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Gift Your Online Buddies with Real Drinks with GetThemIn

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Get Them In!

Still in doubt with what to give your online buddies this holiday season? Christmas day is over, but it’s not too late to send those special someones something before the year ends. You could perhaps send them an email or an e-card, but having something tangible is definitely better. You can order books, flowers or pretty much anything online. But for beer buddies, how about something with a little bit more alcohol in it?

Get Them In! lets you do just that.

GetThemIn is a Facebook application (http://apps.facebook.com/getthemin) that allows people to buy each other real beer, wine or other alcoholic drinks for the first time ever – perfect for sorting out those last minute Christmas present dilemmas or getting the Christmas drinks in with your mates without actually being there.

People can choose from a variety of drinks and other real-world gifts and send them to their friends using Facebook platform and PayPal. Recipients receive a personalised message from the sender via SMS, email and Facebook, with the option to keep it virtual or redeem their gift as a voucher that can then be used in one of hundreds of First Quench outlets across the UK (including Threshers, The Local, Wine Rack and Haddows).

The service features several popular brands, including Fosters, Cobra, Heineken, Tuborg, San Miguel, Bulmers Cider, Newcastle Brown, WKD Blue, Old Peculier, Blossom Hill, Hardy’s, Taittinger, Radcliffe’s D.B., Teacher’s, Cockburn’s S.R., Harvey’s Bristol Cream and Courvoisier V.S.

Aside from cheering up your buddies, you also help a worthy cause. GetThemIn has been officially granted the DrinkAware trust trademark license and will be donating a percentage of its profits to COUNTED4, which counsels and promotes the health and well-being of anyone affected by substance misuse.

The drinks can be redeemed in about 1,500 participating wineries. But the deal is valid only in the UK, so folks from elsewhere would have to toast to a virtual drink!

[via WebItPR]

Originally posted on December 30, 2008 @ 12:53 pm

PicApp Launches WordPress Plugin

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Blog readers are attracted to posts with photos, and with this in mind, PicApp launched to provide use of copyrighted photos to independent publishers free of charge. However, it may not always be easy to copy and paste code from one webpage to another. And so PicApp is making its service more accessible to WordPress bloggers, through a WordPress plugin.

Having hard time finding affordable, yet high end, images for your blog? problem solved. Access millions of updated images, of any topic (news, celebrity, sports, events, creative and more) directly from your WordPress environment and add any image easily to your post. The images, legal and free to use under the license terms , will enhance your blog content , improve its SEO and attract a significantly larger readership.

The plugin makes it easier to insert free, quality photos into a blog post by integrating all these into your WordPress interface.

[via XFEP]

Originally posted on December 20, 2008 @ 1:13 pm

iBegin Labs Releases WP Lifestream Plugin

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iBegin Labs has announced the release of its WP Lifestream plugin for WordPress, which enables bloggers to consolidate all their “life streams” into one handy page on their sites.

The Lifesteram Plugin is simple – used with WordPress, it lets you create one single feed for all your activities online. One feed that can collate what you are listening to, what you are buying, and what you are doing. Twitter, Facebook, iTunes, Hulu, YouTube, your blog, Flickr, Steam, and a lot more – all in one easy to read place.

The Lifestream plugin includes the following features:

  • Unlimited number of feeds.
  • Stores entire feed history, not just the last week or two.
  • Extendable via a base PHP class. Easily add your own feed types with very little PHP code.
  • Customizable display using stylesheets.
  • Allows grouping of events to cutback on the daily feed spam.
  • Localization ready
  • Daily digest available to summarize your activities.
  • Efficient! Built on scalable database structures so it won’t bog down your website.

A sample lifestream using the plugin can be found at davidcramer.net.

I think this is a good way to consolidate one’s feeds from outside of a blog, rather than, say, publish your tweet summaries in a daily digest (which I have done before, but decided it’s a bit tacky). Having all of these in one dedicated page gives readers who are interested in your lifestreams the opportunity to follow your tweets, photos, and whatnot, but doesn’t necessarily clutter the main areas of your site.

The Lifestream plugin is scalable, and iBegin is considering creating a WordPress theme that already incorporates the plugin and a dedicated lifestream page.

Originally posted on December 16, 2008 @ 11:08 pm

Yahoo Mail Going Social

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Yahoo reports that its mail service is turning social, particularly with an end-goal of unifying Yahoo and third-party social media services into one place.

A “smarter inbox” puts messages from friends or family in a separate, tabbed file so they don’t get buried under mountains of spam or work email.

The inbox for the the first time lets people install third-party applications such as movie-recommendation service Flixster and blogging tools from WordPress.

Technology from startup Xoopit (pronounced swoop-it) will fetch all pictures buried in stored emails, even retrieving images from website links found in messages.

Earlier this year, Yahoo opened up its email service to let third-party developers create add-on applications to the service, much like how one could launch applications on social networking site FaceBook. This move is meant to add value to email, which is considered among the top applications that people use the Internet for.

Ideally, this should make things easier to manage. But the concern here is that having yet another social media profile to maintain might make it more cumbersome for users. The idea of consolidating all of a user’s online presences (blogs, social networks, photos, lifestreams, etc.) under one site–or portal, which Yahoo! is–is an attractive proposition, though. But this might be difficult to achieve, given the different standards among different social networks.

Originally posted on December 16, 2008 @ 1:59 pm