We got our hands on the new version of popular Twitter desktop app Tweetdeck that will be delivered to all users tomorrow and we're pretty excited about what's been added.
If you've never used Tweetdeck, it's the most powerful application available for sending and receiving Twitter messages. It's about to become even more awesome.
Remember that link I shared on Twitter yesterday? What if I told you I had a new tool that would help you find it again...and all it would cost was 1 year of eBay founder Pierre Omidyar's time? That would be insane, would it not?
That's exactly what we saw, though, when we got a sneak peak today at Omidyar's new product Ginx. We wrote about Ginx when PE Hub first caught wind of its funding last month. We hoped it would incorporate all kinds of data-intensive recommendation mystery awesomeness. It might later, but so far it's quite simple and we describe below how you can reproduce most of its functionality without changing your essential workflow and using a new tool.
Last week we looked at Baynote, a recommendations company that focuses on real-time community behavior instead of personalization. Today we look at a company that takes a broader approach: richrelevance uses personalization extensively, plus the wisdom of the crowds when relevant. richrelevance claims that its approach is "adaptive AI" and that customers such as Sears and KMart are using its technology. We spoke to richrelevance founder and CEO David Selinger (ex-Amazon), to find out more about the product and what makes it different to Baynote and others.
After a period of dramatic tension, social networking giant Facebook has joined forces with the OpenID community working for a distributed system of standards-based, non-proprietary user identity. It's a move we think bodes well for the web and yesterday the first big collaborative event was held since the union was announced. Facebook hosted an OpenID User Experience Summit at its headquarters in downtown Palo Alto.
Much like last month's summit on Activity Stream standards, we believe that yesterday's meeting was of historic proportion.
MapQuest was once the unquestioned leader among online mapping services. And while others like Google Maps or Microsoft's Live Search Maps offer a more modern interface and far more features than MapQuest, the latest data from Hitwise shows that MapQuest still commands almost 40% of the market. Even on the fast-moving Internet, old habits clearly only die very slowly.
In the last two days, a couple of users noticed a new, Ajax-based interface on their Twitter home pages. Apparently, this new interface will allow users to scroll through their timelines without having to refresh the page. This, by itself, would not be a major new feature, but it hints at a larger refresh of Twitter's user interface.
Yahoo is bringing together two of its most interesting projects today, Yahoo BOSS (Build Your Own Search Service) and SearchMonkey, its semantic indexing and search result enhancement service. There were a number of different parts of the announcement - but the core of the story is simple.
Developers will now be able to build their own search engines using the Yahoo! index and search processing infrastructure via BOSS and include the semantic markup added to pages in both results parsing and the display of those results. There's considerable potential here for some really dazzling results.
According to the latest data from Compete, the '25 Random Things About Me' meme has not only given us access to a plethora of random facts about people we barely know, but this digital fad has also been good for Facebook. According to the latest data from Compete, four times more people than usual visited the 'Notes' section on Facebook in January. Compete estimates that close to 20 million users used 'Notes' in January, while only about 4 million used it in October 2008.
FaceTime Communications, the makers of hardware solutions for security, management, and compliance, have collected live traffic data from more than 80 mid to large commercially deployed networks worldwide - data representing the daily web-based activities of more than 100,000 corporate workers. At the same time, they surveyed I.T. managers on a number of topics, including how many Web 2.0 applications they believed were in use on their networks. They then compared the two sets of findings. The conclusion? On a day-to-day basis, it seems I.T. managers don't know what their employees are doing - or what web apps they're using.
We can no longer call Feedly just "an alternative interface for Google Reader" as we once did. Since the launch of Feedly Mini, a new mini bar that hovers at the bottom of the screen as you surf through blogs on the web, the service has become more of blog reading companion than anything else. Today that bar, also known as Feedly Mini, has been updated to better integrate both Twitter and FriendFeed with your blog reading. The experience is incredible and makes Feedly a must-have tool for anyone who uses these services.
