Android Social Media

I first started using Fring on my Windows Mobile phone about 2 years ago. Fring is best known for their light weight IM capabilities including Skype calls. I copied the following press release directly from the fring.com website:

Android device users can now get onto fring (we know you’re been missing us since some of you recently switched to Android devices ) with (the first) free VoIP calls over Skype, MSN and GoogleTalk and via hundreds of SIP providers. As always you can see real-time presence and live chat with your ICQ, Yahoo! And AIM buddies too. You can also use Twitter there, as part of  your integrated contact list.

fring on android works over 3G, GPRS or Wi-Fi internet connection.

What do you need to do to get your hands on this brand-new version?

You have 2 simple options for getting fring onto your Android device:

1.    Get it directly from the Android Market:

•    Start the Market application on your phone

•    Search for fring and install

2.    Get it from fring’s WAP site:

•    On your Android phone, go to Settings > Applications and check the box to allow ’unknown sources’

•    Point your phone browser to m.fring.com and download

A big thank you to our early access group for your invaluable feedback over the past few weeks!

Welcome to the big, happy, free fring family fringdroid-ers!

Known Issues (Will be fixed in the next version):

- GSM contacts do not appear in fring’s buddy list on the Motorola DROID device
- Call disconnection tone may be heard a few times when terminating a call
- SIP and SkypeOut calls are not yet available on the Motorola DROID device

The fringTEAM

[Update]: Here’s a direct link to the .apk [Link]

Source: http://www.fring.com/blog/?p=1735

We are please to announce the official launching of our first ever “Android Social Media User Manual.” This helpful E-book will help Android users who wish to create and maintain an active online presence in social media and generate an online revenue without wasting endless hours in front of a computer screen.
This manual is about FREEDOM. The freedom to leave your office and continue to be just as productive and effective from your Android phone. This Ebook is 100% FREE OF CHARGE!!! Here is a preview to what’s inside:

• Overview of Internet Marketing & Social Media Principles
• Overview of Mobile Internet and Utilizing the Android device
• Specific App reviews and instructions to help you create & syndicate content, track results, and create relationships
• App Indexes to all the standard Social Media websites including Twitter, Facebook, Youtube, LinkedIn, Freindfeed, Plurk, Blogger, Wordpress, and More.
• Productivity Apps that will help you get more done in less time including an overview of how best to utilize Android Gmail, Contacts, Calendar, etc.

Fill out this simple form to get your E-Book emailed to you right away!

Don’t forget to Re-Tweet & Digg this post!

Video marketing has become a big trend in Internet Marketing because of the ways videos are listed on the search engines. If you can syndicate your video to enough of the biggest video based social websites such as Youtube you can get quick results. Videos are also a big part of social media because of their ability to form relationships and share a more “real you” with others.

The key is in the syndication. How do you create a high quality video with the correct title and description and then get it syndicated to as many websites as possible? Traditionally people without amazingly cool cell phones have used services such as TrafficGeyser.com and TubeMogul.com which both offer video syndication to a vast network of video websites such as Youtube, DailyMotion, Vimeo, Viddler, Blip.tv, MetaCafe, etc. Now that we are going all mobile (THE WHOLE POINT OF THIS WEBSITE) we need to understand how this can be best accomplished from the Android device.

With the update to the 1.5 firmware on the Android platform earlier this year all Android devices now come standard with a camcorder app. By default you can share a video directly to Youtube.com. When you upload to Youtube you can select a title, description and tags but can only upload videos up to 3MB.

www.pixelpipe.com

I prefer the PixelPipe Pro app which will upload all videos regardless of size and also allows a title, description, and tags. Furthermore Pixelpipe will automatically upload your video to Youtube, Facebook Video, DailyMotion, and others. It will also update your status (tweet) the title for you along with link to the video on twitter, facebook, myspace, friendfeed, bebo, hi5, plaxo, and up to 40 other social networking sites. THAT IS POWERFUL SYNDICATION coming from a cell phone.

When syndicating a video consider the following helpful hints:

Taking video from a cell phone is naturally not as high of quality as other video recorders. Hold the phone extra steady while recording and consider your lighting conditions. Poorly lighted places will make for very poor videos.

Choosing a title for your videos is an important process. In addition to letting people know the general content of your video you also need to make a title compelling enough to make it worth watching. If your title shows up on twitter with a link will people click it? Questions often make powerful titles and including the word “video” will let people who see the tweet or status update know that the link will lead them to a video.

The description is your best place to put keywords in paragraph form while describing the video content. Including a url to your main site or blog will also help in SEO efforts.

The tags are keywords. Be creative. You want to consider keywords that people may use to search for you and your content without using the overly used cliches of your niche.

Jacob S. Paulsen
www.jacobspaulsen.com

With the new and official Facebook app for Android there is still a lot of talk among Android users in need of something more. In the last 6 months we have seen a good number of Facebook Android apps come into the market to satisfy the thirst but now even with the official app, users want more.

I admit that I’m mostly satisfied with the new official app. It does everything I would expect it to do and I understand that the more features you add to the app the heavier and slower it is. Some Android users (whiners) would do well to understand this.

Perhaps among the greatest new developments is the home screen widget displaying your news feed, and the live Facebook contacts folder which gives you quick access to the phone numbers of all your Facebook friends.

Here are a few screenshots from the new official app:

There is an Android Facebook App Fan page on facebook with a great video and additional updates!

What are your thoughts? Are you satisfied?

In our original PixelPipe post we talked about the power of the PixelPipe photo syndication app. Today we want to add to that chain of thought by talking about the new 1.5 pixelpipe app which supports video & audio uploads as well. The new Android version 1.5 added the ability to upload videos directly to Youtube.com While this is a great feature on its own it doesn’t begin to compare with PixelPipe. Let me give you an example.

Today while grilling some steaks in the back yard I took a short video clip of my crazy dog trying to “bite” the smoke out of the air. I chose the share option and instead of choosing Youtube I shared it via Pixelpipe. What did this do? Not only did it directly upload the video complete with title, description, and tags to YouTube but it also uploaded it to Dailymotion.com and Facebook video. Then it also updated my status on all 18 of the social networks I participate on to include the title and link to the video. All of this from the camcorder app on my Android… THATS COOL.

Get an account at PixelPipe.com if you haven’t already and then download the pixelpipe app from the android market. From either the app or the website set up your “pipes” to include all of your photo, video, and social networking websites. Give it a test run… go ahead… syndicate a photo, video, or audio…
How cool was that?

If i got paid hourly for the time I spent on facebook i would not need to do anything else to support myself. I am sure I am not the only one who mis-employs hours of mine (or my employers) time on facebook. I have friends that work in tech support for a company that owns several internet dating sites and people were on facebook there so much that the management has blocked the employees from even accessing the site. That behavior coupled with a study by Men’s Health that “proves” that spending some of the bosses time on social networking sites is really beneficial to your effectiveness at work and not the contrary as the management at my friends work place suggests. That is what prompted me to download and review a few popular FREE facebook apps in search of how to get the absolute best facebook experience from your mobile phone so that the boss does not know how much of his/her time you truly spend chatting with friends, looking at pictures and playing mafia wars. Once I find a way to do that from my phone, game over my productivity goes from 50% to 1.5% maybe… that game has my goat.  They announced that they had an iPhone app for their game (silly misguided creators) but have yet to show an app for android.  In that event, look out.

So, Mafia Wars aside, I was not able to find a free app that really effectively delivered the entire facebook experience to my fingertips on my super sweet android G1 phone. But i kinda am OK with that and I’ll explain why. First off I want to say I was really disappointed with androids browser version of facebook.  If I was logged into chat when I was on my computer then I was logged into chat when I got on the mobile browser and accessed facebook.  So what would happen is I would get an email saying hey so and so added you as a friend I would open my phone to confirm the friend request it would log me into chat and someone would chat me while I was on my phone and i was not able to chat them back.

So my need for a facebook app was created, I wanted an app that was first and foremost free. That’s the whole idea with this android market thing if i remember right… and i wanted to access all the content pictures, chat, comment on status’ and pictures and albums and what not. And I wanted to be able to be logged out of chat and just do facebook sometimes too.

I started with fBook. it was the most popular and seemingly most relevant of all the free apps so i downloaded it and played around for a couple hours. I like that i am able to access photos and comment on them, that’s huge for me. However i was bugged that you couldn’t access stuff on the wall to comment other than status’. I like making smart alek comments so that was a negatron there. I was also bugged that its basically a window for the mobile version of faceboook but i liked that they organized it by tabs which made it a little more accessible.  I loved that i could upload photos straight from my mobile phone so that made things instantly available to me jealous friends when i was on awesome vacations… however my two biggest beefs with fBook are 1. the chat tab. They should just get rid of it. its only for private  messaging which you can do alot easier and faster from other places in the app and the actual feature it should run, (facebook chat) runs shoddy like the browser runs it.  However after experimenting with the FBabble app I kinda like that fBook drops the chat ball. Sometimes I want to chat, other times I just want to facebook and comment and write on walls.  My other huge beef with fBook is I am unable to access fan pages. and being that android social media  (that’s us) has a fan page http://budurl.com/vafa that I like to be able to edit, I was prettty miffed about that. But thats what I love about a rooted G1, I can use it as a wireless router and then no matter where I am my computer can log onto the wifi that my phone is emitting and I can edit and change my facebook anything: profile, fan page, whatever.  All using the internet my phone is providing for my computer, yeah its slow, but its better that paying 80 bucks a month for a wireless aircard…

FBabble is great I like that its quick, easy and makes perfect sense. you can have multiple chats open, you can swipe your finger to change from conversation to conversation you can do other stuff while the app is open and it will alert you when someone you are chatting writes back. I love that the whole status is displayed when people are logged in.  4 stars.  My only beef with FBabble is that sometimes as you open and close the app  it will confuse who said what… but its not that big a deal.  I’m not enough of a space cadet to forget or not be able to tell what i said verses what the person I’m chatting said.  All that aside, its true its not perfect… but I couldn’t find an app that really satisfied all my facebook needs…  So, you developers out there and anyone reading this post. If you know of an app that really gets everything done on facebook cleanly and efficiently, let us know!  If your experience is the same as mine, maybe its time to write a new app that can truly do it all.

On occasion someone will ask me, “Why? Why do I need a cell phone so that I can do the same things I am already doing from home while on the go from a 2 1/2 screen?” This post is to answer that question. Why should you invest in an expensive cell phone and pay the monthly fee for unlimited data service (mobile internet)? There are basically three HUGE reasons and here they are:

1. I am assuming that since you care at about Social Media Marketing that you must be an entrepreneur of sorts and have a desire for FREEDOM. The usual formula applies: TIME + MONEY = FREEDOM. Now here is the problem; if you are going to utilize social media and the internet to build your business how do you ever expect to acheive freedom while sitting in front of your computer? That would make for a great video on youtube as you sit in front of your computer for 10 hours a day and claim to live the ideal “lifestyle.” GET REAL!!!! Living a life of freedom requires leaving the computer desk and sometimes for days or even weeks at a time. The only way to live that true lifestyle of freedom as an internet marketer utilizing social media is via a good cell phone (Android of course) with mobile internet. ACCEPT IT.
2. Using your android device (or any cell phone for that matter) will cut the amount of time you spend “working” your online business in half. WHAT??????? Are these Android Social Media guys claiming that if I will just get a nice Android device and get away from my computer for awhile that the total time I will work will be 1/2? YEP, YEP, & YEP. Let me explain this from a different angle. Half of the things you do while sitting in front of your computer “working” are in fact non-productive and time wasting. If you instead made the decision to operate your online business from your cell phone you would in fact eliminate the wasteful, non-productive activities because frankly they just aren’t as entertaining from a 2 1/2 inch screen. Make sense? Wouldn’t you rather spend that time out on an adventure/vacation/trip/golf course?
3. Now, this is where you are going to have to really take my word for it. I PROMISE you that when you get your android device with unlimited internet access a whole new world will open up for you. Your life will change! It will be like the time when you got your first cell phone. It doesn’t take long before you start to wonder how you got along without it! You can scan barcodes to check prices of any item for sale locally and online. You have access to google maps with street view everywhere you go. You can use your own cell phone as a wireless router to connect with your laptop when out and about. Its not JUST social media. There is a whole world of endless exciting options waiting for you. Get plugged into it.

Jacob S. Paulsen

P.S. The image shows my primary desktop screen on my android phone. At my fingertips I have access to Facebook, twitter, myspace, friendfeed, linkedin, plurk, ping.fm, flickr, pixelpipe, delicious, google reader, google analytics, wordpress, & TONS more.