Latest Articles

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  Web

  Comcast Plus Plaxo: Not a Pretty Picture!

  Communications giant Comcast has acquired social web application Plaxo for an estimated $150m or more. Techcrunch confirmed the deal first but offers an understated critique of the alliance. Many web users familiar with the operations of both companies are much more upset about the deal.Plaxo has probably the most clouded...

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  Web

  Play the News: Data Portability’s Future

  Last week, the fight to manage your social data kicked off in earnest as three major players in the social networking space each announced independent competing approaches to making profile and friend information data portable. MySpace Data Availability was followed by Facebook Connect and then Google Friend Connect after that....

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  Web

  Google Maps Coming to Media, AIR Desktops, via Flash API

  At the Where 2.0 conference today Google announced the availability of a new Flash API for Google Maps. From Flash microsites to embedded media players to beautiful cross-platform AIR apps on the desktop - expect to start seeing interactive Google Maps embedded in a lot of unusual places soon.A substantial...

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  Social

  Did Twitter Really ‘Outshine’ the Mainstream Press?

  We love Twitter just as much as any tech bloggers -- that should be clear to anyone who has read this blog over the past six months. But stories like this one from the AFP are a bit rankling. Writing about how Twitter had news of this week's deadly China...

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  Web

  Digital Image Resources on the Deep Web

  Sometimes you stumble across something that really makes you say "wow" and reminds you that there's so much more to this internet thing than just the latest web app. Case in point is this article describing some of the visual resources available on the web. The deep web. These images...

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  Web

  Too Many Choices, Too Much Content

  Sometimes it's just hard to keep up. In this technology-focused niche we all live in there are new applications, new initiatives, and new platforms that spring up every day, not to mention constantly breaking news that fills our RSS readers. Take a day off and you're behind. Take an hour...

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  Web

  DiSo Project Figures Messina and Norris Join Vidoop

  Chris Messina and Will Norris, two leading community figures working on distributed social networking, identity and data portability, are joining the staff of OpenID provider Vidoop, the company will announce soon. Messina and Norris have been working on a project called DiSo, an umbrella group working to bring open source...

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  Web

  Netvibes to Share Items With ReadBurner

  The RSS Aggregation niche has been very busy this week. Numerous changes and enhancements were recently made to RSS aggregator RSSmeme.However, another service that was once exclusively for Google Reader users is expanding to give users a more accurate analysis of what's popular on the web. Today, ReadBurner announced a...

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  Web

  comScore: Yahoo! Buzz Overtakes Digg in April

  Digg is in big trouble. We already know that Yahoo! Buzz, a beta social news service by Yahoo!, can drive a large amount of traffic and comments to websites. We also know the ongoing problems at competitor digg, which continue to be skated around by digg management. Now we have...

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  Web

  Slandr May be the Best (non iPhone) Mobile Twitter App Available

  Twitter is often thought of as a mobile application, but the mobile version of the service that the company itself offers is maddeningly feature-bare. Users can't read replies via m.twitter.com, for example. If you're looking for a good, full featured way to use Twitter on your phone - you need...

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  Web

  Report: Slowing Economy Finally Catches Up to Online Ads

  "The Internet is recession proof," is a sentiment we've heard trumpeted over and over and over again the past year. However, guest author Llew Claasen argued on this blog in February that paid search ads specifically are actually not recession proof, and a new report out today appears to confirm...

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  Web

  FontStruct: Font Making Made Easy

  FontStruct is a new online font creation tool from font seller FontShop that was officially launched last week. The site combines a Flash-based font maker (the Fontstructor) with a community site built around sharing, discussing, and building off of those fonts. FontStruct is free to use, as are all the...

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  Web

  What’s Next for Data Portability & Why is Facebook Still Holding Back?

  One of the buzz phrases we've heard a lot this year is "data portability", which means the ability to move your personal data between different applications and vendors. It has its own standards group, called naturally enough DataPortability.org. Some of the big Internet companies have signaled their support for data...

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  Web

  Online Video for the Very Young

  It's no secret that YouTube's age demographics skew young, but young still means 18-34, and much of the content on the site would be inappropriate for children under the age of 13 -- the COPPA cut off age that YouTube adheres to as the minimum allowed for anyone to sign...

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  Mobile

  Android Developer Challenge I Winners Announced: Our Picks

  The Android Developer Challenge is a two-part contest whose goal is to encourage developers to build apps for the new Google mobile platform, code-named "Android." In this first round, dubbed "Challenge I," submissions were accepted up until April 14th. Yesterday, the top 50 entries were announced. Each of these application...

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  Web

  Digg Townhall #2 Wrap-Up

  Last night was the second Digg Townhall, a live session hosted online by Digg founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson. Like before, Kevin asked Digg users to post their suggestions on Digg as to what topics should be covered. (The thread is here). Now that the event is over,...

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  Web

  FreshAIRApps: A Premier Adobe AIR App Directory

  The Adobe AIR platform is one of the hottest desktop platforms available. While we've given you numerous recommendations on great AIR apps, finding them all in one spot (outside of ReadWriteWeb) can be a pain. With so many to discover, here's a look at why you might want to recommend...

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  Web

  Twitter and the Architectural Challenges of Life Streaming Applications

  Because Twitter is getting more popular, every glitch in the service is now felt more acutely. Going without Twitter for many people is even harder than going without email, and so outages lead to complaints. Complaints pile up and become debates, asking questions like: should Twitter be converted into a...

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  Web

  Here Come the Geo-Smart Apps: Yahoo! Opens Location Database to Developers

  Yahoo! today released a developer preview of its Yahoo! Internet Location Platform, a collection of in-depth geo-location based APIs. We expect to see location be more smartly used in many applications around the web thanks to this platform. The gist of what's being enabled is this: applications can provide the...

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  Web

  Powerset vs. Google: The Completely Premature Head-to-Head

  As our network blog AltSearchEngines reported this morning, the long-awaited and much hyped natural language processing search engine Powerset launched this morning. Kind of. For now, the search service only uses Wikipedia and Freebase as source material for answers to your query. So it's not really fair to compare it...