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YouTube has launched a new feature that allows channel owners to send text messages and links to videos to the front page of their subscribers' YouTube accounts. It's a cool, if logical, feature to offer and one that could make visiting YouTube a lot more fun. Called Channel Bulletins, the feature is pretty simple. But am I looking forward to seeing little updates sent out between videos from the people I'm subscribed to? Yes, I am. Sponsor It would be nice if YouTube allowed channel owners to pipe in RSS feeds, maybe Twitter messages. The personal touch should be nice too, though. If you aren't subscribed to any channels on YouTube, you're missing out on one of the best ways to experience the site. I'm subscribed to Steve Gillmor , Breaking the News , Social Data Revolution and Brown Man Thinking Hard , among others. (Would love to get your suggestions for video channels to subscribe to, RWW readers.) Blippy co-founder Phil Kaplan brought this feature to our attention and framed it as YouTube's version of Twitter. It may play out that way for hard-core YouTube users, but I hope more casual publishers will regularly send out bulletins as well. I wouldn't mind getting them as emails, even. It would be nice for subscribers to be able to reply easily to Channel Bulletins, too. There are lots of ways this could go, but getting it started, offering messaging other than videos and comments, is a good move. Channels have long been a part of YouTube, Paris Hilton got the first branded one in 2006 , and it's pretty far-out to think that text message communication between channel owners and subscribers has taken this long to arrive. Perhaps when you're coming from a video-centric perspective, these things don't always come to mind. There are many other social features that could be added to make YouTube a more compelling site. Could I please be shown the YouTube channels and favorites of my friends on Twitter, Facebook and Google Accounts, for example? That would be great. Discuss
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YouTube Launches Twitter-Like Channel Bulletins
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There is a phenomenon among consumers that is evidenced by the rise in popularity of sites that allow users to share information about the products they buy or want to buy with friends and other shoppers like them. These sites exist because consumers inherently trust the opinions of their friends and their peers when it comes to purchasing and business related decisions, and they trust them a whole lot more than they trust most marketing campaigns. Author John Jantsch , who previously penned the book Duct Tape Marketing is a few weeks away from publishing his second book which focuses specifically on the power of referrals. Sponsor The book, titled The Referral Engine: Teaching Your Business to Market Itself , hits bookshelves in mid-May, and could be an excellent resource for early-stage startups and entrepreneurs-to-be. Jantsch's first book did so well that it lead to the creation of the Duct Tape Marketing System and the Duct Tape Marketing Coach Network, while additionally earning accolades for both Jantsch's blog and his podcast on small business marketing which continues to release episodes today . In his new book, Jantsch explores how companies can strategically market their products to take advantage of the referral and peer review phenomenon of consumer buying habits. As Jantsch points out in a video explaining his motives behind the book (embedded below), he discovered that most successful small business which are thriving off referrals didn't do so by including some special sauce into their recipe. Instead, he says that these companies are, by their very nature, "more referable" than others. Some of Jantsch's suggestions for being more referable include making and effort to communicate personally with customers via social media and other means, being sure your customers know who they should be referring to, and getting your sales team on board with referral strategies. Early anticipatory praise of the book is already coming in from the likes of author Chris Brogan, Silicon Valley investor Guy Kawasaki, and Zappos founder Tony Hsieh whose upcoming book we previewed a few weeks ago . A free download of the first chapter is also available on the book's homepage, and the full book, coming in around 250 pages, will be available on May 13 according to Amazon . Check back here next month after the book publishes for a more in-depth review, and in the meantime, keep an eye out for ways to boost your company's referral engine. Discuss
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Weekend Reading: The Referral Engine, by John Jantsch (Preview)
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A couple of months ago, we asked whether MySpace could make a comeback . Since that time, they've become #1 on Android and jumped into bulk user data sales . Today, MySpace has unveiled a new events plaform . Called MySpace Events , it presumes to be "a global events and calendar platform providing users with new tools to create, discover, share, and manage events across MySpace and multiple social networks." Sponsor Key features include the following. A new social and pop culture calendar that "combines your friends' events, your events, events from your favorite artists, with pop culture events and sponsored events." Ability to buy concert tickets directly from an artist's profile. "Social advertising," wherein advertisers can purchase ad space inside users' social calendars. Cross-plaform event viewing in which a user's MySpace calendar includes Facebook events. "We're providing features to share events on MySpace via the Stream and across the web including on Facebook, Twitter, and tiny url." The announcement focuses on the benefits to both the Myspace users and the individual, up-and-coming "artists" who have used the service to promote themselves. It will be interesting to see how bigger companies use the platform. Discuss
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MySpace Launches Events Platform
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Rally Up , a new location-based social network with a strong focus on privacy , just became the first fully featured location-based social network with an iPad app. The app, which is available for free ( iTunes link ), includes all of the features of Rally Up's iPhone app. Thanks to making good use of the iPad's expanded screen estate, however, using the iPad app is far easier and a lot more fun. Sponsor Location-Based Services on the iPad: On Hold Until the WiFi + 3G Models Arrive The current version of the iPad has to rely on WiFi triangulation to pinpoint a user's location. As long as you are in a city, this works reasonably well. We expect to see more location-based iPad apps, including from Foursquare and Gowalla, once Apple launches the WiFi + 3G version of the iPad, which will include a GPS chip. For now, Loopt's Pulse is the only other location-based social network that has arrived on the iPad, but Loopt's app doesn't allow users to check in from the app and focuses on letting users browser photos, places, events and their friends streams instead. Rally Up on the iPad When we first reviewed Rally Up's iPhone service a few weeks ago, we noted that the application puts a very strong emphasis on privacy and allows you to tweak these privacy settings individually for every single on of your followers and the people you follow. As Rally Up's co-founder Sol Lipman told us, Rally Up is really more about connecting you to your "real" friends. It is important to note that Rally Up's sophisticated privacy controls also gives you the flexibility to follow whoever you want to and just broadcast very little to none of your location data to people you don't fully trust or know. Using the iPhone version of Rally Up is a lot of fun - in part thanks to the application's minimalist design - but as with so many iPad apps, the larger screen makes browsing your friends streams and looking at their locations on a large map a lot easier. Rally Up's iPad app also emphasizes the microblogging aspects of the service, where the extra screen estate comes in handy for posts with photos, for example. Discuss
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Rally Up Brings Location-Based Social Networking to the iPad
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Email may be old fashioned, but it's still where we spend a lot of our time online. Today Google announced that it's webmail service Gmail is becoming all the richer with the inclusion of support for sending Google Calendar invitations inside the email composition window. In addition to being able to insert invitations, you can also cross reference your calendar availability with the availability of anyone included in your email thread that you have permission to see the Google Calendar for. It's not a perfect system, but it's pretty neat and it demonstrates the potential for building cool new features on top of our email inboxes. Sponsor Mashups and platforms are all about cross referencing multiple sources of data or functionality, as in this case: email plus calendar. We wrote earlier this Spring about a startup called Rapportive that cross references email and social media data about an email's sender (see also competitor Etacts ) and earlier this month we discussed the incredible potential in Google's announcement of a way to give developers secure access to the contents of your emails for analysis and the creation of innovative services. Yahoo has been calling this kind of approach Inbox 2.0 and has been working on it for more than two years. Here's what we wrote in November, 2007 coverage of Yahoo's vision - how do you think it's worked out? ( Yahoo Says the Future Will Be Modeled on Facebook ) The social network of the future will be populated by the RSS feeds of the activities of your friends and your friends will be determined by email. The big players won't put a major push into building a new social network. "It is much easier to extend an existing habit than to create a brand," are the words Google's Joe Krause. Your email account isn't valuable because it's got the email adresses of other people who could be solicited commercially - it's valuable because it articulates who in the world is able to command your attention. It contains analyzable, direct communication between you and the people most important to you. [Yahoo's] Garlinghouse says that in the future email and IM will be prioritized depending on the importance to you of the people who send it to you. We're not talking about the number of times people email you - we're talking about the percentage of times you open those emails, the keywords used in them relative to your personal/work profile, there are metrics so crazy we can hardly imagine that are available for determining the importance of people in your life. In your email. Facebook's people-search uses some similar math already. Various Ways Email Gets Innovated On Clearly there are all kinds of different levels of sophistication that can come with these sorts of developments. In fact, two plus years after Yahoo's call to action, things still seem relatively elementary. Rapportive displays data uniquely well but Etacts displays more data. This new Google Calendar integration with Gmail offers some visibility into your and your contacts' availability, but it doesn't tell you what you've got scheduled at a given time. Etacts offers inferior invitation sending but has a whole set of reminder and follow up features that Gmail doesn't offer natively. And Yahoo Mail more closely ties in Facebook than any other email, something millions of people are sure to enjoy. So while all the kids rant and rave about Twitter, Facebook, Augmented Reality, iPads and location based social networking, don't let them deny: email can still be very exciting. Discuss
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Your Inbox as Platform: Google Calendar More Closely Integrated With Gmail
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