Ilya Zhitomirskiy, one of the co-founders of Diaspora, has passed away at the tender age of 21, according to a report on Techcrunch. No further details were available. Our hearts and prayers go to his family, friends and the Diaspora community. Read More »
Tech
Blogger Marshall Kirkpatrick is leaving his job at Read/Write Web to start a company called Plexus Engine, which he says will offer data-filtering tools he has used as a tech journalist. Kirkpatrick joins a growing group of bloggers who have left to join the startup world. Read More »
Plenty of people seem to be ready to pronounce Google+ dead in the water, or at least doomed to fail. But there are good reasons to believe that it will be around for awhile. If anything, it’s only beginning to show its real power. Read More »
In a smart essay on the technical origins of today’s social networks, Pinboard founder Maciej Ceglowski explores the idea of why the social graph doesn’t work in the way we need — and explodes it in the process. Read More »
Even with all the expert and amateur reviews available on the web today, people still like to get recommendations the old-fashioned way: asking their friends for advice — aka, polling the “lazy web.” That’s where a brand new iPhone app called Wikets wants to help. Read More »
The race to become the default identity platform for the social web continues to intensify, but while both Facebook and Google are determined to win and have substantial resources to throw at the problem, there are some compelling reasons to believe Twitter has the upper hand. Read More »
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 »
Users are outraged about changes that Klout has made to the way it calculates online influence, and some argue these scores are meaningless. But measuring “reputation rank” is clearly a huge potential market, and Klout is far from the only one interested in doing it. Read More »
New social networks — such as the newly launched Unthink, as well as the open-source Diaspora — are pitching themselves as alternatives for those who are upset with or afraid of Facebook. But as Myspace found out, a social network really requires one thing to succeed:… Read More »
Reports that Google will include social features in its new music service reinforce what the rise of Spotify and other services have already made obvious — namely, that Apple and iTunes are falling behind in the social-music race, which could have significant consequences for the company. Read More »
In an interview with GigaOM, UberMedia CEO Bill Gross — who is launching his new content-based social network, Chime.in, today — says existing social networks like Facebook and Google+ suffer from a signal-to-noise problem and a monetization problem, and that Chime was designed to help with… Read More »
Entrepreneur Bill Gross is launching a content-focused social network called Chime.in that will compete with Twitter, Facebook and Google+, as well as link-sharing sites like Digg. He says there is a need for a better way of filtering content, but the odds are stacked against him. Read More »
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