As news spread on Saturday that famed singer Whitney Houston had died, millions of fans around the world did what is now customary. Well, first they tweeted about it. Then they went to one of the many sources of online music to reminisce. Whether by streaming songs from YouTube or Spotify or by buying tracks from iTunes, fans paid tribute to Houston on Saturday by listening to her music.
Meanwhile, somewhere in the depths of Sony Music's UK headquarters, the decision was made to bump up the price on those digital downloads. The reaction was swift and unequivocally critical. How could Sony capitalize on somebody's death? After initially staying silent, Sony apologized and changed the prices back, chalking it up to an error. A mistake indeed, but the notion that it was unintentional is hard for many to swallow.
In the Internet Age, we think in little snippets, but TED has always stood out as an exception. Some of the greatest minds in the world give TED Talks, and TED.com has shared the videos with the world for years. The talks go for 18 minutes, a long time for Internet stuff, but they're so illuminating that it's hard not to pay rapt attention.
Nevertheless, information travels faster and farther in short bursts. To reach more minds, TED has launched TED Quotes today, which lets fans send hand-picked text excerpts from TED Talks like little valentines. The quotes link back to their source video. "Quotes are ideas - in their most compressed and contagious form," says June Cohen, TED Media's executive producer. You can now send these contagious quotes by Facebook, Twitter or email and help them go viral.
The social Web space is abuzz with new developments and entrants these days. Facebook's IPO. The explosion of Pinterest. The rapid evolution of Google+ into a place where the President of the United States hangs out. One name you never hear is one that was all the rage just a few years ago.
MySpace has been losing traffic since 2008, when Facebook first surpassed it on Alexa. Last year, the company was sold for $35 million by News Corporation, who bought it for $580 million six years earlier. Its new owners, Specific Media, have tried to reposition the site as an online entertainment hub rather than a full-fledged social network. If early numbers are any indication, the refocus appears to be working.
Everyone's favorite photo filtering and sharing app for iOS got a significant update on Friday afternoon. Version 2.1 of Instagram adds a new filter, a tool for easily enhancing low-lit photos and a redesigned navigation.
Sierra, the latest filter to join the Instagram family, is a white-bordered filter that adds a lightened, low-contrast vintage look to photos. As far as Instagram filters go, it's pretty standard stuff, but it's always nice to have new options. The more substantial addition to the app is a feature called Lux, which lets users automatically increase the brightness of photos and boost the contrast. The option is meant to offer a way to improve underexposed photos and make them more Instagrammable.
You know how it goes. One way or another, you get introduced to a new song, it sticks in your head and you want to share it with your Internet buddies. There are a few ways to go about it. You could find the song on YouTube and post a link to it on Facebook. You could tweet it. If it's on Spotify or Rdio, you can share it directly with other users or add it to a public playlist.
As effective as these methods can be, they're not always perfect. With Twitter and Facebook, there's the risk of having your song get lost in a sea of other social noise. With direct-sharing on Spotify, you can get more granular, but the social experience more or less ends once your friend hits the play button. This new song you just discovered is so awesome, though.
Reuters reports that a Tennessee couple who "defriended" Jenelle Potter on Facebook were murdered by her father and another man.
"This is just senseless," said Johnson County Sheriff Mike Reece told Reuters. "We've had murders, but nothing like this."
Jenelle Potter, 30, is one of those types who you just don't mess with. She is a Facebook fanatic who stays home with her parents and is constantly on Facebook.
"Once you've crossed her, you've crossed her father too," Reece said.
With all the attention focused on Facebook and Google, it's sometimes easy to forget how many people visit Yahoo on a typical day. The site has over 700 million users and gets a massive amount of page views each day. As the company struggles to figure out what its future focus should be, one thing they've prioritized highly is content.
Every day, Yahoo displays about 13 million different news story combination on its homepage. Those stories are personalized based on demographic data and reading behavior, and the company keeps track of what kind of stories do well with which groups of people.
The Iranian government isn't exactly known as a champion of free speech and access to information. Thus, it's never shocking to hear about Internet censorship in the country, the state of which appears to be getting worse all the time.
Today, news surfaced that the country is blocking access to websites that use HTTPS. That means that a number of popular, secure websites like Google, Gmail, Yahoo and even online banking sites are inaccessible. Anything based outside the country that uses a secure connection via HTTPS is blocked, according to news reports and a thread on Hacker News. Secure sites based within Iran are reportedly still accessible.
Kodak, once a symbol of technological innovation, is lately looking more like a textbook example of a disrupted company. The company filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection last month, after years of struggling to keep up in a landscape dominated by digital cameras, smartphones and photo-sharing apps.
One of the ways that Kodak tried to stay competitive is by manufacturing and selling digital cameras. Today, those efforts come to an end with the news that the company will be getting out of the digital camera business altogether.
The disruption of cable television at the hands of the Internet and its premium video streaming services has been predicted for some time now. Perhaps there's something about the size and demeanor of the cable industry that makes some people long for it to be conquered by the free and open Web. Maybe that skews the imminence of the predictions. Either way, to many, cable's disruption just feels inevitable.
Cable is indeed losing subscribers, but it's happening very slowly. According to the latest data from Nielsen, the number of U.S. homes with cable subscriptions has declined 4.1% in the last year. Meanwhile, TV service provided by telephone companies like Verizon increased 21.1%.
