Twitter has announced some changes to their follower and following pages interface design and functions.
Now, when web users click to see lists of the people they follow or who follow them, they will see more information than just avatars and usernames. The new, improved pages contain full names, locations, most recent tweets, a one-click follow button, and a drop-down menu of possible actions, including @replies, DMs, and blocking. UPDATE: After a commenter pointed out that scanning for non-following users just became more difficult with the new interface, we would like to point out that there's an app for that. You're welcome. We love you, too.
Pandora is one of the Internet's slow and steady success stories.
After years of work and more than $20 million dollars invested, the company is finally looking at the light of the end of the tunnel: Turning a profit. In this exclusive interview with founder Tim Westergren after a town hall meetup in Richmond, Virginia, we discuss the company's close call with bankruptcy in 2007, their ad-based revenue model, their roadmap for adding new features and an open API, and their incorporation into a variety of hardware devices.
According to an announcement on the Google blog, Google Toolbar users can now instantly translate web pages with a single click.
The toolbar is only available for Internet Explorer and Firefox, and this new feature has apparently only been rolled out for IE as far as we can tell. The functionality is hit and miss, as you'll see in the screenshots below.
According to an announcement today on the Flickr blog, it's open season for image-sharing via Twitter on the gargantuan photo site.
Users can now share posted content on their Twitter accounts using a simple web-based sharing button or via email/mobile using a unique "2Twitter" email address. Although all uploaded content is tweetable, new content uploaded via the web is not auto-tweeted. Mobile uploads are only sent to Twitter if the user's 2Twitter email address is used.
People on the internet aren't always very nice. While some adults may be tough enough to wade into the snark-infested waters of YouTube comments and other particularly nasty online fora - many children could use a helping hand coping with it all psychologically.
Enter Firefox for CyberMentors. It's a new custom browser made in partnership with the popular anti-cyberbullying organization Cybermentors.org.uk. It's a good looking option for parents.
When Apple launched the iPhone 3.0 update, we were pretty excited about a number of the new features in the OS, but push notifications, which Apple billed as an alternative to battery-draining background processes, were on the top of our list. After a few weeks with the iPhone 3.0 OS, however, only a very small number of push apps have made it into the store, and even some of the best ones, like BeeJive IM (iTunes link) and the AP Mobile app (iTunes link) suffer from major drawbacks.
Have you ever eaten a casserole made completely with canned ingredients and a potato chip crust? It's similar to if you've ever eaten wet cat food on a dare. It's terrible. Nevertheless, for many of us, these casseroles are as much a part of childhood as Halloween and jump rope. While we can certainly eat casserole calamities and remember our youth fondly, it's probably time we contributed some new recipes to the family cookbook - ones that don't give everyone sodium-induced hypertension. Below is a quick round up of recipe resources:
Have you got a few minutes to spare to help make government activities more transparent? Watchdog organization The Sunlight Foundation launched a new project called TransparencyCorps today. Modeled after Amazon's Mechanical Turk, the project asks visitors to perform small tasks that a human can do better than a machine. The first two tasks include summarizing congressional earmark requests in a form and uploading a photo of yourself calling for increased openness in government.
The innovative system is a pleasure to use and is being open sourced for other organizations interested in crowdsourcing similar tasks. You can honestly do something useful and important in 5 minutes or less on this site.
Not too long ago, Joost was the poster child for the online video revolution. It featured a slick desktop player with innovative controls, good video quality, and it was developed by the team behind Skype and Kazza. It seemed like nothing could go wrong here, but somehow, Joost never managed to get any traction and after the first hype had died down, most users just abandoned the desktop player for in-browser video portals like YouTube and Hulu. After a long delay, Joost finally abandoned its desktop player strategy, but the company never managed to attract a large enough user base.
Today, Joost announced that it is mostly abandoning its original strategy and that the company will focus on offering white label video solutions for media companies and distributors instead.
Recently, new data from security solutions company Webroot revealed some interesting insights into the thoughts and behaviors of users on social networking sites like Facebook, LinkedIn, MySpace, Twitter, and others. According to their survey, a majority of users (78%) reported concerns about their social network profiles' privacy, but when asked about specific behaviors it was apparent that "concern" didn't translate into action. In fact, it didn't even seem to translate into a basic understanding of how to use the privacy tools already in place on the networks today.
