The weekend is a good chance to play around with web apps and social networks. With that in mind, on a rainy Sunday I found myself checking out Sarah Perez's classic post from May: How to Make Facebook Useful Again. You may also want to read the comments for other useful suggestions. But if you just want the highlights and then do some experimenting within Facebook on a lazy Saturday or Sunday, then here they are:
You can find tons of lifestream badges floating around sites. These badges showcase the latest online activity of the author and provides a little more insight into who they are and what they like. Lifestream badges also provides a way to share information with users that have similar interests. We've given you 35 ways to lifestream your life and Escaloop was one of them. So here's a look at their custom lifestream badge.
RSS feeds are the all the latest craze. It's one of the best and most popular way of staying up to date quickly. However, with services web feed readers like Google Reader and even desktop readers such as FeedDemon, those updates may not always come as quickly as you'd like them too. Or maybe you just don't live in your feed reader like I do. If you're not using Snackr, or Anothr, and you'd like your RSS updates as quickly as possible, try out IM Feeds.
It's no secret that the mobile web is one of the next big things. From the future of mobile social networks, mobile social networks to check out, and what's plaguing them, we've talked a lot about mobile social networks here on ReadWriteWeb. But what about the applications? Here's a look at some of best mobile applications for the Windows Mobile platform.
The San Francisco based social groupware provider Grou.ps announced today that it has secured a Series A round of financing for $1.1 Million in a deal led by Golden Horn Ventures. Grou.ps has also announced that it is open sourcing a restricted version of its code under the Affero Public License.
Grou.ps aims to provide users with a comprehensive set of tools to collaborate online and currently has about 200,000 active users worldwide.
Here are some of the highlights from the week's Web Tech action on ReadWriteWeb. On the product side we reported on Nokia's buyout of the open source mobile OS Symbian, reviewed a "memory augmentation" service and a semantic search engine, and looked at what LinkedIn's strategy tells us about the IPO market. On the trends side, we contributed our 2 cents to Yahoo's board, investigated another Wikipedia controversy, analyzed the capacity of web 2.0 to bring about "change", and explored the online video market.
I used to be annoyed by people who commented on my Twitter messages (tweets) in FriendFeed, rather than replying directly to me in Twitter (the platform I was using).
However with the introductions of Rooms, FriendFeed is no longer a lifestream aggregator anymore - it is the perfect platform for sharing and discussing content with groups focused on a specific topic.
Some ideas are either so good (or so easy to copy), that it's only a matter of time before they have been cloned so many time that they become cliché. Popurls was exactly such an idea - a simple web site that aggregates headlines from various Web 2.0 blogs and social media sites.
The latest Popurls clone is Smashbuys: a site that displays the top sellers in various categories at some of the major online retailers, including Amazon, Newegg, and iTunes.
Tutorial creation tool ScreenSteps released a new version today and we're excited to discover this very useful looking tool. This desktop app for Windows and Mac lets users create attractive screenshot-based support documents in minutes. You can capture full or partial screenshots, add relatively sophisticated annotation and then publish to the web or export in HTML or PDF formats.
The 30 day trial of ScreenSteps Pro took us just a few minutes to learn how to use and we're already excited to use this service for product reviews and tutorials.
Open standard based user authentication protocol oAuth has now been implemented across all Google Data APIs, quickly offering this young standard for easy mashups more market validation than it's ever had before.
Eight months ago we wrote about the launch of oAuth 1.0, asking if the standard would lead to a flood of mashups across the web.
