This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites.
Digg.com recently had a survey pinned to the top of the site's front page, that hints at some of the new features we can expect from the next iteration of Digg. Let's take a more in-depth look at these features and how we would like them to be implemented.
Don't let the headline excite you, there's still no easy way to play poker online from a US-based computer -- at least not with money involved. But today the US reached deals with the European Union, Japan and Canada to compensate those countries for revenue lost by keeping foreign gaming companies out of the US market. The agreement with the EU centers around trade concessions regarding mail services and warehousing, and though there was no immediate word on how much the deal is worth, it is likely to fall far short of the US$100 billion that European Internet gambling sites say they are owed.
Design is a challenging thing for non-designers to wrap our heads around, but we think we know it when we see it done right ("I want it to look 'clean!'"). CommandShift3 is a website that lets you choose between two website screenshots in a "battle" and vote for the one you find most appealing.
It's a fun site to play with and some really nice pages get voted up allong the way. CommandShift3 is the keystroke combination to grab a full screen capture on a Mac.
Mozilla Labs released what could be an interesting tool this weekend, called Personas for Firefox.
It's a browser plug-in that lets you quickly apply different skins to your browser's chrome. You can also set your skin to change automatically with incoming designs on a JSON feed. The aim is to make new skins easy to build, and easy to try out without downloads and relaunching. They don't change any of the buttons in the browser like real Firefox Themes do. It's a good idea, but unfortunately most of the "personas" at launch are ugly as sin.
I'm very pleased to announce a brand new design for ReadWriteWeb, including a new look n' feel and new logo. The design was created and implemented by San Francisco design firm Ideacodes - specifically Emily Chang, Max Kiesler and Bryan Collick. Personally I've been a big fan of Ideacodes for a long time, so I was thrilled to work with them on this new design.
It's been a year or so since our last major re-design. And this is the first RWW design where I haven't been involved in the coding myself.
Here is a quick wrapup of the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. For those of you reading this via our website, note that you can subscribe to the Weekly Wrapups, either via the special RSS feed or by email.
This week on ReadWriteWeb we did our annual review of Web companies and most promising for 2008. Check out these posts for our picks, and see if you agree!
The British Broadcasting Corporation quietly launched a beta version of their spiffed up new homepage last week.
The new page, which the Beeb has dubbed a "lick of paint," draws on a number of so-called web 2.0 design aesthetics: rounded corners, large fonts, big buttons, a soft color palette, and a liberal dash of AJAX.
Earlier this week we announced our Best BigCo of 2007 as Facebook and our Best LittleCo of 2007 as Twitter. In this post we'll give you our pick for Most Promising for Web in 2008.
Originally we planned to pick the most promising Web company for 2008. But in the end the ReadWriteWeb team decided to follow the example set by Time magazine last year, when it named "You" as its 'Person of the Year'.
Two popular project management tools for software developers, Assembla and Unfuddle, both made major releases of new services this week.
Unfuddle announced an extensive API yesterday, as well as a Mac Dashboard Widget based on that API. The widget will let users monitor project activity, create tickets, time entries and more from their desktop.
The vast majority of the blogosphere exists in the long tail, and as we have often talked about recently, attracting an audience in the long tail is very hard to do. So it stands that many good blogs go virtually unread. Automatic aggregators, like Techmeme, end up acting somewhat like gated communities that are dominated by the biggest blogs -- who link to one another and prop each other up. Paid syndication like Blogburst is hit or miss and also favors the more prominent bloggers who have name recognition.
