Archive for April, 2008
New Scripts Aol To Buy Social Networking Site Bebo
Posted on Apr 30, 2008 11:25:02 PM
Today, AOL said it had agreed to buy Bebo for $850 million and planned to turn it into the “cornerstone” of its efforts to attract more Internet users and advertisers.
(Link)
New Script Liberated Films For Sale In The Web 2.0 Marketplace
Posted on Apr 30, 2008 12:01:08 AM
Today,
Liberated Films, the video sharing site for independent film producers, has put itself up for sale in Mashable’s Web 2.0 Marketplace and on its own site.
The site has more than 12,000 short and feature length films uploaded, the founders claim, as well as licensed trailers to major studio productions via partnerships the company formed earlier this year. Versus traditional video sharing sites where anyone can upload content, a team of editors reviews the work submitted.
The site has a pretty standard set of community features – commenting, rating, tagging, and the ability to embed films on other sites. We first reviewed Liberated Films when it launched last November, and generally liked it. The founders blame a lack of time for the sale, but clearly the ultra-competitive nature of online video and the continued rise of YouTube must have had an impact. It makes you wonder how many independent film sites can really thrive when YouTube commands such a large audience.
Internet Ethanol, The Ultimate Home Brew
Posted on Apr 29, 2008 05:25:37 AM
Admin wrote: What if you could make fuel for your car in your backyard for less than you pay at the pump? Would you?
(Link)
Source Mashable T-shirt Contest: 1 Day Left To Win An Iphone
Posted on Apr 28, 2008 07:10:03 PM
Today,
There is only 1 day left to win an iPhone in our Mashable T-Shirt Design Contest.
If you haven’t entered yet, send us a submission now to be considered - the email address to send entries to is in this post. In the meantime, here is a second handful of submissions from my inbox. Also check out the first batch of submissions I posted…
New Scripts Zuckerberg Interview
Posted on Apr 28, 2008 01:00:58 AM
Admin wrote: I was involved in starting the Foursquare conference, a private media conference that takes place each year around this time in NYC. I’m not involved anymore, but I do pay attention to who’s there. This year Mark Zuckerberg and his CFO stole the show, it seems. There is not much press at the event, but this piece in Portfolio.com slipped out. The quotes are worthy of repeating:First, financing. C.F.O. Gideon Yu told Portfolio.com today that the company is preparing to raise an additional $260 million to close its Series D financing round…….[Facebook’s ad system] will allow businesses to set up their own Facebook pages and then reach out to real, live users — that is, potential customers — based on the interests they have described in their profiles.If those interests include not seeing advertising, that is too bad. “There is no opting out of advertising,” Zuckerberg said….”"The ads are going to feel like content to a lot of people.”…Asked why Facebook chose not to participate in Google’s new social networking consortium Open Social, Zuckerberg replied, “Who says we didn’t choose to be a part of it?”In fact, he added, “We didn’t really find out about it until an hour after it launched.”And then there’s this vignette:At one point, Google co-founder Sergey Brin emerged from a side room at the conference, which was held at the Pierre Hotel in Manhattan, and headed straight for Zuckerberg. Bystanders held their breath, waiting for some kind of showdown.But like a couple of championship boxers at a pre-fight weigh-in, they didn’t so much as acknowledge one another. Brin just smiled as he walked straight past Zuckerberg, who kept his gaze straight ahead. (Source: John Battelle’s Searchblog)
(Link)
Brand New Software Bug.gd Is One Self-regulated Bugger (de-bugger, That Is)
Posted on Apr 27, 2008 02:27:11 AM
Admin wrote:
bug.gd is a new community for bugs and the people that love them. Or hate them, rather. If you come across a bug on a particular application, you can post it here. It then becomes part of the larger community, where others that have encountered a bug and have created a work around, can provide it here.
Now you’ve got a self-regulated, self-helping community that revolves around bugs. It operates as an all inclusive forum/Q&A service, which will let you post an error and will subsequently email you when a fix has been posted. If this doesn’t happen within 48 hours, bug.gd will email you and as if you’ve managed to find a fix since posting the error on the site. This is how bug.gd reminds and encourages you to keep the flow going on the site. Users can also leave comments on individual bug reports.
Surely there’s a hope of creating quite a useful resource with this community, meaning people will come to bug.gd in order to perform searches. That being said, the search and filter options on the site can be expanded to make for easier site navigation. Others in this space, like ShouldDoThis, often delineate bugs and requests based on the company name, i.e. Microsoft or Apple.
And while bug.gd is currently free and ad-free, it’s revenue model may not work in the long run (it’s currently funded by the sales of the software on which it runs). Providing an internal or branded option for companies to enable a self-regulated error reporting system has been the route of others like Fe.vote and CollabAndRate.
[via webware]
New Action Better Times Ahead For Cellphone Gamers
Posted on Apr 26, 2008 08:36:11 AM
Today, Barriers to a better mobile gaming experience, like high prices and slow download times, are expected to fall in 2008.
(Link)
Brand New Source Hay You Kids, Get On My Lawn!
Posted on Apr 25, 2008 09:40:24 AM
Today, Stephen Fry on the much vaunted Web 2.0 and it’s Social Networking Voodoo:I am old enough to remember Prestel and the original bulletin boards and “commercial online services” Prodigy, CompuServe and America Online. These were closed communities. You paid a subscription, dialled in and connected. You made new friends and you chatted in “rooms” designated for the purpose according to special interests, hobbies and propensities. CompuServe and AOL were shockingly late to add what was called an “internet ramp” in the 90s. This allowed those who dialled up to go beyond the confines of the provider’s area and explore the strange new world of the internet unsupervised.[…] My point is this: what an irony! For what is this much-trumpeted social networking but an escape back into that world of the closed online service of 15 or 20 years ago? Is it part of some deep human instinct that we take an organism as open and wild and free as the internet, and wish then to divide it into citadels, into closed-border republics and independent city states? The systole and diastole of history has us opening and closing like a flower: escaping our fortresses and enclosures into the open fields, and then building hedges, villages and cities in which to imprison ourselves again before repeating the process once more. The internet seems to be following this pattern.If MySpace and Facebook are the walled in citidel’s, I suppose blogs (at least this one) are the equivalent of the tumble-down shack int he woods with the weird, creepy person standing on the porch, ranting into the wilderness, heard only by the odd passing stranger or concerned friend who, like Red Riding Hood, comes by fortnightly to see if we’ve been devoured by some wolf yet. Which is fine by me. I see little point in FaceBook type networking sites; seems like an awful lot of work just to let poeple know what you’re doing. …
(Link)
New Impressive Nokia Dishes Out $153 Million For Trolltech
Posted on Apr 24, 2008 05:15:09 PM
Today,
Unless you’re a software developer, chances are you’ve never heard of Trolltech. It’s a Norwegian company whose flagship product is called Qt, a multi-platform GUI framework that’s used in applications such as KDE and Skype.
Now, Engadget reports that Nokia has acquired Trolltech for the hefty sum of $153 million, in a deal that’s expected to be finalized by the end of June.
With this move, Nokia plans to help developers create applications that work on their smartphones as well as PC’s, which should “increase the competitiveness of S60 and Series 40.” It’s important to note that Qt is open source, which makes this a direct reaction to the upcoming threat called Android.
Read the official word from Trolltech on this acquisition, as well as their open letter to the open source community, here.
Scripting Sober On New Year’s? Vote A President On Myspace.
Posted on Apr 23, 2008 04:10:23 PM
Admin wrote:
MySpace announced its plans to hold a Presidential Primary poll on its Impact Channel several months ago, and the day is just around the corner. If you’re not too hung over on New Year’s Day, feel free to participate in the poll. It opens at 3:01 am EST, Jan 1, 2008 and closes at 11:59 pm EST, on Jan 2, 2008. See our initial coverage here.
While Pete and I wondered at the ulterior motive behind News Corp.’s decision to hold a primary poll for the typically Democratic-minded youth demographic, the company’s attempt to engage teens and young adults for political involvement is a very good thing. As we’ve seen in the past year or so, social networks and social media have become a serious means of communication for political figures.
Nearly every social network out there has been leveraging its user base to gain some semblance of political support, and there have even been social networks and other social media tools created for the sake of luring users in with the fun of “playing” politics. While MySpace may not be the bellwether for choosing our next leader of the free world, the over-arching affect of social media on the web will very much find itself a useful tool for research purposes in coming elections.