Tag: Social Sharing

How Technology Has Changed The Way We Vacation [Infographic]

I am sure that many of us don’t remember a time when you couldn’t take an airplane to visit some far away destination. In fact, since commercial air travel was popularized in the 1960’s, many of us weren’t even born yet.

But I do remember a time when booking airline passage and hotel rooms wasn’t so easy to do. Also, as far back as I can remember, Disneyland and Las Vegas have always been popular vacation destinations.

Regardless of what changes I have lived through, this next inforgraphic from HomeAway.Com illustrates some of the ways technology has revolutionized the way we travel and vacation.

I may not remember the Heli-Camper, but I do remember when we didn’t have Facebook or Twitter (or even online reservations for that matter). Take a look at what they came up with, it’s really interesting see how technology has shaped the world we live in.

(Lead image courtesy of National Lampoon’s European Vacation 1985)

June 15, 2012
BOLT is Pinterest With Privacy and Permanence

BOLT, a new social content sharing platform, has officially launched today. Though the service provides a Pinterest-like grid of shared – or “bolted” – images and articles, BOLT has many features that Pinterest lacks.

“BOLT is the next step in the evolution of the Web. We make it simple to corral the web and to save and share great content for fun and for serious business,” said James Roche, co-founder and co-CEO of BOLT. “BOLT includes consumer-centric features that reflect the changing model of the online experience, as it moves in a more visual and social direction.”

Similar to other social sharing sites, BOLT users can populate their collections of Bolts with content through the bo.lt website, with BOLT bookmark, or with the BOLT Chrome extension. When Bolting content, users can choose the image that best suits the Bolt, and then add a comment that will stick with it, no matter where it is shared.

The main feature that sets BOLT apart from other social sharing platforms is that when a user shares content, it is automatically saved. Images, files, or entire webpages can be saved to BOLT, meaning links to “bolted” content will never be broken. According to the company, Bolts are not links or images, but working copies of the original content. This doesn’t mean that pages are stolen, however. Page analytics are left intact for these “super screen captures,” and attribution is carried along with the Bolt.

The privacy options of BOLT also set it apart from other sharing platforms. When users create a Bolt, it can be shared instantly to Facebook, Twitter, Tumbler, or even Pinterest itself, making it a sort of backend that saves all of the content users share across social networks. However, Bolts can also be set to private, meaning only the user who bolted it can view the content. This is useful for private obsessions that users might not want their social networks to know about, or for more professional uses, such as a school research project. Since all of the Bolts are saved, Journalists who use the service won’t have to worry about sources disappearing overnight. It is a feature Pinterest users have requested, but not yet received.

“The sheer wealth of information online is truly daunting – millions of pages, countless words, images and ideas,” said Matthew Roche, the other co-founder and co-CEO of BOLT. But imagine you could pick out, organize, save and share the things that interest you most, or things that could help you most in your work. That’s BOLT. Our team has spent the past six months making it easier and more fun than ever to tame the web – to find, share and even create – content that lasts forever.”

Below is a silly video provided by BOLT to demonstrate the basics of the platform. Take a look for yourself and decide whether BOLT’s features make it stand out from the current excess of social sharing platforms:

Will BOLT have what it takes to move into Pinterest’s territory and succeed? It’s certainly possible. After all, Facebook definitely wasn’t the first social network to come along, and Reddit used to be the smaller, nerdier version of Digg. The internet’s short history is full of stories where competitors were able to slowly gather a community and dominate a particular niche that others had created. Also, recent evidence has shown that Pinterest’s meteoric rise in popularity is now waning a bit. It will be interesting to see how, or whether, Pinterest reacts to BOLT, and whether users will see Pinterest add features as a result of the competition.

June 12, 2012
Exclusive: What Cloudee Really Means for Boxee

Boxee, the company known for creating the software that lets users access online video through their TVs, introduced a new initiative this week that indicates it has big plans for the future. The new service is called Cloudee and is a mobile app that allows users to create, share, and store their own video content in the cloud.

“The idea is to provide an unlimited space for all the users’ videos in the cloud, which we believe is a real need that users have,” Avner Ronen, Boxee’s CEO, tells us.

Cloudee brings the concept of private sharing to users, since they can share their videos with specific friends and family that they choose, instead of sharing them publicly. YouTube and services such as Viddy and Socialcam are geared toward public sharing, whereas Cloudee is very private and includes more long-term content, explained Ronen. Boxee views Cloudee as being a place for users to put collections of videos. For instance, they can have categories for birthdays and vacations.

The new service has also been compared to Dropbox for its storage capabilities. Ronen, however, told us that Cloudee is very different since it is focused on the video experience and social capabilities.

“People can now capture more videos than ever… you can email those videos, and you can post them on YouTube, and you can put them on Dropbox,” said Ronen. “But, we still think that there’s an opportunity there to provide a place that the users can trust.”

“I think it [Cloudee] fills a void,” he added.

Although there has been an influx of mobile video-sharing apps lately, Boxee’s Cloudee did come as a bit of a surprise from the company. As a result, rumors have begun to circulate that the company could be shifting its focus. Ronen denied the claim saying that Cloudee would actually be the way to monetize Boxee.

“We spoke kinda vaguely in the past about the fact that we were going introduce premium features in Boxee as a way to monetize,” he said. “Cloudee is the way we’re going in terms of monetization.”

“It’s [Cloudee’s] going to be a big part of the Boxee experience moving forward,” he continued.

The company wants its Boxee Box to work hand-in-hand with Cloudee. The vision is for Boxee Box users and Cloudee users to have the same relationship as iPhone users do to iCloud users.

Rumors have also been spreading that Cloudee could be Boxee’s first step toward launching a cloud-based DVR service to be used with its Live TV dongle released earlier this year. Ronen also refuted this rumor saying that, while it would be great for users, it would be a challenge to build.

“I think it would be a great feature, if it could be done – enabling DVR in the cloud,” Ronen said. “But, I think technologically, it’s very difficult to potentially solve.”

Since people are trending toward consuming video through services such as Netflix, Hulu, and Boxee, Ronen did say that the company believes the cloud, and particularly Cloudee, will play a role in TV consumption going forward.

“We think the cloud is gonna be a big part of the future of television,” he pointed out. “Looking into the future, there’s no real need for local storage in the user’s home [because] everything can be in the cloud when it comes to video.”

Ronen also told us that Boxee hopes to be the company that makes this possible. In other words, Cloudee could definitely be the beginning of some very big things from Boxee.

At this point, Cloudee is in closed beta, but users can sign up for an invite here.

June 7, 2012
Flattr: The World’s Next Social Sharing Button?

Today, social sharing buttons are, essentially, a core part of most web pages. Users “like” content for Facebook, retweet it for Twitter, +1 it for Google+, and even pin it for Pinterest.

Since these actions have become a very popular way of promoting content across the Internet, a Swedish based company that has put a unique spin on social sharing hopes to become the next big sharing mechanism. The service is called Flattr and is designed to help people share not only content, but also money.

Is there room for another social sharing button? Let us know.

Flattr is the world’s first micro-payment service and allows users to make monetary donations to their favorite bloggers and publishers. As Flattr’s CEO and Co-founder Linus Olsson explained to WebProNews, users set an amount for how much money they want to donate, and, at the end of the month, Flattr divides it evenly between all the content they’ve “flattr’d.”

Although it is often referred to as an “Internet tip jar,” Olsson told us that users don’t make any purchases. Instead, they simply make a donation if they like the content.

“We call it social donations, social micro-donations, or social micro-payments because you actually pay for content,” he said. “You have got the content already, but you want to pay for it.”

The content consists of anything from music to software to articles – whatever users think deserve a donation. Olsson said Flattr is “agnostic” to content as long as no laws are broken. Incidentally, Flattr was said to be used as a method of donating money to WikiLeaks after PayPal, Visa, and Mastercard cut off submissions to the site.

PayPal and other payment systems have been a standard up to this point, but Flattr believes its service is a better alternative for micro-donations. Olsson explained that, while PayPal is a great platform, its system is “too tedious” for small payments since it is based on purchases.

“A micro-payment service needs to be instantaneous and one-click and a no-brainer to use,” he said. “That is not PayPal.”

On the social side, Flattr is integrated into both Facebook and Twitter. Last week, the company also announced an Explore feature that allows users to follow content producers and fellow donators. Olsson told us that this feature was the first step toward a more social and personalized experience through Flattr.

“Donations and monetary payments toward content on the Web should be as social as the content itself,” he pointed out.

According to Olsson, Flattr is taking social sharing to an entirely different level. As a result, he thinks that Flattr will soon be listed with all the other social sharing buttons.

Would you be willing to “flattr” your favorite content? Could this change the way businesses are funded? Please share.

March 27, 2012
ShareAndTell to Become New Sharing Button?

With nearly every web page incorporating multiple social sharing capabilities, it is safe to say that peer-to-peer sharing has become extremely valuable. We also know that consumers, typically, prefer recommendations from peers as opposed to brands.

How much value do you put in a peer endorsement as opposed to a brand endorsement? Let us know.

In an effort to take sharing on Facebook and Twitter a little further, ShareAndTell is a new product that puts an interesting twist on sharing. It puts incentive behind the sharing action. In other words, it hopes to reward users for sharing while also helping brands to potentially gain more endorsements.

Joey Caroni, ShareAndTell’s founder, explained to us that instead of competing with Facebook and Twitter, they hope to encourage more sharing on these platforms.

“We’re kind of eliminating the anonymous shares that get made and providing the website owner with more analytics and a deeper knowledge of who their endorsers are,” he said.

Also, for brands, he pointed out that they “can identify the key influencers, [and] they can kind of close the communication loop with these people.”

While the product is available to anyone, ShareAndTell is primarily geared toward small businesses. According to Caroni, it takes the legal burden away from them and also helps them better connect with consumers.

Does ShareAndTell have the potential to replace the current sharing buttons on websites today?

April 19, 2011