Group items tagged

adding new functionality to its Groups feature

making threaded conversations within groups similar to face-to-face professional interactions by removing the wall between original remarks and off-site content such as news articles. You can share links on Groups the same way you would on the homepage. And your profile picture will now be attached to any comment you make on a group, personalizing the experience.

You can also now roll over the images of the last three participants on any thread to see comment previews

Gowalla () users who follow USA Today and check in at major U.S. airports will receive airport and airline news and features from the news organization’s Travel section and online community.

“Because SCVNGR has all this premium activity (challenges, not just checkins), our location-based activity items get surfaced far more often in Facebook’s () activity algorithms, meaning that we get more placement, comments and likes,” says CEO Seth Priebatsch.When coupled with SCVNGR’s previous Facebook Places integration features and do-it-yourself rewards system, the application completes the loop and turns the Place Page into something much more than a repository of checkins.

As game developers and publishers look more and more to digital distribution as a way to bypass current brick-and-mortar game sellers -- in part to cut down on game reselling, a major loss to their bottom line -- we could be witnessing the beginning of a new model of game development. In the future, when you drop $60-$70 on a new game, you might just be buying the game engine and the background art, with the knowledge that the developers will be releasing content packs that provide entirely new, self-contained game experiences that build off the original title.

Edmunds.com, which supplies consumers with information on new and used cars, provides an example. IT workers at the firm originally began using Splunk to better understand patterns of visits to the website—for example, to determine whether a sudden spike in traffic was a cyberattack or the result of an article that went viral—and to help track system logs. Today Edmunds uses Splunk for much more. "We now provide data dashboards to business groups in the company to show them up-to-date information that helps them make decisions," says John Martin, senior director of application operations at Edmunds. "The information that business groups need is in our IT logs, but it wasn't being looked for." One such dashboard allows the editorial and marketing staff to track in real time which auto brands and models are attracting the most views. This allows the business to experiment with ways to be more responsive to what users are doing hour by hour. For example, ads could be shuffled to match what people are most interested in at any moment.