Angel Blog Reviews » user

Voice-Activated Internet: Text-Free Tweeting, Blogging & More

cgseo — Wed, 13 Jan 2010 05:12:19 +0000

As some of our readers know, I was clumsy enough to hack off a chunk of my finger while making dinner a couple nights ago. This incident has severely curtailed my blogging activity, but it's led to a fortunate inspiration, as well! For those of you who are differently-abled - temporarily or otherwise - or for those of you who are simply too lazy to type, here are a handful of resources for hands-free Internet use, from blog posting to Twitter updates to straight-up voice-to-text transcription services. I hope you find these apps as useful as I have. Sponsor Jott Jott is a transcription service that takes your speech and converts it to text. With tiered subscription plans that run a modest gamut of around $4 per month to $13 per month and a pay-as-you-go option that seems perfectly geared toward casual users, Jott is competitively priced for both a satisfied userbase and profitability. The site allows users to set in 15- or 30-second snippets of audio to be converted into text. Jott also offers services for consumers (voicemail transcription) and the enterprise (a Salesforce integration ), as well. The company started in Seattle in 2006. Since then, they've integrated Twitter functions and a suite of mobile apps for various devices. QuickTate A similar service we found is QuickTate. This service allows users to leave audio messages for themselves via phone; the messages are then transcribed to text and delivered to the user via SMS or email, depending on one's account settings. Text messages are also available on the web. QuickTate also allows provides a voicemail transcription service and has a handy iPhone-optimized widget. It too offers tiered subscription plans, with a convenient free option for occasional users and monthly plans ranging from $3.50 to $30 a month for up to 200 transcribed messages. We actually tested this one firsthand and found the vocie-to-text process both quick and extremely accurate - Google Voice transcription this was not. Each word was correctly spelled, and sentences were adequately punctuated. TweetCall TweetCall was another simple, free and accurate service we tested for posting updates to Twitter. There are many similar apps on the market, including TwitterFone (still in private beta after more than a year and a half since inception), but we appreciated the quick and easy nature of TweetCall. Signing up for the service took no more than a minute, after which we were able to dial 1-877-TweetCall, enter an optional PIN and leave a message to be transcribed to a 140-character tweet. The service worked just fine, and the text of the message was transcribed beautifully: We were not too surprised to learn that TweetCall is, in fact, powered by QuickTate. We were curious enough to dig around to find out why each product had such quick and accurate transcriptions; we found both are affiliated with iDictate , a long-standing figure in the space that employs actual human beings to get voice messages into text formats. It might not be the most technologically innovative or scalable solution, but these two apps certainly did everything we needed them to, and with a higher degree of accuracy than similar applications that rely on machine transcription of messages. Audio Blogging on Tumblr Lots of blogging software applications have tools for audio posts, but few are as simple as Tumblr's. Tumblr has the distinct advantage of giving users a completely free offering, as well. Early last year, Tumblr gave users the ability to post audio entries to their blogs. While this function doesn't provide any text transcription, it does do the trick for most casual bloggers who might need to call one in on occasion. We tested it out , and weren't too disappointed. The sound was a little muffled, though, and it's definitely not a feature that would be of any use to professional or enterprise bloggers. Visual Voicemail For an extensive and thorough look at voice-to-text voicemail transcription services, check out this post from Baratunde Thurston . I did not test voicemail transcription services because I, dear reader, make a point of not checking my voicemail, ever. Although Google Voice and similar services' audio message (mis)translations can be humorously wrong, they're often helpful for getting the gist of a communiqué without having to reroute through the labyrinthine depths of one's voicemail inbox. Let me know your favorite voice-to-text apps in the comments - I'll need them while I'm resting up and trying to regenerate my finger down in the basement of the ReadWriteLabs. Discuss

See the article here:
Voice-Activated Internet: Text-Free Tweeting, Blogging & More

A Facebook Proposal: Let’s Make Gmail Contacts & Google Reader Subscriptions Public

admin — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 21:34:28 +0000

Jonathan Swift argued in A Modest Proposal that children of the poor should be eaten. He went to a rhetorical extreme in order to illustrate the absurdity of a perspective he mocked and opposed. In order to illustrate how absurd Facebook's new privacy policies are, I want to imagine a fictitious but analogous situation: imagine Google announcing that our Gmail contacts and Google Reader subscriptions were to be made publicly visible to the web at large. If you don't want the world to know who you are communicating with and what you are reading, maybe you shouldn't be communicating with those people and reading that content. The tools you've used to communicate and read privately must stay current with the times, right? Sponsor What Happened at Facebook In the middle of December, Facebook began prompting users to re-evaluate their privacy settings on the site . If users had not changed any privacy settings in the past, then the privacy of status updates, photos, videos and shared was switched to a new default: no longer visible only to approved friends, that data was now by default publicly visible to everyone. That default could be opted-out of, though, and users could return their activity update settings back to private, limited to friends only. Other user-data was switched from private to public without recourse for users. User profile pictures, fan pages followed and lists of friends on the site are now made publicly visible and cannot be limited in their visibility. A fast backlash led the company to allow friends lists to be removed from public-facing profile pages, but anyone's friends lists are still publicly available by programs that ask for it. Friends lists can no longer be made accessible only to trusted friends on the site. RSS never caught on in a big way, but Facebook democratized online subscription to syndicated content. Now your interests and subscriptions are naked as a jay bird before the world. Requiring that Fan pages be public is important because that's how users express their interests and subscribe to updates from organizations they care about. RSS never caught on in a big way, but Facebook democratized online subscription to syndicated content. Now your interests and subscriptions are now naked as a jay bird before the world. (As an aside, did you know that most people who are fans of the Facebook page ComedyTweet are also fans of the page PornstarTweet ?) Why did Facebook do this? Company founder Mark Zuckerberg said this weekend that this is the way the world is moving - towards being more public and less private. He said that the company recently considered what settings it would apply if the site were to be created anew today and "just went for it." I explained yesterday why I don't think that move has been backed up by a credible argument , why privacy is still important. Last night I heard a story about a podcast for parents struggling to concieve a child. Some Facebook users have said they feel unable to subscribe to updates from the show as Fans on Facebook because they don't want friends to know they are trying to concieve. Becoming a Fan but being discrete about it isn't an option anymore. Stories like that are probably much more common than we might think. Consider now what it would be like if this same changes were to be made to a different set of technologies many of us use. Let's Open Up GMail Contacts and Google Reader Subscriptions! You may have signed up for GMail and Google Reader because you thought they would be effective, private and secure ways to communicate with people and subscribe to news of interest - but you were fooling yourself if you thought that information wasn't going to be made public someday! Don't you know that privacy on the internet is an illusion? Do you know how little money Google is able to make from Gmail and Google Reader with your data left private? What do you mean you use Twitter to communicate with people publicly and Gmail to communicate with them privately? Have you seen how seldom people talk about Gmail on TV these days? What's a web service to do? It's really a sign of the times. People are blogging more and more these days, you might even have a public blog on Google's Blogger.com. That's evidence right there that it's time to make your subscriptions and contacts public, too. Google Reader and Gmail are both much smaller than Facebook, half as many people use Gmail as use Facebook. Google Reader is much smaller still. Contacts and subscriptions on Facebook are public now - clearly society is moving in this direction. If you don't want people to know about who you are emailing and what you are reading, maybe you shouldn't be emailing them and reading it. Think this analogy is a stretch? Think that hundreds of millions of people don't think of Facebook as a private way to communicate with the friends they've approved, just like you do with Gmail, and to read updates from organizations they are interested in, but don't neccesarily want everyone to know about, like Google Reader? I don't think it's a stretch at all. I think these are similar tools for many people. As we've said before, Facebook's unilateral privacy policy changes have violated the contract they have with users. Just imagine how that would go over if it happened on other services we consider private. We give Facebook a hard time, but we love the site, too. Come be a fan of ReadWriteWeb there . You won't be able to hide that from anyone, but maybe it will distract people from your Comedy Tweets obsession. Discuss

View post:
A Facebook Proposal: Let's Make Gmail Contacts & Google Reader Subscriptions Public

TwitAlbums: Private, Collaborative Content Sharing Via Twitter

admin — Fri, 08 Jan 2010 07:24:34 +0000

Have you ever wanted to share a set of memories with some of your Twitter friends, keeping the content private while still allowing for collaboration between certain folks? It's not anything we thought we wanted, either, but after playing with TwitAlbums , we find the concept charming. Here's how it works: Using Twitter's OAuth function, users log in and create collections or "albums" containing multimedia content and text comments. They can invite whatever users they like to join them in adding files, and only the users they invite can see the content or comments. Best of all it looks like this little app already has a monetization strategy in place. Sponsor The concept is inherently charming. Users create an album with a single click. They can then proceed to upload movies, pictures and audio files. We'd like to see options for adding more file types, such as web pages, text files and more. Users can then choose others to collaborate with them on the album. A tweet is sent inviting the collaborators to the album, and they are prompted to sign in via OAuth when they click the tweet in the link. This immediate request for account access without an explanation of the app might be a bit disconcerting for some, however. If an uninvited Twitter user clicks the link, they are given an "invite only" notice and denied access to the content. Collaborators can add content, leave comments and invite other users, depending on the permissions set by the original album creator. Finally, it's interesting to note that the app's creators have built in a mechanism for modest financial returns. Each uploaded file costs the user a single onsite credit, called a TwitSeed. Accounts come with 50 TwitSeeds, and more can be purchased in bundles of 100 for $1, 500 for $4, or 1000 for $8. One thing we don't like is that the app pushes a ton of link- and hashtag-studded notifications into the user's Twitter stream. As with other apps that gain access via OAuth, from the infamous Spymaster to the successful TinyChat , this is a very fine line that most users would appreciate the app not cross. Generally speaking, users won't have a problem with a single tweet or two, but a constant stream of app-related messages when the user is active on the site can only end badly. Worst of all, we don't see a way to opt out of these notifications, so we've had to delete these tweets manually, which does nothing to mitigate the swarm of updates for our friends using Twitter clients such as Tweetdeck. Particularly since the content is set up to be private, it doesn't make sense to broadcast tweets about each user's on-site activity. We think this app would work well for younger users, social media addicts and long-distance friends, especially if the above-mentioned issues are addressed. What do you folks think so far; does TwitAlbums have what it takes to become a widely used Twitter application? Would you use it, and what would you use it for? Let us know in the comments. Discuss

Go here to see the original:
TwitAlbums: Private, Collaborative Content Sharing Via Twitter

Should You Reserve Ad Budget for Sponsored Tweets?

admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 23:45:11 +0000

Social media is likely to be factored into your ad budget for the new year, but the problem is deciding which format best suits you. While highly controversial, tech influencers like Chris Pirillo and Robert Scoble are being paid to tweet periodic product endorsements. The question is: Are sponsored tweets are worth it? ReadWriteWeb caught up with Likes.com co-founders Bindu Reddy and Arvind Sundararajan as they make the case for conversational advertising and the sponsored tweets landscape. Sponsor Similar to Ad.ly and Sponsored Tweets , MyLikes is a service that pays influencers to Tweet about specific products. In what resembles an AdWords -style dashboard, advertisers create a budget for their campaign and set the parameters and URL for where they'd like endorsers to redirect their friends. This month, Moo created a campaign in the hopes of selling business card packages to US-based users. Rather than being forced to endorse Moo, members chose to endorse them from a long list of companies. From there the endorser creates a short line about why they like a particular company with a link to pre-populated images, video and the campaign URL from their blogs and Twitter accounts. Bindu believes that because the network gives users options in who to endorse, the sponsored tweets become more authentic and better targeted to the user base. On a cost-per-click basis, campaigns range between $0.20 - $0.60 cents per click based on the influence of the endorser. If you compare this against some of the higher priced AdWords keyword campaigns, Twitter sponsorship is quite reasonable. While a budget analysis is an obvious indicator of whether or not you should sponsor tweets, another factor to consider is your company culture. When Izea's sponsored tweets program launched in late June many questioned the process of disclosure and the role of a social media influencer. While the FTC Act revisions make the space more regulated, they don't change the fact that your stakeholders may simply be put off by the practice. I'm going to answer your question about sponsored tweets with another question, "Are sponsored tweets more cost effective than your current click-thru campaigns and will your audience embrace it?" Discuss

View original post here:
Should You Reserve Ad Budget for Sponsored Tweets?

One More Thing: Multitouch on Nexus One Is Just a Hack Away (VIDEO)

admin — Wed, 06 Jan 2010 03:22:12 +0000

The only thing preventing Google's Nexus One phone from supporting multitouch features might be Apple's patents . Allow me to explain: There is nothing in the hardware of this device to prevent multitouch as evinced by Google's comment this morning at their press conference. When asked if the Nexus One would one day support multitouch, a Google rep responded, "We'll consider it." In a word, this means that the hardware is ready for users' pinching and zooming, but the current iteration of Google's software is locked to prohibit multitouch for legal reasons. We give the hackers of the mobile world a couple days to hack the device - after all, it's already been done on the Droid. Sponsor Here's a video showing multitouch on a Droid: And here's how that was accomplished. European hackers figured out how to jailbreak the device a scant month after its release. In the States,the folks at AllDroid sussed out how to port the web browser from the Motorola Milestone - which does support multitouch - over to the Droid. Granted, the hack only works for web browsers, but it's a significant improvement for those who can live with a bricked phone. The hack requires the would-be multitouch hero to get root access to the phone and install and delete certain components. Clearly, this user runs the risk of breaking the device and may violate Motorola's TOS and void the warranty. All of the above applies to the Droid. However, the same stipulations that prevent multitouch on that device also apply to the Nexus One: It's not a hardware issue; the software is simply locked. So, we're likely looking at a wait of a few days to see who wants to risk a $500+ device in the quest for an Android-powered multitouch mobile via TOS-violating hacks. Apple's involvement with the stalling or prevention of more and better multitouch devices has been a topic of speculation in the mobile gadget press since last year, when a group of several key patents for specific gestures were published. Since then, several multitouch devices, such as Palm's Pre, have been released without legal fanfare. Still, some speculate that Google's holding out on multitouch for legal reasons. "I think at this point that's more of a legal consideration than a technical one, since many phones that run Android have the capability of supporting multitouch on a hardware level," wrote Jason Chen of Gizmodo when he toyed with the device last month. And Chris Ziegler of Engadget said , "This is still very much a sensitive subject - but at least we have some confirmation that it's a software limitation alone... there's definitely some logic (probably legal logic, but logic nonetheless) behind which devices are getting it in which markets." What do you think - is this a patent issue? Or is the software simply not ready for public consumption yet? Better yet, if you had one of these devices, would you jailbreak it for multitouch capabilities? Let us know in the comments. Discuss

See original here:
One More Thing: Multitouch on Nexus One Is Just a Hack Away (VIDEO)

Synchtube: Watch Synchronized YouTube Videos With Your Friends

admin — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 17:25:34 +0000

Chances are that you are getting at least a few emails and IMs with links to YouTube videos every day. While watching these alone can be fun, Synchtube turns this into a far more social experience. Synchtube allows you to share and discuss a video in real time with up to four of your friends. The first person to enter the room controls the playback and also has the ability to change videos. Sponsor Features To get started, just head over to Synchtube.com and copy and paste a link to a YouTube video into the box in the lower right corner. Then send out the link to the room to your friends and start the video once they have arrived. In our tests, the service worked just as advertised. The chat room itself is basic, but it fulfills its purpose without getting in the way. The video sync sometimes lagged behind a bit by up to 4 seconds. This is definitely within an acceptable range, however. Just like these commenters on Reddit , we would love to see a few additional features in the app, including the ability to create playlists, search for videos within the app or give control over the room to another user. The developers have promised to continue to work on this app and plan to add more advanced features in the near future. Verdict For now, if you are looking for an easy way to watch YouTube videos with your friends without having to install a desktop app like DeskTube , Synchtube is one of the easiest apps to use. The app has some limitations, but for the vast majority of users, the current version should work just fine and most of the current issues will surely be fixed in the near future. Discuss

See original here:
Synchtube: Watch Synchronized YouTube Videos With Your Friends

Twitter 2.0: API Rate Change Could Lead to a World of New Apps & Features

cgseo — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 23:29:16 +0000

One of the best things about Twitter is its wildly creative ecosystem of applications built by people outside the company. Those apps have been constrained, though, by technical limits imposed on retrieving data from Twitter. Those limits are just about to be raised much higher and developers tell us that a whole new world of applications and features may become possible. Twitter's Director of Platform Ryan Sarver followed up on earlier public announcements this weekend with an email to developers explaining plans to raise the limit on the number of times an application can request information from Twitter for a single user to 10 times what it is today (from 150 req/hr to 1500/hr) and to offer everyone the same kind of paid access to the full "fire hose" of user updates that Google and Bing enjoy. People who build cool Twitter apps say this is very big news. Sponsor Twitter developers say the new changes could lead to: Richer functionality for apps and services, beyond new user interfaces. More development around new features like Retweets and Lists. More real-time user experiences. Improved viability for the Twitter API. The Twitter API gets hit every time an application wants to look up a user's friends, their updates, their bio information and more. If you're building an application that analyzes, cross-references and offers useful and fun insights and features based on those types of information, then current API limits are a constraint on how much analysis you can perform, bake-down and present to your users. Raising the limits on developer access to user information will enable more processing to be done behind the scenes and more magic to be presented to end-users of Twitter apps. We spoke to some of our favorite developers about both the API limit increase and the fire hose access. Here's what they had to say. Iain Dodsworth, Tweetdeck "Not wishing to overstate the case but these changes will allow for the next generation of Twitter app. So far the ecosystem has mainly concentrated on providing numerous new UIs onto Twitter (with pretty good success I might add). Potentially the 10x API will signal a shift towards richer functionality & service development: Twitter 2.0. [emphasis added] "We're already working on functionality which mines and analyses Twitter data within the application layer which wouldn't be possible without a 10x API limit. I'm interested to see how the API scales with these new API limits." Loic Le Meur, Seesmic "The increased API limits allow apps to come up with new interaction models for Twitter, and also to catch up on all the new features Twitter added (new RTs, lists), which couldn't be supported properly with 150 requests per hour. " Justyn Howard, SproutSocial "On the 10x increase - Not too many people bump into the authorized limit today unless they run multiple apps, but that was by design. All of us developers built in controls to limit the calls, which has left power users constantly slamming the refresh button. So this does a couple of things: 1. It allows developers to loosen the logic throttling API calls which will create a closer to real-time experience for the end-users. 2. Also opens some new opportunities on cool things we can do which require the user API vs. Search (some things you can't get from the open API's, you need to use the user's account to do them). 3. Will open the doors for more secondary apps, where users previously couldn't have more than one or two [different Twitter apps] open without hitting rate limits, you'll see more people using niche apps in the background if they provide some capability beyond what Seesmic, Tweetie and Tweetdeck offer." On Access to the Firehose for Everyone Kevin Marshall, co-founder of innovative social graph parsing application provider Wow.ly , builds apps that have a clear need for increased rate limits. "This is great," he told us, "because the 150 per hour limit in conjunction with various API features (for example, the social graph API) makes it very difficult to pull off some more 'advanced' features I would like to build." On offering the Firehose to everyone, Marshall had an unusual and interesting response that demonstrates the maturity that this ecosystem is developing. It's not a simple matter of everyone chasing thoughtlessly after the real-time stream. "The more I do with and around social data, the less interested I seem to become in 'realtime' and the more interested I become in 'over time.' When I first started hacking on Twitter (and Facebook) apps, I was in love with the idea of parsing and analyzing data in real-time and I was very link/content focused. But the more I build and use these tools, the more I see the value in the history and the trails of the data set - especially when you consider that we are all living in a more asynchronous world then ever before thanks to things like blogs, Tivo, Hulu, iTunes, and other media-on-demand stuff. I don't think it's really so much about 'what are you doing right now' as it is 'what have you done that's interesting to me right now?'...and I think you get that by aggregating and analyzing." None the less, many developers will welcome the opening of previously selective fire hose access. Mailana founder Pete Warden says even his seed-funded company is looking forward to ponying up some cash. "This may sound counter-intuitive as a starving entrepreneur," he told us, "but the best guarantee the API will stay open and available is if Twitter makes money from it." "It gives developers the chance to move from being charity-cases to paying customers, and so gives Twitter a lot more reasons to listen to what we want. Anyone who wants to deal with the flood of data from the firehose already has to invest in some beefy hardware, (my server and bandwidth bills are thousands of dollars a month) so reasonable fees from Twitter shouldn't raise the barrier to entry by much." These changes are expected to go live soon and we look forward to seeing what they enable new and old Twitter apps to do. You can find and follow the RWW team on Twitter here . Discuss

Excerpt from:
Twitter 2.0: API Rate Change Could Lead to a World of New Apps & Features

Augmented Reality: Passive Consumers versus Creative Contributors

admin — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 01:44:23 +0000

While 2009 has been the year of the API, it's the codeless creative experiences that drive mainstream adoption. Every December ReadWriteWeb's writers collect up their thoughts from 2009 and make predictions for the year ahead. My

Continued here:
Augmented Reality: Passive Consumers versus Creative Contributors

Migrating to Windows 7? Virtualization Can Make it A Bit Easier

cgseo — Mon, 28 Dec 2009 19:46:57 +0000

It's not easy to migrate to Windows 7 from Windows XP. Core incompatibilities just make it inherently difficult. In the next year, it is likely that the enterprise will face the challenges of this migration, especially as new workstations are purchased. The challenge is compounded by the fact that Microsoft does not offer a clear migration path to Windows 7. Further, a number of legacy applications will not work in Windows 7, no matter how well the software is moved. Sponsor Virtualization software such as that from ZInstall can make the process of switching to Windows 7 a bit easier. ZInstall offers two "TV stations," meaning the company uses virtualization so the user may see both Windows 7 and Windows XP on the desktop. This gives the user the ability to move to Windows 7 at their own pace. ZInstall migrates all applications, settings and files from the old system to the new one, with no reinstalls. The virtualization technology means every application works on Windows 7 just like on Windows XP. ZInstall supports two main scenarios: Migration between two personal computers from one with Windows XP to a new one with Windows 7. Migration to Windows 7 on an existing personal computer. Virtualization is proving to be highly popular in the enterprise. Companies such as Citrix and VMWare are making small fortunes selling its virtualization technologies. ZInstall is banking on this trend with its virtualization technology designed to take the headache out of switching from Windows XP to Windows 7. Discuss

See the article here:
Migrating to Windows 7? Virtualization Can Make it A Bit Easier

5 Million NYC Property Records Available Via Startup’s API

admin — Fri, 25 Dec 2009 03:12:00 +0000

Back in the fall, we told you about NYC's BigApps competition , which encouraged technological innovation to benefit government and civic engagement. Public voting for the submitted applications opened this week. One of the submissions to come out of this competition is Blocks and Lots , an interesting app and API that essentially expose all the property records - more than 5 million records, total - for New York City. For site owners, there's a customizable widget that can be embedded in just about any kind of site. Sponsor Blocks and Lots' API allows developers to integrate detailed property information into any web or mobile application. Sample code is available in PHP and JavaScript. Blocks and Lots comes from BlankSlate, an NYC startup offering a web platform and set of read/write APIs for making, sharing, monetizing, and monitoring web apps. The company provides capabilities such as data, file, user and payment management through REST APIs. Using the same platform, BlankSlate was able to gather the city's data files from 45 file sources from three different city agencies, import them and instantly export APIs. This process took just a few days. For example, you can use the Blocks and Lots widget to dig into the property valuation for Ellis Island, which is apparently worth about as much as Zynga these days. In the near future, Blocks and Lots will add location-aware iPhone and Android apps (i.e., the user's mobile device will automatically retrieve property data depending on where the user it), and enabling the writable APIs to add user-generated content to the city's data (e.g., photos, documents or text). To vote for Blocks and Lots - or any of the other apps submitted in the BigApps competition - check out the app gallery and voting rules . Discuss

More:
5 Million NYC Property Records Available Via Startup's API