Try to guess America’s most engaging social network. Facebook? Wrong. Twitter? Wrong. Pinterest? Wrong again. According to comScore‘s most recent social networking data, from the month of March, the San Francisco based site Tagged engages users like no other service. It was the only site to finish in the top two in both of comScore’s engagement metrics.
Tagged users visited an average of 18 times each during March according to ComScore, second only to Facebook’s average of 36 visits per vistor. And each time a Tagged user visited the site, he or she stuck around for 12.1 minutes — which trailed only Tumblr (14.7 minutes) and beat out Facebook (10.9 minutes).
Tagged co-founder and CEO Greg Tseng says he’s happy about ComScore’s March data, but that his company has been among America’s most engaging social networks for about a year now. The secret to Tagged’s success? A pivot Tseng and co-founder Johann Schleier-Smith made around the beginning of 2008.
The longtime friends started Tagged in 2004, at the time angling it to be a Facebook-like social network for high schoolers. Eventually, however, Facebook expanded beyond a closed college network and allowed anyone over the age of 12 to join.
“We took a hard look and decided we weren’t going to win,” Tseng says. “But we had found out a lot of our users were actually using Tagged to meet new people, so that led us to pivot into a new space called ‘social discovery,’ where people use sites to make new social relationships.”
As opposed to sites like Facebook, where people primarily organize and maintain relationships established offline, Tagged functions mostly as a portal to meet new people online for romance or simply friendship. The site’s algorithms encourage users to connect based on shared interests, tastes and hobbies.
Tseng says Tagged’s 10 million core monthly active users form an average of 100 million new connections per month. The site has been profitable since 2008, and over the past year tripled its staff to a current count of more than 170.
With social discovery as a whole seen by many to be a rising tide, Tseng believes Tagged’s success will continue to grow.
“If I look out at the next five or 10 years, I really see social discovery as big as social networking — in some sense I think you can think of social discovery as the engine for social networking,” he says, referencing Dunbar’s number, which theorizes that humans can maintain an average of 150 connections at a time.
“Facebook is the place where you maintain your current 150,” he says. “And Tagged will be the place where you refresh that 150.”
Do you think social discovery is the next big thing? Let us know in the comments.
Hey Girl, Foursquare Ryan Gosling Memes Should Be on Your Radar [PICS]
January 26, 2012 by Brian Anthony Hernandez on Mashable
The “Hey Girl” meme, featuring actor Ryan Gosling, now comes in a new social media-infused flavor — Foursquare — after being on the market in other iterations since 2008.
Using Google+‘s new meme generator, Nicole Buergers from 4sqday created 14 new flirtatious “Hey Girl” memes that put a twist on common Foursquare terms and phrases on top of various photos of Gosling (see gallery below).
“As an SEO specialist at an agency, I adored the recent creations of Agency Ryan Gosling and SEO Ryan Gosling,” Buergers told Mashable. “I thought Foursquare Ryan should exist, too.”
The “Hey Girl” meme was first spotted in December 2008 on the F___ Yeah! Ryan Gosling Tumblr blog, according to Know Your Meme.
Gosling isn’t oblivious to his photos with random text on them circulating throughout the web. During two separate interviews with MTV, he’s read aloud “Hey Girl” memes. In the second video (watch it below) released in mid-2011, Gosling prefaced his verbal interpretations of the memes with how he felt about them: “This is so stupid. This is so dumb. OK, you ready for this?”
Got a Hot App? Microsoft Will Pay Top Dollar for a Windows Phone Version
by Peter Pachal on Mashable
Microsoft has a plan to beef up its Windows Phone catalog of apps. And it involves cash — lots of cold, hard cash.
In the mobile world, Microsoft’s Windows Phone platform is a toddler compared to the mature ecosystems of Apple’s iOS and Google’s Android. That means the number of apps on offer in the Windows Marketplace is just a fraction of those available from its counterparts — it’s officially 65,000 to iOS’s 600,000 and Android’s 500,000. Some counts put it higher.
When I reviewed the Nokia Lumia 900 smartphone earlier this week, I was surprised at how many apps are on offer from major brands like Twitter, Facebook and eBay.
What I didn’t realize was that Microsoft is paying some of those companies to develop apps for the Windows Phone, since they normally wouldn’t dedicate the resources to create apps for a platform that has less than 4% market share.
Take Foursquare. The service’s Windows Phone app is a beautiful example of how the platform’s interface, called Metro, can shine. Fonts are large, type pops and the menus have a fluid movement that makes the whole experience come alive.
But Foursquare didn’t create the app. Microsoft paid an outside company to do it, The New York Times reports. Foursquare was involved — and the app is listed in the Marketplace as coming from “Foursquare Labs, Inc.” — but since the growing startup has limited resources, it spends most of its time fishing where the fish are: iOS and Android.
Foursquare is not alone. Microsoft is said to be paying developers anywhere between $60,000 and $600,000 to create apps, presumably for well-known or rising brands, to shore up its app catalog.
With Nokia as a partner, Microsoft has help. The “Nokia Collection” in the Windows Marketplace has even more big names, offering apps from CNN, ESPN and Univision. However, all of the apps are made by Nokia, not the companies themselves.
What Microsoft and Nokia are doing may seem a little desperate, but it’s actually not that surprising. Windows Phone is playing catch-up, after all, and it needs to everything it can to close the “app gap” between its platform and the others, appearances be damned. If an app is in the catalog, and customers like it, does it matter who made it and why?
That’s up to you. Does the fact that Microsoft directly finances some of the apps in the Windows Marketplace matter to you? Would it influence whether or not you’d buy a Windows Phone? Have your say in the comments.
There’s a lot riding on the Nokia Lumia 900. While Windows Phones until now have generally been capable if not outstanding devices, the Lumia 900 brings Microsoft‘s mobile platform to a new level. Not only does it add a super-fast LTE connection from AT&T, but it’ll also serve as a flagship device for Nokia and Microsoft, at least until Windows Phone 8 devices come later in the year.
I’ve been using the Lumia 900 for the past week, and it’s a great smartphone. It’s also an excellent example of just how far the Windows Phone platform has come since its debut a year and a half ago.
Good Windows Phone apps used to be in extremely short supply, but I was pleasantly surprised to see many of the same apps that I use regularly on iOS in the Windows Phone Marketplace.
Foursquare? Check. eBay? Check. Spotify? It’s there. Readability? Yep. Kindle? Got it. Pulse? Totally. There’s even Foodspotting, yo.
Still, there’s no Instagram, Pinterest, Flipboard or Hulu Plus. So the Marketplace — recently clocked at 65,000 apps to the iPhone’s 600,000 — certainly has some catching up to do.
But if you’re not already locked into another platform, it’s reassuring to know Windows Phone has the essentials covered.
Metro Stretches Out
Most of those apps look gorgeous on the Lumia 900′s 4.3-inch OLED screen. Indeed, the increasing sizes on today’s smartphones are perfect for Windows Phone’s Metro interface. Its design favors big fonts and splash layouts that stretch to the screen’s edges and beyond.
Windows Phone works best when it’s got lots of real estate to work with.
For example, Foursquare makes the multiple menus in the app feel like one giant poster. My friends, activity and checkins are all partitioned into pretty columns. The iOS and Android versions look claustrophobic by comparison (see below).
The seamless Metro-inspired design isn’t automatic, however, and your mileage will vary from app to app. Most apps from indie developers are pretty blah.
The design occasionally trips itself up. Metro presents its iconography as if it were as familiar as street signs, showing symbols with no labels. It’s pretty easy to pick the wrong function, especially if it’s your first time launching the app.
When navigating, you should proceed with caution, especially in social apps. Shares and check-ins can happen before you know what you’re doing.
Begging to Be Touched
Pretty design is one thing, but usability is another. Windows Phone begs to be touched, swiped and pinched, even more than iOS or Android. The big layouts practically beg you to see what’s on the next screen.
Here’s where the Lumia 900′s 1.4GHz Qualcomm processor shines. It’s only a single-core design (Microsoft doesn’t yet allow multi-core chips on Windows Phones), but it was more than enough to keep up as I pushed and pulled menus with my fingers. The whole interface feels alive as you touch it.
Besides the great UI, Nokia offers up some special apps to Lumia owners. Probably most useful is Nokia Drive, a free turn-by-turn navigation service that works with Nokia Maps (not Bing Maps, which are also pretty).
Nokia has also created dynamic Metro apps for CNN and ESPN that look fantastic, especially when it comes to video.
The CNN app highlights one of Windows Phone’s differentiators: live tiles. The photo from the most recent top story in the app is highlighted on the app’s icon on your home screen.
That’s great, but there’s no headline or even a slug to help guide the user. What, for example, is this picture of Barack Obama supposed to signify?
Live tiles have a lot of potential — but few apps use them, and those that do need work.
Nuts & Bolts
Back to the hardware. This is a really well-made phone; even though the screen is 0.8 inches larger than an iPhone’s, it doesn’t feel large in your hand.
That’s partly thanks to the polycarbonate casing, which is smooth but provides an excellent grip. Nokia offers bumpers that can better protect it, but it’s pretty durable. I don’t know why you’d want to cover it up. The camera is 8 megapixels, and to my eye the quality is on par with the iPhone 4S, though it records at “only” 720p resolution.
The Lumia 900′s screen shows off AMOLED’s strengths — bright colors and true blacks that make icons and artwork pop. The screen also uses anti-reflection optics to reduce its reflectance.
The upshot: a screen that’s much easier to see in bright sunlight. You can see just how much in the gallery below.
Finally, there’s that LTE connection. I managed to get download speeds up to 28.4 megabits per second here in the Flatiron district of New York City.
That’s pretty amazing, especially when you consider our office Wi-Fi typically got about 9 Mbps. Puttering along at AT&T’s “4G” HSPA+ speeds, my iPhone 4S maxed out at 1.9 Mbps.
Lumia Rises
The Nokia Lumia 900, which will be in stores April 8 for the tidy sum of $99.99 (with contract), is by far the best Windows Phone ever made. Not only does it have a great screen for Metro apps, it has the hardware to really deliver on the experience they promise.
This is the device that Microsoft needs to show off how good Windows Phone can be. Sure, you don’t get Instagram (yet), but the world of possibility it opens is unlike anything else out there.
Nokia Lumia 900, Home Screen
The Nokia Lumia 900 ($99.99 from AT&T with contract) is the first Windows Phone to have a high-speed LTE network connection.
Polycarbonate Shell
The Lumia 900 has a smooth-yet-grippy polycarbonate shell that comes in blue or black. A white version will be available April 22.
Foursquare Comparison
The Windows Phone version of Foursquare is a great example of how the Metro interface is vastly different from the Android and iPhone experiences
CNN App
A comparison of the CNN apps for Android, iOS and Windows Phone. Note how on the Windows Phone version the "chrome" (network icons, the time, etc.) is absent and headlines pop larger. Also, Nokia created this app, not CNN.
Vs. iPhone in Sunlight
Here's how the Lumia 900 looks next to an iPhone in sunlight. The Lumia uses special optics to reduce reflectivity.
Nokia Drive
The Nokia Drive app is a free turn-by-turn navigator for Windows Phone.
Live Tiles
These two pics, taken seconds apart, show how the live tiles work.
Office for Windows Phone
Office apps come pre-installed on the Lumia 900, letting you view and edit documents on the fly.
New York Times Web Page
Here's how Internet Explorer for Windows Phone renders a typical web page.
Mashable App
Mashable has no official Windows Phone app, but a few third parties have created apps of their own.
Windows Phone Hero?
Will the Nokia Lumia 900 take the Windows Phone platform to new heights? Stay tuned.
