What are you doing? How about now? Has anything changed since you started reading this blog post? Every story has a who, what, where, when, and why - but the event-driven nature of the social Web may be putting such a premium on broadcasting about what we're doing, that software designed to help us answer important questions like who and why are at risk of being neglected.
Reflecting on the human condition was once a popular past-time. A lot of people used to read poetry, as you may have heard. It may not be the Internet's fault that we're becoming less introspective - in fact the huge amount of activity data we're sharing online offers incredible opportunities for reflection, and for learning more about ourselves. It seems quite likely that we're going to miss those opportunities because our software is focused entirely on doing (and advertising) instead of on helping us think as much as it could. Of course that's much harder to do.
At a Digg townhall meeting earlier this month, Digg's founder, Kevin Rose, and CEO, Jay Adelson, announced that Digg's shout feature would be removed sometime this week and replaced with a share feature. This change just went live on the popular social media site. Users on Digg used to be able to share stories on Digg with other users right on the site, a feature that was often abused. Now, Digg's users can only email stories, or share them on Facebook and Twitter.
Yahoo Image Search got a nice update today that allows users to filter search results by Creative Commons (CC) license.
For now, this search only includes CC-licensed images from Flickr, Yahoo's own photo sharing service. The Yahoo Image Search interface actually turns out to be a very nice gateway to the CC-licensed image collection on Flickr, especially because the previews update immediately after you change a filter setting.
The Web 3.0 Conference in New York last week was a visible success. Attendance was good, and so it seems that the organizers are making money. That is significant in a recession, when many conferences that were announced have had to be suddenly canceled due to lack of interest. At a more qualitative level, the Web 3.0 Conference had a good mix of different types of people. It was not an echo chamber. Personally, I found the conversations more stimulating than average for a conference.
Today, the folks over at Microblink have launched a new application which allows you to visualize your FriendFeed data or the data belonging to your friends. Called FeedStats, the app displays charts and graphs which show what services are being used, what time you post, and who interacts with your content the most. In short, FeedStats is a lot like the Twitter service TweetStats, but designed just for FriendFeed users.
Jennifer Preston has been appointed the first Social Media Editor of the New York Times. It has come to this; the flagship institution of traditional journalism now has an editor level position dedicated to new media.
Little is known about Preston's personal use of social media, she's either using aliases or is remarkably quiet around the web, and details are still forthcoming about the new position she'll fill. The Times has done a remarkable job of engaging with social media so far, though, and we have high hopes for this new post.
After we saw some rumors about this over the weekend, Facebook today confirmed that it will receive a $200 million investment from Digital Sky Technologies (DST), one of the leading Internet investment groups in Eastern Europe. This investment puts Facebook's valuation at $10 billion. DST also plans to offer to purchase at least $100 million in Facebook common stock from existing shareholders.
According to Facebook's CEO, Mark Zuckerberg, roughly 70% of the company's users are now outside of the U.S., so cooperating with an international investment firm seemed to make sense in order to bring a global perspective to Facebook's operations. DST will not get a seat on Facebook's board, however.
At the end of last week, Yahoo! introduced an update to their iPhone application (iTunes URL) which now includes the ability to perform web searches using only your voice. This is the first real competitor to Google's Mobile App, whose voice recognition technology came to the iPhone back in November of 2008. Now the only question is how do these two apps compare?
A few weeks ago, we heard that Yahoo was readying a Portuguese-only Twitter clone under the name Yahoo Meme. Today, we finally got our invitation to try this new service, and while it is indeed an interesting micro-blogging service, we wouldn't go as far as calling it a "Twitter killer." Instead of cloning Twitter's communications features like @ replies and direct messages, Meme goes back to the basics of micro-blogging. Users can upload photos and post text (without a 140 character limit), YouTube videos (just copy and paste the URL), and links to MP3 files.
I am not a shopper. I am a buyer. I need something; I locate it; I buy it. By some accounts, this makes me a total gender traitor. On the other hand, it makes me a prime target for any startup willing to do the shopping for me.
Take consumer electronics site Woya, for example. When faced with the daunting task of buying a new laptop without the requisite Gs needed to make that process sufficiently simple, I have been paralyzed into procrastination. In about 30 seconds, Woya showed me inexpensive, well reviewed laptops I wanted from eBay, Craigslist, Overstock, Amazon, and other sites. It did the legwork and analytics for me, making the process entirely painless.
