« April 2008 | Main | June 2008 »
May 30, 2008
Top3Clicks or Why Dive Into Social Commerce?
After talking for months, Mike and I finally took a leap and built out the initial version of Top3Clicks. We’ve spent a number of months refining the app and still have a ton of features to add.
One question we both get is “why social commerce”?
Mike and I are interested (as are others) in trying to marry e-commerce with the social graph. We went deep into e-commerce with iPrint and messaging (SMS/IM/SMTP) with MessageCast. We made several attempts at wiring e-commerce into messaging, but never felt like we hit more than a single.
With F8, Facebook enabled this scenario for, perhaps arguably, the first time. The key piece of what had been missing previously, the user profile, is available via the Facebook APIs. In many cases, the user profile is a rich data store of information that allows us to provide the user with an “easy on-ramp” to add Top3Clicks and begin using it immediately.
Messaging with the Facebook APIs is available in a number of areas. We are concentrating on application updates to the Profile page and using Notification and email to let the user know when a new item is available from their favorite author or snowboard company.
My personal experience has been great – I’m always on the lookout for new music from the likes of My Morning Jacket, Ryan Adams, The Clash, etc. After adding Top3Clicks, my profile information was imported and with no effort was immediately able to discover new offerings from favorite bands of mine.
Try out the app if you have a moment; gratuitous feedback is encouraged.
Posted by davehod at 04:46 PM | Comments (0)
May 29, 2008
BaconMarathon Debuts With Top3Clicks
It's still in way-early-Alpha, but Mike and I have rolled out the first app from BaconMarathon, Top3Clicks.
Mike has written several blog posts about Top3Clicks; I'll follow in a bit with a post on why two of the guys from iPrint and MessageCast decided to dive into social commerce.
Posted by davehod at 08:48 PM | Comments (0)
May 15, 2008
Overheard at the Office Today
A pearl of wisdom gleaned from an email today:
It just shows that you can’t hire people only because they’re smart – they have to be team players too.
Posted by davehod at 01:59 PM | Comments (0)
Last.fm Feature Request
I stream a lot of music over my Slimdevices Squeezebox, usually listening via Winamp (yeah, I’m old school). Additionally, I occasionally use Launch on Yahoo Music.
After reading a ton of glowing posts about Last.fm from people like Fred Wilson, I decided to dip my toe in the water a few months ago.
Unfortunately, I just can’t get into Last.fm and I think I know why – scrobbling doesn’t work for streams (at least I can’t find anything that says it does). I’m essentially starting from scratch on my preferences and building it up is taking too long.
Feature request for the Last.fm folks – if possible, it would be great to enable scrobbling for streams. I could stick with my routine for a while, build up my profile and in turn, make Last.fm a great listening experience.
Posted by davehod at 11:00 AM | Comments (0)
May 12, 2008
Noise on FriendFeed
If you are a FriendFeed user and using Google Talk, please don’t have GTalk broadcast a status update every time you play a new mp3. Getting a ton of updates that say things like
“The Roots – What You Want”
and
“Jay-Z & Linkin Park – Numb/Encore”
isn’t really useful.
Posted by davehod at 01:20 PM | Comments (0)
May 06, 2008
Facebook Drops Java Support
Facebook announced that they have dropped support for their Java client.
To this end, we have decided to discontinue support for our official Java client library, and rely on the existing community-driven libraries to fill this gap. While we understand this may have an impact on some developers, we feel that it is most important to keep working on our list of initiatives I referred to before, instead of maintaining an additional client library of which the developer community has already built several unofficial versions.
They recommend moving to one of the project listed here.
I have to ask, was anyone actually using the Facebook Java client anyway? Six months ago, I gave it a whirl and found it pretty poor. Instead I moved to the project being hosted at Google Code, known as the “Facebook Java API Community Project”. The “Companion Utility” makes it easy to do things that the PHP library has had since the beginning, including detecting if the user has logged in and if the user has previously added the application. Getting the whole thing to run in a Tomcat container was straightforward.
Posted by davehod at 04:51 PM | Comments (0)