Rayzz 3 Front Page Screenshot
Today we’ve got some very exciting news for you as we publish the first ever screenshots of our new Rayzz 3.0 software – sure to get the hearts racing of all online community admins everywhere!
Rayzz 3.0 Home Page
(Please feel free to ‘steal’ the screenshot above and post it on your blog or website when discussing the upcoming release of Rayzz 3)
Simply beautiful, isn’t it? Rayzz 3.0 is going through final testing and once finished will include the beautiful and seamless integration of the following modules:
- Videos
- Music
- Photos
- Blogs
- Articles
- Discussion
Who Could Use Rayzz 3.0?
Rayzz would be perfectly suited to a golfing community portal. You’ve got the videos to provide video demonstrations on how to reduce handicaps and get better putting accuracy, photos to show some of the amazing golf course locations, articles to give insight and technical theory on various aspects of the sport and a discussion board to let members interact and ask questions.
You could even customize it a bit more and integrate Google Maps to show where all the golf courses are, create a directory of golf courses all over the world and let members view, comment and share them.
Stay tuned for some more screenshots which I’ll post later this week!
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.
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.
Google New Social Networking Attempt – An Appropriately-Named Google Buzz
Google has always been interested in social networking; Orkut was one of the first successful social networking portals out there, and Google snapped it up. Orkut never really quite made it past niche markets in India and Brazil though. But Google still had its core search business that had never been stronger. But in a world where it is beginning to emerge that social networking like Facebook can in some cases overtake basic search in raw Internet usage share, and a world where people prefer the links they come by on their social networking forages over searching for things themselves, Google has been taking a good hard look at gaining a presence here for itself – as a way of hedging against future eventualities. Last Tuesday, Google finally came through on its social networking promise, with Google Buzz; a way that lets Gmail account holders pass around photos, videos, and general updates.Google Buzz is going to be an added feature on Gmail, and not an independent service. This gets it started on an excellent user base right on its first day. All of Gmail’s 176 million users, will automatically find themselves on Buzz, and their friends circle on Buzz will be their most frequently e-mails contacts. So what does someone do on Buzz? The same thing as any other standard Facebook clone – users post their status, they post their pictures from Picasa, their videos from YouTube, and of course, messages from Twitter. If you look at it, Buzz seems to look like it got a lot of inspiration from Facebook; and the real Facebook, certainly has a lot to worry about now.
Trying to out-Facebook Facebook may not really work at this stage though; Facebook has had a six-year headstart, and has 400 million users. How much banality can people share at one time? But Google actually feels that overloading people with banal information is the way it can become relevant. Google’s search and relevancy algorithms, they feel, are going to make Buzz so easy to use in a time when people have a superfluity of information to sift through; Google’s powerful search filters can pick the needle of interest out of the haystack of irrelevance so well that people will want to leave Facebook behind.
Facebook is trying to step into Google’s home turf too for its part – into instant messaging. Facebook plans to use the Jabber protocol to allow other instant message services, to integrate with Facebook’s own. AOL’s AIM will be the first. AIM users will log into Facebook right through their familiar AIM environment, and directly find out about which Facebook friends are available to message to. Facebook’s game, it is clear, is no longer to just be a website that people go to mess with friends on. They want to be Internet infrastructure; they want to be the behind-the scenes social networking foundation people end up using whenever they need to get in touch with their friends, no matter what website they go to.
In Japan, Tweets Cost Money to Read
Successful social networking sites haven’t exactly found a plan to turn their popularity into reliable revenue. Twitter in Japan operates through a local partner, Digital Garage, that is launching a paid Twitter service there. Twitter users in Japan are able under this plan, to close their tweets to followers unless they pay up. Digital garage of course, gets a commission. Why does Twitter imagine that anyone would pay to read a tweet? The answer lies in the way the Japanese Internet industry is built.
To begin with, paying for online content is pretty much established in Japan. People access premium content through their cell phones regularly, and pay through their monthly mobile bills. Why, Internet on cell phones is even more popular in Japan than Internet on PC. Japan is also a considerably more celebrity-crazed culture than elsewhere, and people will happily pay to keep up with the latest on their favorites. They don’t have to be international superstars or anything; a Twitter recipe feed by a celebrity chef for example, attracts fanatical following. And value for money is somewhat easier to provide in the Japanese script; the Japanese script allows more information to be packed into 140 characters than does English.
Keeping up is much easier when there is a proper and official Twitter client to use on the cell phone, as there is in Japan. Twitter’s 2 million users in Japan can certainly give the paid model enough momentum. All eyes rest on this preliminary foray into turning social networking into a paying business model. Time will tell how successful it is.
Is Facebook’s “25 Random Things” the Latest Incarnation of the Chain-letter?
On the terrible morning of the 9/11 attacks, the news crawls related pieces of the grave news all day; until someone decided to put in the crawl the following words: ”Beyonce no longer likes the word Bootylicious”, right next to news of how people were trapped in the burning buildings. The world has been moving towards context-free, reason-free information for a decade now: sound bites, news crawls – all trailers of parts of the world of news you will never see – served up predigested. And now, this: Facebook’s 25 Random Things. It goes like this: your Facebook friends will send you an e-mail of 25 obscure, maddeningly irrelevant facts about themselves. They’ll say things like how “ I watched the 17th episode of Friends 700 times”, or “I taped back my eyelids and tried staring at the sun three hours straight in the middle of summer”. What’s more, they’ll show you how to do much the same yourself, and will encourage you to compile a list of 25 banalities to send to 25 other people. No one really knows what will come of this, but this has to be the latest in the chain-letter concept that refuses to die.
This then, is how Internet bandwidth is used; just try this if you will: search for “Facebook’s 25 Random Things” on a search engine; your trouble will reward you with tens of thousands of such lists, all cleverly brought together by Facebook – they’re the ones who embrace this the most enthusiastically. Facebook’s reasoning is that such an exercise helps you contemplate the meaning of your existence. The Random Things meme is certainly sweeping the Internet up ; there were 5 million notes created last week for Random Things compilations. Facebook admits that this is a kind of record in note making. The whole “Random Things” concept has been around ever since the dawn of email: the 100 questions fad. Some things just never die.
If You Call Google’s AdSense Revolutionary, What do you Call Facebook’s Social Maps?
The old Web was bumping along just fine until YouTube, Facebook and the others came along and gave it a shot in the arm and turned it into Web 2.0. But Google & Co. aren’t content with just changing the Web; they’ve turned out to control the Web, and therefore all the advertising that is done on it. The problem that the advertising industry has traditionally been raised to solve is: how do you catch the consumer off-guard and serve him an advertisement, he may not want to watch, or believe? There was consumer resistance in traditional advertising, but at least the companies held some control in their own hands how much money to spend to brainwash the consumer. But barely has the advertising industry caught up to how AdSense and search results work, than Facebook comes along to finish off the traditional advertising premise altogether.
Businesses at least had the consolation back then that the consumer had not much else to turn to for product information other than company-controlled advertising. But they do now: forums, Facebook, and Twitter. People have a hundred Facebook friends, and whatever they feel about a product, they vent their feelings and generate powerful word-of-mouth. When friends receive product information from a “friend”, the advertisers suddenly arte made irrelevant and have nothing left to say. Word of mouth has always found a great friend in the Internet of course; but Facebook and Twitter make word-of mouth particularly powerful.
For instance, when you have your own social networking facility on a company intra-net or a trade group the familiarity and identity felt with other members of your group is particularly strong. Advertised opinions will pale in comparison. Facebook’s social map Loomla, or Connect, for example, bring along you your personal cloud of trusted friends wherever you visit on the Internet. Any place you visit on the Internet, Loomla or Connect will tell you how many of your Facebook friends have visited before, read it, and said something about it. It’s like travelling with your own crowd of friends no matter where you go. And if any advertiser is going to want to get to you, he’s going to come through your friends. Perhaps Facebook is going to overtake Google and its AdSense after all in online advertising.
Social Networking When Things do not go as Planned
Facebook posts, rants in cyberspace, personal e-mail, are all a part of the good life. Exactly how will we feel about all our digital tracks when life isn’t that good though? It is all over the news how a little careless Facebook mistake by a woman in Canada put her disability benefits into doubt. Well, what else could happen if you were careless with your Facebook revelations?
Let’s say in happier times a couple had a crazy party; one of them is just very proud of the partying he is capable of, and impulsively posts pictures of his wild hijinks on Facebook. In a child custody battle, how would party photos of him in drag strike the judge? If you personally manage to be discreet with your own profile, what do you do about descriptions of your life that your friends have on their page? They may not be too discreet themselves; they could open your life to one and all.
After a particularly sad event like a death in the family, what does one do with the online presences used by the deceased? One could plan for such an event, by placing all of one’s passwords on a service like Legacy Locker; they allow you to record all your important passwords, to be turned over to family, when they prove that an unfortunate event has occurred. Facebook will help you keep the account of the dearly departed, but will help you make it less live, by removing status updates and such. Some e-mail companies like Hotmail, will help you out by sending you a CD’s worth of the entire e-mail account held by the departed.
Internet services like social networking are so new and so full of life now that no one really wants to think of how reality can spoil the party. But as people like to repeat a lot these days, these are parts of your digital life; you wouldn’t want it to just get lost in space, or get into the wrong hands, now would you?
Information Security on Facebook – Learning to be Aware
It gets people all hot under the collar thinking about how the social networking sites might be careless with members’ personal friend lists and personal information. But what if those same privacy-jealous social networking members freely pass out their friend lists themselves – on other websites? Social maps exist now, like Facebook Connect, that allow members to carry their Facebook experience, to Amazon, to the New York Times, to Netflix or on any of 10,000 participating sites, and find out what their friends like on those websites.Do the people who connect with social maps realize that those websites they go to with their social maps can actually completely look into their profiles and those of their friends too? When they find out where you go, what you do, who your friends are and what you look like, who knows what they will do with it? Digg for example will use your Facebook profile picture to publish next to recommendations. Other websites will try to share the information they harvest on your viewing habits among fellow businesses. Your Facebook information properly analyzed, can lucratively help them target advertisements to you wherever you may be in the world signing in through that Facebook account.
Only two years ago, the Facebook Beacon app brought all kinds of privacy concerns up; when a user went around the Internet while signed in into Facebook, Beacon was able to record all the places visited and phone home to Facebook. The biggest problem there was, that Beacon was turned on by default; Facebook’s Connect on the other hand, has to be turned on manually.
Facebook Connect also allows you to use your Facebook username and password to log in into participating websites; and then you can choose to have Facebook publish all your Internet meanderings on your profile. They are all doing it these days: MySpace with MySpaceID, and Google with Friend Connect. Of course, there are larger concerns here than having some private company look at Facebook’s information to send you advertising. The courts could subpoena your personal information from Facebook any day if they have reason to believe there is incriminating information there.
Facebook Emerges as the Second Most Popular Video Streaming Website on the Web
With all eyes always on videos on YouTube and Hulu, it’s no wonder no one saw this sneaking up: Facebook is suddenly number three in the video streaming stakes, it was recently reported on Nielsen.com. People keep calling YouTube the most popular; exactly how popular is it? Actually, they just served up about a video for every person on earth last year – more than 6 billion. Hulu comes in second with about a tenth that number, and surprise, Facebook is catching up with about a quarter million videos streamed last month. Facebook even beats Hulu if you would look at it another way: Facebook has more viewers than Hulu. If you would look at it by the number of viewers each service has, Facebook has 10 million, and YouTube has 100 million.Social networking with video is really growing; people watched videos twice as much this year as they did last year. People only spent about half a billion minutes watching videos on YouTube and similar websites last year as opposed to a full billion minutes this year. The problem now isn’t to do with getting people to use the service; it has to do with attracting enough interesting content to keep up the growth. People need to keep making great interesting videos to upload, to drive this kind of growth.
People seem to spend most of their web time these days on social networking sites; having videos right on site makes everything more convenient for all involved, and this could be a reason for the emergence of Facebook as an important video streaming site. Right before our very eyes, Facebook is getting transformed from being a place that people head to to catch up with friends, to being a place where people can share their whole lives with each other with music, games and video in addition.
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