Author Archive

I gotta be honest. Having opened my trusty ol’ PowerBook this morning and looked the latest bits from my favorite feeds, I’ve so far seen almost nothing of immediate interest that I think worth picking apart. Some of the stuff’s recycled material. Various opinions on where the Web is headed in ’08. Tedious Facebook talk. [...]

We all know of Google?s established time limit for user-submitted material to be uploaded to YouTube. Ten minutes. That?s it. No more. Have a good twenty minutes or more of highlights from that Little League baseball game you?ve wanted to share with the extended family via the video host? It ain?t happening. At least not [...]

The modern invention known as OpenID, first developed by a Mr Brad Fitzpatrick (creator of LiveJournal), offers quite an enticing prospect. In essence, its purpose is to simplify greatly the maintenance of multiple Web service/utility accounts, by providing a single name and single password, both (ideally) secure, in order that the user’s experience when interacting [...]

As a writer, I?m partial to inventions that have to do with those provocative things we call words. Obviously. So when I read a piece published very recently in Red Herring which spoke of a social network, or ?online community,? meant to bring authors among the likes of Maya Angelou, Amy Tan, James Patterson, Salman [...]

We here at Profy first profiled Gather.com – a social networking site geared to provide a meeting place of sorts (hence the title) for above-average intellectual discussion (as opposed to the mostly idiocratic MySpace and so forth) – in November of 2006. The following February we delved in a bit deeper, spotlighting the site’s establishment [...]

Facebook is going through something of a rough patch at the moment. It’s getting heat from just about all sides for its “overreaching” Beacon advertising initiative, and as a result the site is now routinely hounded by a large number of bloggers and podcasters for, among other things, generally existing and occupying the tubes of [...]

Not too long ago, we castigated Adobe somewhat for signing onto a creepy PDF overlay advertising plan with the Yahoo! Mail folks. Now we will celebrate the company for doing something rather wonderful. No, we haven’t gone bipolar. We’re still well in control of our senses. We just really, really like what we heard yesterday [...]

Profy’s Michael Garrett wrote in late October of an expected update to Flickr in the way of an image editor. Yesterday, the company delivered on its promise. As mentioned in the previous piece by Michael G. noting the impending release, Flickr teamed up with Picnik to provide its users a set of tools – ranging [...]

By now you've likely all heard plenty about the iPhone. Too much, even. Since the start of summer we’ve seen both the mainstream press and the blogosphere harp incessantly about Apple’s invention – its technological advantages, the seeming unrivaled grace with which it functions, or those specially-concocted websites and applications that have risen to public [...]