Tutorial 4: Viddy and Instagram

Kasama Media intern, Steven M. Paquin shares the benefits and uses of successful iPhone apps Instagram and Viddy.

Holiday related tutorial on Twitter Lists.
By Steven Paquin

Royalty Free Music by Kevin MacLeod
“Hot Swing”
“Merry Go”
“Sweeter Vermouth”

Royalty Free Sounds from Freesound.org

Oink App Review

By Roland Quitalig 

Milk Inc. has launched their first iPhone app from Kevin Rose’s new startup. Oink is a recommendation service which lets users recommend specific items from a specific place. Combining the social networking power of both Twitter and Facebook with Foursquare’s check-in service, Oink has the potential to become the next Yelp. With it’s simple to use interface, Oink pushes recommendations a step further.

Although still a bit buggy, Oink offers a lot. You may rate an item with ‘Love it,’ ‘Like it,’ ‘Ho-hum’, and ‘Dislike it’ at the click of the button. Users may also include a mini review limited to 200 characters. Along with uploading picture, users can choose from a variety of photo filters to give their mediocre iPhone photos a little umph.

Overall the app is spectacular. With this one app, Oink brings in so much more activity than any of its competitors. 

A brief tutorial on auto-following and #TeamFollowBack from Kasama Media.

Royalty Free Music by DanoSongs.com
“Hot Swing”

Royalty Free Sounds from Freesound.org

A brief tutorial on using hashtags from Kasama Media featuring awesome dance moves by Media Intern Steven Paquin.

Royalty Free Music by DanoSongs.com
“Hot Swing”
“Off to Osaka”

AnyBeat First Impressions

By Roland Quitalig

I finally received my AnyBeat invitation today. Staring at my measly CRED score of 2, I’m already researching how to increase it. I posted a picture, answered two questions, changed my relationship status, and liked a random stranger’s forum post. I was able to increase my score to 5.

Taking focus of this figure, I realize that Dmitry Shapiro’s site is not much different from Facebook or Twitter. You first login to a newsfeed where people can share posts and links. You maintain a profile that has a feed, about, photo, and questions section. The networking schema uses a follower and people you follow system. How is AnyBeat going to draw users from these popular social mediums?

For AnyBeat to be successful, it is going to need to offer its users something different from what’s already provided. Its campaign for anonymity is a good start. Both Twitter and Facebook discourage users from using pseudo identities. Pairing anonymity with a CRED system, however, shows to be pointless. People already gauge credibility on these type of sites by the number of friends, followers, fans, and likes.

AnyBeat is going to really need to play out its strengths wisely before its official launch. Still in development, it is still too soon to predict whether it’s going to make the cut.