I really love Twitter. I tweet at least once or twice an hour from my phone when watching a movie, playing my xBox, out with friends our just about doing anything you can imagine; including writing for Crenk. I’d hate to see Twitter slip down that slope that few seem to be able to get back up. Kind of like MySpace is right now.
FaceBook’s new iPhone app may be just the thing that pushes it too. Over the past few months FaceBook have tried to match Twitter on all fronts. While FaceBook still markets itself as a social network they have become more twitterish and this is reflected in their new app.
You can have status updates similar to those on the new Windows Live Messenger. You can also blog and surf through your pages more easily. Furthermore, the app incorporates the ‘Pages’ idea which is to coax people to join FaceBook because of the celebrities on there – much like Twitter did…Hmmm.
This app is also really integrated with the iPhone’s call and text features. If you want to call or send a message to a friend you can do so right from your friends list on the FaceBook app rather than closing it and dialling from the phone’s interface.
As an app I think it’s really good but it’s obvious that Facebook are now trying to play Twitter’s game when it comes to status updates, celebrities, micro-blogging and the portability that comes with streamlined apps.
It appears as though Yahoo! may be the first real competitor to Twitter. Other companies such as Facebook have tried to draw people away from micro-blogging back to social networking. But there has been no real competition on the actual micro-blogging front.
A while back, Yahoo! stealthily rolled out Yahoo! Meme in the Portuguese language only. Nobody was all too sure why they did this because as business goes, you’re supposed to promote, promote, promote! Now their reasoning is clear.
It was a test. To see if it stood a chance without causing the company any embarrassment if it failed. They are now tackling Twitter on the global front by launching the micro-blogging platform in the second biggest language in the world; Spanish.
While people all over the world do use Twitter, studies have shown that services are received better by the public when they are tailored specifically to their needs – in this case their language.
While I can’t see Meme over running Twitter on the English servers I can see the new Yahoo! service picking up steam in South America, Mexico, West Africa and of course Spain.
Spotify is undoubtedly one of the fastest growing music and entertainment services on the internet today. And as with all good services they have decided that it’s time for more Apps. They recently announced that they would be releasing an App for android devices similar to those for the iPhones.
This would allow users to access their Spotify accounts easily from their android devices. However, they have a competitor.
“I can’t believe it’s not Spotify” has just launched and is taking on a lot of users as they wait for the official app to be released. It packs much of the same features as what we expect in the official version but lacks in one – offline playback. However, the developers say that this may come later if it continues to grow in popularity.
While I can’t see this app lasting as people tend to veer towards products with an official stamp on them, I can definitely see its use at the present. The developers deserve their time in the limelight because they plugged a gap in the market. But soon the official app will push them out with no really effort.
We all like music. Rock, rap, R&B, metal, rave, trance. What ever your taste sometimes talking about music with other fans is really cool. Discussing favourite songs, artists, concerts or the industry news is what music fans do. iLike is a platform that allows you to do just that.
It’s is about to be purchased by the floundering MySpace – perhaps in some desperation to heal their wounds. Anyway, I’ll give you a quick run down on what iLike has to offer.
Firstly, it combines all of the great music facilities into one profile from across loads of different social networks such as Bebo, Hi5 and FaceBook. So instead of flying around all the different social networking sites to discuss music you can simply go to iLike.
They’re also in tune with the music scene with tons of news and song updates. iLike will also detect what city you’re in and inform you of upcoming concerts and festivals in your area.
And, as expected you can get songs their (well, iTunes). On the homepage there are free Mp3 songs from lesser-known artists that you can download for free. They also have popular songs that you can buy.
iLike also has different arrangements with many different singers and bands. For example, at the time of writing this article they were promoting Creed’s upcoming tour. The smaller things include loads of applications for download and cool pictures and videos for your enjoyment.
Flickr, owned and run by Yahoo is the YouTube of photography. If I ever fancied a change in wallpaper I’d go to Flickr and enter in phrases such as ’forest’ or ’ocean’. I would get back loads of professional photographs taken all over the world that looked stunning on my desktop. However, in getting those results I would always be annoyed at the amount of page surfing through the results I would have to do in order to find the right one. Scrolling down through the lot got on my nerves too.
Now, Flicker must have read one of my five million angry e-mails and changed how your search results are displayed. Instead of having a long list of images with all the information about it to the side such as name, photographer, tags and a description, everything has been streamlined.
The updated search results show a load of small images right the way across and down the screen with just the users name under it in small writing. This is a much better way of searching for images and way less stressful given the sheer amount of images on Flicker.
I am also very impressed with the quality of the thumb nails shown. With other services such as ‘Image Search’ on Yahoo! or Google the images are fuzzy and have tons of useless information surrounding them.
Regator is a very popular news directory which profiles some of the best blog posts from all over the world on a variety of topics. The directory only profiles the Crème de la crème of sites and then only the best articles on those sites.
Today Regator is announcing the launch of their iPhone application. Features include:
· Browse posts from over 500 topics as diverse as beekeeping, geology, indie music, pop culture, job hunting, or basketball.
· Search Regator’s extensive archive, returning results that users have described as being consistently more relevant and higher quality than those returned by Google Blog Search.
· View the most popular blog posts across the blogosphere or in your favorite topic.
· See trends to get an up-to-the-minute, spam-free look at exactly what bloggers in any niche are writing about right now.
· Keep up with the newest blog posts, updated every few seconds.
· Read the full text of posts on the original source blog.
· Share posts via email, Facebook, or Twitter.
· Find more information on a story with Regator’s related posts feature.
One look at my Twitter account will prove that I like the old inter-web. I Tweet, Google, chat, play, surf and download. Am I addicted? No. On average I’d say I spend around 4-5 hours a day at my computer which isn’t bad for someone who makes a living as a writer. However, imagine if you or I were addicted to the internet and were beaten to death for it.
Deng Senshan was shipped off to a paramilitary style boot camp by his parents to cure his computer/internet addiction. These camps are notorious for treating teens harshly with physical and mental abuse. They have even been known to shock their young clients with high amounts of electricity as a punishment.
Upon arriving at the camp, Deng was placed into solitary confinement as though being addicted to the internet was illegal. Then, just days after arriving at the camp, instructors beat him to death because “he ran too slow”.
His family, who paid £600 to have him sent to the camp for a month are calling for the immediate closing of the camp. Three instructors who are taught to have killed Deng are being held by local police.
Internet and gaming addictions are becoming widespread in countries such as the US, UK and France, but loosing your life for it is wrong. I guess this story goes to show what living in China on a day to day basis is like where instructors are allowed to beat, shock and mentally torture kids.
As I write this post my tweet is still trying its hardest to do just that – tweet. No I haven’t gone crazy but Twitter is down and wounded. I look down through the other tweets of the people I’m following and their all saying the same thing – barely getting tweets through.One of my followers commented “that was a fun little time without Twitter”, not knowing that it was all still going on. One blogger at AwakenedVoice.com had foreseen this and reckons it’s down to the amount of third party apps relying on the system. “I think it is very likely that the future will yield a Twitter crash. This crash could be caused by any number of factors.
The Twitter infrastructure may become increasingly unreliable due to the volume of third party requests on the system. The crash could end up being a result of an altered Twitter API due to a change in architecture. Twitter might end up altering their terms of service, possibly in an attempt to make some money, thereby making some of these services unauthorized users. Twitter might be purchased by an entity that makes wholesale changes to all of the above. Or Twitter might end up failing and close down.” This may well hold water as another one of my followers, Emmzy_138 mentioned that TwitPic is also acting up.
The Twitter blog today recognized the problem and gave us a reason : Twitter is under attack. Here is what they said in what was a very short but tense post. “On this otherwise happy Thursday morning, Twitter is the target of a denial of service attack. Attacks such as this are malicious efforts orchestrated to disrupt and make unavailable services such as online banks, credit card payment gateways, and in this case, Twitter for intended customers or users. We are defending against this attack now and will continue to update our status blog as we continue to defend and later investigate.” I will update this post as I get more information. Subscribe to Crenk here to stay informed.
Google have just announced that they have acquired a new technology company that will serve YouTube very well indeed.
That have just invested shares worth over $106 million dollars in On2 Technologies which are a video compression company. This new venture could change YouTube forever giving it faster download speeds and less buffering as a result.
This may also help to cut Google’s massive bandwidth bill of over $300 million per year that is necessary to keep YouTube up and running. By compressing the size of the videos (some of which are as big of 2GB since HD was introduced) this would make the site smaller and easier to manage while attracting more because of a better user experience.
“Because we spend a lot of time working to make the overall web experience better for users, we think that video compression technology should be a part of the web platform.
“To that end, we’re happy to announce today that we’ve signed a deal to acquire On2 Technologies, a leading creator of high-quality video compression technology.”
Last week, here at Crenk we reported that Microsoft and Yahoo! are entering into a deal to combine search technology and the revenue from their engines in a bid to strike Google who has a share of around 65% of the global market. Yahoo! and Microsoft barely have 28% – combined.
It has emerged that the companies’ lack of market holding has led to Yahoo! putting a clause in the agreement which states that Yahoo! can back out of the deal at any time before the scheduled five year renewal if their revenue share falls too low.
Yahoo! and Microsoft failed to specify what exactly the number was that would entitle Yahoo! to pull out should revenue fall below it however it is expected that the danger zone will be in the first eighteen months.
This is because any new service, whether continuing on from an old one or starting from scratch will experience growing pains. A few other details have emerged since the deal was officially filed with the US Securities and Exchange Commission.
For example, Microsoft must hire 400 Yahoo! engineers and pay them “market-competitive” wages. Furthermore, a full deal must be struck by October 27th otherwise the debates will be brought to a arbitration panel. Time is money.
I guess now we all have to play the waiting game. I wonder in two years time will be caught saying “I Binged myself and I’m 5th in the search results!”.
Even though there is a global recession closing businesses, putting people out of work and somehow still giving top bankers big bonuses, companies still have bills to pay. The most widely used way to pay bills is via the tried and tested paper way. A bill comes in, it’s circulated and approved by all those necessary before being shipped down to accounting where it can sit for weeks before it is paid.
That’s assuming that it makes it that far. Anyone who ever worked in a big company will tell you that invoices and bills seem to grow their own legs and go walkies quite a lot, often unnoticed until an angry supplier calls up.
Bill.com looks to change all that. The company, which has just raised 17 million dollars, takes the whole thing digital. When a paper bill comes into a company, they fax it to a special number and when an e-mail bill comes in they e-mail it to a special address. Then, when they log into Bill.com they will all be there in digitised form. Then all the managers who need to sign off on the bill can simply click ‘Approve’. The bill is then set to a status where by accounting will take control. They can then pay the bill via transfer and all is done and dusted.
Many companies report that Bill.com has halved the amount of man time it used to take in paying bills. This is because everything is all in one place where everyone can approve or pay the bill at a time that suites them. This way, a bill doesn’t become stuck at a managers desk for days because he/she is busy, leaving others waiting around to sign. It also dramatically reduced the chances of the bill getting lost or misconstrued.
This is a great web tool for any medium or large business where bills seem to eat up too much company time.
Right next to downloading, music streaming is the next big thing in terms of entertainment on the net. It’s really starting to pick up with many people launching their own private radio stations. While the vast majority are in too small a niche to actually make money, the big companies will.
Spotify are the biggest at the moment. They are the ones to go to for video and music streaming. Recently however, Microsoft announced that it would launch its own music streaming service. This was originally intended for July but has become delayed.
Several other companies are now catching up quickly with streaming services already launched or in the works.
TechCrunch.com contacted Microsoft and this is what they had to say for themselves:
We don’t have much detail to disclose on this subject but what we can share is that, in the coming months, MSN is planning a new music service in Beta via its Music channel in the UK.
“At this stage we won’t be confirming the details behind this but more information will be available soon and will be communicated in due course.”
At any rate, Microsoft had better hop to it if they want to succeed in what it becoming a crowded market. If they let users get too comfortable with one source (as we have see happen in the past with iTunes) then they will not want to move onto any future service provided by Microsoft.
I really love Twitter. I tweet at least once or twice an hour from my phone when watching a movie, playing my xBox, out with friends our just about doing anything you can imagine; including writing for Crenk. I’d hate to see Twitter slip down that slope that few seem to be able to get back up. Kind of like MySpace is right now.
Spotify is undoubtedly one of the fastest growing music and entertainment services on the internet today. And as with all good services they have decided that it’s time for more Apps. They recently announced that they would be releasing an App for android devices 
We all like music. Rock, rap, R&B, metal, rave, trance. What ever your taste sometimes talking about music with other fans is really cool. Discussing favourite songs, artists, concerts or the industry news is what music fans do. iLike is a platform that allows you to do just that.
Flickr, owned and run by Yahoo is the YouTube of photography. If I ever fancied a change in wallpaper I’d go to Flickr and enter in phrases such as ’forest’ or ’ocean’. I would get back loads of professional photographs taken all over the world that looked stunning on my desktop. However, in getting those results I would always be annoyed at the amount of page surfing through the results I would have to do in order to find the right one. Scrolling down through the lot got on my nerves too.
One look at 
Last week, here at Crenk we reported that
Even though there is a global recession closing businesses, putting people out of work and somehow still giving top bankers big bonuses, companies still have bills to pay. The most widely used way to pay bills is via the tried and tested paper way. A bill comes in, it’s circulated and approved by all those necessary before being shipped down to accounting where it can sit for weeks before it is paid.
Many companies report that Bill.com has halved the amount of man time it used to take in paying bills. This is because everything is all in one place where everyone can approve or pay the bill at a time that suites them. This way, a bill doesn’t become stuck at a managers desk for days because he/she is busy, leaving others waiting around to sign. It also dramatically reduced the chances of the bill getting lost or misconstrued.
Right next to downloading, music streaming is the next big thing in terms of entertainment on the net. It’s really starting to pick up with many people launching their own private radio stations. While the vast majority are in too small a niche to actually make money, the big companies will.
