Archive for July, 2008

Over the past 48 hours I conducted a poll of Twitter users. Unscientific? Absolutely. Generic? Of course. And yet I was surprised at the results. What did I ask on Thursday? “Which issue is bigger to you? Gender gap/social media, race/social media, poverty gap/social media or generation gap/social media.”
I must admit I picked a hard time to conduct a Twitter Poll, what with Twitter going down, but I still got a healthy number of responses. When I started the poll, [...]

Please excuse the obvious irony in the above title, but it couldn't be left alone.  For those of you who aren't familiar with Loopt, it is a mobile social locating platform that is pushing many of the current boundaries in mobile social networking, not the least of which are privacy boundaries.  Loopt's biggest obstacle right now is getting GPS-equipped handsets into consumer hands and making GPS service somewhat affordable.
Though not much can be done on Loopt's end to force GPS-enabled [...]

I've just bumped into a post on official Google blog that announces a significant milestone for the search engine, i.e. a total of 1 trillion (1,000,000,000,000) indexed pages. And I could not help but mention it here - after all, even if this is not such a big event and every long-term blog owner contributes a few thousand of unique pages to the amount, it is still amazing when you come to think of it.
The number of [...]

Gizmodo noticed that Aurora Feint spent some time yesterday delisted from Apple's App Store for the iPhone and iPod Touch, apparently due to security violations. The app, a game that's part casual gaming, part MMO, was alleged to be sending a user's contact list up to the Aurora Feint servers unencrypted.
The game is back in the App Store today with the contact list integration feature removed, and additional security features, according to the Aurora Feint staff, who are also doing [...]

I have just seen a press release (in Russian) issued by Begun, the Russian contextual advertising company recently acquired by Google from Rambler. The ad company reports on the revenue it has received in the first 6 months of 2008 - and the results really are amazing which proves that Google has made a smart business decision again.
And I am sure everyone will agree that a company that within first 6 months of 2008 achieves profit 25% higher [...]

Update: Well, we managed to come it at just a tiny bit over an hour. We're doing better at cranking through the topics! Duncan claims he's on some type of medication that gave him a sunny disposition, but there was enough cussing in the after-show to let us know he wasn't overtaken by a pod person. For your listening enjoyment, here's tonight's episode:
 
It's Thursday again, and time for Things You Can't Say About the Internet, my weekly podcast on [...]

I have to start with a confession: I am a die-hard Scrabble lover in real life, but a Scrabulous-only player online. Hasbro introduced a Scrabble FaceBook application after Scrabulous spent vast amounts of time wiping the floor with them by having theirs up first. Frankly, Hasbro, your application is too little, too late and not as much fun to play.
Scrabulous had to know this lawsuit was coming, though. Profy writer Cyndy Aleo-Carreria predicted this lawsuit as far back as January [...]

I’m always game for a new search platform that offers a unique perspective on delivering search results. Even if they aren’t pulled off to perfection, good concepts are always worth a few laughs, at the very least. Centrif is a search platform that answers questions (reminiscent of Ask.com) with social bookmarks that users have submitted as fitting particular search queries.
Centrif is a small operation, created and maintained free of financial backing by Steve Wilson, a resident of the [...]

You remember that only a week ago we were all betting if Twitter really recovered and we will see Fail Whale only when it really means maintenance, not some unexpected crash. Twitter users that left to FriendFeed or Identi.ca started to mention that they could still return to Twitter if it really proves to be back to stable again.
And to a certain extent our expectations were met - we had API requests lifted to 100 after 20 per hour and [...]