There’s a new show on MTV called Meet or Delete that takes a look at the hard drives of complete strangers to see if they deserve to be hooked up with band mates, dates or dream jobs. It looks like it could be very entertaining.
It made me think about how good it would be for single people to be able to rummage through the social bookmarks (del.icio.us) to see if they were appropriate dates. I think of all the things on your hard drive, it would be your bookmarks that would say the most telling.
In a brainstorm recently we were talking about what can be possible with Facebook apps. Of couse, every agency under the sun is considering building Facebook apps but I was thinking about how it’s fairly annoying that if you build such an app, say for example a turn-based game, that you can’t stick that on your blog or your web site or wherever else you might want to stick it. Well, those spunky individuals at Facebook have gone and done it again. They’ve made a JavaScript library that allows you to do just that very thing.
Although this is helpful, it’s a real shame that they haven’t decided to take up OpenSocial yet.
This is an incredible pixel art impression of satellite images. Apparently, in China there is some law about aerial satellite pictures which this circumvents.
Another very interesting report from Pew that segments technology use. Very useful if you’re working in digital and trying to understand levels of involvement online.
Very funny video remix of one of those annoying iPhone ads with the patronising store assistants that look like failed record producers or your mate’s groovy dad that tries to talk to you about The View.
When you first visit, they actually recommend on the home page you upgrade your data package if you haven’t done already, which is nice. The first video you can I saw was ‘The Internet Party’, which I had a look at on The Computer Internet earlier this week, very amusing. Clicking on the link brings up your Real Player (if you’ve got one installed, which is pretty likely if you’ve got a camera phone that takes videos) and not Flash Lite, as I was expecting. I was shocked, it streamed really quickly and it… actually… worked.
The music service Last.fm, which acts as you own personal MP3 player has never been quite as good as it could. The problem being that it could only play 30 seconds of tracks by more popular artists. That was until now, well, as of Wednesday. “As of today, you can play full-length tracks and entire albums for free on the Last.fm website.” You can only play it 3 times before you have to pay for it, which seems to me to be more than fair to all involved and is a model made possibly by the support of all four major labels. The subscription service hasn’t launched yet but when it does it will allow you unlimited listening. It’s all very exciting, it seems that the major labels are basically adopting a number of different models, essentially allowing people to consume music in the way they best want to consume it. Fair enough really.
Google are attempting to launch a demographic bidding service. This means that you can target keyword advertising by age groups and gender. This sounds great, the only problem being that this isn’t on their search results. Of course, Google doesn’t know your age and gender when you do a search on Google. Unless of course you happen to be logged in to your Google mail or something and that doesn’t sound like a very Google thing to do. So, at the moment this would only be for advertising on Google’s content partner’s sites. The only site worth mentioning on that list is MySpace and at a push, Friendster. But given that only people aged 8 – 30 use MySpace, I’m not entirely convinced but it’s certainly a step in the right direction.
T-Mobile announced a partnership with Yahoo! that will allow them to show banner adverts on T-Mobile’s Web’n'Walk portal.
I’ve been using The Mobile Internet (in addition to The Computer Internet) for a couple of years now. I only really use it when I’m very bored or I’m not able to get on to The Computer Internet. It looks like these ads will only roll out across the Web’n'Walk portal, which is still stuck in 1998 back when brands believed that people actually want to use generic portals. Could it be that the only reason people go to the Web’n'Walk portal is because it’s almost impossible to change your home page?
Apparently, “mobile advertising will be enormous for the industry”, but I think many advertisers, particularly for eCommerce would have trouble buying media on The Mobile Internet if there is no measurable goal i.e. the user can’t use their credit card on The Mobile Internet. Until the telecoms stop charging 40% on reverse SMS and come up with an appropriate payment mechanism, eCommerce will not be getting on board. And that ultimately means that the market wont get any traction.
The thought of blinking punch-the-monkey banner ads springs to mind. There is limited screen estate as-is, it’s like using The Computer Internet but through back-to-front binoculars. Fudging the user’s experience up with invasive, targeted banner adverts is a sure-fire way to ensure that 2008 is NOT the ‘key year’ for mobile Internet.
There’s a new show on MTV called Meet or Delete that takes a look at the hard drives of complete strangers to see if they deserve to be hooked up with band mates, dates or dream jobs. It looks like it could be very entertaining.
