What is Twitter? What seems like a simple question is actually a mystery that's difficult to solve.Even the founders of Twitter didn’t agree on exactly what it should be. According to Hatching Twitter: A Story of Love, Power, and Betrayal, cofounder Jack Dorsey envisioned a way for people to share...
ReadWriteBuilders is a series of interviews with developers, designers and other architects of the programmable future.Alexis Ohanian took on the challenge of building the "front page of the Internet" by co-founding the social platform Reddit in 2005. Reddit has blossomed into one of the most popular social sites on the web, boasting over...
Reddit is cleaning house, sweeping some of its less savory elements under the carpet as it spiffs the place up.On Wednesday, Reddit management via blog post shook up the social news and community site by demoting site subsections devoted to discussion of atheism and politics from Reddit's front-page menu bar. In their...
After Texas Sen. Wendy Davis had wound up her historic 13-hour filibuster, the clock struck 11:51 pm. It was the pre-agreed time for people watching from the upstairs gallery to start chanting in order to interrupt an impending vote on SB5, a GOP bill to limit abortions. It was then...
Google+, Google’s social network, turns 2 today. And like a toddler, it’s starting to find its footing after a lot of crawling around and wailing. ReadWrite was the first outlet to report on Google+, creating a lot of anticipation for Google's take on social networking. Like many people in the technology...
AngelList. It’s the place for startups to connect with funding and talent. Just this month, the site has helped raise $12 million in venture funding for a wide collection of startups. It may be the one site that best represents all players in the tech startup universe - from glamorous poster-child...
[Editor’s note: Joachim Kempin is a former top Microsoft executive and author of a new memoir, Resolve and Fortitude: Microsoft’s 'Secret Power Broker’ Breaks His Silence. This is Kempin's fourth column on Microsoft for ReadWrite. See his earlier contributions here, here and here.]Over the last couple of weeks, my provocative weekly columns and blogs have...
It passed the House, the Senate, and just before the new year, the President signed it into law. In a significant shift in video privacy - online video rental companies can now share information about the movies you rent or buy. As you might expect, things are about to get more...
Microsoft had a pretty lousy year in 2012, putting out a string of big products – Windows 8, Windows Phone 8 and the Surface tablet – that all turned out to be be disappointing.But those pale in comparison to what may be the biggest disappointment in Microsoft’s history — its...
On November 6, 2012, the first post-PC U.S. presidential election will come to a close. Just like the primaries, conventions and debates, tonight's election returns will be obsessively and extensively live streamed and covered online. For those relying on the Internet for their nail-biting date with democracy, there are more...
"We know what you think is funny."That's what the folks over at Venice, Calif., startup Laffster are claiming. Last week the MuckerLab-accelerated company closed a $750,000 seed round and launched its first product, an online political comedy-discovery app called Mock the Vote. The app features articles and videos on political news, dividing content by red, blue or undecided...
A new joint Harris/BrandYourself study released Monday shows that nearly one third of U.S. adults have looked up information about a candidate online, which puts more onus on campaigns to get their online messaging straight. Encouragingly in the face of so much negative political messaging, positive information found online seemed...
When Barack Obama and Mitt Romney go head-to-head Wednesday night to tell America why they should be President, the whole country, and in some cases the whole world, will be watching. But thanks to the rise of the Internet and social media, millions of people won't just be watching, they'll...
YouTube’s livestreaming Elections Hub received a swell of press coverage at launch, but come its first event - the Republican National Convention - the number of viewers was pitifully small. Do the low numbers result from the site's lack of an adult audience, the difficulty of generating political interest among younger...
As election season nears, more and more people are discussing the candidates and their positions online. Facebook and CNN want to be at the center of that conversation - but they have a long way to go if they really want to add to the debate.The two organizations announced Facebook-CNN...
Yesterday we outlined why topic pages are becoming increasingly popular on the Web, as a way to organize social or news content. As daily consumers of such content, we're used to the chronological (and often real-time) ordering of updates from Facebook, Twitter, blogs and more. But the latest wave of...
Russia's new Web blacklist is only the most recent of an alarming series of authoritarian moves to muzzle networked communications. National governments bent on censorship are eating away at the global, public Internet. On Wednesday, the Russian parliament's lower house approved legislation that would block Web pages selectively. The proposed law...
Sports news website Bleacher Report (B/R) was mentioned twice in Mary Meeker's 2012 Internet Trends report: as an example of re-imagination of both sports news and TV. Bleacher Report, founded in 2006 by four sports fans from Silicon Valley, has become so influential that Time Warner is rumored to be...
Last week, the CloudStack controversy questioned whether there can be more than one open source cloud. Evan Prodromou, founder and CEO of StatusNet, says no, arguing that it's "going to be better for everyone" if there is a single contender for open source cloud computing thanks to network effects.Prodromou makes...
We have truly entered a social-networked monitoring society. So keep an eye on your Facebook friends. In 2009, Zuckerberg declared the age of privacy over. By making Facebook user information public by default, he really did mean it. He later backpedaled and removed the default public-facing status update, but the...
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