Blogging

The location-based social network Loopt, just announced and demoed its native iPhone application onstage at WWDC. The application, which will be free at launch, helps you connect with and find friends around you. Using the location technology built in to the iPhone, Loopt will drop pins onto a map, showing where your friends are.

Loopt also contains other social-networking features, such as calling, texting, and sending invitations to meet up. The example used was seeing if any friends are in your area for lunch. Once you have located friends, you can send them an invitation for lunch, and if they agree, you will be one touch away from directions to their location. As Sam Altman from Loopt put it, “You will never have to eat alone, or at a bad restaurant again.”

This is an exciting step in bringing location-based networking into the mainstream. With native third-party applications for the iPhone and the rumored GPS feature, expect to see many applications leveraging these same sorts of capabilities in the future.

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Loopt demos free location-based iPhone app

At the many advertising conferences dotting Internet Week New York this week, speakers and panelists have been exhorting the ad industry to start thinking more creatively when it comes to tackling digital media–even creating elaborate branded series in lieu of traditional commercials.

They weren’t the only ones who got that memo. Record label Universal Music Group’s Universal Music U.K. announced Monday that it’s partnered with social network Bebo to broadcast a series called The Secret World of Sam King: one part video blog, one part Choose Your Own Adventure, and one part Universal advertorial. It’s being produced by Globe Productions, a division of Universal.

The premise of the new series is that Sam King, an extremely low-level fictional employee of Universal Music, decides to found his own record label in the company mail room. Along the way, he encounters real-life Universal artists, and viewers will be able to submit opinions, send in material, and suggest which bands Sam should scout.

The show will also be fueled by product placement, with handset manufacturer Sony Ericsson signing on as the inaugural brand sponsor. Apparently this will lead to the protagonist “winding his boss up with mobile phone-related pranks.”

Bebo and Universal have not provided a concrete debut date.

Universal’s concept of a “brand show” is a bit similar to Back On Topps, a series created by former Disney exec Michael Eisner’s video start-up Vuguru, as a promotion for the trading card company (which Eisner himself owns). That series, premiering this week, also pits fictional company employees against the celebrities affiliated with it–in Topps’ case, famous athletes.

For Bebo, which has its biggest audience in the U.K., and parent company AOL, its 42 million members get video content that will (ideally) be enjoyable and will keep them around. It’ll also be cross-promoted across other AOL video brands. For Universal, creating an (ideally) hip show geared toward Bebo’s young users could help recapture the attention of a generation that’s turned away from the major labels and in the direction of BitTorrent.

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Universal Music U.K. to debut series on Bebo

Sad messages from Twitter.com.

Today is the day of Steve Jobs’ Apple WWDC keynote. Very exciting! But it’s a sad day for Twitter fans who are watching the service, already suffering from weeks of intermittent problems, collapse under the load of people who are tying to use it to talk about the Stevenote.

There are at least two initiatives for people, like me, who can’t just walk away from our old friend: Summize and Twiddict.

Summize will tell you everything the Twittersphere is saying about Apple.

Summize is a Twitter search engine. It can read what’s happening on Twitter and is a bit easier to deal with than the intermittent Twitter.com. Today, for the Stevenote, Twitter itself is publicizing a Summize feed that tracks Apple news (actually just the words WWDC, Apple, iPhone, and “Steve Jobs”).

That doesn’t help people who are having a hard time using Twitter to post to the service, or the API-based apps like Twhirl that are working worse than ever before. If you want to update Twitter during one of its outages, check out Twiddict, which will accept posts from you and queue them up until Twitter is working again. Clever, but it’s clearly not a business. Furthermore, why bother updating Twitter when its recent and current outages are teaching its users–the people you’re trying to reach when you post–to stay away from the site?

Twiddict lets you update Twitter even when it's down.

I’ve gotten some flack for my previous proposal that Twitter go offline until its scaling problems are fixed. But I stand by that idea: It’s lunacy to keep a business open when you can’t deliver on its brand promise. Especially, as in Twitter’s case, if you’re not making any money from it anyway.

Until Twitter is fixed, you can find me over on FriendFeed.

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Twitter is dying. Summize and Twiddict are trying to keep it alive

(Credit: Thumbs Up)

It’s been noted many times that digital photo frames–among the most overproduced items in the gadget world–are perennially searching for new ways to differentiate themselves from the ever-growing pack. Some have included Webcams, combined with land lines to provide photo IDs, or have doubled as secondary computer displays.

eStarling, for its part, has taken a different tack: Rather than contantly updating its hardware, it adds new feeds to its 8-inch Wi-Fi frame. Already able to get streams from online photo services such as Flickr or Photobucket, the wireless frame has now added
Facebook to its networked family.

Once hooked up to your Facebook account, it will automatically display photos uploaded to the social network, GeekAlerts says. Which means that you probably want to be careful where you place the frame when mom and dad come over.

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Facebook photos make their way to the shelf