E-mail sharing is vanishing from the online news world
The days of publishers showing “most e-mailed articles” may be numbered as readers abandon the familiar “email this” icon in favor of other ways of news sharing. Read more at paidContent »
CouchSurfing raises $15M to build a human travel network
CouchSurfing, a former non-profit that helps travelers find a place to stay, has raised a $15 million Series B round, led by General Catalyst Partners. The money comes a year after it raised $7.6 million and incorporated with a B Corp certification. Read more »
Redesigned Bitly wants to be your hub for saving and sharing links
Bitly is building out its service with an eye toward doing more than just shortening links. With a major redesign of its website rolled out Tuesday and its first iPhone app the service is making it easier to save, share and organize content. Read more »
Twitter gobbles up Posterous team
Twitter announced it has acquired blogging and sharing platform Posterous in what appears to be acquisition of talent. No details about the acquisition were released but Posterous Spaces will remain up and running for the time being, though it’s unclear how long that will last. Read more »
Coworking: A support system for collaborative consumption
The ability of coworking spaces to keep talent in town and boost local businesses is relatively well known to the movement’s fans, but another possible economic benefit of the spaces is less obvious. They help people share resources more efficiently, argues one space founder. Read more »
What developers need to know about OS X Mountain Lion
OS X Mountain Lion looks to improve on Lion with UI refinements and some significant changes for developers. Most of those changes appear to be out in the cloud. Here’s a list of changes that Apple is rolling out, and how they will affect developers. Read more »
Why Facebook is (mostly) right about sharing
photo: Flickr user Luc Legay
As is usually the case when Facebook adds new features, the rollout of its “frictionless sharing” has caused controversy because of privacy and oversharing issues. But more than anything, what Facebook’s changes illustrate is that we still need better filters for our growing signal-to-noise problem. Read more »
Our relationship with e-books: It’s too complicated
photo: Flickr user Marcus Hansson
The fact that books are digital now means it should be easy to share our favorite books or passages, but competing rights, standards and platforms mean these features are available on a tiny fraction of books, and that keeps most readers inside proprietary corporate silos. Read more »
How to set up iCloud on your iPhone or iPad
Setting up iCloud on your iOS 5 device is actually pretty easy, especially because Apple gives you the option to either use your existing Apple ID or set up an entirely new account to get the process started. Here’s how it works, from beginning to end. Read more »
Subscriber Content
NewNet Q3: Facebook remakes headlines in social media
Last quarter’s big headline in social media and real-time technologies came from Google, which launched Google+, its first social tech product that seems legit. In the third quarter, things were back to normal. Google+ is still growing, but Facebook’s platform update dominated the news. And as Google+ passed 25 million users and won some raves from the digerati, its competition with Facebook intensified. Additional companies mentioned in this report include Zynga, Salesforce, BranchOut and Foursquare. For a full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Why Facebook’s frictionless sharing is the future
Facebook’s recent launch of what CEO Mark Zuckerberg calls “frictionless sharing” has caused a lot of controversy over whether the feature is an invasion of privacy. But the reality is that Facebook is simply adapting to the increasingly social way we are living our lives online. Read more »
What changed at the Apple Store? It got more social.
The Apple Store went down this morning, and there’s still no official explanation as to why. But one thing did change: all Mac Pro and iPod classic models now feature drop down arrows that let you share the product on either Facebook or Twitter. Read more »
Network effects: Social media’s role in the London riots
photo: Flickr user Petteri Sulonen
Everyone seems to be looking to blame Twitter, Facebook or BlackBerry for the recent London riots, but these tools are just aspects of our increasingly real-time, mobile and connected digital lives — and that can be an incredibly powerful force for both good and bad. Read more »
With Skillshare, everyone can be a teacher
Skillshare is riding the P2P wave and has built a platform for users to offer real-world classes of any kind to interested students. It is expanding to San Francisco and Philadelphia later this month and is closing its Series A round soon. Read more »
Subscriber Content
How to leverage the web-sharing economy now
The emerging web-sharing movement, which includes startups like Airbnb, RelayRides, and ThredUP, has its roots in the maturing way that people use the Internet and cell phones, and its future economy will rise around location, niche groups and capital-intensive, under-utilized and time-sensitive objects. For entrepreneurs looking ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
Facebook & its double standard on sharing
Facebook’s approach to data is that of a one way street. Use any of its products — Connect, Comments, Likes — and you keep sending data into the giant Facebook brain. When you want to take something out of the Facebook borg — well, tough luck! Read more »
5 tips for a more social iPhone on Social Media Day
Today is Social Media Day, so in honor of that, I’d like to offer a few tips about making your iPhone a more social device. You could just wait for iOS 5 and the Google+ iPhone app, but why bother when iOS offers plenty already? Read more »
Google+ should help, not hinder Apple’s social efforts
Google+ has some features that may seem familiar to owners of Apple’s iOS devices, like group messaging, video chat, and automatic photo sharing. But Google’s offerings just add to existing and upcoming iOS features; they don’t threaten to replace or compete with them. Read more »
What We Want in iOS 5, and What We’ll Likely Get
WWDC 2011 is just around the corner, and that means we don’t have to wait long before we see what Apple’s latest major mobile operating system update has in store. Here’s a list of some things that could make iOS 5 the best update yet. Read more »
Startups Take Sharing Beyond the Sandbox
As kids, we were all taught to share our favorite toys. At Green:Net Shelby Clark from RelayRides and Joe Gebbia from Airbnb talked about how their companies are leveraging the power of social media to take sharing into the grown-up world. Read more »
The Clean Web Is the Next Innovation in Green Tech
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 »
How to Share Your iPhone’s Data Connection Right Now
Don’t want to wait until iOS 4.3 becomes publicly available to share your iPhone’s data connection? There’s a way to do it, but you’ll need to also have a Mac handy. It isn’t the most portable solution, but it gets the job done. Read more »
Do We Share Too Much?
I’m probably more comfortable sharing my work with other people; I also tend to share information about other parts of my life online. Occasionally, I like to step back and think about how much is too much when it comes to sharing details about my life. Read more »
Quick Tip: Sharing iPhone and iPad Apps On the Go
What if you are on the road with your spouse or children and want to try out one of their apps, or share one of your own? Apple provides an easy way to do this…just don’t abuse it. Read more »
Eric Schmidt: Today's Most Interesting Engineering Problems Are Around Sharing
Google CEO Eric Schmidt sat for a Q&A at the company’s Atmosphere event yesterday pitching its Apps platform to the enterprise. A couple of his remarks stuck with me today and I wanted to share them as well as a video of the session. Read more »
SXSW: Shirky's New Opportunities in Public Sharing
Today social technology theorist Clay Shirky delivered a fitting counterpoint to Danah Boyd’s keynote on privacy at SXSW the day before. Where Boyd spoke of the danger of making information more public than users intended it, Shirky talked about new opportunities for sharing information. Read more »
Bye Bye USB Syncing: Is the iPad Bad for iPhone OS?
Users of Lexcycle’s terrific iPhone e-reader app Stanza (which was acquired by Amazon last year) are expressing their disappointment over a recent update that removes the ability to sync and share your book library over USB from the program. When pressed as to why exactly the […] Read more »
Apple’s Tablet Is Good News for the e-Reader Market, Even If It Isn’t Real
The effect of Apple’s still speculative tablet on the electronics industry continues to amaze me. Not only has it prompted countless computer makers to join the fray and release their own slate devices, but now it’s affecting e-book pricing policies over at the biggest player in […] Read more »
Spotify: Life Without iTunes
This week’s arrival of Spotify in the App Store (right now limited to UK, Sweden, France, Spain, Norway and Finland stores) could be the ideal opportunity for us all to throw iTunes in the trash and experience the freedom that Spotify has to offer. Speculation was rife […] Read more »
Google Docs and Google Groups Come Together: It's a Good Thing
Google is trying to get ahead of the game before Microsoft gives it a real run for its money with Office Online, coming in 2010. One way it’s doing that is by enhancing the collaborative abilities of Docs, and further integrating all of its services. Which […] Read more »
