Friday, March 23, 2012 12:28 PM EDT
Mad Men mania: 4 social TV apps for Draper fans
Tweeting while watching TV is so 2011. For many the days of the one-screen TV-watching experience are gone forever, but now technology companies are upping the ante with show-specific and rewards-based social sharing apps – so-called social TV apps – to extend your viewing experience.
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Wednesday, February 29, 2012 3:04 PM EST
How to put a price on Facebook friends
Are your Facebook friends worth a penny each?
Remember the Whopper Sacrifice? The 2009 campaign on Facebook that offered you a free hamburger if you ditched 10 friends. While the initiative was great fuel for headlines, there was user backlash and eventually the giant social network informed Burger King's agency that the application violated its terms of service (because it openly notified deleted friends). While Facebook didn't remove the app, the developers were asked to change how it worked. And then? The campaign fizzled.
Today there is another marketing push on Facebook that messes with your friend count. However, this time around you're not tempted to delete a friend but perhaps inspired to gain a few more.
Thursday, February 23, 2012 1:49 PM EST
Mitt Romney’s wife gets patriotic on Pinterest
Remember when it was a big deal when U.S. First Lady Michelle Obama joined Twitter?
Twitter has long been a destination for pundits and wags to post witty 140-character tweets about political goings-on, like GOP primary debates featuring folks like Rick Santorum (New Yorker writer @RyanLizza “I hope Buzzfeed is already preparing a slide show of Santorum facial reactions to Romney”) and Mitt Romney (comedian @AlbertBrooks “If I were advising Romney I would tell him to stop bragging about the Olympics and just come to these debates on skis”).
But if 2008’s election was the first truly Internet election – President Barack Obama, sometimes dubbed the first Tech President, certainly benefitted from grassroots efforts on the web – 2012 looks to be the social race. But many of the traditional social networks are as old as Obama’s presidency – such as Twitter, YouTube and Facebook – and the race is on to own the latest digital playgrounds, such as Pinterest.
And now, Ann Romney, wife of GOP frontrunner-through-attrition Mitt Romney, is one of more than 10 million registered users pinning her passions.
Thursday, February 2, 2012 3:25 PM EST
Don't check me in: Etiquette in social media
A week or so ago I went to brunch with some friends at a swanky restaurant in the Distillery District of Toronto. After stuffing my face with smoked salmon, fine cheeses and a messy pile of eggs, I returned home to curl up on the couch and get caught up on work (translation – check my social media streams). When I jumped on to Facebook the first thing I saw was a message from one of the people I ate breakfast with that same morning. Well, to be precise, it wasn't a message but instead he had “checked me in” at the Boiler House as soon as he arrived in the dining room (i.e. I am at 55 Mill St. with “Amber Mac”).
While I make a living teaching people how to use social media, it struck me that many people would prefer that others did not identify their exact whereabouts without their permission. It's one thing to tag a person in a photo on Facebook, but broadcasting a person's exact location could be a violation of that person's privacy.
Thursday, January 19, 2012 3:27 PM EST
Anonymity is toxic to online comments, except when it’s not
The other day I posted a business-related article on my Facebook wall. Here are four of the first five comments, “where are you from,” “aka,” “princesse” and “UOOU!” Since Facebook requires that you use a real name when you sign up for their service, I can only assume this feedback is from real people. However, by the look of it, there is an obvious language or communications barrier between my online friends and me.
Like many digital enthusiasts, I'm getting used to a large percentage of nonsensical comments on things I share online. If it's not spam-like junk, it's often negative feedback and the occasional attack from an unhappy reader. If it's a positive comment from a person with a real-looking headshot, it's a good day for me in the webosphere. All of which leads me to believe – on bad days – that our online commenting systems are broken, forever flawed and possibly with no hope of improvement.
Thursday, December 15, 2011 2:05 PM EST
Path: An intimate social network with your 150 best pals
If you're familiar with Dunbar's number, you know that according to the British anthropologist the average person can only maintain stable connections with approximately 150 people. Take a look at a typical teen's Facebook page and you'll often see a contact count that soars into the thousands. This leads many of us to ponder how the digital world is messing with our historic definition of “friend.”
While most social networks encourage users to expand their connections, a new-ish mobile app called Path is organized around Robert Dunbar's theory. As the service explains on its website, “We tend to have five best friends, 15 good friends, 50 close friends and family, and 150 total friends. At Path, we're building tools for you to share with the people who matter most in your life.”
Friday, December 9, 2011 8:22 AM EST
Should Rick Perry's YouTube ad be banned as hate speech?
This morning I woke up to a Google+ post from a friend featuring RickPerry's latest YouTube ad called “Strong.” At first glance the 31-second clip looks like a political spoof from The Onion, featuring the Texas Governor strolling up a riverbank, pausing to deliver his punchline six seconds in: “You know there's something wrong in this country when gays can serve openly in the military, but our kids can't openly celebrate Christmas or pray in school.” Alas, a spoof it is not.
To date, the video has more than 700,000 views and zero comments.
Thursday, December 1, 2011 2:35 PM EST
BBC iPlayer joins Canada’s video-on-demand library
Like many digital consumers, I've been teeter-tottering on the idea of cutting the cable-TV cord. While I haven't fully committed (mostly because I'm hooked on 24-hour live news programming), we're coming to the point in our home where we're watching more subscription-based content, ranging from Netflix on our television to Treehouse (for my toddler) on our iPad.
This week another compelling video-on-demand service was launched, the British Broadcasting Corporation’s Global iPlayer.
Wednesday, November 23, 2011 3:50 PM EST
New breed of review apps want you to rate everything
Every few minutes my iPhone oinks. It's not a barnyard-themed ringtone, but a new app that encourages users to rate anything in the world around them. The development team at Milk uses a quick snort as Oink’s notification about things being rated in your community. TinyReview serves a similar purpose, but its execution is far more simple: Take an iPhone photo of something nearby and rate it in three lines or less. Recently, some ex-Googlers also entered this crowded mobile app category with Stamped, which asks users to give their “stamp of approval” to restaurants, music, books and other things.
While the average smartphone owner might care very little about taking photos of a good meal or a favourite book, the world of recommending things is big business. Hunch, which launched a couple of years ago, has been quietly working to build what they call a “taste graph” for the Internet. They're monitoring what their users like and, over time, hope to recommend things based on an individual’s preferences. On Monday eBay acquired the New York City start-up for what some bloggers are saying is a price tag of $80-million in an effort to “revamp their own e-commerce recommendations.”
Saturday, November 19, 2011 12:00 PM EST
If Ashton leaves, what will keep us on Twitter?
According to Twbirthday.com, I've been on Twitter for 41,761 hours (and counting). When I first signed up in February, 2007, a web editor who sat near me in a busy Toronto newsroom mocked me endlessly for wasting time “tweeting” with my nerdy friends.
Fast forward almost five years and I'm watching grown men fight on national TV about their Twitter success. More specifically, on Wednesday night The X-Factor's Simon Cowell smiled ear-to-ear when the show's host declared that Cowell was the most popular judge based on a real-time Twitter survey (incidentally, @simoncowell just signed up for the service this past week, just in case you care).
Today, various social media blogs are reporting that the former king of Twitter, Ashton Kutcher (@aplusk), publicly tweeted that his relationship with Demi Moore (@mrskutcher) is officially over, explaining that “Marriage is one of the most difficult things in the world.” This is just days after Kutcher vowed to quit Twitter (making him a “Qwitter” - no, I don't make this stuff up) after he defended Penn State's Joe Paterno in a tweet (without realizing that the coach is at the centre of the university's very public child sex-abuse scandal).
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Amber MacArthur
Amber MacArthur is a new media consultant, speaker, and journalist. As co-founder of agency MGImedia.ca, her team has managed social media initiatives for Tony Robbins, Canada Goose, Rogers, the American Dental Association, among other organizations. She is also an exclusive speaker with The Lavin Agency where she keynotes dozens of conferences across North America every year. As a new media journalist, she currently hosts Webnation on CP24, commandN.tv, and net@night with tech guru Leo Laporte. Amber's book, Power Friending: Social Media Strategies to Grow Your Business, hit store shelves in June.
You can find her on Twitter as @ambermac.
