Last week I was watching TV and saw something that really caught my eye. It was a commercial for Special K, the breakfast cereal from Kellogg, and rather than end with a plug for the product's web site -- SpecialK.com -- it advised people to search Yahoo! for "Special K" instead. I started to wonder two things: 1. is Yahoo! paying Special K for tack-on advertising? and 2. has searching really become so natural that it is more effective to tell people to search for your site than it is to tell them to visit directly?
Did you participate in the Twit-Out yesterday? Do you even know what that is? To get you up to speed, a handful of Twitter users, fed up with the regular outages of their favorite service, decided to band together to show Twitter some tough love by boycotting the service for a day. (Unfortunately, despite having fewer users on the service, Twitter still went down). However, in light of recent world events, it's a shame that the cause the tech community has chosen to rally around is that of Twitter's instability. Aren't there more important things going on right now?
In the tradition of American Idol, The Apprentice, Top Chef, and Dragons' Den, a new TV show is in development in New Zealand that will bring the 'Elimination/Game show' format of reality TV to the world of startups. I will be one of the 3 judges.
Facebook and MySpace have replaced email for a substantial number of young people. Facebook, though, appears to believe that some things are better off not discussed in conversations between its members.
We've found two instances of words that will get a Facebook message blocked and we presume there are others. The company says it's spam control, but it seems creepy to us.
We've gotten quite a few requests for a "print this page" button on RWW, something that styles up an article nice and clean for readers to print out and pass around. We never set something like that up, in part probably because here at RWW we don't ever see any of our co-workers. We've got people in New Zealand, Rhode Island, Florida, Georgia, New Jersey, Oregon and beyond.
Many of you would like to print an article occasionally though and share it with co-workers, friends, family, clergy, grocery checkers or the civil servants in your neighborhood. We really appreciate that! Thankfully, fabulous RWW reader Alex Muntean has created a system you can use in just minutes make a printable page on RWW available with a single click.
PolicyMap is a new website that offers more than 4,000 points of data about any location in the United States, including demographics, real estate markets, crime, schools, housing affordability, employment type, energy consumption, and public investments. It's powered by a new Application Programming Interface (API) from commercial mapping service PushPin.
I just found a more useful way to search than Google. (Sort of.) It only works for a defined use case, but, in a search market that is 85% going on 90% Google-dominated, this can still be significant. The site that provides a better search experience than Google? Business social network LinkedIn. Long time readers of this blog know that I have already chronicled my success at using LinkedIn for both business development and recruiting. So it is not a surprise to me that LinkedIn is seeing easily the highest growth rate among social networking sites.
The popular mobile browser Opera today launched a software developers kit (SDK) for widgets. While rival Apple's iPhone SDK requires that applications be distributed exclusively through the still-unlaunched iPhone App Store, pay a $99 application fee and wait - Opera SDK built widgets appear to be much more open and free.
Opera's widgets will be able to run on the company's wildly popular mobile browser, Opera Mini excluded, the desktop version of Opera, the Nintendo Wii and any other devices that run Opera 9.5. We covered the launch of 9.5 here.
Offline/online synchronization is one of the biggest challenges when it comes to taking web apps offline. Adobe, whose AIR platform brings us some of our favorite apps as of late, like Twhirl and Snackr (our coverage), offers a way for developers to create web-based applications that run even when there is no internet connection. Offline, users can make changes that get synced back to a central server when the internet connection returns. However, in the past, this is no easy easy feat. To help address some of the issues with offline sync, Adobe released LiveCycle Data Services ES 2.6 (LCDS) last month, which aims to make the process easier.
Wikipedia, which turned 7 this year, is a source of information for 683 million visitors every year. A poster child for user-generated content, Wikipedia has grown from its first year in which just 12 articles were created to over 10 million today in 253 different languages. That's a whole lot of content, and naturally, being able to easily search it would be helpful for anyone wanting to get the most out of the web's favorite encyclopedia. You could use the site's official search engine, or you could search Google for "site:wikipedia.org" ... or you could use one of the 10 alternative methods below (in no particular order).
