Custom Field Formatting: You can now define how to format custom fields when displayed on the file information page. This allows you to force fields that should contain a link to be hyperlinked, or to show an image based on a selection in dropdown, for example.

View Downloaders: You can now allow users on the public side on a per-group basis the ability to view who has downloaded each file.

Change File Owner: You can now change the owner of a file from the front end. Super moderators will have this ability automatically, and you can control on a per-moderator basis which of your IP.Downloads moderators have this permission.

Latest Files Hook: A board index hook has been added to show you the latest files in IP.Downloads on your board index.

Better Submission Control: Users can now specify which screenshot they submit is the “master” or “primary” screenshot. Users can now supply a file version number and a changelog for their submissions. Screenshots will now be cropped to a square size, rather than a proportionally downsized image.

Changelog/Version Support: The file number and changelog submitted with files is backed up with each version, so users can view a full changelog of each file (when the submitter provides this information).

Downloads Portal: A new (optional) homepage has been added acting as a portal to your IP.Downloads installation. You can quickly see what’s new, what’s popular, any featured files, top downloaded files (or, when using IP.Nexus integration, top free and top paid files), and much more.

Overhauled Interface: The interface for IP.Downloads has been overhauled from top to bottom, providing for a much cleaner and sleeker experience.

Moderator Options: Files can now be featured (one file at a time) – the featured file is shown on the downloads portal. Files can now also be pinned and unpinned. Better indications are shown for

Miscellaneous: You can mark all categories as read from the IP.Downloads index page; you can now control on a per-group basis who is able to report files; you can now ban individual users from submitting files. Parent categories that only contain subcategories will now show the files from it’s subcategories within the parent category view.

Relevant Blog Entries:

Purchasing

You can purchase IP.Downloads right in your client area by clicking the green New Purchase button in the upper right corner. New clients can purchase IP.Downloads right along with IP.Board. If you an IPS Community Hosting client, IP.Downloads comes with all packages!

Don’t forget to try our free demo to see IP.Downloads in action for yourself.

If you have already purchased IP.Downloads, you can download it in your client area.

Release Notes

  • We have had several beta releases for testing and are confident any major issues have been addressed. However, as this is the first supported release that will be used by thousands of people, there could be as yet undiscovered issues. Please report issues in the bug tracker.

  • Important technical support note: During the launch of a new products, and the great interest created, support response times (especially for install or upgrade requests) may be delayed. We appreciate your understanding during the launch time.
  • IP.Downloads requires IP.Board 3.1.4 and will not install on prior versions.

Invision Power Services, Inc. is pleased to announce the release of IP.Nexus 1.0.3!

This is a maintenance release for IP.Nexus, or ecommerce platform for IP.Board, to fix various issues reported since the last version and to enable support for the new IP.Downloads integration. The IP.Downloads integration allows you to sell paid file access to your members just like we do in the IPS Marketplace!
IP.Downloads 2.3.0 and IP.Nexus 1.0.3 Released

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/ip-downloads-2-3-0-and-ip-nexus-1-0-3-released/feed/ 0 See Who Is On Your Flight And At Your Airport With Planely http://www.invisionskins.net/see-who-is-on-your-flight-and-at-your-airport-with-planely/ http://www.invisionskins.net/see-who-is-on-your-flight-and-at-your-airport-with-planely/#comments Thu, 02 Dec 2010 22:20:53 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/see-who-is-on-your-flight-and-at-your-airport-with-planely/

Flying out to attend TCDisrupt in New York, a bunch of us were delighted to discover we were all on the same plane together, the infamous #VX22. Let’s face it, being on the same flight with someone you know is pretty fun most of the time, as a plane flight is a pretty unique shared experience and oftentimes results in a lasting bond. Don’t believe me? Shortly after sharing #VX22 with TechCrunch staff, I too started working for TechCrunch.

Planely co-founder Nick Martin is trying to tap into precisely this effect with his Copenhagen-based startup Planely. Travellers can connect with Facebook, enter their flights and see what other users will be at the same departure airport, on the same flight and/or at the same arrival airport.

This is great especially in the use case of massive early adopter attracting conferences like LeWeb, which is the first conference to partner up with Planely. Conference attendees can share rides, information or simply get better acquainted while travelling.

Planely users can also message each other beforehand, and start building a relationship before they even leave for the airport. So if anyone else is leaving for Paris on Sunday, you know where to find me.

CrunchBase Information
Planely
Information provided by CrunchBase




See Who Is On Your Flight And At Your Airport With Planely

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/see-who-is-on-your-flight-and-at-your-airport-with-planely/feed/ 0 Momento Is Perhaps The Perfect Passive Diary App http://www.invisionskins.net/momento-is-perhaps-the-perfect-passive-diary-app/ http://www.invisionskins.net/momento-is-perhaps-the-perfect-passive-diary-app/#comments Mon, 29 Nov 2010 04:04:44 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/momento-is-perhaps-the-perfect-passive-diary-app/

To me, one of the most interesting thing about Foursquare is the History tab. It transforms the service from a “where you are” app, into a “where you were” log. In a way, it’s sort of like a diary. I wish Twitter was better at this idea as well. Because what I tweeted a year ago says something about how I was feeling, or what I was doing back then. In fact, a lot of the web services we use on a daily basis would be perfect for this type of passive diary writing. And that’s exactly what Momento, an iPhone app, makes happen.

At its core, Momento (made by the UK-based d3i) is a straightforward diary app. It allows you to easy write “Moments” (diary entries) to express what you are doing or feeling on any given day. It takes the process a step further by allowing you to tag friends (from you iPhone contact list), places, events, and add photos to these entries. But the real killer feature of the app is that it also allows you to import bits of information from a number of services including Twitter, Foursquare, Gowalla, Facebook, Flickr, YouTube, Vimeo, Digg, and any RSS feed. The result is a brilliant log of almost everything you’re doing online.

Other services have tried to do similar things before, but Momento works because they’ve nailed the user interface and experience. The entire app looks like a journal, which is broken down by days in descending order from the current day. In this view, you get a snapshot of any given day, including the most recent items (tweets, check-ins, etc). Clicking on any of these days takes you to a detail page which shows you all of your activity for that day. All your tweets, check-ins, blog posts, pictures, etc, are here.

There’s also a calendar view which allows you to quickly hop to any moment in the past. Clicking on a date will again take you to a specific day page with all of your info with what you did that day.

Another view allows you to see entries broken down by tags. From here, you can choose to see only entries with certain people tagged. Or you can see only entries that you gave a high rating to (when you make your own Moments, you can rate them if you want).

There’s also a way to see just certain types of elements, such as tweets. Again, these are broken down by the day they were sent. And what’s really awesome is that you can search all of this stuff if it has been imported into Momento.

The key to Momento is that all of this information is for you and you alone. You import social items, but it never sends anything out. It’s simply a way for you to log and keep what you did on any of these services in a given day. And it’s all presented in a very nice, easily accessible package.

It’s another of the anti-social social apps, like OhLife and the newer Path, which seem to focus more on what experiences mean to you (or a very small group of friends), rather than to strangers and the larger web as a whole.

With the personal approach in mind, Momento also comes with an impressive way to both backup and export all of your data (this is accessed through iTunes file sharing).

Momento also comes with some nifty importing options to better tailor you data. For example, you can tell it to leave out tweets with a certain hashtag. Or you can tell it to only import tweets with a certain hashtag. You can tell it to leave out @replies and/or retweets, etc.

Momento actually isn’t a new app; it first came out about a year ago. But version 2.0 was recently released, and with it comes a huge number of excellent improvements including all the geolocation service integration and the video service integration. Both of these features are pretty key for a full and interesting social service diary.

Simply put: I love this app. I think it’s a near-perfect execution of a very compelling idea: passive diary writing. The downside is that it currently only works with the iPhone/iPod touch/iPad. But if you have one of those devices, this app is well worth its current $1.99 price (that’s a limited-time price). Find Momento in the App Store here.




Momento Is Perhaps The Perfect Passive Diary App

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/momento-is-perhaps-the-perfect-passive-diary-app/feed/ 0 Sites With Government Seized Domains Are Moving On, On Twitter http://www.invisionskins.net/sites-with-government-seized-domains-are-moving-on-on-twitter/ http://www.invisionskins.net/sites-with-government-seized-domains-are-moving-on-on-twitter/#comments Sun, 28 Nov 2010 06:27:52 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/sites-with-government-seized-domains-are-moving-on-on-twitter/

Last week while everyone was waiting for the COICA bill to move through Congress, the US Immigrations and Customs Enforcement agency one upped the Attorney General and seized domain names from a group of over 70 copyright infringing websites. A visit to the blacklisted domains now results in the ominous looking message from Homeland Security below.

While the graphic is pretty scary, Market Ticker’s Karl Denninger points out the websites themselves and the servers they run on have not actually been seized, just the domains.

“That’s a lot of staff attorney time and trouble to get a big fat nothing out of it, which is exactly what they get going down this road. Why? Because all they can do is redirect the domain pointers which will do exactly nothing when the sites re-register under a top-level domain not under the US Government’s jurisdiction – and there are lots of them.”

Domains under US jurisdiction currently include anything controlled by Verisign which puts .com site owners in a legal relationship with the United States. According to Denninger, all afflicted site owners need to do is move to a non-US controlled top level domain in order to avoid further ICE seizures.

Some have already started to migrate to other domains, though it’s likely choices like .net won’t be any safer. Torrent-Finder owner Waleed Gad El Kareem said he switched his site over to Torrent-Finder.info the moment he saw the ICE message on Torrent-Finder.com, posting the new site’s address on Twitter.

Hip hop site RapGodfathers has aggressively followed suit with its own .info address, using Twitter to get the word out about the move and asking people to retweet as well as @replying fans with its new domain.

RapGodFathers.info@RapGodFathers
RapGodFathers.info

Everyone please retweet our new link, lots of people still don't know about it. http://www.RapGodFathers.info #RGF

about 7 hours ago via webRetweet

Onsmash seems to have not made the move over, but is soliciting emails from fans on Twitter who oppose the domain name seizure as well as tweeting out stuff like “THEY CAN NEVER STOP US!!!” I’ve emailed them and sister site dajaz1.com about possible plans to move to a different domain and am waiting to hear back.

Hof // OnSMASH@HofOnSMASH
Hof // OnSMASH

ARTISTS: If you oppose the seizure of @OnSMASH pls send an email to gmail.com”>freeonsmash@gmail.com & express why. Your participation is appreciated!

about 7 hours ago via webRetweet

Even the counterfeit sites have caught on, an email I sent to www.2009Jerseys.com was met with the following auto response, “Notice: The original Domain Name has been suspended, please visit the new domain name www.2009Jerseys.net, We apologize for the inconvenience. If there is new information, we will first time inform you.” The people behind Dvdcollects.com have decided to focus all their energy on the yet unfettered Bestcollects.com according to their Facebook page.

If it really is that easy to pick up and move on its hard to believe that the other 70 or so sites won’t find friendlier domains on which to land, rendering ICE’s efforts ultimately futile. If anything, the seizures serve as lesson to all possibly infringing sites — Steer clear of the .com top level domain.




Sites With Government Seized Domains Are Moving On, On Twitter

]]> http://www.invisionskins.net/sites-with-government-seized-domains-are-moving-on-on-twitter/feed/ 0 Gmail Lite: If You Build It Google, We Will Come http://www.invisionskins.net/gmail-lite-if-you-build-it-google-we-will-come/ http://www.invisionskins.net/gmail-lite-if-you-build-it-google-we-will-come/#comments Sun, 28 Nov 2010 03:10:18 +0000 admin http://invisionskins.net/gmail-lite-if-you-build-it-google-we-will-come/

I’ve seen the future of messaging — it looks a lot like Facebook Messages. More specifically, it looks like the new version of Facebook Messages that the company began rolling out two weeks ago. But I’m not sure that the future is Facebook Messages. At least not for me. Because that’s simply not how I have used Facebook and it’s too hard to switch my patterns now. And that’s why Gmail has a huge opportunity. We need a Gmail Lite.

At first, I was underwhelmed by the new Facebook Messages. But that’s just because I really hadn’t been using Facebook Messages before. I would get a message every now and then, but mostly I would ignore the area. But in the past couple of weeks, probably as the feature gets turned on for more users, I’ve started to get more messages coming to me this way. And as that has happened, I’m seeing the absolute beauty of the system. Namely, I’m seeing the beauty in its speed.

I’m not even talking about loading times or anything necessarily related to the technology behind Facebook Messages. What I’m talking about is the feature that allows you to respond to a message simply by typing in the tiny box below it and hitting return to send. Some people hate this idea because they want the return button to insert a carriage return like the old days — and that’s fine, that’s still an option right next to the box you’re typing in — but I love this quick-send ability. Love. Love. Love it.

The famous cliche is that every second counts. But it’s a cliche because it’s true. Every second does count. At first, you might think it’s ridiculous that I’m jumping for joy because Facebook Messages is saving me one or two seconds by not having to use the send button. But those seconds really do add up. I wonder how many times over the years I’ve hit that send button? Tens of thousands? Hundreds of thousands?

100,000 seconds is almost 28 hours. In other words, I’ve probably wasted a day of my life hitting that stupid button.

And yes, I know there are keyboard shortcuts. But the percentage of people who use those is likely pretty small. Plus, on Gmail, the keyboard shortcut to send something involves hitting two keys: tab then enter. If you could cut out the tab part, you’d still be saving about a half second. Again, per message. It adds up.

But that’s just one part of it.

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