I want to tell you about one of my favorite things on the Internet. Storify is the best way to gather tweets, comments, snippets and images from all around the Web and put them into one post. It's a new way of blogging that lets all your Internet friends participate.
Storify.com on the desktop is the place to start. You can use Storify to capture a momentous event online, or you can ask a question and curate the best answers. Its uses are almost limitless. I've gotten so much out of it as a blogging tool, and I know you will, too.
Today Storify launched its new editor interface, featuring slicker, easier-to-use tools for fast content curation.
The new foundation flip-flops the search and editor sides of the interface, and places a higher priority on each content curator writing their own text for the story. Photo searches are big and bright, and the results are displayed in a handy gallery format that mimics a slick, white cube art space. The drag-and-drop functionality makes story curation more user-friendly. Previously, Storify didn't have a logo - now it does. Storify has its own login system now, too.
Social TV and entertainment check-in app GetGlue pushed out an update today that brings real-time chat, Tumblr integration and new Web widgets that let users show off their accumulated badges.
Once a user checks into a show, movie, album, video game or other form of entertainment, they can engage in a conversation with others. It prioritizes updates from one's friends, but mixes in "interesting" comments from others and select updates from Twitter.
One of the talking points of Mary Meeker's presentation at Web 2.0 Summit
yesterday was the future of sound. Meeker claimed that sound would soon be bigger than video on the Web. Specifically, she name-checked Spotify, Siri and SoundCloud. Siri is already a part of Apple, but the other two startups are independent. One of them could well be the next YouTube, if sound ends up having as big an impact on the Web as video. But that's a very big if...
Immediately after Meeker's presentation, I sat down with SoundCloud's young co-founder and CEO Alexander Ljung. I wanted to find out just how Ljung and the SoundCloud team plan to take their service to the mainstream.
The effect Twitter and the social Web have begun to have on entertainment, journalism and other media-related industries is by now well known and much-discussed. Its impact on other areas of human culture and knowledge, however, is still emerging. For example, how does the microblogging service impact academics and scholarly communication?
That's exactly what researchers at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill are hoping to figure out. The team has selected a sample of faculty and non-faculty scholars at five US and UK-based universities and used Twitter's search API to find their Twitter usernames, filtering out those whose profiles did not clearly identify them and using scripts to positively identify 230 scholars.
Serendipitous Web discovery engine StumbleUpon has released version 2.0 of its iOS app. The update adds the Explore Box, a search box that suggests new topics to stumble, and faster page loading. The iPhone app also received a significant interface overhaul, adding side-to-side page swiping and less cluttered navigation.
We already found StumbleUpon for iPad to be like a magic carpet ride for your brain, and the addition of the Explore Box will make discovery even faster. The Explore Box launched for the StumbleUpon Web version in August.
Experian Hitwise has released some new numbers about social network use around the world. It found that Brazil and Singapore are the top two countries for overall social networking use. But Facebook is not the network on which Brazilians are spending their time.
The study also measured the length of the average user's Facebook session and found that Brazilians spent comparatively little time on Facebook. While Singapore users spend nearly nearly 39 minutes per Facebook session on average, Brazilian users spend less than half that, just over 18 minutes.
Social networks seemed poised to take over the Web. This year, Facebook reached 800 million users. LinkedIn went public in a blockbuster stock offering. Twitter produced a billion tweets per week. And Google launched its own social network, Google+, attracting 25 million users in one month.
Amid the continued growth of these social networks, there has been much excitement about how the rest of the Web would soon be infused with all things "social": social search, social commerce, social deals and more. And yet the effort to socialize the rest of the Web has so far failed to live up to its promise. Why?
Overwhelmed by new features? Tickers? Open Graphs? What about Hangouts and Circles? Well, Twitter doesn't have those things. Twitter still exists because it's not going bananas with new features all the time. There's no room. Hell, it only got photo albums a month ago. Everyone's always worried about how Twitter has only 140 characters. Well, Facebook allows 5,000 now. Isn't that a little worrisome, too? Facebook keeps track of your whole life now. Tweets fall off a cliff after a couple days. Doesn't that sound nice at this point?
Today is Friday, and on Twitter that means it's #FollowFriday. It's a hashtag holiday that's all about sharing people. There are no algorithms, no "People You May Know" (well, those are in the sidebar, but ignore them). It's just a real social gathering on the Web at the end of every week. #FollowFriday is a much maligned phenomenon, but it's just misunderstood. Read on to find out how #FollowFriday really works.
Julpan, a New York-based social search startup founded by former Google scientist Ori Allon, announced today that it has been acquired by Twitter. Julpan algorithmically analyzes social Web activity to make search results personally relevant.
With hundreds of millions of tweets per day, Twitter needs smart personalization algorithms to make sure its search results are relevant far beyond simple keyword matches. This acquisition will help Twitter keep the value of search inside its own properties.
