Entries tagged with social networks - Channel 10

Dashwire 2.0 Launches: Backup Your Phone and Sync Content To Social Web

sarahintampa — Thu, 03 Jul 2008 00:19:00 GMT

On Tuesday, mobile phone app Dashwire released Dashwire 2.0, a much improved version of their mobile phone backup and sync service. With Dashwire 2.0, you can backup your phone’s content – like photos, videos, text messages, ringtones, bookmarks, speed dials, contacts, and call logs – to Dashwire’s site on the web. This syncing is done automatically, so if you make a change to your phone, that change is reflected on the web, and vice versa. In addition, the app lets you share your content across several social networking sites. You can easily and automatically send photos and video to flickr, Facebook, bebo, and Twitter and you can also update your Twitter and Facebook status from the app. The Dashwire website also offers you a public page where you can share your mobile uploads with others who can then leave comments on the items. Dashwire 2.0 is free for Windows Mobile users - just go to m.dashwire.com from your phone’s browser to sign up.

Loopt’s Mobile Network Now Runs Virtual Earth

sarahintampa — Fri, 13 Jun 2008 01:57:00 GMT

At the recent AWDC event on the 10th, Loopt CEO Sam Altman demonstrated the upcoming Loopt mobile social network for iPhone (Loopt currently runs on numerous phones already, including Blackberry). The mobile social network they provide helps you connect with friends in the real world by dropping pins on a map to show your friends’ locations. What’s interesting about all this is that they chose Microsoft Virtual Earth to be the mapping service for Loopt on iPhone. This was spotted by VE evangelist Chris Pendleton, who caught a screenshot of the demo (pictured to the left - thanks Chris!). That’s especially interesting because this seems to be a departure from the mapping service they used before. Hmmm, wonder if they’ll let us switch to Bird’s Eye view? Anyway, congrats VE team! Hey, I heard you were just on CNN, too.

Microsoft Partners with Top Social Networks for Data Portability

sarahintampa — Thu, 27 Mar 2008 15:03:00 GMT

It was announced that the Windows Live division has partnered with five social networks - LinkedIn, Facebook, Bebo, Hi5, and Tagged to facilitate address book portability, as a part of the commitment to supporting data portability initiatives. Using the Windows Live Contacts API, announced at this month's MIX08, the users of the social networks can easily import their Windows Live contacts into the social network web sites. Starting today, you can visit www.facebook.com and www.bebo.com to find your friends using the Windows Live Contacts API. Hi5, Tagged and LinkedIn will be live in the coming months.

Additionally, a new site, Invite2Messenger, will let social network users invite their friends from their social networks to join their Windows Live Messenger contact list. As of today, Facebook works, with the other networks coming soon.

This 2-way street for moving relationships from site to site is more secure than other methods, like "screen scraping," which is the term used to describe the process of allowing one site access to your address book by providing your login credentials (or vice versa). This new process respects your privacy while still allowing for the open flow of data.

Microsoft's FriendFeed?

sarahintampa — Tue, 25 Mar 2008 15:50:00 GMT

With all of the buzz about FriendFeed in the blogosphere lately (guilty!), Mary Jo Foley's article on C2 ("Microsoft's Take on FriendFeed) peaked my interest. C2, recently unveiled at this month's TechFest, is a social network data aggregation service built by Microsoft Research. The service would aggregate data from across the social web - Facebook, MySpace, flickr, Spaces, etc. as well as from your "personal social network" of email and IM. Not only that, but the service would work online, on your desktop, or on your mobile phone or PDA.

The C2 project features three parts: aggregation, with a sharing privacy model; user experience; and a unified model for traditional and emerging communication tools, such as e-mail, social networks, and instant messaging. Beyond that, not much is known and no online demo is currently available.

In order for a Microsoft Research project to become a commercial product, it is often first be shown off at research fairs like TechFest, where a Product team may decide to pick it up and commercialize it. Pick this one up, I say.

From the sounds of C2, it would be like FriendFeed on steroids - not only social networks integration (hopefully you'll include twitter) but email and IM, too? If you add in sharing links and shared RSS posts, then I would have to say that could be a killer app. If it offered everything FriendFeed does plus the additional items, and the online/offline availability, then it would have great potential to be an example of "Microsoft cool."

Let's see this thing launched already - call it beta and put it out there!

Social Network Screensaver

sarahintampa — Tue, 29 Jan 2008 03:10:00 GMT

A new product called Chirpscreen is a screensaver that displays information from your social networks. Having just launched into beta, the screensaver currently shows content from Facebook and flickr, but plans to offer much more in the future. The Facebook content includes status updates from your friends and the flickr content can be your photos or photos from the network that match a particular tag. The application works by collecting the information from 3rd party sources via its APIs or RSS feeds to display a screensaver of your personalized content. With the screensaver active, pictures and updates from your friends float slowly across your screen. Each piece of content the screensaver shows is linked, so you can click it to open up a web browser that goes directly to that page. Chirpscreen is currently available for Windows only.