After only 100 days and fifteen updates, Google has taken the "beta" label off Chrome, its WebKit based browser. Given that the company has a penchant for keeping products like Gmail or Google Docs in perpetual beta, it comes as a bit of a surprise that Google already considers Chrome to be a 1.0 product.
Since the first beta release, Google has focused on fixing stability issues (especially with regards to playing Flash video), sped up the already fast V8 JavaScript engine, and added a better bookmark manager and privacy controls.
A fast-growing new group of Facebook users from Bosnia called on Facebook to shut down another group on the site that celebrates the 1995 massacre of 8,000 Bosnian Muslims by the Serbian army in Srebrenica. It appears that the group has been shut down while we wrote this story about it, the link to the group now redirects users to their profile pages with no explanation. Was that the right way to handle it? We're not sure.
Reuters wrote this morning about the Serbian group that reportedly describes itself as "For all those who think that Muslims are best on the spit and while swimming in sulphur acid". The anti-Muslim group's membership grew 20% to more than 1100 people since the Reuters report was published.
Researchers Nicholas Christakis and James Folwer recently published a paper in the British Medical Journal where they examined how a person's happiness is related to the happiness of their friends in their offline social networks. To follow up that study, they examined those same happiness clusters in online networks like MySpace and Facebook. Their conclusion? Happier people tend to have more friends and are more central to the network when compared with their more sullen friends.
"Koobface" is the name of the Trojan worm that's been making its way through the social networking site Facebook lately, but to the site's users, it's been simply known as "the Facebook virus." That name will soon become a misnomer, though, because the worm is now spreading outside of Facebook's walls to attack other social networks like Bebo, MySpace, Friendster, MyYearbook, and Blackplanet.
It's been quite the month for the world of distributed social networking. Both Facebook Connect and Google Friend Connect - two services designed to help user manage a single profile across multiple sites - launched on the same day. Then, MySpace followed in close succession with their MySpaceID offering, another distributed social option built on the Open Stack. In a matter of days, the distributed social space went from nascent to completely confusing. Now, JanRain hopes to alleviate some of that confusion with RPX.
The last time WordPress - the popular open source blogging platform - changed their user interface, they got a reaction. And it wasn't positive. Even diehard fans were questioning the reasoning behind the changes, trying to figure out ways to work within the new construct, or simply throwing their hands up in despair. So, it comes as little surprise that the latest release, WordPress 2.7 - codenamed "Coltrane" - has had a great deal of time and energy focused on improving that interface. But could the WordPress development team win back the adoration of those angry users with yet another interface change?
As we reported on Jobwire, OpenID thought leader Dick Hardt announced Friday that he has joined Microsoft. Hardt's hire will be added to a recent history of the software giant making controversial hires from among its presumed opponents, advocates of open source and open culture. Is this assimilation or are we seeing a company change, with the infusion of new and different DNA?
Yesterday our regular podcast show, RWW Live, was on the topic of 'shopping 2.0'. The show was very illuminating about how the Social Web has changed e-commerce and what tactics leading apps use to target their audience and make money. Indeed many of the lessons can and should be used by other forms of business, such as media and technology startups.
We have a two-part post summarizing the highlights from the show. In this post we discuss why and how shopping 2.0 sites are targeting very niche customers and how that's helped them increase revenues.
Microsoft Labs today released Thumbtack, a new bookmarking application with a very slick user interface that represents an interesting take on bookmarking and saving online information, though it often falls short on delivering some of the basics that we have come to expect from online bookmarking services.
According to Microsoft, Thumbtack was developed based on user feedback the company received after releasing Listas in 2007. Unlike Listas, however, Thumbtack does not focus on social bookmarking but rather on creating online research collections. Thumbtack supports both IE7 and Firefox, though Firefox users miss out an a few interesting features.
A grainy video has just become available from the Adobe Max conference in Milan, Italy last month of a sneak peek at a new experiment called Infinite Images.
The project is so cool we couldn't help but post about it, even though very little about it is known yet.
