The voice of the BlackBerry community.
Brightkite is a location-based social network. In real time you can see where your friends are and what they’re up to. Depending on your privacy settings you can also meet others nearby. Brightkite also allows you to post photos and notes at locations for others to see.
BrightKite is now available in version Alpha 0.1.2.
Download BrightKite OTA (Requires OS 4.5 or greater).
Download BrightKite for your desktop (Required IE and Blackberry OS 4.5 or greater).
[Thanks for the tip @LouTreize]
The Cluetrain Manifesto is a book written 10 years ago and it describes the way in which businesses and social networks interact for the greatest amount of utility. The book starts off with 95 theses that describe how businesses should use social networks to their advantage, or be overtaken by other companies who simply get it. Thomas Petzinger, Jr. of The Wall Street Journal, sums up the ideas nicely in the forward:
The idea that business, at bottom, is fundamentally human. That engineering remains second-rate without aesthetics. That natural, human conversation is the true language of commerce. That corporations work best when the people on the inside have the fullest contact possible with the people on the outside.
Keith McCarthur is the social networking coordinator for Rogers and Fido and he originally contacted me about BlackBerryCool.com. We talked about the challenges bloggers face when interacting with carriers. Fast forward to a few weeks ago when I discovered his project to celebrate the 10 year anniversary of the Cluetrain Manifesto by having 95 bloggers write a post on one of the Cluetrain Manifesto theses. As my experience is blogging in the smartphone industry, I chose a thesis I felt fitting for those experiences.
Continue reading about the Cluetrain Manifesto applied to RIM and BlackBerry
BBMNation is a social network that, like most BlackBerry social networks, uses PINs to connect users. Designed by a night club promoter named Steven Ojo and his partner Alex Trumpower, the site launched about a year ago. The site is incredibly bare bones, and has a graphical style reminiscent of web 1.0. On the bright side, its users seem to be attractive college students, possibly associated with Steven Ojo’s night club background.
You can register for BBMNation here.
Magmic Social aims to connect its BlackBerry and mobile gamers with one another in order to create a better overall mobile gaming experience. The site does this by connecting users, creating high scores, developing personalized avatars and promoting a more interactive community.
Magmic Social is in my opinion, the most unique of all the BlackBerry social networks. The reason is that is focuses on the one aspect of BlackBerry that gets the least news coverage: games. I’m hard pressed to find a blog that focuses on BlackBerry games specifically, which is interesting considering it’s such an up-and-coming market.
Go see Magmic Social for yourself here.
More social networks after the jump
The BlackBerry Cool staff made a resolution that 2009 would be a year of giving back to the BlackBerry community. So just because we’ve given away 2500+ free beta trials of the new BOLT browser in the past two days, don’t expect us to stop. Today we have BlackBerry Cool 15 presenter Ubiquitous Systems, with 200 closed beta invites for their SocialScope application. SocialScope is a social networking application that allows you interact with your Facebook and Twitter accounts at once. Interested? I thought so.
To sign up for the closed beta (I wouldn’t right now if you’re a BlackBerry Storm user), simply follow the link below and hope you’re one of the first 200 people (we’ll work SocialScope for more invites). If you missed out, worry not: our hands on impressions, a list of new feature additions (yep, SocialScope hooked us up with the newest build) and a gallery of screenshots are after the jump.
SIGN UP FOR THE SOCIALSCOPE CLOSED BETA
SocialScope Impressions, Feature Additions and Gallery
TechCrunch has posted an interesting (if cursory) investigation of the ways in which the Twitter community gets their Tweet on. Getting their metrics from Twitstat, TechCrunch shows that not only does popular BlackBerry Twitter client TwitterBerry crack the top ten, but TwitterBerry users are going Twitter crazy, with an average of 3.68 tweets per user. Currently, TwitterBerry is beating out desktop clients TweetDeck (a personal favorite) and FriendFeed.
While Twitstat’s metrics come from both a small and dedicated group of users, and thus don’t reflect the general Twitter population, it really doesn’t matter. BlackBerry users have always been considered ‘hardcore’ adopters, and it’s cool to know they’re using TwitterBerry to keep their Twitter feed well stocked. Are you on Twitter? If so, follow us:
Sweet mother Mary, is that an impressive number! Here’s what RIM PR sent me late last night in regards to MySpace for BlackBerry, that social networking application which is so cool with the kids these days.
We wanted to give you a heads up that RIM just found out that the MySpace application for BlackBerry Smartphones has been downloaded more than one million times. The one millionth unique download happened sometime on Saturday December 13th, which makes it a month exactly since the application launched.
I’ve yet to confirm if the amount is a reflection of pure downloads, or includes BlackBerrys pre-loaded with the application, but that is still quite an impressive number in such a short time frame! Check out some relevant MySpace for BlackBerry links below.
MySpace for BlackBerry Screenshots
www.blackberry.com/myspace (Desktop download)
m.myspace.com (OTA download)
www.myspace.com/blackberry (MySpace BlackBerry Community page)
Wow. When we announced last week that RIM and MySpace had released the MySpace for BlackBerry application, we knew it was going to be popular, just not this popular. Since the application’s launch on November 13, 2008, there have been more than 400,000 downloads, an all-time high for both MySpace and RIM in terms of first week application downloads. Users have also collectively sent and received more than 15 million messages and updated their mood and status over two million times in the first week.
“This rapid adoption is a reflection of an evolving consumer lifestyle where social connectivity and information access are more important than ever,” said Jim Balsillie, Co-Chief Executive Officer at Research In Motion. “This powerful new mobile application combines social networking and mobility in a highly personalized and empowering manner and we are very excited to see such a positive response in the first week.”
www.blackberry.com/myspace (Desktop download)
m.myspace.com (OTA download)
www.myspace.com/blackberry (MySpace BlackBerry Community page)
Following up on their hugely popular Facebook application for BlackBerry, RIM has now released MySpace for BlackBerry, allowing users access to one of the largest worldwide social networks. Here’s a look at some of the features:
In addition, RIM has launched a BlackBerry Community page on MySpace. It’s great to see RIM offering more consumer-focused applications, but I have one simple request: you’ve made a Facebook application, you’ve made a MySpace application, now please please make one for LinkedIn.
www.blackberry.com/myspace (Desktop download)
m.myspace.com (OTA download)
www.myspace.com/blackberry (MySpace BlackBerry Community page)
MySpace for BlackBerry screenshots
Soocial is a contact management and synchronization service that enables you to sync contacts between computers, smartphones and web applications like Gmail. Soocial also provide tools to manage these contacts, backups, and keeps your current address book in sync and up to date with all your devices. Previously in private beta, Soocial is moving into public beta in a really big way, with an announcement at the Under the Radar conference later today of Outlook support and a BlackBerry client coming in a few weeks.
This move into the BlackBerry/Outlook ecosystem will obviously make it more appealing for business users. Soocial plans to add Windows Live, Yahoo Mail, LinkedIn and iPhone support as well.
To learn more about Soocial, you can watch CEO Stefan Fountain’s presentation at FOWA London, recorded last month.
|via TechCrunch|
A friendly reader tipped us off today that RIM has updated their popular social networking application, Facebook for BlackBerry. Facebook version 1.3 doesn’t come with a change log, and doesn’t seem to contain any drastic changes, but an update is still an update. You can download the latest version of Facebook for BlackBerry at the link below:
The voice of the BlackBerry community.
