Common Paradox Tech Blog

Trackle, a personalized web and RSS feed tracker we wrote about earlier this year, is making itself a whole lot more social today with the launch of a real-time search engine on the site that lets you follow other people’s Trackles. Trackle.com’s free web service provides personalized RSS feeds for data such as the latest crime in a user’s neighborhood, fluctuating airline ticket prices, how much a user’s house value is down this week, updated job listings, sports scores and more.

The new search platform within Trackle lets you search for other user’s trackings by keyword. Here’s how it works: people within the Trackle community contribute by setting up alerts for very specific and changing information (they will show up in search when users set up their profiles as public). These alerts are then shared by the community, specific, time-sensitive information, such as information is then posted on Trackle as it happens, in real time. Duplicate requests are removed, so there are no repeated alerts.

A lot has been said recently about Facebook’s decision to re-write its privacy rulebook to encourage users to be more open about what they share. Privacy implications aside, at least it appears that Facebook is eating its own dogfood. First CEO Mark Zuckerberg shared a bunch of person images, and now comes a big new feature that everyone should appreciate: Posting individual status updates to Twitter.

Yes, at some point this week, Facebook will roll out the ability to send your status updates to its rival, Twitter, we’ve confirmed. This will be built-in directly to its UI and not through some separate app you have to install, we’re told. It will be similar to the functionality it rolled out for its Pages feature in August, but this will be available on all profiles.

For quite a while now now, one of the biggest problems with Android has been its app support. In particular, the Facebook application has been quite limited: you could read your News Feed, but many of the app’s functions actually kicked you into a separate browser window and weren’t done in the native app. Today, that changes.

A new version of Facebook for Android is now live on Android Market, and it’s a big improvement. I’m still playing around with it to find the various changes, but the app’s description points out two big ones: you can browse your friend’s profiles and photo albums natively. Given how core both of those features are to the Facebook experience, it’s surprising that they weren’t there to begin with. Suffice to say, this is a big leap forward for the app, and users are already expressing their delight on Twitter and the Market’s integrated reviews.

We recently wrote about Babble, a magazine and parenting community site aimed at urban hipsters, after the startup raised $1 million in funding from Greycroft Partners (the site previously raised $2 million in an earlier round). Spun off from sex and dating community Nerve Media, Babble takes a more modern view on parenting, aimed at a younger generation of parents who live in cities, equally share parenting duties (or at least make an effort) and use the internet to access information.

Babble’s new Facebook app, called “Connected by Kids,” allows parents to create Facebook profiles for their children, as well as groups for schools, softball teams, and friends. The virtue of the app is that it allows users to share photos and updates with family friends without sharing them publicly.

Sharky2009 writes “VMware is developing virtualisation for smartphones which can run any two OSes — Windows Mobile, Android or Linux — at once. The idea is to have your work applications and home applications all running insider their own VMs and running at the same time so you can access any app any time. VMware says: ‘We don’t think dual booting will be good enough — we’ll allow you to run both profiles at the same time and be able to switch between them by clicking a button,’ he said. ‘You’ll be able to get and make calls in either profile – work or home – as they will both be live at any given point in time.’” Also mentioned in February of this year, but now the company’s announced a target of 2012 for mass production.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

Pre owners who have imported their device from Germany (the only country in Europe with a carrier selling the GSM version of the phone SIM-lock free) for use on a non-O2 network had a rather unpleasant surprise after updating to 1.3.1: no access to the App Catalog. 

As it turns out, Palm Profiles are associated with the country and wireless service provider of the SIM card in the phone when you create your profile.  It also happens that apps are only certified for Germany, Ireland, Spain and the UK.  The result?  If you’ve activated your phone and set your Palm Profile up while having a non-O2 SIM card installed, you’re going to get the "App Catalog unavailable" message appears any time you go to shop for apps.

There is good news for those of you who have been brave enough to import that Pre with the QWERTZ keyboard, as a Palm employee detailed a workaround in its support forums.  It’s a bit convoluted, and it requires that you have access to a SIM card from an O2 network that sells the Pre and that you create a totally new Palm Profile:

To fix the problem, create a new Palm profile using a SIM card from a wireless service provider in Germany, Ireland, Spain, or the UK.  Turn off your phone, insert the new SIM card, turn the phone back on, and perform a partial erase.  After the phone restarts, create a new Palm profile.  Once the profile is created, shut down the phone, insert your original SIM card, and restart the phone.  Log in the the newly created profile.  Open the App Catalog to see available apps.

That’s a lot of hassle to be able to download apps again (still no purchasing for Europe), but that’s sometimes the life of folks who like to import exotic technology. We wouldn’t expect any kind of a "fix" on the issue beyond the workaround already put forward by Palm, since it has more to do with the fundamental way they’ve chosen to deploy the phone in Europe and the App Catalog than it does with being any kind of oversight.

Thanks to Patrick for the heads up!

Twitter’s Retweet functionality, which has caused so much consternation appears to have disappeared not long after it was introduced last month.

The Retweets area in the right side bar has gone and the RT function button on people’s profiles has gone as well.

The design of the Retweet feature created huge confusion over how RTs were attributed, plus different client applications treated RTs differently. Retweets of these retweets were even worse.

Startup Genieo, which develops personalized home pages, has raised $3 million in seed funding from undisclosed investors. Genieo’s technology automatically discovers the user’s topics of interest when they are browsing and generates a personal home-page with relevant content and personalized news widgets.

A desktop application, Genieo maps and profiles user behavior on computers to determine what content to add to a user’s hompage. Content that is integrated into Genieo’s homepages include favorite websites,news/blog updates, Facebook status updates and Twitter Streams, a Google search bar, videos, and more.

Palm recently had a problem with online profiles, and following on the infamous Sidekick failure, it becomes yet another cautionary tale and reminder for us all — backup, backup, backup.

That’s right, the process so nice vitally important we repeated it thrice. Data doesn’t exist if it it isn’t in at least three places: source (device), [...]

This is a story by the iPhone Blog. This feed is sponsored by The iPhone Blog Store.

Busted Palm Online Service Reminds Us Again to Backup, Backup, Backup

We talk a lot about how big brands are embracing social media as a mechanism to connect directly with customers. Still, it’s much easier to talk about integrating social media into your brand than it is to actually do it.

That’s why IKEA’s recent Facebook campaign is so awesome. The Swedish furniture company opened a new store in Malmo, Sweden and rather than spread the word the old-fashioned way, they decided to go directly to the people using Facebook.

This video describes the campaign in detail:

An account was created for the store manager at the Malmo store. Over a two-week period, showroom images were uploaded to his Facebook photo album. Using the all-popular “tagging” feature, customers were able to locate items in the pictures and put their name on it. The first person to tag an object got to take it home.

The word spread through Facebook and users started embedding links and images in their own profiles and across news feeds. In turn, thousands and thousands of users willingly promoted IKEA and its new store to others, creating a big win for IKEA.

[via CNET]

Reviews: Facebook

Tags: facebook, IKEA, social marketing, trending