At SXSW Interactive yesterday, I met Curtis Spencer (@cruxlux) in the hall between panels. We sat down and spoke for a few minutes and he told me about an application he was developing called Cruxlux. The name describes what the application attempts to do: Lux for light and Crux for the decisive point. In essence, the goal of Cruxlux is to analyze the web page you are visiting, and scour other web sources for related stuff, then present that information to you, summarized, and without actually leaving the current page. Although technically in beta, it is available to use without registration.
Facebook today announced Facebook Connect, its proprietary technology which allows the sharing of data between Facebook and third party applications, can now be integrated into iPhone and iPod Touch applications. This new feature will work in much the same way that Facebook Connect has worked for Web pages over the past few months, by providing a one stop shop for login and allowing you to share your data with your Facebook friends.
But the news again brings up the question of whether we should trust this company that seems to continuously place user privacy on the back burner almost every time it announces some new or innovative feature.
We knew it was coming; we just didn't know when. Google yesterday announced that it is releasing its Jaiku code under the open source Apache license 2.0 after finalizing the move of the micro-blogging service to Google App Engine last week.
As we mentioned two months ago, Google will no longer be developing the Jaiku codebase, but Google volunteers will be available to offer support.
Today is Pi Day; the day the first three digits of Pi, 3.14, match the calendar date, March 14, and this year it's official according to Congress, which last week voted 391-10 to designate today as National Pi Day in an attempt to raise the profile of science and math in education.
The first Pi Day celebrations were held at the San Francisco Exploratorium when the now retired Larry Shaw decided the day was worth commemorating. Since then, the annual geek celebration has grown and is now held across the United States at universities, museums and even some folks' homes.
Twitter users clearly love the social alarm clock Sleep.fm, the Vaynerchuk brothers, Chris Knight, and ezinearticles. At least, according to search analytics firm Compete, which aggregated the top search terms since Twitter acquired Summize in July 2008, these are some of the top searches that users performed on the popular microblogging service.
Besides the terms mentioned above, the top ten is rounded out by searches for Barack Obama, the iPhone, AJ Vaynerchuk's PleaseDressMe, music site TheSixtyOne, and FollowFriday.
Over the past couple of days, Facebook has been rolling out a revamped home page to all its users which delivers several major changes including real-time updates, new filtering controls, a new share box (called "the Publisher"), and an area that highlights some of the more important updates from your stream. For public figures on Facebook, the biggest change was the revamp of Facebook Pages. Now called "Public Profiles," these pages are supposed to act more like personal profiles - they can even update the News Feed. However, that alone stands as the only major change of note to these company-centric locales on Facebook. In almost all other ways, pages remain static, broken, and difficult.
SXSW Interactive begins today, bringing thousands of geeks from all around the world to Austin, Texas, to talk shop and party. One of the key stories about SXSW history is that Twitter blew up there (in a good way) two years ago. Everybody wants to know - will there be another app that takes off in the same way this year?
Many people will likely come to the SXSW Web Awards at the Hilton on Sunday night hoping to discover the next big thing. The fact is, though, that the annual Web Awards are all about design - not social functionality a la Twitter. In years past, most of us have ended up leaving the room afterward scratching our heads and saying "I've never even heard of those websites." But not this year. Check out the RWW Guide to the SXSW Web Awards Finalists below, where you'll find brief scannable explanations of who and what is behind the 80+ companies and projects that have been named as finalists for the awards.
Friendfeed, the popular social media aggregator, just released an Adobe Air application that displays real-time updates from your friends right on your desktop. Whenever one of your friends posts a new item or leaves a comment, a message will appear on your desktop. Friendfeed is clearly making real-time updates a core feature of its service, as it already offers real-time updates in its web interface and through IM.
Yahoo has just released a new application which brings their location-aware platform Fire Eagle to Facebook's social network. The new app called "Friends on Fire" lets you easily share your current location with a set of trusted friends. Fire Eagle users can also share short, Twitter-like posts with each other. These are quick updates and tips tied to your location and displayed on a map within Facebook. In addition, the Fire Eagle team has also introduced a Firefox extension that lets you update your location with just one click.
On March 13th, 2009 the World Wide Web will turn 20 years old. Sir Tim Berners-Lee invented this world-changing layer on top of the Internet on this day in 1989. It's hard to overstate the impact this young technology has had already and it's even more exciting to think about where it's going in the future.
Berners-Lee has some great ideas about where the web should go next. His vision is of a major advance that could serve as the foundation for innovations that we can't even imagine today.
