Archive for June, 2008

Someone on Hacker News was kind enough to post a link to a patent application filed under Facebook CEO and co-founder Mark Zuckerberg's name. The application, filed with the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office (USPTO) in February, has a fairly generic description, "Systems and methods for dynamically generating a privacy summary" with the abstract not giving a whole lot more detail:
"A system and method for dynamically generating a privacy summary is provided. The present invention provides a system and method [...]

Jay Meattle's FireFox Add On Shareaholic has become one of my favorite and most often used browser tools in record time. It works in FireFox 3 . It works with Flock 2.0. It just… works. It makes sharing among all of my sites (Digg, Reddit, Del.icio.us, FaceBook, etc.) a breeze.
In fact it makes it so much of a breeze I actually had trouble focusing on writing my article about it. I kept trying out the different options for sharing [...]

My initial reaction to Steven Hodson's post about the digital divide between the haves and the have nots has stuck with me, but apparently, 10 days is too long for it to have remained in the attention-deficit world of the Twitterati. The gap between the designers and the intended users is growing ever wider, and you have to wonder if the eventual fate of Web 2.0 won't be a result of the chasm in the middle.
Personally, this week has been [...]

Facebook fans look to the social networks most recent ComScore numbers as a sure sign of worldwide domination, and touted the release of Chinese and Russian translations of the site as the best thing since sliced bread. In reality, the release of Chinese and Russian versions may be too little too late for two markets that already have their own established social networks. While Web 2.0 seems almost dominated by products from and designed for English speakers, both China and [...]

Over the course of the last several months, I've been doing a series on Politics and Social Media. Most often this involves reviewing various new political social sites, like 20DC, candidate sites, or other seemingly static applications of politics online. Today marks a first - politicians embracing social media darling Twitter.
Barack Obama, as I mentioned in an earlier article about candidates online, has embraced Twitter from early in his campaign, as well as embracing other social media and [...]

Remember playing the "telephone game" as a child? You'd stand in a line or sit in a circle and pass messages from one person to the next, whispering into an ear. At the end of the line, the message was usually so garbled from the first person as to be unrecognizable from what it began as. So goes the tech blogosphere these days.
News moves at a fast and furious pace, with each blogger trying to jump on the latest news [...]

Qtrax finally launched, reaching a milestone that many thought would never happen. After huge delays in getting up and running, some of which led to contracts with record labels expiring and then having to be renewed, they are up and running.
Well, sort of.
Qtrax’s launch was supposed to provide free and legal music from EMI and Universal, with more labels in negotiations. But after all the delays, there are still far too many things missing. One being a version of the [...]

New York Magazine featured an op-ed piece today in their News and Features section that just had me cringing. Basically, it invited all of America to add to the pointless noise level of the internet and social media. The whole article is a classic case of missing the point.
The first thing that struck me was that the author, Rex Sorgatz, was patting himself on the back for not continuing his search for what he called "microfame" online, after his brief [...]

As a former homeschooling parent, I read Facebook's announcement this morning and wanted to applaud. Facebook's minor verification system has always required a school affiliation for the minor, which means that homeschoolers have been unable to sign up as themselves.
Facebook doesn't detail what the verification process for homeschoolers will be, but it will be a welcomed networking opportunity for many students who may have limited opportunities in their own communities. While many cities have vibrant homeschooling communities with many activities [...]