In the battle to achieve simplicity, it's a mouse click here or there that can make all the difference. In the field of image sharing on the Web, Imgur has held the top spot and its simplicity has certainly been one of the reasons.
A new service called Minus has entered the image sharing arena and it makes sharing image files - on their own, in online galleries, and zipped together as downloadable collections - as easy as a quick drag and drop.
Machine processing of large quantities of unstructured text, to discover media mentions, relationships between entities and sentiment analysis need not be priced out of the range of the everyday web lover or small business.
Tonight two Texas companies announced a collaboration that brings exactly that to market, at a disruptively low price. Web crawling service 80Legs and Natural Language Processing service Language Computer Corporation have combined their efforts to create Extractiv, a web crawling and semantic analysis service offered at an affordable price. I've already put it to use to perform some awesome bulk text analysis for my own work.
Well-funded instant messaging and sharing service Meebo is annoucing a new product tonight that will offer loyalty programs and website recommendations for frequent visitors to any site around the web.
The new Meebo MiniBar, not to be confused with the drastically overpriced hotel fare, is a free way for users to choose to share the sites they visit with their friends from various social neetworks including Facebook, to discover related sites frequented by people with similar interests and to gain VIP status on their favorite sites. The technology will be available on Tuesday and will roll out over time to become visible to the 180 million unique users who visit a page that uses Meebo monthly.
Mobile social photo app Path launched tonight to huge press attention. Here's our coverage. After a few hours of testing it, though, it's a real surprise to see just how many features this deep-pocketed, heavily pedigreed startup launched without - after a year in stealth mode. Below is our list of 10 surprising things you can't do on Path.
Perhaps the most surprising thing, however, is that the app is still quite interesting. Some number of these missing capabilities will be deemed Features Not Bugs, but for now here's what you shouldn't expect from Path.
Skitch, arguably the best free screenshot capturing service for the Mac, has relaunched with a new emphasis on sharing images with friends and admirers. In addition to quick screengrabs, resizing, mark-up and upload, the service now includes a lightbox view, subscriptions, comments and is now ad-supported.
Co-founder Cris Pearson says a web uploader and a Windows version will be available soon. His shots are here on Skitch and he recommends following other users including designers Wolfgang Bartelme and Chris Messina.
It's been just a handful of days now that I've had this Logitech Revue Google TV unit sitting in my bedroom and, if anything, it's making me wish I had cable. I was expecting the unit to show up and explode the universe of Internet video onto my television, but instead I see a multitude of subscription services with a few freebies intermingled.
Google TV Product Manager Rishi Chandra's warning that "Cord-cutting is not happening anytime soon" is right on the money, because right now you not only need to buy the cow but even then, the milk isn't free.
Instagram for the iPhone is hot, right? That it is, but have you seen PicPlz? It turns out that both companies offer very similar social photo apps and as of tonight's news - both are funded by the hot VC firm Andreesen Horowitz. (It appears the conflict of interest was resolved in PicPlz's favor.)
PicPlz is a very nice app - some people will like it better than Instagram - and it's available already on Android. Were that not dramatic enough - a third (very similar) entrant just hit the iTunes App Store tonight. Burstn is from Hollywood and it does some things that neither Instagram nor PicPlz do. Which app should you use? Check out the feature-by-feature comparison of these three apps below.
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.
Microsoft's Windows Phone 7 made its debut in the U.S. today. We got a chance to give the company's new mobile operating system a spin over the last few days. Even though we have a few minor issues with it, Windows Phone 7 (WP7) is a welcome and much-needed reboot of Microsoft's mobile platform. The new mobile OS introduces quite a few innovative design ideas and should give the company a good shot at once again becoming a major player in the mobile business. Here are some of the things we enjoyed while using the phone, as well as some of the negatives we discovered during the time we spent with it.
The author of the web's first worm-virus, teamed with a man who dresses as a medieval warrior and goes to battle on the weekends and a woman who follows World of Warcraft, acupuncture and ballet, have raised $24 million dollars to storm the gates of the Google Castle. They got incredible press coverage when their new search engine, called Blekko, launched this week - but they are probably going to get slaughtered.
In the meantime, they have provided an opportunity for countless other freaks and geeks to use the magical tool they've built to grow our stature wherever we work; to cut through information overload, to shine a bright light on opportunities and to augment our minds with the snap of a finger. Read on for my advice about how to use Blekko and we'll use it well - for as long as it lasts.
