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Television shopping channel QVC has been working to integrate the latest technology into their offerings for a few years. Last year they hired Courtney Cason, their first “multi-media host”. From what I can tell, Cason created a bunch of holiday videos where she interviewed the on-air salespeople and she also provides live chats during some of the fashion shows. The network has also created mobile apps for all of the major platforms so you can look for and order items anytime. Overall I think QVC has done a good job in the online space and certainly a better job than their competitor HSN.

I’ve been following a thread on the QVC community forums for the last week. The subject of the popular thread is, “Get rid of the Tweets, Blogs, FB’s and the F.F.”

The gist of the thread is that the on-air hosts are spending too much time pimping their Facebook pages and Twitter accounts instead of talking about and explaining the actual products. As I noted above, Courtney (along with a few of the other junior hosts) appears to be hosting many of the live chats and she appears on air to read some of the comments and to get other shoppers to participate.

Here are a couple of the interesting comments from the discussion thread:

• I also have no interest in FB or any other social networking site, and it’s especially aggravating on a shopping channel. Seemed even more disruptive last night on PMS. It reminds me of Romper Room when they start reading off the names of those supposedly participating with Tweets, etc.
• QVC is a TV HOME SHOPPING CHANNEL…..We can’t actually see, touch, etc the items we are buying so its QVC’s job to give us as much detail/information about the item for the customer to make a decision. I don’t care about what people I don’t know are doing, buying, etc etc. Just give informative presentations without the nonsense.

Continue reading “QVC Shoppers Say “No More Facebooking and Tweeting During On-Air Presentations”” »

One of the big movies last year for geeks was The Social Network, which provides a look into the early days of social networking service Facebook. The movie has won several awards and has been nominated for a variety of Golden Globes awards.

Peter Bradshaw at the Guardian has an in-depth review of the movie. Boris at The Next Web suggests you watch the movie as it will help tech entrepreneurship grow.

If you are like me, you didn’t get a chance to catch the movie in theaters. Good news for all of us, the movie will be released on DVD, Blu-Ray and in some of the rental machines tomorrow. You can pre-order the movie (it will ship tomorrow) from BestBuy and Amazon. BestBuy launched the movie on DVD at $16.99. Late last week Amazon matched the price and depending on your tax rate, you could save a buck by buying the movie on Amazon. You can pre-order the DVD for $12.99 from both outlets. The nice thing about the Amazon option is they are offering $5 in free Video On Demand movies when you purchase the movie in either the DVD or Blu-Ray versions.

There are a number of bonus items if you purchase the Blu-Ray option — I have two sources telling me that the failed interview at SXSW is included in a hidden track.

It does appear that The Social Network will also be available for $1 in RedBox and Blockbuster Express machines. This is how I will watch the movie as I can’t see any real reason to own this film. The movie does show up on Netflix although no date is provided regarding availability. And if you were planning to watch the movie via Amazon Video-On-Demand, you will have to wait until February 2, 2011.

Happy new year to all of the awesome CN readers! 2011 should be an interesting year for tech as we see Android tablets battle the iPad, a number of startups moving closer to IPO, more bubble talk, a small shift in the tech blog space and I think I will finally purchase a new mobile device (goodbye Samsung Ace!).

I wanted to thank everyone for the birthday wishes on Facebook and other social networks. It’s great to wake up on the first day of each new year to such warm greetings and well wishes for my birthday. There have even been years where I’ve received virtual birthday cakes (in case you are wondering, don’t try to eat the cake).

There’s only one small issue…today isn’t my birthday. When I sign up for social networks and other online services, I typically select January 1st as my birthday if a response is required. If a birth year is also required to use the service, I will generally just pick something in the 1950s to make sure I get full access to the service.

Of course selecting a year way earlier than my actual year can lead to some odd responses when friends and colleagues think I am decades older than I actually am.

I’d bet that January 1st is the most popular birthday worldwide for every online service that collects this data.

Whether January 1st is your real or fake online birthday, I wish you a very happy birthday.

It appears social networking site Facebook is currently down and out of action. Reports are coming in rapidly that the site is either completely not loading and/or the service is loading very slowly. I am unable to access Facebook currently from multiple Internet connections – I only get a blank page. Twitter users are also noting issues connecting to Facebook.

Update 4:45pm Eastern – Facebook is back – resume tagging photos, planting crops, etc. It does appear that they may have rolled back the changes that went live today.

I’ve had multiple people try loading the facebook.com site from different parts of the world and no dice – nothing loads.

Some CN readers have noted that the outage has been going on for over 15 minutes now although most reports are only a few minutes as of the time of this post. I also note that Like buttons are not loading as well – this will make it hard to tell the world about your love for Pepsi or the New York Yankees.

My favorite reply comes from Landon Palmer who notes, “Somebody should ask Time’s Person of the Year why Facebook isn’t working right now.”

The outage could have something to do with the changes Facebook made today including some massive changes to their Pages infrastructure.

We have emailed Facebook for more information and will update this post when we hear back.

Please remain calm during this time – you might want to use this time to do something productive.

As always, please report in if Facebook is down for you and also note what you are doing to occupy your time during this outage.

Earlier this week, we took a look into the offices of Russian search engine giant Yandex. Today Yandex has announced a new partnership with Facebook in which Yandex will integrate information from the social network on the Yandex website. Financial terms of the partnership were not disclosed.

From the partnership announcement, “Yandex makes its services more attractive for the users of social networks, including those with a Facebook account. So, the portal’s front page hosts a Facebook widget and the company’s own instant messaging service Ya.Online informs its users of new notifications on the networking website. In addition, Yandex will now add the data from Facebook into its blog search index improving its international search and boosting new, recently created pages’ indexing. Specifically, Facebook will provide Yandex with a syndication feed that gathers information about updates on its Pages and profiles created to represent public figures, businesses or organisations.”

If you click the Facebook widget (seen below), it does request access to basically your entire Facebook account. This is different than the Like badges seen on many blogs and websites.

Javier Olivan, Head of International at Facebook, noted regarding the new partnership, “We feel that this partnership will bring a lot of value for our Russian users as we would like the public information on Facebook to be easily searchable via Yandex.”

It appears social networking site Facebook is currently down and out of action. Reports are coming in rapidly that the site is either completely not loading and/or the service is loading very slowly. I am unable to access Facebook currently from multiple Internet connections. Twitter users are also noting issues connecting to Facebook.

On one connection, the following error message displayed on my screen, “Error 101 (net::ERR_CONNECTION_RESET): Unknown error.”

Today’s outage comes  just a month after several days of outages on the social sharing service.

Facebook website badges (like the one on the right side of this page) and Like buttons do appear to be loading at this time.

Some CN readers have noted that the outage has been going on for over 30 minutes now although most reports are only a few minutes as of the time of this post.

We have emailed Facebook for more information and will update this post when we hear back.

Please remain calm during this time – you might want to use this time to do something productive.

As always, please report in if Facebook is down for you and also note what you are doing to occupy your time during this outage.

I’ve been suggesting for a long time that inch by inch, day by day, Facebook moves closer and closer to becoming AOL 2.0. I am not talking about the new AOL that’s a collection of blogs, I am talking about the 14.4 dial up, 3.5″ floppies, look at photos of Cindy Crawford and email “You’ve Got Mail” AOL.

It’s easy to see how hooked people are to Facebook when the service is down as it has been a couple of times the past month. It’s the same crack that had me and lots of my friends hooked to AOL back in the 90s and pushed my first bill over $600.

In February I took a long look at the components of Facebook and compared them to the old AOL. Facebook had a press conference today to discuss a variety of updates at the social networking service. Next Web has a recap of all of the changes. The Facebook Groups update was the most interesting to me. It was fun to watch how quickly everyone ran for a group and how many updates were posted on my Facebook page about x person joining y group. It was interesting to note that groups can have email addresses @facebook.com which is one of the items I noted back in February would be coming. I still believe we will see full username@facebook.com email addresses coming soon. Email was the core functionality of AOL so it’s easy to see why I think it will be coming to Facebook.

Email is really the only function left that keeps Facebook from being its own complete island. Almost all of the other services a normal Internet user uses on a regular basis are provided by Facebook. From photos to videos, groups, IM, chat, apps, games, what else is there where a person would need to go outside the walls of the Facebook?

While many compare Facebook and Google, I would actually suggest Facebook’s next battle will be with Apple.

I’ve been watching how my sister has been using Facebook as of late and it is EXACTLY the same way she used AOL.

Continue reading “Facebook Takes Another Step Towards AOL 2.0” »