FontStruct is a new online font creation tool from font seller FontShop that was officially launched last week. The site combines a Flash-based font maker (the Fontstructor) with a community site built around sharing, discussing, and building off of those fonts. FontStruct is free to use, as are all the fonts created using it.
One of the buzz phrases we've heard a lot this year is "data portability", which means the ability to move your personal data between different applications and vendors. It has its own standards group, called naturally enough DataPortability.org. Some of the big Internet companies have signaled their support for data portability - in January Google and Facebook joined DataPortability.org, and in February Microsoft announced a strategy shift towards Data Portability for its core products Windows and Office.
ReadWriteTalk host Sean Ammirati this week interviewed Chris Saad, the co-founder of DataPortability.org, to ask him how the group has been progressing - and perhaps more importantly where it's headed next.
It's no secret that YouTube's age demographics skew young, but young still means 18-34, and much of the content on the site would be inappropriate for children under the age of 13 -- the COPPA cut off age that YouTube adheres to as the minimum allowed for anyone to sign up on the site. Totlol is a new video site that launched in beta this week aimed at children aged 6 months to 6 years. The site is community moderated to ensure that video content is always appropriate for small children.
The Android Developer Challenge is a two-part contest whose goal is to encourage developers to build apps for the new Google mobile platform, code-named "Android." In this first round, dubbed "Challenge I," submissions were accepted up until April 14th. Yesterday, the top 50 entries were announced. Each of these application authors received $25,000 to fund further development of their app. We've dug through the list of winners to pick out our favorite apps and the ones we're most looking forward to.
Last night was the second Digg Townhall, a live session hosted online by Digg founder Kevin Rose and CEO Jay Adelson. Like before, Kevin asked Digg users to post their suggestions on Digg as to what topics should be covered. (The thread is here). Now that the event is over, we can review how well those questions were addressed.
The Adobe AIR platform is one of the hottest desktop platforms available. While we've given you numerous recommendations on great AIR apps, finding them all in one spot (outside of ReadWriteWeb) can be a pain.
With so many to discover, here's a look at why you might want to recommend your favorite Adobe AIR apps at FreshAIRApps.
Because Twitter is getting more popular, every glitch in the service is now felt more acutely. Going without Twitter for many people is even harder than going without email, and so outages lead to complaints.
Complaints pile up and become debates, asking questions like: should Twitter be converted into a protocol and become decentralized? Is that the way to scale Twitter and make it more reliable? If not, how can that goal be accomplished?
Yahoo! today released a developer preview of its Yahoo! Internet Location Platform, a collection of in-depth geo-location based APIs. We expect to see location be more smartly used in many applications around the web thanks to this platform.
The gist of what's being enabled is this: applications can provide the name of one location and then the Yahoo! APIs will report neighboring and "parent" locations. Flickr developer and map lover Dan Catt articulates the potential power of the API very well in a blog post today.
As our network blog AltSearchEngines reported this morning, the long-awaited and much hyped natural language processing search engine Powerset launched this morning. Kind of. For now, the search service only uses Wikipedia and Freebase as source material for answers to your query. So it's not really fair to compare it to Google yet, but this is a search engine, and that means it will always be held to the gold standard set by the market leader.
Marketing consultant and web connoisseur Noah Brier has launched a simple but fascinating project called BrandTags.net. The idea is that visitors are shown a logo, we respond with a word or very short phrase that we associate with the corresponding brand and then we're given the option to view all the "tags" given a brand in a big tag cloud.
It's a simple but elegant and interesting experiment. The tag cloud for Walmart, for example, shows that the word "evil" is pretty big - but "cheap" is even bigger! We've embedded the site below in an iframe if you want to try it out yourself.
