What was once awesome and useful is now filled with dogs in costumes and photos of donuts.
Trailblazing social bookmarking service Delicious relaunched this morning under new management: Chad Hurley and Steven Chen, the co-founders of YouTube who bought the neglected service from Yahoo earlier this year. The plan is to make the service appealing to a larger number of mainstream users. So far it's pretty underwhelming.
When Yahoo bought Delicious years ago, I was disappointed it wasn't the Library of Congress that made the acquisition. It was that useful. Now this new Delicious looks like just another Web 2.0 startup.
A curious hacker named Matt Mastracci was diving into the Google Plus code yesterday, trying to turn on access to the new Circle-sharing feature, when he uncovered several new features apparently in the works. One, referred to in the source as "Google Experts," appears to be a Quora-like question and answer feature with the same posting, commenting and sharing features as regular Plus posts.
Mastracci also uncovered Google Voice integration, which will not require phone numbers; new photo browsing options including photos from Messenger; new, clearly labeled privacy presets and a feature like Facebook's wall, letting users post on each other's profile without showing up in others' streams.
Daphne Oram was the first woman to direct an electronic music studio, the first woman to set up a personal studio and the first woman to design and construct an electronic musical instrument. This happened back in the late 1950s when she used sine wave oscillators, reel-to-reel tape decks and other electronics that most of us vaguely remember. She went on to invent a machine in 1965 called Oramics that used hand-drawn patterns that were converted to music that would be stored magnetically.
With a Web full of stuff, discovery is a hard problem. Search engines were the first tools on the scene, but their rankings still have a hard time identifying relevance the same way a human user would. These days, social networks are the substitute for content discovery, and even the major search engines are using your social signals to determine what's relevant for you. But the obvious problem with social search is that if your friends haven't discovered it yet, it's not on your radar.
At some point, someone in the social graph has to discover something for the first time. With so much new content getting churned out all the time, a Web surfer looking for something original could use some algorithmic help. A new app called Thoora, which launched its public beta last week, uses the power of machine learning to help users uncover new content on topics that interest them.
Big news on the Google Plus front. Circles, its way of organizing Plus-buddies into groups, just got much more useful. Google engineer Owen Prater just announced - where else? - on Google Plus that circles are now shareable, so users can share interesting groups of people with one another.
Since Google Plus launched in June, we've worried that keeping our circles organized might require too much effort, but the ability to share circles turns them into something well worth our while. Circles aren't just filters for us to selectively share our stuff anymore. Now they're conversations that can be shared far and wide.
Later this week, the Jewish High Holidays begin with Rosh Hashanah, which marks the beginning of the new year. It seems like good timing for Google's announcement that the Digital Dead Sea Scrolls project is up and running.
Created by The Israel Museum in conjunction with Google, the project, first announced last year, offers the public the opportunity to read five of the scrolls in super high-definition.
Zynga, maker of popular Facebook games like Farmville and Mafia Wars, has announced today that CityVille will be its first social building game on Google Plus. Zynga Poker launched with the rest of the Google Plus game platform in August, but this is Zynga's first Google game in the mold of their virally successful Facebook titles.
Zynga has over 146 million users of its social games, but they're almost entirely on Facebook. But as we reported in July 2010, Google quietly invested over $100 million in the gaming company, ensuring that major Zynga titles on the Google platform were only a matter of time.
On-demand music streaming service Spotify announced today that it's eliminating its "Open" subscription tier and offering all new users six months of unlimited streaming.
Spotify Open was a more limited version of the Spotify Free plan. The company is now merging these two non-paid account types together. To make signing up for the service more attractive, they're also giving all new sign-ups a six month grace period in which they can stream music with no time caps of any kind.
Amazon.com added FOX movie and TV titles through its Prime Membership platform today in a deal that will roughly double the number of available titles to 11,000 by this Fall.
The announcement comes two days before Amazon is expected to launch one of two Kindle tablets to compete with the iPad.
DreamWorks Animation is betting big on the future of the Web's popularity for consuming premium video content. The major Hollywood animation studio has signed a deal with Netflix to stream its library of content exclusively to Netflix subscribers, the New York Times reported.
The deal, which covers such popular film series as Shrek and Madagascar is expected to net DreamWorks Animation $30 million per movie for the duration of the agreement. What makes this deal significant isn't so much its price tag or the content involved. Its significance lies in the fact that this is the first time such a major Hollywood content provider has inked a deal that skips over pay TV distribution in favor of the Web.
