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Near the beginning of the month I had made two blog posts in relation to API. One of the things I wished I could do was to have a status update across multiple social sites, from Facebook to Twitter.

Well - you can. Facebook has apparently included the ability for applications on it’s site to push info into the status area. Although it’s not quite as easy as checking a button in your profile settings, it’s simple enough. All you have to do is use the application TwitterSync. TwitterSync will take whatever update you post on Twitter and change your Facebook status accordingly. Furthermore, if you wish it can filter out certain commands so that it doesn’t pull certain tweets. For instance, if you’re blog updates your Twitter page with a link to the post and a notification that it’s been updated and you don’t want it to be posted on your status, you can enter a keyword and it won’t post any tweets containing that keyword.

In addition to that, I’m now using Google Talk to update my Twitter page, so I don’t even have to open up a browser. Simply send a message to the Twitter account on Gtalk and it sends it.

Nifty stuff. Get on board MySpace??

technology API, Google Talk, Social Network, Twitter

First a little technology cable channel called TechTV gets taken over by Comcast-owned G4 Media and becomes G4-TechTV for a short while before finally being killed off into G4 and having it’s array of hosts dismissed and programs cancelled to be replaced with stuff like Cheaters and Cops 2.0.

Then a game review company (Gamespot, actually) fires one of it’s lead reviewers for a brutally honest review that was critical of a handicapped game because it was advertising heavily on Gamespot. That’s right - Gamespot would prefer their employees lie for financial gain rather than give good, honest reviews as a review media outlet.

Well, the plot to the story of the web these days seems to be full of people that got knocked down, picked themselves up, dusted off, & trump their previous employees.

Those geeks that used to work at TechTV? Kevin Rose, Alex Albrecth, Patricmk Norton, Sarah Lane, Martin Sargent, Dan Huard, Jessica Corbin and even past behind-the-scenes operators like segment producer David Prager are just a few of the major players you might remember from TechTV and they’re back to producing a new sort of media. It’s television for the internet and it’s getting huge. Revision3 -  with twelve shows updated weekly and another five joining the set in 2008, the site is pushing out content that is, in fact, in large demand and they’re producing it for the right audience. With shows ranging from the top news stories from Kevin Rose’s Digg being dicussed over a beer with previous The Screen Saver’s cohost Alex Albrecht to a talk show with Martin Sargent where he interviews all sorts of odd personalities from the web - it’s television for a new generation.

They have the Totally Rad Show which is a mixture of reviewing new television shows, movies, and video games while also reminiscing about and comparing to older flicks and games.

But all of these shows are not just shot on hand held consumer video cameras. They’re professional shot and edited on sets in a studio. They’re actual segments ranging from daily shorts to full 30-45 minute (and occasionally longer) shows that you can stream from Revision3’s website or download in a variety of formats.

And it’s free. . .

Just like standard television, the shows are all ad-supported. Unlike standard cable, however, you don’t pay an access fee. “Commercials are typically at the beginning and end of a show and presented by the host - usually with a code that grants you discounts for things like GoDaddy.com or Netflix online movie rentals. Sponsors range from Sony’s Playstation Network to the Microsoft Zune. Even IBM and Adobe Systems understand the potential for advertising revenue and have jumped on board in the past.

So head over to Revision3 and check out the show schedule.

Oh. . . And in case you’re wondering - that reviewer from Gamespot? He’s teamed up with a buddy and formed his own review company. Look for updates on that as summer approaches.

technology gaming, movies, revision3, technology, television, Web 2.0

Following up on my previous post on API’s. . .

If Facebook and MySpace would open up a little bit, imagine how nice it would be to send your status across multiple services. For instance, I like having Twitter for it’s stand-alone “what am I doing” style status. It would be nice if I could tell Facebook and MySpace to import a status RSS feed from Twitter, which it already has available for anyone to use. For you still not quite up to speed on web trends, that would basically pull anything I posted on twitter to be displayed on Facebook and MySpace so I didn’t have to login to multiple networks.

Why isn’t this happening now? Probably stubborness to keep you on one social network and not drift to others. Most of these sites make the majority of their revenue serving adverts on your pages - just like TV commercials but the majority of them have content and services you don’t have to pay for. Now I honestly don’t think it really would have a huge impact on revenue to add this - infact, I know I’d rather use a service that was more open to making it easier for their users.

Unfortunately, services like Pownce, Twitter, del.icio.us and more aren’t being utilized by average internet users. Don’t get me wrong - these sites have a large database of users, but they’re still not touching your average teenage to adolescent userbase in areas like the midwest - and while I know few users in my area taking advantages of these services, almost everyone has both a Facebook and a MySpace. If the demand was there, I’m sure we’d see even more support across websites and services.

There’s so many ideas that would be very neat if implemented to provide support and data across networks. Unforunately, data always has a price and everyone wants it, no matter how mundane it seems to you.

And one last thing, as a side note. Facebook and MySpace are virtually the same anymore - including both having applications which you’ll see rolling out on MySpace very soon. I’ve been tinkering with the opensocial API (I signed up for the dev program after writing my last post on API) and it’s easy enough to use that I’d put a pretty good wager on you’ll start getting those invites you hate on Facebook in your MySpace inbox any day here.

technology API, Facebook, MySpace, opensocial, Pownce, social networks, Twitter

That’s a mouthful, eh? Application programming interfaces, or API’s, essentially allow a user to code a program that uses resources from another program or in conjunction with it. More commonly in recent web trends, an API allows things like the applications on Facebook. For example, someone might write a program that sits on your desktop or in your taskbar that would notify you of comments being posted to your page or if you’ve received a message to your inbox.

API’s are all over the place and you’re most likely using one. Why am I talking about API’s? Because there are some websites that either don’t have them in place, they’re not easily accessable, or they’re handicapped in performance and don’t allow you to do much. Facebook’s API is wonderful. You can very easily, with little programming knowledge at all, create a very simple application.

MySpace on the other hand, I’m not so sure of. Google developed something called opensocial, which MySpace jumped on board for. Typically anything Google touches turns to gold and I’m a huge fan of the company - hell, they turned a search box into one of the biggest companies on the internet. (Yes, I’m using the term search box and of course know that’s a bit of an understatement.)

I haven’t taken the time to delve into the API much yet, and I’m a little concerned about doing so. While the idea is good, opensocial is, as the name might imply, very open. And the more open you are on the internet, the more vulnerable you are. One of the first sites to use opensocial was cracked within 20 minutes of going live with the API and allowed attackers to view private information. I would have prefered that MySpace had developed it’s own API with a bit more limits. Had they done so, I would have liked to have seen the following features.

*Pulling content from blog posts.

*Pulling content from bulletin posts, in a similar fashion.

*Pulling content from events and calendars.

*Providing a means to pull albums and specific pictures from a users profile.

These are very basic requests and would only be allowed on public profiles. Why would this work well? Because beyond the standard users of MySpace, there is a large amount of musician, comedian, commercial, and soon celebrity profiles. While I could care less about most of these, a solid API would simplify things for smaller bands on the web.

I’m currently doing the coding for a website for a local band in my area. If I had access to these tools, they could post news/events/photos on their MySpace page and have them appear on their website. They’re still allowed a professional web prescense of their own while being able to keep their fans & friends on MySpace updated at all times and able to communicate with them via that platform.

Anyways - I don’t know. I felt it was time for a good rant, but it’s becoming obvious I’m out of practice as my hands are starting to cramp up and this has been an unbelievably nerdy post of no worth. Until next time.

technology MySpace, Social, Web 2.0

MySpace still hasn’t implemented the ability to import RSS feeds from other sites. As such, I cannot send this feed to MySpace. Now, I used to double post - but that’s just fucking dumb. So I stopped.

Facebook can do it. Why can’t MySpace?

Such as life.

technology