Today is a special day: it’s National Doughnut Day! No, I’m not kidding you…the first Friday each June is considered to be National Doughnut Day and a lot of bakeries and doughnut shops are probably vying for your attention as they are practically giving out doughnuts left and right. But one small problem for those of us still working in an office…just how are we supposed to go to a Krispy Kreme or Dunkin Donuts if we’re stuck in the office? Obviously we would have access to a car and can drive there, but sometimes the practicality of it, not to mention the logistics of getting there, is bewildering and not efficient.
Fortunately, Postmates has come to the rescue.
Here in San Francisco, this fledgling, yet growing and strong startup, has decided that since people can’t go to the doughnuts, it will help bring the doughnuts to the people. All day Friday, with every delivery transaction you make through their one-hour courier service via their Get It Now app, you’ll get a free delivery of Dynamo Donuts! That’s right, just use their iPhone app and request a delivery to you and your courier will drop off a package containing two of the most delicious doughnuts here in San Francisco.
By now you’ve probably heard about Facebook’s recent outage. You know, that time when everyone’s productivity either went up or was further distracted by Twitter or Google+. This afternoon, for at least a couple of hours, the massive social network took a brief hiatus and decided that people needed to take a break. It’s quite fascinating that today’s outage occurred, not because that it’s anything new, because it isn’t — Facebook has suffered and endured multiple outages over the past eight years of its existence and still managed to keep a fairly good record of uptime. Actually, because of where the company stands right now and its incredible influence over hundreds, if not thousands, of applications, websites, and services.
Facebook is now officially a public company–an entity with far-reaching implications on others that interact with it. This outage, no matter how short of a duration, can pose some risk, albeit most likely minimal, in terms of people’s confidence in investing in Facebook. Frankly, could the social network stand further scrutiny over its stock? It’s currently selling for around 22% below what it started out with a week ago. But that’s not the biggest issue that concerns me and maybe others. It’s actually the fact that now with Facebook playing such a pivotal role in services and applications, shouldn’t the company be a bit more forthcoming and proactive in helping inform the public of any of these outages so that alternative plans can be thought about or implemented?
Did you know that API stands for Application Programming Interface? You hear that acronym thrown around all the time these days, but what does it stand for? Why should you care? And most important, how do they impact your business? These questions and more were discussed during the Social Media Club of San Francisco’s panel discussion at @Mashery HQ in San Francisco, Tuesday the 15th of May.
Moderating was Christopher Saad, the Chief Strategy Officer and Co Founder of Echo. @Chrissaad’s Echo works with sites such as Lady Gaga, Discovery Channel and Universal Music Groups. Raj Kadam, Co-founder and CEO of @ViralHeat and works extensively with sentiment analysis, analytics and engagement for social media and real time web. Roland Smart, VP of Marketing at Involver which powers more pages on Facebook than any other platform. Muray Mckerlie, Co-Founder and VP of Sales & Marketing of Whit.li, an API that creates “Relevancy Ratings.” And to round out the panel, Tyler Singletary, the Developer Evangelist for @Klout and manages the API platform. He also has a brother at Twitter!
API’s are open data systems that allow anyone to create and customize rules to build upon the original data and create what might be needed for your own business or organization. If your not sure what an API is, s simple, fun explanation of API’s is offered by BBYOPEN on YouTube here: http://youtu.be/7r7QpIDEI_o
It was an open discussion also in the way that the seating was set up for the event. Rather than have the 5 panelists that face the audience as if lecturing, the chairs were a bit “helter skelter “off to the side. It set the stage for an engaging and open conversation about how API’s influence us today especially in the world of Social Media.
Here are Bub.blicio.us, we like to try and cover as many parties and events that we can and one of the most common things that we usually see is the free-flowing amount of alcohol. This is typical of tech parties and combined with things like mobile phones and social tools, just one simple click and share could cause some unintended consequences for those in the photo or video. Come on, admit it, we’ve all been in those situations where someone takes a photo at a party where everyone has had one too many and then shares it on Facebook. The next morning, you wake up and realize that the photographer has tagged you in it, thereby allow your friends, family, and even co-workers to view it. What’s worse is if they had pushed it to a service like Twitter or Google+ with you associated with the tweet. The bottom line here? Social media, while it’s great to help you relive those memories, you’re going to want to make sure certain ones aren’t shared publicly.
Enter About Last Night. This mobile application is like the Facebook/Path version specifically for nightlife. It’s going to create a brand new community where people like yourself can hang out (virtually speaking) and share photos and videos. And once there, you can choose who you want to share the photos with or even keep them pretty private so that no one will ever see them in public.
Launched just today at TechCrunch Disrupt in New York City, About Last Night (ALN) was created by the “Dodge brothers”, Derek and Darren Dodge, who are the sons of Google’s Developer Advocate and legendary startup and tech insider, Don Dodge. It’s probably one of the few apps devoted to helping your nightlife experience be more social but adhering to that time-honored adage of “What happens here, stays here” and helps you maintain your privacy without impeding on your ability to share what you want. Sure, this app isn’t necessary if you wanted to just post those nightlife photos onto Facebook and have specific friends view them, but what about those photos where you have people who aren’t your friends but were there and you’d like to share photos with them? It’s going to take a bit more of an effort to friend them just so that they can see the photos. Okay, then what about Path? That’s a true private social network, but again, you’re limited in who can view your content and it’s only for 150 of your friends. Not really ideal and requires some major shifts in your relationships to make it work.
History has just been made. At around 9:30am EST today, the NASDAQ stock exchange welcomed their biggest and latest entry into the public market. It was quite a sight to behold, quite frankly…in just one quick move, founder & CEO Mark Zuckerberg did two things: usher in a change from Facebook to $FB and instantly make hundreds, if not thousands, of millionaires out of his colleagues (and himself!). So today, we welcome one of the biggest companies into the world and wish Mr. Zuckerberg congratulations.
So what’s next? Well the stock isn’t going to actually be traded until 11am EST, just less than two hours from now. But the hope is that after the hype and the initial rush wears off, Facebook will certainly get back to work and be more innovative with their technology and platform. In watching CNBC’s “Squawk on the Street” this morning, it seemed that the anchors and pundits were suggesting that Facebook was going to be a ad-supported platform and that’s how the would generate revenue. I suppose one might believe that and there’s no doubt that Facebook advertising is going to be a significant factor in their annual growth–although one might think the contrary in light of the move that General Motors played earlier this week. But Facebook is not going to simply be supported by advertising revenue. In fact, another anchor on “Squawk on the Street” pointed this out, that they hoped that Facebook would now make their developer platform more open and by going public, a new era of application development for the platform would be created and usher in profound innovations in how we communicate and share data with one another. That seems to be a pretty interesting thing for a public company to do, right?
