Today, MySpace announced a global partnership with Research in Motion (RIM), makers of Blackberry smartphones. The two companies have come together to create a new version of the MySpace Mobile application designed specifically for Blackberry devices. MySpace Mobile, which officially launched in March of this year, lets users interact with messages, comments, and friend requests from any handset with a web browser by visiting m.myspace.com. However, the Blackberry version of MySpace Mobile will not be a mobile site, but a downloadable app that integrates MySpace with the Blackberry to provide push-based messaging to users.
MixMatchMusic is a new music community whose goal is to cater to the long tail of content creators. Although the concept of an online community for musicians is not new - we've covered several here in the past including Imeem, The Filter, and Rifflet - MixMatchMusic is different because it's trying to solve the biggest problem facing the music industry today: helping artists, especially indie artists, get paid for the music they create.
Just in time for the back-to-school season, Google added some new features to Google Docs. Among these are a built-in version of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary and thesaurus, as well as the ability to look up any term in the Encyclopedia Britannica. You can also now highlight any word in a document to initiate a search in Google or Google Images. For now, these new features are only available in English.
And we've got the answer. Three of them actually: Listen, learn, and let go. Let's face it, Web 2.0 is a buzzword. And when it comes to government, change, and innovation, we have to reach beyond buzzwords. Surprising to some, the government isn't too far beyond.
Government is doing some amazing social media initiatives to better serve their constituents, and why not - social media is all about increasing the democratization of communications. The government serves its people, and thus, it's a perfect match.
Since Amazon's Kindle introduction to the world last year, the company has increased the number of available book titles for the portable reader from 90,000 to over 170,000. Most of these titles have also been available at significantly lower prices than their bookshelf counterparts. Amazon is now looking to use the help of the hype surrounding the elections this year to improve its Kindle sales. As of today, Amazon has announced that they will offer two new political books well before their publication dates exclusively on the Amazon Kindle.
Traffic analysts estimate 5 billion US video views in July for YouTube alone.
Comscore issued their report for July website traffic in the online video sector today and two numbers really stand out. The company estimates that US web users viewed more than 5 billion videos that month and says that 75 percent of the total U.S. Internet audience viewed online video in July. Those are some pretty high numbers, but 3rd party traffic stats always have to be taken with a giant grain of salt. Do you believe that online video is this universal yet?
Music discovery services are definitely a hot topic right now, with Pandora, Last.fm, imeem, and others vying for users. Yesterday, Apple joined the fray when it released iTunes 8 and its 'Genius' recommendation engine. After examining your iTunes library, iTunes uploads data about your library to Apple's servers and returns back a set of information about how the songs in your library correlate to each other. Based on this, iTunes can now build playlists of similar songs and display shopping recommendations.
I recently attended the Office 2.0 Conference in San Francisco. The highlight for me was the first session where Ismael Ghalimi interviewed David Allen, the author of "Getting Things Done." The book and associated methodology highlight the need to capture and organize ideas and tasks in a structured way. The interesting question for me is how to make it work on an Enterprise or company level.
Google announced a few additions to Gmail Labs today that make using labels a bit easier and expand the functionality of some of the already established features. Google announced Gmail Labs in June and, at that time, introduced 13 experimental features. This new batch of updates consists of 3 new features: custom label colors, label specific keyboard shortcuts, and the ability to change the order of items in the navbar.
Digg for programming questions? Joel on Software and Jeff Atwood of Coding Horror start letting users into their well built site.
The highly anticipated general release of StackOverflow, the social site for programming questions developed by rock star programmers Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood, hasn't happened yet - but the doors are cracked open and many new users are streaming in this morning.
