Are you itching to get out of the office and network with your peers? In a new feature on ReadWriteWeb, we'll provide a weekly roundup of upcoming Social Web events. We'll publish this every weekend, as good a time as any to review your conference plans.
Know of an event taking place that should appear here? Let us know in the comments below or contact us.
In this edition of the Weekly Wrapup, our newsletter summarizing the top stories of the week, we look at the state of the smartphone industry, study new stats showing Facebook's international market penetration, review 'The Oprah Effect' on Twitter, check out a new product called Google Me, analyze the closure of Web 1.0 icon GeoCities, and more. Also, we look at featured stories from ReadWriteHire, our new product which tracks hires in tech and new media.
Over the past year, all the major tech blogs have done round-up articles of great Greasemonkey scripts to use with Twitter (including us). What this says about Twitter's native functionality we aren't sure, but we know we've had upwards of 10 separate scripts installed and active at different times.
All that is going to end, at least for the next little while, as we have just found the GM script that does everything (and we mean everything). It's the innocently named, Troy's Twitter Script (created by Troy Thompson) that we first noticed written up over on TechRaga.
Today, Apple announced that its customers have now downloaded a whopping one billion applications from its App Store. Here at ReadWriteWeb, quite a few of us have iPhones, so we thought that this would be a good time to feature some of our favorite apps. We download and test a lot of iPhone apps, but here are the ones that have stood the test of time for us. The App Store is now home to over 35,000 applications, so this is obviously only a small selection of applications, but these are the apps that we don't hesitate to recommend to our friends.
Most blogging platforms now feature a number of third-party plugins that can display a list of related stories on your blog, or even on other blogs on the Internet. Typically, these plugins will look at how a story was tagged and then display a short list of similar stories that use the same keywords. LinkWithin is the newest contender in this market. The plugin looks at tags, but it also analyzes other factors like relevancy, popularity, and recency. Unlike similar plugins, however, LinkWithin doesn't just display a list of headlines underneath each post, but also a thumbnail with a picture from each post, which makes it far more attractive than most of its competitors.
Posters on the wall, teen magazines, boom boxes playing the same stupid songs over and over again (automatically!) - that's not a sustainable situation, by definition. That's teenage living and that's what MySpace built its huge site on. Just like being a teenager, MySpace is something that most people grow out of. Today marked an important point in the internet's move beyond MySpace.
The company ushered Tom out the door today from President into an advisory role is in talks with Tom about a new role if he leaves his post as President, and replaced its CEO with former Facebook business exec Owen Van Natta. Increased revenue isn't really what MySpace needs, if it's to stay strong it needs to stop bleeding users. That's not likely.
We know that Oprah Winfrey's brought a lot of new users to Twitter in the U.S., but according to Hitwise, the popular microblogging service is currently seeing some of its most impressive growth outside of America. In Australia, where Oprah Winfrey doesn't command the same kind of daytime television audience, Twitter grew over 1,000% since the beginning of 2009, and its annual growth since last April tops 3,200%. In Australia, Twitter is now the 37th most visited web site.
Despite the number of add-ons available in the Firefox ecosystem, it can still sometimes feel like there are only a few truly good ones out there. That's why when we find one that's actually worth using, we get excited. The latest add-on getting installed into our small but critical collection of extensions is Pixelpipe's new drag-and-drop uploader. This utility lets you upload media directly from your computer or the web to any of the 75 plus services you've configured at Pixelpipe.com.
Recently, business information solutions provider LexisNexis released the results of a study that examined how technology was used in the American workplace. The focus of the study was on the differing opinions between generational groups. Their findings? The generation gap at work is really wide with vast discrepancies when it comes to what the appropriate use of technology is - a problem that leads to increasing tensions in the workplace.
When Google has an idea for a fun or useful project based on one of their established properties, they will often categorize that project under the heading of Google Labs. Google Labs have been created on everything from search, to Gmail, to Picasa. And today, a new Labs opens its doors: Google Toolbar Labs.
Limited to the Internet Explorer 6 web browser, for now, Google Toolbar Labs debuts with two toolbar variations with different goals. One toolbar includes enhanced location detection and the other optimizes the toolbar for the Chinese character set.
