Okay - have we all had a good long laugh at the digital cognoscenti who managed to get themselves infected by that Google Worm last week? Are we done yet? Apparently not. *Chortle.* *Guffaw.* Okay, now I'm done.
I'm painfully aware, though, that whatever laughs I'm having at the expense of those folks are going to come back at me in spades. The social engineering behind worms and viruses is getting smarter, and it's only a matter of time before something slips past my defences. I'll click on something I shouldn't; and that will be that.
One of the biggest complaints we hear from Twitter users is the increase in Twitter auto direct message spam. You know, those "thanks for following me" DMs that include a link, almost as an afterthought, offering you a free gift, the ability to earn a ton of cash, or the opportunity to check out a new product. Well, we're a bit sick of them too.
Apparently, SocialToo CEO Jesse Stay feels the same way. Last month SocialToo users were given the option to turn off auto DMs from other SocialToo users; today, Stay announced SocialToo is completely disabling auto-DMs.
While Facebook has been busy working on its new constitution in an effort to appease its increasingly anxious community over the past few days, the second application of dubious intent made its way onto the troubled site in the space of a week. The bad guys, it seems, have perfect timing.
Trend Micro reported Thursday that a rogue Facebook application had been posting false notifications to user profiles, telling them they have violated Facebook's Terms of Service and directing them to a malicious site for more information.
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarising the top stories of the week, we look into Facebook's controversial new "principles", check out the latest OpenID trends, cover Amazon's public data initiative, analyze Wikipedia's possible future as a development platform, investigate the future of 'touch' apps, and more. Also we cover the highlights from our Enterprise Channel and Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.
"Gather 'round children, it's time for story time with RoboGrandma - just make sure my batteries are charged!" This kind of blatant intellectual property violation will no longer be committed by the Amazon Kindle. The company today announced that it has given in to demands by the Author's Guild and will let publishers choose whether or not to enable the Kindle's speech to text audio functions for individual texts. Remember, folks, when reading by robots is outlawed, only outlaw robots will read aloud.
The Author's Guild argued that Kindle had only licensed display rights for content on the kindle, not audio or performance rights. The feature will now be neutered and put under the control of publishers on a title by title basis.
We heard about a new to-do list service today: Tasck. Tasck is a web-based application that stands out because of the pure simplicity of the service. Another to-do list service, KonoLive, just released a major update to its service and now features integration with Google Docs. KonoLive is an Adobe Air-based application that focuses on sharing to-do lists with groups. There are, of course, already plenty of to-do list managers available on the net, but both Tasck and KonoLive put their own spin on this established genre.
Mufin, a music recommendation service we looked at a few times in the past, just released a stand-alone music player for Windows that combines some of the most interesting features of Mufin's online service and iTunes plugin into one coherent desktop application. While it looks and acts like a standard music jukebox, Mufin Player's most important new feature is that gives you a new way to manage and sort your music collection based solely on the similarity between songs.
According to Cameron Marlow, Facebook's "in-house sociologist," that number is four if you are male and six if you are female. As the Economist reports this morning, Marlow's research indicates that the average Facebook user has a network of about 120 friends, but only has two-way conversations with a very small subset of these 'friends.' Interestingly, even for those users who have a far larger number of friends (500+), those numbers barely grow (ten for men and sixteen for women).
Denver's Rocky Mountain News daily paper is being closed by its owners the Scripps Interactive Newspapers Group. The newspaper had a difficult year economically, was put up for sale for a mere one month and this week was told by its owners that the doors were simply going to shut.
It's a story that we may see more and more often in coming months and years. The newspaper industry is changing radically and in many cases contracting. There are a lot of possible explanations and quite a few likely consequences to consider. Today, instead of discussing those in our blog post - we want to turn the microphone over to the good folks at the Rocky. They've produced a very moving 20 minute video about how it feels and what it means to lose their jobs and newspaper. The staff has put that video on the top of their front page, we've embedded it below.
While it used to be a bit of a media darling, it's not often that we write about MySpace anymore, but they continue to plug along - as one of the most popular sites on the Web. And, they continue to roll out new features for their user base. For many, these features may fall into the "too little too late" category. But it's still interesting to see which new MySpace features were a high priority to add or fix - especially for a site that seems to be rapidly losing touch with the audience that once embraced it.
