FreedomSpeaks.com is an L.A.-based startup dedicated to taking the friction out of civic engagement. The site, a politically neutral platform for activism, allows registered users to identify and communicate with government representatives without once using a printer or stamp.
Angel investor Dale Okuno gave founders Kurt Daradics and Jason Kiesel an undisclosed sum in April 2009, and the company has already reported marked success with their first client, faith-based media conglomerate Salem Communications.
Yesterday afternoon Twitter made a fundamental change to the options available to users by eliminating the option to receive messages from our friends sent publicly to people we are not following. We called it a disaster that would seriously disrupt serendipitous discovery of interesting friends of our friends.
Twitter has offered two explanations for the change. First, that very few users were choosing to receive these kinds of messages anyway and that it was confusing. Then, this morning, the company put up a blog post saying simply that "there were serious technical reasons why that setting had to go or be entirely rebuilt--it wouldn't have lasted long even if we thought it was the best thing ever." So what's the story? Here's our best guess.
Craigslist, the popular online classifieds service, announced a major revamp of its "erotic services" section today, which, until now, featured copious amounts of ads for prostitutes and escort services. The "erotic services" section will be closed and will be replaced by an "adult services" section, where Craigslist's customer service reps will review every ad before it can be posted. This decision comes after pressure from various political organizations on Craigslist mounted, and after the attorneys general of Connecticut, Missouri, and Illinois met with officials from Craigslist last week.
According to the latest data from Hitwise, paid search traffic has taken a major hit in the last year. While, according to Hitwise, about 9.84% of the search engine traffic it registered in April 2008 came from paid clicks, in the four weeks preceding May 9, 2009, this number declined by 26% to 7.25%. Hitwise registered this trend across all of the categories it tracks, with the sole exception of paid traffic to site in its education category, where paid search results increased slights from 1.39% to 1.45%.
TED, the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference made up of short talks by brilliant people from around the world, is now making its archives available with subtitles in more than 40 languages. This is the kind of news that could make a real impact in a lot of peoples' lives.
TED Talks are brain stretching, tear-jerking, 18 minute nuggets of emerging wisdom. The new translation project is sponsored by Nokia and uses the awesome volunteer-powered translation service DotSub.
According to a new report from website monitoring service Pingdom, Feedburner had an uptime of 99.94% over the last two months. Feedburner, which a lot of publishers use to manage their feeds and get usage statistics, was acquired by Google in 2007, and even though Google has kept the service running, a lot of users have been unhappy with various aspects of the service. With a 99.94% uptime, though, there is good evidence that the core function of the service, making feeds available, stands on solid ground - which, of course, we would expect from a service that runs on Google's servers.
Yesterday at Google's Searchology event, which we live-blogged, the search market leader announced two significant features to its search product: Search Options and Rich Snippets. It also previewed a new fact-finding search product called Google Squared. The first two features are already live on google.com and they've notably extended Google's core search product. As we sit back and reflect on the meaning of this, one thing is starkly clear: the core Google search experience is now much more than a simple search box on a plain white background, which it was for so long. Just how far has Google evolved its search experience over recent years? And has it become too much of a shift from its core focus? Let's explore that.
It's not exactly a silent spring, but a change made to Twitter's settings this afternoon has already greatly reduced the tweets its users are witness to. In what the company called a small settings update, users no longer see public replies sent by friends to people they themselves are not following. (Fragmented conversations, they are called.) This isn't a small change at all; it's big, and it's bad. The new setting eliminates serendipitous social discovery.
Are you familiar with The Onion's biting political commentator Baratunde Thurston, cyborg anthropologist Amber Case or Google's Kevin Marks? If not, that's too bad - they are all really interesting people I talk with a lot on Twitter. If you're not following them, though, you'll never discover them through my public conversations again. As far as you're concerned, those conversations just silently disappeared.
Update: For the latest in our ongoing coverage of this story, see this speculation about the technical explanation for why Twitter made this change.
Update again: In less than 24 hours, Twitter has changed this policy. Click here to read how.
In the evolving Web, where mobile web growth is exploding and therefore the mobile experience matters as much as the desktop one, it is becoming increasingly important for websites to ensure that their mobile site performs well. According to a new mobile web performance benchmark produced by Gomez (a web application performance management firm) and dotMobi (the company behind the .mobi Internet domain), there is a widening performance gap between the traditional fixed web and the mobile web. According to Gomez data, traditional fixed websites loaded an average of 3% faster in April than in March, while mobile websites were 9% slower. We check out Gomez's data below.
Real-time information delivery is fast emerging as one of the most important elements of our online experience. No more waiting for the Pony Express to deliver a parcel cross-country, no more waiting for web services to communicate from one polling instance to another. This is information being available to you at nearly the moment it's produced, whether you're watching for it or not.
Just this afternoon, Google declared real-time search to be one of the biggest unsolved challenges it faces. This morning the NYTimes put a link to a new real-time view of all its news stories on the front page of its site. Last night Facebook announced a new feature that will let users be notified instantly when their friends interact with media related to themselves on the site. This is big stuff, but what does it all mean? We offer below a collection of readings on the real-time web. Give these articles some time and you'll have a solid foundation to understand, discuss and act on this emerging paradigm.
