Also: Knitting & Star Wars | Digital editors' Network | My Neighbourhoods | ITV News by mobile | UGC for GCap Radio | Bizarre podcast | Second yawn) Life | Google stuff
Facebook is attempting to get the techies on side by allowing them to build their own applications into the site, and this has prompted much fuss and fluffy among technophiles.
Founder Mark Zuckerberg unveiled more than 40 initial partnerships during a Jobs-esque ceremony in San Francisco.
Liz Gannes on GigaOM has some good insight and says the services is about more than adding widgets, a la MySpace and bebo:
"Facebook has become a primary relationship and identity broker for millions of people. Now outsiders can capitalize on that information in a safe way, pulling from users' expressed interests in their profiles, building on their stated intention to attend events, or simply giving them more dedicated tools for expressing themselves. The outside apps will be woven into a structure that's already been built and is utilized every day."
The Wall Street Journal picked up on the video element, pointing out that 23m users will be able to share and create video within Facebook. This is something that finally sounds like a YouTube killer.
Knitting and Star Wars. That's the bank holiday sorted.
The Shiny Media guys have launched anew blog about craft called Crafty Crafty. Expect crochet. (Crafty Crafty)
If that's not quite your style, try your hand at putting together your own (legal) Star Wars mash-up using 150 clips from the film on the LucasFilm site. (WSJ)
And if you're more televisually inclined, maybe try the Secret Blog of a TV controller.
Digital editors blog
Nick Turner, head of digital content development at the CN Group, has set up a blog for digital editors along with Andy Dickinson and Francois Nel of University of Central Lancashire and a few others. (Digital Editors Network)
My Neighbourhoods
Fledgling social networking site My Neighbourhoods has partnered with the JobTonic recruitment site. Users get a reward of between £50 to £2K if they recommend the right candidate, which sets the service apart from all the other recruitment sites. (My Neighbourhoods)
ITV News by mobile
From 28 May, ITV News will offer daily mobile bulletins for both 3G (with video et al) and 2G phones. Newsfix will cost £2 per week. (ITV)
UGC plans for XFM, Classic FM and Capital
GCap is developing user content features for Classic FM, Capital 95.8 and XFM's web and mobile sites. Yomego already provides similar platforms for GMTV, MTV Flux and Endemol. The first will roll out later this month and the rest over the summer. (Scotsman)
The Bizarre Podcast
Also in radio world, ish, The Sun is partnering with GCap for a new music and entertainment podcast. It'll be free, weekly, and styled as part of Victoria Newton's Bizarre column.
Second (yawn) Life
The Second Life blogger James Wagner Au is picking through some stats on whether corporate investment in the virtual world as a marketing tool is really worth it.
Coca Cola, Calvin Klein and Sun Microsystems all joined with space with much fanfare, but according to SL stats geek Tateru Nino, some of those firms have barely seen 55 visitors a week.
I've got very bored of the discussion about Second Life, mostly because the corporations piling in are failing to grasp the potential of the space: what is the point of joining an almost unlimited virtual world if you just recreate the real world? isn't that missing the point by a mile?
Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Sky's SL newsroom pop up on TV today, and found myself (at a distance, admittedly) trying to work out whether it was the real one or the virtual one. Are they too scared to do something really creative? Seems a wasted opportunity to me. </ moan>
Anyway, SL destination's like IBM's lab for open sorcerers (sorry) sees around 4,826 people each week and the virtual destination for The L Word about 4,687.
About a million people have used SL in the past month and 400,000 use it weekly. The most popular venue was not a sex club or gambling den, but the PG-rated Phat Cat's Jazzy Blue Lounge which had 31,248 people on the week in question. (GigaOm)
Google stuff
Plenty of buzz about Google, still...
I'm hearing that the Google mobile rumour - that Google is about launch its own branded phone with Nokia in the UK - is true. We'll hear more about that soon, no doubt.
And one more thing: Google is buying Feedburner, the feed aggregation site for around $100m. Sam Sethi scooped this last week and rightly pointed out that the motivation is that a significant number of people are bypassing Google's ads on sites by reading everything through their RSS readers (amen to that) so we can expect Google to weave its ads into Feedburner's feeds somehow. (Vecosys)
