Twitter is rumored to be acquiring TweetDeck, and one of the big questions is whether it will keep the app alive or not. But if it does decide to kill it, the company could do further damage to the already tense relationship it has with developers. Read more »
Anyone who posts early results during Monday’s federal election in Canada could be fined $25,000 or sentenced to five years in prison, according to an ancient provision in the country’s Election Act — but some Twitter users have said they will defy the ban anyway. Read more »
While many would like to give credit to Twitter for breaking the news about Osama bin Laden, this isn’t about Twitter vs. media — it’s about the reality of a new ecosystem of news, one in which Twitter and Facebook play an extremely powerful role. Read more »
The reasons for the recent screwups by Apple, Sony and Amazon were different, but their reaction was remarkably similar: a conspicuous lack of timely response. Like many others, these tech giants don’t seem to have realized that crisis response has to become real-time now too. Read more »
OnSwipe founder and CEO Jason Baptiste says apps are good for some things, but when it comes to publishing content, “they suck.” So the startup gives publishers the same features as an app, but using the web — and it wants to do that for advertisers too. Read more »
At the Activate conference in New York, Craigslist founder Craig Newmark talked about his work with non-profits and his views on the importance of a free press, and Electronic Frontier Foundation co-founder Lawrence Lessig talked about his efforts to fight corruption with a project called Rootstrikers. Read more »
New York City’s new Chief Digital Officer Rachel Sterne said New York City is trying to turn the city’s government into a platform that enables developers and individuals to take data about life in the metropolis and use it to create apps, services and other resources. Read more »
Hashable has a fun interface but is all business under the hood, according to founder and CEO Mike Yavonditte. With its ability to track and index your professional relationships and connections in real time, with social awareness and even geo-tagging, it is everything that LinkedIn isn’t. Read more »
YouTube founders Chad Hurley and Steve Chen have acquired Delicious, but it sounds like they have something much bigger in mind than just maintaining the service. So what could Delicious become? The key is information discovery, one of the meatiest problems in media right now. Read more »
Journalism professor Jay Rosen says one of the lessons he has learned in his career is that “the more people who participate in the press, the stronger it will be.” In other words, while “crowdsourcing” can produce plenty of noise, journalism is the better for it. Read more »
Facebook’s new Deals offering may or may not become a “Groupon killer,” but the social network has two major weapons in its arsenal that others do not: One is the power of the site’s social graph, and the other is the integration of Facebook Credits. Read more »
Author and media consultant Jeff Jarvis has come up with a breakdown of what he calls some “hard economic lessons for news,” and it makes for somewhat gloomy reading indeed. That said, however, there are some glimmers of hope amid the murk and despair. Read more »
The explosion of real-time information through social networks like Twitter and Facebook has created an opportunity for “curation” tools such as Storify, which just launched as a public beta. These kinds of tools allow anyone to perform the same kind of function traditionally reserved for journalists. Read more »
The word “book” used to be so simple — now there are e-books, and blogs that become books, and long pieces of journalism published by startups like Byliner and The Atavist. If you’re an author, it’s a time of incredible chaos, but also incredible opportunity. Read more »
One of the ways that designers can incorporate environmental awareness in their work is by using software to model the impact of different materials and processes on the energy efficiency and sustainability of their designs before they start building, says Autodesk CEO Carl Bass. Read more »
The next big driver of cleantech innovation won’t come from the hardware side, Sunil Paul of Spring Ventures said at the Green:Net conference Thursday. The next big wave will be in the “CleanWeb,” which marries information technology and the social web with green initiatives. Read more »
The New York Times’ latest financial results are a snapshot of a traditional media giant that is trying desperately to move into the digital future, but keeps getting dragged back down by the weight of its legacy businesses, whose health continues to decline. Read more »
News.me, which grew out of an experiment by the New York Times, and Trove — which is backed by the Washington Post — have very different takes on customizing the news and making it social, but both are part of a growing trend towards personalized media. Read more »
Amazon is launching a Kindle lending program for libraries, and while there are some interesting features included, the plan raises questions about who controls the content in these books, and what happens if Amazon or its publishers change their minds about the terms of the deal. Read more »
Apps like Flipboard and Zite are showing traditional media entities what readers really want when it comes to mobile content consumption: smart aggregation, customization and personalization, and a better interface. If publishers don’t find a way to ride that wave, they will be crushed by it. Read more »
If there’s one thing The Huffington Post does better than just about any other media entity, it’s take advantage of social media — and the site has just rolled out some new features that traditional publishers and media entities could learn some useful lessons from. Read more »
According to a news report, Twitter is in talks to acquire the U.K.-based developer of Tweetdeck for as much as $50 million. Although the deal could obviously still go off the rails, buying Tweetdeck would be a smart move for Twitter on a number of levels. Read more »
Demand Media says the latest changes to Google’s algorithm aren’t a big deal, even though they pushed its eHow unit down by as much as 65 percent, according to some estimates — but the reality is that Google is both Demand’s biggest partner and its biggest threat. Read more »
Facebook is planning to roll out a new version of its Deals feature soon, and the fact that this Groupon-style service will be integrated directly into a user’s news feed will make it even more obvious that Groupon and its competitors aren’t really all that social. Read more »
The Obama administration introduced its National Strategy on Trusted Identity in Cyberspace on Friday, and took pains to point out that this program will be led by the private sector, and isn’t some kind of Big Brother-ish, government-issued ID card everyone will be forced to use. Read more »
For anyone trying to understand why bloggers would give their content for free to a site like The Huffington Post — which is being sued by contributors for as much as $100 million — here’s a related question: Why do some programmers choose to create open-source software? Read more »
Twitter seems to be a company in turmoil — not just on the product side, but on the management side as well. What it needs more than anything is a consistent and tangible vision for what it wants to become, and someone who stands for that vision. Read more »
UberMedia is said to be working on developing a social network that would compete with Twitter. But while the company is arguably the most well-funded of all those who have tried, and there would be benefits to having multiple players, the odds are stacked against it. Read more »
Web 2.0 has grown up and is calling in the lawyers. A blogger for The Huffington Post has launched a class-action arguing that writers — who agreed to provide content without pay — should get a share of the $315 million it got from AOL. Read more »
Hitwise data shows the New York Times has seen traffic fall by 5 to 15 percent a day since it put up a pay wall. That may not seem like much, but it’s a significant drop, and it reinforces the risks in such a strategy. Read more »
Former Twitter CEO Evan Williams breaks the important aspects of identity down into five distinct pieces, including authentication and personalization. But the reality is that what we mean by “identity” can change from moment to moment, and that may be the most difficult problem of all. Read more »
Reports from Chinese sources say that Facebook is in talks with local search giant Baidu to create a social network in China. But will Facebook be able to live with the kinds of things it will have to do in order to appease China’s totalitarian government? Read more »
Bandwidth caps seem like not a bad idea, until you find yourself struggling to figure out how your home network suddenly started downloading hundreds of gigabytes of data in a matter of days, and you have blown through your monthly limit in less than a week. Read more »
In a memo to Google staff, new CEO and co-founder Larry Page says employee bonuses are effectively on the line if the company’s efforts to add more social features don’t succeed. But the Google co-founder may find that you can’t threaten people into being social. Read more »
Forbes media writer Jeff Bercovici says Journalism 2.0 is somehow to blame for the deaths of 24 people in Afghanistan in the wake of a Quran burning in Florida. But the story he refers to says more about Journalism 1.0 than it does about new media. Read more »
A big factor in the $75-billion theoretical market value Facebook has amassed is the idea that the social network will become a major e-commerce player. But a new report from Forrester Research argues that Facebook may never actually achieve that goal for a number of reasons. Read more »
LinkedIn has launched a series of website plugins that effectively duplicate the features of the “open graph” platform Facebook launched last year — a move that throws the business-oriented network into what looks like head-to-head competition with Facebook for the clicks and identities of web users. Read more »
If Twitter can help you figure out which movie to see, can it also help predict which stocks will rise or fall? A German PhD student says his analysis shows it can, and he has set up a website to put his theories to the test. Read more »
Does Facebook have Twitter envy? The latter has become a platform for real-time journalism, while Facebook is still thought of as a place where friends share photos or play games. Now the social network is reaching out to the media with new resources aimed at journalists. Read more »
Newspapers seem to have a hard time accepting the “social” part of social media — a case in being the new policy introduced at a major Canadian newspaper, which tells its staff not to express personal opinions and not to respond to reader comments. Read more »
