Category: Social Media
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Facebook Takes On Snapchat With Launch of “Messenger Codes” To Easily Connect Users
Continue Reading: Facebook Takes On Snapchat With Launch of “Messenger Codes” To Easily Connect UsersOn the eve of Facebook’s major “F8 Developer Conference” happening April 12-13, the company has launched a clear attack on Snapchat’s “Snapcode” method of connecting users with their new “Messenger Codes“. If you go into the newest version of Facebook Messenger on iOS (which is the only platform I have to test right at this moment) and click on the gear icon in the lower right labeled “Settings”, you now see a brand new profile screen:There are two things to note here:
- The circular shaped code around my profile image; and
- The new short URL of m.me/dyork which brings me to a web version of Facebook Messenger. (More on that in a different post.)
The circular code clearly reminded me of Snapchat’s “Snapcode”, where mine is:
And sure enough, when I clicked on the “People” icon at the bottom of the Messenger app, the first option on the top is “Scan Code”:
Since I had learned about these codes via a tweet from Chris Messina, I pointed my phone at my laptop screen where his Messenger Code was visible:
As I got closer to the code, the Messenger app automagically recognized the code and put me into a message…
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The Mobile Messaging Wars Continue – Facebook Forces Separate Messenger App On Mobile Users
Continue Reading: The Mobile Messaging Wars Continue – Facebook Forces Separate Messenger App On Mobile UsersIn the ongoing war for mobile messaging dominance and “what will replace SMS“, Facebook has decided to annoy a serious part of their user base and force all mobile users to move to Facebook’s separate Messenger app. In a short period of time, you will be forced to install the Messenger app if you want to send messages to Facebook friends while using your iOS or Android mobile phone.Here’s the thing… I already tried Messenger on my iPhone a while ago… AND I *UNINSTALLED* IT!
I don’t want a separate messaging app. I already have a ton of those. When I am in Facebook I want to do all my Facebook activities and messaging within the one app. I tried Messenger and found the switching between the apps to be painful enough that I wanted nothing to do with it.
Now… in fairness, being someone who tends toward the “early adopter” stage, it was a while ago that I tried Messenger and before their “big update”, so presumably they’ve made improvements. As Facebook so helpfully tells me, 190 of my friends use Messenger already. Knowing some of the people whose images I see on that ad Facebook show me,…
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Further Thoughts on the Google Voice / Google+ Hangouts Integration
Continue Reading: Further Thoughts on the Google Voice / Google+ Hangouts IntegrationMy post this week about Google Voice ringing into Google+ Hangouts generated a good bit of commentary, not only on the original post but also out on Hacker News, Reddit, Google+ and other areas. Given the range of responses, I thought I’d reply to a couple of points and also expand on some further related topics. So here goes…
“DUH! This is nothing new/disruptive. You could do it forever with GTalk/Gmail!”
A common response was to point out to me that Google Voice had been integrated with GoogleTalk / GMail for quite some time and so this integration was really nothing new.
Okay, fair enough. Point taken.
I’ll admit that I never keep GMail open in a web window and so while I do recall that this integration was there in the past, I never personally used it.
Similarly, in Google+, I’ve taken to logging out of the GoogleTalk/chat sidebar because I found it was sucking up CPU cycles on my Mac. For whatever reason, the new Hangouts sidebar doesn’t seem to consume as much CPU cycles and so I’ve left it running there.
So yes, the integration may have been there in the past and now it is there…
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Join the Google+ “IP Communications & VoIP” Community
Continue Reading: Join the Google+ “IP Communications & VoIP” CommunityWant to connect with others interested in the bleeding edge of IP communications and VoIP? Want to exchange links or engage in discussions with people interested in these topics? If you are a Google+ user (as I am), there is now the new “Communities” feature and Randy Resnick of VUC fame has set up a new Google+ community on “IP Communications & VoIP” at:https://plus.google.com/communities/114149566116254233716
Given that Randy is very active on Google+, this community is also very active, both through Randy’s posts as well as the comments and posts of others. I’ve already learned a good bit from a couple of the discussions that have occurred there.
There are other Google+ communities that you might find interesting, too, such as those related to DNSSEC and IPv6, but Randy’s is a great one for VoIP / IP communications / UC topics. Check it out and join in the conversations….
Plus, if you haven’t checked out the VUC calls that occur each Friday at noon US Eastern, they, too, are definitely worth listening to and participating in.
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Skype Releases Photo-Sharing for iPhone/iPad – Trying to Disrupt MMS? iMessage?
Continue Reading: Skype Releases Photo-Sharing for iPhone/iPad – Trying to Disrupt MMS? iMessage?Today Skype launched an attack on sending photos via Apple’s iMessage, via email or via traditional SMS/MMS with the release of photo sharing for the iPhone and iPad versions of Skype. The key point of the blog post to me is this:
There’s no limit on the size of the file you can send, so you can send photos without reaching email size limits or paying expensive MMS charges.
This is yet another example of Skype seeking to disrupt the traditional telecom industry as an “over-the-top (OTT)” app – and make the user experience that much easier. (And yes, I am fully aware that Skype for Android has had file sharing since December 2011.)
Skype’s blog post doesn’t directly mention Apple’s iMessage, but that’s the reality of what else will be disrupted. Think about it… here is what you have for options inside the built-in “Photos” capability of an iPhone:
You can either email the photo or use the “Message” which goes either through the traditional SMS/MMS route – or via iMessage. This Skype functionality replaces both of those capabilities… although you need to be in the Skype application to use the sharing. Note that for a reason I’ll explain…
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Free Webinar June 15th – Preparing Your Contact Center for theRise of Social Media
Continue Reading: Free Webinar June 15th – Preparing Your Contact Center for theRise of Social MediaHow can contact centers adjust to the rise in social media? What does the research actually show around the changes in consumer preferences? What solutions are out there?On Wednesday, June 15, 2011, at 2pm US Eastern time, I will be representing Voxeo and joining with Wendell Black from Contactual to discuss these changes and solutions in a free webinar:
Preparing Your Contact Center for the Rise of Social Media
Registration is free and open to anyone to attend.
Here’s the abstract from the site:
Social Media’s impacts to traditional methods of providing customer service cannot be ignored. More and more individuals are turning to Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube and similar forums to connect with businesses and organizations and this trend shows no signs of abating. In this session you will learn how to navigate the new world of the connected and sophisticated customer. What Attendees Will Learn:
- Important trends in multichannel and social media customer interaction methods
- How social media is impacting customer experience optimization efforts
- How organizations are leveraging multichannel interaction to better service their customers
- Benefits of an integrated approach to managing the proliferation of customer interaction touch points
- Important steps organizations can take now to prepare…
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Free Webinar tomorrow – Unified Self-Service: one app for voice, SMS, IM, web and Twitter
Continue Reading: Free Webinar tomorrow – Unified Self-Service: one app for voice, SMS, IM, web and TwitterAre you interested in how you can service customer requests across all the different communication channels they might use? Do you want to give your customers a choice in the way they interact with you? Rather than requiring them to call in to a customer service phone number, do you want to let them send you a text message? Or an IM? Or use Twitter?If so, you may be interested in a free webinar I am giving tomorrow, Thursday, June 17, 2010 at 11:00 am US Eastern time titled “Unified Self-Service: Creating multi-channel communications apps using Voxeo tools“. You can register for free.
I’ll be talking about this concept we call “Unified Self-Service” where you can create a single application that interacts with customers across multiple communication channel (but not necessarily using the exact same user interface). It’s a topic I blog about on Voxeo’s site and mention in our various presentations.
Perhaps obviously to long-time readers, I have an interest in the “social” side of the communication, particularly as we talk about “Social CRM” and engaging with customers through social channels. You can naturally expect to hear me talk about that tomorrow as well.
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Tropo.com plugs Twitter into the voice/SMS/IM communications cloud
Continue Reading: Tropo.com plugs Twitter into the voice/SMS/IM communications cloudWhat if you could have a single application that communicated with your customers not just through voice but also through SMS, IM/chat and even Twitter?That’s exactly what we announced at Voxeo today with our new Tropo.com release. Tropo is our “cloud communications platform” operated out of our Voxeo Labs team that is focused on reaching out to web developers using today’s programming languages and APIs. We launched it back at eComm in March 2009 and have been steadily adding more capability to it over the last year. Today the “beta” label was officially peeled off of Tropo, new international phone numbers were added, international speech recognition (ASR) and text-to-speech (TTS) were added in 7 languages, and a host of other features were added, too.
Naturally, though, my interest was drawn to the fact that one of the channels you can now communicate to customers with is….
Twitter!
I demonstrated this in a post on the Tropo blog, “How to Add Twitter Support to a Tropo.com App – Step by Step“, where I hooked up the Twitter account @danweathertest to an existing Tropo sample app I had that retrieved weather info from Yahoo!Weather when given a US ZIP code. I…
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Out at VoiceCon next week in SF – Presence, Web 2.0, Voice Mashups
Continue Reading: Out at VoiceCon next week in SF – Presence, Web 2.0, Voice MashupsIf any of you will be out at VoiceCon or Enterprise 2.0 next week in San Francisco, I’ll be out there speaking at both conferences. I have the full schedule in a post on the Voxeo Talks blog, but for VoiceCon it looks like:Monday, Nov 2 3:15 – 4:15 pm – Presence – Current Progress and Future Trends Wednesday, Nov 4 3:15 – 4:15 pm – Developing Voice Apps Using Mashups and SOA Thursday, Nov 5 8:00 – 9:45 am – Web 2.0 and Enterprise Communications – Fad or the Future?
The full descriptions can be found on a page on our Voxeo Events page. I’m very much looking forward to all three sessions out there. The first is a “reactor panel” where we have a discussion around the issue of getting richer presence info between systems – and moderator Don Van Doren specifically asked me to be there to react to what the larger vendors will be saying. The second panel is just two of us (myself and a gent from IBM) talking about creating mashups and then the last is a “Deep Dive” that Irwin Lazar and I will be doing into what is the state of…
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Speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week in Boston
Continue Reading: Speaking at the Enterprise 2.0 conference this week in BostonThis week, I (Dan York) am at the Enterprise 2.0 conference today through Thursday at the Westin Boston Waterfront in downtown Boston. The keynote panel I’m on, The Future of Social Messaging in the Enterprise, doesn’t happen until Wednesday morning at 9:15am… but I came down early as a good number of the sessions are of interest.If you are at the show and would like to say hello, please do email me. I expect to also be posting updates to Twitter on both danyork and voxeo.
You can also follow along with the conference “backchannel” on Twitter by following the hashtag “#e2conf”. Here’s an easy search URL:
http://search.twitter.com/search?q=e2conf
I expect to have a very cool Voxeo announcement out on Wednesday, too… but more on that then… 😉
P.S. And why do I do the silly “I (Dan York)” construction at the beginning of this post? Because I see my content being scraped and so “I” alone doesn’t make sense in other places the content winds up 🙂
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Disruptive Telephony explores how Voice over IP and emerging technologies are rewriting the rules of telecommunications as we know them.
Recent Posts
- Russ White On The Process Around Creating RFCs in the IETF
- WhatsApp and End-to-End Encryption (a ChatGPT3 article experiment)
- Remote Working: the Benefits, Disadvantages, and some Lessons Learned in 15+ years
- The Publishing of RFC 8496 Concludes the 10-year Saga of P-Charge-Info
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