No ambitious young person wants to wait until graduation to start working on projects, developing ideas, and building teams. As a case in point, consider how many success stories from the dotcom and Web 2.0 eras have begun with brilliant twenty-somethings dropping out of college to pursue their passions.
Speaking directly to this concern (or phenomenon, depending on your perspective), two students at the New York University Stern School of Business and a former MySpace IT director have started FledgeWing, a new social network that aims to connect aspiring student entrepreneurs with one another as well as with mentors, investors, and industry professionals.
Yesterday, Google Translate announced the addition of Persian into their roster of supported languages in order to facilitate online communication within and from Iran.
Now, at least one team - the minds behind BabelWith.me - has developed the functionality into a cool, useful chat application that capably (if not perfectly) translates chats in real time. The service enables simultaneous communication in up to 45 different languages. It's kind of like the U.N. of IM.
According to research group Ipsos Reid's "Social Networking: 2009" poll, Canadians are flocking to social networking sites. In the last 18 months, the percentage of Canucks with a social networking profile has increased from 39% to 56%. This rapid rise in social networking users has Canadian marketers scratching their heads as to how they can best brand in the space. With more than three quarters of those online owning a Facebook profile, it's not surprising that the blue beast is the main topic of discussion in relation to marketing groups. Says report writer Mark Laver, "Online social networks tend to be extremely personal and this thus creates a dilemma for marketers and businesses - how to communicate in a personalized setting without upsetting the target audience."
One of the most controversial practices widely used to build up influence on Twitter is now cause for account suspension, according to a message on the Twitter developers email list from a company support team member.
Using third party software to systematically add a large number of social connections each day, then break those connections with anyone who doesn't reciprocate, is a method used by some number of Twitter users to create an appearance of legitimacy for subsequent new connections. Twitter's Doug Williams said last night that such practices will now risk account suspension. Some users will be unhappy about the policy, many others will probably applaud it. There are valid arguments on both sides of the position.
Flickr, Yahoo's popular photo sharing site, just released a nice update of its mobile site. If you have an Android phone or an iPhone (updated to the 3.0 firmware), you can now see images that were taken close to your current location. The new mobile site makes good use of some of the new APIs in the iPhone 3.0 update. Specifically, it looks like Flickr's mobile site now hooks into Apple's Core Location service right from Safari. Typically, developers could only access this from their own, native apps, but now, web apps are also able to access location data.
As we reported earlier this week, the retrial of Jammie Thomas-Rasset, who was accused of illegally sharing 24 songs on Kazaa, was about to come to an end this week. In an earlier trial, Thomas-Rasset was ordered to pay $220,000 to the music companies, but today, a different judge and a different jury came back with a new verdict that was surely not what Thomas-Rasset was looking for. A federal jury, clearly unconvinced by Thomas-Rasset's defense, awarded the recording companies $1.92 million - which comes out to $80,0000 per shared song.
Wikipedia, the free web-based encyclopedia used worldwide, will be adding video to their online repository in a matter of months. When the new system launches, you'll find a new button labeled "Add Media" on Wikipedia articles. Upon clicking this, you'll be prompted to search through three online repositories for relevant videos which can be added to the article. You can even select particular portions of the video instead of embedding the entire clip.
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These are glorious days for networking. The social Web is richer and wider than ever before, and it offers a myriad of services and platforms to help us connect with each other, share our likes and dislikes, etc. Some people even say that too many such services exist, that many of them will plunge in dot-com bubble-like style.
Tonight, the bored and lonely segment of Twitter users banded together to push three sexy, raunchy, and totally inappropriate terms into the trending topics leaderboard.
Within minutes (as far as we could tell), both terms were removed from the list on the web interface at Twitter.com. However, they still showed up on third party services such as TwitScoop and Hashtags.org. We feel this blog's cachet and provenance do not allow for the repetition of such phrases, so you'll have to check out the screen shots below and gasp in mock horror along with us.
As of tonight, Facebook has launched a new beta version of the site in Persian, in order to further enable the flood of news that has poured out of Iran in the wake of that country's contested election last week.
As Twitter became the star platform for Iranians to convey breaking news from on the ground, Facebook has been quiet by comparison. Now, by releasing an edition in the official language of Iran (also colloquially called Farsi), its attempting to capture some of the revolutionary self-expression that has thus far passed it by.
