Social Networking and Web 2.0

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Web services, Social Software

We’re big fans of Mint, Shaun Inman’s web stats tracking tool. Although the default Pepper (Mint’s term for plugins) will track the basics, the beauty of Mint (aside from the interface, which IS beautiful) is in the various Pepper’s developed by Inman and the Mint community for further tracking web statistics.

Till Kruss has just released the first stable version of his Pepper, Tweets (which you can download here) which combines Damon Cortesi’s Tweet Stats script with Mint. Not only can you “Tweet” from within the Mint dashboard (and view recent tweets from those that you follow), you can also display and track your Twitter usage statistics.

A look at the frequency of Tweets per hour using Tweets in Mint

The Pepper is still in development, and there may still be some bugs — not to mention Twitter’s own erratic behavior as of late — but we think this is still a very, very cool little tool.

[via Peppermint Tea]
Read | Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Business, Developer, Internet, Social Software, web 2.0

Meebo, the online instant messaging platform with support for multiple protocols, has just released the API for meebo rooms and meebo network.

Meebo rooms are customizable spaces that integrate instant messaging with the sharing of web Links and media, including videos and images. The meebo rooms API was created for large-scale implementations of meebo rooms for bigger community sites. The API also automates a large portion of the creation and configuration of meebo rooms.

Examples of implementation include:

• embedding a chat room on every “group” page of a social network
• live community groups for an artist or show
• a chat room in the “comments” section of a blog.

So why do all this? Two words: Muh-knee.

Each meebo room built with the API will run ads, and meebo will share 50% of the ad revenue with its partners (if you dry heave at the idea of an ad-supported meebo room, a yearly licensing fee option is also available).

In January alone, 18 million unique users visited meebo widgets distributed across the Web by partners and users. So if you’re looking to monetize your website, meebo rooms and widgets might be the way to go.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Internet, News, Social Software, web 2.0

Talk about coming out of nowhere. Less than 48 hours after each company posted effusive posts praising the other service on their respective blogs, Joyent, the company that provides the infrastructure for Twitter, has announced on the company’s blog that Twitter has been off of their servers since 10 PM last night.

As the post itself states, this is very surprising, especially coming only a day after Twitter posted this to the official Twitter blog. Interestingly, Joyent also posted a message yesterday, announcing their plans to provide excess capacity for Twiter during the Super Bowl.

What changed in 24 hours? While we have no idea, we can’t help but speculate that this break-up is somehow related to Twitter’s frequent outages and service hiccups as of late. The Twitter blog from this morning indicates that the team was working on a planned infrastructure project all night and that the increased downtime was unexpected. The entry further expresses the company’s shared frustration with users over the recent downtime.

From the tone of Joyent’s post, especially in the final line, “…Joyent is standing ready with excess free infrastructure to support Twitter through this transition in the event that they need it,” we can’t help but think Twitter might have dumped Joyent for a more stable provider.

Developer of our favorite blogging tool, Daniel Jalkut tweeted his own theories: Twitter will announce an acquisition deal in the next few days. His purely speculative thoughts, Google. We sure hope not.

Phone calls to Twitter were not immediately returned. Frankly, we’d turn off our phones too. We’ll keep you posted if anything in this story develops. You know, assuming Twitter works well enough for us to get updates on all the gossip.

[via @gruber]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software

On February 5, MySpace will open its system to developers so that they can begin building applications (similar to Facebook applications). MySpace intends to offer advertisement-revenue sharing to developers while avoiding the feed/request pollution that Facebook has.

MySpace will be supporting OpenSocial which is a collection of API’s for developers to create applications that run on multiple social websites. The theory is that with OpenSocial a developer can make one application that interacts with different sites (like MySpace, imeem, Plaxo, etc.). So now instead of asking one group of contacts if they want to take your “how funny are you?” quiz, you can ask all of your contacts!

If you want to write apps for MySpace, you can pre-register on their developer site now.

[Via Mashable]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, Search, web 2.0

The problem with search engines (if you’re one of those people who believe there’s a problem with search engines) is that they don’t know who you are. Google and other search companies are tackling this issue by compiling your search history in a way that could eventually help the Search Engine decide which results will be most relevant. But for the most part, right now when you, your mother, and that mad scientist down the street search for information on building a nuclear bomb in your basement, you’ll all get the same results.

Delver wants to change that. The company came out of stealth mode at this week’s DEMO conference. The idea is that you can search for information that’s relevant to you by gathering search results from your friends’ social networking pages. All you have to do is enter your name into Delver’s service (no registration necessary) and it will try to determine who you are, and then search your public profile on sites like Facebook, Flickr, and YouTube to determine who you friends are. Then when you enter a search term, like say “pizza places,” you should get a list of places your friends recommend or at least have talked about.

If you do register for an account Delver will let you associate yourself with accounts on social networking sites. But as you’ve probably guessed, other users will be able to search your social network without knowing your password. Theoretically they can already do this, since all Delver does is draw publicly available information together in one place. But it’s still mildly creepy. Then again, why would anyone care where your friends buy pizza?

[via TechCrunch]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Fun, Internet, Blogging, Social Software, Beta

Earlier in the month, we told you about TwitterStats, a downloadable script that would graph your Twitter statistics. The author of TwitterStats, Damon Cortesi, thought it would be great to take TwitterStats to the next level. He did so by making TwitterStats into a Ruby application that you could run without having to download and run a script, a task perhaps only advanced users are capable of.

When you visit TweetStats for the first time, the website prompts you for your Twitter username. Another interesting piece to the front page is the graph that shows you the most popular Twitter apps. FYI, currently the web interface is the most popular at 46% followed by Twitterrific with 21%. After you enter in your username, TweetStats gives you a basic graph of your Twitter activity. As you can see by the screenshot above, my most active Twitter day is Wednesday.

We like TweetStat’s simplicity and functionality. Being able to link back to the graph url is a nice feature for those who want to show their graph on their blog or website.

Thanks Damon for this addicting new Twitter tool! Now we stand to get even less done today as we play with TweetStats.

Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Iterasi is a new bookmarking service that allows users to save dynamic web content. What does that mean? Once upon a time web pages were relatively static. If you wanted to see the content of a web page, all you had to do was enter a URL and up pops your news article, movie listings, or photo collection. But today more and more sites are packed with dynamic content which changes regularly while the page’s URL remains the same.

For example, imagine you’re searching Google Maps and you zoom in and drag the map around. When you bookmark the page, all you get is a link to the map you saw when you started. Or what about pages that are changing every day like Techmeme or the New York Times? Sure, you could bookmark pages for individual articles, but what if what you really want to save is the equivalent of today’s front page of the paper?

You could take a screenshot of those pages, but once you save the text content as an image file, you lose the ability to search the page. And that makes it pretty unlikely that you’ll be able to find that page again when you need it. Iterasi solves this problem (even if you didn’t know it was a problem) by creating snapshots of web sites using a process the company calls “notarizing.”

All you have to do is install a browser toolbar and click the notarize button any time you see a page you want to save. It will be saved in its current state to Iterasi’s online service. The page includes active Links, searchable text, and everything else you could need. You can find your content by logging into your account from any web browser. You can also add notes and tags to pages for easier indexing. And of course, you can share pages with your friends. Iterasi also includes a scheduling application for saving pages at regular intervals. So if you want to save the front page of your local paper once a day or 6 times a day, you can schedule automated backups.

[via Mashable]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Search Engine Optimization methods are divided in two categories: black hat SEO and white hat SEO. Recent developments indicate that websites that use black-hat methods will be in trouble soon.

Three weeks ago, we informed you about Google’s new position 6 penalty. At this time, it was unclear why Google assigned this penalty to some websites. It seems that Google doesn’t use this penalty anymore. Why did this happen?

Filed under: Internet, Social Software, web 2.0

The Twitter 100 is an easy way to keep track of all the people you’re following on twitter (or 100 of them at least) at once. To use Twitter 100 you just enter your Twitter user ID and are then taken to a page with 100 of the people you’re following and their most recent tweet. You can set the refresh rate at every 3 minutes, 10 minutes, or every half hour.

Twitter 100 would be a lot better if you were able to update your own Twitter page from the Twitter 100 page. As it stands you’ll still have to do your own tweeting from another source. If you’re away from Twitter for a while (you know for that sleeping thing) it can however be an excellent way to quickly catch up on everything you’ve missed while you were away.

For more great Twitter tools check out Twitter tips-tools for your tweets.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Google is working with the Publicis Groupe to improve advertising in a partnership that is being showcased as the general direction of how Google wants to be viewed by the advertising industry.

An excerpt from SearchEngineJournal

Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Publicis Groupe CEO Maurice Levy announced limited details of the collaboration at a meeting in Paris, France ahead of the World Economic Forum in Davos, which begins today and both men are attending. This marks the very first announcement that Google has made with one of the world's major advertising groups, and indicates that they are attempting to ease some of the strain they have with the advertising world that is somewhat wary of their objectives.

Google, with its expansive plans has been perceived as a threat for firms in the advertising business. The partnership sends out the message that Google wishes to take care of the technology aspects on advertising while letting the actual content remain where it belongs - with advertisers.

See full article.

Related Entries:

Google's Expansion hits Madison Avenue - 02 November 2006

Ask.com to introduce Contextual Advertising Product - 25 April 2007

Google, Korea Daum In Partnership Talks - 28 May 2007

More Limits On Microsoft - Google - 28 June 2007

Contents of this feed are a property of Creative Weblogging Limited and are protected by copyright laws. Violations will be prosecuted. Please email us if you’d like to use this feed for non-commercial activities at feeds - at - creative-weblogging.com.

SEO by the Sea recently had a post on Yahoo's internal relevancy testing measures and tracked that to a patent filed by them.

An excerpt from SEO By the Sea

How well do the searches for the top related terms in query logs match up with appearances of those top related terms in search results for the primary search term or phrase?

If they match up well, then you might be able to say that the Search Engine is providing relevant results. If the frequencies of appearances (percentages) don't match up well, then it's possible that a search algorithm or two might need to be tweaked by a search engineer.

The method is used for finding out the relative relevance of results to the primary search term.

It is great to see Yahoo innovate on the search front but can that be converted to a lead over Google?

See full article.

Related Entries:

How do you Manage Content for SEO? - 28 April 2007

Mahalo And Its "Alpha" Test Release - 30 May 2007

tyBit could be The Next Big Thing in Online Search - 30 June 2007

Yahoo's Beginning… - 10 November 2007

Contents of this feed are a property of Creative Weblogging Limited and are protected by copyright laws. Violations will be prosecuted. Please email us if you’d like to use this feed for non-commercial activities at feeds - at - creative-weblogging.com.

Microsoft's David Treadwell, a VP at Windows Live will be joining the Data Portability Working Group. After Facebook and Google this is the next high profile membership to speak about.

The Data Portability Working Group seeks to provide a standard mechanism for individuals to port their social network information across the web and thus allow competition among web companies to persist on the basis of services alone.

An excerpt from the Live Blogs

“Today Microsoft is announcing that it has joined DataPortability.org, a group committed to advancing the conversation about the portability, security and privacy of individuals' information online. There are important security and privacy issues to solve as the internet evolves, and we are committed to being an integral part of the industry conversation on behalf of our users.

The decision to join DataPortability.org is an outgrowth of a deeper theme that technology and the internet should be deployed to help people be at the center of their online worlds, a theme that has begun to permeate our products and services over the past few years. We believe the logical evolution of the internet is to enable the removal of barriers to provide integrated, seamless experiences, but to do so in a manner that ensures that users retain full control over the security and privacy of their information.

Read Write Web also has a good video link on what the Data Portability Working Group is all about.

See full article.

Related Entries:

Windows Live Search: Microsoft macht Google in den Unternehmen Konkurrenz - 17 Mai 2006

Microsoft baut jetzt auch Social Networks - 13 März 2007

Microsoft To Release 6 Security Updates - 08 July 2007

Data portability on the Web - 13 January 2008

Contents of this feed are a property of Creative Weblogging Limited and are protected by copyright laws. Violations will be prosecuted. Please email us if you’d like to use this feed for non-commercial activities at feeds - at - creative-weblogging.com.

Filed under: Internet, Social Software, web 2.0

Are you the sort of person who likes to bookmark interesting web pages on del.icio.us, submit important or odd articles to digg, share rumors with Truemors, and send funny pictures of cats to your Twitter followers? Then have we got a Firefox add-on for you.

Sharealic is a Firefox add-on that works with Firefox 2, 3, and Flock and Songbird. It adds a handy menu to Firefox that lets you submit any web page to a ton of social bookmarking sites or similar services with just a few clicks. Sure, there are plenty of other ways to share items with your friends, but it you like to spread your love across multiple services, Shareaholic can save you a lot of time.

Shareaholic also lets you know at a glance how many times a page has been dugg or submitted to del.icio.us. Of course, if you’d rather submit a site to multiple services all at once, you might want to check out the Mahalo multi-submit toolbar. Shareaholic requires you to submit your Links to one service at a time.

[via Mashable]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Fun, Social Software, web 2.0

If you’re new to the whole Twitter scene, and your friends have yet to climb on the bandwagon, your Twitter page might be looking awful lonely. You might have no one to stalk, er, follow-and no one is following you. Enter the Twitter Pack Project, a wiki where the community recommends fellow Twitter-ers by topic of interest or geographical area.

The Twitter Pack Project has lists of all shapes and sizes. For example, if you’re an Apple nerd, you can find a list of Twitter-ers whose Tweets are more or less related to Apple. Like having a good belly laugh? Visit the laugh pack and become a follower of your favorites. Want to follow fellow Twitter-ers in the same city? Packs exist for San Francisco, Los Angeles, and more; basically every major metropolitan area is included.

If you don’t find a pack to suit you, you are encouraged to sign up for the wiki and create your own (the invite key is: project). You can add new lists to existing packs (say, a new geographical location) or create an entirely new pack (for example, packs by birthday dates, and so on).

So what are you waiting for? Get to following.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software

Love them or hate them, Facebook applications are what makes the social networking site what it is. Back when MySpace, Friendster, and other sites let you connect with friends, leave messages, and maybe even play some music, Facebook let you send snowballs, play Scrabble, and graph your bestest friends.

The only problem with Facebook applications is that up until now, you’ve had to actually visit Facebook to access them. OK, sure, that makes sense. But as Google promotes its OpenSocial initiative which will let people develop applications that can run on any website, Facebook’s approach was starting to look a bit antiquated.

Now Facebook has upped the ante by releasing a JavaScript client library that lets you add a Facebook application to any site. That means you can visit Joe Schmo’s home page and still play a game of Scrabulous with your Facebook contacts. You know, if Hasbro and Mattel don’t shut it down.

There appears to be some debate in the developer community about how significant this announcement was. Facebook had already released an API for writing applications. And some developers have created applications that can be hosted on other sites. But by releasing the JavaScript library, developers can create multi-site applications that do not require any server-side code, making it incredibly easy for anyone to embed an application on their site.

[via All Facebook]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Internet, Utilities, Social Software

Would you like to be in a wagon on the Oregon Trail? What about sending all of your friends virtual cupcakes? Maybe pretend you’re a pirate or a Jedi? No? How do you feel about comparing all your movie and music tastes? All of your friends to determine who is in fact the “#1 Best Shopping Companion?” Still no? Don’t worry you can say no today and we’ll make sure someone asks you again tomorrow.

If your popularity has earned you not only a good amount of Facebook friends, but also a good amount of unwanted invites to Facebook applications you have no interest in using then we have something for you. Ignore All is a bookmark you can add to your browser that makes it easy to say no to all your unwanted Facebook invites.

The idea is pretty simple, when you have your applications request page open click on the bookmark and it will automatically click the “Ignore” buttons on all your application requests while keeping your friends requests, event invites, and group invitations. Pretty simple in design and execution, but if you get as many application requests as we do on a regular basis then it can be a huge time saver. Check out a video of IgnoreAll in action here.

[via ReadWriteWeb]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Google has been the poster boy in the online advertising space. With its online relevancy matching Adsense platform, it has no close rival. But Munich based start-up Proximic is looking to prove a challenger in exactly this very area.

Buoyed by the partnerships with Yahoo and eBay for providing contextual ads using their pattern matching technology.

An excerpt from BusinessWeek

Proximic says it can not only handle more ads but also do a better job than Google at matching online buyers and sellers. That's a big claim for a company with just 14 employees. After all, in the first three quarters of 2007, Adsense generated around $3.5 billion for its partners. And, unlike Proximic, it has built up relationships with hundreds of thousands of publishers over a period of years. Google also provides tools to advertisers that give them control over targeting and placement.

The technology of the firm does real time pattern matching based on the keywords and the profiles of web pages as well. The ad model does have the power to deliver contextual advertising but the question is whether they will prove a serious rival to Google in the near future.

See full article.

Related Entries:

Growing Internet Ad spending - 08 June 2006

ebay to offer contextual ads - 12 June 2006

Ask.com to introduce Contextual Advertising Product - 25 April 2007

Google Disabling Arbitrage Publisher Accounts - 19 May 2007

Contents of this feed are a property of Creative Weblogging Limited and are protected by copyright laws. Violations will be prosecuted. Please email us if you’d like to use this feed for non-commercial activities at feeds - at - creative-weblogging.com.

Filed under: Utilities, Blogging, Web services, Freeware, Social Software, web 2.0

If you’ve had a blog for any length of time, you’ve probably been assaulted with blog comment spam. Users of WordPress have the fantastic Akismet spam filtering tool freely available to them by Automattic, the makers of WordPress. But while Akismet is good (really good), it’s not perfect.

If you have been using Akismet, but are still seeing too many spam messages slipping through, consider installing Simple Spam Filter by TanTanNoodles. Simple Spam Filter has existed for a little while now as a basic spam filter, but was recently updated to make use of captcha security via reCAPTCHA. The implementation is beautiful.

Let’s be honest, nobody likes having to fill out captcha forms. And you wouldn’t want all of your site visitors to be facing a captcha form every time they submit a comment. Luckily, they won’t. Simple Spam Filter will only offer up a captcha field to commenters whose comments are flagged as spam by the plugin itself, or by Akismet.

While it’s never going to be possible to have 100% protection from comment spam, the combination of Akismet and Simple Spam Filter sure comes close, at least for now. If you’ve got this problem, maybe the solution is as simple as installing and enabling this WordPress plugin.
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments

Filed under: Internet, Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Twitter’s alright if you like to keep hitting refresh on a static web page. But we like our social software to be a bit more interactive. Desktop Twitter clients like Snitter do a great job of making Twitter feel more like an instant messaging platform and less like a web service. You receive a notification whenever someone you’re following posts a new tweet, and you can quickly post new messages or replies.

The only drawback is that Snitter doesn’t let you login to more than one account at a time. So if you maintain separate accounts for work and personal tweets, you can only use one at a time. Fortunately, there’s Twhirl.

Twhirl has pretty much all the same features as Snitter, and like Snitter, it’s built on Adobe AIR which means you can use the Twitter client on a Mac or PC. Plus it lets you login to multiple accounts. For example, we were able to monitor and update the Download Squad Twitter account at the same time as a personal account.

Twhirl also offers some nice customization options. For example, you can change the font of tweets, schedule how often the program will check for new messages, and determine how notifications will be displayerd.

[via Digital Inspiration]
Read | Permalink | Email this | Comments