Archive for the ‘business’ Category

Launching the ProBlogger Job Board

Posted by Gary King on September 08, 2007 at 11:12 pm

logo.gifOne of the projects that I’ve been working on is the ProBlogger Job Board, where people and companies can post jobs available for bloggers. It officially launched on August 30th, so I’m a little late with this post, but better late than never!

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Facebook Applications that I am working on (nearly 2 million users and growing fast!)

Posted by Gary King on August 03, 2007 at 6:27 am

It’s time I dispel some of the mystery surrounding the Facebook Applications that I have been spending my time building these past few months. I’ve mentioned in previous posts that I have been spending time building Facebook Applications on the Platform. Well, it’s time I mentioned what I’ve been working on.

A large number of the applications that I’ve built from the ground up with a partner (who wishes to remain nameless) consists of one group, which are basically TV shows, and another group, which contain several sports.

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Not blogging at Blog Herald anymore

Posted by Gary King on July 11, 2007 at 3:35 pm

logo.gifJust a quick thing, but I’ve stopped blogging at Blog Herald. The posts that I’ve previously written are still accessible, though. I’ve got way too many other things going on these days so I’m trying to prioritize my time – especially with the many Facebook Applications that I’m working on.

I’d like to thank Tony for giving me the opportunity to write there – it’s been a great experience the whole time!

70 strangers meet to build a startup over the weekend

Posted by Gary King on July 07, 2007 at 11:12 pm

startup-weekend.png70 people who have never met each other before have discussed online to build a startup over this weekend. It’s called Startup Weekend. TechCrunch mentions it here. The product that they are building is called VoSnap, and it’s supposed to help a large group of people agree on decisions quickly. I’m guessing that this was partly inspired by the situation that they themselves are currently in.

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I’m building Facebook Applications

Posted by Gary King on June 29, 2007 at 6:09 am

Well, since I’m out of b5media now, I’ve been busy with building Facebook Applications. Actually, a whole slew of them.

I won’t mention any specific Application names right now, but hopefully we’ll hit the half-million-users point soon in terms of the total number of users that we have across all of our Applications. A few of our applications are even in the top 100 most popular application list.

You may also have noticed that my Facebook profile has recently been having a major make-over. No, it’s not turning into a MySpace profile! I’ve just been testing out so many Facebook Applications that I end up just leaving them there :)

I’m also building a few Applications for other people as well; a few are in the education world, helping students with their notes, and others are more oriented towards the business-minded people.

Hopefully I’ll have fancy graphs and statistics to show in the near future ;)

I’ve left b5media

Posted by Gary King on June 29, 2007 at 6:00 am

Well, I’ve left b5media as of last Friday (a week ago today). I blogged about when I joined them way back in January.

First of all, I’d like to thank them for giving me the opportunity to work there. I’ve learned a lot of things, and I take away with me experiences and relationships that I will use for the rest of my life.

In a way, this event is perfect for me. Now that I have more time available to myself, I’ve invested it into my own projects that I have planned for quite some time (most of which are still under wraps!) I also have several projects that I have been working on but had to put on hold because of my work at b5media, so now I can spend more time to focus on them.

Anyways, thanks, muchos gracias, to everyone who has been involved with my experience over at b5media. It’s been fun, but I can only work at the same place for so long!

Plus, I get bored easily, so I try to spice things up by changing the platforms that I work on and such (I primarily used WordPress over at b5media). Which, leads me to my next point… I’m building Facebook Applications now. Read on by clicking here!

New Facebook Applications are much less viral than previously thought

Posted by Gary King on June 29, 2007 at 2:35 am

An anonymous letter from a Facebook Application developer was posted to Valleywag today, talking about how their hopes of the hyper-viral promises that Facebook brings were over-warranted.

This is unfortunate. I have had similar-but-not-as-bad issues with the Facebook platform and with Applications that I have on there, which I will post about hopefully sometime in the near future.

I think that it’s important to take advantage of the news feeds of your application’s users that are available to you because these are published to the friends of all of your users. This will have to be the next big goal for Facebook Application developers because Facebook has now add a limitation to only allow up to 10 invitations per application to be sent out by each user, per day.

This is very disappointing indeed.

Friendster finally picking up in traffic again

Posted by Gary King on June 26, 2007 at 11:54 am

friendster10.jpgLooks like Friendster is back in the game, with a 40% increase in traffic in the last month, according to ComScore statistics and as mentioned by VentureBeat.

TechCrunch mentions that being a member of a social network is thought to be mutually exclusive, meaning that there can only be one major growth leader in the world of social networks. With Facebook booming as much as it has been lately, one would assume that other networks such as MySpace and Friendster would slow down in growth, but that is not the case. I somewhat agree on this.

The one thing that I do completely agree on with VentureBeat is that social networks are finding new markets in places where there previously were no real reigning social network to begin with. Places like the Philippines and Malaysia have people that are attracted to Friendster, which is probably partially fueled by the fact that Friendster is already one of the social networks of choice in China, whereas Facebook is not nearly as popular as it is in the United States.

Twitter for audio to be released soon

Posted by Gary King on June 25, 2007 at 10:23 pm

Looks like Dave Winer of Scripting.com fame is going to be releasing the ‘Twitter for audio’ soon, called TwitterGram. It’s basically like Twitter, but instead of sending short quips of text, you’re sending audio files that are 200 kb or smaller in size.

This isn’t going to be nearly as big as Twitter; not even a quarter of the popularity. Audio is just not as easy to glance over than text.

Podcasting, for example, has gotten relatively big, but blogs are still massive compared to podcasting, which is partially why podcasting startups such as Odeo didn’t do nearly as well as they would have hoped for. I would imagine that podcasts take up less than 5% of all existing blogs. The same will go for TwitterGram.

LinkedIn is opening up to developers

Posted by Gary King on June 24, 2007 at 11:26 pm

linkedin.pngLooks like LinkedIn is finally beginning to open up their vast amount of content to developers through an API of sorts over the next few months.

People have been saying that this is in response to Facebook, but in my opinion, if done properly, an application could be developed that would merge the best of both worlds from Facebook and LinkedIn to create a hybrid of sorts. Now THAT could be potentially a very useful application to many people, including myself!