Ping.fm Adds Support For RSS
Ping.fm, the service which lets you broadcast your status messages across all your social networks, has tapped SuperFeedr to add RSS support. This is definitely a powerful new enhancement to the Ping.fm services, which was just recently purchased by Seesmic. I’m a big Ping.fm user and welcome any updates and feature additions, but this one has me worried.
There are a plethora of apps out there that completely automate Twitter with the goal of helping marketers get their message out there. Most of these service are abused and end up creating droves of spammy and useless Twitter drones. With RSS support in Ping.fm, there is potential to easily create the same type of zombies across the entire social media landscape. Maybe I’m just being overly dramatic.
Gowalla Goes Real-time
Gowalla is another service taking advantage of SuperFeedr to enhance their service. They’re providing real-time RSS feeds for checkins and venues. This will allow you to do things like add your checkins into Buzz, track your favorite venues and people right in your RSS reader, and we’ll probably see some fancy Yahoo Pipes magic in the near future. As RWW points out, Foursquare offers RSS feeds for each user, but they’re not the real-time PubSubHubbub feeds now provided by Gowalla.
iBooks Coming To The iPhone
The fancy new iBooks app that was created as part of the iPad launch will be coming to the iPhone with the new OS release later this year. It’s unclear why they’re making iPhone users wait until the release of the new OS to provide access to the iBooks software. When it comes down to it, it’s really just another app. Another issue is that Apple may be leaving a lot of money on the table by not snatching up existing iPhone users before they break down and get a Kindle. Amazon has more books, anyway.
Foursquare Cracks Down on Cheaters
Foursquare, pretty much the leader in location-based services, has one major problem: cheating. Anyone who knocks the service points out this Achilles heel and Foursquare has decided to solve the problem once and for all. If they can’t verify your location, your checkin doesn’t count.
One of the reasons I decided to go with Foursquare was that it was easy to checkin via SMS, so it was working out pretty good. With this new change, users won’t be able to cheat as easily, but I also won’t be bothering because pickings were slim via SMS already.
Dennis Crowley goes into detail about how the changes may affect in this comment.