i.TV Application Added to Apple's iTunes Store

Three weeks ago, we showed you images from an early access build of i.TV, a new application for the iPhone and iPod Touch that lets you get the latest TV and movie schedules from your area, rate shows, and leave reviews. The application, which is free, was added to the Apple iTunes application store late last night, and is available to the public immediately.

At launch, i.TV bills itself as the "ultimate" movies and TV guide for Apple's portable devices, offering more than 144,000 TV and movie listings, data from 5,000 local theaters, and nearly 6,000 TV previews or movie trailers. It currently works in the United States and Canada, so those outside North America will need to wait.


i.TV Pulled Down My Channel Data in Seconds to the iPhone
As has been said by many, no application is complete without some social element these days, and i.TV, as you recall, is no different. You can engage with other viewers of shows you like by sharing reviews, and you can recommend shows to friends by e-mail. In fact, some of the elements of this app shadow the recommendations I gave TiVo in June. (See: TiVo Is a Zero On the Social Web. It's Time They Fast Forward.)


You Can Get Show Data and Theater Info on i.TV
I downloaded the new application from the iTunes Store tonight, and the speed is remarkably faster than the first alpha I tried last month. It automatically recognized my location, and based on that zip code, I was pulling down channel listings in seconds. Given its price (free), there's really no reason not to have this app if you already have an iPhone or an iPod Touch. You can find it here: Apple iTunes Store: i.TV.

Spokeo: Ad-based Service Was a Failure, Declares Web 2.0 "Over"

A year ago, Spokeo entered my view as a service that would let you follow all your friends' updates across multiple social networks. At the time, the idea that you could see all their updates, from MySpace to Friendster, as well as follow all your RSS feeds in one place, was quite compelling. But even then, I said, "there's always the question of "How will they make money?" Not surprisingly, their approach of building a large user base, and slapping ads all over the place, gathering the pennies where they fell, simply didn't scale.

Their timing was also impeccably poor, as just two weeks after my initial post, FriendFeed debuted, ushering in a new level of expectations for social following and engagement.

Tonight, in a blog post by Harrison Tang, the company's founder, he writes that "as most of you would agree, the Web 2.0 era is long over", recounting that the company "ran ads for 3 months in the beginning of 2008, and we quickly realized that even if we grow the traffic by 100 times, we still couldn’t cover our basic costs."

In what's a complete 180 from their initial free model open to all who grabbed beta invites, Spokeo has revamped, making itself a premium play, and has flipped the data on its head, being less about tracking friends, and instead, tailoring it toward HR professionals who want to do some detective work on potential hires. (See: www.spokeo.com/hr)

This new model actually falls further into what people often called "Spook-eo", as the service can dredge up items you might have thought had been long since tucked away in the Web's archives. But Spokeo, after having launched with big expectations, has clearly scaled back, and is facing a new reality head on, trying to salvage something. As Harrison wrote, "Advertisers aren’t dumb, and they won’t pay for ads that don’t work forever." I've been outspoken in my distaste for display ads on Web sites, and think they're not the solution to all that ails the Web. Even services and blog networks more mature than that of Spokeo are going to struggle as ad budgets dry up, and differentiation decreases.


An example of an update within Spokeo's new interface

If anything, Spokeo has never been one to shy away from questionable publicity. You might recall in the wake of Google's auto-friending debacle last December, Spokeo made no changes and held their ground. But I don't know that I was waiting for them to declare Web 2.0 "over". Maybe the "ads + free" model is on thin ice, but Web 2.0 is and was about more than that. Should be interesting to see if Spokeo can turn the corner with their new approach, and if HR professionals will come their way instead of relying solely on LinkedIn. I think they'll find this new road a struggle as well.

Liking the Dislike: Social Networks Don't Force the Love

Newton's third law of motion says that for every action, there is an equal and opposite reaction.

Many technologies have ratings features built in with equal and opposite choices these days, from the thumbs up and thumbs down on your TiVo remote control, to rating songs from zero to five stars in iTunes, and of course, deciding whether to Digg or Bury. But as social networking tools don't necessarily need to subscribe to Newton's laws, not all services offer diametrically opposed activity. You can't offer a negative share on Google Reader, canceling someone else's share out, for example, and FriendFeed limits you to "liking" items, making users oddly "like" things they hate, if only to draw attention to the item. Social Median, which is increasingly looking like FriendFeed, added the ability to "like" and "dislike" items on Monday, through what they call a "mood button", drawing more attention to the battle between love and hate. (See a discussion on FriendFeed about the new feature here)


Social Median gives articles mood, based on the like/dislike ratio
With so many people consuming as much content as we are these days, with more Web sites, RSS feeds and social networks to imbibe, services are making it ever easier to make our feelings known in the shortest amount of time, with the least amount of effort. While a year or two ago we may have left a comment and engaged with the blog author, these days, we're just as likely to vote up the number of stars on their Outbrain widget, share the item in Google Reader, or just click "like" on FriendFeed, essentially "checking the box off" on what was required for me as a reader, taking the easy way out. Often, this is done even by reading just the headline, and not the full article. (Do you really think people are reading all the items they Digg?)

Social news sites like Reddit, Mixx and others tend to simply show the sum total of votes by its members, subtracting the down votes from the up votes to determine an item's popularity. As a moderator on the Elite Tech News Reddit, I recently found myself looking at what the community had selected as the best news items. Usually they will have anywhere from only 1 to 3 points, but by looking deeper, the actual up and down votes are more like 12 to 9, or 11 to 10. Negative voting is almost always approaching 50 percent.


Ballhype says, "Don't be a hater"
I'd always thought if I didn't like something, I should just skip it rather than calling out that I don't like it. I do bury some items on Digg, if I find them to be duplicates, from shady Web sites, or, punitively, if I see the authors relentlessly pimping for votes on Twitter, but those are exceptions, rather than the rule. So who are these people who are just as likely to vote items down as up? So far, typical social networking behavior has let you play the role of hit and run, disliking an item and taking off, if you have that option, letting you do so anonymously, even if the system knew it was you. In fact, Ballhype would put up an alert to "Stop being a hater" if you gave too many thumbs down in a row.

Social Median's new approach to "Mood" not only lets you "dislike" an item, and see the percentage of people who dislike it, but you can see just who voted it down, adding a level of accountability to your vote. I am curious to see if the community takes to "dislikes" as quickly as they took to likes on FriendFeed. It's always easy to be in a group of friends who like something, but if you say you dislike something, it begs a follow-up. Why did you dislike it? Was it the subject matter? Was it poorly written? But again, that takes you out of the realm of doing as little as possible, and actually needing to answer the questions. I bet the community would vote thumbs down on that idea!

Microblog Megaphoning: Informative or Irresponsible?

By Mona Nomura of Pixel Bits (FriendFeed/Twitter)

Microblogging is becoming more common. Especially Twitter, which has been featured in major publications, including TIME, Newsweek, and InformationWeek. Aggregating sites are spawning and major social networking sites are encouraging data sharing, which is efficient, since we are active on various sites and...

Oh, screw this. I'm going to say what I have to say.

I am active on FriendFeed and it is an aggregator. Meaning, I see everything my "friends" choose to feed in. Most shares are informative, helpful, and newsworthy. Others are quite appalling. Specifically, Tweets.

Just today, I saw a bunch of Tweets from a FOAF (friend of a friend) detailing work, client, and vendor relations. Last week, said individual was Tweeting about how busy and tired they were, and gave the impression (s)he was unhappy with their job. As an employer, I would not be happy to see the flow of complaints megaphoned.

And that person's Tweets exemplify only a few of the thousands of baffling Tweets I've seen.

The problem with microblogging and the ease of publishing information is this: most people don't think before spewing 140 characters. Don't get me wrong, not everyone is emotive, but I've seen one too many foot-in-mouth Tweets.

The simplest solution may be requesting Twitter to implement "Mail Goggles" like Google did for Gmail. Perhaps then, we will see some tact. Until that day, remember to think before hitting "post". After all, not only do those spontaneous Tweets represent who we are, those brain vomits will forever be indexed and cached by Google.

Read more by Mona Nomura at Pixel Bits.

A Recession's Impact: Lower Expectations Across the Board

The stock market is a disaster.

Banks are going under, and massive financial institutions are being bailed out. Companies are announcing hiring freezes and layoffs. And just about everybody has less money now than they did last month, or the one before that. While many of these perceived losses are quantifiable (on paper), more widespread are the losses that cannot be quantified, as people and companies cast off their optimism, and exchange it with a dark reality.

Those of us who made it through the last recession have seen this play out before, and others, a few times as bust follows boom, and back again. This time, the bust just might be deeper, and its impact further felt. I made a handy chart to see how people here in the Silicon Valley might be adjusting their expectations - from personal goals to family, possessions and career. In every aspect, I think it's safe to say that many are choosing door number three.


How a market changes one's goals - in chart form...
(Feel free to reuse the image on your blog)
With all the bad news out there, have you already made some of these choices? I'll likely be keeping my 1998 Mercury Tracer going just a bit longer, and despite the twins, I don't see us moving out any time soon, as demand for housing has cratered. Stocks I held just last week are worth 80 cents on the dollar today, and it could be time to buckle down unless things turn around soon.