Tuesday, February 24, 2009 at 10:07AM This is Ford's Focused - Episode 4. I take a look at Social Networking . . . is it really networking, or social for that matter. Take a look and subscribe through iTunes.
Wednesday, September 10, 2008 at 12:18PM What if I told you owning an iPhone could save you $60 a year? What's that? All we ever hear is how expensive the iphone is! Well compared to plain vanilla cell phones, you might be saving a bundle depending on what you want a phone to do.
AT&T is launching MyCommunities, a service allowing you to check in on your myspace and facebook accounts from, wait for it, your phone! And the price of this integration is a mere $2.99 a month.
And AT&T also offers phone number backup for $1.99 This service allows you to backup your contacts on AT&T servers. Again, you can already do this on your iPhone, through iTunes/iCal.
So there you go... If you're trying to justify an iPhone purchase, just tell yourself, or whoever controls the finances in your family, that you'll.. SAVE MONEY!
ATT, Apple, rate plans, social networking Permalink Tuesday, April 22, 2008 at 11:45AM When Apple introduces a new feature, it's usually done quite carefully, and you can count on it being a hit. But what happens when a new feature is added, hundreds of thousands of people use it, then the Apple community seems to collectively forget about it? I'm talking about iMix.
A few iterations of iTunes ago, iMix was added as a way for people to create and share their own personal playlists with the masses. Hey, with all the social networking hullabaloo, it looked like a sure-fire hit. And indeed, there are over 1.3 million playlists uploaded according to Apple. If you're new to iTunes though, you may not have even known the feature exists. iMix is still part of iTunes, but the prominent link on the main page is gone. To get to it, search for "iMix" in the search field, then look in the "related" field in the results.
Why has iMix fallen off the map? Has the community aspect of iTunes been pushed aside to make room for higher profit sections like movie rentals? Are people still using iMix? Does anyone care? Well, a lot of music marketers and advertisers should care. Imagine the information that can be gained about the popularity of particular songs/artists from the iMix lists. And iMix could be a great resource. Let's say you're planning a wedding, and looking for just the right playlist. what better way to start than to see the playlists of other like-minded iTunes users. If you do an iTunes search of "wedding songs" there are no iMix results, and there's not even a way to search iMix. However, if you navigate to the iMix page, by first following the directions above to find it, there are over 100 wedding song playlists, rated by users like you.
iMix can and should be the cornerstone of a new social networking/community component of iTunes, instead of being a wallflower at the largest online (and beyond?) music retailer.
Friday, April 4, 2008 at 12:26AM Sure we Mac users can be seen as a bit of a snobby bunch, so it was probably only a matter of time until there was a special place just for us in the whole web 2.0 social networking world.
Well, that place just launched at net4mac.com Net4Mac, takes a different approach to social networking, requiring a software download to use the service. At first this can seem cumbersome, and frankly it does take some getting used to, but it makes sense, given the interesting features of the service. The application-centric nature of the site allows net4mac to take advantage of the great built-in OS X features. You can take a pic directly from your site, for example, or easily import/invite address book members.
For the service to work longterm, there will probably need to be some sort of web component to access the key features of the site. For better or worse, people are just used to sitting at any computer to access these types of sites. Think of the times you've accessed myspace or facebook from a work computer. Now imagine installing software first on those machines. However, at least in these early days (technically hours, since the service was officially announced about an hour ago) it looks like this will be a different kind of service. It will probably never reach anywhere near the numbers of those other sites, but it has a great potential to create an amazingly tight-knit group of Apple fans. Think of it more as a universal user's group than a facebook wannabe. Give it a whirl, and let us know what you think!
SO give it a whirl (it's free... what isn't online?) and be sure to join thedigitallifestyle.tv viewer's club group on the site.