Author Archive for Rytis Sileika

YouTube API

Published by Rytis Sileika on March 12, 2008 in links and news. 0 Comments

YouTube has announced their extended API to be available for 3rd party developers.

New API allows developers to use YouTube content in their online or offline applications more extensivelly. Here are some key features:

  • Create a web front end to let people view videos about specific topics.
  • Create a desktop application or plugin that plays videos in a customized environment.
  • Add related, dynamic video content to your website or application.
  • Customise the Flash player to fit the look and feel of your site, device or application
  • Add feeds of videos from each of YouTube’s 18 international domains

More technical details in Google code website.

Art of Data Mining

Published by Rytis Sileika on March 5, 2008 in links. 3 Comments

Just few examples of how you can turn meaningless (at the first glance) data into an art…

Spooky social network

Published by Rytis Sileika on March 4, 2008 in links. 0 Comments

Apparently Steven Spielberg is about to launch a social network for users interested in paranormal and extraterrestrial experiences…

MySpace launched Development Platform

Published by Rytis Sileika on February 5, 2008 in news and social networks. 4 Comments

Keeping up with the “I post what you post, you post what I post” paradigm, I feel obliged to inform you that MySpace has launched their development platform which is based on OpenSocial API.

As opposed to Facebook, MySpace are going to have two or so month lead in period, so to allow fair play for all developers. Until that moment has passed no application is allowed to have more than ten or so installs.

A little bit worrying comment is this:

As for OpenSocial compatibility, company representatives say that 90% of MySpace’s platform aligns with the OpenSocial specification, meaning that OpenSocial developers will have to do a little bit of reengineering to get their applications to work.

What are the 10% delta we’ll soon to find out. I have to admit that I don’t yet have MySpace account, which is a shame. So first thing on today’s agenda is get myself an account and start playing with the platform.

Vote for your search results

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 29, 2007 in news. 1 Comment

Google is experimenting with new voting engine for the search results. Users have the following options:

  • Like it?
  • Don’t like it?
  • Know of a better webpage?

It’s all experimental and in testing phase.

Emphasis is on the social note. However to work properly I believe it has to be tightly integrated into existing social networks. Ideally, search results should not be influenced by the whole internet community, but only by the preferences of the close friends group.

How to integrate services in Facebook - example

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 29, 2007 in links. 3 Comments

What I’m going to do today, is to show how company can integrate their existing services with Facebook.

Company that I’ll take as example is Box.net. Company was founded in 2005, they are specialising in online storage solutions and they were the first company to provide this service. For those who don’t know, online storage means that you can store, retrieve and share you files on the web and access them from anywhere. All you need is a web browser. Box.net also provides an open API for accessing the data. Company has 1.2 million users with over a million files served each day.

To expand and get more users Box.net wrote an application for Facebook, which allows accessing and using Box.net services directly from your Facebook account.

All you have to do is to add their application (if you don’t have an account with Box.net, they allow you to create one immediately, registration process is very simple an literally takes 10 seconds).

There’s very subtle, but yet effective viral marketing item. If you invite your friend to Box.net application, you’ll get extra 20MB of storage for each friend you invite.

Using the service is pretty straightforward:

  • Add (remove) folders
  • Upload files
  • Share folders/files
  • View (access) you friend’s files

User interface is minimalistic and very intuitive:

Overall impression is very good, and the service is quite useful. If you want to share something between your friends this application is a must have. I may try to be picky here and note that 20MB for free these days isn’t the greatest deal, but the ease of use and convenience might overweight the limitation. If you need more storage, pricing is very attractive and is only 2$/month for extra 2GB.

It also serves as a good example on how easy is to expand your business into Facebook arena and start enjoying the growing user base. Box.net already attracted over 71,000 users with over 1,400 active daily users. Box.net themselves recognise the importance of this move and I’m happy that Facebook application pool has really useful applications, besides all the fun stuff.

Social portfolio… for reporters

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 27, 2007 in links. 0 Comments

In continuation on my previous post about social networking portfolios. Here’s an article describing why a reporter needs to use Facebook and more, why a reporter needs two Facebook profiles:

With a Facebook “page,” a journalist can collect followers or fans of his/her work. For example, here’s a page for ABC’s Sunlen Miller, who is covering the Barack Obama campaign. (Note: You’ll need to be logged in to your Facebook account to see that page.) Miller’s page features notes and photos from the campaign trail, links to ABC News coverage, and anyone can “Follow this reporter,” which is sort of a variation of becoming a “friend.” Followers of Miller’s work can send her a message, or write on her “wall.”

Social networks = social politics?…

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 27, 2007 in social networks. 1 Comment

Yesterday Facebook and ABC announced a partnership to bring political coverage to Facebook:

ABC News and Facebook have formally established a partnership — the site’s first with a news organization — that allows Facebook members to electronically follow ABC reporters, view reports and video and participate in polls and debates, all within a new “U.S. Politics” category.

This partnership is primarily focusing on political news, but that alone wouldn’t be enough for Facebook users, so ABC and Facebook jointly sponsoring and organising Democratic and Republican debates in New Hampshire.

Now, this may look as a partnership to bring massive news (political) source into one of the most popular online social network, but is that it? If you think about it, Facebook has 57million active users, with 50% of them logging in to Facebook each day and spending at least 20 minutes on the site. There’s groups, there’s polls, there’s people chatting, there’s custom applications… And you bring politics on top of that.

I see at least two immediate areas of influence:

  • Attempt for form the political view. This is obvious one, this has been happpening for ages with the help of mass media, and social networking sites are just another type of mass media.
  • Completely opposite reaction. Most of Facebook users are in US, but yet this is international community. Given that, any political even will be analysed and will get different opinions regardless the government will. Now, add social groups in to the equation and you ultimately might end up with more objective voters…

I guess it’s really hard to predict where this is all going, but definitely it is going to be the new way of doing politics.

Now you have to thank Alexey, who installed the polls things, and here’s a question for you:

What will the direction of political influence be?

View Results

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Developing your Facebook strategy

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 26, 2007 in links. 4 Comments

Since we’re in social networking, we have to use social networks to promote ourselves, right? I was reading about various strategies to promote a blog. And found an amazing article by Dave McClure.

In short, Dave recommends the following seven steps for promoting your business/organisation using Facebook:

  1. Set Up Your Graph: Profiles & Privacy
  2. Make Connections: Networks, Groups & Events
  3. The Need for Feed: Your [Shared] Social Activity Stream
  4. Share Your Content: Share & People-Tag Your Stories & Media
  5. App to the Future: The Facebook Platform, APIs, & Applications
  6. Pay to Play: Ad Networks, Sponsored Stories, & Paid Distribution
  7. Show Me The Bunny: Gifts, Points, & Virtual Currency

Online social portfolio

Published by Rytis Sileika on November 25, 2007 in social networks. 2 Comments

I want to identify what is an optimal set of social networks one should join and participate in.

First, let’s identifyuser groups we’ll be selecting portfolios for. We can’t use “one size fits all” approach here, especially when talking about social groups.

So, most obvious selection is by age, let’s start with three groups (G):

  1. Under 30
  2. 30 to 50
  3. Over 50

Second selection group is based on occupation (O):

  1. Student
  2. Non-professional
  3. Professional

And thethird, and last at this moment, is by income (this should be based on national average and abviously vary between countries, but the grouping remains the same) (I):

  1. None to high low
  2. Average to high average
  3. High and above

Now here comes an interesting bit, how do we select most common combination? After I’ve done some research I came up with only two selections that make up two large distinct groups:

  1. G1 + O1/2 + I1
  2. G2 + O3 + I2

This is just my feeling which is not based on anything at the moment, so I’d really appreciate if anyone could point me to some statistical data.

I’ve mapped this to some statistical data I could come accross, and the second group is much smaller in all popular networks. Both groups follow similar distribution pattern in most of the large networks. The only real differentiators I’vespotted were LinkedIn and MySpace. Therefore I think the portfolios should look like this:

First group:

  • MySpace or Facebook
  • Twitter or Jaiku
  • LiveJournal

Second group:

  • Facebook
  • Twitter or Jaiku
  • LinkedIn

Surely these lists must be customised for each case, depending on one’s preferences and interests, but I believe these could serve as initial kick off point.