Hasta La Gadget!

This article was written on May 10, 2007 by CyberNet.

It appears that the latest social network trend is classifieds as both Friendster and Facebook are taking this route. Facebook teamed up with Oodle, while Friendster teamed up with OLX. Neither of the services are extremely impressive because in both situations, Oodle and OLX are just gaining access to the massive amounts of people that Facebook and Friendster have in their communities.

Facebook Classifieds Details

Despite what I originally thought, Facebook isn’t doing this on their own.  I would have thought it would be beneficial for Facebook to set up their own system where people could buy from others in their own networks. Instead, they’ve teamed up with Oodle Classifieds which means that you won’t exactly be buying from other Facebook users.

Facebook has implemented this feature in the form of a Facebook Group which you can find here. Students make up a good portion of Facebook, and the classifieds will help students get rid of books, furniture, and other items because there’s no charge to list them.

Probably the best feature that’s come out of the entire service is that Facebook users are able to specify if they want their classified listings to be available only to their friends and other Facebook users, or if they want it available to the entire Oodle community.

Keep in mind, anything you want to do whether it’s search, buy, or sell, you’ll be taken away from the Facebook site and re-directed to the Oodle site.

Friendster Classifieds Details

Friendster’s classified service launched today, but it’s really nothing more than a classifieds tab at the top and a link back to OLX. The benefit for OLX obviously is the number of people who the classifieds will now be exposed to, and the benefit for Friendster is that they will get half of the revenue generated from the deal.

Unlike Facebook, users don’t have any control over who the listings are available to. You can’t specify that you want your listings available only to your friends – they’re automatically available to the entire OLX community.

Source: Mashable

Wrapping it up

If I had to choose to use one service over the other, I’d definitely choose Facebook’s Classifieds.  In general, I like Oodle’s user interface, and the fact that I can select my listings to be available only to my friends or those in my network is appealing.

Either way, neither of the two services blew me away. Any guesses on which classifieds service MySpace will team up with? Or will they just come up with their own system? I’d say they’ll go for the latter. They like being independent.

Update: As it turns out, Facebook really is introducing their own classifieds service called Facebook Marketplace that has no affiliation with Oodle. As Patrick points out in the comments, “Odle made the unfortunate decision to purchase a Facebook group for integrating classifieds at just about the same time Facebook was planning to roll out their own.”

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What happened in the tech world while you were out enjoying the last throes of the summer? Rumors of a Facebook phone have come and gone–well, I suppose “gone” isn’t quite the proper term here. After all, in the tech world, product rumors never really disappear–at least not until the product itself is actually introduced.

Rather the rumors surface and were almost immediately denied by Facebook.

Let’s recap: Over at TechCrunch yesterday, Michael Arrington posted a story with the seemingly straight forward headline “Facebook is Secretly Building a Phone.” In it, the blogger happily reported that Facebook developers were building software for a handset based around the popular social network.

The site, as the rumor goes, wasn’t actually working on a physical handset–they would farm that part of the process out to an unnamed third party. “Facebook wants to integrate deeply into the contacts list and other core functions of the phone,” Arrington wrote. “It can only do that if it controls the operating system.”

He happily pointed at TechCrunch’s reporting from this time last year, when the site broke a rumor about a long awaiting “Google Phone,” the handset that would eventually become the Nexus One. While that particular handset didn’t perform especially well, the eventual appearance of a Facebook-branded phone does almost seem like a given.

High level Facebook employees Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos (who had worked on Firefox and Chrome, respectively) were reportedly working on the device. Most of the rest of the staff, meanwhile, is said to be unaware of the project.

A report from TechCrunch today claims that Facebook may be working on a phone of its own to compete in the ever-warming smartphone race. According to a “source who has knowledge of the project,” the social networking site has put two high level employees to the task of creating a smartphone which will allow deep integration with Facebook contacts. Apparently, says the source, Facebook has been concerned that Apple and Google represent some kind of threat as competitors, though there is rather deep Facebook integration in the Android platform, and even the iPhone app allows for contact merging. Additionally, the site speculates that the device could be targeted at the low end of the market ($50 or less), which would not place it as a direct competitor to anything but featurephones. The article goes as far to suggest that Facebook and Spotify investor Li Ka-Shing (who apparently had a hand in the Spotify featurephone with INQ) may have started putting those efforts and relationships into the Facebook handset. But, INQ’s been down this road with Facebook already — take a look at the INQ1.

Still, TechCrunch says that Joe Hewitt and Matthew Papakipos are “secretly working on the project,” which is being kept tightly under wraps; even Facebook employees are in the dark about the plan. Hewitt and Papakipos have certainly both worked in this space: the former created the Facebook iPhone app, and the latter was head of Google’s Chrome OS team until June. But the article strangely leaves out what could be the most telling piece of the puzzle — the departure of Android’s lead project manager, Erick Tseng. After leaving the company in May, he went directly to Facebook to take on the job of head of mobile products. Keep in mind, Erick was high-up enough at Android to act as a spokesperson for the brand — even appearing on the Engadget Show to talk about the platform.

But does this make for a Facebook Phone in our future? That’s not so clear — the idea that the company would see an opportunity in an already overcrowded smartphone marketplace is questionable, and if it’s truly worried about the major players, it wouldn’t be targeting a low end handset. We also may be giving the company a little too much credit to think that it can pull off being a heavy hitter in the social networking space (platform and all), and make a dent in the hardware and services game (remember, the competition is Microsoft, Apple, Google, RIM, and Nokia). Like all rumor and speculation in the gadget world, take it with a grain of salt, but you can be sure we’ll be putting our feelers out to get a concrete answer on this one.

Update: Facebook wasted no time today shooting the idea down: “The story, which originated in Techcrunch, is not accurate,” a spokesperson told Mashable. “Facebook is not building a phone.” The company told the publication that it’s focusing on “deep integration” with existing mobile platforms, but that “building phones is just not what we do.”

Is Facebook working on a phone? (update: No.) originally appeared on Engadget on Sun, 19 Sep 2010 14:29:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Twitter‘s been trending on its own social network this week over a much-hyped announcement… and now it’s been revealed. So what do we have? A relaunch of the Twitter.com, as it turns out. The format seems to follow the two-column style we saw recently in its iPad app, with the left side showing the stream and the right providing all the other content. The biggest addition here is embedded content: depending on the link, it’ll now open in-line in the right column. Sixteen media providers are on board, including YouTube, Vimeo, Ustream, and all popular picture services. The search bar and settings has been given placement at the top of the site in its own header. Rollout begins today to select members, but there’s no current announcement on when everyone will get the new experience. With any luck, it won’t be long. In the meantime, you know the drill… pics below!

Update: … and we’re in! So we’ve spent a few minutes going through the interface, and we have to say, it’s quite sleek. The in-line content makes the experience all the more enjoyable. Conversation threads are vastly improved, but it only shows one reply back at a time — you can go through an entire timeline, but it takes far too many clicks. The best thing about it? Quite snappy. It isn’t perfect, though: it seems the @mentions thread updates much more slowly — that’s particularly irksome, having to refresh for a quicker response. At the risk of sounding vain, the “My Tweets, retweeted” section could benefit from actually showing the number of retweets in the left column — we’d love to know at a glance which of our recent messages were most popular without having to click on each individually. Usual rules apply, no extension to the 140 character limit and no support for multiple accounts. No word on a new fail whale, but not to worry, we’ll let you know as soon as you see it.

We’re not quite ready to give up our dedicated Twitter clients (Tweetie, TweetDeck, and so forth), but it’s definitely up there now as one of the best-designed Twitter interfaces. Really, though: fix the @mention refresh and conversation threads, and we’re sold. Pictures below.

Twitter unveils new website with picture and video content embedded on site (update: hands-on!) originally appeared on Engadget on Tue, 14 Sep 2010 19:58:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Continue reading Sanyo launches Xacti VPC-GH4 full HD camcorder with YouTube, Facebook integration

Sanyo launches Xacti VPC-GH4 full HD camcorder with YouTube, Facebook integration originally appeared on Engadget on Thu, 09 Sep 2010 11:28:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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