IT Geeks

I have been seeing quite a few complaints on Facebook about this new app.

The Automatic Friend Finder is an annoying new thing which pops up saying “These two friends have found new connections through this application. Click here blah blah blah”.

Quite a few people have pasted Twitter / Facebook messages saying they’ve never used the app yet Twitter displays their profiles there saying that they have used it successfully.

A few grumpy people out there – anybody else experienced similar things?

One of my mates showed it to me last night and I think it is quite a cool application.

HOWEVER I tried to download it on to my phone (Nokia N70) and it keeps coming up with a message that my security settings do not allow the installation of the application. I can’t seem to find anywhere to change security settings so I’m stuck. About to browse their support forum to find an answer but if there is a smart person out there who can provide me with the answer sooner, then that would be good!

Any takers?

What’s fring?
fring is a free mobile application that lets users communicate with friends on popular networks over their mobile phone’s internet connection.

fring users make free mobile calls, video calls, live chat & more, from their mobile phone with all their friends on fring & other internet services like Skype®, MSN Messenger®, GoogleTalk™, AIM®, ICQ® , Facebook® & Twitter, all through one central, integrated phone book. See the full feature list here.

fring is completely free. It’s free to download and free to use to make calls, video calls, instant messages and more, all via your mobile phone’s internet connection (over ‘IP’).

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WorldChat – Phone overseas from 29c per minute! Buy airtime online and get a 10% discount! Click Here

In the US the number of Farmville farmers outnumbers the number of real farmers by a ratio of nearly 60:1…

… that says something about society. It does not matter if the world goes hungry - so long as we get to play Farmville right…?

Apparently Farmville is the most popular application in the history of Facebook. It has 62 million registered users and 22 million logging on at least once a day. That makes it bigger than Twitter.

Source: http://www.omg-facts.com/view/Facts/597

Frightening stuff. Farmville drives me absolutely nuts when it keeps populating my Facebook feeds – eventually had to trim down some of my friends who were Farmville addicts.

I am just reading a story on TBI about an Irish start-up called Goshido which used social networking site LinkedIn to raise $230000 in financing for their small business.

I have been meaning to blog about LinkedIn for a while and this story jumped out at me as a good one to look at LinkedIn.

Truth be told – until January this year I haven’t really used LinkedIn as a networking tool. As much as I despise a lot of these social media tools, I’ve been keen to use things like Twitter, Facebook and Skype to communicate without necessarily building my online LinkedIn presence.

I’m starting to get into it now and beginning to make some nice contacts on the platform which I wouldn’t make through the other tools. The main takeaway for me is that LinkedIn seems to offer more professional credibility.

What are your thoughts on using LinkedIn to grow your professional network?

The year appears to have been a water-shed one for the online sector with the global financial crisis and economic recession forcing many “Web 2.0″ participants to take a long hard look at their business models.

A major shift that I think has happened is that we have finally broken out of the “free” model for online and we are starting to work out how to monetise online content.

In the last 48 hours I have read two articles which highlight this. First up I read on Mashable that Twitter is in fact going to generate $25m worth of revenue this year. This evening I picked up an article on Business Insider which reckons that Facebook has revenue of nearly $1bn to be booked in 2010 - a huge leap from the $550m reported in the 2009 financial year.

Suddenly this big question of whether online sites and social media can be monetised are being answered.

(Just as a quick aside on that Twitter number. Twitter is ”valued” at $1bn, but revenue of $25m … still doesn’t stack up. On top of that I think I remember reading that the $25m is a result of some search deals which will need to be expanded on in the following year)

A lot of the people now talking about investments in the line space are less interested in “eyeballs” and more interested in either carving out a niche or showing exactly where revenue is going to come from.

Looking at some of the investments made by the venture capital firms in the last few months, many of them are keen to not only embrace ”big idea’ or “social media” concepts, but also to look at how quickly they can get them into a revenue generating form.

Finally I also think there is a bit of a shift happening in consumer behaviour and the way they embrace (and buy in) to content. While I certainly am no proxy for the global internet consumer, for the third time time this week I found myself almost tempted to pay for my subscription to the Wall Street Journal.

At some point I will give in and pay it. I suspect that if I am thinking along those lines then so are other consumers and ultimately that will change the way that people adopt media and the media companies and publishers themselves monetise their offerings.