ReadWriteWeb

Despite the booming interest in the service, Q&A site invite-only model outside of the U.S. and a few select countries. This may be an attempt to control the growth of the community, similar to the early days of Facebook. This cautious approach is not only limited to its community. The service only opened up to search engines last August. Access via RSS feeds is limited. Recently it released a very limited API, coupled with the arrival of the first Chrome and Firefox extensions.

The Federal Trade Commission has approved the controversial sale of a majority share of NBC Universal by General Electric to Comcast, leaving only Justice Department approval for a deal that could define the changing landscape of national power. (Update, it's all approved now, by the Justice Dept. as well.) Critics used to call into question the relationship between NBC, a leading provider of news and analysis regarding current events, and its owners General Electric, a leading provider of big weapons that made those current events go boom.

Now we live in a different world, a post-Cold War information age. Power used to hinge in large part over who had the biggest bomb stockpile. In the future it may be a question of whose voice and content gets delivered through the tubes. If this deal goes through, the many tubes that belong to Comcast will have a vested interest in getting NBC content to customers fast. Other content, not as much. Into that breach may come legislation. The openness of the Web will be hotly debated.

What new things could we discover if social network analysis took time and space into account, in addition to the raw connections between people? In most cases, social network analysis today is limited to discovering friend connections, community leaders and outlines, influential people and personal friend recommendations - in a static or snap-shot kind of way. If new factors could be taken into consideration, specifically changes over time and space, then social network analysis could discover things like emergence or decay of leadership, changes in trust over time, migration and mobility within particular communities online. That's very valuable information that the social web has barely begun to tackle capturing.

That's the topic of discussion in a new paper by Shashi Shekhar and research assistant Dev Oliver, spatial data scientists at the University of Minnesota, titled Computational Modeling of Spatio-temporal Social Networks: A Time-Aggregated Graph Approach (PDF). The paper was highlighted on the blog GIS and Science today. We've excerpted and put in context key points below.

When an internal announcement leaked out of Yahoo last month that it was "sunsetting" popular social bookmarking service Delicious, that service's users flew into a panic. Yahoo quickly backtracked on the plans and the service remains up and running, if minimally supported.

Would Flickr survive the hemorrhaging at its parent company Yahoo? That was the next logical question. Today Flickr power user Thomas Hawk did a little investigation of how many $25/year paid Pro accounts and thus how much annual revenue he estimates Flickr contributes to Yahoo. Hawk's methodology seems reasonable, if generous, and led to the conclusion that Flickr probably brings in around $50 million in annual revenue. Minus expenses, the profit it brings Yahoo is probably negligible. In other words, Yahoo has little economic incentive to support, maintain or grow one of the biggest photo sharing sites on the web and the place many of us pay to store our photos online. That's cause for concern. Note: Former Flickr chief software architect Cal Henderson responds in comments below, saying that Hawk's methodology is "deeply flawed" and that advertising makes up a large amount of Flickr's revenue. So take the following with a grain of salt now that we've heard that from a former insider.

The time we used to spend sitting on the train on our way to work in the morning, reading the trusty local rag, has changed. Now, we whip out the iPhone, Android or iPad and catch up on all the blogs and online articles we found but didn't have time to read the day before. On the way home, we do the same for those bits we found at work.

According to Read It Later, the app that lets users tag content on their computer to be, well, read later, mobile devices are helping people avoid the constant barrage of information and relegate reading back to the most comfortable time slots and locations of the day.

Privacy policies are dead, says Fran Maier, President of privacy auditing firm TrustE, and it's time for the web to move into an era of "just in time" notifications whenever new types of data are being collected or when our data is being used in new ways.

At a time when online data about individuals and our actions is growing exponentially, when the potential for that data to drive innovation and monetization is just beginning to be understood, when users are wrestling to take control over new forms of communication and when government is looking to take action to protect the complex interests of its citizens - Maier's forward looking statements, well informed by the history of online privacy practices, are well worth paying attention to.

As the Consumer Electronics Show (CES 2011) kicks into high gear this week in Las Vegas, we're again seeing a number of 3D-enabled products from TVs to tablets to mobile devices. It's the second (or is it third?) coming of 3D, it seems, and this time around it's often glasses-free.

Much of the development around the technology is concerned with bringing 3D to your living room, such as is the case with the 3D-enabled TVs from LG and Toshiba, for example, Samsung's 3D LED monitors, or the addition of 3D movies to the streaming service VUDU, which can pipe Hollywood entertainment directly into your living room. But 3D is showing up on other screens, too - mobile phones and tablets, gaming devices and mobile 3D DTV devices - although still in early forms.

But before you go all in, early-adopting this new craze, there's a little tidbit of not-inconsequential data you need to know first.

Banking giant Goldman Sachs has invested $500 million in Facebook, buying shares at a price that puts the value of the entire company at $50 billion. If all shares in the company were priced equally (they are not) then we could assume that Goldman, and co-investor Russian giant DST, bought 1% of Facebook. What's most important isn't the amount of literal control over the company that the banks bought, rather it's the valuation this gives the company and the relationship the investment fosters between Goldman and Facebook.

ReadWriteWeb readers, probably more concerned with technology and innovation implications than the business end of this deal, may benefit from a summary of the flurry of news coverage that began last night with the scoop by Andrew Ross Sorkin and Evelyn M. Rusli at The New York Times.

Facebook's data team proved once again today that when you analyze a large set of anonymous user data from the world's biggest social network, you can learn some very interesting things about the state of humanity.

In a blog post titled What's on your mind?, the company disclosed the results of its text analysis of 1 million anonymized messages. Among the findings: Young people swear more than older people and older people talk about other people more than just themselves. Popular people are more likely to talk about other people, TV and movies, to swear and use religious words. Less popular people are more likely to talk about work, sleeping, eating and thinking. These are but a few of the many observations made by the in-house data team. The biggest question about the data remains unanswered, though: what could a world of independent researchers discover in this data?

I'd like to ask for a moment of silence to mark the passing of a Web application that had eyes bigger than its stomach. An ambitious little startup called Nsyght gave up the ghost this weekend and with it went some very, very cool features. In the end, this little Twitter and Facebook message-parsing service just couldn't do what it set out to do, and so it has closed up shop.

By some standards, Twitter publishes a whole lot of data, about 1,000 messages per second. Nsyght allowed you to do remarkable things with that river of data: search inside Twitter lists, retrieve your own long-lost messages or filter messages from your friends by media type. Below are three of the ways I used Nsyght every day in my news gathering routine. Maybe someday, someone, somewhere will be able to bite off this many Tweets and return these kinds of dream-features to the world.