Apple’s big announcements earlier this week included the release of iTunes 10 with a new look and feel and the launch of Ping.
Ping, which should win the prize for least imaginative social network name ever, is Apple’s “answer” to social networking seemingly.
Want to join Ping? Then you need to use iTunes. Don’t have iTunes? Tough. Want to browse it online? Tough. Ping.com has nothing to do with it. And I don’t think you’ll find a ping.anything that is in anyway related to Apple’s new venture.
Personally I’ll be sticking to Last.fm!
Meanwhile Ping, apart from being well, boring and totally lacking in anything, is being attacked by spammers and scammers.
According to reports this week Germany is seeking to enact legislation that would restrict the usage of information about prospective employees garnered from social media sites by employers. The legislators are drawing a line between “pure” social networking site and the more professional ones.
“The bill would allow managers to search for publicly accessible information about prospective employees on the Web and to view their pages on job networking sites, like LinkedIn or Xing. But it would draw the line at purely social networking sites like Facebook, said Philipp Spauschus, a spokesman for the Interior Minister, Thomas de Maizière”
No idea how they’ll classify Twitter or FourSquare .. though I can see FourSquare being used to keep track of supposedly sick staff … .. Or am I just cynical?
Looks like the Irish media (both online and offline) are all excited about the latest useless statistic
Seemingly there are over 100 thousand Irish Twitter “users”. How they reached that figure is beyond me.. Probably based on what the users have stated in their location. Or maybe Twitter have provided data?
In any case it’s a meaningless figure, as so many of the accounts are either completely dormant, abandoned or have so little activity that they might as well not be there…
Twitter, in common with other social networking sites and services, has an authentication system. In Twitter’s case it’s called OAuth and it allows you, as a user, to give applications and service access to your account. For an application or service to function correctly it might need to gather information from your Twitter stream. Maybe it needs to see who you follow and who follows you etc., etc., etc.
All quite innocent and boring really.
However some applications are badly written – either intentionally or accidentally, and you can easily end up giving a 3rd party far too much acess to your account.
In the case of Twifficiency as soon as you login via OAuth it will send a “tweet” to all your followers saying:
My Twifficiency score is xx%. Whats yours? http://twifficiency.com/
So basically publicising itself.
Needless to say it doesn’t ask you before it does this nor does it give you any warning or indication that it’s about to do it, so it basically spams your followers
The developer, meanwhile, is denying he did this intentionally (you’d think he’d have checked .. .. )
Foursquare allows you to post and share your location. Depending on where you are and how adventurous the businesses are in the area, you might get the odd discount or special offer for doing so ..
But there is a potential downside to oversharing your location with the world..
It’s not enough that Facebook and its founder get splashed around in the mainstream media day in, day out .. now Hollywood wants us to watch a movie ..
There’s a couple of versions of the trailer floating around.
The first one (below) gives a few headlines and doesn’t show any real action:
The second one is a bit more revealing:
I’m not sure when it’s going on general release..
So will you be going to see it?
Apart from the social media addicts and gurus, will it attract a “normal” audience?
