Today, Bloglines has unveiled a new skin for its public beta site and has announced that it will start displaying ads on its start page. The new skin for the beta is is quite well done and definitely an improvement over the regular Bloglines interface, as well as the last version of the beta skin. The really interesting news, however, is that Bloglines now, for the first time, features advertising on its service after it had originally abandoned the idea when it created a major controversy back in 2005.
Yahoo today announced that it will allow its customers to opt out of customized advertising on Yahoo.com. Yahoo made this announcement in a response to the an inquiry by U.S. Congressman John Dingell (D- Mich.). Just yesterday, Google had announced a similar opt-out program for its DoubleClick advertising network. Yahoo's opt-out program won't take effect until the end of this month and will be an enhancement of Yahoo's current privacy policies with regard to customized advertising.
Does Twitter Have a Role in the Workplace? A Directory Project Thinks it Can Help
Did you know that there are more than 100 people who work in the Oil and Gas industries who use Twitter? There are more than 400 people on Twitter who say they work in a field related to accounting, 115 professional language translators, 75 people who sew or are tailors and 33 people in the Air Force. How well is your industry represented on Twitter? Wouldn't you like to find those people to connect with them?
According to a report in the International Herald Tribune, Facebook tried to acquire the popular German social network StudiVZ. When those negotiations ended without a deal, Facebook decided to sue StudiVZ instead for copying Facebook's look and feel. According to the article, StudiVZ's owners, the German media company Holtzbrinck Gruppe, wanted to sell, but for far more than the $134 million it originally paid for StudiVZ in 2007.
By now you've surely heard the story about the "I Am Rich" app that sold in Apple's iTunes store for the ridiculous price of $999.99 (U.S.). What you may not have heard was that there were eight people who actually bought the app - six in the U.S. and two Europeans. So far, there only appears to be one person who bought the app in error, if a certain screenshot circling the net is to be believed. But what about the other seven? Did they know what they were getting into? And, if so, was Apple right to remove the app from their store?
If you love both Facebook and Adobe AIR, then you're going to love these three new AIR apps for your desktop: Facedesk, Zebr, and Flair. Facedesk is a standalone application that lets you use Facebook without having a browser window open. Both Zebr and Flair are notification programs for receiving alerts about Facebook status updates, wall posts, messages, and more. The last two are a bit more useful, but true Facebook addicts might want to try all three.
Yesterday, Mozilla announced Snowl, a prototype of a universal messaging/content aggregation plugin for Firefox. In its current incarnation, Snowl only allows you to view your Twitter messages and RSS feeds, though Mozilla is planning on adding more messaging services in the near future. During our first tests, we came away disenchanted, as the execution of this first version leaves a lot to be desired, even if the general idea behind Snowl is quite interesting.
Earlier this week we ran a competition for 2 full tickets to the New York Web 2.0 Expo conference 16-19 Sept. The tickets are valued at over $1000 each and we also have a consolation prize of a free Expo hall pass (value $100).
To be in to win one of the 3 prizes, we asked: for the 'Web Meets World' charity auction at the Web 2.0 Summit later this year (5-7 Nov), what would YOU bid on that web celebrities could offer? The 3 best answers, subjectively chosen by the RWW team, are printed below.
This week we've discussed how Social
Media Marketing and Online
Video is being used in the Beijing Olympics. It's now 8.08am on Friday 8th August 2008 in Beijing and some Chinese Web fans have launched a campaign to
celebrate and support the opening of the Beijing Olympics, using (you guessed it) Twitter!
Automated translation services seem to be getting more and more traction these days. Today, we saw announcements about new translation related products from both Microsoft and telephony service JahJah. Microsoft announced that it will be giving its users a free update that will integrate Windows Live Translator into MS Office 2003 and 2007, while JaJah is now offering free voice translations from Mandarin into English through JaJah Babel.
