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Pete Cashmore: Michael Jackson’s Memorial: The Biggest Web Event in History?

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:17:17 +0000

The web’s response to the passing of music legend Michael Jackson has been staggering. Social media was pounded with tributes last Thursday after the news broke, but next Tuesday could be a huge test for the entire infrastructure of the web, when the memorial for Michael Jackson will take place.

The tribute and remembrance of the late King of Pop occurs next Tuesday (July 7th) at 10:00 AM PT at the Staples Center in Los Angeles. Beyond the 17,500 tickets that will be given away to fans and the millions more that will converge on downtown L.A., the memorial will be live streamed free via the web and media outlets across the world.

This event will almost certainly shatter records for the biggest single live stream ever, and could be one of the biggest worldwide media events in history. Will the web be able to handle it?

The details

The splash page of the Staples Center

Although details are sparse, CBS News does a good job of breaking down the information currently available. Here are the key points:

- The memorial will occur at the Staples Center in downtown Los Angeles. 17,500 tickets will be randomly drawn in an online lottery available until 6 PM PT July 4th. Only U.S. residents qualify
- 8750 names will be selected Sunday, each of which will receive 2 tickets to the memorial
- There will be a simulcast in the Nokia Theater
- There will be a free live stream on the Internet available to all. Details on how the stream will be distributed are currently unavailable
- However, we suspect that thousands of stream will be available from media companies and live stream services around the world

The demand was so high for these tickets that the Staples Center website has had trouble staying up, and in fact took down almost every non-essential image and menu to keep the website up. This could be a prelude to the worldwide response we’ll see next Tuesday.

What will Jackson’s memorial mean for the web?

If you remember back in January, there was another historic event that blew us away: the Obama inauguration. Here are some of the staggering numbers from CNN and Facebook.

- 200,000+ status updates through the Facebook integration on CNN.com
- 3,000 people commented on the Facebook CNN feed per minute
- CNN served 13.9 million live video streams globally in about 6 hours
- Don’t forget about the millions of other live streams and TV viewers that watched worldwide.

Now, throw all those numbers out the window, because Michael Jackson’s memorial is almost certain to utterly overshadow Obama. Not even Obama consumed 30% of Twitter and set traffic records at Yahoo.

With the world mourning and a specific time and place set for the memorial, we may very well see the entire web converge on this one event. There will likely be thousands of streams worldwide via platforms such as Justin.tv and Ustream (the latter of which has a deal with CBS to stream events like this one). It’s also certain that Twitter, Facebook, and the social web will be booming with commentary on the event.

How many people will watch Jackson’s memorial? Can the web’s biggest players handle the massive traffic that will ensue? Will there be enough bandwidth? Could this event be the single media event in history? The answers to these questions will not only be a testament to Jackson’s impact on the world, but may very well set records that will last in history.

Perhaps most of all, the web will allow people to come together to celebrate Jackson’s life, no matter who they are or where they live.

Reviews: Facebook, Twitter, ustream

Tags: jackson memorial, justin.tv, michael jackson, ustream

Richard MacManus: Ten Companies Twitter Should Consider Acquiring Next

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 20:08:13 +0000

If you were a little blue bird, with a good pile of money and a whole lot of hype, what would you buy to spice up your nest? There are so many little services being built on top of Twitter that we wouldn't be surprised to see some more of them acquired by the company soon. That would mean more features for everyday users and more usefulness for features loved by loyal early adopters.

Twitter has acquired two other companies so far, that we know of. Search engine and sentiment analysis service Summize became Twitter's own search engine and Values of N sold its assets so engineer Rael Dornfest could be brought into the company. Here are ten other startups we think that Twitter should consider acquiring next. Which kind of company would you most like to see become part of Twitter itself? We've got a poll below.

Sponsor

Is Twitter in a position to make more acquisitions? We suspect so. It has cash but more importantly it has stock. Think of it this way: Google is afraid of Facebook and Facebook is afraid of Twitter. Would startups bend over backwards to become a part of Twitter? We suspect most would.

Some of these we think are likely acquisitions, some less so. In making this list we considered both functionality that would be helpful to have added to Twitter's own site and technology that would be worth buying instead of just building in-house. Whenever a platform company builds technology that a number of other startups offer, there is a risk of scaring other people away from investing in development that the platform could just reproduce. Acquisitions of startups on a platform probably increase the appeal of development though, as it's a chance to get in on the game.

Quite Likely, if It Hasn't Happened Already

Bit.ly is the most full-featured and popular URL shortener on the market right now and was recently selected as Twitter's own shortener of choice, dethroning TinyURL. Bit.ly offers all kinds of smart analytics, from real time click tracking to semantic analysis for topic keywords from the links that people tweet.

One trusted industry source speaking on the condition of anonymity told us that Bit.ly servers "were moved into Twitter's racks months ago in preparation for this change." [Becoming the default shortener.] Bit.ly is becoming too important to Twitter to keep that functionality outside the company's own shop and the two companies share some investors. We will not be surprised at all if a Bit.ly acquisition by Twitter is announced sometime in the near future.

Could Happen...

Tweetmeme is another fast growing Twitter analytics services that tracks sharing on the service. With another chunk of new features just added today, the service is looking a whole lot like "Feedburner for Twitter" but with even more viral distribution possibilities. The Tweetmeme API is quite interesting and could compliment Bit.ly quite well.

Twitpic is a popular way to share images on Twitter. The site faces a strong challenge from ImageShack's YFrog, but independent Twitpic would be a cheaper acquisition and is already well known among Twitter users. (Twitter should probably look at Enjoysthin.gs, it's got the best user experience.) An increase in imagery on Twitter would probably offer the company a lot more advertising real-estate.

Tweepz is a fascinating Twitter search engine that acts like a directory that lets you parse your results using various metrics gleaned from Twitter. Check out this search, for example. Twitter could benefit from making this kind of search available to users, advertisers and researchers - and Tweepz has already built it. See also Twazzup, another company doing interesting things with Twitter data.

Longer Shots

An iPhone app company could be a good buy for Twitter, there's certainly plenty of options. M.Twitter.com is a good mobile service already but someone specializing in super high-quality Twitter apps for the iPhone, Android and Pre could be good to bring in house. It could be AteBits, makers of Tweetie. There may not be enough reason for Twitter to buy one of these companies, though.

A desktop Twitter app company could help Twitter increase user engagement. Many of the most serious Twitter users (though not all) swear by desktop access. Twitter could acquire the most popular and arguably most innovative desktop app, Tweetdeck, or it could bring Seesmic in house. Tweetdeck would be cheap and shares investors with Twitter. Seesmic is probably getting cheaper by the day (sorry!) and has some really talented people working there. Desktop apps may be too limited in appeal to be a compelling acquisition target.

Geo-location could be a good feature to add to Twitter. Search by user location could be made much more meaningful and the list of things that could be done with it is very long. Brightkite is popular and well developed, Shizzow is pretty and wouldn't be expensive. On the other hand, browsers themselves will likely all become more location aware in the near future and Twitter may be satisfied with its current location data.

Which of these kinds of companies would you like to see Twitter acquire next?(polls)
A semantics company could bring structure to the Tweets, making them more useful and easier to advertise against. Right now links Tweeted are semantically analyzed by Reuters' Calais and sent to Bit.ly, but we wouldn't be surprised if Twitter was interested in scooping up a small semantics shop and helping it scale so that analysis was being done in house. Twitter may feel like semantics don't need to get that close to consumer users, though. (Disclosure, Calais is a ReadWriteWeb sponsor.)

Topify is a widely loved service that intercepts your new Twitter follower notification emails and sends you much more useful ones. It's great but probably too easy for Twitter to just reproduce itself.

FriendFeed plus Twitter would be a match made in heaven. It would be an engineering powerhouse. It would be a step towards mainstream user adoption of FriendFeed, a service that can't make up its mind which end of the sophistication spectrum it's targeting. It's also quite unlikely to happen. If there's one related startup we can imagine turning down a Twitter acquisition offer, it's probably FriendFeed. (Though the investment laden and highly ambitious OneRiot is a close second.) None the less, it would be awesome if FriendFeed's cross-network aggregation, threaded conversations, groups, media support, search and more joined forces with Twitter.

Ultimately, it may be most likely that Twitter's next acquisition will be something vapid. A service that aggregates shopping Tweets, or celebrity Tweets, or something else that will fall short of taking advantage of the Twitter platform's huge potential to change the world. Twitter staff makes relatively simple use of its own service, so hoping that it will acquire companies that make it all the more powerfully sophisticated may be an early adopter's pipe dream.

Maybe not, though. We wouldn't be shocked to see Twitter pick up at least a few of the companies above. What do you think? Are there other services you'd like to see become part of the Twitter team even more than the above? It's a wild and woolly micro-content ecosystem out there - anything could happen.

You can find ReadWriteWeb on Twitter, as well as the entire RWW Team: Marshall Kirkpatrick, Bernard Lunn, Alex Iskold, Sarah Perez, Frederic Lardinois, Jolie O'Dell, Dana Oshiro , Lidija Davis and Steven Walling.

Discuss

Pete Cashmore: Geocaching Down, Too

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:45:56 +0000

Today a fire hit a major datacenter in Seattle, taking money processor Authorize.Net down. This has caused many web-based financial transactions to grind to a halt, but Authorize.Net isn’t the only website that’s gone offline today.

Another popular website has fallen, Geocaching.com, a worldwide GPS-based treasure hunting game, leaving thousands of people trying to figure out just what’s going on and why it went down. Wikipedia explains the game’s worldwide reach:

Geocaching is an outdoor treasure-hunting game in which the participants use a Global Positioning System (GPS) receiver or other navigational techniques to hide and seek containers (called “geocaches” or “caches”) anywhere in the world. A typical cache is a small waterproof container (usually a tupperware or ammo box) containing a logbook and “treasure,” usually toys or trinkets of little value.

Geocaches are currently placed in over 100 countries around the world and on all seven continents, including Antarctica. There are over 820,000 active geocaches in the world right now.

While the fire may or may not be responsible for this specific outage (we cannot confirm), it’s clearly had an effect on the entire web. Even Microsoft’s search engine Bing was affected, specifically Bing Travel.

We will provide updates on Geocaching and Authorize.Net as we receive the information.

Reviews: Wikipedia, bing

Tags: geocaching

Tech Crunch: The Inevitable Anti-U.S. Backlash Has Started On Kiva

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 19:31:32 +0000

When we reported on Kiva.org’s decision to open up its micro-lending platform to U.S. entrepreneurs, Kiva CEO Premal Shah told us he was concerned about backlash in the community. Shah acknowledged that the decision to open lending to U.S. recipients may draw criticism because it goes against the idea on which Kiva was founded—lending to help development in third world countries where credit options are limited.

It looks like Shah’s prediction was correct. There is now a lending team on Kiva’s community platform titled “Unhappy Kiva Lenders.” The members, which total 375 lenders from around the world, are angry that Kiva is extending loans to U.S. entrepreneurs. The team’s page states that “including borrowers from the USA has undermined the very core of what made [Kiva] so unique and special; small, impactful contributions to entrepreneurs in impoverished situations in developing countries.”

The tirade on the page is harsh, calling the decision “shameful and disgraceful” and a deviation from Kiva’s core mission. The group cites an example of a recent Kiva loan request from a U.S. entrepreneur who had a college degree and a career in architecture who wanted to start a business in website design. The loan he requested was for $7000 to start the business, an amount the lenders suggest could help 7 to 10 different borrowers in other parts of the world.

Kiva’s stated mission is “to connect people through lending for the sake of alleviating poverty.” The anti-U.S. lenders claim that lending to U.S. entrepreneurs doesn’t alleviate poverty because Americans aren’t living in true poverty, compared to people in underdeveloped countries.

**US borrowers do not have to pay to send their kids to elementary school. **They don’t have to build their own house. **They don’t have to walk miles to get the bare minimum of medical care….if needed they can access FREE, generally high quality medical care. **They have a system of laws and courts in place that work. **They enjoy police and fire protection. **They generally have access to inexpensive and dependable public transportation. **They take for granted electricity, clean water, inspected food and indoor toilets. **

Some of that may be true. On the other hand, Shah makes a compelling case for the need for a micro-lending platform in the U.S. He says more than 10 million U.S. business owners face difficulty obtaining capital—even before the credit crisis and economic slowdown which made lending tight. And there’s no doubt that with the credit crunch creating a drought of lending, small businesses in the U.S. are finding it tough to find funds, especially if their financial history isn’t stellar. Finally, there is nothing wrong with giving U.S. lenders the opportunity to boost entrepreneurship at home, especially at a time where jobs created by small businesses can help lift the economy out of a recession.

It seems to me like the angry protests are misdirected. Kiva’s lending program has long been hailed as one of the more innovative platforms on the web and its ambitions have always been towards helping foster entrepreneurship (as well as alleviating poverty) in various areas of the world. Kiva’s decision to offer microlending to U.S. entrepreneurs reflects a genuine need for additional lending in the U.S. economy. And who knows? Kiva’s policy may attract a new crop of lenders who want to help at home first, and once they get hooked, spread capital overseas as well. The more capital that goes into the Kiva system, the more chance borrowers everywhere will have to eventually tap into it because many Kiva lenders simply recycle their loans as they are paid back.

We’ve contacted Kiva.org for a formal response.

Crunch Network: CrunchGear drool over the sexiest new gadgets and hardware.

Pete Cashmore: Shooting at Arlington Apple Store [News Video]

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 18:44:55 +0000

A somewhat distressing tech story today: a female employee at the Arlington Apple Store was shot in the shoulder this morning by a man who rang the doorbell at the back of the store. Fortunately the employee is said to be recovering in hospital. It’s thought the motive was attempted robbery.

According to ABC7 news, the shooting happened shortly after 10 a.m. at the Apple Store located at 2700 Clarendon Blvd. A search for the suspect is underway.

The Washington Post adds that the suspect is “a black male, between the ages of 35 and 45, with a medium build and facial hair. He was last seen fleeing the area on foot, wearing a light-colored, short sleeve shirt, light-colored long pants and a dark baseball cap. He was carrying a handgun.”

Tech Crunch: Want The Obama “Hope” Artwork On Your iPhone? Nope, Says Apple.

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:48:19 +0000

Start Mobile has managed to get 18 separate iPhone applications approved by Apple. So you’ll imagine their surprise when one of them was recently rejected. But you may be even more surprised to find out why.

Apparently, Apple doesn’t like the way one piece of art in the app depicts President Obama. Is it out of line or tasteless? Well, you can determine for yourself, because you’ve undoubtedly seen the art in question before: It’s Shepard Fairey’s famous “HOPE” image of Obama that was everywhere during his Presidential campaign.

So why on Earth would this be rejected? Well, here’s the wording in the rejection:

It contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states: “Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

“Ridicules public figures”? This image is hanging in the National Portrait Gallery at the Smithsonian — yet, Apple apparently finds it inappropriate.

To be clear, the app in question is a free demo app of Start Mobile’s galleries and contains a dozen images, but Apple is clearly just unnerved by the Obama one as you can see in the correspondence below which the developer has shared.

Here’s Apple’s initial rejection letter:

Subject: Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery 1.0: Application Submission Feedback
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 12:27:02 -0700 (PDT)
From: iPhone Developer Program
To: XXXXX@XXXXXXX.com, XXXXX@XXXXXXX.net

Please include the line below in follow-up emails for this request.
Follow-up: 74455381
Dear START MOBILE, INC.,

Thank you for submitting Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery to the App Store. We’ve reviewed Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery and determined that we cannot post this version of your iPhone application to the App Store because it contains content that ridicules public figures and is in violation of Section 3.3.12 from the iPhone SDK Agreement which states:

“Applications must not contain any obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory content or materials of any kind (text, graphics, images, photographs, etc.), or other content or materials that in Apple’s reasonable judgement may be found objectionable by iPhone or iPod touch users.”

An example of a public figure is attached.

If you believe that you can make the necessary changes so that Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery does not violate the iPhone SDK Agreement we encourage you to do so and resubmit it for review.

Regards,

iPhone Developer Program
****************************

Here’s Start Mobile’s follow-up trying to explain why the image is not ridiculing a public figure:

Subject: [Fwd: Start Mobile Wallpaper Gallery 1.0: Application Submission Feedback]
Date: Tue, 19 May 2009 21:56:29 -0700
From: John Doffing
To: iPhone Developer Program

Follow-up: 74455381

Apple Developer Program:

The attached image is most certainly NOT content that ridicules a public figure, nor is it in any way “obscene, pornographic, offensive or defamatory”.

The attached image is an iconic portrait by globally acclaimed artist SHEPARD FAIREY, and is actually included in the National Portrait Gallery!

* http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/entertainment/arts_and_culture/7817466.stm

According to the BBC:

“When people think of a portrait of Obama, they think of this image.”
Fairey’s works are also in the collections of the Museum of Modern Art in New York, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art and the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

Thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

–

THANK YOU!

Best,
John

Now, lest you think Apple is possibly rejecting the app because Start Mobile doesn’t have permission to use the artist’s work, Start Mobile has three other apps featuring the work of Shepherd Fairey that are already in the App Store.

Okay, so maybe Apple’s isn’t comfortable with the bit of legal wrangling that is taking place over the artwork? That’s possible, but that’s not what it says in the rejection. And there are other applications like this one that use the image in question. And, you’ll notice, that’s not even the real version of the image, and it’s being used in the app’s icon. Why Apple would let that slip by and not this app? I have no idea.

And further, Start Mobile actually has another app that also features an Obama image that has been sitting around waiting to be approved for 2 months now, presumably for the same reason. That app features artwork from urban artist Justin Bua, and contains the image of Obama shown on the right.

So why doesn’t the developer just remove the offending images and get these apps approved? Well, because he doesn’t think he should have to, and believes this is just another case of the App Store approval process gone off the tracks.

“You notice that my original email to you didn’t scream CENSORSHIP or anything like that. I am quite sure that this is simply what amounts to a clerical error. A billion apps sold. 50k apps. etc etc. So this is just growing pains on their part. But unfortunately, it effected us directly, and had we not done SOMETHING, the end result would have been what amounts to accidental censorship,” Start Mobile’s John Doffing told us over email.

He goes on to note that he spoke with someone in developer relations a few weeks ago about the rejection, and they indicated that any apps that contain images of Obama may simply be getting rejected outright because there was a lot of “incendiary political content” that was coming through the App Store approval process around the time of the election. Sometimes “‘the baby is thrown out with the bathwater,” is what Doffing was told.

Doffing said that openness about what was going on made him hopeful that the app would find its way to the App Store, but that apparently didn’t change anything.

Sadly, this looks like yet another ridiculous App Store rejection. While Apple has no shortage of developers wanting to make apps for the platform, at some point, all of these ridiculous rejections run the risk of turning developers away.

Apple badly needs to straighten out its policies and get a team in place that doesn’t make dozens of silly mistakes with regards to app approvals and denials. The system continues to be broken.

Sure, Apple can do what it wants, but it’s asking developers to make apps for its store, which move iPhone and iPod touch units and make Apple all that money. Increasingly, the promise is that developers can earn a living off of the platform, or at least supplement their income. But they can’t do that if Apple keeps rejecting their apps for no apparent reason.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Pete Cashmore: Should Twitter Crack Down on Pornography?

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:41:21 +0000

For marketers, Twitter has been a dream come true. It’s an open platform growing at a phenomenal rate. This combination can allow a single tweet to be seen by thousands of potential customers. But as Twitter continues its mainstream ascent, it has been targeted by spammers and scammers, something that doesn’t help legitimate marketers or users at all.

Yet despite its spam woes, Twitter has somehow avoided an overflow of content from one of the Internet’s biggest industries: porn. Well, until recently that is. An interesting article in MediaPost describes both marketers and Twitter users noticing an increase in pr0n-related spam, and they are not liking it. The issue makes us wonder: should Twitter stamp out pornography; and how should they go about it?

Twitter Users’ Feedback on Pornography

The MediaPost piece essentially quotes some of Twitter’s active marketers on the issue of Twitter and porn. What they have to say, though, is not pretty at all. While you can guess how users react in the piece, Ben Smith of MerchantCircle sums up the problem best:

MerchantCircle has begun to offer a portfolio of local city-specific coupons via Twitter feeds. “As we have found with any new communication form, pornography and other types of issues creep in,” says Ben Smith, MerchantCircle CEO. “The problem with this type of activity is that it undermines the trust in the communication channel, which will have a disastrous effect on the channel.”

Has pornography taken over Twitter? No, not by a longshot. Is it a growing problem? Absolutely. Things like Twitter porn trojans make it clear that Twitter is not impervious to porn-related spam and malware.

What Do Twitter’s Terms of Service Say?

We took a look at the Twitter Terms of Service, which governs user interactions with the Twitter platform. While it mentions that they can “remove Content and accounts containing Content that we determine … are obscene or otherwise objectionable,” it makes no specific reference to pornography.

Compare this to the terms of service of other social media companies, such as the Facebook Statement of Rights and Responsibilities, which specifically states the following:

6. You will not post content that is hateful, threatening, pornographic, or that contains nudity or graphic or gratuitous violence.

Does this mean that Twitter doesn’t care about porn? Absolutely not – Twitter has addressed pornography spam in the past and we doubt that it would let the Internet’s underground industry tarnish its strong reputation.

And yet Twitter needs to monitor the situation. Porn should not be acceptable on Twitter, especially an open platform that millions of companies and users use for business and marketing every single day. It may be a relatively small issue now, but it will grow more prevalent unless they put a stop to the problem early. It’s easy to forget just how much of the Internet is entirely porn.

First though, Twitter needs to build a search spam solution ASAP. It’s all part of the same core problem that Twitter will need to address.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: porn, pornography, twitter

Pete Cashmore: Twitter Better: 20 Ways to Filter Your Tweets

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 17:02:44 +0000

For a complete collection of Twitter resources, check out The Twitter Guide Book, Mashable’s hub for all things Twitter.

-
Most Twitter users probably follow under a thousand other people, but that’s enough to make it hard to keep track of the real-time stream. I actually started having trouble keeping up when I hit about 50 follows — and depending on how prolific the people you’re following are, you could be dealing with a hard-to-parse Twitter stream even following just a handful of people. But while people like social media fanatic Robert Scoble, who follows over 100,000 people, appear to have the superhuman ability to stay on top of things, the rest of us need help filtering the Twitter stream.

Fortunately, there are a good number of methods and applications we can put to work to filter tweets from the people we’re following. Which work best for you? Let us know in the comments.

(Please note that a few of the apps in this post actually do multiple types of filtering, and so could have theoretically been added to more than one category.)

By Keyword

One way to filter Twitter is by keyword. Filttr is a full-featured, web-based Twitter app that includes keyword-based filtering. You can both blacklist and whitelist key phrases and Filtter will block or allow those tweets. Flittr, though, has a pretty steep learning curve, and before I even added any keywords it started filtering tweets — and took a particular dislike to a few of my Twitter friends. I’m not sure what criteria it was using for those initial filters.

Another full web-based client that includes keyword filtering is Mixero, which is in private beta.

Philtro, which is also in private beta, learns what types of tweets you like based on your ratings. Give thumbs up and thumbs down ratings to tweets, and Philtro slowly figures out what you like and attempts only to bother you with tweets you’d be likely to want to read.

By Links

About 19% of all tweets contain links, but if your Twitter stream moves quickly, you may miss many of the best unless you use a filter. MicroPlaza organizes the links tweeted by out by your followers by recency or popularity. MicroPlaza personalizes the concept employed sites like Tweetmeme, Twitt(url)y, and dailyRT, which assume that the more a link is tweeted, the more worthwhile it is of your attention.

MicroPlaza not only looks at which links are being tweeted and retweeted the most, but also which are being tweeted specifically by the people you’re following. The idea is that you’re most interested in things your followers are saying (otherwise, you wouldn’t be following them), so if they tweet about popular links, they’re more likely to be of interest to you.

One of the coolest features of MicroPlaza, though, is that you can assume the identity of any other Twitter user — so if you follow someone very connected to a specific industry, you can see the links that their friends are sharing.

By Grouping

Another way to filter Twitter, is by organizing your friends into groups. By putting the people you’re following into groups, you can break up and effectively slow down your Twitter stream, making it easier to follow tweets from your friends, colleagues, and family members.

There are a ton of different ways to organize you friends into groups, but one of the easiest is to use a Twitter client that supports grouping, such as desktop heavyweights Seesmic Desktop, Destroy Twitter, and TweetDeck (which has a complimentary iPhone app that also supports groups), or a web-based app like PeopleBrowsr.

Another option is to use a service that helps you create channels or groups of Twitter users and monitor their tweets. Floxee is one of the most full-featured such sites. It not only lets users monitor the tweetstream of a predefined group, but also displays stats about the activity of that group (or “flock”). Other sites you could use include TwitHive, Tweetizen, Twhanel, Crowdstatus, TwittGroups.com, and TweetChannel.

Disclosure: TweetDeck partnered with Mashable to create MashDeck, a branded version of the software.

By Favorites

Favorites aren’t the best way to filter tweets, because the reasons you favorite tweets might not be the same as other people. However, by the same token, tweets that have been favorited by multiple users are generally worth reading for some reason: they’re interesting, funny, clever, extraordinary, etc.

Favrd keeps track of the most favorited tweets, but is limited to those users who have signed up with the service to have their favorites watched. (Careful: Favrd is often NSFW.) Favotter is another favorite tracking site, but again, watches a limited number of users (due to API limitations, according to the site’s about page).

BONUS: TwitterForBusyPeople doesn’t really filter Twitter, but it does organize your recently active follows in a way that you can get an “at a glance” view of the activity of people you’re following. Once you get used to it, it is potentially a good way to make your Twitter stream more manageable.

BONUS 2: Twalala does keyword filtering, but where it really shines is the ability to mute certain users to remove their tweets from your twitter stream temporarily.

Bird illustration via Flickr user matthamm.

Reviews: Flickr, Mashable, Mixero, Seesmic Desktop, TweetDeck, Tweetizen, Twitter

Tags: filter, twitter

Pete Cashmore: Authorize.Net Goes Down

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:40:30 +0000

As a lot of e-commerce businesses and Twitter users are noticing, the entire Authorize.Net infrastructure crashed a few hours ago. For anyone who makes a purchase online, this is huge; Authorize.Net is the largest service for accepting credit cards and e-checks through the web. This means that millions of web-based transactions and purchases have come to a halt.

Luckily, Authorize.Net understands the usefulness of social media in situations like these. They set up a new Twitter account, @AuthorizeNet, earlier today to keep users informed about the recovery of one of the web’s most important payment systems. So what took Authorize.Net down anyway? And when will it be 100% back?

Twitter and the status of Authorize.Net

According to AuthorizeNet, the cause of the outage was a fire at their datacenter in Seattle. This impacted not only their website and transaction platforms, but even their backup center. Couple this with the fact that today starts the 4th of July holiday weekend, and you have a recipe for disaster.

Luckily, it seems that transaction processing has returned, although global processing is still down:

This is the most important aspect of the outage – without the payment system, merchants couldn’t accept credit card payments, which could result in millions of dollars lost among all of its vendors. The website is still down, meaning that accounts can’t be accessed. Luckily, the company had the foresight to use Twitter to keep merchants and users informed. We will update this post with any new developments on the situation.

Update: From the Authorize.Net Twitter account:

#authorizenet Full transaction processing has now been restored with Concord EFS.

The website seems to be loading now too, albeit very slowly.

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: authorize.net, payment

Tech Crunch: Tweetmeme Wants To Be The King Of Retweets

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 16:36:22 +0000

One of the most effective ways to amplify your message on Twitter is to get your followers to retweet it to their followers. Retweeting is also becoming a popular way to pass links around Twitter. They are becoming the new currency of the Web because of the power of passed links. One service in particular, Tweetmeme, is cornering the market on retweets by making it easy for blogs and other sites to add a retweet button to every page. You can see one at the bottom of this post, or the one at right. Just click on it, and it will take you to your Twitter account and populate a message with a “RT,” the headline, and a short link. Go ahead, do it now. Do it again. Okay, thanks.

Lots of sites use Tweetmeme’s retweet button, and it drives a lot of its overall traffic. Nick Halstead, the CEO of Fav.or.it (Tweetmeme’s parent company) says that the buttons are so widespread right now that they are generating 196 million impressions a week ~~month~~. In other words, that is how many pages load with the buttons every ~~month~~ week, and some portion of those result in actual retweets. Halstead is making some improvements to the retweet buttons. Before each retweet generated by the button would include a promotional “via @tweetmeme.” That has now removed to make more room for the actual headline and link. Next week he is going to introduce an image button which can be included in RSS feeds and emails to spread the retweet love even further. And sites will be able to embed a retweet counter to show how many overall retweets they get every week.

More importantly, the retweet buttons will begin supporting URL shortening service other than bit.ly, and will include an option for sites to choose their own custom short URL. (For instance, we use http://tcrn.ch). Tweetmeme will also offer analytics for site owners to see how their retweets are spreading. Basic data will be free, and Tweetmeme will likely charge for more detailed analyticss. All of this, of course, also turns into valuable data for Tweetmeme to determine the most popular links and stories on Twitter, and makes Tweetmeme itself a better news aggregation site.

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Tech Crunch: How To JailBreak the iPhone 3GS

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:52:24 +0000

Before I go defile myself with burgers and beer I wanted to jailbreak my iPhone 3GS for you all. The process was amazingly simple. Using a Windows netbook - it doesn't work under Windows 7 - I simply installed iTunes and ran purplera1n. It took a second to reboot then it rolled through recovery mode, rebooted, and an app called Freeze appeared. Freeze then installed Cydia and all was right with the world.

Richard MacManus: How to Install Chrome and Chromium Side-by-Side (So You Can Play with Extensions!)

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:46:24 +0000

We're sure by now you've heard about the upcoming extensions that will soon arrive in Google's Chrome browser. Already we've seen a handful of these become available including AdSweep, a PageRank checker, Cleeki, and, as of yesterday, a new bookmarking extension from Delicious. However, if you've been running the standard Chrome install (or even the public beta), new features like this are just out-of-reach.

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If you're a developer, you're probably already running the version of Chrome released to the Dev channel, but many "regular folks" are hesitant to make this switch because moving from the stable release to the beta or from the beta to the dev release is a one-way conversion. You can't go back to an earlier build without re-installing Chrome. So how's another ordinary techie supposed to play around with all the cool new stuff coming to Chrome? The easiest way is to install a build of the Chromium browser side-by-side with your (stable) version of Google Chrome.

How to Install Chromium and Chrome on Your PC

First thing's first, if you haven't already installed a copy of Google Chrome on your PC, you should do so now. This new browser built on WebKit is winning converts right-and-left among the early adopter set these days, mainly for its blazing speed. From google.com/chrome you can grab the latest release or, if you're a little more daring, you can click the link to download the public beta version instead.

That was the easy part - the trickier part is installing Chromium, the open-source project that powers Google Chrome. You may have already visited the Chromium site over on Google Code in search of the download only to be confused when no obvious download link jumped out at you. Home, Docs, FAQ, Blog, Group, Terms - but no "Download." In fact, the only download link on the main page points you back to the stable version of Google Chrome. What gives?

They're probably not trying to hide the download from you, it's just a matter of knowing where to look. Developers get this but us "ordinary" tech enthusiasts may need a little assistance. You see, all the Chromium builds are all stored online at build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots. If you're a Mac or Linux user, this is where you can grab your copy, by the way.

Windows users need to head directly to the link at build.chromium.org/buildbot/snapshots/chromium-rel-xp. Once there, you'll notice a list of build numbers accompanied by a "last modified" date.

To get the most recent one, scroll to the bottom of the page and click through to the files listed. The easiest way to install Chromium is to download the "mini_installer.exe" file. This is a simple executable that installs Chromium on your PC.

Make Chromium Extension-Ready

Once installed, there's one more step before you can begin playing around with extensions in Chromium - you need to enable them. To do so, you're either going to need to modify the Chromium shortcut or create your own new shortcut.

Windows XP

On a Windows XP computer, you can just modify the "Target" field in the file properties. To do so:

Go to C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium\Application\ and locate the file called "chrome.exe."
Right-click on the file and choose "Properties." Click the "Shortcut" tab.
In the field labeled "Target" change the text to read (and yes, you need the quotes): "C:\Documents and Settings\[User Name]\Local Settings\Application Data\Chromium\Application\chrome.exe" -enable-extensions
Click "OK" when you're done.
Make sure this modified shortcut is the one you use to launch Chromium from now on. You may want to copy it to your desktop to be sure.

Windows Vista/Windows 7

On Windows Vista or Windows 7, you can't simply modify the "Target," you have to create a new shortcut instead. To do so:

Go to C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Local\Chromium\Application
Right-click in the white space of that folder somewhere and click "New" on the menu that appears.
Choose "Shortcut" from the menu to launch the Create Shortcut wizard.
In the window that appears, enter in the following where it asks you for the location of the item: C:\Users\[User Name]\AppData\Local\Chromium\Application\chrome.exe -enable-extensions
Click "Next" then "Finish"
A new shortcut will appear in the folder. Make sure this shortcut is the one you use to launch Chromium from now on. You may want to copy it to your desktop to be sure.

Launch Chromium and Install Extensions

Now that you have Chromium installed and modified, you can play with extensions. To install an extension, you simply click on the hyperlink for the extension which is usually labeled "extension_name.crx." A box will pop-up asking you to confirm, just click "OK."

Here are some extensions you can try now:

AdSweep: an add-on that hides advertising on web page you visit similar to how AdBlock works. It uses JavaScript to adjust the CSS of a page and is also available as a user script.
PageRank checker: a simple extension that shows the Google PageRank for the current web site.
Cleeki: an extension that delivers the functionality of IE8's Accelerators to other browsers
Gmail Checker: One of the Chromium sample extensions that displays a toolstrip that shows how many messages are in your Gmail inbox.
Subscribe in Google Reader: Another sample extension which adds a button to the URL bar when a page has a feed that can be subscribed to. Clicking the button takes you to Google Reader.
BuildBot Monitor: A third sample extension which shows the current status of the Chromium Build Bot.
Chritter: a Chrome Twitter notifier that shows recent tweets in the tooltip
Delicious: the official alpha version of the social bookmarking extension. (Note: you may have to save the file on disk and then drag on Chrome window to trigger the install instead of just clicking on the link).

Final Note

Keep in mind that Chromium isn't going to give you the same everyday experience of using the stable version of Chrome. While playing around with it, the browser actually crashed on me a couple of times - two times too many to make it worth switching over to permanently. This may just be an issue with the particular build I installed and will be corrected in a future version, but that's what you get when you're playing with cutting-edge tech.

At least I was finally able to get my hands on the extensions and really see what they were all about. And for that, it was well worth the headaches. Extensions are incredible!

Discuss

Pete Cashmore: Google’s New Layout: Love it or Hate It?

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 15:29:45 +0000

Readers may have noticed that Google changed the way it displays search results this week: the Google logo is smaller, results are indented and spacing has been added above the search box. Google also removed the page size indicator, which gives you a hint of how long the page might take to load.

Reader Marek Foss sent us screenshots comparing the old and the new layout (below), which he feels looks more like Google AdSense than a page of Google search results.

And yet we know that such changes can have a significant effect of Google’s revenue and page load times – removal of features (eg. page size indicator) gains a fractional boost in load times, for instance. We also know that Google is meticulous in optimizing pages, and that asking the user what they want (as we do here) might not result in the correct answer, as a CNET article last year explained:

For example, Mayer said, the company wanted to find out how many search results to show users–the customary 10, or 20, 25, or 30? When asked directly, users said they’d like more results on a page, but testing showed otherwise.

Specifically, Google found that when the results increased to 30 per page, people searched 20 percent less overall, Mayer said. After much analysis of server logs, the company found it was because it took about twice as long to display the longer results list for the user, and speed matters.

Google’s latest layout change, then, isn’t likely to be for aesthetic purposes: it’s for speed and revenue. The question is: do you, like Mark, find it less aesthetically appealing?

Are you a fan of the new Google layout?(trends)

Reviews: Google

Tech Crunch: Singing A New Tune: The Imeem Music Store.

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:56:32 +0000

Does embattled music streaming site imeem think it can take on iTunes? For the most part, nearly every streaming song on the site has a download button which links to both iTunes and the Amazon MP3 store. But it is quietly testing its own music download store which bypasses iTunes and Amazon and sells MP3s directly. For instance, this is the case with some Sub Pop artists, such as Iron and Wine and The Shins. When you hit the download button on songs for those artists, a window pops up showing the album where that song came from with with the option to download the entire album or any individual song for $0.99 (see screenshot above). You can then pay imeem directly by credit card or Paypal and download the song to your computer.

This imeem music store is obviously an experiment. The vast majority of songs still direct users to iTunes or Amazon for downloads, and you’d expect imeem to provide its own lightweight desktop client to manage and store the downloads, or at least place them directly into iTunes instead of a download folder on your computer. But it is also likely a sign of things to come. After nearly running out of cash because it was paying out too much money to the music labels for streaming rights, imeem went through a sever recapitalization. Warner Music ended up taking a $20 million hit to write down its investment and bad debt from imeem. Instead of walking away, however, Warner renegotiated its deal with imeem to get new shares without putting in any new money.

Imeem is doing everything it can right now to cut costs and find new sources of revenue. Last week, it announced it will soon stop storing user’s photos and videos, an expensive remnant from its earlier strategy to compete with Facebook and MySpace as a larger social network. Now, imeem is focusing on being a music site. It was one of the first sites to strike streaming deals with all the major labels and for the most part has renegotiated those on more favorable terms. Its iPhone and Android apps, which also offer streaming music, are taking off and driving even more downloads.

And that’s where the imeem music store comes in. Currently, imeem gets a dinky 5 percent affiliate fee for every song its users buy from iTunes or Amazon. As part of its renegotiations with the music labels, it is getting download rights along with its streaming rights I’ve been able to confirm. Instead of getting a few pennies for each song from iTunes and Amazon, imeem can capture the roughly $0.30 per song that doesn’t go to the labels. What is more likely, however, is that it is giving the labels more than the 70 percent cut they get from Apple. Even if it splits its share with the labels and takes only $0.15 per song, imeem still stands to triple its download revenue. Add in ringtone sales and its existing advertising revenues (imeem attracted 25 million unique visitors worldwide in May, according to comScore), and imeem might just have a chance to survive. But if it does survive, it probably won’t be because of its advertising model alone. It will be because the free music is driving enough sales of actual music downloads.

Update: Imeem has confirmed that it is planning to roll out this store more broadly, but says that when it does it will continue to offer iTunes and Amazon downloads as an option.

Below are screenshots of the new post-payment window for songs imeem sells itself and the regular affiliate link window which still pops up for most downlods:

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Tech Crunch: Authorize.net Goes Down, E-Commerce Vendors Left Hanging

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:49:36 +0000

Talk about a serious outage. Payment gateway service provider Authorize.net has been down and out for several hours, a number of tipsters inform us. That has big implications: since the service is used by tens of thousands of e-commerce vendors to accept credit card and electronic checks payments on their websites (example), it likely means millions are being lost during its downtime. PayPal and Google Checkout are still up and running.

It’s unclear when the downtime started exactly, but the consensus is somewhere between 5 and 7 hours at this point (11 AM Eastern), with e-commerce vendors desperately looking for ways to contact the company or get any first-hand information about what’s going on and when the problems will be resolved. Twitter, meanwhile, is buzzing with the news as the United States wakes up (hashtag #authorizenet).

According to some threads in hosting forums, which remain unverified for the moment, there was a fire at a Seattle datacenter during this U.S. holiday weekend which caused a massive technical failure.

We’re trying to get more information about the situation.

Update: nobody is picking up the phone at the U.S. offices of CyberSource, the holding company of Authorize.net. Someone I talked to at their UK offices couldn’t help me and told me I should keep trying the U.S. office.

Update 2: Nathan Cheeley writes:

A fire in Fisher Plaza, Seattle has cause a massive power outage causing leading IP-based payment gateway solution Authorize.Net to go down around approximately 11:15pm PST (last night).

A traffic reporter for KOMO News that operates out of Fisher Plaza tweeted that a fire set off the sprinkler system which fried the generators.

Update 3: Authorize.net has set up a brand new Twitter account to keep everyone updated, confirming the cause of the failure was a fire but also stating an ETA for resolution is not available at this time.

Update 4: a new tweet says backup was in place but that datacenter was impacted as well.

Update 5: tweet number 4 says “transaction processing is back up, with the exception of Global processing.” (12 AM Eastern)

Update 6: Or not. (12:30 AM Eastern)

Update 7: Authorize.net reports that full transaction processing has now been restored with Concord EFS.

(Thanks to everyone who sent this in)

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Tech Crunch: Coming Soon: Even More TechCrunch in London

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:34:11 +0000

It’s been a nice two weeks in San Francisco, but in about 10 hours I’m headed to SFO’s international terminal again. This time, I’m going to London. I’m traveling as part of a group of bloggers, authors and videographers called “The Traveling Geeks,” whose mission is simply to go to various cities around the world and try to learn as much about its tech scene as we can. Our first trip was to Israel last year; now we’re headed to London.

It’s a rag-tag group that includes Craig Newmark of Craigslist, Meghan Asha of Nonsociety, Robert Scoble of everywhere, videographer JD Lasica and many other fine geeks you can read all about at the link above.

As a Sarah-Lacy-bonus-feature I’m sticking around London an extra week, mostly to do some interviews for my book. But I’ll also be meeting with companies, handing out an award at the TechCrunch Europas Awardsfor European startups, hosted by our network site TechCrunch Europe, and—yes, Arrington—writing some posts as well on what I find.

We’re kicking the whole trip off with a Tweet-Up this Sunday night. I think we’ve got about 50 slots left if you act quickly! Yes, there’s a fee to get in, but it comes with free drinks, food and all the Scobleizer you can handle. And, if that’s not enough for you Euro-techies, Intel is giving away a few laptops. (Intel is a sponsor for the trip. For more on sponsors and our ethics statement go here.) Discount code and other details are here.

Hope to see you all there or at the Europas!

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Tech Crunch: Turn Web Content Into A Map With GeoMaker

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:25:06 +0000

At the end of last May, Yahoo released an experimental version of Placemaker, a “geo-enrichment” platform. What it does is help developers make applications location-aware by identifying places in unstructured and atomic content (think RSS feeds, web pages, news, status updates etc.) and returning geographic metadata for geographic indexing and markup. In layman’s terms: it can detect places by scanning content and is capable of putting the aggregate data on a map.

While Placemaker does not serve as a geocoder and thus does not perform address recognition on street-level, it is perfectly capable of geo-extracting and indexing documents or atomic units of text, giving third-party developers the means to mark-up and index Web content geographically in a globally-aware, locally-relevant, and language-neutral manner (and Geo Microformats-compatible, too). But the process of parsing the data could sure have been made a lot easier, and if you weren’t a developer there wasn’t really any use for the tool at all.

Enter GeoMaker, a fresh project by the hands of Yahoo developer Chris Heilmann that aims to make the whole process more user-friendly. Now it just takes three easy steps to copy-paste content either by directly entering data or by fetching it from a Web address and create a map based on the places the underlying software can identify. It even comes with its proper API.

To see it in action, jump to this non-embeddable Flickr video that shows you how it works.

To test it, I entered the URL for a post I wrote yesterday about the apparent geographical differences in terms of level of engagement with social networking services. I don’t have access to a free map developer key, or I would have been able to replace the YMAPPID in the embed code with the key and embed the map, but here’s a screenshot of how it came out:

I can see a couple of uses for this, but it’s worth noting Christian is asking for feedback at this stage, which he intends to use to refine and improve GeoMaker prior to making it available as an open-source project on GitHub.

(Hat tip to Programmable Web)

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Richard MacManus: Twitter Needs a Spam Filter? No, We Need a Marketer Filter

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:16:48 +0000

Has Twitter spam gotten a little out of hand? According to today's top story on Techmeme, it has. Apparently, marketers are calling for Twitter to filter out spam and other adult content from the microblogging service. You know, so their all-important tweets about the products and services they're pushing don't have to share the same web space as that other nasty stuff. But fighting actual spammers is still relatively easy for an end-user: it's called the "unfollow" button.

Ironically, if anyone's to blame for spamming our Twitter timelines, it's the marketers themselves. They've managed to trick our friends into spamming us with their messages instead.

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If You're Getting Real Spam, Blame Yourself

We're not sure where anyone, marketers or otherwise, get off telling Twitter that it's their responsibility to filter the content that flows through their service mainly because Twitter is already doing so. The company itself currently addresses the spam issue by providing an @spam account where you can report spammers and other abusers in the Twittersphere. If the account in question is indeed a spammer, Twitter boots them from the service. That sounds good to us. Simple and effective...at least for the end user. (It's probably a nightmare to deal with at Twitter HQ).

Of course, Twitter doesn't want their service overrun by spammers - no one would. However, they're probably more concerned with wasting their resources to support these fake accounts than they are with the annoyance it causes for their users. But do they have it under control? Perhaps not - fighting spam is sort of like fighting computer viruses. You block one and someone makes a new one. The same goes for spammers - kill one spammer and another appears to take his place. It's an ongoing fight, not a plague that can be wiped out overnight through some magic filter.

Besides, what you consider spam, I may consider "valuable information about a product." Probably not, but there is a grey area there that has to be taken into consideration. Some spam is out-and-out spam, but others may just be "hot deals" from a legitimate company. However, if you didn't want to see said hot deals, you might consider them spam. Still, how would you see them unless you actually followed that account to begin with? Or maybe you turned on auto-follow using a service like SocialToo? If that's the case, it's a little ridiculous for you to get annoyed when half your timeline turns into a slew of "buy this" messages - you only have yourself to blame for that.

Where Actual Spam Hurts Us

The only place that honest-to-goodness spam can really affect you on an everyday basis is not in your own personal timeline of friends' tweets, but when viewing a trending topic's stream or when doing a keyword search. In these cases, spammers hijacking a currently popular hashtag may show up in the timeline, potentially diluting the results with irrelevant information. For this reason alone, we support Twitter's spam-fighting efforts.

Even More Dangerous? "Tweet to Win"

What's actually more concerning than spam, however, is the new trend we'll call "tweet to win." Legitimate companies have begun using Twitter to promote a message - essentially an advertisement about their business's offerings. To cajole twitizens into "spamming" their followers in this way, they're offering prizes or the chance to win prizes in return. (Full disclosure: this author did this once and still regrets it).

This situation hasn't gotten out-of-hand just yet, but it seems like it's only a matter of time before it does. Because really, how many of you could resist yourselves if all of a sudden a company started giving away free Macbook Pros? Oh, apparently not too many of you because you've already spammed up trending topics today with #moonfruit. What's Moonfruit? Why, it's a company that's giving away a free Macbook Pro every day for 10 days. Is this a brilliant social media promotion (as Adam Ostrow of Mashable claims) or just a new, inventive way to junk up the twitterstream with advertisements? We think it's closer to the latter.

The only consolation in this particular case is that Moonfruit doesn't care what your tweet says, so it can just be appended to any ordinary tweet. That's not usually the case - most companies provide a message for you to re-tweet.

What's frightening about this "it's not spam, it's a message from your friend" is that it's really not. My friend isn't actually telling me that Moonfruit is this great new company they just heard about and I really have to go check them out. This isn't a word-of-mouth recommendation - my friend just wants to win a new laptop. They know this, I know this, and the company knows this. And that makes the message just as spammy to me as any other in-stream tweet from an actual spammer.

So, what can be done? Well sure, I could unfollow that so-called friend, but why would I? It's not like they do this regularly and 99% of the time, I like what they have to say. But while one day that friend is tweeting to win a Macbook, another may be tweeting to win something else. Even if only a small percentage of an ever-shifting group of my friends tweeted a promotional message every day, it would be enough to junk up my timeline.

Sadly, that's one kind of spam that Twitter can't really block. And neither can I.

Discuss

Pete Cashmore: Want to Circumvent Green Dam? Buy a Mac

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:13:30 +0000

We’ve noted before that China’s Green Dam, web filtering program supposedly designed to block pornography, but in reality a serious threat to privacy and security, was obviously created in a haste, with many of its shortcomings being revealed as the story unwinds.

Now, besides the fact that it doesn’t work on 64-bit operating systems, we have another one: it doesn’t support Macs. Thus, Apple’s computers seem to be – at least for the time being – exempt from the order that all PC makers must include Green Dam with new PCs sold in China.

This is probably just another temporary setback to the controversial Green Dam initiative, as the program will undoubtedly get updated to include support for currently unsupported operating systems. IDG writes:

“A service representative at a sister company to Green Dam’s main developer, Jinhui Computer System Engineering, said the company is testing the software on non-Windows platforms and will release an updated version if compatibility is added for other OSes.“

Yes, the program is a possible security threat, and yes, the entire initiative was launched before it was actually possible to implement. But judging by the fact that most PC makers have already started to comply with the demands of Chinese authorities – even with the actual initiative being postponed – proves that all those shortcomings probably won’t be enough to stop it.

Tags: censorship, china, Green Dam

Ajaxian: It’s Friday. Play some drums…. HTML5 style

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 13:11:53 +0000

Brian Arnold created a fun sample drum machine simulator using HTML5 <audio>.

PLAIN TEXT

JAVASCRIPT:

function playBeat() {
if (isPlaying) {
var nextBeat = 60000 / curTempo / 4;
// Turn off all lights on the tracker's row
$("#tracker li.pip").removeClass("active");
// Stop all audio
stopAllAudio();
// Light up the tracker on the current pip
$("#tracker li.pip.col_" + curBeat).addClass("active");
// Find each active beat, play it
$(".soundrow[id^=control] li.pip.active.col_" + curBeat).each(function(i){
document.getElementById($(this).data('sound_id')).play();
});
// Move the pip forward
curBeat = (curBeat + 1) % 16;
// Schedule the next one
setTimeout(playBeat, nextBeat);
}
}

That's not all Brian is working on:

I'm also working on something like the ToneMatrix or Tenori-on (Flash and actual devices, respectively) in pure HTML/JS. It works too, but the sounds aren't exactly designed to be great together (it's currently working on a C scale) and so if you're careful, you can get some decent sound but otherwise, it'll hurt your ears.

Ajaxian: Machsend: P2P file sharing via Browser Plus

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:52:52 +0000

Alex MacCaw has released Machsend, a Yahoo! Browser Plus plugin that enables P2P file transfers from inside the browser.

It showcases what can be done with a BP plugin, leaving you wish cross browser functionality.

I guess it is kinda fun to hack the browser :)

Tech Crunch: Brace Yourselves! “Asteroids” Headed For The Big Screen

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:48:41 +0000

According to The Hollywood Reporter, movie studio Universal has won a bidding war to pick up the film rights to the classic Atari video game “Asteroids”. Initially released as an arcade game back in 1979, Asteroids featured a triangular space ship that needed to be navigated through an asteroid field.

The object was to shoot and destroy masses of rock and the occasional flying saucer while avoiding smashing into both, so we suspect it will not turn out to be romantic comedy.

Matthew Lopez will write the script for the feature adaptation, which will be produced by Lorenzo di Bonaventura, the producer of both Transformers movies as well as the 2005 adaptation of the Doom game.

Also wondering how you could possibly build a script around the simple game? Universal is just going to try and see if it sticks:

“As opposed to today’s games, there is no story line or fancy world-building mythology, so the studio would be creating a plot from scratch.”

(Hat tip to The Register, which offers some advice for a story line and potential cast)

Asteroids made by Neave Games

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Tech Crunch: In India, Google Searches For Users With Print Ads

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 10:09:50 +0000

Different markets have different needs for marketing products or services. We all know that much. But that doesn’t take away the weirdness of a company like Google advertising its core product (online search) by using ink that was printed on paper.

Guilty of this hideous crime (I kid, I kid) is Google India, who apparently ordered some targeted quarter-page advertisements to appear in a variety of city supplements of The Times Of India, the leading English-language daily newspaper in the country.

According to PluGGd.in - who we can also credit for taking the picture of the ad - this isn’t exactly the first time Google India has advertised services in dead tree form. They apparently also ran a print campaign to promote the company’s SMS search service back in November 2008.

But this could well be the first time the Internet behemoth feels the need to pimp its search service in print. Or is it?

Have you ever heard about other countries where Google advertises its search engine in printed publications? Let us know in comments.

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Pete Cashmore: TweetCraft: Finally, You Can Tweet While You Raid

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 09:03:48 +0000

I don’t play World of Warcraft anymore. The doctor ordered me not to. Suffice to say that I actually started reading about TweetCraft 10 hours ago, and then ended up watching the entire BlizzCon ‘08 PVP tournament replay.

However, if I did play today, I’d definitely appreciate the ability to tweet in-game. Waiting for 25 people to come together for a raid, or standing in front of the battlegrounds gives you a lot of time to kill, and what better way to do it than to tweet your heart away?

Now you can. TweetCraft, a Twitter plugin for World of Warcraft been in the works for a while, and although it’s still not the easiest thing to install (read the full instructions and some background here), it’s fully functional.

Basic features, beside in-game tweeting, are the ability to queue tweets for later, upload in-game screenshots through TwitPic, autotweet certain events such as entering an instance (for the love of God, please don’t use this option), and the ability to connect with other AddOns which can also register events and set them to autotweet.

If you’re worried about breaking Blizzard’s terms of service, it’s a bit of a gray area, but you’re probably safe. From the FAQ:

“Is this a violation of World of Warcraft’s Terms of Use or the new AddOn policies?
As far as we know, no. We do not do any internal memory reading or other hacks to the Warcraft client. You could argue that it’s possible to follow a Twitter user that would add advertising in-game which would violate the addon policy for in-game advertising, but the onus is on the user of TweetCraft to ensure the people they friend don’t write messages (Tweets) that violate Warcraft’s AddOn policy. In short, it’s up to each person to ensure they’re following Warcraft’s terms of use. “

However, since it is, in part, a third-party app, it’s always wise to wait for official word from Blizzard before you install it.

There are some bad news, too: it doesn’t work on Macs, as it requires an external, Windows-based application to run while you play.

Download TweetCraft here, check out an introductory video below, and remember; if you need a shaman, PVP-specced, has a job but will probably get fired after reactivating his account, I’m back at Burning Legion (EU) (;.

Reviews: Twitpic, Twitter

Tags: twitter, world of warcraft

Tech Crunch: First iPhone 3GS Jailbreak Hits The Web

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 08:43:47 +0000

George Hotz, the 20-year old hacker who originally unlocked the iPhone, has released a jailbreaking application for the iPhone 3GS codenamed “purplera1n.” It’s currently Windows-only (Windows 7 not supported), and requires the latest iTunes installed, and an iPhone 3GS with the 3.0 firmware.

Hotz mentions in a blog post that the jailbreak for Mac is “coming soon.” The iPhone Dev Team did release a unlock for 3.0 which did not work on the iPhone 3GS, but Hotz’s version does (although it doesn’t free you from your current carrier).

Hotz goes over the process of the jailbreaking on his blog:

Connect your iPhone normally. Click “make it ra1n”. Wait. On bootup, run Freeze, the purplera1n installer app.

Hotz does warn users that you’ll need to backup your data just in case, and emphasizes that the tool is still in beta. Hotz also mentions that normally he does not make tools for the public, and rather have the iPhone Dev Team figure out the unlock process. Hotz continues by explaining that Apple will probably find a fix for the loophole, release an update, and he will go back to work on finding the next loophole.

Update: John Biggs over at CrunchGear goes through the process of jailbreaking his iPhone 3GS using Hotz’s program.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Tech Crunch: My Interview With Antitrust Expert Gary Reback: Google’s Looming Antitrust Issues

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:27:45 +0000

On Wednesday I spoke with antitrust attorney Gary Reback, the man who spearheaded the push to break up Microsoft in the nineties. The event was hosted by HBSTech at the Computer History Museum in Silicon Valley.

If anyone in the world can make antitrust law interesting, it’s Reback.

Much of the hour plus conversation focused on the history of antitrust law and Reback’s experience in big antitrust cases from his new book, Free the Market!: Why Only Government Can Keep the Marketplace Competitive (buy it here). But we also spoke about current events and his concerns that lax antitrust enforcement has led to less competition today in tech than is optimal.

We spent a lot of time on Google. His chief concern is Google Books (jump to the 30 minute mark), and he argues that a DOJ investigation is appropriate. I’m more concerned with competition in search and search marketing, and we spoke about this as well.

One interesting insight from the conversation: I ask Reback if he thinks we’d be in a better world if Microsoft had in fact been broken up into two or more companies as was originally ordered. His response - “no.” The investigation and lawsuits themselves, he said, did enough to force Microsoft’s hand and allow browsers like Firefox, Chrome and others to blossom.

We’re giving away 15 autographed copies of Reback’s book. We’ll determine the winners in the same way we did with Sarah Lacy’s book - retweet this post using the green button below. We’ll select the winners randomly from retweets that occur by midnight California time on July 3rd.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Emily Chang: gdgt

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 07:08:13 +0000

A new kind of technology site -- a social gadget platform that enables you to connect with the community through your gadgets, and connect with your gadgets through the community. It's a place for you to engage with your devices and hang out with people who are as passionate about their gear as you are. (Disclosure: Emily Chang's company, Ideacodes, did the design for gdgt) URL: gdgt.

Programmable Web: Yahoo’s Placemaker Yields the GeoMaker Project

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 06:05:09 +0000

You may remember our earlier post on Yahoo Placemaker, a new “geo-enrichment” platform that includes an API (our Placemaker API Profile) that can be used to make applications and data sets location-aware by determining the “whereness” of unstructured content. Now, Yahoo developer evangelist Christian Heilmann has released GeoMaker, a new app that makes it dead simple to use the Placemaker API with any web site.

Christian developed GeoMaker as a side project using PHP and several Yahoo developer libraries (including YQL and YUI). Although in its initial stages, GeoMaker currently allows users to input text or a URL (e.g., http://icant.co.uk/geomaker/index.php?url=http://news.yahoo.com) to be ge-enriched. Subsequently, a Yahoo Map is output, including code for copying pasting the map on to your favorite site or blog. As a bonus, GeoMaker also outputs the geo-enriched location data in Geo Microformats. Christian has also put together a short video (below) that provides a good overview of GeoMaker on the Yahoo Developer Network Blog.

GeoMaker serves as a great example of how a viable and functional web app can be rapidly and easily developed by leveraging existing developer libraries and APIs. Christian is currently asking for feedback, which he intends to use to refine and improve GeoMaker, prior to making it available as an open-source project on GitHub (our GitHub API Profile). Nicely done, Christian!

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Yahoo Placemaker API Profile

Tech Crunch: Does Anybody Still Use Second Life? And If So, How Much Is It Worth Today?

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 05:48:26 +0000

Analyst firm Next Up Research has published an extensive report on Linden Lab, the San Francisco company behind virtual world Second Life. The research is based on aggregate data and is available on SharesPost, a site set up to trade shares of privately held companies (if you register, you can download the report for free from that page, or you can find other valuation reports on companies like Facebook and LinkedIn). The report goes rather deep into the valuation of the Linden Lab, which it pegs at somewhere between $658 million and 700 million.

Richard MacManus: How to Be an Effective CEO

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 04:25:00 +0000

This is one post/chapter in a serialized book called Startup 101. For the introduction and table of contents, please click here.

First-time entrepreneurs are usually also first-time CEOs. When you look at your first business card that says CEO, don't forget that it is not necessarily telling the truth. You earn the title of CEO through your actions and your results. You still have your training wheels on.

Fortunately, there is probably more advice available on how to be an effective CEO than on almost any other subject. This chapter gives you a quick guide, but do invest the time to read the classics, particularly:

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"The Effective Executive," by Peter Drucker,
"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," by Stephen Covey.

These are timeless classics. Their authors do not attempt to create any modern theory or expound on any particular business or market trend. The books work because they are based on observation. The authors observed effective people to find out what they did right.

The Effective Executive

Peter Drucker's "Effective Executive" was written in 1966. It is a slim tome and easy to read, even if the language is a bit dated. Drucker focuses on how to allocate time, because you can get more of almost any resource except time. His advice to find time for uninterrupted work is particularly relevant to today's multi-tasking world. He is also very clear about the need to allocate enough time for people. If you need an hour with someone, don't think you are being efficient by rushing through the meeting in 15 minutes.

CEOs allocate resources. The first resource they need to allocate is their own time.

One popular book today is "Now, Discover Your Strengths," by Marcus Buckingham. Drucker was a big proponent of accentuating a person's strengths rather than managing their weaknesses.

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

"The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People," first published in 1989, is a self-help book written by Stephen R. Covey. It has sold over 15 million copies. Drucker observes the following habits in effective people:

Habit 1: Be proactive.
Change starts from within. Most people react to external forces. To lead effectively, you have to overcome that natural tendency.

Habit 2: Begin with the end in mind.
You cannot lead unless you know where you want to get to.

Habit 3: Put first things first.
This is similar to what Drucker recommends. You need to have a very clear view of what is important, so that you know what to spend time on. Note that this often means leaving your comfort zone by acting on tasks that you don't naturally like or feel competent in performing.

Habit 4: Think win/win.
Seek agreement and relationships that are mutually beneficial. In cases in which a win/win deal cannot be achieved, accept that agreeing on "no deal" may be the best alternative. In developing an organizational culture, be sure to reward win/win behavior among employees, and avoid inadvertently rewarding win/lose behavior.

Habit 5: Seek first to understand, then to be understood.
First seek to understand the other person, and only then try to be understood. Stephen Covey presents this habit as the most important principle of inter-personal relations. Effective listening is not simply echoing what the other person has said through the lens of your own experience. Rather, it is putting yourself in the mindset of the other person, listening empathetically for both feeling and meaning.

Habit 6: Synergize.
Through trustful communication, find ways to leverage individual differences to create a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Through mutual trust and understanding, people can often solve conflicts and find better solutions than would have been obtained through either person's own solution.

Habit 7: Sharpen the saw.
Take time out from production to build production capacity through personal renewal of the physical, mental, social/emotional, and spiritual dimensions. Maintain a balance among these dimensions.

Three Things a CEO Has to Do Well

This is all you need to do as a CEO:

Set direction and milestones (resisting the tempting distraction of juicy diversification). The ability to clearly say, "No, we are not doing that," is very important.
Allocate resources (both financial and human, starting with your time).
Hire and fire the top team (we have devoted a separate chapter to hiring an A-Team because this is much harder to say than do).

Making the Transition from Entrepreneur to CEO

Your average entrepreneur would probably say, "Yeah, right!" if told that they have to do only three things. The reality of a startup is that you usually have to do a bit of everything. You have to be product manager, if not the actual coder and designer. You become the chief marketing officer, chief financial officer, chief of just about anything that needs to get done.

This, of course, is unsustainable. You have to work out a transition plan that allows you to hire people to take over all the jobs that you currently do except the three CEO jobs.

Here are five tips for managing that transition:

Record how much time you spend on these tasks. Understand the process. You cannot hire for, outsource, or automate a task unless you understand it yourself. Look at this "chief of everything" phase as your chance to learn.
Recognize the reality that you are not an expert in these tasks. So K.I.S.S.
Understand the difference between "core" and "context" in your business. Core is what you have to do really well and do in-house. Everything else you can and should outsource.
Hire, outsource, and automate in proportion to the growth of your business. If you can manage five clients with everything else you are doing, and your two-year plan calls for 20 clients, hire someone who knows how to win and manage 20 clients (not someone who managed 1,000 clients at their last job). When you finally get the resources, there is a huge temptation to over-engineer.
Pay particular attention to hiring someone to do the one job that you love and could continue doing very competently (whether that is coding, design, marketing, sales, or finance). Holding on to this one job, your comfort zone, is hugely tempting. But it is a huge mistake that will prevent you from becoming an effective CEO.

Discuss

Tech Crunch: As The DOJ Pounces, Google Makes Book Search Even Better

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 01:43:58 +0000

Google received some unfortunate news today, with the U.S. Department of Justice formally announcing the investigation of the $125 million settlement Google made with the Author’s Guild to pay authors a nominal fee for copyrighted works it has scanned and made available on the Web. The settlement has drawn its fair share of critics, including Jeff Bezos. But Google keeps on plugging away, making its book search better and better.

For instance, Google Books recently launched a plethora of new and innovative features to make the product easier for consumers to use, such as embeddable previews and better in-book search. Today, it added one more useful feature relating to search: a visual cue on the right margin showing the pages throughout a book where a search term appears.

When you search within a book, a page appears in a window, with a scrollbar on the right. Little rectangles will appear in the margin beside the scrollbar to show you where your results are located. When your mouse hovers over one of the rectangles indicating where a search term can be found in the book, you’ll get a preview of the search results and the option of jumping directly to that respective page by clicking on the rectangle.

With the previous search function, it wasn’t as easy to find the exact location of the results in a book. With this simple tweak, Google has improved the visual display of search functions, helping users navigate results in a more organized and efficient way. The DOJ will probably hold that against it.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Tech Crunch: Google Voice Now Lets You Change Your Number. It’ll Cost You $10.

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:49:18 +0000

When I first signed up for GrandCentral a few years ago, I lived in a different city. As such, I had a different area code. And that was fine until I moved and Google, which bought GrandCentral in 2007 and subsequently put it on lockdown, prohibited me from changing it. I didn’t think much of it until my GrandCentral account magically transformed into a Google Voice account a few months ago, taking a good service and making it excellent. Unfortunately, I was still stuck with my old number. But now, there’s an option to change it.

The “Change your number” functionality, as spotted today by Boy Genius Report, is great news for users like me. Unfortunately, it will cost you to change it. There’s a one-time $10 fee, which in my mind is well worth it. Best of all, Google Voice will activate your new number right away and still keep your old one active and forwarding to the new one for three months.

What’s also nice is that in picking your new number, you can search by area code and by a word that you want your number to contain. So for example if I search for area code 408 and the word “tuna,” I can get a 408 number that ends in 8862 (”T-U-N-A” on a keypad).

Here are the details:

There is a $10 one-time fee to change your Google Voice number. Here is how it works:

Pick a new number in the area codes we have.

Pay $10 with Google Checkout, using your credit card.

Your new number becomes active right away.

Calls to your old number will keep coming to your Google Voice account for three months, so you have time to tell everyone about your new number.

We’re still waiting on number portability (the ability to use your existing numbers as Google Voice numbers), but this is a nice start.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Tech Crunch: Fitnio: Finally, An iPhone Exercise App That Gives You Control Of Your Music

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:45:06 +0000

Since the debut of the App Store last summer, my iPhone has become an indispensable part of my workout routine. The phone makes it easy to track your workout progress both in the gym and outdoors, where applications like RunKeeper allow you to use the phone’s integrated GPS to plot your bike or running course on a map. But there’s been one annoyance that’s aggravated me (and many others) to no end: the limited control you have over your music once you’ve launched one of these fitness apps. Fortunately the iPhone 3.0 software update finally fixes this, and a RunKeeper-like application called Fitnio(iTunes Link) has managed to beat some of its more well-known competitors to the punch.

Until the release of the iPhone 3.0 software update, developers were unable to access the phone’s music library. In order to play music as you ran, you’d have to first open up the phone’s iPod application, pick a playlist, then switch over to the excercise app. Once there, you could use your headphone’s multifunction button to execute some basic commands (next song, pause, and previous song), but if you wanted to switch playlists you were out of luck.

Fitnio breaks down this barrier, allowing you to browse through your iTunes playlists and queue one up for the next time you begin a jog. It may not sound like a big deal, but it’s certainly a very welcome change. Unfortunately there’s still no way to jump to a specific album or artist’s songs, but developer Robby Walker says that those will be coming in the future.

Fitnio is a pretty barebones app, without the nice visualizations you’ll see on RunKeeper (it also doesn’t have voice overs announcing your progress, which some people may miss). But it gets the job done, tracking your movements while biking or running using the phone’s integrated GPS, and it’s only a fifth of the price of RunKeeper’s Pro app, coming in at $1.99.

Of course, Fitnio’s musical advantage over the competition will likely be short-lived. Given that all developers have access to the new features in the iPhone 3.0 software update, you can expect similar apps to include this feature very soon. That said, if you’re looking for a fix right now, Fitnio is worth checking out.

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Richard MacManus: Microsoft Wishes You Happy Porn Browsing in New Vomit-Filled Video, Then Retracts Ad

Fri, 03 Jul 2009 00:36:20 +0000

Under waves of ever-increasing competition from Mozilla, Safari, and Google, Microsoft has released a series of edgy, PSA-style online videos to promote Internet Explorer 8.

Featuring one-time Lois and Clark actor Dean Cain, the ads are uncharacteristically hip and discuss such real-world Internet problems as the fear of missing something (a.k.a. insomnia by social media) and the fear of your S.O. finding your porn cache. However, at least one of the videos was just too cool for Microsoft. After becoming strangely popular and talked-about online, the video was renounced by the software mega-company and pulled from the promotional website. Somewhere tonight, a creative director weeps.

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A Microsoft rep wrote in an email to CNET, "We created the... video as a tongue-in-cheek look at the InPrivate Browsing feature of Internet Explorer 8, using the same irreverent humor that our customers told us they liked about other components of the Internet Explorer 8 marketing campaign. While much of the feedback to this particular piece of creative was positive, some of our customers found it offensive, so we have removed it."

The spot itself features a young lady spewing copious amounts of what used to be breakfast on a young man. She'd borrowed his laptop and evidently stumbled upon some hideous new Rule 34 form of online entertainment. The ad serves to highlight IE8's sneaky no-history InPrivate browsing feature.

The ads are, as a group, delightfully off-brand. They're too cool for Microsoft, which has generally dwelt somewhere between stodgy and cutesy in terms of marketing.

Better still, they show that Microsoft just might be listening to what users really need: Web Slices to get quick views of personally important sites without wasting unnecessary time browsing between full-on tabs; sharing accelerators for sending along lolcats or other media with a single right-click; and yes, a way to keep the missus from finding out about your love affair with Suicide Girls.

The features are nifty in themselves. We'd totally use them if we weren't already committed to Chrome and Firefox.

Discuss

Richard MacManus: Iran's Mobile SMS Up & Running; Will Twitter Start to Lose the Green Hues?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 23:08:43 +0000

According to a report today from the BBC, Iranians are able to text message one another for the first time since the day before the presidential elections.

SMS service, which political dissidents had used to spread messages and organize protests, has been restricted since June 11, causing many Iranians to use Twitter, Facebook, YouTube, and other social sites to broadcast and communicate.

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The BBC report stated that, according to Iranian news outlets, SMS capabilities are now unblocked but that users are experiencing massive technical problems. Some messages as old as three weeks were just now being received, and some messages were delivered multiple times.

Iran's broken digital communication infrastructure caused many Iranians to turn to services such as Twitter, using proxies to work around government restrictions for web use. Twitter became so integral to Iranians' communication, particularly with the wider global community, that the U.S. State Department asked Twitter to postpone scheduled maintenance which would have occurred in the immediate aftermath of the election and resultant protests. Other services rushed to add Persian translation features.

Hopefully, the unblocking of text messaging in Iran is a sign that communication channels are returning to normal. So, does this mean that everyone's new favorite color, "Solidarity Green," will begin to fade away from social web avatars sometime soon? Once the country and its government emerge from crisis mode, what news will come from Iran, and what will the Internet have to say about it?

Discuss

Tech Crunch: Dice Reports Murky Waters For Tech Jobs

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:51:08 +0000

After months of dismal unemployment numbers, this morning’s continued growth in the unemployment rate from 9.4% in May to 9.5% for the month of June reinforces the fact that the U.S. is still very much in the midst of recession. Additionally, the U.S. Department of Labor reported today that employers cut 467,000 jobs in June, compared to 322,000 jobs in May. Unfortunately, the tech industry is still feeling the heat of the recession, with the rate of available jobs not improving much from the past few months, according to technology jobs site Dice.com.

Tom Silver, senior vice president of Dice.com, told us this morning that Dice.com is reporting a 44% year-over-year drop in job listings for the month of June. May’s year-over-year decline hovered around 45%. And Silver also points to a rise in the Department of Labor’s unemployment rate for the “Computer and Mathematics sector,” (the area best associated with the tech sector). June’s unemployment rate for the tech sector almost tripled year-over year, from 1.9% in June of 2008, to 5.4% in June of 2009. While Silver says that the tech job market is certainly better than during the fourth quarter of 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, the number of job opportunities have remained stagnant over the course of the past few months.

According to the TechCrunch layoff tracker, layoffs in the tech sector may be slowing down, which we reported in May. Layoffs are still taking place—the tracker has increased by 10,000 lost jobs over the past two months to a total of 340,000 individual layoffs. But there is a marked difference in the pace of layoffs from late 2008 and the first quarter of 2009, when layoffs were increasing by 100,000 every few weeks For instance, it only took three weeks for cumulative tech layoffs to go from 200,000 to 300,000 in February and five weeks for layoffs to go from 100,000 to the 200,000 mark before that in January.

Though companies are cutting back and limiting hiring for the near future, Silver says that there are still certain jobs within the tech sector that are in demand. Developers who are skilled in the areas of virtualization and IT security are among those in high-demand. And Silver maintains that tech companies are always in need of talented and skilled programmers. But for all the marketing and business development folks out there, demand usually picks up in line with the economy.

You can check out CrunchBoard for tech job listings.

Photo Credit: Flickr/Lisa Brewster

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Richard MacManus: How FriendFeed Could Become the Ultimate Social Media Tracking Service

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:25:30 +0000

FriendFeed, the multi-network activity aggregator co-founded by Gmail creator Paul Buchheit, announced today that it has entered the crowded field of real time search. FriendFeed was already the best way to learn what early adopter social media users were saying about any topic across blogs, Twitter, delicious and other diverse social media sites. If FriendFeed wants to step it up to the next level and challenge business-class conversation trackers, we believe there are four steps the company needs to take.

We think that would make a whole lot of sense. In fact we think that if real time search were turned into a business tool it could challenge social media monitoring services like Radian6, Scout Labs and Sysomos. Here's what we think needs to happen in order for that to become a possibility.

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We already use FriendFeed to keep track of who quietly touches our blog posts out around the web. For example, our recent post Google Updates Blog Search - Where's The Innovation hasn't gotten any comments yet - but FriendFeed shows us that leading marketing blogger Andy Beal shared it with his network on Google Reader. That's good to know.

We think FriendFeed could offer some of the most sophisticated social media conversation tracking on the web, if it just took a few steps in particular.

Broaden the Index Beyond Opt-In

Right now FriendFeed tracks what users say and do across more than 40 different social media sites and any RSS feeds (like blog feeds) that users input as part of their profiles. It's a great way to track people and topics on networks you yourself don't participate in.

Because FriendFeed is such a high-profile startup, many people have set up accounts just to try it and have their activities pulled into the site automatically even though they no longer use FriendFeed itself. That adds to the richness of the site's search function.

If FriendFeed wants to offer full-service conversation tracking, though, it is going to need to go beyond the early-adopter crowd that has opted in to having their activities imported into the site. FriendFeed is going to need to proactively discover and import feeds from users of Twitter, Delicious, SlideShare, BrightKite, etc., and bloggers who have not set up FriendFeed accounts. This will increase the usefulness of the site's search function by an order of magnitude.

That's no small task! Many startups have tried to do social-media-wide search in the past but few can achieve the scale and speed needed to pull it off well. Two things make us think FriendFeed can do it. First, who better than the creator of Gmail to achieve new heights in rapid, scalable information delivery? Buchheit isn't the only former Googler on the team, either. Second, FriendFeed has been engineered from the start to import massive amounts of data. A number of the streams FriendFeed pulls in aren't even from RSS feeds as you'd expect; the company's co-founders told ReadWriteWeb in an early interview that they import from a wide variety of Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) beyond RSS.

Spam Control

Right now there's a fair amount of spam on FriendFeed and we imagine it's only going to get worse. There's also a lot of people who use the service as their RSS reader - so blog posts and search results show up in your search results even though no one has touched them.

This wouldn't be a difficult problem to solve. FriendFeed is just a few steps away already from allowing searchers to query all sources other than manually imported RSS feeds except when a feed item has one or more comments or "likes" added by a user.

Apply Business Savvy

There are all kinds of ways that FriendFeed could become more business savvy. One way we would suggest is through making more use of LinkedIn.

FriendFeed users have been able to associate their LinkedIn profiles with their FriendFeed accounts since the start of the service, and job changes used to be displayed right along with Tweets and other online activity. It was great. Unfortunately, LinkedIn knows what a pot of gold it sits on and took the noxious step of cutting off these kinds of importing functions by obscuring the HTML on its profile pages. FriendFeed was scraping those pages for changes and it was a great service for everyone. It was pure folly by LinkedIn; it wasn't specifically targeting FriendFeed, but as a result FriendFeed users no longer see when their friends change jobs and so no longer click through to LinkedIn to learn more.

Fortunately FriendFeed hasn't removed LinkedIn as a field that can be viewed by users; it just doesn't update anymore. When you see that someone has said something in your search stream, you can often click through to their LinkedIn profile to see what they do for a living and what their job title is. FriendFeed could display job titles by default on a business version of FriendFeed if LinkedIn was more agreeable, or FriendFeed could look to the much friendlier and social media-savvy Google Profiles instead.

Knowing the job titles of people who have bookmarked your web page in Delicious or shared it in Google Reader would be really valuable.

Some other business-oriented rules, like alerts when certain discussion thresholds have been reached, would go a long way too.

Bring Back Aggregate Analysis

When FriendFeed launched, it offered some great data visualization, showing you the users whose content you "liked" the most and who "liked" your content the most. It showed in a pie chart which services most of your content came in through.

Unfortunately, in a recent redesign aimed to make the service more mainstream-user friendly, those visualizations were eliminated.

Bring that and more back and you've got a viable competitor for services that businesses pay hundreds or thousands of dollars a year for. Add some sentiment analysis, made easier by FriendFeed's "like" feedback function, and you've got a really desirable product.

Will FriendFeed take these steps though? That depends on whether it continues its Quixotic quest to capture more everyday consumer users for a cross-network, real-time conversation aggregator (!) or finds audiences that appreciate its value and starts building out features that they will pay for.

Discuss

Tech Crunch: The Infamous 2009 LimeWire Pizza Fiasco

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 22:08:29 +0000

July 1, 2009 - the day the music wars started in earnest. Last night the guys from Dovecote Records, a small music label based in New York, were hanging out at their local bar. Employees from file sharing startup LimeWire showed up to have a party. There was confusion over the ownership of some pizza, and a riot almost ensued.

From the Dovecote Blog:

Woman: “Who the FUCK are you? And why are you eating our pizza?”

Kosuke and Paul look confused.

Kosuke: Are you joking? Is this a joke?

Woman: No this is definitely NOT a joke. I want to know who you are and why you’re eating our pizza.

Kosuke: Well our friend came in and told us there was free pizza at the bar. We are. So. Sorry. It was a misunderstanding.

Woman: (with unbridled entitlement) This is a company party our CEO is here and you STOLE our pizza. Are you from out of town? Because let me tell you, NOTHING is free in New York City. Nothing is free… well maybe except for the condoms in Times Square.

Paul and Kosuke continue apologizing. They offer to pay for the two slices.

Woman: (didactically snobbish) We don’t want your money. No. Enjoy the pizza, but you can’t steal other people’s things. You can’t take what’s not yours

Again the duo continues their apologies. Kosuke tries to turn the situation around and befriend them.

Kosuke: What company do you guys work for?

Woman: We work for Limewire.

Kosuke’s eyes go wide. Anger festers in his pupils.

Kosuke: Oh ok. Well I work at a record label so fuck you. You’ve stolen from us enough. (Bites pizza. Begins to walk away.)

Then things really got out of hand. One of the Dovecote guys grabbed a whole pizza and tried to run away with it. A Limewire engineer pursues and pours beer on him:

Paul’s anger builds. He stands up. Puts his bag on runs out the door, taking an entire pizza box with him. Matt T., a software developer at Limewire, tries to stop Paul by grabbing him and pouring beer all over his shirt, backpack, laptop, and pants.

We usually side against the labels on just about everything, but in this case we’re with Dovecote. Limewire is a mess and everyone knows it.

Whatever happens in the future with the battle between users and labels, we know one thing. July 1, 2009, the date of the Infamous 2009 LimeWire Pizza Fiasco, was when it wasn’t just about words and lawsuits any more. On that day, the music wars turned humorously physical.

Crunch Network: CrunchBase the free database of technology companies, people, and investors

Pete Cashmore: 10 Ways to Find People on Twitter

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:35:56 +0000

Twitter is all about facilitating conversations, but until you’re following some people, it’s just a blank page. Once you find people to follow and talk to, however, Twitter becomes exceptionally useful. You can share thoughts, ask questions, get updates about news, music, brands, and businesses, and discover helpful links and information. Finding good people to follow, especially for new users staring at a blank page the first time they log in, can be a bit daunting, though.

Thankfully, there are a number of ways you can find people on Twitter. Here are ten sites you can use to locate “tweeps” to follow. Let us know in the comments if you know of any others.

People Search

1. Twitter People Search – Twitter’s built in people search isn’t the greatest way to find people on Twitter, but it’s probably where you should start. Twitter searches the “real names” people enter in their bio fields, but because there isn’t much accompanying bio information and because Twitter doesn’t have any sort of requirement to use your actual name, that can make it a bit difficult to find people, especially those with common names. It also makes it hard to verify that the people you find are actually who you’re looking for. Still, it’s a good place to begin your search.

2. Tweepz – Because the biographical information Twitter collects is minimal, no Twitter people search engine can improve on Twitter’s that much. Third-party site Tweepz does an admirable job, though. Tweepz lets you limit searches to specific parts of Twitter’s user information (like name, bio, and location), filter results by follower/following numbers, location, and other extracted terms, and greatly improves on the layout of the search results.

3. TweepSearch – TweepSearch lets you search by Twitter name or location, or search a specific username to get a list of all friends and followers. However, if the “indexing” number listed on their main page is accurate, they’re crawling about 600,000 less Twitter user profiles than Tweepz.

4. TwitDir – TwitDir is another search engine, but if the crawling stats are accurate, it’s well behind the curve, searching about 3 million fewer users than Tweepz. Still, it’s not a bad people search engine, and has some helpful “top” lists if you’re concerned with who the most popular or prolific people on Twitter are (then again, they’re also not that up-to-date — the site doesn’t seem to know who @aplusk is, for example).

Directories

5. Twellow – Your best bet for finding like-minded Twitter users might be to use a directory, and Twellow is certainly one of the most complete. Nearly 6 million Twitter user profiles are indexed in Twellow and placed into a huge number of categories. You can search the entire lot of profiles, or confine searches to a single category. Twellow also operates a local directory called the “Twellowhood.”

6. WeFollow – Created by Digg founder Kevin Rose, WeFollow is a Twitter user directory that organizes people by hashtags. WeFollow is user-generated and anyone can add themselves by tweeting @wefollow with three #hashtags that describe them.

7. Just Tweet It – Just Tweet It is another user created Twitter directory. It’s not quite as well organized or easy-to-use as Twellow or WeFollow, but it is certainly large enough that you should give it a browse when trying to locate people in your interest areas to follow.

Recommendations

8. Twubble – Twubble recommends people to follow by spidering the people you’re already following and recommending users that they’re following. The idea is that the people you’re following are interesting to you, so if more than one of them are also following another person, that person might also be interesting. Of course, that means that Twubble can’t be your first stop when finding people to follow — you already need to be following some people for the service to work.

9. Twitterel – Twitterel attempts to find people you might be interested in following by doing keyword searches of tweets. The service can update you by email, direct message, or @reply when it finds new people it thinks you might be interested in following. It’s kind of like Google Alerts for Twitter follow recommendations.

10. Who Should i Follow? – Enter you Twitter username into Who Should i Follow? and the service finds users who are similar to those you’re already following. The site doesn’t disclose information about how it works, but in my experience it is pretty accurate at finding users whose tweets are similar in content to your followers. The results can be filtered by how popular the people are, and how close they are to a specific location.

BONUS: Mr. Tweet – Mr. Tweet is a very popular Twitter app that lets you give and receive recommendations about Twitter users. The app also provides more helpful statistics about users, such as tweets per day or the percentage of tweets containing links. To get the most out of Mr. Tweet, consider installing the Firefox plugin, which gives you access to statistics and user recommendations while you’re browsing Twitter.

More Twitter resources from Mashable:

- 19 Twitter Desktop Apps Compared
- 6 Gorgeous Twitter Visualizations
- Top 7 Twitter Tutorials on YouTube
- 5 Ways Twitter Can Save You Money

Reviews: Digg, Twellow, Twitter, WeFollow

Tags: Just Tweet It, people search, tweepsearch, tweepz, twellow, twitdir, twitter, twitterel, twubble, wefollow, who should i follow

Pete Cashmore: UserTesting.com: Get Video of Real Users Testing Your Web App

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:34:53 +0000

This post is part of Mashable’s Spark of Genius series, which highlights a unique feature of startups. If you would like to have your startup considered for inclusion, please see the details here. The series is made possible by Microsoft BizSpark.

Name: UserTesting.com

Quick Pitch: Provides real users who record their screen and voice as they use your website. $29 and 1-hour turn-around.

Genius Idea: If you’re launching a new web app, ideally you’ll have time to organize a focus group and watch real users interact with your software, and tweak it based on the feedback. Unfortunately, that can be both expensive and time consuming. UserTesting.com looks to solve this problem by bringing together users that are willing to do usability tests (for $10 each) with companies that need testing done on their products (who pay $29 per user for the service).

When you request a test, UserTesting claims it can start returning results within an hour from members of its panel, though that can be delayed a bit if you request specific demographics. Nonetheless, the final result seems like a good value: a video that shows how the user interacted with your site (essentially a screen cast) with their voice commentary. The user also submits a written report detailing what the user liked, disliked, or found confusing.

Here’s a sample video for a usability test done on behalf of TripAdvisor:

The idea seems to fill an obvious need, and UserTesting.com has received some fairly high profile endorsements, including Evan Williams of Twitter, as well as executives from Amazon.com, Justin.tv, oDesk, and lots of other prominent websites. Between a great name, a valuable service, and lots of success stories, UserTesting.com seems like a winner.

Tech Crunch: Twitter Makes Hashtags More #Useful

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:14:28 +0000

You may have noticed that Twitter has started hyperlinking hashtags. Those are words preceded by a “#” which denote what the Tweet is about and makes it easier to search for Tweets about specific topics and events. For instance, try searching for #realtimecrunchup. Now that they are hyperlinked, when you click on a hashtag, you are led to the search result page for the specific hashtag. Others have been implementing this; FriendFeed (big surprise) has been doing this for awhile. Some of the Twitter clients, including the desktop versions of Tweetie and Seesmic Desktop also provide hyperlinks to hashtags.

For Twitter, search is a navigation tool, and this functionality is yet one more way to allow people to easily discover new Tweets outside their group of followers. This trend started when they added the search box to everyone’s home page last April.

Real-time search is heating up. Just earlier today, FriendFeed launched its own real-time search. By linking to hashtags, Twitter is giving people another entry point into its existing search. Now, if you could only track mentions of specific hashtags over time.

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Richard MacManus: eMusic Users Revolt Over Latest Changes

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:06:48 +0000

eMusic, one of the world's largest subscription-based music retailers, has for the first time added music from Sony's catalog to its store. Most users on eMusic subscribe to the service because of the eclectic selection of independent music it offers, and very few users were excited to hear that eMusic was going to make major changes to its service, including raising the price per song just in order to give its users access to mainstream music that they were not very likely to be interested in. While eMusic did a fine job at communicating the basic changes to the service, it didn't reveal the full extent of the changes until yesterday, and its users are anything but happy about them.

Sponsor

Higher Price, More Restrictions, Unhappy Customers

Until yesterday, for example, users could just re-download songs they purchased from the service (quite useful when your hard drive or MP3 player dies on you). Now, however, most likely in order to combat fraud, eMusic has put some restrictions on the number of downloads it permits per song.

Also, while even long tracks (often in the classical or electronic music section) used to cost just one credit (users get a certain amount of credits per month, depending on their subscription plan), a lot of albums now cost 12 credits even when they only feature four or five tracks. The 12 credit idea was actually sold as a positive by eMusic, as it would allow users to download any album without having to pay more than 12 credits. That's great for albums with lots of short tracks, but now, for a lot of users, this actually brings down the value of their subscriptions and raises prices significantly.

There is also some inconsistency here, as some albums don't yet feature the 12-credit price. According to eMusic, only about 50% of all albums have transitioned to album pricing so far.

Some songs are now also only available when users purchase a complete album, whereas before, any songs could be downloaded individually.

The Good

Of course, there are also some positive aspects to the new eMusic. A new feature, for example, now shows users which tracks from an album they have downloaded before and allows them to complete this album.

EMusic also still offers all of its tracks as DRM-free MP3s, and some albums are now a real bargain, as you can often get albums with far more than 12 tracks for only 12 credits, and while taste is obviously debatable, we have to admit that there is also some interesting music in Sony's catalog.

Is the Customer Still King at EMusic?

Where eMusic failed though, even though we have to acknowledge that it tried to communicate with its customers, is in preparing its users for these changes by being completely transparent about the updates. It's no secret that most users don't like change, and while there is a lot of talk on the eMusic forums about unsubscribing from the service, we will have to see how eMusic's subscriber stats develop in the next few months. While some of eMusic's loyal subscribers might indeed leave, having the Sony catalog in its repertoire might actually attract quite a few new users as well.

Discuss

37signals: QUOTE: 'Rock Star' is perhaps the most abused phrase

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:02:00 +0000

‘Rock Star’ is perhaps the most abused phrase in the history of job listings. Nobody should be looking for a “rock star” accountant, HR recruiter or janitor. Whomever is posting these jobs is grossly misinformed as to the nature of rock stardom. Or accounting. Or both.

—AvoidThisJob.com on the differences between a Rock Star and a Planet Funk Store Manager

Pete Cashmore: Unknown Lifeform in North Carolina Sewer: A Monstrous YouTube Hit

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 21:01:43 +0000

With 3.3 million+ YouTube views in the past two days, the video “Unknown Lifeform in North Carolina Sewer” (below) is taking the web by storm, becoming the most viewed video this week and beating out a performance of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. The clip, which shows an alien-looking life form living in a North Carolina sewer, was posted along with a claim that it was extra-terrestrial life.

Today mainstream news has taken notice and corrected the myth: the video is indeed real, scientists say, but the strange creature is very much a terrestrial phenomenon. News14 writes:

Ed Buchan, environmental coordinator at the Raleigh Public Utilities Department, said staff biologists have confirmed that the “creature” is actually a colony of tubifex worms. The colonies attach themselves to roots that gradually work themselves into weak points in the pipes. “They seem to respond to the light from the camera,” Buchan said. “That light is pretty hot.”

The worms naturally occur in sewage and pond sediment and are actually sold both live and dried as fish food in pet stores. He said other staff members in the department have seen it before, although sightings aren’t particularly common. “I’ve seen a lot of sewer TV before and I’ve never seen them,” he said. “We were surprised. We didn’t know immediately what it was.”

It’s unclear what made the clip such a YouTube phenomenon: most likely it’s explained by the mystery surrounding the strange creature, much like last year’s Montauk Monster mystery.

Reviews: YouTube

Tags: creature, lifeform, youtube

Tech Crunch: One More Thing: The New Facebook iPhone App Will Allow Video Uploads

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:37:37 +0000

Yesterday, we wrote about what Facebook was planning for the next major release of its iPhone app, version 3.0. The big update will contain 15 new features, probably none bigger than the addition of event management to the app, finally. But there was one thing Facebook developer Joe Hewitt didn’t mention yesterday, and it’s a big one: Video uploads from the iPhone 3GS.

Hewitt just started working on the feature yesterday, thinking it would be something that would come in the next release, after this one. But he was surprised at how quickly he was able to get it up and running and so he tweeted out today, “3GS video uploading for the Facebook iPhone app is a go — didn’t plan to include it in the 3.0 update, but it was really easy to code.”

This is excellent news as it gives iPhone 3GS owners another easy outlet to upload video to. We’ve already detailed how simple it is to upload to YouTube from the device, and how doing so from the new Kyte app gives you great video quality. The iPhone 3GS is simply awesome as a mobile video device, and Facebook is an excellent platform for sharing video amongst friends.

Additionally, we’ve heard talk the new iPhone 3.1 beta software which was just released to developers the other day, has some new functionality that should make video uploads even easier. Apparently, the device will be able to change the quality of the video getting uploaded based on your available bandwidth to optimize for the uploads.

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Richard MacManus: Google Updates Blog Search - Where's the Innovation?

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 20:24:58 +0000

Google just announced a number of changes to its blog search engine, Google Blog Search, but none of them will knock your socks off. RSS feeds for search queries were added, something that no self-respecting search engine of dynamic content would be without. Hot search queries and recent posts from popular blogs round out the slight redesign of the Blog Search home page.

While many different Google projects push the envelope with features and interface innovation - users are excited just to see Blog Search make catch-up moves, since it's a sign that the product is still breathing at all. No news about much needed spam control, no response to Twitter stealing many blogs' thunder, no personalization, no visualization, no semantics, no mobile play - nothing. It's really disappointing. Google Blog Search remains the best option if you're looking for fast results, but other options are better if you have any needs other than speed.

Sponsor

Six months ago we published an article titled The State of Blog Search, 2009. Here's what we wrote then about Google Blog Search:

Google Blog Search is the fastest in the industry but has gone almost untouched since the day it launched, except for a recent dabble with meme-tracking on the front page. Google Blog Search spam control is not good and recently the search engine started bringing back search results from places like blog sidebars. [Update: that appears to have been fixed now.] It thinks that content is new, too, every time a new blog post (the content we really care about) is published. It's painful to look at Google Blog Search results pages, but if you've got a need for speed or want to make use of the relative heft of the Google search input box for things like complex queries - then it's a good option.

Day in and day out, I use Ask.com's blog search instead. It's nothing earth-shattering, but there's a whole lot less spam.

Is blogging such old news that only Twitter search is interesting to innovators anymore? When it comes to more thought-out, long-form, researched, discussed news and opinion, blogs still matter. We wish Google felt the same way. The web is a really exciting place these days - why isn't Google Blog Search?

Discuss

Tech Crunch: Google Blog Search Takes Two Steps Forward, One Step Back

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:51:13 +0000

Last fall Google launched a revamped version of its Blog Search, converting the site’s frontpage into a automated news portal similar to sites like Techmeme. It has its fair share of issues (for one, it’s subject to the same problems of automated grouping as Google News is), but it was a step in the right direction for the site.

That said, it has been missing some key features. For one, there hasn’t been a good way to track breaking news stories as they happen — generally stories only pop up as they gain momentum and are written about by multiple sites, which can take quite a while (relatively speaking). There also hasn’t been a way to subscribe to a feed of the latest stories via RSS, which nearly every other similar site offers.

Today, Blog Search is finally adding these features. Each feed now offers its own RSS/Atom feeds, as well as an iGoogle gadget that integrates new top stories into your Google homepage. Finally, the site has added sections for both ‘Hot Queries”, which shows the most popular search terms, and “Latest Posts”, an unfiltered view of the latest blog posts indexed by the search engine. These last two features could be quite useful for tracking breaking news, especially given how fast Blog Search is at finding new blog posts.

Unfortunately, they’re not quite there yet. My biggest gripe is that the ‘hot queries’ and ‘latest posts’ sections are not category-specific. In other words, when I’m browsing through the Technology section of Blog Search, I’m still being shown new posts about McDonalds, Exxon, and Asteroids. The Hot Queries section is equally irrelevant. This is especially strange given that Google is already categorizing the blog posts into different sections based on their topic, and I’m hoping that Google will at least offer a filtered view as an option.

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Pete Cashmore: FriendFeed Adds Real-Time Search Results

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:47:20 +0000

Social activity aggregator FriendFeed, which re-designed earlier this year to show updates from friends in real-time, has just extended that same functionality to search. Now, when you search for a given term – like “Michael Jackson” – you’ll see updates from FriendFeed users stream in real-time in your browser.

Just as on your homepage, you can hit “pause” on the real-time results, which, after a few minutes of staring at items about Jackson being shared, is definitely a needed feature if you’re actually attempting to keep up with a topic. After hitting pause, FriendFeed will tell you how many items have been queued, and you can then hit play to see them and resume the live streaming updates.

Personally, I’m not so sure that I don’t prefer the latter approach – simly checking search results for a given term (I generally keep “mashable” open all day on Twitter search) periodically rather than watching it constantly in the browser.

That said, the coolest aspect of FriendFeed’s real-time search might be that you can extend it to your own website via an embeddable widget. To embed a search, you can simply click the “Share / embed search” option that accompanies each search result and grab the embed code, like such:

Reviews: FriendFeed, Twitter

Tags: friendfeed, real-time search, Search

Alexander Muse: Our founding document

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:27:08 +0000

Over this fourth of July weekend it is important to remember how a simple declaration started a revolution and allowed us to create our great republic. If you haven’t read the Declaration of Independence in a while, take a minute and read the words one more time.

When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government. The history of the present King of Great Britain is a history of repeated injuries and usurpations, all having in direct object the establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid world.

He has refused his Assent to Laws, the most wholesome and necessary for the public good.

He has forbidden his Governors to pass Laws of immediate and pressing importance, unless suspended in their operation till his Assent should be obtained; and when so suspended, he has utterly neglected to attend to them.

He has refused to pass other Laws for the accommodation of large districts of people, unless those people would relinquish the right of Representation in the Legislature, a right inestimable to them and formidable to tyrants only.

He has called together legislative bodies at places unusual, uncomfortable, and distant from the depository of their Public Records, for the sole purpose of fatiguing them into compliance with his measures.

He has dissolved Representative Houses repeatedly, for opposing with manly firmness his invasions on the rights of the people.

He has refused for a long time, after such dissolutions, to cause others to be elected, whereby the Legislative Powers, incapable of Annihilation, have returned to the People at large for their exercise; the State remaining in the mean time exposed to all the dangers of invasion from without, and convulsions within.

He has endeavoured to prevent the population of these States; for that purpose obstructing the Laws for Naturalization of Foreigners; refusing to pass others to encourage their migrations hither, and raising the conditions of new Appropriations of Lands.

He has obstructed the Administration of Justice by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.

He has made Judges dependent on his Will alone for the tenure of their offices, and the amount and payment of their salaries.

He has erected a multitude of New Offices, and sent hither swarms of Officers to harass our people and eat out their substance.

He has kept among us, in times of peace, Standing Armies without the Consent of our legislatures.

He has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.

He has combined with others to subject us to a jurisdiction foreign to our constitution, and unacknowledged by our laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation:

For quartering large bodies of armed troops among us:

For protecting them, by a mock Trial from punishment for any Murders which they should commit on the Inhabitants of these States:

For cutting off our Trade with all parts of the world:

For imposing Taxes on us without our Consent:

For depriving us in many cases, of the benefit of Trial by Jury:

For transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended offences:

For abolishing the free System of English Laws in a neighbouring Province, establishing therein an Arbitrary government, and enlarging its Boundaries so as to render it at once an example and fit instrument for introducing the same absolute rule into these Colonies

For taking away our Charters, abolishing our most valuable Laws and altering fundamentally the Forms of our Governments:

For suspending our own Legislatures, and declaring themselves invested with power to legislate for us in all cases whatsoever.

He has abdicated Government here, by declaring us out of his Protection and waging War against us.

He has plundered our seas, ravaged our coasts, burnt our towns, and destroyed the lives of our people.

He is at this time transporting large Armies of foreign Mercenaries to compleat the works of death, desolation, and tyranny, already begun with circumstances of Cruelty & Perfidy scarcely paralleled in the most barbarous ages, and totally unworthy the Head of a civilized nation.

He has constrained our fellow Citizens taken Captive on the high Seas to bear Arms against their Country, to become the executioners of their friends and Brethren, or to fall themselves by their Hands.

He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us, and has endeavoured to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian Savages whose known rule of warfare, is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes and conditions.

In every stage of these Oppressions We have Petitioned for Redress in the most humble terms: Our repeated Petitions have been answered only by repeated injury. A Prince, whose character is thus marked by every act which may define a Tyrant, is unfit to be the ruler of a free people.

Nor have We been wanting in attentions to our British brethren. We have warned them from time to time of attempts by their legislature to extend an unwarrantable jurisdiction over us. We have reminded them of the circumstances of our emigration and settlement here. We have appealed to their native justice and magnanimity, and we have conjured them by the ties of our common kindred to disavow these usurpations, which would inevitably interrupt our connections and correspondence. They too have been deaf to the voice of justice and of consanguinity. We must, therefore, acquiesce in the necessity, which denounces our Separation, and hold them, as we hold the rest of mankind, Enemies in War, in Peace Friends.

We, therefore, the Representatives of the united States of America, in General Congress, Assembled, appealing to the Supreme Judge of the world for the rectitude of our intentions, do, in the Name, and by Authority of the good People of these Colonies, solemnly publish and declare, That these united Colonies are, and of Right ought to be Free and Independent States, that they are Absolved from all Allegiance to the British Crown, and that all political connection between them and the State of Great Britain, is and ought to be totally dissolved; and that as Free and Independent States, they have full Power to levy War, conclude Peace, contract Alliances, establish Commerce, and to do all other Acts and Things which Independent States may of right do. — And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of Divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes, and our sacred Honor.

Pete Cashmore: Google Blog Search Gets More Like Other Google Search Tools

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:24:22 +0000

Google Blog Search has just added a few features that users of other Google services are likely familiar with.

First, you can now subscribe to any topic via RSS or Atom, like you already can do in Google News. This means every time there’s a new story in the “Technology” category, or more specifically a search term like“social media” you can get that update pushed to your RSS reader. There’s also a new iGoogle gadget if you’d rather access the topic or search term via iGoogle.

The Google Blog Search homepage now also features a “Hot Queries,” which, is similar to Google Hot Trends. This shows what searches are currently hot in Blog Search, as opposed to Google Trends, which shows what’s hot in the broader search engine. That said, both lists appear to be fairly similar, though Blog Search only shows a top ten at this point.

There’s also a new “Latest Posts” feature on the homepage that simply lists new posts that Blog Search has picked up. It’s a nice update, but one that makes me wonder how much utility separate blog search really has at this point. Google News already includes plenty of blogs in its database (there are now more than 25,000 sources in total), and as evidenced by the similarities in Google’s two different trend lists, users are generally searching for the same things at any given point in time. In other words, blog search might be filling a need that no longer exists.

Are you still using blog search engines regularly? Share your thoughts in the comments.

Reviews: Google

Tags: blogging, Google, google blog search, Search

Tech Crunch: FriendFeed Makes Its Search Results Real-Time Too

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:23:50 +0000

Ever since its redesign a few months ago, FriendFeed has been one of the standard-bearers of the real-time web. That’s because while a lot of sites claim to be real-time, FriendFeed is one of the few that actually updates continuously as data comes in. Starting today, any search you do will also get that same real-time treatment.

Enter any query into FriendFeed’s search box and you’ll see a constantly updating stream of items related to it. It works for advanced searches too. Best of all, it also searches through comments left below items. And these results can even be embedded in other blogs, as you can see right now on the FriendFeed blog (or below in this post).

It will be interesting to see if FriendFeed uses this functionality in a business sense. Given that it is now possibly the most compelling way to in real-time search streams of hugely popular services like Twitter, YouTube, Flickr, Digg, various blogs — and all the comments related to those — a paid search model would seem to be an obvious choice. So far, FriendFeed has shied away from any business model, but has shown possible hints of what’s to come with its “Shameless Self-Promotion” banners.

And FriendFeed still has a few more things in store, including, yes, track for topics (it already has it for people and groups). “We’re also working on allowing you to subscribe to saved searches, add them to your friend lists, and even get notifications based on search keywords. So stay tuned,” writes Jim Norris today.

The timing of this announcement is also perfect considering our own real-time event is coming up a week from tomorrow. And yes, FriendFeed will be a part of it, along with the other major players in the field.

Below is an example real-time search embed to see what people are saying about TechCrunch in real-time.

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Richard MacManus: Rupert Murdoch: Facebook is Just a Directory

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 19:19:18 +0000

Rupert Murdoch, the 78-year-old CEO and chairman of News Corp., just gave a revealing interview to The Street's Dan Freed. In this interview, Murdoch argues that the latest head-count reduction at MySpace was necessary because the number of employees at the company had grown out of control. In addition, he also told Freed that he wants the site to be very different from Facebook, which, in his eyes, is nothing more than a directory, while MySpace is a place "to find common interests, share music, that sort of thing."

Sponsor

In the same interview, Murdoch also says that he has no idea how to monetize Twitter and that nobody has actually figured out how to monetize "the Web today to any extent other than search." Micro-payments, in the eyes of Murdoch, are also not a good alternative to advertising revenue, though he still thinks that subscription models for his papers along the lines of what the Wall Street Journal currently does might be a solution for monetizing news content.

Facebook: Just a Directory

With regards to Facebook, we can't help but think that Murdoch must be willfully oblivious to the fact that the service's users are abandoning the company in favor of Facebook. Just a simple look at the current traffic stats for both services tells a very clear story about the abysmal state MySpace is finding itself in today. While Facebook is growing rapidly, MySpace's traffic is, at best, staying flat. And to think of Facebook as nothing more than a directory just ignores the reality of how users are using the site and what Facebook's management team envisions the service to be.

Maybe before Facebook turned into the platform it is today, that statement could have held true, but today, to imply that users on Facebook don't go to the service to find others with common interests is simply wrong.

Micro-payments: Not a Solution

We have to agree with Murdoch, though, that micro-payments are probably not a viable solution for monetizing news content on the web -- though we would argue that some people have managed to make a living off the Internet from doing things other than just monetizing search.

So far, users have also resisted subscription models for online newspapers. The only exception here is the Wall Street Journal, which is really a special case, and only time will tell if readers are willing to buy online subscriptions to their favorite papers.

Image credit: Wikimedia Commons

Discuss

Tech Crunch: Google App Engine Stalled Out For About 6 Hours Today

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:06:03 +0000

A little over two hours ago, a Google employee posted a note in this Google Groups thread indicating that Google App Engine was “seeing elevated Datastore latency and error-rates, as well as elevated serving error-rates.” He noted that the problem began around 6:30 AM Pacific time and that the team was looking into it. A few minutes later he updated that Google App Engine was going into “unplanned maintenance mode” — over 4 hours later, it’s still not back up.

That’s a long time for any service to be broken, but especially one that is the backbone for many startups’ web apps. What’s worse is that while Google is updating the Google Groups thread, the actual App Engine Status page has been down the entire time as a result of the problems, so people are going there for updates and seeing nothing.

The last update from Google came about an hour ago:

Read-only mode continues. Elevated latency and error-rates persist for Datastore reads. Memcache writes have been reenabled to better soak read-only load. Our engineering teams are looking into the root cause of the problem. Will post more information as soon as it’s available.

Obviously, the natives are getting restless on Twitter. This outage follows the popular hosting service Rackspace experiencing some rare downtime earlier this week.

Update: And it looks like this downtime is even hampering the development of Chrome for the Mac. Here’s was lead developer Mike Pinkerton just tweeted out: “Popup blocking UI is done, but appspot apps are all horked so I can’t get it reviewed. #chrome”

Update 2: 6 hours later, it looks like things are finally back in working order. The latest update from Google in the Google Group thread:

Datastore writes are reenabled and functioning normally! Overall App Engine health is back to normal! We will update this thread if anything else develops, but at this time we anticipate no additional problems. Thank you for your patience.

[thanks Adam and everyone else who sent this in]

CrunchBase Information

Google App Engine

Information provided by CrunchBase

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Richard MacManus: Study says Patents Hurt Innovation

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 18:00:00 +0000

According to a study published in The Columbia Science and Technology Law Review, patents may be harming our ability to innovate. Patents and the Regress of Useful Arts, written by Bill Tomlinson of UC Irvine and Andrew Torrance of University of Kansas School of Law, tested the hypothesis with a game called PatentSim. The game is an online simulation of a pure patent system, a patent-free commons system, and a mixed system. Within each environment, first year university students were asked to license, assign, infringe, and enforce patents. The study found that while a mixed patent environment and pure patent environment did not offer substantially different results, students in a commons system generated significantly higher rates of innovation, productivity and social utility. Essentially, the study supports what Lawrence Lessig and free culture advocates have been saying for years: a society free from intellectual property monopolies is a society that is better off.

Sponsor

In the study, Torrance and Tomlinson explain how patents have been wrongly justified as a way to encourage invention. The justification has been that by excluding others from duplicating an invention or process, the patent owner is more likely to spend time, energy and resources on their product. However, past studies have proved otherwise. Data collected from PatentSim further substantiates these findings.

PatentSim was presented as a game in which the goal is to make as much money as possible. In each environment, subjects combined objects in a "Creation Box" to simulate an invention. Whenever a subject created an invention and clicked on the "Make" button, money would appear in their virtual bank. In the pure patent and mixed patent environments, subjects could also click on a "Patent" button to increase their profit. Each patent was priced at $20 and each use of a lawyer also cost $20. At the end of the study, students had produced significantly more inventions and profit in the commons environment when they were not being penalized for patent infringement or were busy enforcing their patents.

The study suggests that innovation not only thrives in a competitive environment, but that more profit can be generated by inventors in a commons system. Because PatentSim is just a simulation, readers need to take findings with a grain of salt. While the rate of inventions would likely increase without patents, it's tough to tell if inventors would really see unlimited profit potential in an environment free of patents. After all, how many different zipper pulls does the market demand?

Nevertheless, in some cases, the demand for a product or process is all too evident. Imagine the competitive market for hearing aids and prosthetics, or the success rate of farmers who are free to use the best possible processes. And honestly, does HIV really care if it's being treated by Glaxo, Pfizer or a tested generic knockoff?

This study is important in that it might spur policy makers to question how we look at innovation. Are inventions just disparate exclusively-owned products, or should we be sharing them out of necessity to solve our bigger-picture problems?

Discuss

Pete Cashmore: GoDaddy Wants You to Go Twitter

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:50:37 +0000

Ideally, your brand has the same name across all of the social sites you use, and, it matches your domain name (for example, we’re mashable.com, twitter.com/mashable, and facebook.com/mashable).

Realizing this fact, popular domain registrar GoDaddy has integrated Twitter registration into its domain manager, allowing you to see if the Twitter username that matches your URL is available, and if so, register it.

The target here is GoDaddy’s small business users. The company explains in the tool that you can “Join today and start “tweeting” about your next sale, when you’ve updated pictures on your site, or other things that may be going on with you or your business.”

To use the feature, just login to your GoDaddy account and click on any of your domain names to access the manager (where you also go to do things like update name servers). There’s now a Twitter option under “Domain Enhancements” from which you can check your username availability.

While this probably isn’t a big deal for most our readers, it could be for Twitter. This integration puts the service in front of millions of people that are actively managing their online identity, many of whom have probably heard of Twitter, but haven’t actually signed up for the service. As if being featured on Oprah and on the cover of Time wasn’t enough free publicity …

Reviews: Twitter

Tags: godaddy, twitter

Tech Crunch: And Yet More Proof Of Why AT&T Needs To Keep That iPhone Exclusivity

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:39:02 +0000

An internal AT&T memo that was leaked today is full of very impressive number regarding the iPhone 3GS — numbers that once again show why AT&T’s exclusive contract with Apple to sell the iPhone in the U.S. is so important.

The iPhone 3GS’s launch gave AT&T its best sales day at its retail stores — ever, its second largest traffic day at retails stores, the most transactions it has ever processed in a day, the most orders through att.com in a single day ever and the biggest features sales day at att.com ever. Oh, and it led to the most upgrade eligibility checks ever, which is not surprising at all, though most were probably disappointed.

What’s crazy about all this though is that while many people were expecting the iPhone 3GS launch to pale in comparison to the iPhone 3G launch, it actually exceeded it in just about every way when it came to actual sales (at least through AT&T’s stores and online). The lines may have not been as long at stores because of pre-sales, but sales overall exceeded the 2008 launch day numbers, and all of the heavy holiday shopping times. And apparently iPhone 3GS sales exceeded the iPhone 3G launch day sales by noon Central time.

AT&T’s exclusive contract with Apple for the iPhone is set to expire next year. There has been a lot of talk about AT&T wanting to extend the deal for at least another year, but there has also been talk of Apple flirting with rival Verizon.

It seems pretty clear that Apple is getting up to the limit of where it take the iPhone with AT&T. The biggest complaint about the device now seems to be the service provider. And if it can sell millions of units in just days on just one provider, imagine what it can do if it were on two — or better, all of them.

Below find the memo. You’ll also note that on the day of Michael Jackson’s death, AT&T saw more text messages sent than ever before — exceeding even that of American Idol finales and New Year’s Eve. That’s pretty insane, especially considering what a rip-off text messages are.

1. Fact of the Week: On June 25, the day Michael Jackson died, text messages sent on our network spiked at 65,000 messages per second — the largest volume ever recorded — surpassing events like American Idol voting and New Year’s Eve, when millions of our customers wish their friends and family a happy new year via text.

2. iLaunch day 2009 was one for the record books, as AT&T customers scrambled to get their hands on the fastest, most powerful iPhone yet.

Here’s a look at some of the milestones we achieved:

Best-ever sales day in our retail stores

Second-largest traffic day in our retail stores

Most transactions processed via our IT systems in a single day

Most upgrade eligibility checks in a single day

Largest order day in att.com history

Largest features sales day in att.com history

On this year’s launch day, iPhone sales exceeded sales recorded on 2008’s iPhone launch day, Black Friday 2008 and Dec. 26, 2008 — all heavy-volume sales days. In fact, this year we surpassed 2008’s launch day sales at about noon Central time, and sustained our previous peak hour record, also set in 2008, for 11 straight hours.

[photo: flickr/Jen SFO-BCN]

Crunch Network: MobileCrunch Mobile Gadgets and Applications, Delivered Daily.

Tech Crunch: Twine Tries To Manage The Stream With New Coverflow-Like Design

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:24:43 +0000

What is the best way to sift through a stream of information? The list view seems to be the most popular because it is information-dense and easy to scan, but it can be overwhelming. More visually appealing ways to manage data are needed. Twine, a site which lets you collect and subscribe to different interest feeds, just introduced a new way to wade through its streams.

The new Flash visualization presents your stream of shared links as a deck of headlines which you can shuffle through (see video below). A slider along the bottom, lets you cycle through the deck by time, and arrows underneath let you move sequentially, or you can just click on a deck in the background to move it forward. If you want to learn more, you can flip each deck to read a snippet and link to the full detail page. The semantic tags associated with each item also show up on the side and can be clicked on to navigate through the deck.

It feels like Coverflow on Apple’s iTunes, except that you navigate through the deck front to back instead of side to side. It also reminds me of the deck metaphor on the new Palm Pre. I can definitely see this as a good UI for mobile apps as well where screen size is more constrained. Don’t worry, though, the regular list view is still an option.

My only problem with the visualization is that it takes a while to load (Flash, why do you torture me?). But other than that, it makes sifting through each feed seem more like channel-surfing in the way that SearchMe does for search results and music search or StumbleVideo does for Web videos. But there must be a better way to wade through the stream. What is it?

Crunch Network: CrunchBoard because it’s time for you to find a new Job2.0

Programmable Web: Twitter Increases Rate Limits by 50%

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 17:22:14 +0000

Your Twitter mashup may have just got 50% more real-time content. And if you follow many people, you may have already noticed an increase in the flow of information. Why?

That’s because in the last 24 hours Twitter quietly increased the limit from 100 to 150 requests per hour (as seen in the update Twitter made to their developer wiki shown below). For a site that has had significant uptime issues in the past, hopefully this is a sign that they can control the firehose.

For a Twitter developer it might mean a little tweak to your code. It is important to keep track of the requests that get sent out, or you’ll risk being blacklisted if you attempt to request beyond the limit. You can also get the requests remaining from the Twitter API without being “charged” for a request. High volume applications can request “whitelisting” which, if approved, increases the limit to 20,000 requests per hour.

The update to the rate limit does not effect the search API, which was already “quite a bit higher” than 150 per hour. Twitter does not publish the search limit, but recommends watching for a 503 error, a sign you need to throttle back.

With the increase to the rate limit, perhaps it’s time to add your Twitter app to the 200+ Twitter mashups we list, or get more familiar with the Twitter API.

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Twitter API Profile, 216 mashups

Richard MacManus: Social IDs Go Shopping: Kmart and Sears Implement OpenID

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:59:57 +0000

Users on Kmart's and Sears' web properties can now use their OpenID credentials to sign up and log in to these sites. MyKmart.com and MySears.com, which are both owned by the Sears Holding Company, implemented technology from Viewpoint and JanRain to allow users to use their login credentials from Twitter, Facebook, MySpace, Google, Yahoo, AOL, and Windows Live, as well as from any other OpenID provider. This marks one of the first times that such a large, mainstream online retailer has adopted OpenID.

Sponsor

As Sears points out in its press release, it simply makes good business sense for the company to allow its users to use their social IDs to log in to its properties. After all, not having to sign up for yet another new account on yet another site greatly reduces the likelihood that a potential customer would just abandon the process and head to a competitor's site.

At least for the MyKmart site, though, we can also see why the company would want to make the sign-up process easy. In the last hour, only one review was posted on MyKmart and just about a dozen people signed up for access to the site. In contrast, MySears seems to attract more users and the site already has a far more active user community than MyKmart.

Good UI

Overall, we really like Sears' implementation of this technology. While OpenID faced some serious usability issues in its early days, Sears and its technology partners have made the process extremely easy and straightforward.

We are glad to see that a large mainstream company like Sears is putting its weight behind OpenID and we hope that more companies will follow suit in the near future. After all, this only makes things easier for both the company and its users, and as users get more familiar with this idea, they will probably begin to resist signing up for sites that don't let them use their already established credentials to sign in to a new service.

Discuss

Pete Cashmore: iPhone 3GS Used to Film Music Video: Technologic Overkill

Thu, 02 Jul 2009 16:56:01 +0000

Not to be confused with the first music video about the iPhone 3GS (”Got My Mac on With iPhone 3GS“), the first video purportedly shot using the camera on the new device is making its way around the web.

The video – “Technologic Overkill” – is directed by filmmaker Steve Ellington, and shows “the plight of a little blue robot and his attempt to be relevant in an increasingly technological world,” set to a song by the band XFYA. Check it out below:

As we recently noted, mobile video certainly seems to be at a tipping point, with dozens of services offering apps to get your video from your phone to the Web, and YouTube seeing a huge upswing in mobile uploads since the iPhone 3GS launched. Technologic Overkill is perhaps a small symbol of this movement, in what will likely be just one of many firsts that we see as people get their hands on the new Apple phone.

Reviews: YouTube

Tags: iphone, iphone 3Gs, music videos, video

Planet Ajaxian

Pete Cashmore: Michael Jackson’s Memorial: The Biggest Web Event in History?

The details

What will Jackson’s memorial mean for the web?

Richard MacManus: Ten Companies Twitter Should Consider Acquiring Next

Quite Likely, if It Hasn't Happened Already

Could Happen...

Longer Shots

Pete Cashmore: Geocaching Down, Too

Tech Crunch: The Inevitable Anti-U.S. Backlash Has Started On Kiva

Pete Cashmore: Shooting at Arlington Apple Store [News Video]

Tech Crunch: Want The Obama “Hope” Artwork On Your iPhone? Nope, Says Apple.

Pete Cashmore: Should Twitter Crack Down on Pornography?

Twitter Users’ Feedback on Pornography

What Do Twitter’s Terms of Service Say?

Pete Cashmore: Twitter Better: 20 Ways to Filter Your Tweets

By Keyword

By Links

By Grouping

By Favorites

Pete Cashmore: Authorize.Net Goes Down

Twitter and the status of Authorize.Net

Tech Crunch: Tweetmeme Wants To Be The King Of Retweets

Tech Crunch: How To JailBreak the iPhone 3GS

Richard MacManus: How to Install Chrome and Chromium Side-by-Side (So You Can Play with Extensions!)

How to Install Chromium and Chrome on Your PC

Make Chromium Extension-Ready

Launch Chromium and Install Extensions

Final Note

Pete Cashmore: Google’s New Layout: Love it or Hate It?

Tech Crunch: Singing A New Tune: The Imeem Music Store.

Tech Crunch: Authorize.net Goes Down, E-Commerce Vendors Left Hanging

Tech Crunch: Coming Soon: Even More TechCrunch in London

Tech Crunch: Turn Web Content Into A Map With GeoMaker

Richard MacManus: Twitter Needs a Spam Filter? No, We Need a Marketer Filter

If You're Getting Real Spam, Blame Yourself

Where Actual Spam Hurts Us

Even More Dangerous? "Tweet to Win"

Pete Cashmore: Want to Circumvent Green Dam? Buy a Mac

Ajaxian: It’s Friday. Play some drums…. HTML5 style

Ajaxian: Machsend: P2P file sharing via Browser Plus

Tech Crunch: Brace Yourselves! “Asteroids” Headed For The Big Screen

Tech Crunch: In India, Google Searches For Users With Print Ads

Pete Cashmore: TweetCraft: Finally, You Can Tweet While You Raid

Tech Crunch: First iPhone 3GS Jailbreak Hits The Web

Tech Crunch: My Interview With Antitrust Expert Gary Reback: Google’s Looming Antitrust Issues

Emily Chang: gdgt

Programmable Web: Yahoo’s Placemaker Yields the GeoMaker Project

Related ProgrammableWeb Resources

Tech Crunch: Does Anybody Still Use Second Life? And If So, How Much Is It Worth Today?

Richard MacManus: How to Be an Effective CEO

The Effective Executive

The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People

Three Things a CEO Has to Do Well

Making the Transition from Entrepreneur to CEO

Tech Crunch: As The DOJ Pounces, Google Makes Book Search Even Better

Tech Crunch: Google Voice Now Lets You Change Your Number. It’ll Cost You $10.

Tech Crunch: Fitnio: Finally, An iPhone Exercise App That Gives You Control Of Your Music

Richard MacManus: Microsoft Wishes You Happy Porn Browsing in New Vomit-Filled Video, Then Retracts Ad

Richard MacManus: Iran's Mobile SMS Up & Running; Will Twitter Start to Lose the Green Hues?

Tech Crunch: Dice Reports Murky Waters For Tech Jobs

Richard MacManus: How FriendFeed Could Become the Ultimate Social Media Tracking Service

Broaden the Index Beyond Opt-In

Spam Control

Apply Business Savvy

Bring Back Aggregate Analysis

Tech Crunch: The Infamous 2009 LimeWire Pizza Fiasco

Pete Cashmore: 10 Ways to Find People on Twitter

People Search

Directories

Recommendations

More Twitter resources from Mashable:

Pete Cashmore: UserTesting.com: Get Video of Real Users Testing Your Web App

Sponsored by Microsoft BizSpark

Tech Crunch: Twitter Makes Hashtags More #Useful

Richard MacManus: eMusic Users Revolt Over Latest Changes

Higher Price, More Restrictions, Unhappy Customers

The Good

Is the Customer Still King at EMusic?

37signals: QUOTE: 'Rock Star' is perhaps the most abused phrase