We’ve seen many, many iterations of the popular tower defense games over the years, but this one has a special meaning for all you Twitter fans out there.
Based on a tried and true concept, Tweet Defense is an iPhone game that lets you fight zombies with various tower defense units, but with a social twist: it grabs your various Twitter stats – number of followers, friends and tweets – and calculates bonuses to your defense based on them. It’s like an infinite time sink which connects two enormous time wasters – Twitter and tower defense. In other words, it’s beautiful.
Get Tweet Defense for $0.99 from the App Store.
Tags: iphone, tweet defense, twitter
We had a chance to step into MySpace HQ for a chat with new Co-Presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones, who preside over the News Corp.-owned social network from a shared desk in Beverly Hills. The joint office speaks to how closely Hirschhorn and Jones are working together to create a unified vision of the future for the lately struggling MySpace, whose former CEO Owen Van Natta exited the company after only 9 months in the hot seat.
Hirschhorn describes MySpace as a site that “lacked focus” as he and Jones were getting up to speed and learning about the business. He sees the pair’s role as instilling that much-needed focus as well as driving a re-imagination of the site from both a user interface perspective and in the development of new products. All of what we saw today on the near near future of MySpace’s roadmap — into approximately Fall of this year — is in service of the networks’s new overarching goal of promoting user discovery and self-expression.
As Hirschhorn (pictured, right) describes it, MySpace’s trajectory moving forward is about the “pillars of broadcasting, discovery, self-expression, and making content a part of all those experiences.” He spoke to quality, usability and engineering as major focal points: “we want as many people here to be people who build, and who create, and who have top-notch engineering talent.”
Jones relates that metrics have become a core mantra for the company as well: “if someone’s inside the company, we want to give them complete transparency in regards to what they’re working on it, why they’re working on it, why it’s important, and if what they did actually came to a good effect.” They’ve effectively retooled the way the business works to make data a huge driver, including implementing very specific new product rollouts, user testing, and full circle evaluation of how changes affect user behavior.
But beyond instilling a level of discipline regarding the process of implementing user interface changes and building new products, at the end of the day Hirschhorn says MySpace is about “music that you love, the photos that you love, the video that you love, and the artistic stuff that goes on every day that says that you’re you. Those are the pillars of how we’re going to be building our product.”
We asked Hirschhorn and Jones whether they envisioned MySpace as needing to cultivate its roots as a social network versus crafting the site as more of a destination around premium content, and the answer essentially is both. “You need to be a platform where your audience has a voice,” even as culture constantly shifts and changes, said Hirschhorn. “I think a lot of people say ‘content portal’ — it isn’t just about putting up channels that broadcast this stuff one-to-many. It’s about putting up a platform that’s totally accessible to anyone that creates content, whether it’s big media or not.”
Jones (pictured, left) agrees that “going back to the roots of what made MySpace MySpace early on” is important. “I think at some point it lost its way, and we’re basically just tying it back to that. I don’t think it’s a decision of content site or social network — people are doing things that are very social within MySpace, and they’re doing things that are social in other environments too. There’s a type of user, there’s a type of relationship that MySpace is really, really good at, there’s a type of environment around discovery that we’re really good at, and it’s about embellishing that.”
Hirschhorn acknowledges that MySpace is “centered around pop culture topics” that resonate with the primarily 14-34 year-old demographic (“and a very sweet spot in the 18-24 demographic”), “so while you could share your thoughts about the elections in Iraq it might not be the place that you do that — but you’ll certainly talk about what went on in The Hurt Locker and what dress Sandra Bullock wore, and that crazy lady who ran onto the stage during the Academy Awards. That is a part of the pop culture conversation that goes on every day, and also a place we feel we can win at.”
We asked if the Co-Presidents saw social networks like Twitter and Facebook as competitors, or whether they thought there was room enough in the market to allow a multiplicity of sites to flourish. Jones sees ample space for many social sites: “I think there’s room for all the players. I think at the end of the day there’s not going to be a direct overlap saying ‘this is the exact behavior on MySpace or FB or Twitter’ — there’s always going to be some crossover. I don’t think it’s a winner take all because I don’t think it’s a singular behavior we’re all trying to capture.”
Hirschhorn agrees: “The reality is there are people on there with accounts on both. When you’re as big as 100 million or 200 million users you seem to have a little bit of everybody.” He says that after seeing commonalities with Twitter and doing a simple integration deal allowing MySpace users to sync the two accounts, “all of a sudden we started to see people back on MySpace we hadn’t seen in a while.”
He sees a certain level of platform agnosticity as being a necessary attitude when operating online: “I think that if you want to maintain a presence online, you have to think cross-carrier or cross-network. When you and I were coming up, SMS didn’t take off until it was cross-carrier. To think that your audience is only going to be on one network is silly. It’s very important for us to be cross-networked, and to make sure that if you’re someone who is managing your presence on MySpace that you can also publish into Twitter, and you can go into Facebook, and if you’re creating a playlist and you want to distribute it into Facebook, that’s great.”
We were shown a number of elements from the upcoming re-imagination of the user interface, primary among them being changes to profile pages. Users will still have control over customizing the look and feel of their profile (“they’ll actually have better tools,” says Jones), but there will be more unification to the underlying structure and framework behind profile organization in order to make a better, more cohesive experience for users in terms of site navigation.
Hirschhorn says that customization is obviously valuable but “has to work within a usable framework. And that is going to be a religion for us. It can’t be homogenized, it still has to be ‘let your flag fly,’ but there has to be a certain kind of structure to it. And that’s a very very important point for us going forward.”
He acknowledges the dual blessing and curse of the original wide open profile customization: “giving them that control had a real impact on the usability of MySpace. So the real mission we laid out to the staff was how do we give them the visual control but still maintain a certain kind of architecture in how you browse through the site.” The new profiles will bring a unity to the overall experience while still allowing the “crazy and fun” level of self-expression users came to know and enjoy about the site.
In the past, you couldn’t do things like publish videos or other types of content directly into the Stream, but the vision is to allow all types of content. Moreover, you’ll be able to filter the contents of your stream by type, so you can view only videos or see just the links, for example. The MySpace Share mechanism will handle incorporating content from all over the web directly into the Stream, both via buttons webmasters can incorporate within their sites and as a browser bookmarklet that allows sharing content just as easily even if the buttons aren’t specifically included.
Currently in testing now is a change to the former status update tool into an explicit publishing tool, allowing users to simply add videos, photos, links, and other types of content. Within the next month we should expect to see a new feature that allows cross-posting to sites like Twitter, Facebook, and Digg via a simple dropdown. “Why not? Publish once, go everywhere. If you increase publishing, you increase engagement,” said Hirschhorn of the upcoming feature.
Back in October, MySpace launched an Artist Dashboard tool (pictured below) as part of the MySpace Music hub for musicians and bands. We’ll be seeing that tool become available for users as well, with the goal of providing a visually-rich view into the “ripple effect” of a user’s activity on MySpace. Imagine being able to get statistics back on what your most popular shares are, who is reacting to what you’re publishing and where they are, and all manner of metadata about what kind of user you are on the site and the effects of your activities there.
Closely related to that will be a system of achievements and badges that users can display on their profile to show off what type of users they are, whether it be someone with the most shared playlists or someone who spots trends early on and more. This creates a cycle of feedback and recognition to the user, as well as providing an additional layer of self-expression and identity driven by the data surrounding how that user is actually interacting with MySpace.
We were shown bright, friendly icons for potential badges that anyone who has used Foursquare will recognize as familiar, and this particular part of the strategy certainly recalls mechanics like Xbox Live achievements or PS3 trophies as well. The idea is to add game-like elements that not only are fun but also give recognition back to the user in a playful visual style: “that’s what the future of MySpace is going to look like. It’s not going to be bland and data-oriented; it’s not going to look like chaos like it does today. It’s going to be fun and tactile,” said Hirschhorn.
Hand in hand with data visualizations in your Dashboard, another new featured area to look for in the near future is a way to identify trends. Here too we should expect to see bright and visually-engaging ways to find out where the hotbeds of activity are around MySpace, whether it be a hot conversation thread or new movie trailer or new album stream. Trends will be tracked in real-time and be based on what’s being most shared, most talked about, and generating the most activity around MySpace at any given time.
Those trends will also be able to be broken down very atomically by various indices like region and demographics, so you might be able to drill down very specifically into data points like “what is the most popular album among teenagers in New Jersey,” for example. This level of detail is another example of how data-driven some of the new features will be as well as how much of that internal data will be open and transparent to users, but ideally in a way that’s more visually attractive and accessible as opposed to your typically dry charts and graphs: “I want something more visual. I want it to be visually cool,” said Hirschhorn.
In addition to friending (a bi-directional relationship) and following or subscribing, a new “Liking” mechanism will emerge in the future as one part of a system that will start to understand more about you. This hints at a still nascent element that will likely play a much larger role in MySpace’s strategy moving forward, which is about learning specifically what you like and changing your experience over time to be more customized.
Hirschhorn said of the Liking mechanism that it “starts to build preferences that ultimately are going to build up who you are in our database so we can deliver you better experiences. They don’t change your user experience overtly in front of you but they’re going to behind the scenes. That will be both passive and active. That’s a discipline I don’t think we’ve had here, but it breeds engagement and action on the site.”
In the long-term, the goal is to build up “interest maps” based on what users have liked and gravitated towards in the past, although the eventual personalization engine will also have to be wide enough to allow for new things and new experiences. “Discovery has to be wider than what you think you want,” and won’t be just about matching a stated set of preferences but also about allowing for serendipity and for new types of content to be exposed to you based on elements including what your social network is actively interested in.
Other new features we were shown included a big visual and thematic update to the Calendar application, which will gain the ability to sort and filter by type of event like concerts, movies, etc. The calendar will be culture-based and have a strong local component, so users can drill down in a visually accessible way to pop culture and entertainment-oriented events nearby.
Apps and games will also see significant development in the coming months, with the goal of increasing audience usage from the current 20-30% participation to something more like 50%. Mobile development will also be hugely important, with iPhone and Android (app pictured, right) being the biggest platforms, although currently mobile usage is “overwhelmingly” not smartphone users yet. “The iPhone is gaining very quickly,” though, says Hirschhorn.
We should also expect to see a better introduction to MySpace for new users, who will get recommendations in terms of friend and content suggestions upon creating an account on the site. This will give new users a place to start from even if they don’t yet have any friends.
Topic pages will be another new feature that will pull in content from around MySpace but also from Twitter, YouTube, and all over the web where it’s happening surrounding a particular topic, movie, celebrity, or other entity people are talking about online. This starts to organize existing content around user interest specifically as opposed to relegating content discovery to specific content hubs in music, movies, etc.
Lastly and perhaps more importantly: when will we be seeing all of these new plans come to fruition? The answer is incrementally, as features become ready — as opposed to saving everything up for one big launch. “I don’t think the world wants to wait for a redesign and also, those days are over. 100 million people use this every day, and you can’t just freak out and pull the tablecloth off,” said Hirschhorn of the decision to roll out incremental updates, changes, and new MySpace features.
In other words, if you’re curious about how all the above is actually going to be implemented, you likely won’t have to wait too long. From what we saw today, there’s a lot on the plate for MySpace in the coming months, and we should expect to see a lot of changes coming soon. Will it be enough to restore the social network to its former glory, and put MySpace back on a path of growth and leadership in the social networking space? Only time will tell, but if Co-Presidents Jason Hirschhorn and Mike Jones are able to successfully execute the vision they’ve laid out, it’s perhaps reasonable once again to be optimistic about the future of MySpace.
Tags: Film, interview, Jason Hirschhorn, Mike Jones, music, myspace, social media, trending, tv
In November, Phonebooth.com released the beta version of Phonebooth OnDemand, which is a full-featured phone service that lives in the cloud, but can communicate with both cellular phones and IP desk and conference phones. Today, that service — which costs $20 a month per user — is becoming generally available. Phonebooth.com is also leveraging its own private VoIP network to launch Phonebooth Free, a free version of its hosted phone system, which is very similar to Google Voice but aimed at small businesses. Phonebooth.com is a product from Bandwidth.com. While Bandwidth.com might not be as well-known as players like Comcast, Verizon and Cisco, in the business VoIP space it’s a pretty big player. Bandwidth.com has its own VoIP network and because of that has more flexibility over pricing, which is one reason the company can launch products like Phonebooth Free.
A problem that a lot of small businesses face — especially businesses that have employees located all over the country — is deciding on a phone system. On the one hand, the investment into a PBX system is often an expense that just can’t be justified in the beginning. On the other hand, having everyone use their own cell phones can appear unprofessional — especially if you are a customer-facing company.
Services like Grasshopper exist and they offer a low-cost way to get features like auto-attendant (press 1 to reach Jenny in Accounting) and call forwarding, but even they have a minimum monthly pricing plan.
Phonebooth Free is, from what I can find, the only free VoIP-based phone system that will give you a local number with up to five extensions, offer call forwarding to multiple sources, voicemail with transcription, and the ability to let users connect with you from the web (like the Google Voice widget) for free.
Free? Yeah. Free. If you sign-up for Phonebooth Free you get a free local phone number for up to five users and 200 inbound minutes a month. Every additional minute is 6¢, which is about the industry standard.
Phonebooth Free includes an auto-attendant so that you can have number-based redirection to go to other employees or users. And like Google Voice, you can set-up call forwarding to forward to one or multiple cellular phones based on rules that you set.
Phonebooth Free also includes support for something called Contact Us Plus, which is a dynamic widget that you can put on your website that offers up contact information (including click-to-call), plus other business contact info like e-mail, Twitter links and a Google Map with your company’s location.
The widget is dynamically generated, which means that if you change your phone number or website or other information, it gets updated automatically.
Phonebooth Free is a brand new offering, but Phonebooth OnDemand is also becoming generally available. Phonebooth OnDemand is a product aimed at businesses that need either more inbound minutes or need to be used with desk phones and have other features from a full-featured phone system.
Phonebooth OnDemand is $20 a month per user and includes unlimited local and long distance calls on the Phonebooth.com nationwide network, supports HD VoIP and IP phones, can handle conference calls (that can be set up within the web admin interface), and can do everything that Phonebooth Free can do in terms of number porting and forwarding.
Phonebooth.com has an upgrade path that will let users or companies upgrade from Phonebooth Free to Phonebooth OnDemand, if their needs for a phone system extend or grow beyond free offerings.
Phonebooth Free has most of the features of something like Google Voice except for one — outbound calls still appear from the number in which they originate from. I spoke to Todd from Phonebooth.com and he said that while masking tools will probably be available in the future, it will most likely be done on the software side for the individual cell phone clients, because those systems handle that sort of thing better.
On the mobile end, Phonebooth sees the potential for mobile and VoIP integration — especially at the business level — and they have plans to make their whole platform integrated across the big mobile platforms. As it stands, you can use your cellular phone with either Phonebooth service without a problem, but mobile clients are something that will be featured in the future.
By offering a free option with a direct upgrade plan to another product, Phonebooth Free is really attractive for small businesses — or even individuals who want to maintain separate business and personal communications fronts, without having to invest in getting multiple phone numbers or phones.
We think that VoIP’s business implications are potentially even greater than its consumer implications, especially as more and more companies move or consider moving to IP-based PBX systems. Hosted services like Phonebooth have a real opportunity to get business from companies that might not want to invest in full systems that someone has to be paid to maintain, but that still want an easy way to route and manage incoming and outgoing calls.
Does your business use any sort of VoIP solution? What do you use and why? Let us know!
Tags: bandwidth.com, Google Voice, grasshopper, phonebooth, phonebooth free, phonebooth ondemand, voip
Back in October we wrote about Appboy, a social network for mobile app developers and users. Since launching, Appboy has continued to evolve into a community for both developers and users to find and rate apps, as well as submit ideas for new mobile applications. Appboy has just rolled out a big update to its site which improves the design, adds stronger integration with Facebook and Twitter, and makes it easy to keep up with what your favorite app developers are doing. The site has also launched a new companion iPhone application and started a new partnership with Best Buy Mobile.
The Appboy Profile pages have been given a total facelift. Now, in addition to displaying your user activity and favorite apps, users can link their Twitter accounts with Appboy and auto-publish any #appboy tweets directly to their Appboy page.
For users, this feature might not get a ton of play, but for app developers it becomes a pretty handy way of keeping your Appboy profile up-to-date with little fuss.
Users can also now login with either Twitter or Facebook Connect. We really like that Appboy has embraced other social networks instead of trying to force users to keep everything in the Appboy garden.
You can also now follow other users, which is especially helpful when you want to keep up with what’s happening with your favorite app or app idea.
The App Pages have also received a new coat of paint, with an easy way to vote “Love It” or “Hate It” on an app’s page. Comments and reviews can now be viewed separately, which is nice when you just want to distill one group or the other. Plus, users can now add related links, videos and reviews to an app page which can help provide better context.
User reviews are also now ratable — Digg style — which allows the most helpful reviews to appear higher on the list.
In addition to a new website design, Appboy now has its own iPhone app. The free app gives users all the functionality of the website right on the iPhone. That’s really nice, especially when you are looking for a new app or want to leave a review for something you just purchased. Sure, the App Store works for that too, but what is nice about Appboy is that it is a community.
Check out these screenshots to see the app in action. As you can see, the interface matches the website and it’s very easy to get around and rate or learn about apps and app ideas.
One of the most unique features of Appboy is that it isn’t focused on just one platform; it’s focused on mobile apps in general. So whether you have an Android device, an iPhone, a BlackBerry or a Palm Pre, you can find, rate and suggest ideas for new apps.
Best Buy just launched a new mobile site, Best Buy Mobile, and Appboy powers the Apps section for iPhone, Android and BlackBerry. The top 10 apps from each platform are fed into Best Buy’s site and those apps come directly from the Appboy community.
This is a pretty big step, considering the relative age of the site, and we think it’s because Appboy has shown itself as being committed to the mobile community as a whole.
Appboy continues to be a great resource for developers and users wanting to connect and share what’s cool and what sucks in the mobile app space. The new iPhone app is a really nice addition to the site and we hope that the Best Buy partnership will bring even more users into the community.
How do you find out about new mobile applications? Let us know!
Tags: android, appboy, apple, apps, iphone, iphone apps, mobile apps
Today at the Google’s Campfire One event at the company’s headquarters in Mountain View the Internet search giant is launching its new app store for business, known as the Google Apps Marketplace.
Last week, we broke the story that Google Apps Marketplace would launch today, reporting that it would be an app store integrated within Google Apps that would allow third-party developers to sell software directly to Google’s business consumers.
Now, with developers gathered at the Googleplex, we’re about to learn how Google Apps Marketplace works and, more importantly, which apps are going to be available at launch.
My live notes from the event are below:
- Note: you can watch the live stream of Google Campfire One on the Google Developers YouTube Channel.
- Vic Gundotra, Google’s Vice President of Engineering, has just started speaking
- Vic is talking about feedback it’s received from its business customers. Google believes that business apps should be run in the cloud. One problem: to use multiple business apps, you need to log into multiple websites, which can be messy and a security threat.
- Google Apps Marketplace announced.
- Details: $100 flat fee, no matter the amount of apps you launch. 20% revenue share. This is an important number, as most app stores charge 30% revenue share, especially Apple’s iPhone app store.
- Over 50 partners for Google Apps, including Aviary, Expensify, Intuit, and others.
- Now Google is talking about the technical details of how to get your app added into the Google Apps interface.
- Google’s diving into secure data access via OAuth. Google’s clearly thought about how to make sure that information that apps need is received from users, but that apps don’t take more information than they need.
- Google has brought up a developer, Ryan, to demo some of the code to integrate his app with Google Apps Marketplace. It’s a “Hello World” type of app.
- If you go to http://www.google.com/enterprise/marketplace/, you’ll see the store’s future splash page.
- Intuit is demoing. They’re the people behind Quickbooks and showing off their Intuit Online Payroll app within Google Apps.
- They’re showing of integrations of Intuit’s payroll system within Google Calendar. Logging in via Google Apps seems intuitive.
- New demo: Scott from Atlassin is demoing Jira Studio. The dashboard they’ve built with Google Apps integration is very impressive. Screenshots coming.
- “Fingertip access” to Google Talk. It has Google Docs integration, and is available today. It’s a very killer apps for development management and issue tracking.
- Another demo: Manymoon.
- The key themes seem to be A) how easy it is to code integration with Google Apps, and B) How many nifty things you can do linked to Google Apps. Google Calendar will definitely benefit from these apps.
- Everything will be available tonight for purchase
- Last demo of the night: Ryan from Appirio, a cloud solution provider. It’s a tool for managing your team’s cloud applications, such as Salesforce. It’s meant to transition enterprise into the cloud more effectively.
- One interesting demo: you can trigger actions within your email with Appirio. You can, for example, get information on customers right from within your email (it’s embedded!). The embeds are called Gmail contextual gadgets, and they are really nifty.
- Example: Customers emails you saying that a project is behind schedule. With Appirio, you can access from Gmail the projects that are open with the customer vis PS Connect. It’ll show budget, the status of the project, end dates, and notes.
- Google’s David Glazer (Engineering Director) is closing the campfire session.
- The President of Google’s Enterprise division is on stage. Security, compatibility, simplicity, and more are possible through cloud apps, which is why Google has bet so heavily on it for enterprise.
- 25 million active users of Google Apps. And apparently once companies of 20,000+ employees switch to Google Apps, they don’t switch back.
Tags: app store, Campfire One, developers, Expensify, Google, Google App Store, google apps, Google Apps Marketplace, Google Campfire One, trending
Spam and phishing have been ongoing problems at Twitter for some time, and tonight the company announced that it is stepping up its efforts to stop them with some new features, described as being able to “detect, intercept, and prevent the spread of bad links.”
In a blog post, Twitter writes that the protection works by “routing all links submitted to Twitter through this new service … even if a bad link is already sent out in an email notification and somebody clicks on it, we’ll be able keep that user safe.”
How exactly they do that, we’re not sure, but Twitter notes that you’ll start seeing short links using its own “twt.tl” URL shortener in direct messages and email notifications. As users who have been victimized by phishing scams (and those annoyed by the constant barrage of dodgy DMs) can likely attest, it’s a feature whose time has most certainly come.
Tags: phishing, security, twitter
Google’s call for medium-sized cities to pilot its high-speed broadband network has attracted the marketing wit of another locale: Greenville, South Carolina.
Citizens of Greenville have launched the “We Are Feeling Lucky” campaign –- an obvious play on Google’s “I’m Feeling Lucky” button — an effort that will culminate in citizens trying to form “the world’s first and longest human Google chain.” Glowsticks will apparently be involved in the event, scheduled to take place on the evening of March 20.
The site makes heavy use of Google products and services — likely not a coincidence — in getting its message across. There’s also a social media component, with “We Are Feeling Lucky” having a YouTube channel featuring citizen videos, a Facebook event for the “Google on Main” event and a Twitter hashtag: #LuckyGVL. Here’s one of the YouTube clips featuring a variety of Greenville residents:
While citizens work to spread the message and draw Google’s attention, a formal proposal from the city is in the works to be submitted to Google by the March 26 deadline.
Greenville joins a growing list of cities that are getting creative in hopes of landing Google’s fiber. Topeka, Kansas, drew headlines when it unofficially renamed itself Google, Kansas. Duluth, Minnesota, went viral (to the degree a video about a public infrastructure proposal can) with a YouTube video. Columbia, Missouri, has 5,000+ fans of a Facebook Page supporting Google Fiber in their town.
When Google announced its plan to launch the fiber network test, the company made it clear to us that it has no plans to become an ISP. Nonetheless, it appears that lots of cities would be more than happy to serve as the test bed for its vision of a faster Internet, which its claims will have speeds of up to 100x typical connections.
Which campaign for Google Fiber has been your favorite so far? Let us know in the comments.
Tags: Google, google fiber
