Want to be the most popular person on Facebook? All you have to do is write longer status updates, talk about music and sports, don’t be overly emotional, don’t talk about your family, don’t refer to time and use the word “you” a lot.
Giant online retailer Amazon.com announced on Monday that the latest version of its popular Kindle E-reader has become the top-selling item in the company’s history — surpassing the previous champ, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Book 7).
On Christmas Day, Amazon said, more people activated new Kindles and bought more E-books than any other day in the company’s history. Kindle (Wi-Fi) and Kindle 3G devices were the best-selling products on Amazon this holiday season, the company said.
As Wikileaks becomes increasingly isolated on the Web, Twitter’s response will become increasingly significant.
And now Facebook, which wants to be your social network, your photo and video sharing conduit, your search engine, your recommendations machine, your geolocator, your coupon distributor, and (apparently) your email service. This may well be its jump-the-cartilaginous-killer-fish moment.
When you try to be all things to all people, you risk being nothing to no one. I think I saw that on a fortune cookie somewhere.
Facebook has long been a one-way valve. You put data in so you can connect with friends, and then you can’t get it out and use it the way you would like to, even as the company is trying to corner the market on your identity.
And Thursday night Google called out its rival on such data-portability hypocrisy: It banned the huge social network from allowing its users to connect their Gmail contacts to see who among them are also on Facebook to get the friending frenzy started.
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Facebook and Google are locked in a fight over who controls identity on the net, which Facebook is handily winning, with its Connect service that automatically logs you into some sites (and transfers your profile) and gives sites and now phone apps an easy way to let people login via their Facebook credentials. It’s a convenience that puts Facebook firmly at the center of the Web.
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Facebook has a history of blocking its rivals and, until now, it hasn’t been serious challenged. In June, Twitter’s Facebook app gave users the ability to find which of their Facebook friends were also on Twitter, so that you could follow them or make a list of them to follow. Facebook quickly shut that down.
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Mass media is dying, and it appears that mass politicians are endangered as well.
Google Demo Slam is a competition for tech demos - not just by startups and other tech companies, but for anybody who wants to create a video that shows others how to use a cool tech product.
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A place where boring tech demos become (hopefully) gotta-show-my-friends awesome...
Evan Williams, Twitter Inc.’s co-founder said the world’s third-largest social-networking platform will aim to get 1 billion followers, which may help the micro-blogging site compete with Facebook Inc. in attracting advertisements.
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Williams didn’t elaborate on a timeframe.
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"Twitter now is starting to try different types of monetizing methods," said Elinor Leung, head of Internet research at CLSA Ltd. in Hong Kong. "It’s the same as YouTube. They have a lot of traffic, and a lot of people using it, but it’s not easy to monetize because you don’t know who’s watching."Read more at Bloomberg.com
The Internet poses a challenge for authoritarian regimes around the world. But Vietnam's leaders think they have figured out a new way to tame it—by launching their own, Communist-friendly answer to popular social-networking sites like Facebook Everyone at Twitter I spoke with today agreed that this is the single biggest change they’ve ever made to the site since its initial launch.
65 million people play Zynga's online games every day. Millions of web browsers open to millions farms and millions of frontiers. They take turns, they tend crops, they send gifts. They buy millions of objects and upgrades. It's a mind-boggling amount of data. It's a new sort of data, and it warranted development of a new sort of database management system.
That system, Membase, is a "NoSQL" database optimized for storing web applications. Membase was developed by Zynga, NorthScale, and NHN, and its source code released as open source in June of this year.
Google Inc. will allow advertisers on its sites across Europe to use trademarked terms as “keywords” that link Internet searches to ads.
The policy change brings Google’s trademark practice in Europe in line with company rules in about 190 countries, including the U.S., Canada, the U.K. and Ireland. The change, effective from Sept. 14, follows a ruling by the European Union’s highest court in March that Google doesn’t breach EU law by selling trademark-protected names as keywords.
Attention brands: Twitter users aren't talking to you or about you. In fact, they barely know you exist.
Amazing Conversation
Learning
Reputation
Influence
Friends
Business Opportunity
"... the difference between potential value and realized value. There is an appropriate and interesting corollary in the world of high school physics: If you lift a ball off the ground and hold it stationary, it has no kinetic energy but it does have potential energy; drop the ball, and the potential energy becomes kinetic energy. Facebook fans are like that -- all potential energy until you introduce something that creates kinetic energy."Move on, start now. Read the entire post and then think how can you create value from the potential energy of your fans and virtual friends. Looks simple.
If the people who brought us television had played by the same rules that today’s wireless carriers impose — we’d probably all be listening to the radio.
There’s no question that cloud computing, commodity solutions and open-source software have changed our perceptions about the value of IT. Many, in fact, are convinced that information technology is rapidly becoming a standard utility, much like the water and electricity that flows into our homes and businesses.
Here are four key ways IT is making a difference in the companies’ capacity to innovate, @SmarPlanet.com
Perceptions about IT as a standard utility miss the mark. It’s a mistake to view IT simply as a commodity: that’s like saying people are a commodity, or talent is a commodity, or capital is a commodity.
Any system for monitoring or measuring social media has three basic components: data collection, analytics, and application. The differences are in the details, and each component can be the subject of its own build-or-buy decision. If your goal is to beat the industry standard in a particular area, you build, but if industry-standard is good enough, you don't have to.
In an attempt to prove that Flash isn’t necessary, Apple has posted a set of 7 demo pages that show off the power of HTML5, the emerging new standard for Web content that will run, theoretically, in any browser on any device.
Interacting with your computer by waving your hands may require just a pair of multicolored gloves and a webcam, say two researchers at MIT who have made a breakthrough in gesture-based computing that’s inexpensive and easy to use.
As social media continues to evolve, defining the “rules of engagement” will encourage thoughtful interaction that benefits the business, brand, customer, peers, and prospects at every touchpoint. In the end, we earn the attention, relationships and business we deserve.
You don’t need to be a PHP whizz to be able to put together your very own custom Wordpress theme.
There are a lot of online generators which can help designers a lot but few tools are really powerful for designers.
We’ve read through over 50 articles and selected some of the most important and interesting facts web-developers should know about the grid-based approach. Besides, we’ve listed the most useful references, tutorials and tools we found – with precise descriptions of what the articles are about.
Wired has been working with Adobe to develop interactive editions to run on tablet computers including the iPad. But Apple has long frowned on Adobe Flash, among other third-party plug-ins, so Adobe had developed a sort of workaround. Then earlier this month, Apple came out with guidelines requiring developers to write apps with specific programming languages and forbidding... workarounds.
Wired ‘s publisher Conde Nast, now says it can and will proceed: "We are working with Adobe to prepare Wired's reader app for the iPad, and will be compliant with Apple's new guidelines,"
- Total number of TEDx events to date: 500
- Total number of TEDx events planned for 2010: 500 +
- Total languages at TEDx events: 35 +
- Total number of countries TEDx events are held in: 70 +
- Estimated number of people who have attended a TEDx event to date: 50,000 +
- Estimated number of people projected to attend a TEDx event through end of 2010: 100,000
In this context the iPad isn't a computing device at all. Jobs is using his knack for design and user experience to build, not a better computer, but a better distribution channel. One that is controlled, constrained, and can re-take distribution as the point of monetization. You aren't buying a computer when you buy an iPad, you are buying a 16GB Walmart store shelf that fits on your lap - complete with all the supplier beat downs, slotting fees, and exclusive deals that go with it - and Apple got you to pay for the building.
1) People use the average Joe’s poor mathematics as a way to control, exploit, and numerically fuck him over.2) Mathematics is the subject in which, regardless of what the authorities tell you is true, you can verify every last iota of truth, with a minimum of equipment.
Google has perhaps more than any other company become “The Internet Company.” It’s grown hand in hand with the internet and its entire business model has from the start been totally focused on the internet as a delivery platform.
Today, 8-18 year-olds devote an average of 7 hours and 38 minutes (7:38) to using entertainment media across a typical day (more than 53 hours a week). And because they spend so much of that time ‘media multitasking’ (using more than one medium at a time), they actually manage to pack a total of 10 hours and 45 minutes (10:45) worth of medi.
Google, the world's leading search engine, has thrown down the gauntlet to China by announcing it is no longer willing to censor search results on its Chinese version.
In a shock announcement the internet giant said the decision followed cyber attacks which appeared to be an attempt to gather information on Chinese human rights activists.
It also comes amid an increasing clampdown on the internet in China over the last year.
Google acknowledged that the decision might well mean Google.cn, and potentially the company's offices in China, would have to close.
This is the best Android powered phone to date. It’s also the fastest and most elegant smartphone on the market today, solidly beating the iPhone in most ways.
The phone looks more like the iPhone than any other phone on the market. It is 11.5 mm deep, slightly thinner than the iPhone 3GS at 12.3 mm. It is also slightly lighter than the iPhone 130 grams v. 135 grams)
Most of the interaction with the phone will be through the gorgeous 3.7 inch 480 x 800 OLED capacitive touchscreen. This is the best mobile phone display on the market today, blowing away the iPhone’s 480 x 320 display. The screen is bright and alive, and an absolute pleasure to use.
The Nexus One is an important milestone in the smartphone market. This is a software company, frustrated with making compromises with hardware manufacturers, that has taken the product bull by the horns. HTC makes the phone, but the branding is mostly Google and it’s clear that they directed every aspect of the development of this phone. It’s Google’s vision of the perfect Android device, from the huge and beautiful screen and massively fast Snapdragon processor to the software elegance of Google Navigation, Live Wallpaper and the Voice Keyboard.
When combined with Google Voice there is no phone on the market today that can touch the Nexus One.
