Fire-Wired Blog

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com The Super Bowl is hands down the biggest television event in the country. For six years straight, the National Football League’s season-capping game has broken the record for largest television viewing audience. While the Super Bowl is the ratings champion, it seems sitcoms, award shows, live broadcasts and other sporting events are forever trapped in the race for second place. The obvious tech equivalent to the Super Bowl is Facebook. In the world of social networking, Facebook rules. Try as they might, Twitter, Pinterest, Google Plus, LinkedIn and startup Ello are locked in an eternal struggle for second place. Google Plus technically has more users, Pinterest refers more traffic to online businesses, and Ello has that new car smell, but Facebook is king. Facebook has 1.35 billion active monthly users, 4.5 billion user “likes” daily, 300 million daily photo uploads, the largest population of 25-34 users anywhere online (the ...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com There are two things that launch upstart social networks from nothing to necessities: a feature that isn’t offered anywhere else, and being cool. While coming up with an original social network feature seems nearly impossible, being cool and maintaining can be much harder. Friendster, MySpace, and even America Online — the original social network — all brought something to the table the Web hadn’t seen before only to eventually lose their user appeal. For Friendster it was the lack of interaction, for Myspace it was an ugly interface and oversaturation of ads, and for America Online it was the ’90s software mentality that never translated to the browser-based Internet that took over around the turn of the century. Are Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, YouTube, Quora, LinkedIn, Instagram, Vine and Snapchat all cool? Yes; some definitely more than others. But each has its fervent audience. It seems that, with regard to the Internet...

This article was first published by  dmcityview.com As cool as Justin Timberlake is, what’s the first thing you think of when you hear his name? He’s a singer, right? Nevermind that for the  last decade J.T. has been trying desperately to be taken seriously as an actor. Shifting public perception is hard — for entertainers, politicians, companies, even websites. No one is learning that lesson harder than the once-popular location-based application Foursquare. In 2009, at the South By Southwest Interactive technology conference, or SXSWi, Foursquare dominated the hearts and minds of the tech world. Foursquare provided a social network for smartphone users to check in online to locations and share with their friends where parties were, what restaurants were exciting, and basically any location that was happening at that moment. The cherry on top of the GPS cake was Foursquare’s scoreboard for user check-ins, “Mayorships” for users who checked in the most at specific locatio...