I like recent products that let users created personal FAQs one step at a time based on questions from others. You put up a box that invites people to ask you anything. People then ask questions. You answer the ones you want to and publish them. In no time you’ve got an interesting profile of your personality, likes and dislikes.

We wrote about Formspring in January, and Tumblr launched Ask Me a few days later. Now comes ChaCha.me, a new product from ChaCha, where people and businesses can ask and answer questions.

ChaCha.me has good integration with Facebook and Twitter right off the bat, and they’ll allow question asking and answering through their mobile apps and SMS (something ChaCha does well already). But ChaCha is also partnering with celebrities to get them to use the service right away. ChaCha thinks the product is a perfect way for celebrities to talk to fans.

They’re starting things off with 2010 Grammy winner David Guetta – his page will launch later on Monday but users are already lining up the questions. If you’re willing to step things down a few notches you can see my ChaCha page here, and I’ve already answered a few of the questions.

Lots more features are coming in the next couple of weeks, says ChaCha. Among the changes – 15 million or so listed U.S. businesses in ChaCha will have the Q&A feature added to their profiles and will be able to answer questions from users.

ChaCha thinks celebrities and businesses will feel safe using ChaCha.me because they only have to answer the questions they like and they can stay in control of the discussion.

And ChaCha users will be able to integrate the Q&A feature directly into their Facebook pages as well. ChaCha already lets users ask their friends questions on Facebook. The new feature turns that around and lets friends ask you questions, too.

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There’s been a lot of hoopla over the past couple of years about Twitter’s so-called “firehose.” Essentially, it’s an open stream of all their data that is provided to developers to use for third-party apps. Foursquare has a firehose of its own, but access to it has been on lock down. Today, for SXSW, Foursquare opened up its firehose a bit more.

Social Great, a service which tracks trending places in cities back on location data, has just gotten access to this firehose of data. This allows them to show in realtime the trending places throughout Austin, Texas, where SXSW is taking place. The service also pulls in data from Gowalla, Brightkite, and GraffitiGeo (Loopt).

As Polaris Ventures EIR Jon Steinberg notes (who helped build Social Great), “the numbers look crazy.” What he means is the check-in data at SXSW. Judging from what I’m seeing on the ground here in Austin, that may be an understatement. Venues routinely have dozens if not hundreds of other Foursquare users at them when they’re trending.

SimpleGeo, one company that has had early access to Foursquare’s firehose, built Vicarious.ly to visualize real-time check-ins around Austin. That data looks fairly insane as well. Most of the check-ins appear to be coming from Foursquare (which saw over 300,000 check-ins on Thursday alone) and Gowalla, but co-founder Joe Stump notes that the battle is too close to call still.

One other note: all these check-ins are made possible by the fact that AT&T’s network has been up and working the whole time. It’s been impressive. Crisis averted, so far.

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We just came across Packrati.us, a simple bookmarking service that allows you to essentially sync your Twitter feed with your Delicious bookmarks. Once you sign up with you Twitter and Delicious accounts, Packrati will follow your Twitter feed, and whenever one of your tweets contains URLs, the site will add them to your Delicious.com bookmarks.

You can also bookmark URLs in @replies to you. In your Delicious account, the service will include any hashtags you include as tags for your bookmark and include the full text of the tweet in the bookmark comments. Here’s an example of the White House Twitter account’s tweeted URLs in Delicious, using Packrati’s tool.

Last summer, Delicious launched a deeper integration with Twitter, to allow you to also tweet your bookmarked links out. Packrati’s ability to add the URLs your Tweet out to your Delicious bookmarks is so simple, yet serves as an incredibly useful tool to store and organize the links you send out. Of course, you may not want to bookmark all of the URLs you Tweet out, so the site could make your Delicious account a bit noisy.

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For the past couple of months, we have been privately testing our brand new API platform with selected partners with the goal of bringing it to the public someday. After months of bugs fixing, we are happy to say “Today is the day!”.

As Plurk grows, the demand for different set of tools, applications or features to complement our product has also increased. While some of those requests are later added into our social platform, we fully aware it would be impossible for us to implement everything by ourselves. Our users love Plurk passionately and we love them back just as much. So if someone’s mom wants to read her Plurks from her kitchen microwave, she should be able to (provided someone else already wrote such application using our API).

Without further ado, the full documentation of the API is available at: http://www.plurk.com/API. Simple ‘Hello World’ examples for various programming languages are also available on that page. If you are already a Plurk user, you can go ahead and generate a key and start coding.

We are excited with how this new project is going to enhance your plurking experience and looking forward to see how the community evolves and improves Plurk ecosystem with it. Surprise us!

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Keeping tabs on your social media connections these days is like bar hopping, without the cocktails or pool tables with stained felt.

You run over to check your Twitter account. Then you dash to Facebook to see what’s going on there. Then Linkedin. Maybe your blog. All the while you’re feeling like you’re playing catch-up, that something awesome may have happened, and you missed it because you weren’t online. Sound familiar?

Sure, you can centralize some of your social media chores (great post by Chris Brogan), by using Tweetdeck or Seesmic. But that only helps if you’re online and “in the flow.”

For normal humans that check social media a couple times a day, NutshellMail may become your new favorite social companion. And it’s free.

Like RSS for your relationships

NutshellMail sends you a highly customizable email digest (from 1 to 24 times per day) of what’s happening in your social media spheres, so you can browse and get up to speed quickly, without having to visit several different destinations or fire up your iPhone’s social apps.

Twitter Without the Hassle

Want to know who has signed up to follow you on Twitter today? Who unfollowed you today? All the DMs and @ replies you received in the last three hours? NutshellMail batches it all up and sends it to you in a tidy email at the exact time of your choosing. You can even include Twitter searches in your feed, enabling you to use NutshellMail the same way you’d use TweetBeep, or an RSS feed of Twitter search results.

Handy Facebook Reminders

It’s pretty tough to find a credible excuse for missing people’s birthdays on Facebook. NutshellMail saves you from being labeled an ingrate by reminding you of all the birthdays of your Facebook friends this week. The email also can be configured to show you all new friend requests, status updates from pages that you’re a fan of, as well as photos, videos and links from your friends. Plus, event invites, and photos in which you’re tagged.

And More…

Although I’m not using it presently, you can also configure your NutshellMail to include Linkedin and MySpace content, as well as updates from the Ning groups of which you are a member.

Also, if you have several different email accounts, you can use NutshellMail to automatically combine the emails sent to your secondary and tertiary accounts and forward them together to your primary account.

All the content shown in each email is clickable. So, if you want to see more about a new Twitter follower, you can simply click the name or photo in the email, and instantly visit their bio. You can also manage your customization preferences by clicking links in the email, so visiting the NutshellMail Web site isn’t needed after initial sign-up.

Social Integration in an Instant

One of the outstanding new add-on features of NutshellMail is their Facebook app, which enables Facebook fan page managers to easily add an email newsletter tab to the page. Subscribers then receive a digest of all the content posted to the fan page. I’ve been talking a lot about the integration of email and social media, and this is another example of using cross-functional technology to build content creation and deployment synergies. Note that NutshellMail is funded in part by FBFund, Facebook’s venture capital arm.

Here’s a nice video demonstration of NutshellMail and how it can save you time and social media aggravation.

I’ve been using NutshellMail for a few weeks now, and find it indispensible. (Thanks to my friend Will Smith – the world’s second most popular Will Smith – for turning me on to it).

How can you make use of NutshellMail to simplify your social media chores?

View full post on Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

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In November of last year, Gowalla finally extended its reach beyond its iPhone app with a version of its app that worked on the mobile web for Android (and the iPhone’s Safari browser). It was a pretty good web app but had some limitations, which founder Josh Williams accepted because his team was at work on a native app for Android as well. That wait is over.

While it’s not yet in the Android Market, Gowalla has released a very early beta version of the native Android app to its most dedicated users that patrol the company’s Get Satisfaction page. Williams posted about the new app a few days ago, and noted that “Technically, we are calling this beta release 0.1. We will release a more fully featured beta to the Marketplace before the end of the month.” Since it’s not in the Market yet, you can only get the app by visiting this static link — or by using your Android camera to scan one of the bar codes you can find in that Get Satisfaction thread.

Note: To install the app, you have to have your device set up for the installation of “non-Market applications”. This site runs through how to do that, but basically you go to Menu -> Settings -> Applications, then check the “Unknown sources” checkbox.

So how is the app compared to its iPhone brother? Well, surprisingly, in some ways I think it might already be better. While, as Williams, notes, it is currently missing the Trips feature, and it’s not doing any image caching, the 0.1 build of Gowalla for Android is slick and lightweight. As you’ll notice right away, the app has a distinctly different look because it has ditched the iPhone’s green hues for a cleaner, white look. I can’t tell you how many Gowalla users I’ve talked to that hate the green look of the iPhone app and would like a way to change it (I’m included in that list).

More importantly, the Android version of Gowalla flips the features of the service so that your friend check-in stream is now the first tab. This makes the Android version more social right off the bat than the iPhone version, which buries that information in the last tab.

Gowalla’s Android launch is timely as the SXSW conference is less than a month away. Last year, both Gowalla and rival Foursquare launched their iPhone apps at the conference, with Foursquare able to take an early lead over the past year. Foursquare now has apps for all the major mobile OSes except for Symbiam. Meanwhile, Gowalla is also close to launching a BlackBerry app. Game on.

Check out some early screenshots below.

[thanks Wes]

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Although Sweden-born streaming music startup Spotify has done well in Scandinavian countries it would appear to now have a local competitor in the shape of a new service launching in Norway.

Tech companies Aspiro and Platekompaniet have teamed up with telco Telenor to launch a music streaming service for Norwegian users. That’s all fine and dandy. However, someone there needs to go to marketing 101 classes as the service is called WiMP. Yes, I can just imagine myself “WiMPing out” at my Oslo pad listening to music …

Naming #fail aside, WiMP is launching with streaming deals with over 20 content providers for over 6.5 million songs, including the four major record companies and a number of smaller independent partners. These include Universal Music, Sony Music, EMI, Warner Music, Phonofile, Arts Pages, IODA, The Orchard, Beggars Group, Naxos, Vidzone and a few more.

Just as with Spotify, you can search for and discover new music, create playlists, favourites, and recommendations. It’s in Norwegian, obviously.

But aside form this being a vaguely interesting aside, it does rather pose a question for Spotify. If a local Scandinavian telco can come up with this, why can’t another telecoms provider?

Afterall, they have the billing relationship. Yes, there have been plenty of similar services from ISPs, however Spotify may in fact simply be starting to get people used to the idea of streaming music, rather than the company that ultimately benefits, with other players coming up later with the actual services that take off.

It can be tough out there on the bleeding edge.

View full post on TechCrunch Europe

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Aren’t social media and email more alike than they are different? Both seek to keep your brand top-of-mind with customers and prospects, communicating in a relevant, timely way that ideally is measurable and testable.

But the problem with email and social media is that too many people are positioning it as an either/or scenario. Several blog posts have foolishly been written about social media “killing” email. As my friend Jeff Rohrs from ExactTarget (client) says: “How can social media kill email, when you have to have an email address to belong to a social media site?”

And that’s the premise behind Flowtown, one of the most exciting new social media tools I’ve seen in months.

A Social Anthropologist, Hidden In Your Keyboard

Flowtown enables you to enter any email address, and the system instantly reports back where and how that address is connected on the social Web. Here’s the results for my friend and client Indra Gardiner from Bailey Gardiner in San Diego:

Amazing, no?

Social Outposts Without the Mystery

I’m often asked by corporate clients where they should engage in social media. “Should we be on Twitter, or Facebook, or Linkedin, or YouTube, or some other places?”

Flowtown gives you the answer in seconds. Export your email subscriber or customer database to Flowtown, and you’ll know in minutes what percentage of your audience is on Facebook or some other social outpost.

They also have a nice integration with Klout – the leading service to gauge Twitter influence – automatically including Klout scores for each person.

Isn’t that worth the 5 cents per contact that Flowtown charges?

But Wait, There’s More

Recognizing that knowing who your customers are, and being able to do something about it are entirely different, Flowtown also has a built-in email component. So, if you want to instantly send an email to only your customers that are on Facebook, inviting them to become fans of your brand there, you can do it in minutes using Flowtown’s existing integration with MailChimp.

The fee for up to 75,000 sent emails per month is just $99.97.

Tip of the Iceberg

Unlike enterprise-class social anthropology services like Rapleaf, Flowtown is incredibly easy-to-use, and is tuned for the do-it-yourself marketer. But, the current system is just the beginning.

“We want to be the mint.com of social marketing,” says Ethan Bloch, co-founder of the San Francisco based company. “We want to give SMB a complete tool to allow them to move the needle on the 20% of social media that matters.”

Features being considered for inclusion in new releases include CRM integration; deep analysis of customers’ social graph and content they’ve produced (keyword analysis of your Tweets, for example); and even semi-automated social media response mechanisms.

Not Perfect, But Useful

As with any data-harvesting service, Flowtown results aren’t bullet-proof. The more email addresses a person uses across the social Web, the less ideal the results. For example, Flowtown’s data on me isn’t particularly accurate, because I use several different email addresses.

But, the service goes a long way toward tying email and social media together in a coherent, actionable fashion, and is affordable for almost every company. I’m excited to see what these guys add next.

Thanks to my friend (and startup mentoring legend) Francine Hardaway for turning me on to Flowtown – she’s an advisor to the company.

If you take Flowtown for a spin (they have a free trial), will you please tell us all how it goes in the comments?

View full post on Convince and Convert Blog: Social Media Strategy and Social Media Consulting

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Image from Flickr – Nobody’s Hero

Nomao for the iPhone has a hidden feature that lets you see people naked. Augmented Reality???

Image from Flickr – Naked Beauty

Imitation may be the sincerest form of flattery, but blatant theft of code, design, and UI elements is just not cool, especially when the infringing party is the biggest software company in the world. Yes, we’re talking about Microsoft. Blerg.

Here’s the short of what we think has happened:

• Microsoft China officially launched its own microblogging service, MSN Juku/Hompy/Mclub, some time in November, 2009.
• The service’s design and UI is by and large an EXACT copy of Plurk’s innovative left-right timeline scrolling navigation system. (see screen captures below)
• Some 80% of the client and product codebase appears to be stolen directly from Plurk! (see evidence below).
• Plurk was never approached nor collaborated in any capacity with MS on this service.
• As a young startup, we’re stunned, shocked, and unsure what to do next and need your support and suggestions.

We were first tipped off by high profile bloggers and Taiwanese users of our community that Microsoft had just launched a new Chinese microblogging service that looked eerily similar to Plurk. Needless to say we were absolutely shocked and outraged when we first saw with our own eyes the cosmetic similarities Microsoft’s new offering had with Plurk. From the filter tabs, emoticons, qualifier/verb placement, Karma scoring system, media support, new user walkthroughs to pretty much everything else that gives Plurk its trademark appeal, Microsoft China’s offering ripped off our service. See for yourself: (Microsoft MClub on top, Plurk on bottom).

A little overly inspired, wouldn’t you agree? Of course, we understand others will always be motivated to emulate and take bits and pieces of visual and functional elements from widely successful services and carve out localized versions. Plurk was already Taiwan’s biggest microblogging service, 10x bigger than Twitter in that market alone, and emerging as Asia’s answer to Twitter in many of the biggest countries in East Asian, so naturally Microsoft probably saw some potential in piggybacking off the success of our unique service and launching something similar in a related market like China. Ultimately if something works, others will copy it and try to adapt it to another market, be it another vertical or another locale. It’s the nature of the web. And for the most part, we don’t get bothered by clones. Of course, there will always be exceptional circumstances where we feel wholly wronged, both legally and more important, morally, and this one just happens to be one of those rare cases. That it is Microsoft doing the copying in broad daylight makes it even more incredulous.

Let me explain. If this was just a case of visual inspiration gone too far, we could probably have lived with it. We would have taken the time to reach out to Microsoft, get colour on the matter and try to amicably resolve it. That’s not the case here. This is something far more sinister. On closer inspection, we found that MUCH of the codebase and data structures that Microsoft’s MClub uses are identical snapshots of our code. Microsoft has taken Plurk’s custom developed libraries, css files and client code and just ported them directly over to their service without any attempt to even mask this! Here are just 3 small examples of literally hundreds we have found. Any developer will be able to see that this is basically copied and stolen code.

Some users in the blogosphere even speculated that Microsoft Mclub/Juku was some sort of official partnership we’d struck with Microsoft to clear a re-entry into China after our earlier censorship in the region behind the Great Firewall of China, prior to which we were the #1 microblogging service in the country. Let’s clear the air around this. While many reputable internet companies have forged solid partnerships with Plurk, valuing our innovation and market leadership in Asia, Microsoft was absolutely not one of them. We were never contacted by any party at MS to collaborate on such a venture nor did we give any prior written or verbal permission to anyone on their side to take our code, take our CSS, and copy the essence and ethos of our service.

We’re still in shock asking why Microsoft would even stoop to this level of wilfully plagiarising a young and innovative upstart’s work rather than reach out to us or innovate on their own terms. Of course, it just hits that much closer to home when all your years of hard work and effort to create something unique are stolen so brazenly. All the more ironic considering Microsoft has often been leading the charge on fighting for stronger IP laws and combating software piracy in China.

So what next? We’re not entirely sure but we are exploring our options. We have been seeking advice from respected colleagues, responding to press inquiries and gathering facts on the timeline of events and parties involved here to understand why and how this took place.

To our millions of loyal users: We also need your sincere help. We need your loud and emphatic voices. We need you to help us get out this important story to anyone and everyone you know who can raise awareness on what has taken place. Please translate this story into your respective languages, share it with local media, bloggers and friends, and help us fight the good fight for your beloved Plurk.

Press contact: Dave Thompson (dave@plurk.com), Plurk Asia Pacific Press Contact, +64 9 889 0610

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Image from Flickr – Microsoft China