Yesterday, the big news for the identi.ca crowd was an answer to their wishes: Identi.ca is now supported in the AIR app Twhirl. Why is the support for this open-source Twitter clone so important? For one, it makes Identi.ca that much more of a useful service, but it also shows how quickly Twhirl can adapt to add the latest and greatest online communities to its service. More importantly though, Twhirl's support for Identi.ca means you can now tap into a full, real-time social stream all from one application.
Union Square Ventures, the VC shop that funded Del.icio.us, FeedBurner, Etsy and Twitter, has placed its latest bet in the clouds. Cloud computing service 10gen has taken $1.5 million from the high profile early investors, both the fund and the company announced today.
Most interesting perhaps is that the service is entirely open source, offering anyone a full copy of all its source code. Customers will pay for hosting, a Service Level Agreement and customer service. Today 10gen compares itself to Google App Engine and offers hosting for server side Javascript and Ruby.
A Pew study of US newspapers released today finds that national and international news coverage is declining as ad revenue plummets an emphasis shifts toward local stories. While those survey results may not seem so bad, newspaper editors also report that the biggest customer protests are being seen in response to cuts to crossword puzzles and TV listings - not decreasing news quantity or quality.
Just last week we said that the proxy fight between Carl Icahn and the Yahoo board was going to drag on until at least August. In a surprising twist of event, it now seems the battle is almost over, as Yahoo today announced an agreement with Icahn, who will get a seat on the Yahoo board. The board will be expanded from 9 to 11 members. At the shareholder meeting in August, 8 of the 9 current board members will stand for re-election.
We've been as excited as everyone else about the iPhone 3G. But it's easy to forget that the iphone is just a tiny player in the mobile phone market. Even if it hits Steve Jobs' target of 10 million iphone sales by end of 2008, that will still be less than 1% of the mobile device market.
To put it into perspective, Nokia remains the world's biggest mobile handset maker with an estimated 40% of the market. Impressively Nokia has a very healthy lead over its competition. However if you look more closely, Nokia is slipping behind in the all-important Internet mobile device market.
Today's big news is that Amazon's S3 online storage service has experienced significant downtime. Allen Stern, who hosts his blog's images on S3, reported that the downtime lasted 3.5 over 6 hours. Startups that use S3 for their storage, such as SmugMug, have also reported problems. Back in February this same thing happened. At the time RWW feature writer Alex Iskold defended Amazon, in a must-read analysis entitled Reaching for the Sky Through The Compute Clouds. But it does make us ask questions such as: why can't we get 99% uptime? Or: isn't this what an SLA is for?
Five months later and it looks like Facebook is ready to release its new profile redesign. Facebook had announced it was working on a redesign earlier this year. In May, a glimpse of the redesigned was released to developers in the developers sandbox. Tomorrow evening the redesign will be open to the public.
Relay for Life of Second Life is a charity event that celebrates the victories and remembers those that have been lost in the fight against cancer. Th 4th annual RFLofSL relay takes place today in the popular virtual network Second Life. Reports have been coming through the pipelines to let us know that the event has already amassed a ton money and it's only just begun!
Here is a new cartoon from Rob Cottingham of Social Signal. Rob runs a regular cartoon blog called Noise to Signal, in which he puts in graphical form some of the big questions of the social web.
Users love it when products and services from one company are nicely integrated with one another. It helps to keep users from bouncing around services. Companies love it because it's a way to lock users in, while gaining their trust. Nevertheless, Google has me hooked on yet another product from their labs: iGoogle. While I may be late to joining the RSS dashboard game, here's a look at a few of iGoogle's new features that users will enjoy.
