Facebook has long been a big contributor to the open source movement, and releases a number of their in-house projects under open source licenses. They even provide a a mirror for popular open source endeavors, such as Mozilla and Apache. This week Facebook announced the release their first open source JavaScript library.
The Google Online Marketing Challenge! promises excitement for boys and girls around the world who participate in a new school program all about online advertising. Google's giving $200 worth of AdWords to schools where students will marketing students learn how to use Google's online advertising products and test out trial campaigns with local businesses.
Surely the teachers in those classrooms will at least give a passing nod to competing ad networks, right?
A study by digital communications agency @www, reveals that whenever possible, 61% of web users use the same password for all their online accounts, reports the Guardian. The survey also found that more than 1 in 10 users have over 50 online accounts to log into, leading many to experience password fatigue. Hence using the same password across all accounts.
With the rise of online video, broadband providers are starting to feel a strain on their networks. In order to combat network congestion, Time Warner has a solution: charge for Internet access based on usage. But if the growing popularity of online video is the reason for shifting to a per usage billing scheme, it is also precisely the reason why this won't fly with consumers.
According to latest report from China Internet Network Information
Center (CNNIC), by end of 2007, there are over 200 million Internet users
(including 163 million broadband users) in China. 2008 is shaping up to be a very busy year
for the Chinese Internet, and the Chinese market seems to be pulsing with social networking activity. But for Chinese Internet users, social networking has taken on a very different form than it has in Western countries. In China, the most popular form of networking may just be the traditional Internet forum system, or BBS.
Today Sharpcast is launching an invite-only private beta of it's much-anticipated Project Hummingbird product, with full public launch to follow this Spring. The product has been re-named SugarSync and with it you will be able to sync and backup your files and media across all of your computers, the web and mobile phone. Sharpcast CEO Gibu Thomas described this to me in an interview as "the holy grail".
ReadWriteWeb was given exclusive early access to the beta of SugarSync. As well as the first look, we have 1,500 beta invites for our readers (details at the end of this post).
While the media and Silicon Valley have lost our collective minds over the rise of Facebook over the past year, traffic analysts Hitwise released numbers today indicating that things are not as they might seem. Apparently, all the Facebook hype has not translated into a huge growth in social network market share among US users. Hitwise says that Myspace received 72.32% of US visits to the top ten social networks in December 2007, while Facebook received just over 16%.
How about year over year growth? Facebook had 10.59% marketshare in December 2006, Hitwise says. Myspace dropped from nearly 79%. It appears that social networking has grown in general; though Facebook posts impressive numbers of new users, in terms of sheer visits Myspace is nearly keeping up with its growth.
In mid-december, I interviewed Kevin Marks (Developer Advocate, Google Open Social) on Read/WriteTalk . One of the areas we spent considerable time discussing was Open Social's Activity Streams. Since that interview, I have found myself reflecting a lot about the increasing number of social networks that create 'feeds' around user activity within the site. As someone who has been an avid user of RSS for the past few years and created a product to intelligently filter sets of RSS feeds, it probably isn't surprising this is a trend I'm quite bullish about. I'm certainly not the only one who is finds this development promising.
Blogger Aditya Mahesh has managed to corral some of the biggest names in blogging to contribute to the BlogOnExpo, an event Mahesh describes as an online conference aimed at helping bloggers improve their blogs.
Starting yesterday and running through the 18th of January, the BlogOnExpo includes interviews and short tutorials from names many readers here will recognize.
The Library of Congress and photosharing site Flickr today announced a partnership that will put photos from the LoC's collection online in a social environment and users to interact with them. The Library is home to more than 14 million photographs and other visual materials, and to start they've selected about 1500 works each from two of their collections that are known to exist in the public domain. The images come from the Farm Security Administration/Office of War Information and The George Grantham Bain Collection, for which no known copyright exists. The collections will be housed on the LoC's Flickr page.
