Research firm Gartner has just put out a list of the top ten mobile applications of the future. Well, not the distant future, but the far off year of 2012. Nothing on the list is all that surprising or, in many cases, even all that new. Instead, the list includes the sorts of technologies that are just now coming into their own and haven't yet seen widespread adoption as well as the already common technologies that are still experiencing growth.
It's November 2009 and we're nearing the end of a decade. It's been a tumultuous time of change for many industries, much of it driven by the Internet. The newspaper industry has been particularly affected by the Web. Over the past 10 years, news media has undergone a seachange akin to the invention of the printing press in 1440.
Just as Johannes Gutenberg's printing press brought books to the mainstream public in the 15th century, Tim Berners-Lee's World Wide Web brought commercial publishing to the people.
After a predefined period designed to increase transparency and maximize user feedback, Facebook has announced that, with fewer than 7,000 user comments, it will proceed to implement its proposed amended privacy policy.
With adequate user information, Facebook hoped to become better stewards of "the unnaturally uncontrollable nature of communication," as we called their general user-data privacy dilemma in June. And this revision also makes a nod to Canadian objections to Facebook's policies. What's in store for users, and how did the thousands of units of user data impact Facebook's governance and privacy policy? Read on to get the full story.
Digg CEO Jay Adelson told FOX Business tonight that ever since rolling out Digg Ads, the social link-sharing service has been making money and that profitability is right around the corner.
Although advertising continues to be the only seemingly reliable model for monetizing content-centric websites, Adelson reports that click-through rates are higher than expected. That being said, typical rates for online advertising are generally abysmal, so if Digg's ads are working better than most, good for them, and let's all study their model. Read - and watch - for the rest of the story on how Digg has grown and will continue to expand and monetize.
Google just announced a new product in Google Labs: Google Image Swirl. Image Swirl introduces a Wonder Wheel-like user interface for Google Images. The new search interface combines the Wonder Wheel experience with Google's ability to find similar images and discover faces in these images. Instead of just showing one image, the Image Swirl interface displays a stack of photos. Clicking on this stack opens up a Wonder Wheel with related images clustered around the original photo.
After 18 months of negotiation, the Open Web Foundation, a group made up of 106 employees of Yahoo, Google, Facebook, Microsoft, some small startups and their lawyers, today released a legal document template for licensing open web technology specifications. The result could be greatly accelerated time-to-market for new technologies developed on top of these specifications and more awesomeness, sooner, for web consumers.
Standardized legal documents for technical specifications may not seem like the sexiest thing in the the world - but this is actually pretty exciting news. Developments like this could be a key part of the foundation that online service providers need to move forward on a long list of great ideas for ways to serve their users.
Superfeedr, a service that transforms a wide variety of feeds into normalized XMPP or Pubsubhubbub format, announced a seed round of funding from some very high-profile backers this morning. Betaworks, backers of Twitter, Bit.ly, Tweetdeck, Twitterfeed, Tumblr and more, and Mark Cuban, have invested in Superfeedr's parent company Notifixious.
Superfeedr offers services to both publishers and subscribers. Current marque users include SixApart, Adobe, Twitterfeed and Posterous. Notifixious founder Julien Genestoux first met Betaworks CEO John Borthwick at our event last month, the ReadWrite Real-Time Web Summit.
Google just announced that it now features legal opinions in Google Scholar. Starting today, Google Scholar will feature the full text of legal opinions from US federal and state district, appellate and supreme courts. Through this, users can now easily find the text of Roe v. Wade or Brown v. Board of Education, for example. Google Scholar also lists other legal opinions and journals that cited these opinions. In addition, users can also do standard keyword searches to find legal documents.
At Microsoft's Professional Developer Conference, Seesmic's founder and CEO Loic Le Meur just announced that the company will release a native Windows version of its popular Twitter client later today. Seesmic developed this client on top of .NET. As Le Meur told us yesterday, the new client will be faster and use significantly less memory than the current AIR client. In addition, Seesmic will now also feature a Firefox-like plugin infrastructure that will allow developers to extend the application through a new, built-in API.
Three iPhone application developers are cited in an online petition which asks Apple to approve their apps, all of which have been sitting in limbo for months on end. The developers are awaiting word about their new DJ applications which let users mix loops of their own iTunes tracks stored in their iPhone or iPod Touch's music library.
In this case, it's speculated that the holdup either has to do with rights issues surrounding the music or possibly the way the apps in question access the music library. But without word from Apple, the developers can't be sure. The delays have angered fans, too, one of whom created the petition in hopes of forcing Apple's hand.
Update: One of the applications was just approved. Click through for more info.
