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TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 6 January 2012 – Take a Wander

After a brief break we are now back in 2012 with your weekly social media need-to-know.

We have been looking at a free iPhone app called Wander, which connects pen pals and Instagram to allow users to look at and take part in the lives of others all over the world, whilst also interacting and sharing with them.

Not everyone has the money or opportunity to go travelling around the world, so this free app can help to satisfy your curiosity for other cultures and help you become closer to the lives of others.

Wander creates connections with people you have never met through photo based conversation threads and provides the opportunity to explore different surrounding in an interactive, expressive way. Magic.

Each week, you can explore a new part of the world with a new user acting as your local guide. The app works by highlighting a new guide, from over 80 countries and across 6 continents that you can choose to connect with.

If you connect, the app will then suggest photo-based missions to start the interaction. You then upload them to the conversation. No worries if you don’t speak the same language, as there is a built in translation feature to aid your communication.

Wander currently has 12,000 app downloads and nearly 1,100 photos shared each week.

The only downside appears to be that is it currently just available for iPhone users, however the app will soon be rolled out for Android devices. Hurrah!

Wander seems to be the natural step in social networking and for that reason it’s a TIN IT.

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TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 14 October 2011 – Apple introduces personalised snail mail and friend stalking

Apple has introduced a free ‘Cards’ app this week. It allows you to get creative, and design and send personalised, physical greeting cards to all your friends and family, choosing from over 20 template designs.

Buying and sending your postcard or greeting card is similar to buying a song on iTunes. You just enter your Apple ID password and then simply place your order. Apple will then print the card, put it in an envelope and mail it to your loved one on your behalf. Brilliant.

Cards is not an original idea. There are many other websites and apps out there doing the same thing, however this is an Apple app, and with its style and simple design, looks set to refresh and revitalise the crowded greeting card industry.

This is a fun, creative app and we predict it could really take off.

Cards is a TIN IT.

Cards wasn’t the only Apple app launched this week. ‘Find my Friends’ is a location app which allows you to keep tabs on your friend’s location.

We don’t know about you, but if we want to get hold of our friends to find out where they are, we usually just give them a call or drop them a text. This app seems a bit creepy in comparison.

Find my Friends shares your location with your accepted friends, all of the time, which is different to one of the top location apps FourSquare, and not something that is very appealing.

Before you even begin you have to wait about for your friend to accept your request and then, you have to accept there’s back.

Once you are both finally connected, you can click on your friend to see their current location completely in real time. Yet again, this is different to FourSquare, as with the latter, you have to option to ‘check in’ to a place that you think will of interest to your friends. I’m not sure any of our friends, no matter how much they love us, would appreciate a boring update that we are going to the supermarket or just walking home!

This all feels too much like a complete invasion of privacy and a bit pointless. This is not something we will be continuing to use.

Sadly, this app is a BIN IT.

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Hot Tin Roof is a public relations agency creating iconic reputations through concrete communication.

With big plans and a growing client list we are looking for talented people with the enthusiasm and vision to help us build on our success.

For more information email Sarah Lee.

And to apply just send your CV and covering letter (with your favourite film, book and icon) to sarah@hottinroof.co.uk by Friday 14 October 2011. Interviews take place w/c 17 October 2011.

Look no further!

TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 23 September 2011 – Give Em This…

Sometimes finding the perfect gift for your nearest and dearest is, if we are being honest, a bit of a struggle. If you are stuck for ideas, then GiveEmThis.com might just be what you are looking for.

This free web app, by Imply Labs, is a personalised gift engine that algorithmically analyses your friend’s social media updates to recommend relevant gift ideas that your Facebook friends actually want.

The system connects to your social media and analyses your friend’s interests based on their likes, dislikes, interests and other data stored in their profile. GiveEmThis.com then recommends original gift ideas relevant to your friend’s interests and activity.

GiveEmThis.com doesn’t select one perfect gift (that’s up to you) but looks at countless options to show you the things they will love the most.

The app works by calculating your Facebook friend’s online data, behaviour and patterns. Events, status updates, shared links and “Likes” are all included in the algorithmic calculations.

It doesn’t just evaluate Facebook data. Twitter is also analysed, although the downside it that it isn’t as detailed.

The programme is still in its early stages, with only Amazon being used to generate gift ideas. However there are plans to expand, with companies potentially being able to add their products to the system, and Google+ and LinkedIn integration.

Now, don’t get us wrong, we really like the practical application of this gift generator…so we should TIN IT, but we are going to BIN IT purely because we don’t like Facebook and Twitter knowing so much about us. And Christmas just wouldn’t be the same without those weird and wonderful random presents we get but don’t want!

This gift generator is a BIN IT.

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TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 2 September 2011 – Man versus machine

For all the literary lovers out there, there is now a website that can recommend you books using an algorithm. Launched last week by Aaron Stanton, BookLamp is to books what Pandora is to music.

The website analyses a book’s style of writing and assigns numerical values to the ‘Story DNA’, which is described as the breakdown of the settings, themes and characters.

We don’t know about you, but we choose books through human recommendations – from friends, family, colleagues, book reviewers in newspapers and Amazon user reviews.

Obtaining electronic recommendations from an algorithm that has not read and experienced the book just seems a bit dubious. We love technology but sometimes you just need a human touch.

BookLamp can’t distinguish between good prose and sloppy writing styles, so it is lacking the quality control that you usually get from someone you know and trust.

Also, the BookLamp engine can sometimes recommend a ‘zinger’ – which is a book that makes sense from an algorithmic perspective but not from a human view. This seems to be a major problem and something they will need to work on to perfect.

So far there are only 20,000 titles in their database, which means that your choices are fairly limited at this stage until more publishers come on board.

BookLamp is a work in progress. It sounds like a good idea initially, but on closer inspection there are some flaws.

We are not entirely convinced. Think we will just stick to old-fashioned book recommendations from friends and family for now, and come back to this once the BookLamp engine has had time to expand and fine-tune itself.

BIN IT…for now.

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TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 26 August 2011 – Maximising your impact on Twitter

Twitter is great and we sure love to tweet, but lets be honest, it’s sometimes pretty difficult to be consistent with your tweets. It seems to be that you either post lots at once or don’t tweet enough. This is where Buffer comes in.

The app, co-founded by Leonhard Widrich and Joel Gascoigne, builds a ‘tweet queue’ and spreads your updates out over time, meaning that you never have to flood your followers again with tweets. You simply add your tweets to your ‘Buffer’ and they spread them out over the course of the day. Simple.

Now, when you’re browsing the net and you come across lots of great content, you don’t have to post it all at once – this handy little tool will spread it out so you don’t tweet eight things in a row and annoy your followers.

Conveniently Buffer also has an analytics feature for every tweet you send so you can see exactly how many people your tweet has reached and how many followers have re-tweeted.

Another advantage is that Buffer has extensions for every major browser so you don’t even have to visit the website.

We think scheduling tweets is definitely the way forward, however we would not recommend scheduling all of them. Finding the right balance between ‘Buffering’ and live tweeting seems to be the best and most efficient way to use Twitter.

Buffer is a TIN IT.

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TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 12 August 2011 – Question Time

Today we have been looking into a new startup called Knod.es, which is a useful app to help you find the most suitable people in your network to answer a specific question.

It beats going on Twitter or Facebook with an open ended question, which doesn’t usually generate a good response (they are best for broadcasting and sharing). Instead, Knod.es narrows the search down and looks at the public activity of your social media contacts on LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook.

When you search for a select word or phrase, the web app looks for people who have mentioned that exact term. It also allows you to search for people who have talked about that term or even worked at a particular business. To make things easy for you so you’re not faffing about, once you’ve located the appropriate contacts you can message them all in one go, and even better…they don’t have to be on Knod.es.

This app, which went live in private-beta a month and a half ago, is not a unique concept. There are a few similar applications out there like this, but Knod.es takes a different approach – it gives you a list of potential contacts for a specific topic rather than just solely helping to answer your question.

It went live in private-beta a month and a half ago, so only time will tell if this takes off. It does look very promising though.

TIN IT.

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TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 22 July 2011 – Picture this…

With so many different social networking sites and photo applications you can literally have hundreds of images scattered across different platforms and websites.

This week we have discovered Pictarine, a website that gives you a way to pull together all your shots from Flickr, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram etc into one simple place. Genius.

Pictarine creates an album on your chosen service, with the title, description and specified privacy whilst maintaining third party site album structure. The site also allow users viewing access to their friend’s photos on Facebook/Twitter/Instagram, meaning that Pictarine enables you to see nearly all of the photos your friends are posting to the web. Clever eh?

You can now share you private Flickr photos with a few Facebook friends or your Instagram photos with your Yahoo contacts (something that was unheard of before) using what Pictarine calls a ‘Zest’. When you create a Zest you choose photos from wherever they are and share them with anyone and everyone you want.

It has been available to the public since May this year and has already attracted 3,000 users. They have just updated their features this week to include Instagram and Twitter integration.

We think this is a great site that helps to pull together all your photos in one place. There is no denying it, Pictarine is a TIN IT.

Look no further!
TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – 15 July 2011 – Last.fm introduces free festival app

Summer is well and truly here which means the temperatures are high, the days are long and the music festival season is upon us.

However there is a slight problem … the dilemma of which festivals to go to. With so many on offer, all with amazing line ups, how do you pick? Well using Last.fm of course!

The popular music website has introduced a new free Festival App to help you make your mind up. It is available on iTunes and Android and was launched just this week.

All you need to do is download, connect to your Last.fm account and the app will make some recommendations based on your individual music taste and also tell you which festivals your friends are attending.

Drawing from Last.fm’s database of almost two million events, the app narrows the choices down to approximately 4,500 upcoming festivals worldwide.

It organises the festivals under the headings of ‘compatibility’, ‘nearest’ and ‘date’ and once you select a festival you will be offered information on the event and the lineup.

The downsides are that you can’t buy tickets for the festivals using this app, and it won’t be useful if you don’t currently use Last.fm. However this is still a very nifty little app.

This is a Tin it.

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TIN IT OR BIN IT is your weekly social media need-to-know.

Hot off the press we deliver the week’s most ground breaking social media news,
oh-no-you-didn’t stories, tips you can’t afford to miss or simply our opinion on trends in the digital landscape.

Lastly, we’ll tell you whether it’s tin material or bin material!

View them all here on our Facebook page.

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Tin It Or Bin It – Friday 8 July 2011 – Facebook expands to video chat

This week, Facebook announced a partnership with Skype to add video chat to the social networking site used by 750 million users.

Now, whenever you browse to a friend’s profile, you’ll see a new button between the ‘Message’ and ‘Poke’ buttons that says ‘Call’. Click that, the other user will see a popup asking if they want to accept a call, and you’ll be connected straight away. The first time you use the feature you will need to install a small plug in, but once this is done you are good to go.

We at Hot Tin Roof love to keep in touch with our friends so think this will be great new way to connect with them, whether they are in the same city or on the other side of the world. It seems like it will easily fit into our current social media habits as well.

The new feature is great as there is minimal amount of set up (just a few seconds to install the plug in) and you don’t need to create a new Skype account to use it.

One drawback however is that at launch, Facebook’s video chat service will only be able to connect two users, whereas the new Google+ system (which was announced a week before) allows group video calls. To stay ahead of the competition, Facebook will probably have to offer similar features.

We are very excited about this. TIN IT for sure.