LBi London

Weekly Social Media Update

Posted by Sinead Doyle September 20th, 2010

New Twitter Interface

Twitter’s new interface is being rolled out globally this week: the new Twitter allows you to consume shared content without navigating to a third party site, along with integrating some of the best features of existing standalone clients. These improvements take Twitter.com a step closer to being the first choice for browsing your tweets, perhaps paving the way for Twitter to attract advertising revenue in future.

Facebook Places Arrives in the UK

Just a few weeks behind our American cousins, Facebook Places has finally launched in the UK. This is clearly an opportunity to start serving highly targeted location-specific ads, but at present there is no mechanism for doing this through the official Facebook app or mobile browsing experience. Foursquare, on the other hand, is further down the path to monetization, with big brands like McDonald’s already enjoying success with location-based campaigns.

World’s Biggest Coffee Morning

Macmillan’s annual coffee morning takes place on Friday the 24th of September: what a wonderfully easy way to give to a good cause. Here at LBi, we’ll be donating the proceeds from our Friday coffees in the basement, and the Media team will be organizing a good old fashioned bake sale on the third floor tomorrow.

World's Biggest Coffee Morning

Painting With Light

Lovely stuff from Dentsu London and BERG: using an iPad as a light source to generate stop-motion holograms. Nice work.

Tags: bake sale, BERG, Dentsu, Facebook places, geolocation, ipad, LBi, LBi Media, location based networks, Macmillan, new twitter, Social Media, stop motion, twitter, twitter interface, World’s Biggest Coffee Morning

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Interface Development team weeknote (week 1029)

Posted by Paul Carvill May 24th, 2010

A weekly note detailing the joy and the pain of LBi’s Interface Development team.  One of the apparent conventions of the weeknote format (which started with the esteemed BERG, according to Russell M Davies in this Wired article) is that the week numbering scheme runs from the date of the business’s incorporation.  LBi has a long and interesting history, but I managed to trace it back to the earliest incarnation of the group: Linkhand, date of incorporation 03 September 1990, hence the spectacularly high week number.

Week ending 21/05/10:

This week Will spent a few enjoyable days appreciating the benefits of working to a single platform when he put together an iPhone-specific implementation of one of our clients’ sites. It’s probably a bit hush-hush for now so we’ll do a big reveal of that at some point in the future, but let’s just say it’s “kinda interesting”.

After an enquiry from a colleague as to the existence of a platform-independent version of the popular performance analysis tool dynaTrace Ajax Edition, Ray started to put together a “node.js traffic proxy analysis tool thingy” which has the beginnings of something very useful. It lets you route all your http requests through a node.js webserver, where you can analyse the request headers for all sorts of interesting information. Some further tinkering with this will prove fruitful.

Andy and I continued work on our top secret iPad-targeted webapp. We’ve already spent a few weeks developing the client-side architecture, where we employed an MVC pattern to manage the app, made use of mobile Safari’s offline storage capabilities to take care of state, and layered on our own touch interaction system. Now we’re taking a deep dive into the rendering of the views, which it looks like we’re going to split out into a smaller, independent module and which, thanks to some impressive design work, presents some unique challenges. We’re delivering this module with its own test suite of QUnit unit tests, and we hope it will be integrated into a larger continuous integration workflow.

Our fortnightly Interface Development team meeting had two presentations — Filip talked about the HTML5 geolocation API, and I showed an outline of “How To Design A Good API” which will be pertinent to some of the code libraries we’re developing in-house. We also got some amazingly good biscuits.

We currently have around 20 interface developers in the team so we’ll feature a few here each week and try not to bludgeon you to death with detail.  We’re also looking for some more great interface developers, so if you like what you read here then get in touch!

Tags: api, dynatrace, geolocation, interfacedevelopment, ipad, iPhone, javascript, mvc, nodejs, qunit, tdd

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Weekly Social Media Update

Posted by Sinead Doyle May 14th, 2010

IBM Enters the Social Media Monitoring Space

Mashable revealed this week that IBM has launched a new modelling tool. It may not be easy on the eye, but it claims to be pretty powerful: “The software, called the SPSS Modeler data mining and text analytics workbench, will use natural language processing (NLP) to analyze everything from product names and industry jargon to slang and emoticons.”

IMB's new tool

Facebook Privacy Backlash

The backlash against Facebook’s new approach to privacy continues, with stories of stealth apps presenting a fresh security risk. To illustrate last week’s post from the EFF, Matt McKeon has produced a beautiful infographic demonstrating Facebooks rapacious data acquisition strategy. (Thanks to Rushna for bringing this to my attention.)

2005

2010

Another infographic from Mashable shows a selection of interesting facts about Facebook, past and present, but it’s the headline-grabbing facts that are getting attention in the mainstream media: Facebook’s Privacy Policy is longer than the United States Constitution, spanning 5,830 words! Even the EU is now weighing in with its opinion on Facebook’s policy: “It is unacceptable that the company fundamentally changed the default settings on its social-networking platform to the detriment of a user.” Facebook need to take this very seriously if they want to avoid losing users.

Facebook Places In Development

In the same week as Foursquare hit 40m check-ins, a Facebook “places” tab has been spotted in the code for Facebook’s mobile site. Obviously this is still in development, but it firms up the rumours that have been going round about the potential for Facebook launching check-in functionality. Until it finally launches fully, there’s still time for other new location based services to get a foot-hold in the market, especially in the gaming sector: for example, location based games like Booyah, Parallel Kingdom, and Fast Foot Challenge.

Twitter Business Accounts

Twitter is all set to launch paid-for business accounts. Details of specific features are still thin on the ground, but we can assume a business account will automatically be a “verified account” and will probably have enhanced direct messaging capabilities.

Hotel iPads

Intercontinental will be equipping all its hotels with iPads. Guests will enjoy interactive maps and destination-specific video guides, allowing the concierge to effortlessly demonstrate their unparalleled knowledge of their locale.

iHobo

Publicis London have launched an iPhone app with an interesting take on the problem of homelessness: iHobo allows you to carry a tiny person around in your pocket for three days. It’s essentially a “Tamagotchi with a social conscience”: decide for yourself whether that’s tasteless or so crazy it just might work.

Tags: Booyah, checkins, concierge ipad, EFF, EU, Facebook, facebook mobile, Facebook places, Fast Foot Challenge, foursquare, geolocation, hotel ipads, IBM, ihobo, infographic, intercontinental, ipad, iphone apps, location based networks, Mashable, Matt McKeon, monitoring, Parallel Kingdom, privacy, privacy policy, publicis, Social Media, SPSS Modeler, stealth apps, twitter, twitter business, verified account

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