The Get Satisfaction API that we reported on in February was finally released today. Two months ago, Get Satisfaction said they were "superclose" to releasing the API -- perhaps not so close as they thought. However, the company today announced the release of that API with the goal "to expose every part of the Get Satisfaction service." Get ready: the customer support mashups are coming!
If you're a fan of digg, you've probably been noticing that tech stories are becoming less and less a feature of the social news site. The reason? Digg is attempting to attract a large mainstream user base. Just how low has tech sunk in digg? We have new data that shows that the number of frontpage tech stories is halving every year on digg.
Let's be honest here: we're all a bunch of social media addicts. We're junkies. Whether it's a new Twitter app, a new Facebook feature, or a new social anything service, we're all over it. But we may not be the norm. The truth is, being involved in social media takes time, something that most people don't have a lot of. So how can regular folk get involved with social media? And how much time does it really take?
"Ten Thousand Cents" is a crowdsourced art project that led 10,000 artists, each paid one penny for their contribution, to recreate a US $100 bill one tiny section at a time. The brainchild of San Francisco artists Aaron Koblin and Takashi Kawashima, "Ten Thousand Cents" utilized Amazon's Mechanical Turk service and a bit of custom Flash software to lead 10,000 web workers in a coordinated, crowdsourced art project. The result is a rather impressive rendering of a US one hundred dollar bill drawn by an army of contributors.
SixApart launched BlogIt by TypePad last night, a Facebook app that lets you post to SixApart blogs and other blogging software like WordPress, Blogger and Tumblr, to your Facebook Newsfeed and to Twitter all from one place. It's the kind of app that makes Facebook all the closer to being a one stop social media experience.
The service could be more fully developed but it's certainly in the lead compared to other services aiming to do the same thing. A close look at the details leads us to believe that this could be a much bigger move than it might seem to be. Here's a few reasons why we believe it's so interesting.
Last week, Yahoo! purchased enterprise-level web analytics service provider IndexTools. Yesterday, Dennis Mortensen, COO of Index Tools, announced on his blog that Yahoo! would be setting the service free. The decision to offer a free analytics suite follows similar moves by Google and Microsoft. Google released Analytics (which we use here on ReadWriteWeb) in November 2005, drawing on software it acquired from Urchin and Adaptive Path, and Microsoft's adCenter Analytics is based on Deep Matrix, which it acquired in 2006.
If you don't want to go through the whole process of creating a tumblr blog just to save and share interesting photos and videos you find on the web, then you may be interested in the new social bookmarking tool from We Heart It instead. We Heart It is very similar to another photo sharing and bookmarking service - FFFFOUND - right down to the heart-shaped favicon - but unlike FFFFOUND, you don't need an invitation to join.
Brijit, the magazine and newspaper review site we reviewed very positively when it launched in October, is today expanding its innovative platform to include very short user reviews of top articles in Digg, Techmeme and videos on YouTube. The company pays users $5 for each 100 word review of a magazine article, news story or TV show.
It's already proven to be a great way to make more informed purchases in the periodical section of your local bookstore, I look forward to using it now to find gems buried in the flood of content available on these social media sites.
One of the most difficult parts of starting a startup for any entrepreneur is finding that small bit of seed capital to get things going. As evidenced by small seed funds like Y Combinator, a little can go a long way for startup entrepreneurs, but raising that chunk of change to get started can be tricky. Luckily, there are a number of different roads you can take to get from concept to Series A. Below is a list of 13 seed funding options for startup entrepreneurs.
There was a question posted on Slashdot yesterday in which the asker sought advice on an electronic cash register set up that would output sales data in an open format. While the asker was looking for information from the point of view of a shop owner, it got me thinking about data portability. There's been a lot of clamor over the past few months about who owns attention data and a major online movement has started with the aim of pushing companies into granting access to that data to the users who create it. But what about offline attention data? Should we demand access to that as well?
