Businesses strive to find the best avenues to connect with their audience. Today, social media is one of those avenues that not many companies are pursuing. Social media can be a platform that's associated with many risks for these companies.JustMeans is a social media platform that aims to change all of that.
Recommendation service Strands.com launched a lifestreaming service this week that aims to pull together the company's wide range of services in particular media and online activity into one central place for users to share socially. The new Strands is a way to share your music, bookmarks, blog posts and other activity with friends, family and groups. It's a major entry into one of the most interesting sectors of the new web. We give it a mixed review below.
RWW network blog last100 has coverage of the latest Android news coming from Google's I/O conference. Dan Langendorf writes that "as you would expect from the company that brings you search and Google Maps, Android handles information delivery, location and navigation extremely well -- or so we think. There's still no actual Android phones to play with." The obvious question on peoples lips though is: how will Android compare to Apple's iPhone? On that question there are mixed opinions.
For a few years now people have been talking about semantic search.
Any technology that stands a chance to dethrone Google is of great interest
to all of us, particularly one that takes advantage of long-awaited and much-hyped semantic technologies. But no matter how much progress has been made, most of us are still underwhelmed by the results.
In head-to-head comparisons with Google, the results have not come out much different. What are we doing wrong?
How can people be sure that a blog comment left by "Bill Gates" is from the real Bill Gates? How does your lifestream aggregator know? Web developer Kyle Brady, creator of lifestream aggregator OneSwirl, has proposed a system he calls idAuth that he thinks addresses this issue. idAuth is a "push" system for data that can be linked to a specific identity. Theoretically, it would allow lifestream aggregators to collect data from across the web without the need for RSS/Atom feeds, and verify the validity of the id of the data owner.
MediaDefender is a company that acts on behalf of other media companies to muck up P2P and file sharing networks. They're the ones seeding BitTorrent with fake files - a tactic they hope will make filesharing appear to be too much of a hassle and therefore not worth the effort. In September of last year, MediaDefender was in the news for some leaked emails which helped The Pirate Bay prove that the company had hired professional hackers and saboteurs to bring down the world-famous file-trading site. Now, it seems MediaDefender is at it again. This time their target was Revision3, home to popular shows like Diggnation, Tekzilla, Systm, and The GigaOm Show.
Offline, I have a network of under 50 people that I interact on a regular basis as friends. But online, the concept of "friend" is completely different. On Facebook I have nearer to 250 friends, on Twitter I have just over 300 followers. That's just a blip compared to how many friends some of the true power users on those services have, but it brings to mind the question of how many friends is too many? Surely, the answer varies person-to-person, but there have to be some universal upper limits to the concept of "friendship."
Hank Williams relates a story about one of Robert Scoble's comments on FriendFeed being deleted after the author of the blog post he was commenting one removed his FriendFeed account. While the cynical response might be, "So one of the ten million comments Scoble leaves each day was delete -- he'll live," it does bring up a valid point about content ownership. The blog owner was upset that his the discussion around his content was taking place outside of his blog, while Scoble was upset that content he created (and thus should own -- right?) was removed without his permission. On an increasingly fragmented social web, who owns your comments?
Yahoo! Pipes is one of the coolest ways to mashup the RSS feeds of various sites and sources to get the data you want. Since our coverage of Yahoo! Pipes, thousands of creations are now available. However, finding the best picks can be tough. ReadWriteWeb has done the hardest part and comprised a list of some of the best Yahoo Pipes created by users. So without further ado, we give you the ultimate Yahoo! Pipes list.
In our recent article "When User-Generated Content Goes Bad," we highlighted the challenges that companies face today when delving into marketing campaigns that revolve around user-generated content. To combat potential problems, some businesses employ professional tools to monitor the conversations, but others are just now discovering the necessity of doing so. One company that can help with this is Visible Technologies, who has just launched a new version of their TruCast product, TruCast 2.0.
