Social Media news 23nd to 27th April

Social Media news 23nd to 27th April

Jlori, Flickr

Hellooooooooo! How are you? sorry it’s been a while! I’ve been busy making lots of audio for you which will be out very soon, More news of which will follow in the coming weeks :)

Well what can I say but things don’t always move fast in tech world, Google’s long awaited file storing system Google Drive has finally parked up and is ready to use (I am right now!). so here are some facts about the service.

With Drive you get 5GB free storage but let’s face it most people that use the service will need more space so for an update to 25GB you pay £1.54 ($2.49) a month and for extreme users you can get 100GB for £3.08 ($4.99) a month and for big businesses you can get 1TB for £30.80 ($49.99) a month.

Drive fits like a glove into google’s already bulging stable of products and works seamlessly with Gmail and Google+ being able to share photos via drive to either service. Now you can store and view your files offline as well. Google Drive allows live multi author updating meaning a group of people from different parts of the world can work on a research document in live time and changes will be automatically synced to the desktop file of every user with the ability for them to leave comments I.e reasons why their research findings have changed and a notification will be sent to everyone about the change.

Google has massive hopes for the cloud as I written about last year.

The Future’s Bright, The Future’s Cloudy

Google are facing stiff opposition from their longtime rival Microsoft with Skydrive changing profoundly to compete with them. Skydrive will work out cheaper and now once you upload a file to them you can send the link out via email and social media to tell people you have content up you want them to see. You don’t need a Skydrive account to access the file. (As far as I am aware everyone gets the same link to the same file so if there were any copyright infringement it would be easily dealt with!)

My Thoughts

I don’t see Google pushing to open up files on Drive to non users or at least if they did it would be of a token read only functionality. Google will use Drive as a backend product for users to store photos, videos, word documents and audio files on the cloud. I personally hope to see more integration with Blogger, Feedburner and maybe even Youtube but mainly feedburner as then their Blogger service can fully compete with Wordpress as you would be able to store your bands music or companies podcasts on the service. With Drive as the host and add a timed release function to simultaneously upload to iTunes and your website at the same time and add the new episode to the Google Listen directory amongst others providers, while sending out an update on social media (like you can do with new blog posts) to tell everyone that it’s up.

Both services are available on mobile phones Google on Android with and iPhone/iPad version coming soon but Microsoft are ahead with a windows phone version and iPhone/iPad version already available. Both have desktop/offline capabilities. I think Microsoft are the early leaders with more free space, being able to have more in place with phone apps, is a cheaper service and non skydrive members can have access to files however I believe Google drive offers more longevity with the ability to multi author documents, Google having a much bigger share of Cloud storage and what the future may hold with the possibility of great fluidity between Drive, Feedburner and Blogger. Things have just got interesting!




What do you think?



Will you be storing more on the cloud?



Do you use any existing services?



Have you given the service a test “Drive” yet?

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Social Media News 12th to 17th February

Hmm to trust a tweet?

We've all been there before you know you see a tweet that a random celeb has died. In the olden days (well not that old!) you would have been like a midge to a lamp and retweeted or posted an R.I.P but things have changed, you've been burned once to often, Jeff Goldblum was alive! Now you wait for the BBC or CNN to post it or check their website. Most of us heard the news of Whitney Houston's death before AP tweeted it but we didn't trust it. I give two reasons first we've been burned before and also I'm certainly not likely to trust an account by Big Chorizo (simply because the name questions legitimacy). Twitter seems to be the biggest news source out there but with the lack of verification there is still hope for the traditional media outlets.

MySpace 2.0

MySpace is back baby! and it seems they have been listening and changed focus towards music 11 months ago they lost 10 million users in 1 month but according to them they are gaining 40,000 new users every day since the launch of the new music player in December and the largest free music collection in the world of 42 million tracks. They are clearly going after Spotify and with the same level of Facebook integration. Important things to note though are that the new users may actually be old users re joining and it is harder to revitalise a company that has fallen from grace than building a new start up in the Tech world.

Is This The End of MySpace?

but at least this is a step in the right direction and part of what I said I wished for in an article last year.

Are you Pintrested?

Information overlord Mark Zuckerberg sure is and has set up a page for all his pins here www.pinterest.com/zuck. Pinterst is by far the hottest start up of 2012 and has already reached 10 million users incidentally al'lot of which (including Zuck of course) have connected through their Facebook account and over 100 brands are connected from Sesame Street to UNICEF.

Does Mark Z's profile mean Facebook are interested in buying the company or adopting the idea for the social network?

www.pintrest.com/joncassidy is where I'm at!

Facebook Verified

While we are on the subject of Facebook adopting ideas! It's been announced they are to offer verified accounts for celebrities and other public figures. This is something Twitter and Google+ already do while showing a badge on the profile. Facebook are not going to show a badge on the accounts but they will give the users an option to display a nickname rather than their real name, they will also appear in your people to subscribe to more often. The feature will start as invite only to those users with high subscriber counts and the user will have to supply two forms of identification such as passport and birth certificate to ensure it is them.

msnNow

Last year there were rumours that Microsoft were building their own social network, rumours I didn't agree with as they are making too much money from Facebook it would be stupid to cut ties. Microsoft have created a website and Facebook social reader as an aggregator of social media trends across Bing, Facebook, Twitter and their venture with NBC BreakingNews.com but not Google+.

How will that work out for the 17 year old Web Portal?

Microsoft Phone Scam!

I finally got a call from this scam. This is an India based scam that where a “Microsoft Technician” phones to to alert you that there is a'lot of malware on your computer and they direct you to a part of your computer called eventviewer this is a log of each time you send an error report. Say iTunes was running slowly and you try and close it down and you get the option to end now via a popup and another one appears saying send error report to microsoft. this does not relate to viruses. They ask to gain control of your computer remotely DO NOT ALLOW THIS!!!!. They then try and hard sell you software that you can actually get for free online. DO NOT GIVE THEM YOUR CARD DETAILS!!!!, Once they have your details they can and will keep taking money from your account.


If you or someone you know has been a victim of the scam then go to this site http://www.actionfraud.org.uk/

Microsoft will never phone you to report any problems!

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Social Media News 6th to 10th february

Image by qmnonic, Flickr

Fancy a toy farm?

If you love Zynga's games then you will love the news that Zynga and Hasbro have struck a deal to create real life Farmville toys. The toys are expected to be released by Autumn 2012 just in time for Christmas weirdly enough.

Will it be in the form of a toy farm or will it be cuddly cow toys?

Facebook turning Listen stories into Adverts

For a while now we have seen sponsored stories about what page your friends likes but Facebook are moving a step closer to their goal of 100% Social Ads. This week we see the beginning of a trial which sees your listens been promoted I.e If you have listened to Lana Del Rey's new album on Spotify this can be shown as an advertisement on your friends news feed. I don't see this as a bad thing as we already see what our friends are listening to on Facebook and let's face it I would rather see what my friends are reading, watching or listening to as an advert than being bombarded by a load of irrelevance. This will allow advertisers to reach the most relevant people and for them and Facebook to make the more money.

Satellite Tweets

Twitter has partnered with major Satellite providers Iridium and Thuraya so that more people can use Twitter SMS (The companies original set up) Worldwide.

“Now, even if phone lines and the Internet are inaccessible — for example, in a war zone or after a natural disaster — people will be able to share news and stay informed via Twitter,”

Twitter Statement.

The company have set up long codes which you add as the recipient and twitter will tweet the tweet this like their statement says is very helpful in places with little or no bandwidth where there is war or a natural disaster.

Google Love!

At Christmas time google made their sites snow and now someone has found a way to get some Geek love from Google search, just type

sqrt(cos(x))*cos(300x)+sqrt(abs(x))-0.7)*(4-x*x)^0.01, sqrt(6-x^2), -sqrt(6-x^2) from -4.5 to 4.5

into google search (or copy and paste) for some google love before valentines day.

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