The latest from TechCrunch
- FMyLife Starts Clamping Down On Its API, Has Some Developers Saying FML
- Skimble's iPhone App Helps You Track Your Gym Workouts And Outdoor Activities On The Go
- Wibiya's Powerful Web-Based Toolbar Adds Twitter, Facebook, And Video Chat To Any Site
- We All Live In Public Now. Get Used To It.
| FMyLife Starts Clamping Down On Its API, Has Some Developers Saying FML | Top |
| FMyLife’s developer community has a new reason to visit the site this week: to complain about the restrictions the company has recently started to enforce on its API. From now on, FMyLife requires all applications that feature advertising or that have a price tag (e.g. on the App Store) to send 50% of their revenues back to FMyLife. Apps that are available for free, sans advertising, will be able to operate as usual. For those who haven’t been introduced to the FMyLife phenomenon , the site invites users to leave brief personal stories that generally end in catastrophe or extreme embarrassment. All of the stories conclude with “FML” (or F*** My Life), which has become a catchphrase outside of the site as well. It’s a great Schadenfreude fix, and you may even wind up feeling some empathy for your peers (or not). The site, and the third party applications it has spawned, have proven to be extremely popular. Now, FMyLife disallowed paid applications and advertising when its API launched in February 2009, but the company has been inconsistent about enforcing those rules. Some developers have offered their applications with advertising for some time. And FMyLife has even approved the use of advertising and premium versions in some cases, without anticipating just how popular these applications could become. As it turns out, some of these applications have turned into big businesses in their own right, and some have proven to be drains on FMyLife’s servers. Rather than kill off all applications that are monetizing the service, FMyLife has decided it wants a cut. Here’s how FMyLife co-founder Didier Guedj is describing the changes to the policy: The Fmylife API was created to spread FML stories on the internet for free, in the spirit of sharing. However, in recent months, several developers made a very big business by selling FML’s applications or by advertising on it. This has led us to change our policy: 1) Access to the Fmylife API remains free for those using it for non-business purposes. 2) We will now ask that those who are using Fmylife for profit share their revenue at a fair 50/50. The recently policy changes are directly related to a conflict FMyLife has had with Enormego , a developer that built two applications for the iPhone: “F MyLife and” “F MyLife Pro”, (the free version was briefly ranked as the top application on the App Store) . Here’s how Guedj describes the situation: Enormego created two applications for iPhones (”F-MyLife” et “F-MyLife Pro”) which generate consequential revenue (through the sale of the apps, plus advertising) because they got more than a million hits per day since April 2009. These two iPhone applications only work thanks to our website, its concept and content. It was agreed with Enormego on July that any revenue generated by these apps would be split 50/50 (no contract was drawn, just via an email exchange). Enormego has never paid to Fmylife any money, and has not replied to any of our Emails since September. After several warnings without any answers, we decided to cut off their access to the API function. Since, they have been pirating the content of our website to feed their applications. We then asked them to stop. They did, only a few days ago. We’ve reached out to Enormego for their side of the story. FMyLife’s motivations for implementing a more restrictive API are obvious: they want to make money off the site they’ve built. At the same time, the FMyLife service has certainly benefited from the efforts of these third party developers — you can be sure plenty of people who downloaded these mobile apps are also frequent visitors of the service’s homepage. FMyLife can do what they want with their data, but it’s clear that they should have been consistently enforcing their policies from the start. Some applications have already been discontinued (or removed FMyLife support) since the change. All of that said, it does sound like FMyLife would be willing to work something out if a developer has already built an application using the API and objects strongly to the changes. From Guedj: For new applications (premium or ads), we explain the new rule to their developer and they have the choice to share the future income, or they don’t have access to the API. We’ve never disabled an application (except Enormego’s) because these developers work hard too, and we respect their work a lot. We talk with them, explain the situation and all of them have agreed easily (for now) with our new conditions. Image via sjdvda on userlogos . Crunch Network : CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware. | |
| Skimble's iPhone App Helps You Track Your Gym Workouts And Outdoor Activities On The Go | Top |
| We recently wrote about Skimble, an online destination for anyone who wants to plan and track an activity or workout goal. Today, Skimble has launched a free, companion iPhone app to help track sports activities and monitor your athletic progress on the go. You can download the app here. Skimble's online and mobile tools let you discover activities, by giving you information on popular outdoor active trips, i.e. a hiking trip to Lake Tahoe; and gym workouts, i.e. indoor rock climbing. You can join one of these trips or you can create your own. When you create a trip, you can create a feed of news and updates about the trip and share the page with other friends. The feed also pulls in any Tweets about the subject of the trip. Skimble’s app taps into the iPhone GPS to allow users to set your workout and activity trip location and share geotagged “action shots.” Skimble’s activity tracking tool focuses on helping you create a calendar and schedule of your activities, and will chart out your performance based upon time spent on the activity. You can also compare your progress to a friend's. Skimble, which was incubated in The Funded’s Founder Institute, was co-founded by Maria Ly and Gabriel Vanrenen. Crunch Network : CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0 | |
| Wibiya's Powerful Web-Based Toolbar Adds Twitter, Facebook, And Video Chat To Any Site | Top |
| There’s no shortage of web-based interactive toolbars to choose from. This week, a new Israeli startup, Wibiya , is publicly launching its compelling web-based, customizable toolbar to publishers. Wibiya’s toolbar for blogs and publishers integrated services, social media sites, applications and widgets. Everything is customizable, giving publishers the ability to add Facebook Connect, enabling Twitter alerts, and more fairly easily. The toolbar has a fairly in-depth integration with Twitter, Search, latest tweets, Tweets about each page and more. Publishers can also bring their Facebook Fan Page stream to the toolbar. Interestingly, Wibiya has an “app store” of sorts, where publishers can customize their bars with a variety of apps, including Google Translate, YouTube, games and more. Unfortunately the app store is limited with only 25 apps at the moment. Wibiya also has deep integration with TinyChat, which lets publishers have their own video/text chat feature on their sites. As users login to chat, they can Tweet out the URL to the page they are in, helping publishers build traffic. Of course, Wibiya is still not as feature-rich as some of the other toolbars but it’s certainly off to a good start. But it’s a competitive space with Conduit, Meebo, MySpace, Yahoo, Digg and many others in the game. Crunch Network : MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily. | |
| We All Live In Public Now. Get Used To It. | Top |
| As the Web becomes more social, privacy becomes harder and harder to come by. People are over-sharing on Facebook and Twitter, broadcasting their whereabouts every ten steps on Foursquare and Gowalla, and uploading photos and videos of their most private moments to the Web for all to see. It’s easy to say that privacy is dead, we all live in public now, and just deal with it. But things are a bit more complicated. It used to be that we lived in private and chose to make parts of our lives public. Now that is being turned on its head. We live in public, like the movie says (except via micro-signals not 24-7 video self-surveillance), and choose what parts of our lives to keep private. Public is the new default. Stowe Boyd, along with others before him , calls this new state of exposure “publicy” (as opposed to privacy or secrecy). He writes: The idea of publicy is no more than this: rather than concealing things, and limiting access to those explicitly invited, tools based on publicy default to things being open and with open access. I don’t particularly care for the neologism, but the idea behind it is spot on. This change represents a major shift in the social fabric, and it is only now just getting started. If you thought there was a lot of hair-pulling over privacy in 2009, just wait until 2010. Facebook’s new privacy policies which favor more public sharing, will be a big driver of this shift, as will the continued adoption of Twitter, which by its very design makes personal utterances public. Then there are startups like Blippy that go even further by turning every single purchase into a public statement . It takes some getting used to the idea of living in public. As I discussed several hours ago with Andrew Keen , in public on Twitter , instead of making the private public , we will make the public private .” When public is the default, you deliberately select what to keep private instead of the other way around. It’s not that privacy disappears. But it becomes more a matter of emphasis and a conscious decision. Boyd points out: Some people are the web equivalent of nudists: they live very open lives on the web, revealing the intimate details of their relationships, what they think of friends and co-workers, their interactions with family and authorities. But . . . even these apparently wide open web denizens may keep some things private, or secret. Privacy and secrecy are two different things. Secrets can be shared, and thus become “social objects that link those sharing the secrets together, and excluding others,” writes Boyd. Making it easy for people to move from the public to the private, and in between, will become increasingly important for Web companies. Getting back to the original question, privacy will still live on, but will be so transformed as to become almost unrecognizable. No doubt, many people will mistake it for dead and keep pulling out their hair. The rest of us will go on with our public lives. CrunchBase Information Facebook Twitter Foursquare Information provided by CrunchBase Crunch Network : CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors | |
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