Grooveshark allows its users to search for an artist, song title, or theme and find all relevant songs. Grooveshark allows users to pick specific songs they want to listen to and create their own play list.

The service is free. A iPhone application is soon coming and the company is going to start offering premium services.

From a social perspective, Grooveshark allows customers to embed individual songs on blogs, sites, and social networking sites, which is a very differentiated feature from other internet radios. Here is an example of a podcast syndicated from Grooveshark:

You can check out the demo video below that MegaByte TV did to showcase Grooveshark. If you have not tried it, you should and you will probably get hooked.

Facebook connect provides an easy to use api for developers to allow their customers to use their Facebook user name and password to join a community without having to fill out a registration form.  Once registered:

1. Profile information is pushed from Facebook to the new community.
2. Content can be synchronized, so photos, videos, status updates, etc... can be posted to Facebook and to the community from either Facebook or the community.
3. Users can look up Facebook friends from the community and invite them to participate.

In the following video, Robert Scoble interveiws Luke Shepard, a Facebook software engineer, to find how to set up the Facebook Connect comment option for web site or blog owners.  Many social applications already have widgets that make it very simple to use Facebook connect.

With more than 150 million monthly users, Facebook is an excellent community for companies to partner with and leverage Facebook connect to provide niche communities and services to Facebook customers.

Some example of sites that have benefited from Facebook connect integration include:

Prototype Experience - Lets users see Facebook profile information and pictures within the vide game demo.

Beware of the Dog House - Lets users see Facebook friends and decide which ones to send into the Dog House if they misbehave.

For my own mini experiment I have added Facebook connect capability to Social Bean Bag.  So you can register using your Facebook account and immediately make a comment.

]]> http://www.socialbeanbag.com/2009/07/28/facebook-connect-can-increase-your-site-traffic-by-100/feed/ http://www.socialbeanbag.com/2009/04/06/whats-new-in-vignette-community-applications-71/ http://www.socialbeanbag.com/2009/04/06/whats-new-in-vignette-community-applications-71/#comments Mon, 06 Apr 2009 13:28:23 +0000 stedjamulia http://www.socialbeanbag.com/?p=7 Vignette released Vignette Community Applications 7.1 last week.  Vignette Community Applications includes over 76 new social media portlets, compared to version 7.0.  All of these are JSR 286 portlets and are easily integrated into Vignette's portal.

In VCA 7.1, you will find an out of the box community with a video, photo, podcast, presentation, and file library.  You will also find an idea management and event management template.  The blog, wiki, and forum capabilities, which were included in VCA 7.0, are also still included.

Some of the differentiated applications, when compared to other social media vendors,  this platform includes are idea management, presentation management, and video.  The following demo gives an overview of all the social applications in VCA 7.1:

An additional benefit of the Vignette social media platform is that you can create social media applications for your www, extranet, and intranet all from one platform.  Create one or hundreds of communities and Vignette will be able to support your project.

You can find more information about VCA 7.1 at www.vignette.com.

Also, I am including a series of screen shots that showcase each VCA 7.1 application:

From a marketers perspective, Alert Thingy is very useful and it can save marketers a lot of time. They can come to one client and post all there outbound messages while maintaining a pulse on the network's conversations. This for sure is a time saver. Social media strategists, PR managers, or community managers will also benefit from this tool, since they are constantly monitoring social networks.

The following demo gives an overview of all the features in Alert Thingy:

I imagine that in the future, Alert Thingy could add analytic and CRM integration to allow it to become a more powerful marketing tool for people who want to leverage social networks in their marketing campaigns. It would be great if I could take all my customer contacts, invite them to a social network, and then send them messages; much like a drip email campaign. This way I could monitor who viewed my messages, replied, or who just subscribed to my posts, giving me the ability to monitor potential leads.

The application is decent to use. It took some time to find out what were all the functions. I would hope Alert Thingy would copy more of the functionality in the Yammer and Twitter clients. Most people who would use Alert Thingy probably started out with a Twitter or Yammer client and were on their way to covering their desktops with different social clients and open web browsers. Placing buttons and setting configurations in similar locations to the Twitter and Yammer client would make Alert Thingy easier to use. Also, not creating strange buttons, like the little circle for settings, but using a more common icon would help.

The other thing I believe Alert Thingy could do is to create a new logo and rename the product. Alert Thingy is not catchy enough and does not roll off ones tongue easily. A more catchy name would help the product spread virally and possibly help show some direction for where the product is headed. Right now the existing name and logo put Alert Thingy in the same boat as a RSS reader and I believe they have more potential than that.

You can find more information about Alert Thingy at www.alertthigy.com

Also, I am including a series of screen shots that showcase Alert Thingy's capabilities: