Social Networking and Web 2.0

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

It’s all about the future at FOWA. Well, what do you expect? It’s in the conference title. Gary Vaynerchuck of WineLibrary.tv, one of our favorite video podcasts, is giving a talk on “How to Grow a Community in The Future” and we’re liveblogging it! Gary is a machine and a heck of a funny guy, so before Friday afternoon turns your brain to cobwebs, follow along with Gary’s presentation.

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Filed under: Business, Developer, Web services, Yahoo!, Social Software, web 2.0

Everyone loves Flickr, right? Love Flickr or not, they have some sharp minds working hard to bring you a (mostly) rock solid web application. Adding features to an application with such an enormous userbase can be tricky. At Future of Web Apps 2008, Flickr’s Cal Henderson is presenting on “The Application of New Features to an Established Application.” Enjoy it live, or come back to it later.

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Filed under: Developer, Web services, Google, Social Software, web 2.0

As part of our continuing coverage from this huge day of presentations at Future of Web Apps 2008 in Miami, we’re liveblogging Kevin Marks presentation on The Future of APIs.

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

You’re on Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, StumbleUpon, Digg, Flickr, and a thousand other social networking sites. But keeping up with your friends and contacts on each site could be a full time job. Or you could sign up for a single service that lets you view your contacts’ activity on a single page.

FriendFeed is a service that launched last week, which does exactly that. But the service didn’t get hog the spotlight very long, as Yahoo!’s MyBlogLog has launched a feature this week that lets members track their friends’ activity streams.

Existing MyBlogLog members should notice the change right away. Your new profile page will feature all of your recent blogging activity. And if you’ve already added other social networking service to your profile, you should see updates for those as well. When you click on the “my neighborhood” button you’ll see an activity stream with updates from your MyBlogLog members who use those services.

[via ReadWriteWeb]
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Filed under: Business, Design, Developer, Web services, Social Software

Leah Culver founded Pownce with her friends Kevin Rose and Daniel Burka. Pownce is a “social messaging” service which allows you to share updates, files, Links and more with your friends, and (now) provides a robust API to work with your data. Here are the rough cut of our notes from her presentation at FOWA 2008.

Continue reading From FOWA : Leah Culver of Pownce, The Future of Web Services

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Filed under: Web services, Social Software

Glassbooth, the presidential election voting aid we previously covered, has released a Facebook application so that you can put their helpful quiz on your Facebook profile (between your “Hot or Not” and “Which Friends character are you?” apps).

After you take the quiz via the application, results showing your top three candidates are displayed on your Facebook profile. Your friends can click the candidates to see why you agreed with them (based on degree of similarity on specific issues).

Your friends can also add the application to their profiles and take the quiz to show for whom Glassbooth suggests that they vote.
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Filed under: Web services, Social Software, web 2.0

Traackr is a free web service that lets you aggregate data about your media presence on the Web. Just create an account, add your “subscriptions” (flickr username, last.fm username, etc.), and wait about 24 hours for Traackr to get statistics.

Each day Traackr will get information like number of views, comments, and ratings, with trend graphs to make the data pretty. It will also show you which of your tags get the most views (helpful for getting user attention). You can also create campaigns to track how well certain media objects are “performing” which could be very useful for a photographer to see how popular certain groups of photos are.

Traackr could be a great tool for musicians, photographers, videographers, and the ego-centric social-site user. It’s a central location to see how popular you (or your work) are, and it gives you seemingly arbitrary “Buzz” and “Populartity” scores.
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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

If you like the social bookmarking site Digg, but hate actually having to visit the web site to submit and vote on stories, you might want to check out Digg Firefox Extension. Like the Smart Digg Button, which we’ve previously covered, Digg Firefox Extension will let you see at a glance whether a page you’re visiting has been submitted to diggs and how many votes it has received. If the page hasn’t been submitted, you can click the button to submit it yourself.

But that’s where the similarities end. While Smart Digg Button hangs out in your status bar, Digg Firefox Extension adds a toolbar to Firefox, which makes sense as it has a ton of submenus. For example, you can see the last 10 people who dugg the page you’re visiting, and even read recent comments without clicking through to Digg’s web site.

You can also forget about the page you’re on altogether, and use the Firefox extension to see a list of recently popular, recently submitted, and hot stories. Or you can use the extension sort of like the StumbleUpon toolbar by clicking on “Random Story” to be taken to a random site submitted to Digg.

[via Digg]
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Filed under: Fun, Social Software, Beta

CloudFire, a soon-to-be-released offering from the maker of p2p sharing application BoxCloud, is looking to revolutionize the way you share media.

Before CloudFire, if you wanted to share a file with a friend or family member, or access that file on the go, you would have to upload the file to a media sharing site. CloudFire skips the laborious uploading process and allows you to share your media files directly from your desktop or media application (such as iTunes or iPhoto).

This kind of media sharing can be classified as peer-to-web, because the recipient of a file can view them anywhere a browser and internet connection is available, even on a mobile phone.

Details are scarce for now, because the service has yet to launch. The website has some screenshots and snippets of information; as for the prestige, we’ll just have to wait.

Hopefully our invites are coming soon so we can provide a more in-depth look at CloudFire. Or do you think we just drop the name Download Squad and get all the invites, like some celebrity at an A-list nightclub?

[via Gigaom]
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Filed under: Text, Productivity, Social Software, web 2.0

Online office suites are gaining some serious steam, and Zoho Office (along with Google Docs) remains one of the innovators in the market. Today, Zoho has released an update to Zoho Writer, their online word processing application.

The biggest highlight of the update is the added support for Microsoft’s OOXML file format, mercifully titled DocX. In case you didn’t know, whenever you save a Word document, PowerPoint file, Excel spreadsheet, etc…in Office 2007 (or 2008 on a Mac), the default format is DocX.

Zoho Writer now allows you to export your documents as a DocX file - though it looks like importing a DocX file is still a short time away.

Other notable feature updates include:

• Thesaurus (available in ten languages)
• Groups: Share documents with multiple people without having to enter in multiple email addresses each time you share a document.
• Enhanced support for endnotes, footnotes, headers, and footers.

It looks like the line between online word processing and desktop word processing just got a little thinner. How about you, constant reader? Have you made the leap to online word processing? Sound off below.

[via TechCrunch]
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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Social Software

When we first wrote about Open Source Food, we said we loved the idea but the site needed some love. Well, it seems that OSF’s creator, Jon Yongfook Cockle, thought the same thing because he’s overhauled the whole enchilada and it’s tastier than ever.

Navigation is much more intuitive and background is minimalist so pictures of the delicious dishes really stand out (warning: some of the food pictures will make you want to lick your screen). More than just a Web site, it’s a social network and members are encouraged to share photos, recipes, and meal ideas . Of course, tagging, voting, and commenting are also part of the fun.

The thing we really like about this site is that there are plenty of basic recipes for novices — butter baked cabbage, chocolate chip cookies — along with a ton of recipes for advanced cooks. Since the site’s members are all over the globe, OSF also has the international flair thing going on. Hot Thai fish curry, anyone?

Bottom line: if you can’t find a fabulous recipe somewhere on this site, then you’re not really trying.
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Filed under: Productivity, Social Software, iPhone

Web-based task scheduling and organizing tool Remember the Milk, has just released a full-featured mobile version that’s specially optimized for the iPhone and iPod Touch.

Just to set your mind at ease: when they say full-featured, they mean full-featured. With the iPhone/iPod Touch optimized version of Remember the Milk, you can:

• View upcoming tasks (due today, tomorrow, and this week)
• View tasks by list (including Smart Lists), tag or location
• Add new tasks and notes
• Complete tasks with the touch of a button
• Edit existing tasks and notes
• Search tasks (supports advanced search operators)
• View handy settings (such as your Inbox email address)

For you home page perfectionists, the webclip for Remember the Milk is also customized for the iPhone/iPod Touch.

One small caveat: the optimized version of Remember the Milk is available exclusively for Pro users. Non-pro users can test the optimized version free for 15 days; after that, you’ll need to upgrade to the Pro account ($25 for one year) for uninterrupted access. We suggest paying the fee to avoid those nasty Remember the Milk withdrawals.

Point your iPhone or iPod Touch to http://i.rememberthemilk.com/ to check it out.

[via gHacks]
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Yahoo recently published a patent applications that gives some insight on how Yahoo finds and evaluates keyword phrases on web pages. How does this affect the position of your web pages in the search results?

Filed under: Fun, Open Source, Social Software

It’s fun to follow all your friends on Twitter and get updates from Darth Vader but now the bomb is getting Tweets from your little plant friends. If you have a burning desire to get tweets from your plants advising you on their need for water and nutrition, well, there’s an interesting DIY gadget you can build courtesy of the folks at Botanicalls.

Basically, using an Adafruit Ethernet shield from Arduino, some nails, a soldering iron, a healthy plant, and a few other things, like your computer, as well as Arduino’s software environment, (an open source, cross platform electronics prototyping system), you can build a gadget which will provide you with online Twitter status updates for your green leaf friend.

If you’re smacking your head saying, Sheesh, I wish I had thought of that - well, imitation is the greatest form of flattery, right? Let us know what you build for your aquarium fish who are known to have the Twitter fanatic witihin, and while you’re at it don’t forget your little pond friends. They have so much to tell us.
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Filed under: Fun, Internet, Linux, Web services, Open Source, Social Software

Twitter doesn’t have a grouping feature yet (even though they said 7 months ago it was “at the top of their list”) but that hasn’t stopped a group of open source aficionados from finding a way to form one anyway. Five Twitterers including SourceForge’s Ross Turk and open source analyst extraordinaire Raven Zachary launched The Pulse of Open Source today, calling it a “collective stream of consciousness from the open source community.” We just call it “cool.”

All you need to do is bookmark and visit the site, or add it to your feed reader. As people the site follows update their Twitter feeds during the day, their tweets appear on the site or in your reader. The site follows a wide assortment of open source community members ranging from CEOs of companies like MindTouch, to community managers of projects like OpenSUSE and Hyperic.

The tweets don’t always focus on open source, but we like that because otherwise the site wouldn’t be as much fun. How else would we know how Zachary got those cool glasses?
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Copyblogger has this detailed guide to Keyword Research and how it affects your blog traffic. Lets face it - content creation is like a zero entry barrier phenomenon online and it takes more than good knowledge on a subject to get traffic. You need to not only know the topic you write on but also need to know how people approach the topic you are writing about.

Thanks to Copyblogger for the comprehensive guide on keyword research.

Bloggers need to spend sufficient time in mastering the use of several Keyword Research tools that provide a window into the terms related to the niche that they write about.

See full article.

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Google continued its dominance in the Search Engine rankings with the comScore search report of the month pointing to a 58.5% share of all the online searches in US. MSN Live also witnessed double digit growth rate. But the share of Yahoo did not show any stark improvement and continues as a distant third to Google at 22.2%.

An excerpt from the search engine rankings report at comScore:

Americans conducted 10.5 billion searches at the core search engines, representing an 8.9 percent gain versus December. Google Sites saw 6.1 billion core searches during the month, while Yahoo! Sites recorded 2.3 billion. Each of the five core search engines saw the number of searches conducted in January grow at least 5 percent versus the previous month.

The data from these search related metrics could be relevant to the titanic acquisition bids taking place in the technology world. A Microsoft-Yahoo combined entity would represent larger market share but it is questionable whether clubbing two distant search engines will significantly boost search rankings.

See full article.

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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.

After text and image based ads Google logical expansion into more advertising media goes another step further with the Adsense invideo overlay ads. Google Adsense for video beta provides publishers with the option for text overlay ads as well.

The metrics for advertising will be measured on a cost per click basis for text overlay ads and on a cost per impression basis for invideo overlay ads.

And there is the issue that more ads means more distraction. There is already lot of them in text form out on the web and this only ads another avenue to perhaps clutter user view. Advertising does happen to be the bane sponsoring great and free online services.

The service is being rolled out to publishers part of the Google Adsense network and will include partnerships with several video portals such as GodTube and Blip.tv. The move is expected to bring all of good news to major music publishers.

An excerpt from InformationWeek

Google's approach is less obtrusive than showing an ad before a video plays, similar to how an ad is displayed on TV before the start of a show. The company is hoping its approach will be less likely to turn off viewers and position it to grab a sizable share of the growing online video advertising market, which today is a small fraction of the $20 billion spent on Internet ads in the United States.

Google has not been a first mover in the online video ads space but there are issues also being raised about what more data goes into the search giants repositories relating to user viewing patterns.

See full article.

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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, Web services, Social Software, Search, web 2.0

Communiversity is a new site which allows students of various colleges to post pictures and comments on their own school. Though opinions on the site can vary greatly and maybe leave visitors more confused than informed, this new service is an interesting and creative way to find out a little more about your next potential college.

College.SparkNotes and Collegeboard are two other sites to visit if you’re researching new places to get those degrees. These sites are great sources of concrete information like tuition estimates, average SAT scores of attending students, majors offered, etc, and SparkNotes even conducts surveys on the general experience. But the sites still lack in information on the real student experience.

That’s why Communiversity exists. Every school’s page is managed entirely by students, so future undergrads get the info right from the horses mouthes. The site also allows students to upload pictures, so it’s likely visitors will see portions of the campus less advertised. Though the new site is still small relative to its potential, news of Communiversity is spreading fast.

Continue reading Communiversity: students recommend/condemn their own schools

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Filed under: Internet, Social Software

Flotzam is an application that makes pretty visualizations out of your social network updates. Every time someone posts new media or comments to your Facebook, Twitter, Flickr, YouTube, and Digg accounts, Flotzam floats a message across your screen. You can also add any RSS feed to receive updates from other sites.

Flotzam doesn’t offer much more than a pretty visualization. You can click on a message to open a web browse and see the message in its original context. But there’s no way to post your own updates from Flotzam. You can install the application as a screen saver, which could actually be useful. But unfortunately Flotzam’s a bit of a resource hog, so you might be better off using a blank screen as a screen saver if you want to save energy while your computer is idle.

We also noticed that Flotzam had a tendency to crash while it was checking our Facebook page. Once we removed Facebook from our preferences the problem went away. Note that you’ll need to visits the Flotzam page using Internet Explorer if you want to install the application.

[via Go2Web20]
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