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Original Signal delivers the best Web 2.0 news on the Web.
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Firefly lets everyone talk over your site
I've heard of death by a thousand cuts, but never cursors. That was until Firefly, a less than practical approach to letting your site visitors communicate with one another in real-time. The service lets everyone see each others cursors live as they zip around the page and lets them chat with one another via text. To strike up conversation, just start typing and a chat bubble will form above your cursor. Everyone's public chats are stored in a little queue and frequent users can register to have their information and chat history saved to view at a later date.One of the service's greatest assets is that it's highly engaging when you've got a good small crowd together. However, I can see it getting totally out of control when more than about 10 people are on the screen at once. The little bubbles dissolve after just a few moments, and you're left with whatever the chat history catches--not exactly user friendly if you're trying to keep up with several chats at once. Like some of the distributed commenting systems that have popped up over the past year (see Disqus and Intense Debate) Firefly requires the site administrator to install it. The service is in private beta for now, but you can sign up to get it on your site here. Tech personality Leo Laporte has it installed on his Twitlive page where where were about 70 people using it when I came by about a half an hour ago. Many just had the page open and were not chatting. To see it pitched by creator Billy Chasen (without a working demo) you can also check out Centernetworks' video of it from the NY Tech Meetup this past Tuesday night.Chat with others using nothing more than your cursor on any site that's got the Firefly plug-in installed.(Credit: CNET Networks)
Twingly
A spam-free, next-generation blog search engine. Twingly is currently in closed beta but you can request an invitation code.
Breaking: Condé Nast/Wired Acquires Ars Technica
Condé Nast has acquired popular technology blog Ars Technica, we’ve confirmed. The site will become part of Wired Digital (which in turn is under CondéNet, run by Sarah Chubb). Wired Digital assets include Wired.com and Reddit (acquired in 2006). The acquisition price will not be disclosed, but our sources say it is in the $25
MetroFi Is Dot.Gone
In what is proving to be yet another high-profile Metro Wi-Fi failure, MetroFi, a San Jose-based startup that raised over $15 million from Sevin Rosen & August Capital, is close to shutting down, according to WiFi NetNews and MuniWireless, two blogs that follow the MuniFi industry closely. MetroFi is trying to sell its citywide Wi-Fi
Snackr is an RSS Addict's Dream Come True
Snackr is a new Adobe AIR app that lets you display items in your RSS feeds in a beautiful scrolling ticker on any edge of your screen. I am absolutely giddy about it after only a few minutes of use. Snackr is something you'd supplement your existing reader with, not a replacement. It is not for the faint of heart or information averse, either.If you've ever fantasized about having the river of news flow straight into your brain, this is the closest I've seen yet. I've uploaded a small OPML file of my top priority feeds, limited Snackr to displaying items from within the last 5 days and am in heaven. Read on for screenshots and some critique.Below is a screenshot of the live ticker, paused when an item is clicked. The scrolling is really smooth, story order is randomized. When you click on an item, the full text will appear if it's available in the feed. The link at the bottom of the pop-up will take you to the full post.You can have Snackr running at the top, bottom, left or right margin of your screen. I clapped my hands and jumped up and down like a little school girl upon seeing each different view for the first time.The idea is not to read every item here, but to give your eye some opportunity to catch items it might not otherwise. I love it.WishesSo far I've only got two requests for Snackr development. The site supports authenticated feeds (password protected, something Google Reader can't do) which is great. When I click on an item from a particular filter's RSS feed in my GMail account though, the popup window prompts but doesn't allow me to log-in. I wish that were different.Second, once I uploaded an OPML file, I ended up with some feeds I wanted to unsubscribe from and had to do so one at a time. Bulk feed management would be nice. A javascript bookmarklet to add a feed to Snackr with a click, when I discover it around the web, would be great too.All in all though, I am very excited to discover the app. It was the first app I happened to look at on FreshAIR Apps today, an AIR site we reviewed earlier this week. I plan to spend a lot more time on that site, as AIR is a very exciting platform.
Why’d You Have To Go And Make Things So Complicated?
When Data Portability was first announced, it sounded like it would solve what had become one of the biggest problems in the social networking space: a seemingly endless array of new services, each of which required you to setup and maintain your own profile, friend’s list, photo albums, etc. With the support of just SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Why’d You Have To Go And Make Things So Complicated?", url: "http://mashable.com/2008/05/16/data-portability-future/" });
GigaNET: Obama Girl, EQAL & TwitterFone
* NewTeeVee: The men behind Obama Girl are going to the movies.* NewTeeVee: Quincy Smith Q&A: CNET, EQAL and embeds.*WebWorkerDaily: Do apps like TwitterFone signal the future?* OStatic: How to download and save web videos, the Firefox way.* WebWorkerDaily: Putting VoIP to work.
Pushed By Icahn, Yahoo Jumps Back Into Ad Deal With Google?
According to the New York Post, Yahoo-Google advertising deal is not far from reality. After Carl Icahn announced his plan to seize Yahoo’s board of directors, which would consqeuently accept a Microsoft buyout, Yahoo execs are up for an open alliance with Google, and there’s a good possibility that an ad deal between two companies SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Pushed By Icahn, Yahoo Jumps Back Into Ad Deal With Google?", url: "http://mashable.com/2008/05/16/pushed-by-icahn-yahoo-jumps-back-into-ad-deal-with-google/" });
Jerry Yang To Workforce: Nevermind The Pitchforks And Torches. Keep Coding.
The past 24 hours have been thoroughly intriguing. It hasn’t been very long since Yahoo and Microsoft ceased their deeply fouled rendezvous with a reversal from Redmond. And though Yahoo seems to have staved off a shareholder mutiny in post-prod, at least for the short term, it is now forced to contend with a purportedly SHARETHIS.addEntry({ title: "Jerry Yang To Workforce: Nevermind The Pitchforks And Torches. Keep Coding.", url: "http://mashable.com/2008/05/16/yang-icahn/" });
Scoutle
ScoutleScoutle is a social network for personal websites and blogs that helps you find and connect with interesting people, wherever they are.Scoutle: Automated Social Networking For Bloggers
WujWuj
WujWujNo more crappy gifts.
Knewsroom: A Look at the Latest Social News Site
The way we create, interact with, and share information on the web is continuously changing, and at a very rapid pace. The end goal, most would argue, is the create a medium that completely democratizes the entire process. This evolution has taken us through editorially driven community sites (Slashdot), socially driven bookmarking sites (del.icio.us), and socially driven news sites (Digg), but none of them have really managed to figure out how to make the newspaper of the future. Just launched Knewsroom, one of the first apps from Kluster (ReadWriteWeb's coverage), believes that it has gotten it right, but has it really?This is a guest post by Muhammad Saleem, a social media consultant and a top-ranked community member on multiple social news sites."The Knews" gets published every morning, featuring the previous day's top stories in Politics, Business, Technology, Design, Sports, and Entertainment. -- Knewsroom descriptionYou can participate in the Knewsroom in several ways.1. Propose a topic: Any user can speak up and propose a topic for coverage. The propositions are based on future occurrences that you think will take place, stories that might break, or events you would like to see covered. Once a topic has been proposed, any user from the community can create content based the proposition and you have a chance at getting published and getting paid. This feature works a lot like Newsvine - where you can create a column on your subdomain and get a shot at being featured as a columnist on the front page - but the problem is Knewsroom only shares 20% of its revenue with the community, and that 20% is divided between writers, readers, and evangelists. Newsvine on the other hand, gives columnists 90% of all revenue generated from their columns.2. Submit or create relevant content: Story submission has two sides to it. First, as mentioned above, you can write original content based on a story someone from the community has proposed, and second, you can submit a link to an external source to be syndicated as a response to the story proposal. If the community deems your content "Knewsworthy," you will get published on the site's front page, and if the content is your original work you have the chance to earn an additional $150 on top of your cut from the 20% shared with the community. What you have to do to earn this additional money is not clear (but I imagine it is based on the popularity of the content).3. Decide what content is deserving: Once a story idea has been proposed and someone else has either created content in response to it or submitted an external link related to it, the Knewsroom community gets to decide whether the story is worth publishing or not. If enough people agree that it is worth covering, it will be published as a column in the next day's Knewspaper.What I find really interesting about Knewsroom is that the more you participate and the more the community appreciates and respects your participation, the more power you have to shape the Knews. This is a good way to incentivize regular participation and is the exact opposite of the way Digg treats its most passionate users. As you get more involved, you accumulate watts, a form of currency on Knewsroom, that you can 'invest' in proposed topics or created stories to show how much importance you attribute to them and how important you think it is to cover them in the next day's paper. You accumulate these watts - in the same way you accumulate actual cash on the site - by suggesting topics, writing stories, voting, and referring other members to join the site.Just like on Wall Street, your return on investment is determined by the risk you take. You can invest in Topics -- which are kind of like mutual funds (lower risk/lower return), or you can bet on Stories -- which you can think of as individual stocks (higher risk/higher return). Of course, you can diversify and do both. Like everything else at Knewsroom,TM it's entirely up to you.At the end of each day (at deadline time), Knewsroom uses its "sophisticated matrix algorithm" to determine what the most important topics are in each category and what the most important stories are within each topic. If your topics or stories are picked, you get a return on the watts you invest as well as real cash credited to your Knewsroom MasterCard.Problems with KnewsroomAs I was signing up for the service, I immediately saw several issues with it. For example, unlike traditional social news sites Knewsroom's Knewspaper doesn't update as people participate on the site and invest watts into stories, rather there is one Knewspaper per day and once it's published there is no changing it. This feels like a step backwards, toward daily print news cycles where if a news story breaks in the evening you don't know about it until the next day. It's as if they've taken something static (a print paper) and put it on a dynamic platform (web publishing) but refused to take advantage of the dynamicness.For example Knewsroom's coverage in the technology section yesterday had no mention of Yahoo!, Facebook versus Google, CBS's acquisition of CNET, or any other stories that broke later in the day and were all over Techmeme and Digg almost immediately. In fact, I saw some of these stories in the queue for tomorrow's paper, by which time they will already be old news.Furthermore, the revenue sharing, while a good idea, is not enticing enough to attract people already contributing to Newsvine's social news and content publishing hybrid that pays out a much larger percentage for your efforts. And while I like the idea of 'investing' in stories rather than a simple positive or negative vote (because it allows for degrees of approval and also limits how you distribute your watts among stories), the implementation of the feature on the site feels a little contrived. For example, rather than simply submitting a story, you have to first select a category, then pick a topic (or create a topic), then invest in it and hope enough other people do too (not to mention waiting for someone else to find a link to write original commentary on a topic you proposed), before it gets published. And you have until 5:00 AM CST for the entire process to complete, meaning a story that breaks an hour later would have to go through a 23-hour gestation period before it gets published (if at all).If at first glance you find yourself simply comparing the service to a combination of the existing social news services with a newspaper-style presentation of the content, you're not far from reality. Knewsroom uses the existing services as models to build on and even though they are moving in the right direction, they have made some grave missteps that keep them from the prize. In the end, it's the site's slogan that sets it up for failure...The best news isn't up to the minute -- it's up to you.The problem is, a lot of incredibly important news is up to the minute and if I can't get it on Knewsroom, I will go somewhere else where I can.
PingMyCompany
PingMyCompanya fun tool to let everyone share their love/hate for the companies they have worked, want to work, or never want to work forBlog
Widgiland
WidgilandWidgiland is an online Widget Directory. Users can find thousands of widgets for any web, desktop or mobile platforms and for their web pages and blogs. You can search widgets by keywords or browse by categories and platforms.
More on the Usage Lifecycle: Lifecycle Messaging
A great example of the Usage Lifecycle in practice.The other day I wrote about the idea that people go through a progression as they use your software, what I call the Usage Lifecycle. I described how Tripit.com was doing a good job at getting people over the hurdle of Sign-up with several really nice features
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