Posts Tagged ‘Social media’

YouTube opens auto captioning

Thursday, March 25th, 2010

You Tube is a video sharing website that has been profoundly successful over the recent years. People and companies are able to upload videos as well as having the capability to share information on social media websites. They have recently created an automated captioning beta program to the public, for the purpose of helping the hearing-impaired. This feature is only accessible for videos that are in the English language. You Tube is planning on adding other languages and video up loaders can utilize this feature to translate captions in English into any 50 languages. A restriction or two on the auto captioning feature is that it won’t work on videos where there is a lot of background noise and muffled sounds. Ultimately, the auto-captioning feature might help YouTube monetize its videos.

Auto-Captioning works by combining translation algorithms with Google’s automatic speech recognition technology. Auto-captions generate a natural step utilizing speech recognition. Video owners are able to download auto captions for a video by signing into their account and looking for the “English Machine Transcription” track and then clicking on the download button. There are various functions that come with auto-captioning, some of which include helping people word search video content to translating into a person’s native language.

Twitter on the roll

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2010

Twitter is a social networking website that shares what is happening with you, and what you are doing on a daily basis that others may find interesting and some can relate to. You can also follow others that you find interesting, for example: your favorite DJ, Singer, and Actress. It is a great way to see what is going on with your Friends /Family members without feeling the need to contact them if you are short on time for conversation.

With technology improving Twitter has announced that it will be introducing “@anywhere” which is a new podium that will allow partner websites such as Amazon, Bing, Citysearch, Digg and eBay to link to Twitter. This service will give the access to twitter users to send and receive messages while they are browsing through these websites. This means that users will be able to follow related tweets without leaving the site and basically this will allow partners to communicate in a more efficient manner in their conversations and their product positioning with Twitter. @ anywhere can be employed with a few lines of JavaScript code. 

@anywhere is going to decrease communication obstacles across different social media websites and portals. It will allow conversations to flow rather than having to manage so many different characteristics to engage around content.  Right now people can make different comments on each site but they have to repost on twitter. @ anywhere will make it simple for people to share contents and dialogues. 

I think this is a fantastic idea. This service will also help marketers in building their brand reputation and promoting their products. It is a tactic for people to involve themselves in conversations that will make them talk about a product or service that they might not even be aware of. A fact is that consumers tend to purchase products that they find out through word of mouth or that are recommended by others. Reading tweets about a product review that links to the actual page, such as Amazon would enable sales of the product.

Facebook Steps up to the Twitter Challenge: Tweeting or Feeding

Thursday, August 20th, 2009

friendfeed-twitter-facebookFacebook has plans to buy a web service named FriendFeed, which is similar in functionality to Twitter. FriendFeed allows its users to see what their friends are doing on other social media sites and is apparently bridging the gap between a host of social media applications. FriendFeed could be Facebook’s answer to the Twitter challenge.

Bob Marley sang about a timeless truth that big businesses are facing more every day: “You can’t please all the people all the time.” The folks at Facebook understand that 250 million users is an enormous, and diversified, audience to keep captivate, especially as they have watched millions of their own users join Twitter.  From junior high school kids to major media personalities, so many people are tweeting.

Where is the allure with FriendFeed? The real-time search capability that FriendFeed offers is an attractive feature, not only for its users but also to its soon-to-be parent company, Facebook. More importantly, both companies share similar core values – building technologies based on user feedback and fashioning those technologies to leverage relationships, according to Facebook’s VP Chris Cox. The 12 employee company of FriendFeed is purported to stay intact during and after the merger of the two companies, which should allow for a seamless integration of cultures and technologies. So what’s next for the users of Facebook? Tweeting or Feeding?

Author: David Meacham