Taptu for your Social news reading

Call me a Taptu fanboy. Never heard of it? It's a great mobile app for newshounds like me.

Taptu is a social news feed reader that lets you add, remix, search and share streams from your favorite web sites, blogs and social networks like Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn. You can add your favorite sources and topics directly from our StreamStore (including importing from Google Reader), DJ them on StreamStudio and finally share the ones you like the most. It's available for Android and iPhone users.

The company recently announced its launch for the Samsung Bada platform, helping Taptu in its expansion to feature phones, to its dedication to a cross-platform, global strategy with apps on iOS, Android, Barnes & Noble NOOK Tablet, Amazon’s Kindle Fire and now Samsung Bada phones.

On a recent trip, away from my laptop, I used my phone to graze over my Taptu headlines early and often. The beauty is that the content owner allows either a little or a lot of a particular piece. If you want to read more, you click through to their content website for the full piece.

Reviews are mostly positive for Taptu.
VentureBeat: “...a deeper news reading experience than most competitors, in particular because I was able to easily combine news sources. The app also does a great job of recommending stories.”

The Register: “A good news aggregator should be able to pull information from a broad range of sources, present it in a clear and easily navigable format, and make it as easy as pie to find, add, remove and edit feeds. For me the app that best ticks all those boxes on Android is Taptu.” –

Android Police: “Taptu: Social Media + News + Eye Candy = Success: Overall, this is probably the best news reader I’ve come across on Android. It looks GORGEOUS, is incredibly smooth, and integrates my social networking on Twitter and Facebook.”



Taptu the company started as a privately held company, founded in Cambridge in 2007 and is backed by funding from Venture Capitalists including DFJ Esprit and Sofinnova. The company is based in Cambridge (UK) and Denver, Colorado.

If you're a Android user, give Taptu a download from the Android App Store.

For iPhone users, find Taptu at iTunes.

Google Search, plus Your World

Google is moving more and more into the social search space, apparently to Twitter's chagrin. The company announced yesterday a new search paradigm called Search, Plus Your World, which aims to include A LOT more of your social interactions into your search results.

Google wrote at its blog:
"We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:
- Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;
- Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and,
- People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community. Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World."
But the new Google Search won't include your Facebook and Twitter feed friends info. Search guru Danny Sullivan wrote:
"Search Plus Your World doesn’t cover content on Facebook. Or Twitter. Or Flickr. Or any social network or place where content might be shared to a more limited audience. Currently, “Search Plus Your World” would be better described as “Search Plus Google+”

And that's pissed some off of the other social companies. WSJ Blog wrote:
"At issue is how Google rolled out a new social search that completely ignored other social services such as Twitter and Facebook. The search giant defended its actions saying that it did not have access to crawl content on other sites, including Twitter."

I do like what Google is doing around searches for communities. If you're a leading voice in a certain community, it's likely that your search rankings will rise for your, erm, 'thought leadership'. Google writes:
Starting today, if you search for a topic like [music] or [baseball], you might see prominent people who frequently discuss this topic on Google+ appearing on the right-hand side of the results page. You can connect with them on Google+, strike up meaningful conversations and discover entire communities in a way that simply wasn’t possible before.

It's an exciting time for the Web, connecting people and places rather than links and websites. Watch Google's entertaining video on its search 'transformation':

Gary Vaynerchuk Says "Please, Get it Right - It's 2012!"

Happy New Year! It's been awhile since I blogged here (I suppose it's worth it to mention that I've been doing a fair share of blogging for companies and clients, just not here).

So today, I want to change that. With a simple piece of advice from the always straight-up and sensible Gary Vaynerchuk. Gary shares a video (embed below) with his viewers that he can't believe he even had to make in 2012! In it, he implores those of you (us?) working in social media and more for companies and brands to GET IT RIGHT!



Gary himself writes:
"I hate to call out OWN, I mean no one has done it better than Oprah, that said this Tweet just embodies EVERYTHING that is wrong with the way Corporate America and most businesses and brands for that matter are handling Social sites, it is 2012, it has to STOP, has to. Am I wrong?"

Don't just use these channels to force things down your feed's readers eyes and ears. Use these tools to engage, provoke, enhance, enlighten and ultimately deliver. Nuff said. Well said, Gary.