Is Your PC Part of a Botnet? Being part of a botnet is no fun. Your computer b 015:06 :Lidija Davis
Being part of a botnet is no fun. Your computer becomes your worst enemy, watching everything you do, collecting all of your secrets, and then delivering all that data to the bot-herder; the person who originated the network. But what does it really mean to be part of a botnet, and is there anything that can you do about it?
According to a report today from The Associated Press, Internet security company Prevx recently discovered a Web site that was being used as a storage facility for data stolen from 160K infected computers, and the discovery offers an interesting case study.
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The storage site was hosted in the Ukraine and its contents showed that the botnet was harvesting data. Information found included passwords, social security numbers, credit card numbers, addresses, telephone numbers and other personal information; quite a treasure chest if you’re into identity theft.
“One Southern California 22-year-old could be seen registering a domain name with
GoDaddy.com, changing his Yahoo e-mail password and ordering a meal online from Pizza Hut. His credit card number, birth date, telephone number, address and passwords are now all in criminals’ hands, though it’s unclear what, if anything, criminals have done with the information yet,” the AP notes.
But it wasn’t just individuals that were targeted. According to the article, both government and bank sites had also been compromised. The Associated Press contacted one bank customer whose Social Security number and other personal details were compromised during the attack, only to learn that he hadn’t been notified by the bank.
Determine whether your PC is part of a botnet
So how can you tell if you’re machine is part of a botnet and what can you do about it?
Statistically, Macs are safe from botnets, although not completely immune to all threats as we noted here. But if you have a Windows based machine, Prevx suggests you stay on the lookout for an Internet connection that seems inexplicably slow when you are online as it may be that a botnet infection is using your connection to send or receive data.
“If this happens, stop surfing, close your email software (e.g. Outlook) and try and open Task Manager by pressing the CTRL, ALT and Delete keys at the same time then selecting Task Manager,” the company wrote on its blog recently. “When Task manager opens click on the Network tab and see if your PC is using the internet network connection, if it shows more than a few percent usage then this could be further evidence of something using your internet connection without your knowledge.”
Prevx also suggests downloading another security product if you are suspicious, and recommends you use an alternative security product. “If your PC is infected then it is almost certain that your existing security product has already let you down.”
Some of the free tools available include RUBotted (Beta) from Trend Micro, BotHunter from SRI International, or try an online virus scan with the Windows Live OneCare safety scanner.
For a primer on botnets, take a look at this short video from Symantec.
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Cartoon: SXSW Im not at SXSW this year, but I might as well be. 015:06 :Rob Cottingham
I’m not at SXSW this year, but I might as well be. True, I don’t get to run into my friends and colleagues in person, and I’m not rubbing elbows with some of the most famous people in the interactive digital world… but from the blog posts and Twitter stream coming out of Austin, I get a pretty good feeling for it. Enough that I don’t even feel jealous.
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I do have one tiny request, though. How about not blogging about the cool swag you get? I can take the talk about cool demos, captivating panels and sparkly parties you’re attending… but if I see one more reference to that Crumpler bag they gave you, well, it’s gonna get ugly.
Okay, now run along to the next event. And bring your camera… the rest of us will be waiting.
See also:ReadWriteWeb’s Guide to the SXSW Web Awards Finalists. Also look out for RWW’s Marshall Kirkpatrick and Phil Glockner, who will be representing us at SXSW this year.
More Noise to Signal
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WeFollow: A Top Twitters List Kevin Rose, founder of Digg and the man who two ye 015:06 :Lidija Davis
Kevin Rose, founder of Digg and the man who two years ago removed the Top Diggers List after deciding it could be problematic for his site and its most popular users, yesterday launched WeFollow; a user powered Twitter directory, the idea of which appears to be surprisingly similar to the Top Diggers List.
WeFollow comes hot on the heels of Twitter’s own Suggested Users List, which was created to help new users find people to follow. WeFollow attempts to provide a similar service but on a far larger scale.
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While not a new idea, WeFollow offers a clean, well-executed design and easily navigable pages that are clearly refreshed often. Rose himself has explained that the site is “very beta” so expect a few hiccups.
The home page displays lists of the five most popular Twitter users under specific tags and includes a link to more information about them. It also shows what appears to be the most frequently used tags; celebrity, tech, music, news, actor, and socialmedia, although this may change. The right sidebar includes a one-click link to add your username to the WeFollow directory, a list of most popular tags (with a search box), and a list of the Top Tweeters.
Twitter users are encouraged to add their username by either clicking a link on the home page or sending a tweet to @wefollow and including a maximum of three tags they would like to be listed under. The tags need to begin with the hash symbol. For instance, ReadWriteWeb could send this tweet: @wefollow #tech #webapps #webnews.
Similar Services
While WeFollow may provide a similar service to Twitter’s Suggested User List, that’s where the similarities end. Differences include: WeFollow ranks by popularity while Twitter’s service does not (although it does appear to influence popularity); WeFollow allows for an infinite number of users while Suggested Users is limited to under 100, and WeFollow encourages everyone to add their Twitter accounts while the Suggested Users List is compiled by Twitter and does not offer users a way for inclusion.
Other similar services include Tweeple Pages and Just Tweet It.
Concerns about Popularity Lists
While the service may be useful if you are looking to follow people within a specific area of interest, a list of Twitter users sorted by follower count raises concerns as it reinforces the existing popular users and doesn’t offer easy access to get to know other Twitter folk: the rich get richer, the poor fade away.
Many, though not all, Twitter users find the number of followers directly proportional to influence and believe that more is better. Some users see a large number of followers as a great marketing tool; one that can potentially provide an enormous source of revenue.
Dave Winer, a pioneer of Internet based content distribution, cannot reconcile Twitter’s Suggested Users List with what the Internet is about and recently sparked a heated discussion on the Internet concerning the significance of the Suggested Users List and how it can be perceived as a gift from Twitter that is worth money. Mahalo CEO Jason Calacanis was in obvious agreement when he told Winer that he had offered Twitter $250K to lock in a spot as one of the top 20 Suggested Users for two years.
Which brings us back to WeFollow. Whether there is any financial reward for having an enormous amount of followers may ultimately be irrelevant. But, the perception of its potential value coupled with the influence it will surely provide may offer enough incentive for some people to try and game the system, and may provide others with a list of users to point the blame stick at when things go wrong.
“And the people who got the push [onto the suggested users list] have a problem if they are members of the press, because this gift they got from Twitter is worth money. It might be worth a lot of money. If one of them posts a pointer on a Twitter account it’s going to get a lot of flow. And what if a reporter were critical of Twitter in a piece she wrote, would Twitter revoke her status?” Winer questioned in his post.
Which brings us back to Digg. As Rose noted in 2007 when he was attempting to clear up some of the perceptions that have arisen around attempts to manipulate (game) Digg: “Some of our top users - the people that have spent hundreds if not thousands of hours finding and digging the best stuff - are being blamed by some outlets as leading efforts to manipulate Digg.”
And this is why Digg decided removing the Top Diggers List would be the best course of action. And this is why we have to question why the man who rid his own site of such a popularity list would consider creating yet another popularity list for media’s latest darling.
You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner.
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Cruxlux Reveals Related Web Content At SXSW Interactive yesterday, I met Curtis Spence 015:06 :Phil Glockner
At SXSW Interactive yesterday, I met Curtis Spencer (@cruxlux) in the hall between panels. We sat down and spoke for a few minutes and he told me about an application he was developing called Cruxlux. The name describes what the application attempts to do: Lux for light and Crux for the decisive point. In essence, the goal of Cruxlux is to analyze the web page you are visiting, and scour other web sources for related stuff, then present that information to you, summarized, and without actually leaving the current page. Although technically in beta, it is available to use without registration.
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Here’s how Cruxlux works. It can either be launched from a bookmarklet from within the browser, or if the web page is set up correctly, from a link on the page itself. When invoked, it opens a window over the current page, and contextual links and information start being populated. The more types of information on the page, the more links and stories are mentioned in this popup. However, the links within Cruxlux are not simple redirects to outside web pages. In fact, clicking on most links will actually give you more information right inside the popup, which means you won’t be accidentally redirected away from the page you started on. And returning to that page is as easy as closing the Cruxlux window.
At this point, you can feel free to browse the information. We found lots of new related news sources and interesting byways to follow as we explored, but we must admit to a bit of confusion at times. The Cruxlux window is fairly busy and clicking certain items (like the topical slides the run along the top) cause different actions to happen. Also, once we clicked on a topic button, we weren’t sure how to return to the original set of results.
This is a relatively new app that is still in active development and we see a lot of potential with the way Cruxlux works. We are looking forward to how it evolves and grows in to its full potential.
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Facebook Connect for iPhone: Great, or Yet Another Privacy Threat? Facebook today announced Facebook Connect, its pro 015:06 :Lidija Davis
Facebook today announced Facebook Connect, its proprietary technology which allows the sharing of data between Facebook and third party applications, can now be integrated into iPhone and iPod Touch applications. This new feature will work in much the same way that Facebook Connect has worked for Web pages over the past few months, by providing a one stop shop for login and allowing you to share your data with your Facebook friends.
But the news again brings up the question of whether we should trust this company that seems to continuously place user privacy on the back burner almost every time it announces some new or innovative feature.
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The idea of Facebook Connect for iPhone is to solve two problems at once:
Give developers an easy way to socially enable their applications without having to write a whole supporting back-end
To promote the Facebook Connect platform and give iPhone users with Facebook accounts an easy way to share information
While the majority of participating iPhone applications announced today are games - see the full list here - clearly the company expects other mobile platforms and a greater selection of applications for the mobile market to jump on the bandwagon.
But will they - and more importantly, should they?
Apologies Aplenty from Facebook
Last summer, we wrote about the potential dangers of Facebook Connect. At the time, MySpace ruled supreme in the United States but recently, Facebook has taken over. While the turnaround wasn’t really surprising, it may make our point from last year all the more relevant:
“Facebook Connect put the power of the social web into the hands of one company. One private company. Not only that, but a company that’s known for rolling out changes without so much as a warning to its users then having to react to the ensuing uproar.”
The example we used at the time was the much maligned Beacon, the advertising system that sent data from external sites back to Facebook, and its disastrous beginnings with a default opt-out setting, that launched before users were given a way to opt-out.
Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg’s response after the debacle: “We’ve made a lot of mistakes building this feature, but we’ve made even more with how we’ve handled them. We simply did a bad job with this release, and I apologize for it.”
Zuckerberg again was all about regret in February this year, when he revoked the changes Facebook made to its Terms of Service.
Both examples of backtracking and apologies only came about after a backlash from users.
We also pointed out that it appears Facebook’s direction has changed somewhat when it comes to privacy, and wrote that it’s still difficult to imagine this is due to the company genuinely caring, and more likely the result that they’ve learned to cater to users’ demands.
“Facebook has always known that their value - that is, their monetary value - is selling off bits and pieces of your privacy to advertisers. The “real you” on Facebook is a holy grail for marketers.”
With that in mind, what will become of the new Facebook Connect for iPhone service? While no doubt it will be useful to many of Facebook’s 175 million users, the question remains: Should we trust in Facebook as it figures out how to cash in on the power of the mobile Web?
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Developers: The Future of Micro-Blogging is in Your Hands We knew it was coming; we just didnt know when. G 02009-03-15 :Lidija Davis
We knew it was coming; we just didn’t know when. Google yesterday announced that it is releasing its Jaiku code under the open source Apache license 2.0 after finalizing the move of the micro-blogging service to Google App Engine last week.
As we mentioned two months ago, Google will no longer be developing the Jaiku codebase, but Google volunteers will be available to offer support.
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When Google acquired the Twitter-like service in 2007, many of us had high hopes for Jaiku’s future until Google almost immediately closed it to the public offering little explanation. Last August, we wondered whether we were watching Jaiku’s rebirth when it returned with unlimited invites, and now finally, we can stop the speculation as JaikuEngine is handed over to the open source community.
According to a post on the Jaikido blog last week, “JaikuEngine differs from Jaiku in a few key ways. Although core features like the website, SMS (in the US only) and IM bot still work, feed fetching and international SMS are no longer available.”
Google points out that the problem with feed fetching is not specific to Jaiku and all real-time communication services face challenges maintaining freshness when using poll-based systems. As for the international SMS scaling issues, Google explains that the issues were more financial than technical and suggests using IM on “capable mobile devices.”
The new JaikuEngine will also include support for OAuth, the open standard authentication protocol that Twitter recently began experimenting with in an effort to give users more control and confidence in their interactions with third-party applications.
It will be interesting to see what the next few months bring.
Jyri Engestr?m, co-founder of Jaiku and now a product manager at Google, said that he agrees with Dave Winer that it’s time to break out of Twitter. “There should be lots of platforms, and they should talk to each other. Jaiku doesn’t do that yet, but now there’s a decent chance that it soon will,” he wrote on his blog today.
Here at ReadWriteWeb, we are great fans of Twitter. And certainly, it holds the market share when it comes to micro-blogging services. But, we’d love to know what you think. Will JaikuEngine inspire developers enough to give Twitter a run for its money or will the service again slowly wither away? Let us know in the comments.
You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Rick Turoczy, Sean Ammirati, Lidija Davis and Phil Glockner.
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Happy 22nd Pi Day Today is Pi Day; the day the first three digits of 02009-03-15 :Lidija Davis
Today is Pi Day; the day the first three digits of Pi, 3.14, match the calendar date, March 14, and this year it’s official according to Congress, which last week voted 391-10 to designate today as National Pi Day in an attempt to raise the profile of science and math in education.
The first Pi Day celebrations were held at the San Francisco Exploratorium when the now retired Larry Shaw decided the day was worth commemorating. Since then, the annual geek celebration has grown and is now held across the United States at universities, museums and even some folks’ homes.
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So what is Pi?
It’s a mathematical constant representing the ratio of any circle’s circumference to its diameter. It’s also an irrational number, with an infinite number of decimal places and can’t be written as a ratio of two whole numbers. According to Physics Central, supercomputers have been able to compute Pi out to over 1.3 trillion decimal places without seeing a pattern emerge.
Image Credit: Qwantz
For the hardcore, the Joy of Pi has listed the first ten thousand digits for you to peruse, or if you’re particularly keen, why not try to take the crown from Japan’s Akari Haraguchi, the current record holder for being able to recite the first 100,000 digits of Pi from memory.
An interesting coincidence; today also happens to be Albert Einstein’s birthday.
Update: oops - 22nd, not 21st
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Doc Searls Joins AdHocnium AdHocnium, a new network of affiliated social medi 02009-03-14 :Marshall Kirkpatrick
AdHocnium, a new network of affiliated social media marketing consultants, is announcing today that Cluetrain Manifesto co-author Doc Searls has joined the organization. AdHocnium is a corporate body that facilitates ad-hoc contracting for a list of some of the most high-profile “old school” social media marketing consultants on the web.
The company calls the addition of Searls a major validation of its business model, an experimental arrangement intended to facilitate flexible project-specific collaboration of allied consultants with experience navigating large corporations. “It’s a project economy,” founder Chris Heuer says, and AdHocnium is structured to respond to that.
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The company was founded by Social Media Club co-founder Heuer and is also adding Thomas Vander Wal (the man who coined the term folksonomy), Seesmic’s Cathy Brooks, Steven Lubetkin and Mitch Ratcliffe to the team today. The full list of members is quite striking.
We’ll be frank with you; the company’s website is full of far more corporate marketing blah-blah than we can stomach - but hopefully that will change. We have a lot of respect for the group of people behind it.
Adding Doc Searls to the list really will give the group all the more legitimacy. Searls has continued to extend his public profile 10 years after the writing of the famous Cluetrain Manifesto by writing an excellent blog and working at Harvard.
The team already includes an impressive list of heavyweights who have been around since the start of this social media thing; people like J.D. Lasica, Tom Foremski, Neville Hobson, Shel Holtz, B.L. Ochman and others. Everyone will maintain their independence and keep working with other groups as well; only Heuer and an assistant will be full time with AdHocnium.
Heuer acknowledges that it’s a noisy market. Kyle Flaherty’s “bullshit bingo” card for this weekend’s SXSW conference includes the words “I’m an independent freelance social media marketing community expert consultant.” Heuer says that the good consultants “need to differentiate ourselves from the poseurs.” “People get 100 followers on Twitter and start calling themselves social media experts,” he said. “None of those people have solid business backgrounds, have the knowledge to navigate the internal workings of large businesses.”
The group of people Heuer has assembled represents a school of thought based on hard work, thoughtfulness and a mix of new and traditional communication skills. Other, younger schools of thought around social media marketing often put a premium on snazzy websites, pseudo-spam and speed.
We’ll be interested to see if this new project-based structure treats the AdHocnium crew and their clients well. If it does work well, we might see more companies forming following the same kind of model.
Searls pic CC by Dave Sifry.
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Top Search Terms on Twitter Since July 2008: Sleep.fm, Ezinearticles, and GaryVee Twitter users clearly love the social alarm clock 02009-03-14 :Frederic Lardinois
Twitter users clearly love the social alarm clock Sleep.fm, the Vaynerchukbrothers, Chris Knight, and ezinearticles. At least, according to search analytics firm Compete, which aggregated the top search terms since Twitter acquired Summize in July 2008, these are some of the top searches that users performed on the popular microblogging service.
Besides the terms mentioned above, the top ten is rounded out by searches for Barack Obama, the iPhone, AJ Vaynerchuk’s PleaseDressMe, music site TheSixtyOne, and FollowFriday.
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Some of these search terms are no surprise - but it is definitely interesting that more people searched for the Vaynerchuk brothers than for ‘obama.’ Compete’s Becky Blitzenhofer argues that all of these brands and users used “Twitter aggressively as part of their marketing strategy” - and apparently, this popularity translates into search activity as well (but then, Obama also used Twitter quite aggressively during his election campaign).
It should be noted that this data spans over half a year, so it purposely ignores short-term trends and instead features those search terms that users have consistently searched for over a long period of time. Still, we are somewhat perplexed by some of the terms that appear on this top ten list.
Twitter is slowly integrating the search function deeper into the core of its service. Among other things, it is slowly rolling out a new version of its user profiles, which features a search box (some users already have access to this). These new homepages also feature a prominent link to the top ten trending topics on the service. According to Compete’s data, traffic on search.twitter.com kept lagging behind the growth curve of Twitter itself, but given that Twitter never really promoted search.twitter.com, this is really no surprise and we will probably see a major uptick in usage now that Twitter is integrating search into the user profiles.
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Facebooks New Public Profiles: Good for Businesses, Bad for People Over the past couple of days, Facebook has been ro 02009-03-14 :Sarah Perez
Over the past couple of days, Facebook has been rolling out a revamped home page to all its users which delivers several major changes including real-time updates, new filtering controls, a new share box (called “the Publisher”), and an area that highlights some of the more important updates from your stream. For public figures on Facebook, the biggest change was the revamp of Facebook Pages. Now called “Public Profiles,” these pages are supposed to act more like personal profiles - they can even update the News Feed. However, that alone stands as the only major change of note to these company-centric locales on Facebook. In almost all other ways, pages remain static, broken, and difficult.
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Public Profiles Still Don’t Work
According to Facebook’s director of product, Chris Cox, in the new version of Facebook “profiles and pages become the same thing.” During last week’s presentation where he and Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg introduced the changes taking place, Cox was quoted as saying, “now users can open up their profiles for other users to subscribe to. That means pages will become more like the profile.”
That couldn’t be further from the truth.
Pages Didn’t Get the New “Publisher” Box
After testing the new public profiles for hours on end last night, we discovered there are still a lot of issues with these pages. In some cases, the problems we encountered have existed for some time, but in other cases it’s just a matter of pages not getting the same updated features as the personal profiles did.
For example, one of the most exciting changes to the new Facebook is a box called “the Publisher.” This feature brings new functionality to what was once just the status update box. Before, that box prompted you to finish the sentence that began with your name and ended with “is…”. Users could then type in a quick thought and post it to their wall.
Today, the new Facebook Publisher box asks you “What’s on your mind?” The change is a nod to the rapidly growing social network Twitter where users answer the question “what are you doing?” and then respond with text, links, photos, videos, and more, thanks to an ecosystem of integrated third-party applications that let users share more than just a simple thought.
Since the Facebook upgrade, however, the Publisher box permits users to share updates that go beyond text-only notes. Users now can share photos, links, and videos. Some applications are also publisher-integrated, appearing below the box and in the drop-down list beneath it.
Here’s what the Publisher box looks like on a personal profile.
Unfortunately, Public Profiles don’t get this feature. Instead, this is what the Publisher box looks like on a public profile.
Clearly, public profiles are not the same as personal profiles in this area, but the differences don’t stop there.
Most Applications Don’t Work on Pages
If you don’t run a Public Page, then it probably never occurred to you to think about how Facebook applications work with Pages. As it turns out, Pages aren’t able to run most of the applications you can run on your personal profile. This is not a new issue, but it was not corrected in the major upgrade that supposedly makes “public profiles work like personal profiles.”
After creating a Public Profile, you have the option to browse through the available applications on Facebook to find apps you want to add to your page. There is not a separate list for Page-aware applications so you’ll find that many apps just don’t work. You’re often only provided with the option to add an app to your Page’s list of “Favorites” - a move that serves as nothing more than a list of recommendations to your fans. While this is a great way for a company wanting to promote their other public pages and applications (like the New York Times does here), it limits the functionality of the profiles themselves…especially since it’s the applications that often make profiles so dynamic.
So Broken: No Twitter Apps for Pages
A notable example of this problem is with Twitter applications. Although there are multiple Twitter apps available on Facebook, the current ones either don’t work with Pages at all or they don’t work all that well. The most popular of these apps, for example, only works with personal profiles or pages - it doesn’t work with profiles and pages.Obviously, this could be a major inconvenience for public figures, as they would probably like to link their Twitter updates to their Facebook status updates. But today, they are not able to do so without also updating their personal profiles with the same information.
You can follow this thread on the Twitter app’s discussion board where people are talking about the various workarounds for the lack of Twitter integration on Pages. To date, the best workaround for this issue is using the Facebook Static FBML application to display a Twitter badge on your Public Profile page. This is a poor substitute as the badge just reads “follow me on Twitter” and includes a link. It can’t update your status.
To add the badge, you must first add the Static FBML application which lets you copy and paste code (HTML or FBML - Facebook Markup Language) into a box. That box can then be added to your Profile page.
Another workaround would be to add your Twitter’s RSS feed to the Notes application, one app that does work with public profile pages. However, the Notes application only allows for the import of one external feed so you have to make a big choice here: do you import your Twitter updates or your blog?
If you’re savvy with services like Yahoo Pipes or Xfruits, you can combine RSS feeds into one master feed and use that in the Notes application instead. Yet this still is not an ideal solution because the RSS updates from these services are slow. In fact, in testing both Pipes and Xfruits, updates were so delayed that using either feed was almost pointless. Definitely not great for sharing information on a real-time web.
You should also be aware that if you put the Notes box on any other page of your public profile besides the Wall page, it will not be able to update your Wall with posts. So much for customization!
Apps Get Confused Between Personal Profiles and Pages
Another major issue with applications is how they get confused between your Pages and your Profile - like the Twitter issue referenced above. When you create an account on Facebook, you’re automatically given a Facebook profile. That causes problems with some applications as they don’t seem to know whether to link to your profile or to your page. Again, with Facebook’s own Notes application, clicking through the Notes link on the “Page Manager” (the area where you edit the settings for your Page’s apps), you’re taken into the Notes application where personal and public notes are merged. Although you were working on your public profile page, once you arrive in the application you’ll be surprised to see that it’s already linked with your personal profile. All the links you’ve been sharing on your personal profile are also found here on this page, intermingled with your public notes.
This is confusing since most people would assume that, since they had arrived at the Notes app via their Public Page, this would be a separate instance of the application that’s associated only with the page, not the profile. But that is not the case. Even more confusing is the fact that imported RSS feeds you set up on your Page will also import to and post to your personal profile. Disaster!
Other applications, like the popular “My Flickr” app for example, don’t even work on Pages even though they have a button that says they do. Perhaps the reason this app failed in our tests was because it was already on our personal profile, but it’s hard to say for sure.
Don’t Think Problems Can be Solved with a Separate Login, Either
After reading through all these issues with applications you may think the easiest solution is to just create a whole new login for the sole purpose of managing a page. Not so fast!
If you’re a public figure and not a business who wants to create a page for fans in addition to your own private profile, you have to do so under the same login or you’re in violation of Facebook’s Terms of Service (TOS). According to the site’s help documentation:
“Please be aware that managing multiple accounts is a violation of Facebook’s Terms of Use. If we determine that an individual has more than one account, we reserve the right to terminate all of their accounts.”
Either Create a “Business Account” or Don’t Bother with Public Profiles
That sounds to us like Facebook doesn’t want individuals to set up separate accounts. The other option - and one we did not test - was to set up a “business account.” Business accounts are designed for companies that need to set up a page without a personal profile associated with the login. Although these business accounts are still limited by the lack of page-aware applications, they are more customized to a business’s needs. For example, the Facebook business account for bands comes pre-installed with a music player, video player, discography, reviews, tour dates, and a discussion board.
Companies operating on Facebook through business accounts may not have all the same problems as a public figure who creates a page in addition to their personal profile, but there are still issues to be had. But for people, not businesses, it’s almost as if Facebook doesn’t want them to really take advantage of the Pages feature.
In fact, we think Facebook might even be actively discouraging people, be they public figures or otherwise, from setting up pages to represent their public-facing image. There seems to be an undercurrent of thought at Facebook that people should just open up their private lives to the world. You can see this belief in action when you examine how difficult and complex Facebook’s privacy settings are. Those settings are so granular and there are so many different areas to adjust, one has to imagine that perhaps Facebook doesn’t really want people to adjust them at all.
If Facebook made Pages easy for personal users to create and keep separate from their personal profiles, then nearly everybody would go use them - especially when it came time to “friend” people you didn’t really want to friend - people like business colleagues, the boss, and followers (if you’re a public figure).
As a “normal” Facebook user, you may not ever run into these issues, but for public figures, it’s becoming a real problem. And by “public figure,” we don’t necessarily mean major celebrity - small communities also have their own micro-celebs that attract a lot of friends and followers. Even adding as many as 100 or 200 of these so-called “friends” can dilute a public figure’s ability to use Facebook effectively, despite the new friend filtering features introduced in the upgrade.
This problem isn’t just limited to the tech bubble where everyone tries to friend Kevin Rose and Leo Laporte - it’s a growing trend in every industry. It’s also an issue we’ve encountered before - back then it was called MySpace.
MySpace’s core belief is also centered on this idea of openness. Profiles are open by default and gathering the most friends practically became a contest in MySpace’s heyday. But that also may be, in part, what led to its decline among users. (Well that and those garish profiles with glitter text).
By not duplicating the extreme openness of MySpace, Facebook had a chance to differentiate itself. Sadly, it seems that they haven’t figured it all out yet. For public figures, a choice still has to be made: “do I friend everyone who wants to follow me and dilute my network or do I keep Facebook for private connections only?” An upgrade to public profiles should have offered a better option than this, but it did not.
Why Is It So Hard for Individuals to Maintain Public Profiles?
We’re not sure why it needs to be so difficult to let some users (users that is, not businesses) maintain a public profile on Facebook. Why can’t status updates and other posts just be checked as to whether they get posted to a public page too? Why can’t applications be built with different settings for personal profiles and pages? Why can’t “Share on Facebook” pop-ups have a checkbox that reads “also post to my public profile”? Are the technicalities of implementing a simpler system really all that difficult?
Or is it that Facebook doesn’t really care about the people who want to build a public profile page - only the businesses that want to build pages and buy ads, too?
If Facebook can’t strike the right balance between public and private sharing for public figures, it leaves the door open for someone else to do it better. At this point, we would welcome that challenger. Actually, that challenger may have already arrived. It’s called Twitter - the social network that gets one-way friendships right. And the one Facebook has now tried, but failed, to copy.
Discuss
ReadWriteWebs Guide to the SXSW Web Awards Finalists SXSW Interactive begins today, bringing thousands 02009-03-14 :Marshall Kirkpatrick
SXSW Interactive begins today, bringing thousands of geeks from all around the world to Austin, Texas, to talk shop and party. One of the key stories about SXSW history is that Twitter blew up there (in a good way) two years ago. Everybody wants to know - will there be another app that takes off in the same way this year?
Many people will likely come to the SXSW Web Awards at the Hilton on Sunday night hoping to discover the next big thing. The fact is, though, that the annual Web Awards are all about design - not social functionality a la Twitter. In years past, most of us have ended up leaving the room afterward scratching our heads and saying “I’ve never even heard of those websites.” But not this year. Check out the RWW Guide to the SXSW Web Awards Finalists below, where you’ll find brief scannable explanations of who and what is behind the 80+ companies and projects that have been named as finalists for the awards.
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These companies or projects have been selected as finalists in 18 different categories, from Activism to CSS to Technical Achievement.
This year the award ceremony will be hosted by The Onion’s Baratunde Thurston. Baratunde is a must-know dude and says about the Web Awards finalists: “I look forward to making one of the companies in each category very happy.”
The bulk of the research below was done by ReadWriteWeb Research Intern Nisha Chittal, who will also be at SXSW - so friend her up on Twitter!
We hope to see you in Austin. We’re really looking forward to it! If you are going too, you might enjoy attending the Monday morning panel Beyond Aggregation - Finding the Web’s Best Content. I’ll be on that one, along with Techmeme co-founder Gabe Rivera, PostRank community manager Melanie Baker, Micah Baldwin, Biz Dev VP at Lijit and ultra-early-adopter Louis Gray.
Without further ado, here are the Web Awards Finalists!
Activism
Cliff Bar 2 Mile Challenge
The Cliff Bar company encourages bike riding with a Flash site that lets you build or choose between custom bike and gear packages, then tells you where you can buy it all. Track your bike travel and reduce climate impact. Built by San Francisco’s Cobra Creative.
On Twitter: 2MileChallenge
IAmSecond
Plano, Texas based e3 Partners Ministry gathered a collection of famous and everyday people offering video commentary about why they put their religious faith first in their lives.
On Twitter: IamSecond
Just in Queso
Just in Queso is a charitable, not-for-profit foundation that provides funds and resources for those in need. The company believes that tragedy rarely gives warning, so they provide funds to those in need after emergencies. They raise funds by selling Just in Queso Hot Sauce, and 100% of all proceeds from every sale go back to communities in the form of aid and donations.
Sunny Side
Run by The Truth campaign, this website aims to provide a satiric look at the truth and the unhealthy side of tobacco and cigarettes.
Tweet Congress
Tweet Congress is a website that allows you to search by location and find out if your Congressman or Senator is on Twitter - and if they aren’t, sign a petition asking them to join Twitter.
On Twitter: TweetCongress
Amusement
CrappyCat
CrappyCat is an interactive game where a cat traverses through a gothic backdrop and fights monsters using the power of alcohol.
Addictionary
Addictionary is a website for word lovers that allows people to play with words. Share new and amusing words and words-of-the-day, create new words, and participate in word challenges.
On Twitter: Addictionary
GirlGamer.com
GirlGamer is a community, digital magazine, and video game review site for
female gamers. It is currently in private beta.
On Twitter: GirlGamer
Pixton
Pixton is a website where people all over the world create, share, and remix comics without having to draw. According to their exhibitor profile, they’ll be premiering the world’s first remixable animated comics at SXSW.
On Twitter: Pixton
UPS Regifter
UPS Regifter is a service that allows to to re-gift when you receive a gift you don’t like — by taking a picture of your ridiculous gift, uploading it, and
sending it to friends.
Art
StreetArtLocator
Street Art Locator is an interactive website featuring a large map of the world that allows you to locate places where you can find cool new street art — anywhere in the world.
Forward Thinking Museum
The Forward Thinking Museum is an interactive virtual museum that allows visitors to study key issues of the future such as nuclear weapons and global warming.
Remembering Bogle Chandler
Remembering Bogle Chandler is a website combining sounds, images, and text that recreates eyewitness accounts of the tragic and mysterious deaths of Margaret Chandler and Gib Bogle in 1963 in Australia.
The Served
The Served is a website promoting the latest in creative works, with a stream of new projects in fashion, industrial design, photography, motion graphics, and typography
Things I Have Learned in My Life So Far
This website is a community-based project where readers contribute what they have learned in life so far through words, videos, photography, and design.
Blog
The Big Picture
The Big Picture is a Boston news blog told through photographs of the city’s recent news and events each day.
Bygone Bureau
Bygone Bureau is a blog of travel writing and cultural criticism that updates three times a week. It describes itself as a “journal of modern thought.”
Dumb As a Blog
Dumb as a Blog is a blog sharing tidbits of the dumb stuff people to do every day.
OneRiot.com
OneRiot is a social search engine that allows you to search information on the internet, but prioritizes it according to its popularity in the OneRiot community.
Postcards from My Momma
Postcards from my Momma is a blog that asks readers to share their funniest and most interesting correspondences with their mothers.
Business
CNN Shirt
CNN Shirt is an interactive website that allows you to scan the day’s top headlines, pick one, and order a customized t-shirt with your CNN headline of choice.
Jasmax
Jasmax is an architecture firm.
Lowe’s “Welcome Back Spring”
This website is an interactive website getting Lowe’s shoppers excited about welcoming back spring by allowing them to explore people’s gardens and yards and pick out Lowe’s products that they like as well as gain gardening tips and advice.
Modernista!
Modernista is a creative advertising firm whose website allows you to “view Modernista! through the eyes of the web.” It is very hard to describe and kind of disturbing.
On Twitter: Modernista
Zeus Jones Gift Site
This website is an interactive guide that helps you pick a gift for anyone in your life by inputting your criteria: budget, gender, age/maturity, relationship, and more. Created by Zeus Jones Marketing Firm.
CSS
Eden Sessions
This interactive website, home to the band The Eden Project, promotes the Eden Sessions — the Eden project’s series of one-day summer music festivals. Website designed by Richard Quick Designs.
Trevor Exter
This website is the homepage to musician Trevor Exter. Designed by This Design Studio.
Mint.com
Mint.com is a popular web-based financial software that allows people to organize their finances, create budgets, and track spending.
On Twitter: Mintdotcom
Noisefreak.com
Noisefreak is an audio production company that does commercials, promos, and
radio production.
ProjectMiso
ProjectMiso is interactive studio that designs and develops interactive media and custom applications. Their clients include Citigroup, Credit Suisse, Pfizer USP, and the NYC Teaching Fellows.
Classic
ArsTechnica
Ars Technica is a website dedicated to tech industry news and analysis, reviews, reporting, and commentary.
On Twitter: Arstechnica
Flickr
Flickr is a photo-sharing website and community. Users can upload and share photos with friends, participate in the “Creative Commons,” explore photography from around the world, and more.
Instructables
Instructables is a how-to website where users document what they do and how they do it, using pictures, video, audio, and text. Popular projects are then featured for other users to learn from.
On Twitter: Instructables
Picnik
Picnik is a web-based free photo editor that lets users upload their photos and creatively edit them with their photo editing tools.
On Twitter: Picnik
StumbleUpon
StumbleUpon is a social bookmarking site that allows users to submit and share what they’re reading and enjoying right now, and vote on what content is most popular. It uses a recommendation algorithm to create a seemingly serendipitous experience wandering through related content.
Delicious 2.0
Delicious is a social bookmarking site where users bookmark links they like, tag them, and share them with each other. It’s a Yahoo! property and underwent a dramatic redesign last year.
Community
Lost Zombies
Lost Zombies is a community-generated zombie documentary. The website aims to collect 10,000 user-submitted photos and 1,000 user-submitted videos about zombies, which will be put together in a documentary.
On Twitter:LostZombies
Fluther
Fluther is a community website where users ask questions, get answers, and discuss them with the rest of the community. It is a community of people and ordinary experts sharing knowledge.
On Twitter: Fluther
Protagonize
Protagonize is a fiction writing community website where users share, discuss, collaborate on, and learn from fiction stories that they have created. Designed by Taunt Media.
On Twitter: Protagonize
Trusera
Trusera is an online community centered around health. Users submit health questions for discussion, get answers from each other, get personalized health advice, and connect with users with similar health experiences.
On Twitter: Trusera_health
Education
The Cycle
The Cycle is an interactive video website that features short videos that simulate how the recycling process really works, behind the scenes.
Discovery Earth Live
Created by the Discovery Channel, this interactive website allows users to learn about the earth’s ocean’s and tides.
From Ellis Island to OrchardStreet
This website from the Tenement Museum takes visitors through a classic-film style tour of life as an immigrant in early 20th-century America, then allows you to create your own immigrant story.
HowStuffWorks
Here you can learn exactly what the title says — how stuff works. The website features a plethora of articles about almost every topic under the sun, and explanations of how things really work behind the scenes.
OneHen
This Flash website uses stories, pictures, and videos to teach children all about microfinance and how it works. There are also sections for parents and educators to learn about microfinance and how they might spread awareness, donate, or get otherwise involved.
Experimental
Foul Owl Karaoke
Foul Owl is a interactive music visualization tool that uses animals and cartoon creatures.
Popego
Popego is a website that helps filter content to see what videos, music, and content match the user’s interested based on what interests they list and what their friends are enjoying.
On Twitter: Popego
Sweemo
Sweemo is an online auction and retail service that allows users to buy and sell experiences, knowledge, or skills instead of products — think Ebay for experiences.
On Twitter: Sweemodotcom
Ten Thousand Cents
Ten Thousand Cents is a piece of artwork; it is a digital representation of a one-hundred dollar bill, created by 10,000 Amazon mechanical Turk workers who were each paid one cent for their task. Workers from 51 countries were involved in the project. The final project shows a video piece with all 10,000 parts being drawn simultaneously.
We Tell Stories
We Tell Stories is a project launched by publisher Penguin UK, where six authors
will write six stories each over the course of six weeks — stories that relate to the immediacy and connectivity of the internet today. There is also a mysterious “secret” seventh story involved in the project, which will give readers the chance to win prizes from Penguin UK.
Film/ Television
Flight of the Conchords Lip Dub
In this HBO TV show website, users download music videos, videotape themselves
lip-synching the songs, and then upload them to the website for everyone to watch. The contest is now over, and a final winner is going to be chosen soon.
The Flight of the Conchords is not on Twitter, which is a shame.
Hulu
Hulu is an online video service offering free movies and TV shows from major
companies such as NBC, FOX, MGM Studios, Sony, and Warner Brothers. There are
over 1000 primetime TV shows available.
On Twitter: HuluDotCom
In Plain Sight: WITSEC Confidential
This website was created for USA Network’s TV show “In Plain Sight,” a show about the Federal Witness Protection Program. The website allows users to play an interactive game where they protect witnesses from criminals and find clues to solve crimes.
Jinni
Jinni is a movie search-and-recommendation engine that allows users to search the internet for movies that match their interests. It allows users to search for films based on specific features like plot elements, genre, characters, etc. It is currently in private beta.
On Twitter: JinniMedia
The Secret Location
The Secret Location is an interactive media company specializing in entertainment properties combining interactive, film, animation, and motion design. Their website is set up in the form of an interactive video about a mysterious secret location.
Games
Adult Swim Games
This website, home of Adult Swim TV shows, features a host of interactive games and episodes of your favorite Adult Swim shows.
Globulos
Globulos is a French multi-player flash game featuring little “globs” as the main characters. It was launched in 2003 and is available on the web, on mobile and the Nintendo DS.
PMOG
PMOG stands for the “Passively Multiplayer Online Game.” Users install the game into their browser and it turns the whole internet into one game as you go from website to website.
On Twitter: Pmog
PlayCrafter
PlayCrafter features an online game maker that allows the user to create their own flash game and then share it with their friends. They can also enter contests to see who can create the best game.
Why So Serious? The Dark Knight Alternate Reality Game
This game is based off of the hit 2008 film “The Dark Knight.” The game allows you to live in the world of the Dark Night, play out events, and create your own alternate reality.
Mobile
AP Mobile News Network
The AP Mobile News Network (MNN) allows you to get all news, all the time, on your mobile phone through a special application for iPhones, BlackBerrys, and other smartphones. It’s powered by Transpera.
On Twitter: AP_Mobile
Brightkite
Brightkite is a location-based social networking website where you input your location from your phone and see who else is nearby. You can see our extensive coverage of Brightkite here.
On Twitter: Brightkite
Gigotron
Gigotron is a location-based iPhone app that helps you locate where local bands are playing live shows wherever you are. Seth Jacobs of video production shop EQAL (makers of Lonelygirl15) calls Gigotron on of his “top 5 iPhone geek apps.”
On Twitter: Gigotron
Pikchur
Pikchur is a photo-based website that lets you take pictures and share them on the go through your phone and a host of social networking applications. The company also offers an image preview script for Twitter.
On Twitter:Pikchur
Please Fix the iPhone
This website is a place where iPhone users list their complaints that they want to see fixed about the iPhone, and then users vote for their most favorite complaints in hopes that Apple will fix them. It’s fun to see the many things people say about the site on Twitter.
Motion Graphics
ADE Creative Studios
ADE is a creative studio specializing in graphic design, motion design, 3-d animation, and more. They have a very busy website.
Corona Beach
The Corona Beach lets you take a break from your day on an interactive beach with a (interactive) Corona. It was the work of New York’s Big Spaceship and Chicago’s Cramer-Krasselt.
NVIDIA Speak Visual
NVIDIA is a company that produces high-quality graphics processors for computers. Their website features a gallery of stories from customers who have NVIDIA graphics processors.
Synergy - ThyssenKrupp Elevator Corporation
ThysenKrupp is an elevator company and Synergy is their first global elevator system. It comes with a model design that can be custom-fit to meet local codes around the globe.
What’s Your Lighting Style?
This website, from GE, allows users to determine the lighting style that’s right for them, with a set of lighting tips, videos, an interactive quiz to find your lighting style, and information about all of GE’s lightbulb products.
Music
Tracy Chapman
Tracy Chapman is a folk music artist, who has just released the new album “Our bright future.” She is a multi-platinum and four-time Grammy award-winning artist.
The Finetune Family
The Finetune Family is an online music service that allows users to discover new music, create playlists, and organize favorite artists and albums. Users can get Finetune online, on their desktop, embedded in their browser, on their mobile device, in a Facebook app, on their Wii, on their TV, or in a widget.
Soundcloud
Soundcloud is a tool for artists, record labels, and other music professionals to easily send, receive, and distribute music files online. We wrote a well received review of Soundcloud here in December.
On Twitter: Soundcloud
Spiritualized Harmonies
Spiritualized Harmonies is the high-tech new website of the band Spiritualized, a psychedelic/experimental/rock band.Their latest album, now out, is called “Songs in A&E.”
James Zabiela
James Zabiela is a recording artist specializing in house, breakbeat, and techno music. His new album, “Renaissance: the Masters Series,” will be out February 23.
Personal Portfolio
Ali Felski
Ali Felski is a Washington, DC-based independent graphic designer. She previously worked for the federal government and now works for the Sunlight Foundation, promoting transparency in government. The Sunlight Foundation’s work is fabulous. See our reviews of their sites OpenCongress and Capitol Words.
On Twitter: Felskia
Pericycle
Pericycle is the personal portfolio of designer Gabriel Bach, housing a collection of his work in print, websites, postcards, flyers, and more.
Eric Piasecki Stocksearch
Eric Piasecki is a travel photographer whose “Stocksearch” website lets you easily search through all his work, save and download images, and order prints.
Revyver
Revyver is a two-person web design company run by an engaged couple. Revyver
specializes in designing web applications and games. Revyver was acquired in
November 2008 by SpectrumDNA.
On Twitter: Revyver
Lynn Marie Smith
Lynn Marie Smith is an author, speaker, and activist who is a former ecstasy addict and now speaks out about addiction. She uses her website to communicate with teens, young adults, and parents around the world about drug addiction, and will be turning these communications into a book.
Student
Business of Detention
Business of Detention is an online publication made by journalism students that covers the “business of detention” — privatized immigration detention in the United States.
Michael Dick
This website is the homepage and portfolio of web designer and programmer Michael Dick.
On Twitter: MichaelDick
Modernity Spirit of Experimentation
Modernity Spirit of Experimentation is a website showcasing innovate designs in furniture, glass, ceramic, and accessory design, by various designers.
Think Artificial
Think Artificial is the blog of a computer science student in Iceland, where he writes about the “science of artificial” — the world of technology from a semi-technical perspective.
Weekend Pictures
Weekend Pictures is a project that explores the topics of the internet, user-generated content, and privacy. It aims to help visitors maximize their use of the internet as a creative outlet while safeguarding privacy.
Technical Achievement
Absolut Machines
Absolut Machines, created by Absolut, aims to explore the intersection of art and technology by inviting renowned designers and engineers to create machines that website visitors could then interact with over the internet. Make Magazine’s Phillip Torrone took a tour and got some great photos and video of the project last February.
Aviary
Aviary is a multi-tool suite of collaborative image editing web applications. We’ve written about Aviary a number of times, most recently in October.
jQuery UI ThemeRoller
This website from jQuery allows you to “roll” your own website theme using a simple theme-creator tool. Input your criteria for colors, fonts, design, content, and more.
On Twitter: JQueryUI
SkyDeck
Skydeck is an application that lets you see your cell phone, online. It displays all your calls, texts, voicemails, call notes, connections, and more, and then lets you search, read, and respond to communications online. We reviewed Skydeck here last month.
On Twitter: Skydeck
Tarpipe
Tarpipe is an online tool that streamlines all your social media communications, and then lets you publish content across the web from one easy place. Check out our coverage of Tarpipe here.
On Twitter: Tarpipe
Discuss
Friendfeed Notifier: Get Real-Time Updates on Your Desktop Friendfeed, the popular social media aggregator, j 02009-03-14 :Frederic Lardinois
Friendfeed, the popular social media aggregator, just released an Adobe Air application that displays real-time updates from your friends right on your desktop. Whenever one of your friends posts a new item or leaves a comment, a message will appear on your desktop. Friendfeed is clearly making real-time updates a core feature of its service, as it already offers real-time updates in its web interface and through IM.
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The best feature of this app is that you can set the notifier to only display updates from specific groups. Thanks to this, you can set up a Friendfeed group with your high-priority feeds or populate it with only your closest friends on the service and receive instant updates when they post or comment on something.
Friendfeed already gives you real-time notifications over IM, which also let you comment on items from your IM client through a small set of very easy to use commands. The notifier also allows you to comment on an item, but sadly, the app takes you to the Friendfeed web site to do so. You can, however, like an item right from the pop-up window on your desktop.
As with a lot of real-time notification services, the amount of updates can quickly become overwhelming and distracting. Being able to restrict updates to certain groups is nice, but it would be great if FriendFeed also gave you the option to only see certain types of items (blog posts, Google Reader shares, etc.) in your real-time stream.
It would also be great if you could set a persistent search and then get real-time updates from across the Friendfeed network whenever somebody uses a certain keyword. It is pretty clear that search is becoming one of the key features on Twitter, and Friendfeed, even though it has fewer users, aggregates a wider range of content, though it is currently not really doing a lot with this data.
Discuss
Fire Eagle Comes to Facebook and Firefox Yahoo has just released a new application which br 02009-03-14 :Sarah Perez
Yahoo has just released a new application which brings their location-aware platform Fire Eagle to Facebook’s social network. The new app called “Friends on Fire” lets you easily share your current location with a set of trusted friends. Fire Eagle users can also share short, Twitter-like posts with each other. These are quick updates and tips tied to your location and displayed on a map within Facebook. In addition, the Fire Eagle team has also introduced a Firefox extension that lets you update your location with just one click.
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Friends on Fire
When you click the “Get Started” button in the Friends on Fire Facebook application, you’re redirected to Yahoo’s Fire Eagle page where you have to sign in with a Yahoo ID. If you don’t already have one, then you’ll need to create one here - an extra step that may be a bit off-putting for new users.
Once you’ve signed in, you must provide an email address for receiving important updates from Fire Eagle. You then must also specify at what intervals you want to receive an email that asks if you’re still comfortable sharing your location. The choices you’re given are “once per month,” “once every 3 months,” and “don’t bother.” Finally, you have to accept the terms of service and give the Facebook app access to your location.
Back in Facebook, you’ll be shown the other Fire Eagle users among your friends and given the opportunity to connect with them. You can also configure additional settings like how exact the location updates are, who can see them on the map, and whether or not the posts update your wall.
Mobile Updaters
Of course, if you’re out and about, you’re not necessarily going to be hauling around your computer with you. Instead, you’ll want to grab one of the mobile Fire Eagle updaters from Yahoo’s Gallery. These apps include simple mobile updaters like Fire Fone for the iPhone as well as more robust social networking apps like Brightkite. However, even though these apps are integrated with Fire Eagle, we had some problems getting one of them to also update the Facebook Fire Eagle map. Our preferred mobile social network Brighkite, for instance, updated our Wall but the Fire Eagle map did not show our location.
According to Tom Coates, the head of the Fire Eagle project, it might take a couple of minutes for your location to show up when you use a third party application, but we’ve waited for 20 minutes so far and the Brightkite update never made its way to the map. Obviously, this delay could hamper the usefulness of a location-aware app - especially if you’re checking in at places you’re only going to be for a short while - like the local coffee shop or a restaurant where you stopped for lunch.
There are several apps in the list to try, so it looks like we’ll need to check them one-by-one to see if that’s a common issue, or something specifically related to Brightkite. (Share your experiences in the comments!)
Fire Eagle Updater for Firefox
The Fire Eagle Firefox add-on is much simpler to use. After installing the extension, you only need to click a button in your browser toolbar to update your location. This is useful for those scenarios when you are, in fact, toting your laptop around. It’s easy to imagine college students using this on campus, traveling business executives checking in as they launch their browsers in airports and hotel rooms, or web workers checking in from their favorite Wi-Fi hotspots.
Both the add-on and the new Facebook application will help push the concept of location-awareness even further into the mainstream. Although, as we mentioned yesterday, the next step after location-aware apps may be location-aware ads. However, we’re still excited to see the developments taking place in this area, especially when it comes from a standards-based platform with strong privacy controls like Yahoo’s Fire Eagle.
Discuss
Happy 20th Birthday, World Wide Web On March 13th, 2009 the World Wide Web will turn 2 02009-03-14 :Marshall Kirkpatrick
On March 13th, 2009 the World Wide Web will turn 20 years old. Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented this world-changing layer on top of the Internet on this day in 1989. It’s hard to overstate the impact this young technology has had already and it’s even more exciting to think about where it’s going in the future.
Berners-Lee has some great ideas about where the web should go next. His vision is of a major advance that could serve as the foundation for innovations that we can’t even imagine today.
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One year ago Berners-Lee said that all the pieces needed to build a new Semantic Web are now in place. Last month he gave an impassioned talk at the high-profile TED conference about a related concept called Linked Data, a set of ideas he outlined in 2006. The gist of the idea is that we need every institution that can do so to put raw data in a standardized format up on the web.
What’s so exciting about raw data? We’ll defer to Berners-Lee’s 15 minute explanation at this year’s TED conference. The video of his talk will be posted on the TED website early Friday morning, but ReadWriteWeb readers can check it out now.
Thank you Tim, for what you’ve done for the world already.
Discuss
Foursquare: Location-Aware Social Networking Done Right Just in time for SXSW, Dennis Crowley, one of the 02009-03-14 :Frederic Lardinois
Just in time for SXSW, Dennis Crowley, one of the original developers of Dodgeball, has released a new location-aware social app (iTunes link) for the iPhone: Foursquare. At its core, Foursquare is a location-based social network, but at the same time, it is also a nightlife game where users get extra points for being the first to visit a new place, going out every night of the week, and for adding new information about clubs and restaurants.
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Features
From within the app, you can update your location, send shouts to your friends, track your ‘achievements,’ and keep a to-do list that is shared with your friends. You can also add additional information about your favorite food or beer to your favorite hangouts.
Foursquare draws from a list of known restaurants, bars, and nightclubs. The iPhone app also integrates reviews from Yelp and Google Maps. The app currently features a database for 12 of the larger metropolitan areas in the U.S., including Boston, New York, San Francisco, LA, Chicago, Seattle, Portland, and Austin. We expect that Foursquare will add data for more cities in the next few months. If a certain restaurant or bar is not in Foursquare’s database, you can also add your own.
Competition
The competitive elements are clearly stressed in this app, as you don’t just get points for everything you do on the service (and which are tracked on a leaderboard), but you can also receive badges for special achievements. Some of those, like being the ‘mayor’ of a certain place (the player who has checked in from this location more often than anybody else), are only given to one user at a time, and we can see how this might spur some fierce local competitions.
Verdict
Foursquare is a very cool application, and unlike other location-aware apps, it adds a competitive element to the interaction, as it rewards you for checking in whenever you arrive at a new location. This solves a major problem that has held back a lot of similar apps like Loopt or Brightkite in the past: users simply didn’t have enough of an incentive to open up the app and check in every time they arrived somewhere new. With Foursquare, checking in, however, becomes the thing to do.
Overall, we can see how this app could become quite addictive and we wouldn’t be surprised if it took Austin by storm this weekend.
Discuss
GooseGrade Brings Citizen Editing to WordPress Blogs gooseGrade has a unique and valuable perspective w 02009-03-14 :Phil Glockner
gooseGrade has a unique and valuable perspective when it comes to blogging: Unlike traditional media, blogs are lacking the invisible army of copy editors carefully making sure everything that is written is also written accurately and well. Today they are releasing a WordPress plugin that invites your audience to help proofread your blog. GooseGrade got some press from RWW and others last October.
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Honestly, we think this is a really great idea. We have seen countless blog posts from sites great and small (even our site on occasion) that contain spelling, punctuation, and factual errors. To many readers each blemish of this type removes a ‘reputation point’ from that blog’s score. The more responsible sites will quickly catch these errors and correct them, but without the expert eye of a trained copy editor, sometimes they can still go overlooked.
Here’s where the gooseGrade WordPress plugin comes in. Extending gooseGrade’s philosophy of harnessing the power of the Internet to help catch and correct these issues, this plugin closes the loop on WordPress stand-alone blogs, allowing submitted corrections to be seen from within the WordPress dashboard. The corrections list is very Wikipedia-like, showing the original block of text on the left, and the corrected block on the right. One more click and the edit is committed to the post and you are done. Brilliant!
If you have a hosted WordPress blog, and you weren’t a newspaper writer or editor in a previous life, we recommend you check out the gooseGrade plugin. And keep in mind that gooseGrade has a code snippet you can drop in to your site’s HTML if you use something other than WP, like Blogger or TypePad.
Discuss
Veritocracy Moves Out of Beta The personalized news service Veritocracy dropped 02009-03-14 :Phil Glockner
The personalized news service Veritocracy dropped its beta badge today, opening its doors for everyone to register and try their hand at being a story editor. Veritocracy (or Veri) compares itself with Pandora, but for news instead of music. You search for broad topics (think politics or internet) and the site presents you story clusters which you can then vote up, vote down, or even submit your own content. Veri’s motto: “Better information finds you.”
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The way Veritocracy works is by allowing registered users to select topics or keywords they want to see stories on. In most cases, more than one related story will be returned, each from a different source. The user can then move through each story or see a topic overview with a list of sources. Either way, an up or down vote can be recorded. In Veritocracy’s system, this is a vote of confidence, both in the quality of the story and the quality of the source. The choices people make will then be taken into account when presenting stories to other Veritocracy users.
Since the site looks at a number of variables in the voting process, not just the specific story that’s voted on, the system can adjust in a number of dimensions behind-the-scenes to get you the type of stories you want to read on a particular subject. For example, if you consistently vote up stories from a certain source (either one of their generic ‘watcher’ sources or a particular user), you will end up seeing more stories from that user in the future. If you consistently vote a particular story type up (say stories with a conspiracy theory slant), you will end up seeing more of those types of stories.
From what we can tell, the system Veritocracy is going for will benefit overall with the input of as many people as possible. And, since it is a destination site with its voting features (as opposed to a news site that you can grab a feed from and never visit again), active participation is key. We found the process of looking and voting for news overall smooth and enjoyable, the product is very polished and we definitely recommend you go and check it out. It may just become the first place you visit on the web for news.
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Adium to Integrate Twitter by IM Popular Mac multi-service IM software Adium will i 02009-03-14 :Marshall Kirkpatrick
Popular Mac multi-service IM software Adium will include sophisticated support for Twitter in its next version, Adium has announced on its blog. Instant messaging access has been shut off for months and isn’t coming back any time soon, the company confirmed in October, but Adium has built its own system.
Adium’s Zac West posted screenshots to the official blog and the implementation looks great. The plan was announced this weekend but just now noticed by The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
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The gist of the plan is that all your Twitter friends will be added as Adium contacts, messaging them individually will send a “direct message” via Twitter and the bulk of people you are following will have their messages delivered in a group chat. Each individual Tweet will be followed by a link to reply and the frequency of updates will be customizable.
Many people will want to track certain search terms of tags on Twitter in Adium and West says he’s hoping that will be possible soon. He has also said that drag and drop upload of images to Twitpic is another goal.
We hope that the controls on new message receipts will be granular enough that Twitter by Adium won’t be annoying for heavy Twitter users. We presume that having all your Twitter friends as contacts will make it easy to create groups in Adium as well. Groups in Twitter is one of the keys to effective use of the service.
We hate to keep writing about Twitter here, but we do use the service all day long and there’s a reason that so many developers are focused on it. You can follow me on Twitter at Marshallk and the whole ReadWriteWeb crew at ReadWriteWeb. Thanks to Chris Messina for catching this news and bringing it to our attention on Twitter.
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SearchMonkey Keeps Getting Smarter: Now Embeds Videos, Games, and Documents Yahoo today announced a new feature for SearchMonk 02009-03-14 :Frederic Lardinois
Yahoo today announced a new feature for SearchMonkey that makes it very easy for site owners to embed flash videos, games, and documents directly on the Yahoo Search results page. The first sites to make use of this new feature are Hulu, Metacafe, and YouTube. Whenever a video from these sites appears in your search results, you can now watch it immediately in an embedded player right on the search results page.
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SearchMonkey supports a number of popular video players, including Hulu, YouTube, and MetaCafe, as well as documents from Scribd and Slideshare, and Playcrafter games. Embedding these documents in the search results is relatively easy, and Yahoo provides content owners with an extensive set of helpful documents to get them started. To embed a video, for example, a developer only needs to add two lines of code. Videos are already appearing in Yahoo’s search results now, and documents and games will become available in the next month or so.
Google, of course, also shows thumbnails for YouTube clips in its search results, but clicking on these will take you to YouTube and won’t open the video player right on the page.
Yahoo says that it wants to make it easier for developers to make use of SearchMonkey. SearchMonkey is an extremely powerful tool, but it can also be very hard to use for somebody who doesn’t have the technical knowledge required to create a SearchMonkey app. Thanks to this new feature, even novice webmasters will now be able to embed some of the most popular forms of content on Yahoo’s search results page.
As we have said before, Yahoo continues to develop new and innovative ways to enhance its search, but so far, this hasn’t made too much of a dent in Google’s market share. Breaking Google’s momentum will be very hard for any player in the search engine market, but if anything, Yahoo is clearly showing that it is not willing to throw in the towel just yet.
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Hitwise: Twitter Drives Traffic to Blogs and Social Networks, But Not to Retail Sites According to the latest data from Hitwise, Twitter 02009-03-14
