Remember Twitter before November, 2008? Don’t worry, neither do most people. A year ago the microblogging juggernaut started to skyrocket in popularity as celebrities began flooding it with their own personal tweets. Once they began promoting it throughout various television interviews (e.g. Larry King Live with Ashton Kutcher and Sean Combs) and infomercial-like talk show specials (e.g. Oprah) it became a nationwide tech phenomenon that everyone and their mom just had to try out. Read more »

Social networks are still in the process of becoming the natural hubs of our online activity. This is being further proved with the more recent addition of Facebook, Twitter and Last.fm for Microsoft’s Xbox. But Xbox Live already had limited support for web browsing and a few other native social features. Why is social network integration such a big deal? Because people spend the most of their online life on social networks and if you can bring those services into your gaming platform you can increase playing time. Read more »

As promising as virtual goods utilized by Facebook games have looked to be this past year, there has been a wave of controversy rising over its potential expense. As relationships with virtual goods companies and social games are reportedly yielding boatloads of revenue, consumers, privacy advocates and pundits are taking notice. This past week has proven particularly damaging for several companies participating in virtual goods, as scams are revealed and less than stellar business practices are uncovered or alleged with many of the popular social games on Facebook (i.e. FarmVille, Restaurant City, Mafia Wars, etc.). Read more »

Bebo Games launched recently marking the social network’s entry into a deeper integration of virtual goods. While the games are not a direct approach to the virtual goods industry, the potential for growth around this concept is there.

What is notable about the Bebo Games launch, however, is the level of assimilation games have with the individual user experience. Bebo has weaved its games into several aspects of the user experience, from messages to alerts to in-site chat. What that means is that Bebo’s game partners have improved and increased opportunities to communicate directly with users. It also means that users have more opportunity to communicate directly with each other, around their gaming activity. Read more »

Twitter lists emerged as a selective beta for users, presenting a highly anticipated feature for better organizing your Twitter experience. With Twitter lists you can group together users you are following into subcategories, and also offers a feed for each list. Read more »

Many internet startups have had lofty goals, but perhaps none have been quite as ambitious as Japan based startup LIFEmee. Its co-founders are hoping it will become your personal homepage for tracking all the important information related to every aspect of your life. LIFEmee believes that by helping you organize your life, they can also “help you reach your full potential”. Read more »

Twitter is the high-tech haiku, the latest and greatest in social services that’s really going to change the way we do everything! Seriously! Not like MySpace, or Facebook, or any of the other things that mass media advertised as the end of everything that came before (but turned out to be advertising platforms loaded with preteens and people who illegally like preteens). Unfortunately the fantastic future is again unfounded, as Twitter is falling to the same problem that paralyzed previous popular sites: spambots and idiots. Read more »

YoVille is popular Facebook application game in which you create and manage your own YoVille character in a virtual world. The goal of the YoVille is much like the game of life as you work to acquire a house, make friends, and grow your wealth. I’ve been playing YoVille lately and I thought it would be helpful to create a YoVille guide to help beginners learn how to play, earn lots of YoVille cash, and share successful winning strategies with other YoVille players. Read more »

Facebook’s social networking platform continues to grow and mimic nearly every great service on the web. Twitter is probably the most victimized out of all services Facebook has copied. Such features include the Facebook news feed and the currently beta update to the Publisher which will allow you to post content that everyone can see and not just your Facebook friends (i.e. much like Twitter profiles). In the past few weeks I’ve found myself spending more and more time on Facebook and I’ve identified a few other features I’d like to see Mark Zuckerberg and the Facebook developers incorporate into the popular social network. Read more »

Recently I’ve been using Facebook more and more for my social networking needs. Until now however, there’s really not been a decent Facebook app in the Google Android Market. I had previously been using Facebook Lite which acts more like a wrapper for Facebook than a native Google Android application. Facebook Lite is bulky and runs really slow on my T-Mobile G1. Moreover you can’t access the majority of Facebook’s features using Facebook Lite. Read more »