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In the video I walk you through where to check what applications have access to your Twitter account and what access rights you have given.

When Foursquare launched the leaderboard was the place to see how you ranked against other early adopters.  You often did not have a long or strong friend list to compete against and badges were very new.  Swarms were hard to come by.

Now badges are gaining traction with some even competing for the number of accumulated badges.  Points are slowly becoming obsolete.  I want Foursquare to stay ahead of the pack and deprecate points and begin placing better partners and perks.

The AMEX weekend for small business was a marketing hit.  Coupons at local restaurants is a huge bonus and keeps people coming back.  Rewards for verified mayorships are harder to find and should be a growth area.

What I need from a location service is the building of recommendations built around my learned check-in behavior.  Learn the tags of types of places, areas they are in and begin expanding my circle.  Pick something outside the normal radius, suggest adjacent type tags of foods or activities.

Become not only a place for me to say where I am, but a place to look for the next place to visit.  I use Foursquare to not only announce my location for on the fly meet-ups, events or fun, but I began long ago to use the service to place markers on places I really liked and want to visit again in the future. (I wish they would buy sub-services like Foodspotting to match what I like at the locations I check into).

Foursquare has become an event logging, taste building and location service.  I am only giving suggestions to maintain the growth and usage before something else comes along that scoops that part up.

You can also watch the video in HD by clicking through to the Spiked Studio channel on YouTube.

Using search functions powered by Bing’s API, So.cl encourages students to search for topics and then create montages of the visually rich web content. The links are automatically shared as you search, in case there are other students looking for the same thing. You can also have “video parties,” which “let you search, and quickly assemble a list of movies to view together with friends.” (Those friends are other online So.cl users.)

There is an opt-out ability at the very end but quite sneaky.  Mainly when they chose not to use their own Windows Live service as an authentication mechanism. Take a peek in the video above.

While searching AppWorld for Spotify I entered the term Spotify into the search bar.  Instead of it listing no apps found for Spotify, since it isn’t there yet, I was taken into an application called Voydat for international calls.  I did the search again and again with the same result.  It went straight into this application listing for this one and a half star app.

It has nothing to do with music, so I was baffled.  After expanding and reading the tons of Summary information about the application, I found they mention the word Spotify along with other terms like YouTube, Fring, eBuddy, WhatsApp and more.  So any search for those also return this in the search.

So some more testing of search terms had me finding all sorts of applications gaming the system by using keywords in their summaries that have nothing to do with the applications being offered in AppWorld or BlackBerry.

I am pretty sure this was not the intent of the design, but it definitely allows anyone to place an app with crafted keywords to show in search results they should never appear in.

The first sign was an email asking if anyone was interested in purchasing or acquiring the assets or technology behind Refynr.  This service helps build filters for your social media streams in Twitter and Facebook to remove the clutter.

I have begun talks with a few companies already, but am wondering if you, your company, or anyone in your network would be interested in acquiring/buying my company. The Refynr technology has been built up over the past 14 months, has over 1,000 users…

I love this service, yet I forgot about it at some point and failed to go back.  Deconstructing the activity streams is what will save the enterprise worker with recent pushes to include them in every social product and cause users to oversubscribe.

I then received an email from a very cool site VisualCV that helped you build  outstanding online resumes.  They talked about a freemuim model that never really developed I am guessing.

Dear VisualCV Member

We regret to inform you that the VisualCV.com website will be ceasing operations, effective December 30, 2011.
To ensure we meet all our members’ privacy concerns, we will destroy all user data once website operations have ceased. This includes any and all backups we have.

The email goes on to say they will refund prorated funds to paying members.  I am surprised sites liked LinkedIn would not have been interested in this technology to boost their resume creation abilities.   They let you embed images and save off your resume as a clean looking pdf file.

In the middle of these two notices I received another email notifying me of the closing of Strands Fitness on December 30th.  this site created and maintained training logs.  With the creation of such items as Fitbit I can see where they had heavy competition.

I was also confused that you could still create an account with some of these services with the pending shutdowns.  Strands did support quite a few devices, but never caught on in the three years they existed.  They are allowing you to export your data with provided instructions.

The parent site of Strands.com does have other products and sites that are fee based only so they might just be readjusting their focus to viable networks and services they have built.

This begins to ask the question if these smaller social networks can maintain themselves without being bought by the larger.  With limited numbers of users and the larger sites building more features to match close enough, I can see the pull of the users away.

Plus you go where you friends are.  Apparently they are not on many of these smaller networks.

Here is what you missed the last two episodes by not subscribing to the podcast.

Episode 41 – On the Path

• Why did Facebook buy Gowalla?
• What we think of Path and the update to 2.0
• Whim launches in beta
• I ask the question “Are we too early as early adopters?” and get surprising answers

Episode 40  - Cover Your Face

• New facial recognition apps, privacy and usability
• Personal.com launches and wants you to share more personal information than ever before
• Google Plus discussions
• Pepperspray memes and viral videos

Use TheSocialGeeks as your personal filter for the top social news and opinions.  Why not look smarter tomorrow by listening anytime you get a chance.

You can stream live, subscribe on iTunes and even find us on numerous other devices.

“View favorites, follows, retweets and more by people you follow”

I see this as a direct comparison to the Ticker that Facebook launched and has driven many people crazy.  Here is a screenshot of the location if it has not appeared for you yet by some chance:

I can see value in the idea, but this makes keeping up even more overwhelming for many.  Being able to see those I follow who then follow could lead me to a new person of interest, but who has time to click and hover each time with the volume of changes going on.  Favorites are of limited value as I presume I will see the person retweet it and if it has a link, something like Flipboard will catch it.

Gina Trapani made a great suggestion while I was writing this post:

I really want to see the people my friends UNfollow in the Activity tab.

Humorously this adds value, mainly if multiple of your friends have even unfollowed this same account.  One other side note as I scrolled though the new interface was seeing exactly the types of accounts people do add.  From tv and movie stars, to wrestlers and even a few funny yet sketchy accounts does bring light to a bit more of the individual personalities across Twitter.

So are you using the feature with success?  Activity streams are a whole other post coming and the ability to filter them will be key.

Click through for the full HD version via the Spiked Studio page on YouTube!

There will be a part 2 for this explaining how to then hook your website of blog with the new Google Plus page.

I found a few UI issues along the way, but nothing to call a show stopper. Plus this is still a beta product with room to grow and take over what was a space for Gist before they were bought by Research In Motion (BlackBerry).  The service includes seeing:

• inline updates
• it’s own menu on the left navigation
• reminders
• a global address book feature
• new contact alerts

I am eager to see how they evolve and add new social services into the product.  Their feature request list in the FAQ listed Skype and even Google Voice on the wishlist.  So give them a shot and see what you think.  Did I mention it is free?

Related posts

• Gist for BlackBerry review
• Rim buys Gist and deletes all my data?
• Rim buys Gist – thoughts

• Aug 24, 2009 I get invited to a new service and screencast it.  One of the highest viewed screencasts I have.
• Oct 14, 2009 I write about possible competitors in my blog archives
• Somewhere in 2010 I think I activate the Gist plug-in for Google Apps and mail.  Yes Rapportive comes along and beta it in function and look, but I leave both in place.
• Dec 2010 I write about RIM moving to buy Gist
• Mar 23, 2011 I screencast and compare Plaxo to Gist and say that Plaxo didn’t beat them in contact management.
• May 30 2011 I mention on my blog that Gist is ceasing support in Google Apps after the RIM purchase
• Somewhere in June I got an email saying I hadn’t logged on to Gist.  Well I was using the Google plug-in and didn’t need to hit the dashboard.  That email didn’t make it to the Priority Inbox for TheSocialNetworker.
• I log in today to merge another contact list and the account is gone.

So what does this mean?  RIM is purging old users from the system in preparation of something new inside the BlackBerry devices? Gist is scaling back after the purchase and is cleansing some data?  Somewhere along the way they had a Terms of Service you must log into your cloud data every couple months via the site to keep it active?

I do not know the answer to any of these but I am debating importing data into the service again at this point.