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First Details About Lift, the Next Social Network From the Founders of Twitter

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Marshall Kirkpatrick - Aug. 24 (News Report) - The recently-departed co-founders of Twitter who are now working together again under the old Obvious Corp. name (Ev Williams, Biz Stone and Jason Goldman) announced their first official partnership today, with a stealth alpha app called Lift. It's described as simple app for achieving goals through positive reinforcement. It sounds like Twitter and from what I've seen (which is more than I've seen reported about elsewhere yet) it looks a lot like Twitter too - but with more structure. What's called Lift today was apparently called Mibbles just weeks ago and was described then as "a very simple tracking and...

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Facebook's Mysterious Hire: The Guy Who Designed Much of the iPhone

Wed, 03 Aug 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Marshall Kirkpatrick - Aug. 03 (Opinion) - Matas wasn't just one of many Apple designers; he designed many of the key interfaces you probably interact with every day if you own an iPhone, an iPad or a Mac.

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Gates Foundation Distributes $10M to Build Tech Tools to Boost College Graduation

Thu, 07 Apr 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - Apr. 07 (Opinion) - These first award recipients are developing tools and programs for higher education, all in order to boost college graduation rates.

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Samsung Laptops - Now With Secret Keyloggers?

Wed, 30 Mar 2011 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - Mar. 30 (News) - In Network World's Security Strategies Alert newsletter, Mohammed Hassan details his discovery of StarLogger keyloggers on several different Samsung laptops. Keyloggers record every keystroke on a computer's keyboard and email them to a recipient. This keylogger was hidden and pre-loaded on the computers he tested, making it a significant step beyond the "Sony BMG rootkit fiasco" from 2005. There, keyloggers were loaded onto users' computers from music CDs with the ostensible goal of limiting illegal music use....

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Alleged Wikileaks Leaker Faces Death Penalty

Wed, 02 Mar 2011 18:49:02 -0800

ReadWriteWeb - Mar. 02 (Opinion) - Bradley Manning, the U.S. Army private who allegedly passed classified documents to the whistle-blowing site Wikileaks, has just been charged with 22 additional counts, according to his attorney, Lieutenant Colonel David Coombs. Among these are "aiding the enemy," a capital offense. Before we go on, you should understand two things. First, I am Son of Regular Navy. Second, I am not a fan of Wikileaks. Both of these things are relevant to my understanding of what has happened to Manning....

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Zuckerberg's Page Hacked, Now Facebook To Offer "Always On" HTTPS

Wed, 26 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

ReadWriteWeb - Jan. 26 (News) - Facebook announced this morning that it was making several security changes to protect users' accounts, including boosting the availability of accessing the site using a secure connection. The announcement comes less than a day after CEO Mark Zuckerberg's Facebook profile was hacked, and while the announcement isn't necessarily a result of this, it's a good reminder of the importance of always using a secure connection to access your accounts online - Facebook and otherwise. Facebook says it will begin giving users the ability to choose an "always on" setting for HTTPS. The option, which

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Blaming Piracy, Music Industry Says It's Lost a Third of Its Value Over Past 7 Years

Thu, 20 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

ReadWriteWeb - By Audrey Watters - Jan. 20 (Opinion) - It's a familiar refrain from the music industry: sales are down and piracy is to blame. That's the gist of the the International Federation of the Phonographic Industry's (IFPI) annual Digial Music Report, which points to a slowdown in the growth of digital music sales. While digital music revenue has grown 1000% over the past seven years, the entire music industry has lost a third of its value over that same time period. And while digital music seems to represent both the best hopes and the worst fears of the industry, even its growth is slowing.

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Pitching Without a Pitch Deck

Sun, 16 Jan 2011 00:00:00 -0800

ReadWriteWeb - By Audrey Watters - Jan. 16 (Opinion) - Startups often put a lot of work into a pitch deck. That's not necessarily a bad thing. After all, you don't want to be stuck delivering a presentation to potential investors which is eminently awful because of your slides.But here's a piece of advice that may run counter to "build good slides."

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Here's What Happened to Delicious

Sat, 18 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

ReadWriteWeb - Dec. 18 (News) - Over at Quora, Tripline founder and CEO Byron Dumbrill answers the question, "Why did Delicious fail?" Dumbrill joined Yahoo in 2006, about nine months after it acquired the bookmarking service, and his explanation corresponds with what we've been hearing for several years about its fate. Delicious was back-burnered while the company focused on Yahoo Bookmarks. It was a second class citizen, a fact that Yahoo tacitly acknowledged in its statement earlier today when it said that Delicious needs a home where "it can be resourced to the level where it can be competitive." Dumbrill talks about tha

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New Visualization Tool from Google With Data From 5.2 Million Digitized Books

Thu, 16 Dec 2010 00:00:00 -0800

ReadWriteWeb - By Audrey Watters - Dec. 16 (Review) - We've written a lot this year about the boom in e-readers and the benefits that e-books have over print. ... But a new project available in Google Labs today - Books Ngram Viewer - highlights some of the other benefits of digitizing texts beyond better reading and storage.

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Skype Comes to Verizon Prepaid Phones

Tue, 23 Nov 2010 08:41:02 -0800

ReadWriteWeb - Nov. 23 (Opinion) - Verizon Wireless announced that it's extending Skye support to more devices, specifically, "select prepaid smartphones," now bringing the total number of supported devices to 20. For Verizon customers ...

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Twitter Gets to Use Your Photos, for Free? (Updated)

Mon, 18 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Violet Blue - Oct. 18 (News Report) - Twitter has been making a lot of changes lately, and photographers may want to re-read that fine print in the Terms of Service... every photo you share on Twitter can be sub-licensed by Twitter, or worse - all royalty-free.

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Why Facebook's New Groups Will Change the Way You Use Facebook

Thu, 07 Oct 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Marshall Kirkpatrick - Oct. 07 (Opinion) - People use Facebook a lot already, but the addition of the new Groups feature today will lead them to use it even more. Facebook's addition of a far more sophisticated Groups feature than was previously available will increase the time users spend on the site, the number of different ways they use Facebook and the importance of the already very important social network in the lives of those who use it. There are three thematic reasons why this is true: the new feature offers an improved signal-to-noise ratio, increased context for communication and a big improvement in user privacy, thanks to respect for the contextual integrity of conversations. The new feature runs some risk of being too complicated, though. Sponsor Signal to Noise The creation of groups in any set of subscriptions, and that's what your Facebook social graph is thanks to the News Feed, is a key way to offer users an option to change the signal to noise ratio of what they are reading moment-by-moment. Users will continue to spend some time in the bulk Live Feed, seeing the most recent updates from everyone they have added as a friend. They will spend some time in the News Feed, seeing general interest updates from the people they have interacted with the most. And now they will spend some time in their Groups pages, where they know what to expect and where there is a social price paid for posting "off topic" content. Focused conversations and collaboration in Groups will differ substantially from the old Facebook experience of undifferentiated broadcast. People will start using Facebook for new things - planning events, for example. It's not just a social network anymore. Now it's also a newsgroup, a planning tool and more. Note that this is very different from the creation of Lists on Twitter. That organizes all statements shared by particular users grouped by a topic, but not necessarily only discussing that topic. The signal to noise ratio will be far superior on Facebook, but the discovery of serendipitous content relevant only because of who it was shared by - that will be better on Twitter, or on the Facebook lists that the company says only 5% of users took the time to create. There are some things that Twitter lists will still be better at doing than Facebook Groups. Context A message posted to Facebook in general has only your friendship as context, and as Mark Zuckerberg said today - there's no clear definition of what it means to be friends with someone on Facebook. In the new Groups, messages will be written and read with several other sources of context in mind: the topic of the group, who invited a user to the group and related content in the form of shared editable documents and group chats. A simple example: people who do work in complicated fields will now be able to post more high-context content to topical Groups than they may have felt comfortable sharing in their bulk News Feed made up of non-specialist friends and family. All the sudden, Facebook is a place to have deep topical conversations, not just lowest-common-denominator bulk public conversations. That's a dramatic shift. Privacy We, and others, have been saying for 18 months that a more contemporary understanding of privacy would lead Facebook not just to respect the public/private wishes of users, but also to make it easy for the contextual integrity of communication to be respected. No photos from Friday night at the bar being shown in Church, and no audio tape of your prayers at Church being played for laughs from your friends at the bar again later. Yet that's what Facebook has pushed people towards - all content being publicly visible and shared with all people, regardless of the context. Until today. Zuckerberg spoke to this concern extensively today. The groups feature, at least in theory, will let you talk with friends about what's relevant to the groups they belong to, and not about the things that aren't relevant to them. That's a good privacy move, but it's also something Zuckerberg rightly says will encourage people to post more content. The new feature does add another layer of complication to the whole Facebook experience. "The groups work sounded promising, if they can offer something that satisfies the same needs as the little mailing lists that people either formally or informally create now," says social network data analyst Pete Warden. "I'm still worried that they're taking the same approach to privacy that Microsoft takes to security. Their space-shuttle control panel approach is like having lots of noisy popups, people are confused and learn to ignore them. Far better if you can have a really simple story. Even with something as simple as open/closed for groups, it's still too much for most people. Look at the whole 'journolist' scandal - participants obviously weren't thinking through the fact that their messages were ending up in hundreds of people's inboxes. Most people don't have developed the 'street-smarts' to navigate even comparatively simple privacy models. I still regularly reply to Twitter DMs on my phone, and forget to add 'd' to the start of the message, sending the reply to my whole world." I'm not so sure. I think people will be able to handle these changes to Facebook. The interface may require a little more work, but it's pretty good so far. I think people will find it useful, as a sub-stream of their bulk News Feed. I think they will find the signal-to-noise, context and privacy gains compelling enough that it will lead people to use Facebook more, and in new ways. Discuss

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Tumblr Leaves Posterous in the Dust

Thu, 16 Sep 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Richard MacManus - Sep. 16 (Review) - One of the more interesting startup battles in recent times has been Tumblr vs. Posterous, two light blogging services that make it easy for anyone to publish 'found' things very quickly. However for all of Posterous' hard work and bluster, it's been Tumblr that has grown exponentially over the past year.

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My6Sense & The Geek Who Rode His Blog to the Edge of the World

Mon, 23 Aug 2010 21:13:54 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - Aug. 23 (Opinion) -

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Legislature Moves to Make Funded Research Public

Tue, 20 Jul 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - Jul. 20 (Opinion) -

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You Are Not a Gadget: The Continuing Case Against Web 2.0

Mon, 05 Apr 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Richard MacManus - Apr. 05 (Review) - Lanier's main issue with web 2.0 is that, in his view, it promotes the 'hive mind' over individual expression. He writes that web 2.0 presents the current generation of kids with a "reduced expectation of what a person can be."

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Does StreamWork Give a Picture of SAP's Future?

Tue, 30 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - Mar. 30 (Opinion) -

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China To Media: Toe the Government Line on Google

Thu, 25 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Mike Melanson - Mar. 25 (News Report) - est we forget what is at stake with the situation involving Google and China, the Washington Post has published today a list of directions from the Chinese government sent out to all media outlets on how they are allowed to cover the incident. The rules are a stark reminder of why, no matter how long Google kowtowed to government demands there, the search engine's actions are important for the development of a free society.

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Why Wikipedia Should Be Trusted As A Breaking News Source

Fri, 19 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - Mar. 19 (Opinion) - Most any journalism professor, upon mention of Wikipedia, will immediately launch into a rant about how the massively collaborative online encyclopedia can't be trusted. It can, you see, be edited and altered by absolutely anyone at any moment. But how much less trustworthy is the site for breaking news than the plethora of blogs and social?

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Want to Read Good Journalism? Try NewsTrust's New Personalized Filtering Tool

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - Mar. 17 (News Report) - Fair, thorough, enterprising and in context - that's what we're looking for in the journalism we read, isn't it? At a time when shallow ranting takes up so much space in public discourse, a new media evaluation technology offers hope, inspiration and is a lot of fun to use.

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How US Government Spies Use Facebook

Wed, 17 Mar 2010 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Marshall Kirkpatrick - Mar. 17 (Opinion) - The US Department of Justice this week released slides from a presentation deck titled Obtaining and Using Evidence from Social Networking Sites. The document was released in response ...

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Privacy Is Not Dead: Danah Boyd Talks About Privacy at SXSW

Sat, 13 Mar 2010 17:59:29 -0800

ReadWriteWeb - Mar. 13 (Opinion) -

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Google's Eric Schmidt on What the Web Will Look Like in 5 Years

Wed, 28 Oct 2009 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Marshall Kirkpatrick - Oct. 28 (Opinion) - Google CEO Eric Schmidt envisions a radically changed internet five years from now: dominated by Chinese-language and social media content, delivered over super-fast bandwidth in real time. Figuring out how to rank real-time social content is "the great challenge of the age," Schmidt said in an interview in front of thousands of CIOs and IT Directors at last week's Gartner Symposium/ITxpo Orlando 2009.

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The Dirty Little Secret About the "Wisdom of the Crowds" - There is No Crowd

Thu, 17 Sep 2009 00:00:00 -0700

ReadWriteWeb - By Sarah Perez - Sep. 17 (Opinion) - Recent research by Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) professor Vassilis Kostakos pokes a big hole in the prevailing wisdom that the "wisdom of crowds" is a trustworthy force on today's web. His research focused on studying the voting patterns across several sites featuring user-generated reviews including Amazon, IMDb, and BookCrossing. The findings showed that a small group of users accounted for a large number of ratings. In other words, as many have already begun to suspect, small but powerful groups can easily distort what the "crowd" really thinks, leading online reviews to often end up appearing extremely positive or extremely negative.

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