Oh no! Your mom just joined Facebook and what's even worse, she wants to be your friend. More and more people are finding themselves in this situation today and unsure of what to do. Friending mom and dad, the boss, or other work colleagues opens up the details of your private life for the whole world to see - and you might not be entirely comfortable with that. What's to be done?
Generation Y, aka the "Net Generation," does not dominate every aspect of online life. That revealing statistic and many others like it come from Pew Internet and American Life's recent "Generations Online" report which takes a look at how the different generations of users - from Millennials to the G.I. Generation - use the internet.
Here's a survey question for you: Do we really need another Web-based survey tool? There are any number of respectable and useful survey products out there today, all of which do a fine job of soliciting responses from a constituency. So when we started to review Survs, the latest entrant to dip a toe into the online survey pool, we were cynical, to say the least. But as we dug into Survs, we found some thoughtful features that had us revising our answers, changing the radio button from "No" to "Maybe."
YouTube first introduced annotations last June, but starting today, Google's popular video sharing site is making it even easier to add text comments into your own videos. Whereas before you had to go into a relatively complicated annotations editor to add your comments, you can now just click on a spot in the video during playback and the annotations editor will open automatically. Google has also made it significantly easier to add links to other content on YouTube into your annotations.
As a concept, OpenID has shown a great deal of potential. But that potential has often been hamstrung by the series of hurdles through which OpenID users have been required to jump in order to use their credentials. When Facebook Connect entered the distributed digital identity fray, those OpenID usability problems came into stark relief. Now, Google and Plaxo have responded with a new workflow for OpenID logins that simplifies the process and improves the usability - by adding OAuth and the Google Contacts API to the mix.
There is clearly no dearth of slideshow services on the Internet. Some are intricate like Animoto, and others, like Slide, are mostly geared towards the MySpace and FaceBook crowd. PhotoPeach takes a more minimalist approach and focuses purely on the actual pictures without using flashy effects and themes. This is great if you just want to showcase some of your latest photos without the distraction of themes and sound effects.
What blog search engine should you use? That depends on your needs.
In order to join a conversation, you've got to be able to find it first. Three years ago "blog search" was expected to be a booming industry, startups left and right developed different technologies and more than a few raised millions of dollars to help users search the part of the web made up of blogs. These days no one thinks consumer-market blog search is a serious business, but many of us still have a need to limit searches to blogs. What should we do? ReadWriteWeb offers some recommendations and an assessment of the state of the industry below.
RSS feeds have become the backbone of the Web 2.0 movement, but as we are moving towards a real-time experience on the web, RSS is starting to show its age. To update your subscriptions, you have to regularly poll these feeds. This, of course, is a major problem for RSS readers and notification services which often have to deal with a substantial lag before new posts and messages appear. The newest service that tries to tackle this problem is Notifixious, but as Notifixious founder Julien Genestoux explains, a lot of problems still need to be fixed before ubiquitous real-time notifications can become a reality.
Adobe AIR, an excellent cross-platform run time for web-connected desktop applications, has been downloaded 100 million times in under one year of availability, according to a post on the AIR team blog today. We like AIR, a lot, but the hype smells funny to us.
Venture Beat says Adobe is winning the platform race and TechCrunch says that AIR is Flying. There are reasons to believe, however, that AIR is not being used widely and news coverage of the announcement so far has failed to look at those details.
Analyst firm Gartner has just released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies they've identified will evolve quickly and will likely pose issues that will have to be addressed by short term strategies.
