Daily Bits

Social Networks

What’s Taking Facebook too Long to Release an iPad App?

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It’s been more than a month since iPad was released into the wild. Published reports say that Apple has already sold around 300,000+ iPad units since it first became available. Stocks from Apple Stores are depleting so fast. International release is about to happen on May 28. This means that iPad is slowly getting into the hands of many users. So, in due time and if Apple managed to cope up with the demand, the iPad is on its way to millions of fans, who are most probably Facebook users as well.

Now, why is it taking too long for Facebook to release a native iPad app? In case the Facebook folks are not aware of, the iPad is meant for content consumption, as they say. And if there’s one social networking site where users can consumer content and information from – it’s in Facebook.

But of course, you can always say that iPad users can always visit Facebook.com using the Safari browser on their precious iPad. But that’s not the best way to consume content, especially real-time updating contents from Facebook on an iPad. The iPad content consumption is best experienced through the apps.

Alright, I am blabbering here now. I just want a native Facebook app for iPad. I’m tired of using third-party social lifestreaming apps for iPad that has Facebook as one of the accounts supported. They don’t give justice to the real Facebook experience. I want the official Facebook app for iPad. I’m sure, other iPad users want this as well.

In case you can’t wait no more and don’t want the Safari browser route, here are some third-party lifestreaming apps that let you access your Facebook account and do several native Facebook activities on your iPad:

Originally posted on May 11, 2010 @ 8:06 pm

Five WordPress Plugins for Integrating Facebook to your Blog

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Facebook recently made some waves into the social media scene when it launched the new Facebook social plugins – a set of tools that would enhance your reader experience on your blogs and websites. But prior to this, if you want to integrate various Facebook functionality to your WordPress blogs, you can already do that through various Facebook-relate WordPress plugins.

Here we give you five Facebook WordPress Plugins that will help you integrate some Facebook functionality to your WordPress blogs.

1. Facebok Social Widgets

This WordPress plugin allows your users to have an engaging social experiences within your blog. It is hosted by Facebook so your blog readers can still participate in your blog discussion even if they haven’t signed up for your site.  This plugin allows you to add the following social plugins to your blogs – like button, activity feed, recommendations, like box, facepile and live stream. (Download link) [Read more…] about Five WordPress Plugins for Integrating Facebook to your Blog

Originally posted on May 3, 2010 @ 12:51 pm

Twitter Awareness Among Americans Exploding Exponentially

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Another day, another report. This time it’s from Edison Research/Arbitron Internet and Multimedia Series detailing on Twitter awareness among Americans. Key findings of the Edison report revealed that awareness of Americans on Twitter increased significantly from 5% in 2008 to 87% in 2010.

The study, which was a result of three years of tracking data from a nationally representative telephone survey of 1,753 Americans conducted in February 2010, also showed that Twitter and Facebook both have almost the same awareness (Facebook has 88%) but in terms of usage, Twitter is still behind Facebook. There are now 7% Americans of the 17 million Twitter users who actively use Twitter, while 41% actively maintain a Facebook account. [Read more…] about Twitter Awareness Among Americans Exploding Exponentially

Originally posted on April 30, 2010 @ 12:00 am

3 Reasons Why Foursquare Should Not Sell Out

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With its userbase already reaching 1 million this week, coming from a 170,000 membership during the last quarter of 2009, there’s no doubt Foursquare is the hottest and fastest growing location-based social networking service right now. With 20 employees running it, it is not so surprising that talks are already popping out regarding possible sell-out.

And if you’re still doubting whether Foursquare is hot right now, what if we tell you who the rumored buyers are. Well, some of the major players who are reportedly eyeing Foursquare include Yahoo, Microsoft and Facebook. Yahoo was rumored to be willing to buy Foursquare for $100 million. Now, the question is not whether Foursquare will sell out, but rather should Foursquare sell out?

I don’t think so. And here are 3 reasons why Foursquare should not sell out.

1. Location-based social networking is hot and still growing

Both three major social media players namely, Google, Twitter and Facebook are gradually exploring the location-based social media sphere. Google is slowly evolving its Buzz service to have the same cool features as Foursquare. Twitter has activated geolocation of tweets and Facebook has been trying out these feature as well. As for Foursquare, it’s the very essence of its existence – location aware social sharing and networking. Foursquare just need to ponder on why the three major players are wanting to have Foursquare feature’s to understand that it’s going to be the next big thing in the social media ecosystem.

2. Along with growth is the commercial revenue potential

Foursquare currently offers free advertising to small shops and restaurants as it generates revenue from selling ads business chains. It recently launched Foursquare for Business where it gives simple self-service tools that would allow business manager to cook up various kinds of special gigs that would attract customers to business establishments. This is a good start at trying to tap on a business model. Once this service goes viral and businesses spread the word out how Foursquare is helping out drive in customers, you can just imagine how big it will be for Foursquare. Location-based social networking and recommendation site has all the potentials to bring in revenue whether be it for ads or other means. And Foursquare is already ahead of the game. [Read more…] about 3 Reasons Why Foursquare Should Not Sell Out

Originally posted on April 24, 2010 @ 12:19 am

Google Buzz Posts Are All Auto-Feeds

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Here’s an interesting look into the current buzz being posted on Google Buzz. The study was conducted by Post Rank which tracks engagement activities on over two dozen social networks and recently added buzz posted on Google Buzz.

During their analysis of  Google Buzz feeds, Post Rank found some interesting points regarding all the noise that have been building up on Google Buzz.

Turns out, approximately 60% of the content on Buzz is from Twitter! Many users have hooked up their accounts to automatically repost their content from Twitter either directly, through FriendFeed, or via another service.

The runner up to Twitter? Another set of bots! This time, it’s automated alerts from feeds, e.g. CNN publishes a new story and a bot pushes it out to the Buzz stream. All in all, those two sources account for almost 90% of the Buzz stream, and even in the remainder there is a long tail of Google Latitude updates, ping.fm, and others. Unfortunately, there just doesn’t seem to be much original and/or human-generated content in Buzz. Perhaps you shouldn’t hurry to install that Buzz button on your site just yet…

What does this all mean. If you’re a social media marketeer eyeing to implement some marketing campaign on Google Buzz, well you might want to hold back for awhile as there is no clear chance that your campaign would reap higher engagement.

It seems that the activities on Google Buzz right now are all automated. Well, of course you might be engaging with “real people” in your own Buzz streams and that’s pretty understandable since you’ve selected people to follow on Google Buzz yourself.

But then as what Post Rank’s study yielded, majority of Google Buzz posters are actually non-human.

Originally posted on April 21, 2010 @ 12:34 am

Are You Going to Play FarmVille on Your iPhone, iPad or Android Phones?

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I was supposed to cover something else but stumble upon this post and of course, it’s about so FarmVille, so I should cover it first. Anyway, Mashable is running this report saying that Farmville may soon be coming to the iPhone, iPad and Android devices.

Of course you know Farmville, right? If you’re on Facebook and you have not played Farmville even just for once, chances are you’ve received updates from your friends saying that – so and so have harvested something from their farm. Yes, that’s Farmville folks.

Anyway, one proof cited by the report is the blog Supererogatory found out that the domain names farmvilleandroid.com, farmvilleipad.com and farmvilleiphone.com have been registered under DNStination which happens to be the registrar of FarmVille.com.

If those domains were not enough to convince you that FarmVille is coming to mobile platforms, how about a Zynga spokesperson response to Mashable’s inquiry saying – “Zynga plans to expand to various mobile platforms. We cannot provide additional information at this time.”

That’s pretty obvious, right? Unfortunately, the Zynga spokersperson did give out any other detail. But it’s probably enough to elicit some excitement among FarmVille users and fans which currently number around 80 million right now.

Are you ready for FarmVille mobile? Will you play FarmVille on your mobile phones?

Originally posted on April 20, 2010 @ 12:38 am