Social Networking Software
Building a social network website has become very easy nowadays with the availability of high quality social network software like iSocial. With just a domain, hosting and iSocial anyone can create a social network around the topic of their choice, whether it’s for celebrity gossip, school alumni or a local community group, online social networks can benefit a whole range of people.
Nor do you have to make concessions on the type of features because when you choose software like iSocial it comes with all the same features as you are likely to find in Facebook, Orkut and Hi5. With groups, online chat, profile pages, photo albums, videos and more you get everything the ‘big boys’ get for a fraction of the price.
Although most social networking software does everything that the major players can do, you might need to customize the design or add some of your own features specific to your requirements. For example you might need to add some geo-location feature or integration with SMS. Regardless, iSocial is very easy to customize since it is built using PHP and mySQL (just like Facebook!) and has an external templating system which means you don’t have to be a programmer to change the layout and design.
To make iSocial and even more compelling choice to power your social network, it has Open Social integrated which means that all the apps that have been built for sites like Orkut and MySpace can also run on your website! You can create your own Developer Network for your social network and since iSocial uses Open Social for the external applications, there are already tens of thousands of developers who can start creating applications for your site right away.
iSocial lets you create your own social networking software
So while you might not want to create an exact Facebook Clone, using ready made social networking software can save you a lot of time, money and frustration compared with developing a site from scratch.
Facebook Application Development
Ever since Facebook opened up their platform to allow 3rd party developers to access the core engine and build new applications on top of their existing site Facebook has experienced incredible growth as a vast array of companies rushed to build apps that can tap in to the Facebook market.
Without a doubt some of the most popular apps are the simple ones like personality tests, quizzes, comparison tests and games – all of which can be created and start getting users within a month. Take Zynga for example, they created a number of social games using Flash and are now one of the most successful companies to have exploited the Facebook audience, even introducing a revenue stream thanks to their micro-payments which allows users to buy digital items for just a few dollars – the tens of millions of people that play their games means that only a fraction need to get their credit card out in order to make the company profitable.
While you might not want to be as ambitious as Zynga for your first Facebook application development, the potential is still there to create a wildly successful app that can utilize micro-payments (or even SMS payments) to create a real income pulling Facebook app.
Agriya has been helping customers with their Facebook application development since Facebook first opened their doors to 3rd party companies. Our Facebook developers are able to create virtually any type of Application, whether it’s to promote your website or to try and tap in to the enourmous market on Facebook, get in touch with us and get a free quote on your Facebook app idea.
Get a Facebook App Quote
Find out more about Facebook application development.
Advertisers try to Use Geolocation – and the Law Wonders if it Should
In the world goes crazy over privacy breaches on Buzz, and Facebook, there is a lot of material in the new geolocation services, to get worked up over. There are nearly 100 location sharing applications out there, and one thing that really comes across anyone who has used any of these, is that Privacy features are not really central to the way these applications work.If we thought that Facebook and other social networking applications, outraged our privacy, that sounds so old next to what geolocation services are able to do. The US government is quickly trying to catch up with protecting the rights of the citizens affected by these new services. It can’t be long before advertising services try to geo-locate you to serve you advertisements for the place you are in at any point. But now, if everyone can find you – you could be in trouble with the government, or with your job for it – if you can’t ever keep your life to yourself. And will the police be allowed to check on your location if you forget to turn off that function when you are on the run? Do they have the right? All these will be thrashed out, over the coming years as privacy begins to be defined as has never been imagined before.
Meanwhile, there are major new services jumping on the bandwagon all the time. Google Chrome’s latest version, uses a new kind of geolocation. It looks at your WiFi network, and all the ones around you to determine where you are. And the most anticipated entry in the arena is Facebook – as it plans to announce at its f8 developer conference. Facebook has been trying to get this feature right for about a year now, and has included location sharing regulations on its boilerplate. App makers are now going to be able to make use of the Facebook location API to get some real useful functions out there.
But Facebook isn’t really trying to steal market share from established players like Foursquare. In fact, Facebook plans to make use of all the location services, to present them all on its network. What Facebook seems most interested in, over destroying any startup’s business model, is in trying to gain advertising share from Google. Facebook has had revamped business pages for months now, in hopes of enticing small business advertisers away from Google. Google’s Latitude is a great competing service in this area.
With such a Fragmented Geolocation Market, how does one keep Track?
South by Southwest (SXSW) is a group of immensely popular cultural festivals for music and film in Austin, Texas,that rouses tremendous interest in culture buffs everywhere, and this year’s edition, is set to start this week in March. The reason this is of interest to a tech blog like this is, that social media services get a tremendous boost catering to events of this magnitude where there is always something spectacular happening undiscovered that someone or the other needs to spread the word about. But in the months leading up to the festival, social media reports have been completely swamped with one new buzzword – Geolocation.With breakout services like FourSquare, and Gowalla leading the charge, and now with Twitter and Facebook getting in on the act, one has to wonder, if geolocation as a market really big enough to take all this action? To begin with, there are at least 50 new geolocation services coming up right now. And that is on top of the players that make it crowded market as it is. But some of them can be quite useful. Take the Twitter app SitBy.Us. If you are at a conference for a festival, it lets you see exactly where everyone is, physically.
Vicariously is another. It collects check-ins across all kinds of services around the city, to give you the exact locations of the people you’re interested in. It is quite Beta as of now though, as it isn’t really reliable. Or take AOL Lifestream – you don’t have to track specific people on it, you just need to check out the location you’re interested in, and it’ll give you the names of everyone who was there. And it works with Foursquare. So there are alliances forming already; and this can’t be a really good thing. There are so many competing services, that people will probably miss out on check-ins on a service other than one’s own. These geolocation services just need to get together and share their data, before the market gets too fragmented. Gowalla for instance, isn’t readily available on any of these third-party services. Google of course, has an answer – GeoRSS. As you could probably well imagine, the service aggregates information from all the location services for any given place.
When geolocation really takes off, we’re going to get used to a new way to look at a representation of our neighborhoods on the Internet. And if people are not to lose interest, new applications will have to keep coming in. But these innovators are going to have to offer new ways to people harness all the information. Facebook and Twitter could be answer to this problem. They are entering the geolocation space soon; and after the really throw their weight behind their vision of getting every service to come together.
Is the Mutual Friends List on Facebook but the Warmest Social Networking Tool Ever?
Facebook hardly stood still long enough in 2009 to let its millions of new members get a little used to being on board. They’ve brought redesign after redesign to Facebook, and never stopped trying their hand at getting privacy on Facebook right. That is only understandable; the social networking scene is only a couple of years old, and certainly does need to find itself before it settles down to something more constant. And even if Facebook does try a little bit to look like Twitter, it could be forgiven that. But Facebook’s greatest invention this year has to be the Mutual Friends feature. To begin with, this isn’t anything that other competing social networks couldn’t begin to copy. When you log on to your account on Facebook, and visit someone’s page, Facebook will display on the bottom left, a little list of all the people this person knows, that you know too.At most times, this could be the perfect way to break the ice with someone. The moment you learn someone’s name, you can look him or her up from your Facebook account on your mobile, and walk up with a great line like, ” Oh I seem to recognize your name; aren’t you friends with my colleague from work? I’ve heard so much about you”. And if you meet a stranger who’s a little more with it in the social networking scene, you could even have a little fun, and explore what friends you have in common. Once they know that they have a certain number of friends in common with you, they absolutely will have to take you on too. Twitter could never do something like this; Twitter is about following people, and not about being friends with someone.
No other service grows at a half-million new members a day; pretty soon,you could be looking up people in a room, not just by who they know in common with you, but what interests they share with you. If you catch someone at a party about whom you get an alert for Facebook that he enjoys the music of the same rock group you do, you are in business.
If Facebook were to Pay you to Pick a Lower Privacy Setting, Would you Bite?
Getting anything done on the Internet is all about advertising. As resentful as people are that the advertising that comes at them is constant, is privacy-robbing and obtrusive, it does bankroll the services out there that we use. Today, premier services cost you money; but what if you were given a choice to either pay, or give them enough personal information to allow them to target relevant advertising at you? The advertisers would pay the website for the ability to target advertising at you, because they would have a better chance at making a sale. In the future, privacy will no longer just be a simple box you can casually leave checked by default. It will be something that will end up either saving you money, or costing you. If you choose to have a lot of privacy, the website may well ask you for a $5 subscription. Your privacy or the lack of it, could be your credit card; and your privacy could mean different things, depending on what part of the Internet you were visiting.Social networks always had a hard time trying to protect your privacy while encouraging you to share as much with your online friends at the same time, to make for a more enjoyable social networking experience all around. Protecting your privacy has become more difficult now ever since real-time search entered the Facebook equation.Facebook has tried every kind of balance between privacy and openness, and still doesn’t seem to be quite comfortable.
The policy adopted by Tumblr, Twitter and Yelp over privacy when you are on these networks ask that you only put out anything on the services that you don’t mind having everyone hear about. Location-based apps like Foursquare and Loopt are services that have the luxury of not really needing a formal privacy policy. If you are on these, you’re supposed to want to share freely. Privacy is the currency these services use too; although there is really no need for it. You only get to look into others’ lives, as far as you let them into yours. And everyone is supposed to share freely. Indeed, Foursquare is set to become the Twitter of this year. Twitter got people addicted to sharing the banalities of their everyday lives. Foursquare gets people addicted sharing with everyone the places they’re going to all the time.
The only real guarantee to privacy is not in any policy anymore; it is about self-restraint in curiosity over other people’s private lives. You only need to share anything if you wish to look into other people’s lives yourself. But when the entire point of a service is the fun of giving up any semblance of privacy, why have a privacy policy at all? If it helps everyone save money?
When people in the 90s sat down for the first time to sign up to their first e-mail account, they would typically take the password part of the form either very seriously or completely casually. The very serious would dream up an impossible mish-mash of numbers and letters to keep safe from spies. The more regular types among us would treat the password as a joke – who would it even occur to, to want to hack into our worthless accounts? Why not pick 12345, we would wonder. As people got more and more inured to the dangers of poor security on the Internet, websites and e-mail services began to require that people used six characters at least, with at least one number. So now, Internet security has been raised immeasurably to the use of abc123.
A couple of months ago, a company called RockYou, that makes software for the social networking sites, made a mistake and allowed a hacker to copy and publish their entire database of tens of millions of passwords. It wasn’t online for very long before it was taken down, but lots of people interested in computer security, managed to download a copy. No one has ever had this kind of window into the password habits that people have. You have to be in law enforcement to have access to something like that. As for insight, students and computer antivirus experts pored over the lists – and they quickly found that of all those millions, one in 100 just used 123456 as password, and an equal number did 12345. Lots of people used their girlfriend’s first name, or a popular car model name. There was a collection of 5000 very common passwords that were used by one in five.
All that a hacker would need then is, an automated program that can try the 5000 passwords one by one, until something hits. If making more than three wrong guesses within three minutes locks them out of an account, they’ll have the program just make no more than two attempts at a time, and come back after three minutes. It’s not like they don’t have millions of accounts to try to break into while they’re waiting. People don’t really need to make the best and strongest passwords out there to stay safe; they only need to be somewhat better than people who choose elementary passwords. They only need to stay one step ahead of the simpletons. When there are so many of them to be caught, why would any hacker want to waste his time guessing a slightly more difficult password?
YouTube is a Big Fish in the Internet Pond; but in the Real World, Maybe not so Much
Most video serving websites will look at YouTube with awe and feel hopelessly dwarfed; but could there be anything that actually dwarfs YouTube? As it would happen, YouTube, a site that has a guaranteed lock on about 15 minutes of its viewers’ time every day on average, feels envious of the kind of command the regular boob tube has on people ‘s time that they would not mind spending hours in front of it. The way a small niche YouTube clone site looks at enviously at YouTube’s 15 minute sand thinks “Now if only I could get two of those minutes, what a difference it would make”, YouTube salivates for a couple of hours stolen from television.It’s not that YouTube lacks the content; they once said that viewers pumped a couple of dozen hours of video every minute into YouTube’s servers. They have the content; they only need a way to help viewers find the things they like, and watch them. It could take YouTube through the the roof. And this barely profitable company could really begin to pull in advertising.
What is the biggest search engine on earth after Google? Well, it’s YouTube search, of course. And YouTube searches are much more difficult for search algorithms to decipher, because there is actually nothing in the videos that actually has any keywords that the algorithm needs. No search engine actually understands the images in a video; they depend entirely on the tags submitted by the uploader. They need all-new approaches for YouTube search; kind of like the data mining that eBay or Amazon use, to give you recommendations based on what you already are known to like. Maybe they need to announce a search design prize like Netflix did, to improve recommendations.
And of course there is negative marking; if their recommendations are often wrong, they could turn visitors off.YouTube and Google figure that they need personal information for this; much, much more than what they have already. They’ll need to spy on your e-mail, look at what you do on Facebook, look at what your friends do on Facebook, before they can get something right.
They figure that perhaps users need to be given a more TV-like experience if they are to compete with it. Maybe if they could get their viewers to relax a little, and have instant gratification like with TV, they could get somewhere. If YouTube could just move away from having users used search to discover videos; if users could just flip through stacks of videos with the minimal buffering wait period, then YouTube will finally have it made.
Via – to Repost links on Facebook With
One of the most well-used and addictive features on Twitter has to be the ReTweet. People find an idea they like, they just pass it on so quickly; and millions of people can get on to it in no time. It is practically viral. Facebook,the name that gets mentioned in the same breath as Twitter, happens to be much more popular, and is much larger; but it doesn’t spread news like wildfire quitein the way Twitter does.Facebook is all about privacy; Twitter is all about letting it all hang out, with almost all Twitter profiles listed as public, open for anyone to see. On Facebook, you could not even make your profile public until a year ago. Facebook has the need to change its culture, turning away from jealously guarded privacy, to compulsive sharing. So far, names have not been clickable on Facebook as they have been on Twitter; and of course, there is no simple ReTweeting syntax. ReShare has been Facebook’s lukewarm attempt at bringing in the sharing function, but it hasn’t been successful so far.But Facebook is not done with tweaking its own ReTweeting feature. They’ve just released a Facebook feature called Via. It lets you repost something a friend shared with you, and it stamps the originator’s name on it with a Via attribution. It’s online already; you just need to pick up an item a friend has posted in your News Feed, and click on the Share button. You’ll get a Via option here with the name of the original friend stamped on it. When you finish sharing it, it will show up on your profile, with a link that goes to your friend’s profile too. Your friends will also find them on their News Feeds, and that is the closest thing to the ReTweet that you can imagine.
But Via Is only useful for links that someone’s posted. You can’t Via a status update, or your picture for instance. But it’s a first step, and it could evolve. They have the most useful kind of reposting feature up now with the link reposting ability, and that is what counts. Facebook will probably have a service like Tweet meme tracking how far a reposting of anything goes, and it could make Facebook really valuable in a world where instant real-time search is becoming deeply mainstream.
Bing Tries to be too Thoughtful for Google
Have you ever wondered how it is that when you try to look up the weather on the Internet, all the brand-name weather sites just can’t agree on what the weather is going to be like. Well, Microsoft certainly has noticed this, and is trying to win some points trying to smooth this over for for you. When you search on Bing for the weather in your local area, we will certainly get your usual list of major weather forecast websites; but if you venture further, you can find an automatic Bing Compare laid out for you of what all the other websites say. And to help you decide which website you prefer for your forecast, Bing will even write up a journal for you of what the weather has been like over a period of time. Additionally, Bing will also match up the forecast against what really happened, and over the course of a month or two, to give you recommendations on which forecast service is best to choose.Certainly these are improvements, but most interesting about them is the fact that it gives us some clues as to how Bing is trying to outdo Google. Take the innovation at Bing that they call entity cards. Searching on subjects like celebrities, travel destinations, or disease
symptoms, little “entity card” boxes pop up with what Bing considers to be useful asides. If there are a lot of people around the world searching for the same thing, say the city of Paris, Bing will reckon that it must be some event in Paris, and try to offer a hotel and travel information, and listings of important events in those entity boxes. Or if you are looking for information on a pop music personality, Bing will fill those boxes with tour dates and ticket availability information.All the major search engines have great integration with the important social networks; but Bing is looking for ways to take it higher. In Twitter, Microsoft allows you to sort tweets by celebrity, and look up the busiest Twitter celebs first. Bing’s Facebook plan is to lay your friends out on a grid and allow you to choose among the most active ones in lots of convenient ways. Bing isn’t about real revolution yet; it is about thoughtfulness, trying to think like the user, and plying them with lots of delightful little cosmetic touches. This seems to be working, in an age of short attention spans. We’ll get to see if it is a Google beater, not long from now.
Facebook Addiction Tumult – Accessing Facebook through Email
Everyone is abundantly aware of the kind of stupendous distraction social networking is. Facebook estimates the number at 10 billion man minutes – the amount of time that Facebook’s 350 million registered users spend on the site every single day, taking time away from their homework, their official duties, and their families. Doctors seem to say that these are people who deal with a real and active addiction; and informing support networks to keep themselves in check is often as good of an idea for Facebook, as it is for substance abuse. Many people just close or deactivate their Facebook accounts. Others, form pacts with their friends to help keep them off their habit most of the time. Some people even give over control of their account to a trusted friend (presumably one who is less ravaged by the addiction)who will change their password, and not give it back to them until they feel truly able to control themselves. Parents of Facebook-hooked teenage children certainly seem surprised at the determination they see in their otherwise irresponsible young charges, trying to keep Facebook from running away with their whole lives.But children on the whole seem to be in better and control of their dependencies than working adults. Businesses in America and the UK are increasingly finding that they need to block access to social networking sites at the company’s server, to keep this habit from lowering workplace productivity. And of course, employees are certainly not taking a hint at this; they and are finding workarounds, such as accessing Facebook through their e-mail. For the less-than-responsible, a service called MoDazzle lets you do this.. You just send an e-mail to MoDazzle, and it fetches you all your latest updates through your e-mail. You can do most of the stuff on MoDazzle that you would get to do on Facebook.
It isn’t just the matter of self-control that Facebook brings up at work and at home. In America, the state of Florida has ruled that lawyers and judges cannot be Facebook friends. There is the matter of being responsible, and then there is something like this that is clearly silly. Lawyers who are friends, are not suddenly going to turn strangers just because one of them got promoted to being a judge.
Related Posts from the Past:
Recent Post
Categories
- 360Contest (6)
- Use Cases (4)
- Agriya Events (6)
- Agriya Ideas (11)
- Agriya News (111)
- Anova (12)
- Burrow (5)
- BuySell (3)
- Channel (7)
- Client Interviews (1)
- Computer Security (7)
- Crowdsourcing (7)
- Developers (2)
- Extensions (1)
- Feedy (2)
- FP Platform (9)
- Getlancer (1)
- GroupDeal (11)
- GroupWithUs (1)
- Holidays (1)
- internet (16)
- Internet News (57)
- iSocial (8)
- latest technology (21)
- Life @ Agriya (1)
- Marketplace-Quote (2)
- online marketing (15)
- PartyPlanet (1)
- Private Shop (1)
- search engines (9)
- SEO (1)
- SEO Game (19)
- SF Platform (2)
- Social Media News (17)
- social networking (44)
- Startups (2)
- Uncategorized (1)
- Volume (3)
- Web 2.0 (8)
- web design (6)
- Webmaster Articles (114)
Archives
- June 2013
- May 2013
- April 2013
- March 2013
- October 2012
- September 2012
- August 2012
- July 2012
- June 2012
- May 2012
- April 2012
- March 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- November 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- August 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
- September 2009
- August 2009
- July 2009
- June 2009
- May 2009
- April 2009
- March 2009
- February 2009
- January 2009
- December 2008
- November 2008
- October 2008
- September 2008
- August 2008
- July 2008
- June 2008
- May 2008
- April 2008
- March 2008
- February 2008
Page optimized by WP Minify WordPress Plugin