Evan Connors

(if in Dashboard, click that square thing)

Pac-Man comes to life! #vine#vineartvine.co/v/bJtX1WVF2mF

January 29, 2013

My vote for election coverage goes to the NBC Xbox SmartGlass experience. Pretty excellent interactive two-screen experience. Now if only the Android app was available on the Nexus 7…

This is precisely why Foursquare has been my startup crush for years. Not only is it extremely useful for learning what’s around you; it gathers some AMAZING data on behavioral patterns, both in everyday life and in extraordinary circumstances such as Sandy’s reign of terror on New York.

What’s particularly intriguing to me is after the power started coming back on late Friday, people made a mad dash for the bars for a well-deserved drink or five.

Though check-in patterns may have started returning to normal, many people’s lives won’t be for quite some time. Our thoughts are with those still enduring hardships in the days, weeks, and months ahead.

Looks like everything is going according to plan. I’m loving these Connected Apps.

alexiatsotsis:

Boulevard Of Broken Dreams. 

parislemon:

The data isn’t fully accurate — it comes from a sampling of 500 of your followers — but it’s still interesting. My numbers are 5 percent fake, 37 percent inactive, and 58 percent “good”. The low fake count is definitely one good side effect of never having been on the SUL.

(via @erickschonfeld)

This is relevant to me because my follower count wavers a ton, and the new ones don’t always seem very legit. Regardless, I’ve hit 1k, though truth be told this is the 3rd time I hit that milestone since I tweeted about it, and for (seemingly) that exact reason.

Earlier this month, foursquare launched a ground-up redesign of their mobile apps with an even bigger focus on being a recommendation engine for what to do and where to go. This move was designed to court users who want useful community-powered tips, as well as improve usability for the aging app. There were also hints from foursquare about the revamped app experience being a basis for new things to come this summer.

With this week’s launch of Connected Apps, it’s clear foursquare wants to make its mobile apps themselves into a platform for discovery of third-party apps that use foursquare’s API. Several launch partners such as The Weather Channel, Untappd, Soundtracking, and Foodspotting are now providing post-check-in recommendations and other useful data around the places you visit. 

For example, when enabled The Weather Channel will give you conditions and forecasts if you’ve been traveling. A check-in at the local Taco Mac will fetch the hottest beer on Untappd for that particular location and let you check into it or other top brews. Personally, the Untappd integration is great for me, because not only will it remind me to check in with my beer, I don’t have to enter the Untappd app itself to do so.

The addition of Connected Apps into foursquare is a huge win for everyone. Users will find more value in a more robust and customized foursquare experience, and developers have another outlet to get more users and provide relevant data. It’ll definitely be exciting to see the creative ways that app developers will integrate with the service right within the app.

littlebigdetails:

Pinterest - When pinning some image, the selected text of the original page will automatically become your caption.

/via luisafosco

Awesome.

Want to be more Twitter-famous than Lady Gaga? That’s the goal of Fame, a fun new “lottery” built on the Twitter API that wants to give one random person 24 hours of Twitter-fame daily. Every person that joins Fame will automatically follow the one user that is selected daily at 12pm ET, and once a new one is selected, everyone will automatically unfollow the old user and follow the new one. It’s no $640 million, but at least your chances are better.

As a heavy Twitter user, this is a pretty exciting game for me. Not only is there the prospect of reach a broader audience with my tweets (if only for a limited time), but there’s the opportunity of finding interesting new people to follow. Some of the winners so far have been great, and others not so much; however, I think I can deal with an annoying person in my feed for one day as long as I keep finding some great new follows.

Unfortunately, the only ways to keep following a person once their Fame ends are to either favorite a tweet of theirs, or re-follow them later. Also, as this game starts to snowball into Lady Gaga proportions, the quality of tweets people entering and winning may see a decline. At that point I may have to make like a hipster and start hating on it.

I’m not entirely sure what I’d do if I won. To start, I’d probably promote a work-related thing or two (without being tacky about it), and of course I’d show some love to any projects that my friends are working on. Other than that, I’d try to have fun with it and put on a good show.

If you’re interested, join here! And if you win, don’t forget the little guy.

What would you do with your 24 hours of Twitter Fame? 

arainert:

3.5 years of GPS points visualized = awesome. (via Everywhere I’ve Been: Mapping 3 Years Worth of Location Tracking - information aesthetics)

UPDATE 6/25: The app has rebranded as Scope and looks better than ever. I might do an updated review at some point, but then again Dieter at The Verge has given it a run over with more pics & vids than you can shake a Galaxy Nexus at.

At this point, most people who had a BlackBerry have ditched it and never looked back. If anything, most have missed a few features, such as the excellent keyboard or the ease of BBM. For me, the thing I missed most when making the switch to Android was SocialScope, the Swiss Army Knife of social apps. You may remember Chad’s excellent review of that app way back in October 2010, where I got a shout-out on the No Limit blog even before I had taken the job. This post will be sort of a spiritual successor to that, now that an early Android build has been out for a few months now and gone through a few iterations.

On the whole, SocialScope is a pretty good looking app by my standards. The home screen is very Windows Phone 7-like with large tiles for jumping to various types of updates such as notifications, photos, videos, check-ins, and more. The feeds themselves are very cleanly laid out and readable.  

One of the reasons it looks so attractive is the fact that it gives inline previews of basically any type of media and upload service you can throw at it. YouTube? Check. Native Twitter/Facebook/foursquare pics? Lockerz? Check (ugh). Instagram and Picplz? Double check. This app is a content consumer’s dream.

This app also supports a pretty solid list of networks. Twitter and Facebook are included of course, as well as foursquare and tumblr. What you may not expect to sign in to, but can, is Instagram. That’s right, read and (limited) write functionality are available for Instagram in this app. You can Like and comment on images in a dedicated stream, but unfortunately uploads are not supported. This can definitely hold me over until they come out with an actual Android app.

While there is plenty to get excited about, SocialScope for Android does suffer from a few bugs, as well as some feature omissions that made the BlackBerry app so great. It isn’t the most consistent at notifying you of mentions and DMs, at least in a timely manner. The app also tends to forget how to refresh and load the latest tweets. Some glaring omissions as far as features go are no multi-Twitter account support and no ability to post as a Facebook Fan Page. I’m sure those features are in the pipeline, but it’s worth mentioning.

Overall, I’m very optimistic about SocialScope for Android’s potential as a killer jack-of-all-trades social app. However, knowing how the app developers have operated over the last 3 or 4 years, I am not as optimistic about the amount of time it will take to reach that full potential, if at all. The app still has a way to go to be a daily driver for a large amount of people. For me, it was my go-to app on and off for about two months, but I’ve switched back to TweakDeck. That should tell you where the app stands for now.

If you want to give it a shot, leave a comment below or tweet me and I’ll hook you up with an invite!

I’m excited to try this out! It looks like they’ve taken a (great) page out of Facebook’s…book…by attempting to unify the experience across web, mobile, and official native apps. Let’s see how the masses react!

chadatl:

The new Twitter is here, well I don’t have it yet, but it is here in theory! I am extremely excited to try out some of these new features as well as play around with the layout. A question always comes to mind when these updates roll out though, “How often do I (personally) use the native Twitter website + app to actually tweet, search, discover, etc?”

All of the new features of the new Twitter can be found here: http://fly.twitter.com/ as well as in the video below!

By Jim Belosic, CEO of ShortStack.com

Ed. note: ShortStack is an instrumental tool in my job nowadays at NLMC. When they approached me about doing a post here about food trucks, I was game for it naturally. Check out these social tips for mobile eats, and let us know what you think!

Economic woes coupled with a rise in online social networking popularity has created a playing field where food trucks win. Their recession weapon, you ask? Social media. Here are 5 ways food trucks are using social media to improve their bottom lines:

1. Facebook: For food trucks, having a strong social media presence reigns in importance over print flyers and newspaper placements. “Word-of-mouse” packs just as great of a punch as traditional word-of-mouth marketing. With knowledge of that, food trucks are using Facebook Fan Pages to connect, communicate and build relationships with their customers off the streets. 

2. Twitter: Twitter is the golden boy for real-time communication. Tweeting up-to-the-minute truck locations connect hungry customers with their favorite street vendors and foods. As it’s uncommon for food trucks to hold set hours and a location, customers have to get tactical with using social media. Food trucks pose as moving targets; Twitter helps these targets become more hittable.

3. Foursquare: At the end of a treasure hunt there’s usually a reward. Food trucks use Foursquare to provide that reward. Although Foursquare limits badge development to selected brands and campaigns they want to associate with, there are other customer incentives that make checking-in worthwhile. Discounts for first time check-ins, a promo code for repeat customers or a free “x” if you try the day’s special, are all ways food trucks are encouraging their customers to engage with their business.

4. YouTube: Television placements are expensive, making a YouTube video is not. Most recently, food trucks are creating video content to promote their mobile businesses. With camera in hand, social-savvy street-vendors are vlogging and filming food tutorials & customer testimonials to promote their brands and real in customers.

5. Instagram: Food bloggers and amateur food enthusiasts love Instagram. Naturally, the fun photo sharing application has risen in popularity with street-food vendors as well. Food trucks are using Instagram to take and post mouthwatering photos of their daily specials to their Facebook Walls and Twitter feeds.

These are just a few ways social media can be utilized to help promote a growing business easily, effectively and cheap!

What food trucks have you seen that serve up excellent content through social channels?

Here’s a little shout-out to GoRankem for making it on Hypebot again. I had the pleasure of working with these folks in the fall last year while I was gaining my job-hunt bearings, and it was a great time. Plus, I got to go back to Athens a ton. I have no doubt that Adam, Matt, and everyone else in the GoRankem crew will find great success in the future.

buzzfeed:

Rather than trying to save 10% on a Blu-ray player this Friday, do something meaningful that your whole family will be grateful for.

[Forget Shopping, Friday Is Update Your Parents’ Browser Day!]

Also known as “Show Your Parents How to Use Their Upgraded Browser Day”

Great points from BO.LT. The need to cripple things to protect your investment in, and revenue streams from, the App Store made sense in the past, but the product is at a state of maturity. It’s no longer necessary; it’s a nuisance. Open things up and make the world a happier place. Pretty please?

getbolt:

Dear Tim Cook,

We have been eagerly waiting for the new iPhone 5, and the new hardware improvements are nice. However, not allowing web pages to access the iPhone hardware is arbitrary and constrains the iPhone more than CPU, screen, or camera.

It is time to give us a revolutionary new hardware…

Awesome for analytics on brands, as well as some funny words. Give it a shot! This doesn’t look to be real-time or exhaustive, though. It appears that common words and phrases from tweets over a certain amount of time were archived and used for this. Still a great visualization for generally seeing what people talk about when.

VERY insightful. The internet does not forget, thus you may never either.

maura:

I guess one of the benefits of beginning my blogging “career”* while I was still living with my parents was treating every semi-public piece of content I placed on the Internet like something my mom, who I love but who has very rigid ideas of what personal details are “nice” for people to publicly…

Facebook Timeline Screencast

Here is our Livestream we did to preview the new Facebook Timeline (aka the new profile). At the time Chad just ended up randomly getting it, but you can get it now by following these steps. Visit NLMC’s blog too for more fun stuff as well!

What do you think about these changes? What’s your favorite new feature?

Facebook introduces Timeline: This is HUGE. Obviously.

Expect to hear about this a ton over the next few months.