CollegeNET is a new, education-based social network where participation can lead to more tangible results than a large friends list or a lot of wall posts. Instead, the students participating online on CollegeNET can receive something a bit more rewarding: financial aid towards a college education in the form of scholarships. To receive one of the scholarships, students just have to do something they already enjoy: participate in a social network.
Welcome to a new series on ReadWebWeb, which we're calling 'Mainstream Web Watch'. Over the coming weeks I will be exploring a whole range of websites for RWW - from sports sites, to grocery store sites, to government websites, to banking sites, and much more.
We're starting with a sports website that has probably peaked in popularity just this week, the NBA basketball website.
China's top-level domain has now surpassed .net as the web's third most popular top-level and second most popular country-specific domain, according to a study by VeriSign says the Associated Press. VeriSign said that registrations of .cn domains had surged 23% in the first quarter of this year, and tripled year-over-year. China's domain boom is a sign of the country's growing importance on the web and rapidly expanding Internet user base.
In June 2005 Yahoo! acquired upstart Canadian photosharing web site Flickr and the web hasn't been the same since. Yahoo, on the other hand, didn't change nearly as much as everyone expected it to. Pre-CEO Jerry Yang told then-Business 2.0 writer Erick Schonfeld six months after the deal "I look at Flickr with envy, it feels like where the Web is going."
Flickr co-founders Caterina Fake and Stewart Butterfield have now cashed out and officially left the company. Though Yahoo! doesn't appear to have internalized many of the lessons of Flickr, it's not too late for the rest of us to look at those same key lessons for inspiration in our work on the web.
This is post #2 of a 2-part post on today's information overload problem and how we can cope. Please read part 1 here.
The information overload problem has reached a critical point. Workers drowning in their inboxes and jumping from task to task have now cost the nation $650 billion in lost productivity. A research group attempting to understand and combat the problem has recently been formed. We can either wait for answers for them, or we can start finding solutions ourselves. Let's do what social media addicts do best: let's crowdsource this thing!
Popular mobile IM and VOIP service Fring just launched an Application Programming Interface that could bring some awesome new applications to mobile phones around the world. The new API offers the Fring mobile interface, IM, presence indication, file transfer and other features to developers seeking to build apps in standard server-side languages. Fring ties in to users' Google Talk, MSN Messenger, ICQ and Skype IM accounts.
While the iPhone App Store will open some day soon, will be available around the world and will be usable on more affordable handsets than is the case today - Fring may still be more globally accessible than iPhone apps will be.
Firefox has already surpassed the 5 million download mark it set out to meet in its first 24 hours. As I write this, the browser just passed the 7 million download mark for its version 3.0 software, and with over 6800 downloads per minute (and rising) is on track to do 8 million or more by 1pm ET (24 hours since the download went live). Whether that's a record is hard to say, but it's very impressive nonetheless. Are you using Firefox 3? Do you plan to upgrade?
Social news site Reddit's secret announcement -- which people have been speculating about for the past 24 hours -- is out of the bag: Reddit is open sourcing their code. "We've always strived to be as open and transparent with our users as possible, and [open sourcing our code] is the next logical step," said Reddit in a blog post. Reddit, which was built and maintained by just 5 people, also posted a list of the more than 15 other open source projects that the site relies on.
This will be post #1 of 2 posts on today's information overload problem and how we can cope. Part 2 is here.
Information overload is no longer a joke. For those who suffered with this affliction, it never was, but now that there are real numbers attached to the problem, it has finally prompted companies to take action. Those numbers come from a recent study by a research company called Basex and they are to the tune of $650 billion in wasted productivity. Ironically, the time wasted comes from use of applications and technologies that are supposed to make workers more productive. Unfortunately, they seem to have the opposite effect.
At Supernova 2008 this week we got a glimpse of what’s next for mobile; and it has little to do with hardware like the iPhone, software like Google’s open-source operating system Android, mobile platforms put forth by Apple, Google, Nokia, Research in Motion, and the carriers.
What’s coming is life profound. Put billions of sensors in cell phones - regardless of hardware, operating system, or carrier - and affect the way we understand traffic or the weather.
