According to data compiled by O'Reilly's Ben Lorica, Facebook is currently seeing some very impressive growth outside of the United States. In Africa and Asia, for example, Facebook's active user base grew over 70% in the last 12 weeks, and in Indonesia, Facebook has finally displaced Friendster as the most popular social network.
With regards to the basic demographics on Facebook, women still represent the majority of users (51% vs. 45%), and while younger users still represent the majority of active users on the service, users over 55 are driving most of Facebook's current growth.
Adobe today announced that it has partnered with a number of prominent content creators and hardware manufacturers to bring its Flash platform to the living room. As a part of this initiative, Adobe will release a new version of Flash that will be optimized to run on set-top boxes, Internet-enabled TVs, and Blu-ray players. Among Adobe's partners are Broadcom, Comcast, Intel, Netflix, The New York Times Company, and Disney. The company expects that these companies will release the first Flash-enabled devices in the second half of 2009.
A new industry report from mobile analytics firm Flurry reveals some unique insights into the smartphone industry as of right now. Because their firm focuses not just on iPhone, but also on Android, RIM Blackberry, and JavaME, they have the ability to see platform-spanning trends, instead of just those tied to Apple. So what can we learn from their deep dive into their company's data? Anything surprising? Actually, what the report confirms is what we've been hearing for some time now: the iPhone is king, smartphones are the new laptops, and iPhone applications can and do make money.
Word has it there's a secret link available on YouTube's site right now that will give you access to their new top-secret Channels beta testing program. Some YouTube users received notification of the beta via an email message from YouTube, but others discovered it on their own.
So what's this all about? It seems that, in the coming weeks, YouTube plans to launch a brand-new user interface for their Channels section and if you click the secret link, you can be a part of the group that helps test it and provide feedback.
It appears Twitter is experimenting with some additional tweaks that may make status updates easier and faster for its users and could help decrease the back end load on its servers.
A semi transparent notification bar (see screenshot below), slides down from the top of the screen when you update your status via the Web. While in itself, the feature may not appear earth shattering, the fact that updating now feels extremely fluid and is almost instantaneous makes us wonder whether Twitter will begin caching tweets for delivery to its servers.
"The future of 'networked warfare' requires each soldier to be linked electronically to other troops as well as to weapons systems and intelligence sources," says a new report in Newsweek, and the product of choice appears to be the iPod Touch.
According to Newsweek, both the iPod Touch and to a lesser degree the iPhone are increasingly being used by the U.S. military because of their versatility, ease of use and comparative low cost.
When Facebook announced it was opening its site governance to user voting late February, founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg hailed it as an "unprecedented" effort to enable "participation on the Web." Here at ReadWriteWeb, we questioned whether Facebook's management had lost their grip on reality.
Late last week, Global privacy watchdog, Privacy International added its take; claiming that Facebook's Site Governance Vote is nothing more than a "publicity stunt and a massive confidence trick on its 200 million users."
A website (whether a URL, domain, brand, etc.) is a place where the owner, individual visitor, and broader web community come together for a shared purpose. At first, the web adopted a feudal model of "place": owners held all the authority; they depended on the serfs (visitors) to extract value but allowed them no participation in governance, content, or presentation. That model has largely disintegrated.
There's a lot of information about many of us spread around the web and though privacy is important to discuss - there's also another side of that coin. It can be very useful to tie together info from disparate sources about a particular individual. Today I saw a tool for finding those various profile pages that really impressed me.
About this time last year Google's Brad Fitzpatrick, also the creator of OpenID, led the development of the Google Social Graph API. It's a search engine for all the webpages that we identify as profiles online and it tracks the connections between pages linked together for a single person. At a small event today in Sebastapol, California, British developer Glenn Jones demonstrated the most compelling tool I've seen yet for leveraging this powerful technology.
Britain's domestic intelligence agency, more commonly known as MI5, is looking to appoint a chief scientific adviser "to lead and co-ordinate the scientific work of the Security Service so that the service continues to be supported by excellent science and technology advice."
Think the scientific genius behind Q, the fictional gadgetmeister that keeps James Bond ahead of the bad guys, combined with the technological expertise our own recently named CTO Aneesh Chopra has, and you might just see the perfect applicant.
