Twitter is rolling out a great new feature called "Who to Follow" that offers users personalized recommendations for people to follow on the microblogging service. If you're one of the Twitter users selected early for the roll out (like me!), you'll find the new feature on the top right of your homepage at Twitter.com (when you're logged into an account). Twitter introduced the new "Who to Follow" feature in a blog post yesterday: The algorithms in this feature, … [Read more...]
Facebook Stories & Statistics: A Huge Impact
July 17, 2010 by
I am still in awe of the latest Facebook statistics: More than 141 million unique visitors in the United States in June 2010. More than 500 million users worldwide. If Facebook were a country, it would be the third largest country in the world. 50 percent of mobile Internet traffic in the United Kingdom is on Facebook. Facebook tops Google for weekly U.S. Internet traffic. If those statistics and my July 2010 video clip of the month, Social Media … [Read more...]
Facebook COO Thinks E-mail is ‘Probably Going Away’
June 18, 2010 by
Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg created a stir this week when she boldly said, “"E-mail—I can't imagine life without it—is probably going away.” Speaking at Nielsen's Consumer 360 conference on Tuesday, Sandberg said only 11 percent of teens use e-mail daily and instead use SMS and social networking. "I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but in consumer technology, if you want to know what people like us will do tomorrow,” she said, “you look at what teenagers are … [Read more...]
My Membership in ‘Exclusive Club’ Ends
May 21, 2010 by
My membership in the "exclusive" Google Wave club is over. Google announced yesterday that it is making the invite-only, real-time communication tool available to everyone, including Google Apps users, at wave.google.com. Like last year's Google Wave introduction, the announcement took place at the Google I/O Conference. With Google Wave, collaborators share—in real time or over time—e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking merged into topical … [Read more...]
YouTube Celebrates Fifth Birthday
May 19, 2010 by
YouTube turns five years old this year. The domain name YouTube.com was registered on Feb. 14, 2005, and the website launched in beta form that May. Here's one of the videos the company has made to celebrate the milestone and its influence on early users—in this case, Federic Alvarez, a 30-year-old filmmaker from Uruguay behind the YouTube smash sci-fi short, Panic Attack: … [Read more...]
Super Shock! Non-Profit Client’s Domain Stolen
May 15, 2010 by
I was in for a shock last week when I visited the website of a non-profit whose website I recently redesigned in WordPress. Instead of seeing the non-profit’s website, I found a page full of ads reading at the top, “This page is parked free courtesy of [a different web hosting firm than the one the non-profit uses].” Using Network Solution’s WHOIS behind that domain? page, I discovered the non-profit’s domain registration information had been deleted, causing … [Read more...]
Living Stories WordPress Plugin & Theme Released
April 30, 2010 by
Google released a Living Stories plugin and theme for WordPress yesterday enabling anyone who publishes through WordPress to organize coverage of an ongoing event on a single dynamic page. Living Stories is an experimental format for displaying news coverage that Google created in partnership with the New York Times and Washington Post. Google software engineer Eric Zhang wrote about the process of developing the plugin on the Google News Blog. "Our next step … [Read more...]
Ning Users to Say Good-Bye to Free Networks
April 18, 2010 by
Ning--the popular service allowing users to build their own social networks,--is making massive staff cutbacks, increasing its fees for premium services, and cutting off its free services. All Ning users who have been getting their social networks for free of charge will now be asked to start paying fees or phase off the Ning platform. Ning claims more than 46 million users spread over 300,000 social networks. The vast majority of its users are non-profits and … [Read more...]
A Peek at the Google Wave Extensions Gallery
March 13, 2010 by
Remember Google Wave? Last November I was pretty excited to get an invite to join Google's experimental real-time communication platform (which is still in preview and not released to the public). After I got the invite, I immediately logged on and played around a little bit—but largely by myself. With Google Wave, collaborators share e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking merged into topical waves. Since I didn't have any collaborators, or at … [Read more...]
Twitter Code Swarm: A Mesmerizing Video
February 8, 2010 by
One of the things I love about Web 2.0 is all the creativity and collaboration it creates in the high tech community. Today, I want to share with you a Vimeo video from Ben Sandofsky, a team member of the new Twitter Engineering blog, which visualises Twitter's commits history in a beautiful and mesmerizing way. A commit happens when a developer makes changes to a software's code or documents and transfers them into the central project repository. The video … [Read more...]
With WordPress, Your Ideas Beam into Reality
December 2, 2009 by
I love WordPress! In case you missed my Oct. 15, 2009 post, WordPress is one of the leading free open source content management systems (CMS). It’s user-friendly, interactive ( i.e., Web 2.0), and lets you create professional looking websites in no time. More importantly, you can quickly improve your site when you come up with new ideas or technology changes—without having to pay for any software or development costs. This Sunday I came up with an idea on … [Read more...]
White House Website Shifts to Free Drupal
October 25, 2009 by
The www.whitehouse.gov website shifted over to the free open source Drupal content management system (CMS) yesterday, according to an article in the San Francisco Chronicle. A CMS is a software package that lets you build a website that non-technical people can quickly and easily (and therefore affordably) change and update. "We now have a technology platform to get more and more voices on the site," White House new media director Macon Phillips was quoted in the … [Read more...]
What’s Hot: Free Content Management Systems
October 17, 2009 by
eVentures in Cyberland: Through the Web 2.0 Looking Glass, and What Communicators Found There was created using WordPress, a free open source content management system (CMS). A CMS is a software package that lets you build a website that non-technical people can quickly and easily (and therefore affordably) change and update. You could, for example, design a templates-based website like this one for as little as $1,000 (all in design, not writing, labor and assuming … [Read more...]
Google Wave Developer Preview
October 15, 2009 by
I hope I can get a Google Wave invite. Google Wave is "a personal communication and collaboration tool" announced by Google at the Google I/O conference on May 27, 2009. It is a web-based service, computing platform, and communications protocol designed to merge e-mail, instant messaging, wikis, and social networking. About a million people were extended invitations starting Sept. 30, 2009, with the initial 100,000 users each allowed to invite from 20 to 30 … [Read more...]
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