Later tonight Google will launch a new service called Friend Connect, aiming to "bring the social" to any page around the web. Unfortunately the service takes a bunch of open technical standards yearning to see the light of day through mass adoption and puts them in a dark little box where they will struggle to breathe.
Google could have worked with other large companies and with the creators of these standards (some are in the Data Portability Working Group that Google joined, for example) to tackle the hard questions around data exposure, integration and privacy. Instead they are pushing their Open Social standard around in an iframe. Easy is very good, but co-operation could have come up with something better than this.
Benjamin Golub has been busy. He runs the site RSSmeme, an RSS aggregator that displays the top Shared Items items from Google Reader users. For a brief time, RSSmeme was the only Google Reader aggregator in town after ReadBurner closed up shop. But not too much later, ReadBurner was purchased and relaunched (our coverage), putting the two sites in competition once again. However, it looks like Golub has no plans to slow down with RSSmeme's development. He has recently released an RSSmeme API, which allows for all kinds of new filtering options, a mobile web site, and much more.
Yesterday I filled the gas tank of my Toyota Camry and it came to just under $60. To be fair, it could have been a lot worse -- compared to many parts of the country, where I live gasoline is still relatively cheap. But in this world of rising fuel costs, tracking your gas consumption is a necessity if you want get any relief from the pain at the pump. FuelFrog, a new web app that launched last week from Durham, NC-based Second Pixel, aims to make tracking your gas mileage and consumption easier and more edifying.
Crowdsourcing, a term coined by Jeff Howe in a June 2006 issue of Wired magazine, is a model of labor that has been fully embraced on the Internet over the past couple of years. Crowdsourcing takes tasks traditionally done by a single person or small groups of people, and farms them out to a global workforce. The large-scale committee approach is powerful because it leans on the concept of the "wisdom of crowds" (to a certain extent) which says basically that the more input, the better the output. We've written about a number of companies that employ crowdsourcing to produce their product or service here on ReadWriteWeb, but in this post we'll specifically look at companies that allow you to leverage the crowd to get something done.
Looking to visualize your Facebook friend graph? You can with a Facebook app called Nexus. This app is a friend grapher that displays a visual analysis of your Facebook connections. But it's not just a pretty picture: in addition to viewing how your friends are connected, you can use Nexus to discover what interests your friends share and which of your friends are the most similar to you.
Visualization tools are slowly making a way for themselves on the web. We have given you an extensive list of some of the best visualizations tools including visual search engines. However, there is one visual search engine that is making a name and breaking the mold: Viewzi, a visual search engine that has been under wraps since October 2007.
Here's a look at some of the best visual views that Viewzi offers...
Giant social networks Myspace and Facebook have plans to expand beyond their walls. Myspace announced on Thursday its Data Availability platform and Facebook countered quickly with Facebook Connect. Now it seems that Google's OpenSocial platform will join the ranks on Monday with "Friend Connect".
If there's one thing to be learned from social media tools, it's that these services were not made to interact with one another. Complaints are rolling in and heated discussions are taking place about the noise levels within social media platforms. Here's a look at why noise levels are high and why filtering should be the next step for social media platforms.
ReadWriteWeb's Alex Iskold recently described modern Biz Dev 2.0 techniques that do not involve knocking on doors and talking to people. The Internet is great at automating routine transactions and more software is being sold as a service on a simple "click here" to subscribe basis. But occasionally some contact sport is still required, and you have to resort to what we can now call Biz Dev 1.0 -- what we used to call selling. You will need these skills to raise money and to sell your business, even if you never have to sell to anybody else. Fred Wilson reminded us of the most basic requirement, to ask for the order. Here are 10 other tips:
The number of people whose work is touched by the internet these days is hard to imagine. Many of us have been working full-time online for a while, but for the vast majority of people online today that's not the case. Here at RWW we communicate with people with a wide range of experience working online every day.
We've noticed that many people don't use some tools that would make their lives online much more effective and efficient. Here's our list of some tools we'd suggest are essential. Several of these tools will deliver huge value to your workday and take less than 10 minutes to get set up. Some will be obvious to full time web workers, but some suggestions may not be. They include: a multi-service IM client, cross platform screensharing tool, a custom search engine, a startpage and a blog with contact info.
