Krypted » Social Networking

10 Worst MySpace Apps

admin — Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:00:23 +0000

One of the contributors to the success that Facebook has had in the social networking world is the ability for savvy developers to build applications. MySpace has been picking up scraps from the Facebook strategy for some time and has followed suit with the ability to integrate custom applications. Now that MySpace has more than 50 pages of applications, I wanted to do a 10 best MySpace applications post. But beyond the RSS feeder I mentioned earlier and a couple of interesting apps that were also on Facebook (and were better in the Facebook iteration) I just couldn’t do it. Therefore, let’s take a look at some of the high quality applications that have been introduced and what I found when I changed my quest from the 10 best to the 10 worst:

10. Football Scrapbook Frame, http://www.myspace.com/520993626
This application allows you to frame a photo of yourself in a football image. Now, I love football myself, but the quality of the frame combined with the model posing and the sad excuse for graphical editing makes me want to actually skip watching the Super Bowl. I am sure that the developer, whose name is TopRated funny enough, is just trying to get people to download the application by putting the word Football in the title. But this application does absolutely nothing, other than waste space on profiles, take a long time to load and best of all, show your friends that you like football but that you aren’t smart enough to find a better picture to show it (or for that matter upload that picture to MySpace, which is really hard to do apparently).

9. Lover or Loner, http://www.myspace.com/520671795
This application is yet another of the quizzes that have become so commonplace on Facebook and now MySpace. My initial reaction was that it would be bad, but who knew? My guess is that best case, if you are taking this quiz and installing this application on your profile that you are currently a Loner. There is a very high probability though, that the longer you leave this application on your profile, the higher the chance that you will always and forever be alone!

8. Flashy Pink Heart, http://www.myspace.com/518871148
This game is awesome in the very same way that was awesome back in the 1990’s, when the web was new and you could make things blink on the computer. This game does exactly what it says, it produces a pink heart that is flashy and displays your OMG can’t wait to see it, flashy text!!! But the best part of this application has nothing to do with the application itself, but with the fact that it is so prolific, with well over 1,000 users downloading it and installing it onto their profile!

7. Catch Thife, http://www.myspace.com/520715560
TopRated strikes again in this masterpiece where according to the developer you “try to hit the moving thief in order to send him jail.” I’m not sure what gave it away first: my experiences with this developers applications, the mastery of prepositions in the description or the actual game play. This game single-handedly showed me why Apple reviews all submissions for the iPhone App Store!

6. What Justin bieber, http://www.myspace.com/518694013
Did you ever ask yourself which Justin Bieber song most matches your personality? If so then this application will help prove to all of your friends that you are wearing that chastity belt and if you are over 17, that you are hiding something deeply disturbing with it. Obviously a ploy to get a bunch of email addresses to spam about the latest in viagra pricing, this application is really just another Quiz from the developer called Quizzes.. If it isn’t obvious to you that they are a spammer, then what do you think they are doing by spamming the applications list with so many Quizzes?!?!

5. BFf, http://www.myspace.com/518847077
As if the term BFF wasn’t so 2005, the graphics in this application seek to bring back design elements from clip art CDs that came with Microsoft Office back in the 1990’s. Your friends couldn’t just post something to your profile. No, they needed to actually post to an application. And in order to do so they have to use the application too! Maybe I’m just sad that no one posted to my BFF Comments box? I guess an emoticon is in order to indicate my disappointment here.

4. Farm Town, http://www.myspace.com/474755864
This game probably has the best game play and some of the better graphics on MySpace (or Facebook for that matter). So why does it show up on this list? Because 671,665 people are active users. The amount of time spent could end most of the worlds problems? Want a cure for cancer, to revitalize run down neighborhoods or find the meaning of life? How about rewrite Windows so it doesn’t suck any more? Nothing will ever happen until all these people uninstall this game and move on to doing something useful with themselves!

3. The Farmer, http://www.myspace.com/445093191
As if Farm Town wasn’t bad enough, now we have to endure Farm Town copy-cats? Really? I don’t think that anything else need be said about this one. Having said that, many of the other applications from this developer are actually quite good. They just had a little moment where they wanted a few extra addresses to harvest!

2. Twitter Sync, http://www.myspace.com/twittersync
This application just doesn’t work. There’s obviously a lot of code and it’s one of the more mature applications on MySpace. But it doesn’t work. If you absolutely must have your tweets show up on your page then consider iTwitter, available at http://www.myspace.com/463617608

1. The API. Makes me wonder if MySpace was in a rush to put something out or what. The privacy controls are good, but the options are far behind what Facebook offers, making me wonder if MySpace just wanted to be able to say they had applications, but not care about the applications that were made (they’re kinda’ like a Palm Pre that way). But the best part is that almost every application out there is made by spammers. The account I setup to test these things is now getting well over 50 spam messages a day. Thanks MySpace!!!Similar Articles:

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MySpace RSS Integration

admin — Sat, 06 Feb 2010 20:39:16 +0000

MySpace won’t die. Good. Competition breeds innovation and if social networks are to continue to become more and more useful then a somewhat healthy MySpace is simply going to keep the cog wheels turning in the otherwise spiderweb filled heads of talented engineers. MySpace introduced applications awhile back and there is now a pretty ample number, although nothing close to what Facebook has. I suppose there’s something to be said for being a day late and a dollar short, eh?

Most of the applications, as with Facebook, aren’t that useful. Games to help you waste time and quizzes to help you inform your friends and coworkers that you haven’t stepped out in the sunlight in far too long. But there is a specific application that anyone with an RSS feed that wants people to see it might find interesting (after all according to Alexa.com, MySpace is still the 18th ranked website in the world). The RSS Reader application, by Ideamesh, Inc can be used to add a blog or anything else that can be aggregated through a public RSS feed, to your MySpace page. It’s pretty easy to use and provides a quick and easy application box to show the feed.

This RSS reader isn’t everything you might want though. As far as I can tell, it only supports a single stream. It has options for reformatting text and links that are displayed, but not a lot. It doesn’t have any features for limiting feeds, although that is something you can usually do with the path to the feed if you want to.

But it is free, it is somewhat useful and the application framework that MySpace has introduced is a great step in the right direction to perhaps help MySpace to slow their slide into oblivion. Either way it’s nice to finally have a little more integration across all the sites out there, even if MySpace continues to drop in the rankings…Similar Articles:

Now A Social Network

admin — Fri, 18 Dec 2009 14:00:13 +0000

Well, I have no clue why but I decided to setup the feeds and friends aspect of a social network on krypted.com. It turned out pretty good, although there’s still some CSS work to do. You can sign up by hovering over the Social icon in the toolbar and clicking on, ironically, Sign Up. You can then click on Edit Profile to upload a picture and create your own profile page. Then, Directory to see the other users of the network. The Friends button will show you your Friends and the Friend Requests button will show you pending requests from other friends. But most importantly, the Activity button will show you a Twitter-style or Facebook-style stream.

Sorry if I’ve been focusing on site updates and improvements more than content recently. I’ll get back to the content in short order…Similar Articles:

More Additions

admin — Sun, 06 Dec 2009 05:26:00 +0000

At the bottom of the sidebar, you will now find badges for my pages on the main social networks. I also added Flickr & Facebook into a new Pictures page (and added pictures to the actual Flickr account since I mostly used Facebook for that)… Also changed the title and post-info/comments sections to the dark red color scheme, since I didn’t really think they looked right as black any longer. Finally, made the navbar a little slimmer. Hope ya’ll like the changes.Similar Articles:

Initial Thoughts on Google Wave

admin — Tue, 03 Nov 2009 13:00:57 +0000

For the first time today I had a chance to sit down and tinker around with Google Wave. And I have to say that if you remove all that hype that I think it’s a really cool tool. What is Google Wave? Apparently it’s a “Real Time Collaboration Platform.” OK, so what does that mean exactly?!?! Well, let’s break it down. Wave uses, well, waves. A Wave is kinda’ like a thread, or a project according to how you choose to use Wave. For now, I see a few main uses:

As a replacement for other real-time instant messaging solutions (ie – iChat) for certain conversations where you need more interactive options. One nice thing about this is that you can see what others are typing, but you can also (if it’s not read-only) change previous blips. Since you can replay the whole session the changes are easily tracked and can help to keep everyone on the same page provided that everyone understands what’s going on.
Somewhat of a project management tool. The most powerful aspect of Wave is that it is extensible using Google Gadgets, like you might use on your iGoogle home page. These Gadgets allow you to insert wikipedia articles, feeds, images, video, to-do lists, web pages and almost anything you can think of. This can allow for project collaboration and tracking (I could easily see a Gannt chart Gadget). You can also insert files and then use those files as part of your collaborative efforts.
Collaborative coding. Basically, Google Wave can be a replacement for the collaboration features of SubEthaEdit, a tool I’m very fond of. This is kinda’ like using a wiki for coding, but Wave can be used as an interactive wiki of sorts. And since you can automate actions with robots you could actually build a robot to debug your code…
Interlinking communications. There are Gadgets that allow you to link to Facebook, Twitter and other popular social networking platforms that have APIs. This means that you can put a resource into a Wave, embed it on your site and have it be usable in some way in each of your other social networks.

Whatever you are using Google Wave for, you can take a Wave and insert it into a web page. This allows you to embed your collaborative conversation into web sites. And Wave is open source, so expect the innovation (and Google hopes, the adoption as well) to continue. One thing is for sure, using YouTube, Picasa, gMail and other Google tools is a much more streamlined workflow than using local files, or other online situations, etc. This is typical for vendors and not in the least bit to take anything away from Wave. If you have centralized on using Google stuff for other aspects of your organization then Wave is just another tool that, in some ways can be used to bridge the gap between instant messaging, file sharing, project management, document management, etc; in short, collaboration.

But keep in mind, it’s a “preview” solution. Google is still working the bugs out. You still can’t get an account without an invitation. In short, Wave is in beta testing. And my own perspective is also in beta testing. More as I experiment with these Gadgets and such… And if you’ve found other strategies that are working for you, please feel free to comment here!Similar Articles:

Google Wave Video

Social Networking

admin — Mon, 02 Nov 2009 13:00:06 +0000

This is as much for me to have a one-stop shop to find this information as it is for my readers, but some social networks I can be found on:

Facebook:http://www.facebook.com/krypted
LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/in/charlesedge
Twitter: http://twitter.com/cedge318
Ecademy: http://www.ecademy.com/account.php?id=167991

There are more and so I’ll update the list as I can think of them.Similar Articles:

Feeds, Rights Management, Blogging & You

admin — Fri, 07 Aug 2009 05:42:06 +0000

A blog is a stream of conscious. To some degree, so is an rss feed. If you are browsing it in rss then your reader will more than likely allow you to limit which articles you wish to see based on their tags or other information gleaned from the rss feed. For example, you can use feed://krypted.com/feed to access this page without graphics, which looks at the rss feed rather than the richer media content, including the css and other elements that cause graphics and the such to appear on the site.

You can then limit your results to any field that is specified in the index.rss file. In this case, you may choose to say, limit to the articles which I have tagged with Xsan. To do so, you would append a ? to indicate that you are searching for content, followed by the field that you will be searching which is in this case the word tag. Then you need to specify what you are searching for; for example, tag=xsan would limit the results to only articles which have been tagged as being about Xsan. Searches are literal, presenting a good argument why spaces and special characters should not be used when tagging assets.

You can then perform compound searches. To search for content that matches two different tags you would use an ampersand (&) to delimit the searches. For example, you could do feed://krypted.com/feed?tag=xsan&tag=unix which would search for all articles tagged as Xsan and Unix.

A number of solutions are based on the concept of an rss (or at least atom) feed. For example, Podcast Producer submits data to the weblog services of Mac OS X which can then be viewed as a feed rather than using the nice graphical interface that Apple provides (which is by the way very fast). You can also use rss with Final Cut Server (with a lot of tinkering) and with WordPress and a number of other popular sites. While I used the example of tag= above, this is not specified as part of the RFC spec for rss and so might not work across all rss engines, although it does work with weblog and WordPress, the CMS that this site is built on. Twitter and a number of other sites rely on and foster rss as part of their architecture and APIs.

The rss feed option therefore opens up endless possibilities for flexible integration between solutions by parsing feeds and even aggregating multiple feeds. In companies, this can allow you to have a news feed that is integrated into, for example, a SharePoint server. This might be useful if you have an announcement that has been tagged for only specific offices. Each staff member might have a feed in their portal splash page that only displays items tagged for their office, their position title or even their department. I would assume that a new national medical record solution will be a feed and each doctor that a patient visits will view those records in a feed (it’s lightweight and can have links to actual files such as x-rays, scanned/signed insurance forms, etc). In educational institutions this opens up the possibility of aggregating feeds from multiple Mac OS X Servers running Podcast Producer or the wiki+blog services into a course management solution, such as Moodle, Blackboard or D2L.

Aggregation will more than likely have a resounding impact on how we access and how we ultimately find relevant content. You can subscribe to a Twitter feed, to YouTube, Digg and limit your results to those that match patterns that are consistent with what you are interested in displaying. But aggregation of content when it is not appropriate or not acceptable can lead to issues with digital rights. This is one of the key aspects of what the Associated Press has a problem with right now. One solution they have come up with is to inject information into feeds which then can help track potential aggregators (which is according to their acceptable use policy, against the law). Other organizations want you to use their RSS feeds, but to only show the first paragraph or so of content, linking to the original site for the full article. They are saying yes, please link to our content so that we can have more subscribers, but please do not display our entire articles, or if you do please pay us a royalty for having done so.

If you own all of the content though, digital rights of the assets (aka articles) is not an issue. But whose job is it to make sure that you own all of the assets. How do you track which of those assets are yours? How do you limit the content that is appropriate for each user in your organization so as not to incur massive quantities of white noise, but still give the power to inform users and readily access content? These are all questions that creators of a lot of data will be asking (if they are not already) and there is no magic answer to any of these questions. The key though, is to think of the questions and how they relate to you.Similar Articles:

Google Wave Video

admin — Mon, 13 Jul 2009 22:00:26 +0000

Google Wave is Google’s Open Source online collaboration solution – html5 is pretty bad-daddy…:

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MySpace Layoffs

admin — Tue, 16 Jun 2009 22:26:07 +0000

According to Reuters, MySpace is about to lay off around 1/3 of their staff, which will leave them at about 1,000 people strong. Whether connected or not this is just a few days after the number of Facebook users finally exceeding the number of MySpace users. Overall, a smaller and more nimble MySpace might be able to survive, but in order to do so they’re going to need to do something drastic in order to combat the inertia and the far superior technology that Facebook has. It’s hard to believe, looking at the the two portals, but Facebook has a very narrow edge (globally) over MySpace. IMHO, the coming year will see a much different MySpace emerge or it will see MySpace drastically further drop in rank and likely impressions.Similar Articles:

Get Your Facebook Names

admin — Sat, 13 Jun 2009 05:06:38 +0000

http://www.facebook.com/krypted – Facebook, like other social networks before them now allow you to sign up to have a name, or handle, that will follow you and allow you to quickly find friends provided you know their unique name, etc. It seems to be a bit of a scramble and names are filling up fast, so I wouldn’t wait for long. It’s easy to do, log into your Facebook account and there’s a box staring right at you asking if you want to go ahead and set it up!

PS – Thanks to Kevin for reminding me when I got off my flight!Similar Articles: