When we first reviewed Mufin, a music recommendation service that is entirely based around algorithms that can automatically detect the similarities between different songs, we only gave it a pretty average review. Since then, however, Mufin has greatly improved its service and added Facebook and Myspace applications. The most interesting new product, however, is Mufin's iTunes plugin, which brings Mufin's recommendation engine to your own iTunes collection and allows you to create automatic playlists based solely on the musical similarities between the songs.
In our tests, Mufin often performed better than Apple's Genius feature, but for now, the plugin is only available for Windows.
Officials at Boston College have made what may be a momentous decision: they've stopped doling out new email accounts to incoming students. The officials realized that the students already had established digital identities by the time they entered college, so the new email addresses were just not being utilized. The college will offer forwarding services instead.
Whenever there is a conference or event, there's a secondary bit of action taking place behind the scenes: the backchannel. Here, the attendees are live blogging, twittering, posting photos, and streaming live video about what they're seeing on stage or in and around the venue. Twitter has always been the microblogging platform of choice in this scenario, but starting today, they just might have new competition from Brightkite, the mobile social networking service that's making a name for itself among the early adopters.
These are reflections from having spent a few days at the annual Salesforce.com event, Dreamforce. We hope they are valuable to people who need an executive summary-level understanding of the company and its position in the cloud and SaaS marketplace. Full disclosure, the company paid for my flight and hotel to attend Dreamforce.
The current economic climate is having a devastating effect on almost every business around. In order to adapt to changing conditions and opportunities, businesses will need to use flexible, adaptable systems to survive. The days of expensive year-long implementations of behind-the-firewall software look to be behind us.
In an economic environment where a number of companies are stumbling, it's important to remember that sometimes even Google makes bad decisions. Such would be the case with Lively, a browser-based virtual world environment - and purported Second Life killer - that Google launched this summer to great fanfare.
Now, a little over four months after Lively's launch, Google has decided to turn the lights out on the alternate reality, announcing that they are discontinuing Lively at the end of this year.
Editor's note: we're currently running a series of 'Sponsor Posts', focused on use cases and business stories. These posts are clearly marked as written by sponsors, but we also want them to be useful and interesting to our readers. We hope you like the posts and we encourage you to support our sponsors by trying out their products.
Wild Apricot is a young technology company out of Toronto, Canada. We provide Software-as-as-Service for associations, clubs, and non-profit organizations. This is our story of an investment round that fell through due to economic conditions.
This May Yahoo! started testing an "all in one" search product called Yahoo Glue in India. It's a really cool service that tonight becomes available to US users of Yahoo.
Yahoo! Glue search results include web search, images, news, blog search, Wikipedia and YouTube videos. That's right - in the India version at least Yahoo! displayed search results from both Google's YouTube and Google Blogsearch. The end result - all these links on one page - is pretty awesome.
Mozilla today announced that it has served its 1 billionth addon download since they started keeping track of these downloads in 2005. Currently, Mozilla's users are downloading close to 1.5 million addons every day.
Mozilla has cultivated one of the most active and interesting developer communities around its products and seeing numbers like these will surely give a lot of other developers an incentive to try their hands at developing new plugins for Firefox as well.
Gmail's interface was revolutionary when it was first released, but the design was a bit too plain for a lot of users. After a short while, users started to develop Greasemonkey scripts and Firefox plugins that could bring some more excitement to the standard Gmail theme. Today, however, Google itself announced that will be rolling out over 30 different themes for Gmail in the next couple of days.
A few lucky Gmail users are already seeing a 'Themes' tab appear in their settings menu, though as is typical for Google, it might take a day or two before this new feature has been rolled out to all users.
