Tag: social network
Hunted Radio in cool Myspace app shocker
Sadly, it's not often Tech Digest find many positive stories to cover about Myspace any more. However, while the social network struggles to re-align itself in the wake of Facebook's massive successes, we were pleasantly surprised to find a cool…
Shout'em lets you create your own private social networks
Here's a really nifty tool for those looking to start their own private social networks away from the masses of Twitter and Facebook users. Shout'em enables users to easily and quickly create their own mobile social networks that are private,…
Band financed through social-network pals at Slicethepie.com land major label deal
While illegal MP3 downloads may be giving the internet a bad name, here's a story proving it isn't all theft and piracy in the world of digital music. Scars on 45, a UK band funded by fans via the…
Facebook usernames, what will you christen yourself?
On Saturday morning at 5.01am UK time, Facebook usernames goes live. Users will have the chance to register a username which will develop a unique URL for their profile. Currently the URL is populated by random characters and the move will make it “easier for people to find and connect with you” according to Facebook.
As with any change that involves the social networking giant, the announcement has created a big debate online. Some users have been requesting the service for a while now, whereas some users are stringently against it.
Here’s a quick overview of some of the positive and negative impacts the move may cause:
Positive – The creation of usernames should improve shareability, which has got to be a good thing in terms of a social media. Instead of having to search for an individual’s actual name via Google or Facebook directly, users can now search by username – which has proved popular on other platforms like Twitter and MySpace.
It will also be much easier to give your Facebook details to new people you meet. You could even have it printed on a business card if you are really cool/sad.
It will also make it easier to link all of your social networking tools together – providing you use the same username for every platform you are registered with.
Negative – As with any change to Facebook, concerns are going to be raised about privacy and security. Protest groups have, not surprisingly, already been set up.
There are also major worries that people won’t be able to get their desired user names. Facebook has over 200million members, remember. That’s a lot of people competing to get usernames. There’s bound to be issues with username squatting as well, as there are with domain names currently.
The move also leads to comparisons with MySpace – a service that many people stopped using as the popularity of Facebook began to take hold. It could be argued that usernames are a bit of a backward step.
Either way, expect Facebook to freeze up at 5.01am on Saturday as the race begins. I’ll be awarding a gold star to anyone who manages to register ‘markzuckerberg’ as their username.
Read the full FAQs here.
Gallery: Facebook is five today. See how it's evolved
On Friday 4th February 2005, Facebook was born. Initially designed as a way for students to connect online, the past five years has seen it grow into a huge social network with a huge variety of people connecting with friends, relatives and complete strangers on a daily basis.
In his blog post, Facebook’s founder, Mark Zuckerberg, wrote:
While we at Facebook make products that enable people to share information efficiently, Facebook is mostly the product of the people who use it. Without you and the connections you make to others, the products we create wouldn’t have much meaning. So we feel fortunate to have all of you with us. To express our appreciation, we’ve created a “Thank You” gift, which will be available tomorrow in the Facebook Gift Shop for you to to give freely to others. In the spirit of celebrating connections between people, we encourage you to use this gift to give thanks to your friends, colleagues and family members with whom you are connected on Facebook.
Take a wander through the past five years and see how Facebook has evolved…
MySpace launching webmail service
Yahoo, Hotmail and Gmail will all be a little on the worried side this morning as the news broke overnight that social networking giant MySpace is launching a webmail service.
All MySpace users will be automatically assigned an inbox on the service, guaranteeing the site 125 million active users at launch – more than Gmail and AOL Mail, but fewer than Hotmail or Yahoo Mail. Let’s hope the interface is a little better than the terrible messaging service currently integrated into MySpace.
MySpace (via TechCrunch)
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Gigjunkie is a social network for UK live music fans
Live music fans have a tough time of it. You’ve got to contend with awful ticket agencies, heavyhanded security, and crap listings services, and even when you get inside there’s always the risk that you’ll be stood in front of some drunk idiot who’ll hurl abuse and beer at the band throughout the show, ruining your enjoyment.
Well, music fans, there’s a new website that aims to solve at least one of those problems. That of the rubbish listings services. Gigjunkie.net is a “the UK’s definitive and independent Gig Listing”. It aggregates data from loads of sources, and then allows fans, venues and bands to add anything extra.
Last.fm music service comes to Vodafone
Vodafone has announced that it’s done a worldwide deal with Last.fm to bring scrobbling and social networking features to its customers’ mobile handsets.
Initially available on several Nokia handsets, including the N95, N96, N78 and 6210, with other handsets being added soon, the application will allow access to Last.fm’s social music features and online music profile…
GPS for Skiiers is more than just an avalanche tracker
If you’re a skiier, you’ll know the value of not getting trapped under an avalanche, but most decent skiing jackets these days come with GPS in them, for those ‘just in case’ situations. Why do you need a dedicated GPS unit, then? Because Flaik, the company who makes it, has gone all Web 2.0 and tacked on a social network.
Despite Flaik’s website not being properly launched yet, and being epically broken in Chrome, it seems that the GPS unit will let you do all kinds of crazy stuff like running real-time competitions against people you don’t know, tracking the location of individual skiiers, and calculating run-by-run and day-by-day statistics.
Obviously this is for hardcore skiiers only, and there’s no word of price, but it apparently launched last month in Colorado. If anyone’s able to provide any more info, then drop us an email, because this looks like it could be fun.
Flaik (via CrunchGear)
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Exploring .tel – a communications profile parallel to the internet
Okay, this is going to be a bit tricky to explain, so pay attention. Telnic is a company who own the .tel domain name. Never heard of it? That’s okay – it’s not publicly available yet. It’s basically a global contacts database for people. You register a domain, like http://henry.tel/, and it acts as a central repository for all the different ways people can contact you.
You can save URLs, email addresses, phone numbers, usernames, locations – all sorts. You can also specifiy keywords that describe you – for example I might write “blogger”, “technology” and “DJ” there. Each has a clickable link which will open it in any service that you specify. For example, you can just click on a Skype username, and it’ll try and open Skype to call it…
