Nova Spivack's semantic web company Twine is developing a free service to write and host semantic ontologies; the classification trees that enable machines to put concepts in topical context. Ready to play Aristotle and create an ontology of cheese, model airplanes, global anti-hunger organizations or any other topic?
What blogging was to publishing, a simple tool that made far more people able to participate, Twine's new ontology writing and hosting service could be to the act of teaching machines about new topics.
Today, Facebook announced new privacy settings which let you selectively open up portions of your personal profile to everyone on the Facebook social network. As an alternative to the new "Public Profiles" (formerly called "Pages"), these additional settings allow you to pick and choose which parts - if any - of your private Facebook profile are available for anyone to see. According to a company blog post, this means that now people won't need to friend you in order to view the content you want to make public.
The Internet economy has been built on the network effect (i.e. the effect that one user of a good or service has on the value of that product for other people). Investors and entrepreneurs have treated this like Moore's Law. But just as Moore's Law hits physical constraints, network effects have a limit in many types of online communities. Indeed, in some cases, a reverse network effect may exist: as new people join, others are motivated to leave. This dramatically affects the length of the competitive advantage enjoyed by these ventures. In this post, we'll look at which ventures suffer from reverse network effects, which don't, and which may suffer depending on the strategy they choose to adopt.
Now that Facebook has rolled out its new real-time homepage, which in many ways feels like a crossbreed between Twitter and FriendFeed and has allowed third-party developers to access status updates on the service, it only makes sense for developers to try to bring some of these functions to the desktop. After all, it was the rise of the early desktop clients that fully revealed the potential of Twitter to its users, and a lot of developers are hoping to do so for Facebook as well. Seesmic released a dedicated Facebook application last week, and Tweetdeck just released a new version of its popular Twitter client today that now integrates Facebook status updates.
According to comScore, the number of people who accessed news and information sites from their mobile phones in the U.S. more than doubled from January 2008 to January 2009. ComScore estimates that about 63 million people accessed mobile news and information sites from their mobile devices in January 2009, and about a third of these did so on a daily basis. The mobile Internet is clearly becoming a mainstream phenomenon, though it needs to be noted that a large number of these users don't use the mobile Web, but rely on SMS-based services.
The latest tool to fight identity theft may already be in your pocket - it's your mobile phone. Using a new solution from Clickatell, a mobile messaging service provider, consumers can be alerted to suspicious bank transactions via text message. The service called Clickatell SMS Receipts notifies banking customers of account activity via SMS alerts. With this real-time information, consumers are instantly able to verify legitimate use of their account or detect fraud.
IBM's research scientists in India have developed a technology that will offer users the ability to talk to the Web and create 'voice' sites using mobile phones according to a news article in the Economic Times today.
Hyperspeech Transfer Protocol (HSTP), a protocol designed to seamlessly connect telephony voice applications, will enable users to browse across voice applications by navigating the Hyperspeech (the voice hyperlink) content in a voice application.
Being part of a botnet is no fun. Your computer becomes your worst enemy, watching everything you do, collecting all of your secrets, and then delivering all that data to the bot-herder; the person who originated the network. But what does it really mean to be part of a botnet, and is there anything that can you do about it?
According to a report today from The Associated Press, Internet security company Prevx recently discovered a Web site that was being used as a storage facility for data stolen from 160K infected computers, and the discovery offers an interesting case study.
I'm not at SXSW this year, but I might as well be. True, I don't get to run into my friends and colleagues in person, and I'm not rubbing elbows with some of the most famous people in the interactive digital world... but from the blog posts and Twitter stream coming out of Austin, I get a pretty good feeling for it. Enough that I don't even feel jealous.
Kevin Rose, founder of Digg and the man who two years ago removed the Top Diggers List after deciding it could be problematic for his site and its most popular users, yesterday launched WeFollow; a user powered Twitter directory, the idea of which appears to be surprisingly similar to the Top Diggers List.
WeFollow comes hot on the heels of Twitter's own Suggested Users List, which was created to help new users find people to follow. WeFollow attempts to provide a similar service but on a far larger scale.
