Latest Articles

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  Social

  How We Tweet: The Definitive List of the Top Twitter Clients

  Last November we put up a guide to the most popular Twitter clients. For that post we looked at a random sample of 717 tweets from a handful of heavy Twitter users and identified 19 different ways people interacted with the service. Twitter has one of the fastest growing application...

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  Web

  FAROO – Could P2P Search Change the Game?

  Entrepreneurs have learned that pitching anything to investors with "we can beat Google at search" is the kiss of death. This is like pitching against Microsoft in the PC world of yesteryear. None of the high profile, well-funded search engine start-ups with cool new interfaces, social search or natural language...

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  Social

  MySpace Becoming a Portal to Artists’ Own Networks

  When MySpace first launched, one of its main draws was the music offered by independent artists on the site, something which generated a strong following among new musicians and their friends. These young artists were using the platform as a way to get their name out there, share their tunes,...

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  Web

  Loomia: See What Your Facebook Friends Are Reading

  Loomia is a content recommendation service that uses a Facebook application to track what you and your friends are reading on Loomia-supporting sites and then shows you what content is most popular among your social circle. The company has made a big turnaround, from initially focusing on podcast recommendations to...

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  Mobile

  The New Opera Mini Arrives – Now 50% Faster Than Before

  Today, Opera released a new version of their mobile web browser, Opera Mini. This latest version, Opera Mini 4.1 beta preview, offers some new features, but most notably, it claims to be 50% faster than Opera Mini 4.0 when it first launched in November of 2007. For the 40 million...

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  Social

  Frengo Launches Mobile Open Social Toolkit

  Mobile social networking company Frengo has released a toolkit for development of Open Social and Facebook applications on mobile phones. The Open Social Mobile Toolkit supports MySpace, Hi5, Bebo, and Facebook and allows developers of applications on those networks to extend them to the mobile phone. In addition to extending...

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  Web

  Australian Museum Uses Open Calais to Tag Collection

  The Powerhouse Museum of Science and Design in Sydney, Australia has begun to utilize the Reuters Open Calais API (our coverage) to tag their collection. The museum's online collection database houses some 66,303 objects, so tagging them all by hand would be quite a task. By using the Open Calais...

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  Social

  Polling Twitter: 4 Startups that Take the Pulse of the Twittersphere

  We've argued in the past that Twitter can be a platform for serious discourse and our own Marshall Kirkpatrick famously stated last year that Twitter is even paying his rent (by which he meant that Twitter had become an invaluable tool in his blogging). But while Twitter can be a...

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  Web

  Today’s iPhone Users are Young, Rich, and Technically Savvy

  A recent survey of iPhone users put out by Rubicon Consulting entitled "The Apple iPhone: Successes and Challenges for the Mobile Industry," reveals some interesting demographics about the typical iPhone user, their satisfaction with the device, and the revenue that the iPhone brings to AT&T. Not surprisingly, it seems that...

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  Web

  Announcing: The Search Race

  Our network blog AltSearchEngines has just launched a great new sub-site, called The Search Race. It is a brand new format for the monthly Top 100 Alternative Search Engines, starting with the April list today. The Search Race is a fully linked version of the Top 100, a long-requested feature....

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  Web

  With All Else Failing, Starbucks Tries Social Media

  With Starbucks' stock beaten down from its mighty highs of $47 to recent lows of $17 in the face of strong competition from Peet's, Caribou, McDonald's, and Dunkin' Donuts and a suffering economy, the coffee house chain has made many changes over the past few months. From eliminating jobs and...

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  Web

  Queen Uses YouTube to Break Down Stereotypes

  Queen Rania of Jordan, the current queen consort of King Abdullah II, has launched a YouTube channel on which she intends to break down Western stereotypes about the Arab world. The Queen, who has been an outspoken advocate of women's rights and education reform in the Arab world, hopes to...

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  Web

  Flickr’s New Friend Finder: Data Portability or Privacy Violation?

  Late last night Yahoo! owned photo sharing site Flickr launched a new feature - the ability to search your Gmail, Yahoo! Mail or Hotmail contacts list for people on Flickr so you can add them as contacts. Many services let you do that, but almost all of them require you...

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  Web

  Filter Google Reader by Item Popularity With New AideRSS Plug-in

  Overwhelmed with all the content coming through your Google Reader? Want to skim just the top stories from any feed you're looking at? Canadian RSS filtering service AideRSS today launched a new Firefox plug-in that lays the company's unique "filter by popularity" features over the top of Google Reader. Limited...

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  Web

  Blog Comments Still Matter

  Over the weekend, this post on Paul Graham's blog got a lot of attention. The title was "How to Disagree," and it focused on the different types of negative, or disagreeing, blog comments. As Matthew Greensmith of Geek News Central called it, it was "a true geek masterpiece." Paul listed...

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  Web

  Exclusive: Sneak Peak at Google DreamAds!

  ReadWriteWeb has discovered the existence of a stealth Google project, called DreamAds. It is a very ambitious project, topping even the wireless balloons which Google is also looking into. Essentially DreamAds is Google's latest plan to extend AdSense - this time into our dreams. It may sound far-fetched, but an...

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  Web

  Mashery Continues Rapid Growth With WhitePages.com Mashup

  Mashup management service Mashery launched a new API for WhitePages.com today, allowing developers to fold extensive "people search" into almost any other application. Sample applications included in the release include tools to integrate WhitePages.com lookup into OutLook as a toolbar, a Javascript/Ruby on Rails reverse phone number lookup widget and...

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  Web

  AJAX Photo Sharing Site Zoto Goes Open Source

  Zoto is a highly regarded photo sharing site with lots of AJAX, social features and blogging plug-ins. It's been getting good write ups since Om Malik covered it in 2004. Late last year the company switched to a paid-only account model (like Smugmug) and last week it put the codebase...

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  Web

  Google Finally Launches Offline Access for Docs

  Google announced today that they would be adding the ability for users to work offline in their popular web office suite Google Docs. Offline support will be powered by the Google Gears API, which is a browser extension that allows developers to store application data offline and sync it back...

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  Web

  Chumby Gets $12.5M…Here’s Why It’s Taking Off

  Chumby Industries, makers of the Wi-Fi video and widget displaying device, the Chumby, have just announced $12.5 million in Series B funding today. The company notes that this new financing is going to be used to "accelerate growth of the company, and expand and broaden the Chumby Network to other...