Daily Bits

Arnold Zafra

Twitter Wants to be @anywhere

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Twitter just announced its latest strategy at possibly conquering the web – Twitter @anywhere.  The Twitter blog describes this simply as a new set of frameworks that will add the Twitter experience anywhere on the web.  In other words, Twitter will soon be rolling out a framework that will let you do your Twitter activities where ever you maybe on the web – minus the need to visit Twitter.com.

Twitter @Anywhere aims to bring all the features of Twitter that we have all grown to love and some even hate – read tweets from friends, celebrities, companies, media outlets, fictional characters and more, follow any account and be followed by any account and interact with the whole Twitter community. Again without leaving what you are currently doing on the web.

And how does Twitter plans to implement this? Not through APIs. It’s too complicated for simple folks like us but rather a more simpler method – through Javascript.

The Twitter blog also stated that once Twitter @Anywhere is ready for launch, there will be more participating sites including Amazon, Adage, Bing, Citysearch, Digg, eBay, Meebo, NYT, Yahoo and YouTube. Yup, those are the sites that have become part of our daily online fare.

Soon, you’d be able to follow your favorite NYT journalist directly from her byline or tweet a video right from where you are in YouTube. Or if you’re a Yahoo fan, you can discover new people to follow on Twitter while getting your daily news fix from Yahoo.

Sounds promising? Actually it is. If only Twitter gave some examples on how this is going to implemented. But then, patience is a virtue dear readers.  We can count on the Twitter folks to roll this out the soonest time possible.

Big Changes Are About to Happen with Digg

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Do you still use Digg for bookmarking and sharing these bookmarks? Do you still maintain a Digg page? If you do, well expect to see some big changes in Digg in the coming weeks. These changes were announced by Digg CEO Jay Adelson during the Digg’s annual SXSW party.  Some of the changes that you should expect include – streamlined submission process, new personalized homepage, unlimited amount of topic pages, new commenting system and better curation tools.

Read Write Web got the full details of these changes. You may check out their coverage or read the summary below.

Personalized homepage – The new Digg personalized homepage will be populated by popular stories among your friends in relation to the topic that interest you.  This will become your default Digg homepage and not the generic Digg main page anymore. So, once this new feature kicks in, it is imperative that you sign in with Digg.

De-emphasizing the Power of Submitters – The new Digg will now put more premium on who votes for stories rather than who submit them. It will also put more emphasis on third-party services like Twitter and Facebook by allowing auto-submission of stories from these services.

More Twitter and Third-Party Integration – The Digg folks finally realized that to stay relevant in this “social integrated” market, they have to establish a relationship with other sites. So, more integration with Twitter as well as other social sites will be established in the coming weeks.

A Whole New Platform – Digg has stripped down its old infrastructure and completely rebuild a new platform. Possible directions will be more advertising and monetization option for Digg traffic, and the old Digg effect will no longer apply.

All these changes will be rolled out in the coming weeks. Digg is also testing beta testers and you can sign up here.

Smartphone Phone Users Want More Freebies

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Here’s another interesting statistics from comScore, this time regarding the behavior of smartphone users. According to the report,  smartphone users’ behavior has been changed, whereas before smartphones were used to access email, calendar and contacts while on the go, now more smartphone owners are using their devices as much for personal productivity as for entertainment purposes.

Around 74% of smartphone owners are using their mobile devices for personal use. And when asked how much time they spent using their smartphone at various times of the day, the result showed that smartphones are being used practically all through out the day.

So, what’s the point of these findings?  It is definitely very important if you are managing a brand campaign or even if simply running mobile advertisements. This opens up a huge audience base for your product and could result to sales if you can handle it pretty well.

But of course, businesses wanting to engage in mobile advertising would want to know how much of these smartphone users will be potential customers. In other words, how perceptive are they with mobile ads.

Surprisingly, comScore found out that there are quite a number of smartphone users who are willing to partake of what’s being offered on mobile ads.  Smartphone users are more than willing to take on grocery coupons, barcodes that can be scanned by the smartphones, savings offers on consumer products, movie theater offers and more.

Given this fact, if you’re planning to take on the mobile ad space for your products, be sure to make your ads engaging enough to merit a click or tap on your link from smartphone users. The mobile ad industry is still young and is bound to grow leaps and bounds in the coming days.

Despite the Criticisms, Apple iPad is Selling Like Hotcakes

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We have to give credit where credit is due. And in the case of the ongoing success being reaped by Apple at this early pre-order stage of its “magical and revolutionary” iPad, it’s just but natural to commend Apple for coming out with a great promotional. This is what Apple does best – introduce a new product, excite would-be customers, open it up for criticisms and then later on, offer the product for sale.

Once again, Apple has proven its marketing prowess. This early, the iPad is reportedly selling like hotcakes. An estimated 50,000 units were reportedly sold in the first two hours after the pre-order process started.  Stocks are dwindling down, affecting those who are still in the process of pre-ordering and choosing the pick-up option.

And while everybody else are busy, it was found out that the iPad filing has just passed through the FCC.  This heightens the excitement so more. So, it’s true – the magical product is indeed coming. I’m pretty sure when the FCC news broke out, more people started clicking on that pre-order button.

So, have you wondered why despite the criticisms that were hurled against the Apple iPad, many customers still purchased it?  Call it Apple consumerism. A disease that has inflicted me and the rest of the thousands of Apple fans who have pre-ordered the Apple iPad and who will pre-order it until supply lasts.

In case you’d want to ask, yes I’m pretty excited and couldn’t wait for April 3 to come.

Foursquare Ties Up with Starbucks, Free Barista Badges for Every Check-in

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Foursquare continues its quest for media hype dominance with yet another interesting feature. It just launched a new promotional gig that ties it up with Starbucks. So, on Thursday, the next time you visit a Starbucks outlet and check-in to your Foursquare account, you will be rewarded with a barista badge.

The Starbucks barista badge can be earned if you’ve checked-in to five Startbucks outlet. Although, there’s no physical reward yet is given if you earn the barista badge, I’m pretty sure Starbucks and Foursquare will come with something to give out some form of physical rewards in the future. A free tall Cappuccino perhaps for every barista badge earned? This may sound appealing for frequent Startbucks customers, but Starbucks’ Chris Bruzzo, vice president for brand, content and online said that the company is eyeing different rewards set, not just free Starbucks drinks.

This is a rather unique gig and both companies stand a chance of getting positive gains from this deal. Starbucks can use Foursquare to gather feedbacks from clients and perhaps gain new clients as well since Foursquare members can easily share their feedback to their network of friends on Foursquare.

For Foursquare, it already gained from the deal since Starbucks is planning to use the Foursquare business analytics tools that it recently launched.

So, the next time you visit a Starbucks outlet, don’t forget to check it in to your Foursquare account. You might be the first person to earn that “prestigious” barista badge.

AOL Gets Serious with its Social Aggregator – Lifestream

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AOL wants to spoil the Google Buzz party with social lifestreaming service of its own, dubbed Lifestream.  This was previously launched as part of AOL’s platform but due to the success it gained in terms of users AOL decided to launch it as an independent platform.

Basically, Lifestream is just like Friendfeed, aggregating your updates from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, Delicious, Digg, Flickr, MySpace, YouTube and online real-time updating services. It lets you follow other Lifestream members and see all of the content they published on those online sites.

Lifestream also lets you filter out content from specific networks to reduce noise and cluttering in your own Lifestream “stream.” Reversely, you can auto-publish your updates from various social networks to your Lifestream account. Lifestream also has a location feature similar to Foursquare.

For checking out your account, Lifestream offers several methods. You can sign in to your Lifestream account via Adobe AIR interface, on the web, on your iPhone or Android phones. When you access Lifestream on your mobile phones, it automatically notes your location.

In other words, AOL’s Lifestream service is a pretty much full-featured lifestreaming service and it’s a good decision from AOL to launch it as a separate product. With the popularity enjoyed by real-time, lifestreaming services Lifestream can carve its niche into this market.

While it is a pretty solid service, it will also nice if Lifestream would open up to currently popular lifestreaming services such as Google Buzz and Twitter and would not thread the path towards becoming their rival.

You may check out AOL Lifestream at lifestream.aol.com. If you do, please share with us your opinion about it.