On any given day, there are thousands of people snapping iPhone photos and uploading them to Flickr. So many in fact, that the iPhone is one of the top five cameras. That's amazing - but not for the reasons you'd think. It's amazing because the default process of getting a photo from the iPhone to Flickr should be easier. And while any number of apps have attempted to solve that problem, Flickit handles the task in a way that is arguably the most graceful - and iPhone appropriate - of them all.
The New York Times just released an interesting new online product that tries to recreate the experience of spreading out the newspaper on Sunday morning. The new 'article skimmer' gets back to the basics with a streamlined interface that lets you quickly scan the top headlines in every section of the Times. Basically, this is an experimental new interface for reading the Times online, though the links to the actual articles still take you to the standard NYT pages.
This week we received an email from a reader telling us that he'd tried to add a link to ReadWriteWeb onto a Wikipedia article, only to get the message: "The following link has triggered our spam protection filter: http://www.readwriteweb.com. Either that exact link, or a portion of it (typically the root domain name) is currently blacklisted." After a bit of investigation, we discovered that our site had been blacklisted by Wikipedia in mid-2008 and labeled as 'spam'! There is no explanation on Wikipedia as to why this happened. We certainly don't think we've done anything that would justify being blacklisted. So after some emailing and twittering, we found out that the way to challenge this blacklisting was to make our case on this Wikipedia page.
UPDATE, Sunday 15 February PST: RWW has now been removed from the Wikipedia blacklist. I still think that RWW should never have been on the blacklist to begin with, it was simply not justified. However it appears that my personal comments on Wikipedia, now and in the past, may have upset some people - so for that I offer an apology to the offended parties.
Twitter just announced that it has received another round of funding. According to TechCrunch, Twitter raised a total of $35 million in this round, which was led by Benchmark and Institutional Venture Partners. Altogether, Twitter has now raised a total of $55 million. According to Biz Stone, Twitter wasn't actively courting new investments, as the company still had enough money in the bank, but given Twitter's current growth, the company decided to accept the offer.
Yahoo application platform leader Sam Pullara has been appointed Chief Technologist, the company announced internally yesterday. Pullara has been responsible for the widely loved Yahoo Pipes and the next generation Yahoo Query Language, sometimes referred to as "Pipes for the command line."
Pullara is a leader in Yahoo's work on Open Web standards and the open web community appears enthusiastic about his promotion at Yahoo! For full coverage of the move, see our write up on Jobwire, ReadWriteWeb's blog covering new hires in tech and new media.
Google just released an updated version of its Google Docs spreadsheet product that finally allows you to edit your spreadsheets on a mobile phone. Now, if you have a G1, iPhone, iPod Touch, or Nokia S60 phone, you can not just browser through your spreadsheets, but actually edit them as well - though with some rather annoying limitations. Documents and presentations remain read-only for now.
Xoopit, the Gmail plugin that helps you rediscover the lost photos, videos, and files in your Gmail inbox has just announced their new "Facebook meets Gmail" feature. With this addition, Xoopit users can both see and set Facebook status messages from within their Gmail inbox as well as view the profile photos and status messages of their Facebook friends while reading their email.
The "internet of things" is a concept that describes a wireless network between objects. In a way, it parallels the current network of addressable web pages (aka the "world wide web"), except "the internet of things" would include addressable inanimate objects that could be anything from your home's refrigerator to the shoes on your feet. Although this world of web-connected things has been much discussed for years, we've seen little movement pushing the concept forward. At least, until now.
The Cloud. We save our data to it, create documents in it, collaborate in it. But coding in the cloud? That has remained a decidedly desktop-centric pursuit. Now, even that may be changing thanks to Bespin, a new prototype from Mozilla Labs. Flaunting thoughtful functionality and bearing an appropriately geeky name (a nod to the home of the Lando Calrissian managed mining colony), Bespin aims to become your dream HTML editor - from within the cloud.
Techmeme is a semi-automated site that tracks the hottest conversations among tech blogs each day, with updates every five minutes. It's one of the most innovative efforts in news gathering today. In December, Techmeme hired its first human editor, freelance writer Megan McCarthy.
McCarthy tends the gears of Techmeme, makes sure the content on the site remains of high quality and helps ensure the inclusion of new and important voices. It sounds like an awesome job and one that has probably never existed before - a half woman, half robot, news gathering machine. How can you get your blog on Techmeme? What's in the future for the site? We asked Megan in the following interview.
