Just in time for SXSW, Dennis Crowley, one of the original developers of Dodgeball, has released a new location-aware social app (iTunes link) for the iPhone: Foursquare. At its core, Foursquare is a location-based social network, but at the same time, it is also a nightlife game where users get extra points for being the first to visit a new place, going out every night of the week, and for adding new information about clubs and restaurants.
gooseGrade has a unique and valuable perspective when it comes to blogging: Unlike traditional media, blogs are lacking the invisible army of copy editors carefully making sure everything that is written is also written accurately and well. Today they are releasing a WordPress plugin that invites your audience to help proofread your blog. GooseGrade got some press from RWW and others last October.
The personalized news service Veritocracy dropped its beta badge today, opening its doors for everyone to register and try their hand at being a story editor. Veritocracy (or Veri) compares itself with Pandora, but for news instead of music. You search for broad topics (think politics or internet) and the site presents you story clusters which you can then vote up, vote down, or even submit your own content. Veri's motto: "Better information finds you."
Popular Mac multi-service IM software Adium will include sophisticated support for Twitter in its next version, Adium has announced on its blog. Instant messaging access has been shut off for months and isn't coming back any time soon, the company confirmed in October, but Adium has built its own system.
Adium's Zac West posted screenshots to the official blog and the implementation looks great. The plan was announced this weekend but just now noticed by The Unofficial Apple Weblog.
Yahoo today announced a new feature for SearchMonkey that makes it very easy for site owners to embed flash videos, games, and documents directly on the Yahoo Search results page. The first sites to make use of this new feature are Hulu, Metacafe, and YouTube. Whenever a video from these sites appears in your search results, you can now watch it immediately in an embedded player right on the search results page.
According to the latest data from Hitwise, Twitter sends most of its traffic to Google, Facebook, TwitPic, and MySpace. Overall, Twitter sends about 1 in 5 users to social networks and another 1 in 5 to entertainment sites like Twitpic, YouTube, or Flickr. Even though some people think that Twitter is just a 'poor man's email system,' Twitter's clickstream profile is very different from that of most email services.
Red hot TV and movie site Hulu has added a major new feature this morning on the one year anniversary of the site. Logged in users are now able to securely pull in their list of contacts from Facebook, Google, MySpace, MSN and Yahoo. The company calls it "Hulu Friends." Though some skeptics have questioned the impact of social video watching, this kind of move is exactly what we've been hoping all sites around the web would do.
Identity providers are now making it easy for 3rd party content sites to turn content consumption into a social activity. From real-time conversation to recommendations, there's a whole lot of potential here. That said, we do have some concerns about Hulu's implementation.
A new social networking site for music called WorldSings wants to "unite artists and music fans from around the world." If that concept sounds a lot like what MySpace is doing with their music offering, that's because it is - but there's a twist. Like MySpace, WorldSings lets artists create profiles where they can upload music, videos, and concert lists as well as feature live events. Meanwhile, music fans can friend the artists and each other as they engage in music discovery on the network.
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Yesterday, as Facebook rolled out their revamped homepage which delivered new features like real-time updates, filters, and an improved sharing box, another update was quietly occurring behind the scenes. While everyone was busy analyzing the front-end changes to the user interface, Facebook announced to advertisers there were some major updates coming for them as well. According to a Facebook blog post, advertisers are now able to target ads based on languages spoken and the location of users.
