Update: In the frenzy to cover this breaking story, we had high hopes for a Six Apart announcement that emerged today. After seeing the soon to be relaunched Blogs.com site, our hopes were dashed. See the update to the end of this post for a screenshot and reaction.
Blogs.com sounds like a great URL, right? All these years it's just been used to sell Typepad blogging software, but this weekend SixApart will relaunch the site as a comprehensive directory of blogs around the web, organized by category.
The MobileMe service from Apple has been presenting its users with problems since day one. First, it snuck quietly onto computers by being bundled with iTunes. We seemed to be the only people complaining about that. Several outages followed the launch of MobileMe and plenty of problems still plague users of the service. Some can argue that MobileMe hasn't been doing its job very well. Now, MobileMe users have something else worry about: phishing scams.
A one year follow up on a study of social media adoption at 500 of the fastest growing companies in the US has found that familiarity with and use of blogs, podcasting, wikis, online video and social networking has skyrocketed in 2008 to nearly double what it was in 2007. 77% of respondents now report at least some use of a social media tool in their business.
The University of Massachusetts Dartmouth Center for Marketing Research performed the study for Inc. Magazine and their findings confirm what previous studies have argued as well: social media use is now a major, mainstream activity.
The iPhone's memory might be too small to carry your complete music collection with you, but thanks to a growing number of streaming music apps, you don't have to rely on your local storage anymore to have an ample supply of new music to listen to.
And thanks to a new application from Simplify Media, you can now even access all that music from your desktop while on the road.
Lately, people have been noticing that the big shift in computing - that is, moving our apps off the desktop and into the cloud - has more ramifications beyond what simply appears to be a return to a mainframe/thin client architecture. On the surface, today's web seems to be a developer's dream - there are more platforms than ever and everything has an API. Yet the darker side to this shift leaves developers with less control over the apps they build. Instead, they're at the whims of those that run the gated communities and closed platforms of today's web. Are we abandoning openness for the sake of security? And is that a trade-off we want to make?
While there are many popular lifestreaming services out there such as FriendFeed and Profilactic, SocialThing! can be argued to be the more mainstream of them all, with a less geekier user interface and a more mainstream service focus. After snagging Bebo earlier this year, word spread that AOL was looking to buy SocialThing! Though it's only being confirmed again, we're wondering if lifestreaming is finally catching on to the mainstream masses.
We've been fans of Cooliris, the browser plugin formerly known as PicLens, for quite some time. This plugin transforms a normal 2D web page into an immersive 3D experience for viewing photos and videos. It allows you to fly through all the media on a page, zoom in and out, watch the videos full screen or view the pictures in a slideshow format, and so much more. However, the one problem with Cooliris was the limited number of sites that supported it. As of now, that's about change.
Google had a bad week in cloud computing, with serious downtime in Gmail, Blogger and Spreadsheet. Back in July it was Amazon that was embarrassed with their S3 outage. If you measure on total downtime, cloud computing still looks good compared to traditional hosting or in-house data centers. But that glosses over the psychological and market confidence issues, when a problem hits everybody at the same time. In contrast, when was the last time you heard about a massive Skype outage? Maybe it is time to look more seriously at P2P?
It looks like we can finally put the Carl Icahn vs. Yahoo fight behind us. As part of the settlement between the two, Icahn was given three seats on Yahoo's board - one for himself and another two for new members to be appointed by Icahn. After Time Warner denied Icahn's favorite appointee Jon Miller a seat on the board because of a non-compete clause in his old AOL contract, Icahn and Yahoo finally settled on former Viacom president and CEO Frank J. Biondi and former Nextel CEO John H. Chapple.
It's no secret that the iPhone lacks video recording capabilities, which has served as a huge roadblock for companies and services that would like to introduce services that take advantage of video capabilities. For users that love to livestream or lifestream from their iPhones this is also a huge drawback. Well worry no more iPhone heads because Qik and Flixwagon have both introduced their livestreaming apps to jailbroken iPhones!
We'd like to warn all of our readers that jailbreaking your iPhone is not illegal, however it does void your warranty with Apple.
