Pinterest's users are 80% women, according to recent data from Google Ad Planner, as presented by Ignite Social Media. The site is biggest among the 25-34 age range, followed by 35-to-44-year-olds. These site's popularity among people in their late 20s and early 30s is illustrated (quite literally) by the proliferation of images related to wedding planning and home decor.

Gizmodo described the service as a sort of "Tumblr for ladies" and cited internal staff discussions in which the men expressed confusion and uncertainty and the women expressed enthusiastic approval. That's just anecdotal evidence of course, but it's supported by numbers from the likes of Google and ComScore.

Here at ReadWriteWeb, the guys are a little more receptive to the Pinterest and its potential use cases. In "A Guy's Guide to Pinterest", Dave Copeland outlined why the site isn't exclusive to women and detailed his own experience getting started with it. Fellow colleague Jon Mitchell thinks Pinterest actually tackles sharing better than Google+ does, in part because it lets users follow things more granularly and selectively than Google's "circles" model.

"It helps me bookmark visual things, which I only had text-based ways of doing before, and that has proven to be a surprisingly large amount of the stuff I take in on a daily basis," Mitchell told me in an IM conversation.

Personally, I've been using Pinterest somewhat passively for a few weeks, checking in semi-regularly and periodically pinning stuff. I've started focusing on curating imagery and content related to "the future of music" since that's a topic I track quite closely at ReadWriteWeb. I've also started a board dedicated to Instagram photos taken in my neighborhood in Philadelphia, figuring it's worth experimenting with the value of local-centric content on a fledgling social service like this.

I'm still waiting for that "Ah ha!" moment in which I realize why I'd want to use Pinterest on a daily basis, but so far I'm digging it and I certainly understand the value people see in it, regardless of gender or age.

Handpick is a social Web app that doesn't interfere with the Web itself. It lives in your bookmarks bar or Chrome extensions. When you find a link you want to share, you click it, and it pops up a simple form for a title, link, description and a checklist of recipient groups you've created. When you click 'share,' it doesn't buzz all your friends' phones right away. It collects links for you all day and sends an email digest to each group in the evening.

Now, that's still better than an inbox full of email, but that's not Handpick's solution. Recipients of your Handpick links only get one message, and it arrives late in the day, when there's more time for thinking. You create groups of contacts using whatever criteria you choose, and each group gets one message around 5 p.m. Pacific Time.

It has support for desktop and iPhone browser bookmarklets, a Chrome extension, and it can link with Instapaper. It's a great way to share selectively with minimal interruption, reaching your contacts in a place they'd check anyway. Want to try it out? Here's an invite link. Room is limited. First come, first served.

But Google Plus is built around sharing, and one of Google's best sharing services is missing: Google Reader. It's the free RSS reader that lets anyone subscribe to any website's feed, and it's behind some of the most popular RSS client apps, like Feedly. But there's no built in way to share articles from Google Reader with your circles on Plus. Fortunately, you can make one pretty easily. Here's how.

1. Go to Google Reader, click the gear icon, and choose 'Reader settings'
   
   



2. Click the 'Send To' tab
   
   



3. Scroll down all the way and click 'Create a custom link'
   
   



4. Enter the following into the fields that appear:
   
   Name: Google+
   URL: https://plusone.google.com/_/+1/confirm?hl=en&url=${url}
   Icon URL: https://ssl.gstatic.com/s2/oz/images/favicon.ico
   
   



5. Click 'Save,' and Google+ will appear checked, with the nice icon next to it:
   
   

Now, when you go back to Google Reader and click on any article, you'll see Google+ in the 'Send to' drop-down menu at the bottom.


Clicking this will open a new window to add that article as a +snippet, which you can share with any circles or individuals you choose on Google Plus. That's it!


Not all blog posts will turn into nice +snippets, but that's up to the site from which you're sharing. Until Google creates some simple integration of these services, this method will have to do. Once it's set up, though, it's easy to share your Google Reader articles with your Plus-buddies.

Are you new to Google Plus? Check out Dan Rowinski's excellent introduction, How To Use Google Plus.

Thanks to How-To New for finding those share-to URLs.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_share_google_reader_stories_to_google_plus.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/how_to_share_google_reader_stories_to_google_plus.php Google Tue, 11 Oct 2011 09:34:00 -0800 Jon Mitchell A big problem for the nearly half a million apps available in the Apple App store is that they each lack an easily shareable social narrative that would empower users to buy.

San Francisco-based Kinetik, is trying to solve that problem and today launched an app-sharing application for the iPhone that looks at what your friends and potential friends are using and makes suggestions based on those apps to you.

]]> More than 450,000 apps are available to the 200 million iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users worldwide. "Nobody has the time to sort out 450,000 apps. It's really easy for them to see an activity, like what their friends are using," says Kinetik COO Juan Moreno.

Kinetik lets users choose an app, add a short comment and share it across social networks like Twitter and Facebook. It enables users to follow friends to see recent apps shared, organizes these shared apps by popularity, and arranges apps by categories like Games, Music and Photography.



Kinetik's People section shows who to follow based on the apps a user has in common with other app users. It also gives each user a profile so that they can broadcast to friends the apps they are using. The closest thing to it would be companies like GetGlue and Flingo, which do a similar thing for Web and entertainment content.

I've tried the app. The signup process was a little annoying, because it asks for you to login through Twitter and supply them an email address. I don't like giving an email address, because I am wary of spam. I could immediately see what my friends were using and that even introduced a couple of apps that I had never seen before, so, check, that works.

The friend suggestions were both compelling and slightly disappointing. I could follow potential "friends," but the problem was that they had no apps so I could not understand the relevancy. Why were they being suggested? I think this may be because the app is new.

Kinetik has reached number 50 in the ranking for apps downloaded in the social media category since it launched early this morning, according to Moreno. As more people use it, it may really make good on that social narrative relevancy claim.


]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/kinetik_brings_social_narrative_to_app_store_selec.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/kinetik_brings_social_narrative_to_app_store_selec.php Community Tue, 06 Sep 2011 16:45:00 -0800 Douglas Crets Amidst all the hubbub about social media referrals this week, Google has finally made the +1 button useful. It now works the way we all thought it would, and it takes full advantage of Google Plus's rich formatting in posts.

Visitors can now share links to Web pages with their Google Plus circles by clicking +1. It opens a box for adding a comment, and it allows the reader to customize the snippet (also known as a +Snippet) of text and images that will appear in his or her stream. It also adds the option of in-line annotations, like Facebook Like buttons do, so you can see the names and faces of friends who have +1'd a page.


]]>

Now that +1 can finally put some social oomph behind a page, it's a good idea for web masters to format their pages to suit it. The Google Webmaster Central blog shows how to identify the page elements that will go into a page's +Snippet by default.

Here's more from the Google Plus team:


Meanwhile, as Google +1s its social sharing feature, Facebook's ubiquitous button just got disliked in Germany. The Like button is now illegal in the state of Schleswig-Holstein for violating privacy laws.

When you want to share a Web page with your social networks, which buttons do you click? Sound off in the comments.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/googles_1_button_now_works_as_intended_on_plus.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/googles_1_button_now_works_as_intended_on_plus.php Google Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:55:00 -0800 Jon Mitchell Forget Guitar Hero. Much more is possible in the world of musical gaming. Audiosurf has created what Alec Meer from PC Gamer UK calls "A near-religious musical gaming experience." It's a racing game that uses audio files of your choice to generate 3-D courses. The whole mood, even the speed of the ride, is determined by the songs you choose. You collect colored blocks that appear along the course as you go, and you compete online for the highest scores on the same songs.

Audiosurf employs user-generated content and both friendly and competitive online social layers. It's not just for racing; you can discover and share new music along the way.

]]> Check out this gameplay video found by liberal arts 2.0 blogger Jason Kottke:

It's amazing enough as a racing game, but the fact that it's also a music-sharing social network takes it to the next level. Audiosurf's daily scoreboard, which you can view on the website, can be filtered by song and by artist, which can lead players to discover new music and "unlock" new levels in the process.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/audiosurf_turns_up_the_volume_on_social_gaming.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/audiosurf_turns_up_the_volume_on_social_gaming.php Gaming Fri, 29 Jul 2011 11:30:00 -0800 Jon Mitchell Editor's note: This is the first in a three-part series by Alex Korth on privacy. In the next post, he will cover problem areas that originate from provider goals and market mechanics.

To date, we witness the mass adoption of social networks. Roughly every 10th citizen of this planet uses these services to communicate with others. For the satisfaction of human need like socialization and self-esteem, users visit these services - very often more than daily. In communication, regardless of online or offline, people put their privacies at risk for some benefit.

In the offline world, we learned since our childhood how to do this properly with respect to the culture we live in. We learned how physics of the world around us work: We know when spoken word is recorded or who can see us communicating with someone. For most given communication situations, we perceive a level of transparency by sensoring the surroundings to control the receivers for what we want to say.

]]> For instance, we know how loud to speak in a crowded, noisy room so that only our communication partner gets us. We also know that a postal service's personnel will be able to read a postcard we send.

To communicate in a social network, we intuitively try to adopt learned social norms from the offline to the online world. Unfortunately, the transparency and tools for control we need to maintain our privacy do not find equivalent counterparts there.

Compared to everyday communication offline, social networks bring a new party into play: the providers. The fact that providers can freely define their platforms' rules for communication is one reason for many of the problem areas highlighted in the following. Commercial providers run social networks as an ecosystem to generate content and knowledge. That is content about users and other things like locations or photos. From that content, knowledge can generated and monetized, such as to run targeted ads. This ecosystem must be ensured to remain attractive to its users. Otherwise, they would stop to revisit it.

However, Nielson found users to vary in heavy contributors, intermittent contributors and lurkers. This inequality holds more true the harder a feature is to handle. For instance, to found and populate a group is way harder to do than to like something, which requires a single click only. Hence, providers design their platforms' rules for information flow so that this rare, valuable content can be spread as broadly as possible. Any tool that chokes the flow of user content is counter-productive to this goal.

The users of a social network want to satisfy human needs. Therefore, we expose some of our personal information to, in return, receive a satisfaction. Like in the offline world, we need tools that provide us with transparency and control of the audience for our content. The problem is as simple as controversial: as users want to control the reach of their personal stuff, which is most likely a limiting need, providers want to spread user-generated content as wide as possible to keep up the heartbeat of their products.

In this three post series, I want to deal with the problem areas involved in this field. As highlighted in the below graphic, this post concentrates on the users' decision-making process as well as their behavior as to befriending other users and its consequences.



1: Privacy Balance and the Privacy Paradox

The privacy balance is something we control all of a sudden and both online and offline. As Alan Westin observed, every time we are communicating or in public, we make adjustments between our needs for solitude and companionship, intimacy and general social intercourse, anonymity and responsible participation in society, and reserve and disclosure. In the online world, examples for privacy balance can be found in e-commerce applications: users expose selected personal data, such as credit card details and our postal addresses, for the benefit of not having to leave their homes to shop goods.

The privacy paradox kicks in when the satisfaction of human needs, such as belonging, self-esteem and respect by others, gets involved. Research has shown that users who claimed to protect their privacies, at the same time acted against their stated concerns by switching off privacy preserving controls or massively exposing private information. We are distorted in our decision making process. Subconsciously, we trade off long-term privacy for short-term benefits.

2: Befriending Strangers

In most social networks, mutual access to personal information of two users is granted if they are befriended. So far so good; friendships can be considered a proper and intuitive means to control the reach of personal information and content. However, there are three drawbacks relevant here:

• Firstly, in most social networks friendships are not qualifiable. That means that we are able to control future information flow only in a binary way: either there is access granted, or not. There is nothing in between to, say, private stuff can be addressed to one group of friends, and business content to another. Even if a social network lets you group, tag or define lists of friends: do you actually use there features? Most don't.
• Secondly, trust in online systems has been shown to be of lesser perceived necessity than in face-to-face encounters, encouraging people to befriend strangers as a result of disembodiment and dissociation. The problem is missing feedback functions or a reminder that future information flow is received by these strangers.
• Thirdly, providers exploit the second point to encourage users to befriend others. By applying principles like game mechanics, they provide an easy way to collect friends and satisfy our need for self-esteem and social inclusion while at the same time paving ways for a broader future spreading of content.

How did you like the first two of nine problem areas we described here? Did you notice the problems and pitfalls by yourself? Please share your thoughts in the comments!

Photo by rpongsaj

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/on_privacy_in_social_networks_what_drives_users.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/on_privacy_in_social_networks_what_drives_users.php Privacy Thu, 14 Apr 2011 10:00:00 -0800 Alexander Korth "Sharing" may be one of the key elements of our digital world - sharing files, sharing links, sharing content. But has the emphasis on sharing online changed the way in which we share offline?

Results of a study by Shareable Magazine and Latitude Research (led by Kim Gaskins) contend that indeed it has. A survey of over 500 Web users finds that people who share online are more apt to share offline, in part the study argues, because they've learned to trust each other online.

]]> And the impetus behind this sharing isn't simply a matter of saving money. The same number of respondents claimed they share in order to make the world a better place as said they share to save money (although two-thirds did say they were more likely to share if they could make money from doing so).

It's part of a move the authors of the research trace from an ownership economy to an access economy. In this new economy, a variety of new services have been developed in order to allow people use of an asset without having to actually buy or own it.

Share and Share Alike

Sharing was defined by participants as "borrowing or lending an item for free, seconded by co-owning something with others: essentially, exchanges that involved no monetary gain, as well as synchronous access or collaborative efforts toward a shared goal." Over half the respondents identified renting and buying and selling used items as a form of sharing.

Some of the other findings include:

• Sharing online is a good predictor that someone is likely to share offline, too; 78% of participants felt that their online experiences make them more open to the idea of sharing with strangers.
• 85% of all participants believe that Web and mobile technologies will play a critical role in building large-scale sharing communities for the future.
• Age did not seem to make a difference in the propensity to share. And respondents age 40 and over were more likely to feel comfortable sharing with anyone at all who joins a sharing community, whereas younger respondents preferred to share among smaller social circles
• Three out of four participants currently share personal or informational content through social networking platforms, while 70% share digital media, and 68% share physical media like books and DVDs.
• Of those who share information and media online, two-thirds use other people's creations licensed under Creative Commons.



Opportunities for Social Startups

The report also looks at opportunities for entrepreneurs in building startups around social sharing. And those opportunities look good, considering that 75% of participants predicted that their offline sharing will increase over the next five years. The report notes in particular the opportunities in sharing transportation and physical spaces. Even though many of these services are not Internet-based, the report emphasizes the importance of the Web in building the peer-to-peer networks to facilitate sharing.

"The rise of sharing requires us to use a new language where 'access' trumps 'ownership'; social value becomes the new currency; 'exchanges' replace 'purchases'; and people are no longer consumers but instead users, borrowers, lenders and contributors. All of this means businesses must redefine their role from providers of stuff to become purveyors of services and experiences," says Neela Sakaria, SVP of Latitude.

Even though author Malcolm Gladwell recently contended that social media would not bring about revolution, the "New Sharing Economy" study does seem to indicate that our online interactions are having a substantial impact beyond just the realm of communication and culture.



]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/has_online_sharing_spurred_a_new_offline_sharing_e.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/has_online_sharing_spurred_a_new_offline_sharing_e.php Analysis Thu, 07 Oct 2010 18:07:41 -0800 Audrey Watters Sometimes, the best and most relevant part of a video is three minutes and forty two seconds in and it only lasts for 33 seconds - how do you convey that to your friends when you share it on Facebook? How about if you want to share it with your classmates or coworkers?

Interactive video transcription and captioning service 3Play Media has an answer with a video clipping feature it announced today that "allows users to quickly create and share specific portions of a video simply by highlighting the spoken words in the transcript."

]]> Rather than introducing a video by asking your friends to use somewhat inaccurate controls to skip ahead, the service helps take them directly to the part of the video you intend, right down to the specific word. The service creates a link that includes start- and stop-time information. When you click on the link, you're taken to a page that shows not only the video, but a word for word transcription alongside it.



Take a look at a demo of the service using a ReadWriteWeb interview video on YouTube.

"We expect video clipping to be a huge asset for online video publishers. Instead of having to wade through an entire clip, users can now share a specific section of a video, which makes the experience more concentrated and easier to share," said CJ Johnson, director of product and technology at 3Play Media, in the company's release.

Of course, sharing like this relies on the video's publisher using the company's transcription service, which comes in at $150 per hour of video. So while we truly enjoy the feature, we don't see it going widespread across the Web. More likely, we'll begin seeing this service take off for professional and educational videos. As the company's release notes, its customers include "universities, major corporations and web companies" and these are the sorts of publishers we expect we may see using this service.

This is the most prohibitive factor, as far as we see it - you can't go find a Bill Maher video and decide to share 20 seconds with a friend unless HBO already uses 3Play Media's transcription services. However, in specific use cases, such as making video more accessible, this feature looks like a great addition and for providers of educational videos, the feature could be indispensable.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/video_transcription_service_offers_word-by.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/video_transcription_service_offers_word-by.php Product Reviews Wed, 25 Aug 2010 09:00:00 -0800 Mike Melanson AddThis, one of the most popular bookmarking and sharing buttons on the Web, has today released a new version of its sharing menu for the Apple iPad, the iPhone and Google Android. Now, when you visit a site from one of these mobile devices, tapping the button will present a sharing menu that's been built to specifically work with the touch interface of your mobile device and better integrate with its functions, like the built-in email client.
]]> AddThis: Now Sharing with the Mobile Web, Too

You're probably know about the AddThis button even if you don't realize it - it's the orange "Share" button that's nearly ubiquitous across the Web these days. Acquired by the widget creation platform company Clearspring in late 2008, the button was already the most popular of its kind on the Web. The acquisition, said Clearspring, would allow AddThis to reach 300,000 publishers. That number has long since been surpassed. Today, AddThis is installed on 1.5 million websites.

Implementing the button is easy, which is partially why it's been so successful. It's also incredibly easy for the end user to access as well.

From the company's website, publishers need only select their service and style of button in order to get embed code ready for copying-and-pasting onto any website or blog. Those who choose to register with the service can also get built in analytics, too.

What's New?

Prior to today, however, AddThis was not well-designed for mobile use and touchscreens, which is what makes this new release all that more exciting for dedicated mobile users like ourselves. On many websites, it's been more difficult than need be to find an easy way to tweet a link to an article we just read or post a link to Facebook, for example. More often than not, the link simply wouldn't get shared if the publisher didn't have some kind of built in, touchscreen-enabled tool for doing so already installed.

Of course, in the grand scheme of things, one less link posted to Twitter is not a major issue, but it did make the mobile Web feel more clunky and less developed than its desktop counterpart.

AddThis aims to change that with the button's new mobile functionality, which automatically opens Web browser windows for you, with default (but still editable) text filled in. (And don't worry, there's no auto-tweeting/sharing here!) It also now integrates with the built-in email clients on the mobile devices themselves, allowing you to privately share the link with a friend whose address is stored in your contacts list instead of publicly broadcasting it to the Web.

Try it Now: No Code Update Needed

You can see the demonstrations of the new AddThis in these two YouTube videos here and here.

Alternately, you can try AddThis yourself by tapping the "Share" button below this post from your mobile device. We didn't even have to update our code to make this happen - it just works.

This is only one of the many upcoming "new features, experiments and products that help to tackle the problem of mobile sharing," reports Clearspring's Justin Thorp via email. Dare we hope for dedicated native apps next?

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/popular_web_sharing_button_addthis_finally_goes_mo.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/popular_web_sharing_button_addthis_finally_goes_mo.php Mobile Tue, 24 Aug 2010 08:32:29 -0800 Sarah Perez The joy over wide-spectrum sharing has grown more muted even as it has become easier. The brouhaha over privacy issues, ranging from Facebook to Google to the U.S. Congress, has put the frighteners on some users.

For those who wish to share videos, but not with the whole of mankind, VidMe hopes with today's launch to offer an alternative to YouTube both online and with its iPhone app.

]]> YouTube allows you to mark a video as private, but that mainly insures it is not picked up by search engines. A viewer can still forward the link to to others. VidMe makes that scenario unlikely.

"(V)ideos shared using VidMe work only for the intended recipient and cannot be forwarded, downloaded or become viral without the video owner's approval...Links to videos shared using VidMe work only for the intended recipient and become inoperable if they are forwarded to anyone else."

Running a site or service on advertising is untenable for a site that is hoping your video does not get a million views. So VidMe have elected to make theirs a pay service. Upon initial sign-up, a user receives enough free credits to upload several videos. For subsequent uploads they have to pay. VidMe also allows you to record videos on site.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/vidme_offers_a_locked-down_alternative_to_youtube.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/vidme_offers_a_locked-down_alternative_to_youtube.php YouTube Wed, 23 Jun 2010 17:40:00 -0800 Curt Hopkins When asked if he would mind his startup being described as "a Tumblr for designers and developers," Forrst founder and developer Kyle Bragger said he wasn't sure, but that he probably wouldn't mind. After all, that is precisely what his product is - a community where users can share their links, pictures and text in a micro-blog format, with a little Stack Overflow-style Q&A thrown in. This budding startup has quickly gathered a unique and loyal community of designers and developers that are sharing thousands of posts and comments each day, and today I had to chance to chat with its founder.
]]> Built On Inspiration
Want an invitation to Forrst? Read on to learn how to get one!
Bragger, the sole founder and developer behind Forrst (pronounced "forrest"), says he was most certainly inspired by micro-blogging services like Tumblr and Twitter. Even the site's official blog, "Into The Forrst" is hosted on Tumblr. The micro-blog inspiration is seen clearly in both the design and in the simplicity of the user interface of Forrst.



Just as Tumblr users can pick from text, pictures, videos and other media to publish, members of Forrst can choose from links, screenshots of projects, bits of code and questions. They can follow one another and view a stream of posts on their dashboard where they can "like" and comment on activity. Sound familiar? That's the point.

When he was inspired to create Forrst, Bragger was happy sharing random items of information on various social networks and blogging services, but he felt his needs as a developer were being underserved. He didn't feel that Tumblr was the right place to share bits of code and screenshots of projects in hopes of getting constructive feedback, so he created Forrst.

Other inspiration, he says, came from services offering similar solutions, but not the full range of features he included in Forrst. One such service, Dribbble, lets users share just screenshots (no larger than 400x300 pixels) for feedback on projects. Stack Overflow is a great place for developers to find questions and answers, but that's it. With Forrst, Bragger is combining these ideas, and then some, and is pleased that many Forrst users also use Dribbble or Stack Overflow as well.



Slow and Steady Wins the Race

Since launching as a rough prototype at the end of January, the invite-only service features over 3,200 users. According to Bragger, Forrst features a strong blend of U.S. and international users, with the majority of users - around 65% - registered as designers, he estimates. So far, over 5,000 posts have been published on the site, but the majority of the site's activity - some 1,500 to 2000 items a day - comes from users liking and commenting on posts.

As for being an invite-only service, Bragger says he never plans to change this setting, opting instead for a steadily growing more close-knit community that lets users "establish rapport," as he puts it. Around 18% of the users are active each day on Forrst, and the users, he says, are kind, polite, helpful and encouraging of one another. With this very targeted audience, Forrst features highly relevant ads on its homepage - just one of several ways Bragger plans to monetize the service.

The Future: Deeper Into the Forrst

One of the ways he hopes to bring in revenue while also serving the designers and developers of Forrst is to create a service through which freelancers can find clients, and vice versa. Back in March, we mentioned another service - Pick.im - that is trying to help these two parties connect easier online. Bragger says while he is hesitant to force revenue streams on his users, he thinks including this service can simultaneously provide for the users and keep the site running into the future.

Right now, Bragger has investment and support from brothers Gary and A.J. Vaynerchuk, who are also his partners in the business. He originally met Gary in 2007 and eventually worked for his company Cork'd before leaving to run Forrst full-time.

Bragger, who began coding at age 11 with Visual Basic before eventually building his own graphing calculator applications, has been a freelancer since leaving high-school. He also previously worked in New York for the Huffington Post.

If you'd like to sign up for Forrst, you can apply for an invitation, of which a limited number are sent out daily. Or, you can beg one of the sites users for an invite, who earn invitations by actively posting and contributing to the site.

Or, you can leave a comment below requesting one of a limited number of invites provided to ReadWriteWeb. Please leave your email address and a link to some of your design or code work (or some other proof that you are a designer or developer!)

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/forrst_stack_overflow_meets_tumblr.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/forrst_stack_overflow_meets_tumblr.php Social Networks Thu, 17 Jun 2010 16:30:00 -0800 Chris Cameron As Microsoft moves into the cloud with Web-based versions of its Office suite of applications, Google has been beefing up Google Docs to stay one step ahead. The Big G has just made it much easier to share documents online through the service's online document editor, Google Docs. Previously, users who wished to share documents with others had to send a formal invitation through email, but now sharing can be as easy as sharing a link. These changes come on the heels of enhanced collaboration features which were recently added to Docs to give it more of a Google Wave feel.
]]> Each document created Google Docs can now be given a privacy rating on a tiered system. Documents users want to keep to themselves should be kept "Private," while others they wish to share can either be set to "Anyone with the link" or "Public on the web."

Google describes the former of these as equivalent to having an unlisted number - where anyone with the correct URL to a document can view it, but it won't be searchable on Google. The latter option makes the document fully public, and puts the URL in the "phonebook," which means anyone could stumble onto the document through a Google search.

Visibility options are now clearly displayed next to each document on the Google Docs homepage, and users can make bulk changes to many documents at once in their settings. Additionally, users can create a customized URL for their docs to make sharing faster and easier to understand than a jumbled stream of letters and numbers.

These new sharing features, coupled with the addition of Wave-like real-time collaboration and chat continue to push Google Docs to the forefront of online document editing solutions. Microsoft may be slowly catching up by offering Web-based versions of Word, Excel and other Office products, but Google's simplicity, ease of use and Web-native functionality maintain its position as the better choice at the moment.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_docs_makes_sharing_simple.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/google_docs_makes_sharing_simple.php Google Thu, 17 Jun 2010 11:00:00 -0800 Chris Cameron SlideShare just announced that it now offers businesses the ability to create their own custom channels on the popular document sharing service. These channels allow businesses and enterprises to share their presentations, e-books and whitepapers with a wider audience. Microsoft, Ogilvy, Adobe and Razorfish Marketing are among today's launch partners. The White House also now uses a SlideShare channel to share over 1,000 documents with the public. In addition, you can also find a our own custom ReadWriteWeb channel here.
]]> According to SlideShare's CEO and co-founder Rashmi Sinha, SlideShare current gets over 25 million unique visitors per month.

For now, SlideShare is only offering these new channels to larger businesses. This is clearly part of SlideShare's monetization strategy and fits in well with SlideShare's other business-oriented products like AdShare and LeadShare, both of which are part of SlideShare's strategy to position itself as a site where professionals can share their content and connect with potential customers.



According to Sinha, these custom channels - which include all of the standard social networking features of SlideShare - will allow businesses to create communities around their content and help these companies to engage their customers. Besides sharing slides, these companies will also be able to aggregate content from their blogs or their Twitter feeds on their SlideShare pages.

In addition to offering branded channels with company logos and a custom look and feel, SlideShare now also offers enterprises the ability to sponsor topical channels.

Sadly, though, it doesn't look like the company plans to give regular users the ability to create and curate their own channels anytime soon. Being able to curate topical channels would be a nice feature, but for now, if you want to do this, you will have to resort to embedding SlideShare files on your own site.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/slideshare_launches_custom_channels_for_businesses.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/slideshare_launches_custom_channels_for_businesses.php News Wed, 03 Feb 2010 06:00:00 -0800 Frederic Lardinois Starting today, the popular light blogging platform Tumblr will publish its users' feeds in real time. Tumblr will use the increasingly popular PubSubHubbub format to announce updates. Tumblr's real-time hub will be powered by Superfeedr. Thanks to today's updates, Tumblr - which has close to 2.5 million users - will now be able to send out real-time alerts to any service that supports the PubSubHubbub format.
]]> Tumblr is facing increased competition from other light blogging services like Posterous. Posterous enabled PubSubHubbub for its feed in early November and also uses a Superfeedr hub.

Getting Real-Time Updates

Getting real-time updates from PubSubHubbub-enabled feeds is still not as easy as it should be, but an increasing number of services are now able to consume these feeds. With standard RSS feeds, a client has to poll the feed at regular intervals (usually around once every 15 minutes). A PubSubHubbub enabled client, however, will receive a ping immediately after a post has been published.

Among these are Mihai Parparita's PuSh Bot, which uses XMPP to send updates to IM clients, or the Notifications iPhone app (iTunes link), which uses a web-based back-end to manage subscriptions. FriendFeed and Lazyfeed can consume PubSubHubbub feeds, too. Netvibes turned on support for PubSubHubbub yesterday when the company launched Wasabi, the public beta of the next generation of its service.

]]> Discuss]]> http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tumblr_goes_real-time_with_superfeedr.php http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/tumblr_goes_real-time_with_superfeedr.php News Fri, 11 Dec 2009 09:30:00 -0800 Frederic Lardinois