Classified document publishing website Wikileaks has now been kicked off of Amazon, Paypal, its DNS server and its Swiss bank account - but it lives on, including across hundreds of mirrored sites and is the subject for widespread discussion on Facebook and Twitter.
Site leader Julian Assange is hiding on the run but said to be facing imminent arrest in multiple countries. US Republican party figureheads have reportedly called for him to be hunted down like a Taliban leader and executed. He may very well be named TIME Magazine's Person of the Year for pushing the envelope on questions of technology disruption of media and diplomatic secrecy. Senator Joe Lieberman called on US corporations to stop doing business with Wikileaks but tonight Facebook has issued a statement about its stance: for now at least, Wikileaks can continue publishing updates to supporters on the world's largest social network.
The iPad was crowned the fastest-adopted consumer electronic device ever last month, stealing the title from the once-coveted DVD player. Records are made to be broken, though, and the Microsoft Kinect has already come out of the gate twice as fast. Notably, Microsoft predicted back in September that it would sell more Kinects than Apple is selling iPads.
25 days after its launch, Microsoft said today that it has sold 2.5 million motion-detecting Kinect devices. Granted, that includes sales over the Black Friday shopping holiday, but reviews of the device have been positive. Apple took twice as long to sell its 2 millionth iPad. These seem to be the days of the radically new interface.
On Monday, Apple shipped its long-awaited iOS 4.2.1 update for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch, which was the first major upgrade for the iPad since its launch earlier this year. Finally, iPad users have access to features like multitasking, app folders, threaded messaging and a Unified Inbox, thanks to this update. It also delivered new features called AirPrint and AirPlay to all iOS devices, the former for printing from mobile devices and the latter for streaming between mobile devices and Apple TV or other AirPlay-enabled hardware.
But for iPhone jailbreakers, there's only one question that comes to mind when a new upgrade is released: can you jailbreak it?
This week the Web's inventor, Sir Tim Berners-Lee, published an article in Scientific American promoting open standards and net neutrality. In the article, he takes aim at Facebook for being a "walled garden." He claims that Facebook and other social networks are "walling off information posted by their users from the rest of the Web." If Facebook and others proceed unchecked, warns Sir Tim, then "the Web could be broken into fragmented islands" and "we could lose the freedom to connect with whichever Web sites we want."
But how fair is that argument? Proponents of Facebook's Graph API point out that third party sites can access as much of a user's Facebook data as that user allows.
Facebook's domination of the Internet continues, as evidenced by numbers released today by Experian Hitwise today that find Facebook accounting for nearly 1 in 4 page views in the United States.
In March the intelligence company found that visits to Facebook had surpassed those to Google. And since then, Facebook's growth has continued, increasing 60% from the same time last year and making up 1 in 10 website visits in the U.S. last week alone.
Twitter announced today a new partnership with social data streaming service Gnip at the Defrag Conference outside of Denver: Gnip will offer 50% of all the messages posted to Twitter for $360,000 per year, or 5% of all messages for $60,000 per year. Pricing is not yet on the Gnip site, but was disclosed in an interview with ReadWriteWeb.
Customers will only be allowed to analyze the messages, not display them, and resale of the content itself will remain prohibited. The two companies emphasized that this is the first time a structured, reliable arrangement has been available for the many customers interested in purchasing a large quantity of streaming Tweets. Sale of the 100% full firehose will remain in the hands of Twitter itself. The full firehose contains approximately 1,000 Tweets every second.
At Facebook's Mobile Event two weeks ago, Mark Zuckerberg said that there was still at least "one big announcement" to come this year. And as we're hearing rumors that Facebook is about to unveil "Project Titan," it seems likely that today is it.
Facebook is holding a press event this morning where it is expected to launch a web-based email client, as well as further integration with Microsoft's Office Web Apps. Some are speculating that users will also get access to their own personal @facebook email account.
How do people use web apps in this new, device-saturated era of the Web? In Part 3 of our interview with Evernote CEO Phil Libin, we look at the usage patterns of its users. One interesting data point is that 80% of Evernote users say they use the product both at home and at work.
Evernote is a smart phone app that epitomizes the current era of web apps. It is used over a variety of devices, it syncs easily between those devices, it augments your daily life in ways not possible before the mobile web, it can be used equally at work or home. For a more in-depth look at these and other web app usage trends, read on...
What if your social network was made to stay small? What if its privacy settings worked like Facebook's used to? What if that seductive but false promise made by so many spam advertisers, "see who looks at your profile" actually became possible?
Those are a few of the fundamental qualities of Path.com, the new social network launched tonight by former Facebook Platform Manager Dave Morin, Napster co-founder Shawn Fanning and a blinding cast of star investors. After nearly a year in stealth-mode development, the service looks very different from how it looked when ReadWriteWeb got a sneaky peek scoop of what Path looked like in February. The new Path is very different and sounds like it could be a contender - even though the list of "missing" features is very long at launch.
Social web browser RockMelt launched this weekend to a huge press splash, 15 months after ReadWriteWeb first reported that it existed and was funded by Netscape co-founder Marc Andreesen. Reactions among early users have been mixed - and so is our review. I've been using it as my default browser all week.
I want RockMelt to work - I really like the idea. Right now it has too many performance issues, but if those can be resolved - it could be a good browser to use. I won't recommend that most readers use it yet, but I think I will continue to do so myself. Here's the best and worst, after 3 days of RockMelt.
