Latest Articles

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  Web

  Xoopit: Proof that Gmail Needs a Better API

  Email media management application Xoopit launched in private beta today (invite link below) and announced a $5m venture round from some big backers. Would a good feature set and reputation be enough for you to hand over your Gmail username and password to this application? It's not good enough for...

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  Web

  Top 10 Places to Get Fooled on April 1st

  Observing April Fools Day has become a time-honored tradition for many web companies. Much like changing your logo to celebrate holidays, pulling a fast one on your users on April 1st is something that many web services and applications have really taken to heart. But keeping creative year-after-year is tough,...

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  Web

  April 1st, The Annual Day Without Google – Can You Live Without It For One Day?

  Our network blog has just announced an annual 'Day Without Google', starting tomorrow April 1st. ASE editor Charles Knight writes: "All we’re asking is that for One Day you try one of the Top 100 Alternative Search Engines". He implores us to "Choose one, choose several, but for One Day...

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  Web

  Last.fm to Sponsor New Music Category for “Extend Firefox 3” Contest

  Today, social music site Last.fm announced that they would be sponsoring a new music category in Mozilla's Extend Firefox 3 contest. The contest, which encourages developers to build add-ons for the Firefox browser, began on March 17th, 2008 and will continue until midnight on July 4th, 2008. This cycle of...

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  Social

  Facebook to Crowdsource Chinese Translation – China Launch Imminent?

  Following on from our Q&A with Benjamin Joffe about how Facebook compares to top Asian social networks, Kaiser Kuo from Ogilvy China Digital Watch reported today that Facebook users in China "received a message on their main pages this morning asking them to help out with the translation of the...

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  Web

  Picking a Platform: 5 Issues to Consider

  A month ago, ReadWriteWeb writer Marshall Kirkpatrick utilized his huge network of Twitter followers to facilitate a discussion about APIs and platforms. He shared the highlights of the conversation in a post on this blog. The discussion was one that really captured our imaginations, so today we're exploring the issue...

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  Web

  Adobe AIR Makes Its Way to Linux

  The Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR), which allows developers to take web applications to the desktop and store data offline, is finally coming to Linux. Adobe announced today that the pre-release alpha version of AIR for Linux is available immediately on the Adobe Labs site. Adobe shipped the 1.0 version of...

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  Mobile

  Mobile Web Trends & Products, March ’08 Update

  When it comes to keeping track of Mobile Web trends and products, Rudy De Waele has his finger constantly on the pulse. This month Rudy gave a presentation at the Plugg Conference in Brussels about Mobile 2.0. It was an update to the one we featured in September '07 and...

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  Social

  Facebook vs Asia’s Top Social Networks

  One of my co-presenters at this month's Media 08 event in Sydney was Benjamin Joffe, Managing Director at Asia Internet consultancy +8* and Co-Founder of MobileMonday Beijing. At Media 08 Benjamin discussed the leading social networks in Asia. In particular he compared global leader Facebook with Cyworld, Mixi and QQ....

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  Web

  LiveBook Aims to Write Novel on Facebook, Bebo

  LiveBook is a new collaborative writing project that aims to write two separate novels via applications on two different social networks: one on Facebook, the other on Bebo. The Facebook novel, "Helen and her Facebook" chronicles a girl named Helen who has just recently signed up on the social network,...

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  Web

  Swiftboating Made Accessible via VoterVoter.com

  VoterVoter.com is a new web site from advertising firm WideOrbit, which manages $10 billion worth of advertising on 950 TV, radio, and cable stations in the US, that brings the dirty game of campaign attacks ads directly to the people. Billing themselves as "a non-partisan political advertising service" that was...

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  Web

  Amazon’s Other Service: A Virtual Sweatshop? Actually, No

  Amazon's web services get a ton of press, but mostly in the context of the Elastic Compute Cloud (EC2), the Simple Storage Service (S3), SimpleDB or one of the company's other developer-centric offerings. One that doesn't get much coverage in the tech media these days is the Mechanical Turk service,...

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  Web

  10 Reasons Why You’re Going to Love Toluu

  Have you heard about Toluu yet? This new RSS-based service, currently in private beta, lets you share your OPML with others in order to discover new feeds, see what your friends are reading, and even discover new people who share your same interests. If that sounds familiar, it's probably because...

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  Web

  Hype Machine Adds New Features

  Hype Machine, the much-loved MP3 blog aggregator service, has long been the place to go to find great tracks and music reviews on the net. In October of last year, the site got a big makeover, which included new social networking features like user profiles where you could list your...

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  Social

  Marshall Kirkpatrick on G4TV’s ‘Attack of the Show’

  Yesterday evening, our own Marshall Kirkpatrick was a guest on G4TV's "Attack of the Show" television program to discuss Google's OpenSocial platform. Marshall gave his thoughts on why Google formed a foundation with Yahoo! and News Corp. (MySpace) to govern the open source project, and what that means for users...

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  Web

  Watch Out – Adobe Is Slowly Building an Online Empire

  The blogosphere was abuzz today with the launch of Adobe's online photo-editing and storage platform, Adobe Photoshop Express. The new tool isn't so much of a web-based version of Photoshop as people had hoped, but more of a simple online photo editor, more on par with a service like Picnik....

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  Web

  Ma.gnolia: OpenID to Save Anti-Spam, Anti-Spam to Save OpenID

  OpenID is wildly convenient for users, which is good for vendors, but is that motivation enough to really spur its adoption? Cutting-edge social bookmarking service Ma.gnolia stopped issuing new user credentials last night and now requires new users to create a Ma.gnolia account using an OpenID from somewhere else.Why? Because...

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  Web

  Zemanta Brings a Semantic Layer to Your Blog

  A new startup called Zemanta launched in alpha mode today. The service integrates with blogging platforms like Wordpress, Blogger, and Typepad to suggest pictures, links, articles, and tags related to your blog postings. Using proprietary natural language processing and semantic algorithms, Zemanta compares the words in a blog post to...

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  Web

  Microsoft to Offer Revenue Share on Silverlight Streaming Service

  Microsoft's Silverlight may have one heck of a mountain to climb in order to take marketshare from Adobe's near ubiquitous Flash plugin, but Redmond is doing a lot of things right in their quest to spread their new technology. They've been making major deals left and right -- with NBC...

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  Web

  Look Out PowerPoint – SlideRocket Rocks – 500 Beta Invites

  This week has been good for SlideRocket, an online presentation application built on Adobe's Flex platform. The app had an ultra successful public debut at the Under the Radar Conference, where it won 3 out of 4 possible awards, and they also announced a $2 million Series A investment from...