TechCrunch
iPhone Most Social Device, Claims New Study From ShareThis
The mobile web is more social than the desktop web, and among mobile devices, the iPhone is the most social. These are the new findings from Palo Alto-based publisher platform ShareThis, which is today releasing data from a large study of social behavior across devices. The study compared billions of social actions across both desktop web and mobile in order to determine which platforms and devices saw – or spurred – the most social sharing activity.
ShareThis, for those unfamiliar, is a Palo Alto-based publisher platform and the maker of those “social sharing” buttons you’ll find scattered across the web. The company recently closed on $23 million in Series C funding, and acquired the mobile startup Socialize, which provides developers with tools to make their mobile apps social.
ShareThis, of course, has an interest in promoting or encouraging social sharing activity, but its findings today aren’t about whether or not such activity is popular (we already know it is), it’s about where that sharing behavior takes place. The caveat here is that data comes from ShareThis’s network – a company which has historically has been focused more on the desktop web, and only now is moving to bring more consistency between web and mobile platforms. That bias is apparent in the sample sizes - 4.9 billion social patterns across desktop web and 1.2
billion social patterns across mobile web, over the course of 30 days.
According to the research, consumers are nearly twice as likely to click and share content on social networks through mobile devices than on desktops, and on mobile sharing activity is dominated by Facebook, Twitter and Pinterest. Facebook, in fact, accounts for 60 percent of sharing on mobile, and Pinterest is nearly three times more represented on mobile than desktop. Meanwhile, most of the email-based sharing happens on the desktop.
ShareThis also anointed the iPhone as the “most social device,” saying that users are three times more likely to share their content via iPhone versus the desktop, and are one and half times more likely to share on an iPhone versus all other mobile devices. This data holds up with a number of other reports that seem to indicate that iPhone users are more engaged with mobile apps and the mobile web, in general.
Something odd that cropped up in ShareThis’s study is that Pinterest is more popular on the iPad, where it dominates with almost 50 percent of social activity. That raises some flags for obvious reasons. Pinterest is popular, but perhaps ShareThis’s sample is not the most consistent.
At the end of the day, the results of ShareThis’ analysis may tell us more about ShareThis’s customer base than it does the wider web. But that network, largely publishers, does contain several big name brands, including Vogue, Food Network, C-Span, EA, Cosmo, Shape, Boston.com, Perez Hilton, AMC, Travel Channel, Entrepreneur, The Hollywood Reporter, Fandango, Scripps, and others. If anything, maybe it tells publishers that the Pinterest button should be given a more prominent position on their sites – after all, it’s not all cake pops, crafts and home decor on there.
Grooveshark Makes The Google Autosuggest Blacklist, Joining The Pirate Bay And Others
Google’s autocomplete search results can be a great help when you know part of what you’re looking for, or when you want to be lazy, but they also carry a certain political weight. What they don’t offer up is as telling as what they do, and now Grooveshark joins the illustrious ranks of options that don’t appear automatically, as spotted by TorrentFreak.
Grooveshark is a free music streaming service that provides on demand track playback of over 15 million songs, both on its website, through mobile apps and via streaming embeds. The company is trying to play nice with artists and record labels with a host of self-promotion and analytics tools, but it’s definitely not exactly kosher by DMCA standards. Google has been filtering piracy-related sites and offerings from its instant search and autocomplete stuff for a couple years now, and the effect has had a demonstrated effect on traffic to sites like The Pirate Bay.
What’s interesting about this, however, is that Google hasn’t actually been that put-upon in terms of DMCA takedown requests related to the Grooveshark domain. The Grooveshark terms seems to have made the blacklist around the same time as the successful appeal by Universal Music Group won out against Grooveshark back in April, as TorrentFreak points out. Google factors in a number of things when deciding what terms get the boot, but DMCA takedown requests seem to be a key ingredient.
You can still Google “Grooveshark” directly and get results that are actually relevant, but it doesn’t change the fact that taking it out of search suggestions hurts visits and means fewer users will probably discover the service at all. The problem here is that it demonstrates just how much influence Google has in deciding the moral compass of the Internet, and what constitutes a “good” service and what gets classified as “bad,” and in cases like this, it’s hard not to see that as a decision that favours the party with the most money and influence.
Grooveshark may be treading questionable ground with its business model (not that I believe that personally), but it’s at least a little scary that Google’s in a position to decide that for us. There’s not an official blacklist; it still shows up in results. But this subtle shaping using its more advanced search tools is somehow almost more sinister.
We’ve reached out to both Google and Grooveshark but have yet to hear back as of publication time.
LiveMinutes Raises $1.4M Seed Round For Its Real-Time Collaboration Service, Announces Partnership With Evernote
Real-time team collaboration service LiveMinutes today announced that it has closed a $1.4 million seed round. The round was led by Great Oaks Venture Capital – a VC firm that previously backed the likes of Trulia and OkCupid — with participation from New World Ventures, former Facebook business development head Ali Rosenthal and Match.com CEO Sam Yagan.
As the company’s founder and CEO Kemal El Moujahid told me earlier this week, LiveMinutes plans to use this money to extend its marketing efforts and to implement more partnerships with industry players. “We also have a really exciting roadmap we want to implement with regards to real-time collaboration,” El Moujahid told me.
LiveMinutes launched about 18 months ago as a web-conferencing service with a focus on document sharing. Since then, it has morphed into a fully featured collaboration service that still includes live video conferencing, as well as real-time document and to-do list editing, image annotations and some basic sketching tools. The product today feels a bit more like a lightweight version of Podio and less than a video conferencing service, though videoconferencing is still available (and uses WebRTC on Chrome).
The company also today announced a partnership with Evernote Business. Evernote users can now import their notes to LiveMinutes with just a click and then annotate it collaboratively — a feature Evernote itself doesn’t currently offer.
“LiveMinutes adds real-time collaboration to Evernote’s business collaboration features,” says Rafe Needleman, Evernote’s Director of Developer Relations, in a statement today. “It lets colleagues edit notes in real-time, host conference calls, and save everything back on Evernote to get the most of Evernote.”
To annotate images, LiveMinutes is also considering an integration with Evernote’s Skitch.
As El Moujahid told me that, in the early stages of collaboration tools, we had to deal with real-time native desktop clients like Skype and asynchronous web-based tools like Basecamp, which led to very disjointed conversations. Today, thanks to HTML5 and WebRTC, we can bring all of these features together into one service. LiveMinutes wants to be at the forefront of this movement.
Let's Date Adds Flirt Notes To Help Users Get Noticed By People They're Interested In
RL: hey, what’s going on?
RL: when did you leave last night?
TT: I don’t want to talk to you right now.
RL: uh, what?
RL: did something happen?
TT: you got some weird notification on your phone last night
TT: it said you had a date with someone named Christine.
TT: so I left.
TT: WTF?!?!
TT: who’s Christine?
RL: was it from Let’s Date?
TT: I don’t know.
TT: you were asleep.
TT: what’s going on? why are you setting up dates?
RL: hey look, I’m sorry…
RL: I’m not dating
RL: I’m just testing out this app.
TT: WTF?
RL: it’s an app, it’s called Let’s Date.
RL: it’s like, you look at profiles of other people and if you like them, you click “Let’s Date”
RL: and if they like you, then you get a notification telling you to set up a date
RL: and it suggests a place or whatever
TT: why were you using it?
RL: I told you, I was testing it out.
TT: so you had to set up a date with someone?
RL: well, no, I mean, I didn’t have to but I wanted to see how it works
RL: I didn’t actually plan on going on any dates
RL: there’s just this new feature and I was going to write about it
TT: couldn’t you have gotten someone else to write about it?
TT: like Alexia or someone?
RL: she’s in a relationship. you’ve met her boyfriend, remember?
TT: and you’re not?! what about Anthony?
RL: well, I mean
RL: I met with the company when I was in L.A.
RL: and they showed this new feature, called “Flirt notes”
RL: even if the other person doesn’t pick you
RL: you can pay some small amount of money
RL: like a couple of bucks or whatever
RL: and you’ll show up in their feed, like they’ll know you’re interested
TT: so now you’re paying people to flirt with them?
RL: well, you’re not paying them, you’re paying the company
RL: I mean, the app
TT: …
RL: anyway, it doesn’t matter
RL: I’m sorry I was just trying to do my job
[TT: is no longer online]
RL: Hello?
RL: Hello?
Apple Patents On-Hold Media Sharing, Dual-Sensor Imaging For iPhone, iPad And Mac
Apple has won a couple of patents today from the USPTO (via AppleInsider), and both are very practical advancements of tech that it’s easy to imagine being integrated in upcoming versions of existing devices. One is a camera sensor imaging enhancement that could make its way into both mobile and Mac product lines, and the other is a way to make hold more enjoyable for the person doing the waiting on a call.
The imaging patent describes a dual sensor camera system that could be integrated into iOS devices like the iPad and iPhone, as well as into Mac computers, that would use two sensors instead of one to capture simultaneous imaging data and then stitch those together intelligently, picking the best of each and obscuring the other sensor’s faults.
This would have the effect of covering up bad or dead pixels on one sensor, identifying blurry parts or strange exposure or lighting effects and compensating with image data captured by the other sensor. The patent describes a way for it to work with both still images and video, which is probably why it’s described as being useful both for mobile devices and for Macs, where it could help improve video quality being fed to chat applications from the built-in FaceTime camera.
The hold call patent is perhaps of more limited utility, but it does provide a way for users to share their photos and music with one another in an unconventional way. When people are on hold, they’d be presented with a variety of available data from the other party that they could browse while waiting. Options include pictures, music, upcoming events, location, books, wait time, status updates, videos or a recorded message, and a user can customize what kind of content gets shared, and where it gets sourced.
Access to hold content can be adjusted on a granular level, too, allowing you to opt to share some types of content only with family members for instance, while all callers have a much more constrained set of data to check out. Since it could potentially be something the hold party might actually enjoy, there’s even a provision that would let the person who put you on hold indicate they’re ready to come back on the line, giving you a chance to wrap up.
It’s a little precious, as use cases for this might be limited (who even talks on the phone anymore, let alone puts anyone on hold?) but it’s also potentially an easy way for Apple to indirectly advertise more of its iTunes content, and it’s a feature that would show well in demos and in marketing material. Also, it seems like it would be relatively easy to implement.
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