12seconds Lays An iPhone Video Messenger On Top Of Twitter’s Social Graph

Posted on July 11, 2009 by Mike Story
12seconds-logo12seconds has had an iPhone app for a while now. Unfortunately, it was fairly crippled because iPhones couldn’t shoot video, so you had to take still pictures and make 12 second collages. Now, with the iPhone 3GS you can shoot video. And so 12seconds is making its app a whole lot better.

Unveiled today at our Real-Time Stream CrunchUp event, the “12seconds Video Messenger for Twitter”, is an app that’s all about sending short video messages to your friends. And while 12seconds already has a social graph of its own from its website, it understands that Twitter’s social graph is much larger — and so it’s laying this new app on top of that.

Basically, how it works is that you record a video and then select the friend (or friends) you wish to send it to. This friend is then sent a direct message through Twitter with a link to the video. Or if they have the app also, it comes in through there. This is different than a lot of the current Twitter video offerings out there in that it has a main focus on messaging between smaller groups of people rather than the public, though you can do that too. And this app utilizes the iPhone 3.0 software’s new Push Notifications to let you know when you have a new video to view.

12seconds undoubtedly hopes to make use of the new iPhone 3.1 SDK that was just released to developers. It is rumored to have some subtle changes to the way it allows apps to handle video.

And while Twitter is the key social graph that 12seconds is targeting with this app, it will eventually roll integration with other social networks as well, including the big one, Facebook.

The app should be available soon in the App Store.

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Twitter Reigns King of The Web Widgets, But For How Long?

Posted on May 28, 2009 by Mike Story

Twitter LogoThe most recent numbers from Nielsen indicate that Twitter grew 1,382% year-over-year, registering a total of just more than 7 million unique visitors in the US by the end of Feb, 2009. Not only is that huge growth in one year, but in the month of January, Twitter.com clocked 4.5 million unique visitors in the US, meaning the service grew by more than 50 percent month-over-month. But can that Growth be sustained?

It is hard to imagine that any technology could sustain that kind of growth. But what is even more surprising and potentially derailing for Twitters growth, is the lack of Twitter adoption in the teen market. Continue reading →

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What do you mean by Web 2.0?

Posted on April 20, 2009 by Mike Story
web20Web 2.0 doesn’t have a strict and standard definition – the truth is, there are many elements and moving parts. So let’s start out historically for a second. Tim O’Reilly, the founder and CEO of O’Reilly Media, Inc., thought by many to be the best computer book publisher in the world, and an activist for open standards, wrote in a October 2005 article, “The bursting of the dot-com bubble in the fall of 2001 marked a turning point for the web. Many people concluded that the web was over hyped, when in fact bubbles and consequent shakeouts (a major change in an organization or system resulting in streamlining) appear to be a common feature of all technological revolutions. Shakeouts typically mark the point at which an ascendant technology is ready to take its place at center stage. The pretenders are given the bum’s rush, the real success stories show their strength, and there begins to be an understanding of what separates one from the other.” Continue reading →

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Would you pay $1 a month for Facebook?

Posted on April 17, 2009 by Mike Story
As fast-growing Facebook closes in on MySpace in the U.S. in terms of unique visitors later this year, it's burning through millions of dollars a month (some claim it's as high as $20 million), with no magic levers to reverse the trend in the short term. In November 2007, when Facebook took a $240 million stake from Microsoft, the investment was at a $15 billion valuation. Now it's down to $4 billion and probably less. As Caroline McCarthy reported a few days ago, rumor has it "one potential investor submitted a term sheet for a valuation in the neighborhood of $2 billion." As Facebook works its way toward a probable IPO, the big question is how can it show it can make money? Well, one way--and I'm not the first to suggest it--would be to charge a nominal monthly fee. With that in mind, I ask a simple question: how much would you be willing to pay to use Facebook per month? A lot of people I ask say they'd pay $1 a month--or preferable a yearly fee of $10 if paid in one shot. But some say they have Facebook fatigue and would rather quit than pay a dime. Comments?

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The Difference Between a Blog and CMS?

Posted on April 13, 2009 by Mike Story
The Difference Between a Blog and CMS? Software that provides a method of managing your website is commonly called a CMS or "Content Management System". Many blogging software programs are considered a specific type of CMS. They provide the features required to create and maintain a blog, and can make publishing on the internet as simple as writing an article, giving it a title, and organizing it under (one or more) categories. While some CMS programs offer vast and sophisticated features, a basic blogging tool provides an interface where you can work in an easy and, to some degree, intuitive manner while it handles the logistics involved in making your composition presentable and publicly available. In other words, you get to focus on what you want to write, and the blogging tool takes care of the rest of the site management. WordPress is one such advanced blogging tool and it provides a rich set of features. Through its Administration Panels, you can set options for the behavior and presentation of your weblog. Via these Administration Panels, you can easily compose a blog post, push a button, and be published on the internet, instantly! WordPress goes to great pains to see that your blog posts look good, the text looks beautiful, and the html code it generates conforms to web standards. If you're just starting out, read Getting Started with WordPress, which contains information on how to get WordPress set up quickly and effectively, as well as information on performing basic tasks within WordPress, like creating new posts or editing existing ones. - Story

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