Just four days after launching Buzz, and two days after making some substantial changes to the service as a result of privacy concerns from users, Google has made another series of changes, including making the choice to follow someone opt-in rather than opt-out. Read more »
Google has been struggling to make sense of the social web and integrate it into some of its products, but the reaction to Google Buzz is another indication of how the company continues to focus on features rather than real human experience. Read more »
After a number of Google Buzz users complained that the service was exposing their email and GTalk contacts to the outside world without making it clear it would do that, the company has made changes to make privacy and other settings more obvious. Read more »
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Things seem to be humming along in the Facebook game market: Zynga, the leading Facebook game company, with popular apps such as Mafia Wars and Farmville (whose users recently sent half a billion valentines to each other in 48 hours), has agreed to acquire fellow game […] Read more »
According to Zynga, the creator of Farmville and other popular Flash-based interactive games on Facebook, over the past two days alone, players with Farmville accounts have sent close to half a billion virtual Valentine’s Day gifts to each other. Read more »
TweepML, which launched a Twitter-based service offering list management just a couple of months before Twitter launched something almost identical, is now up for sale. The demise of the service is a graphic reminder of the risks of building a startup on someone else’s platform. Read more »
Peter Warden analyzed the user profile data and friend settings from more than 200 million Facebook profiles, and found that they naturally segmented themselves into seven regional groups, based on the number of connections between users and those from other states. Read more »
Forrester Research touched off a bit of a brush fire this past weekend when it said it would limit its analysts to blogging about research-related topics on Forrester.com and decreed that any personal blogs maintained on other domains must be strictly about personal matters. Read more »
Wikileaks, the non-profit web site devoted to exposing government and corporate secrets, says that it has raised enough money to continue operating, but not enough to pay its staff. The site suspended operations recently to try and raise enough funds to continue publishing. Read more »
A battle is raging in the blogosphere about whether Apple’s new iPad is good or evil, since it is a closed and proprietary platform with a locked-down content system built in. But the iPad is unlikely to mean the end of hacker culture. Read more »
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Forrester has observed a “new behavior” of social technology usage, and made a new category to describe such users: “conversationalists.” The group is 56 percent female, moreso than any other group, with 70 percent aged 30 and older. Read more »
Yahoo wants to aggregate its users’ activities from around the web, something it’s laying the groundwork for with its pre-announced Facebook Connect integration, a key feature called Yahoo Updates, and the unification of all its applications onto a platform layer. Read more »
Today we launched our new Analyst Relations Program. Designed to fully leverage GigaOM Pro’s interactive platform, the program gives analyst relations professionals a way to access our research and enables them to engage in substantive dialogue about important issues to their company and about their industry. Read more »
Joseph Smarr, CTO of Comcast-owned Plaxo, announced today he is joining Google to lead “a new company-wide focus on the future of the Social Web.” Smarr, who said he will start at Google in late January, has become highly influential on open social web topics. Read more »
I first heard the buzz on Ann Gentle’s book “Conversation and Community: The Social Web for Documentation” last summer during the lead up to its publication, and followed it online until I was able to order it. While the target audience of the book is technical […] Read more »
As the web evolves, a diverse collection of players are all jockeying to be the primary access point to it, the unifying nexus of information and communication with the direct line to the end user. Social networks, web-connected desktop applications, email, blogs and browsers are among ... Read more at GigaOM Pro »
In a great post from a couple of weeks ago, Charles wrote about some options for managing many online identities. As we branch out and use more and more services on the social web, sites like DandyID, GizaPage and Retaggr, which can help us to keep […] Read more »
[qi:gigaom_icon_social_networking] Every so often a new technology comes along, promising to revolutionize the world of communications. And in the end, it prays at the altar of email. Despite being messy and unstructured, email, which will turn 50 in a couple of years, remains the hub of […] Read more »
[qi:006] In response to a post by Steve Hodson, “Is Social Media Becoming a Social Mess?,” Elliot Ng said something that resonated with me deeply, even more than the valid question being asked by the original post. “My problem with social media is that it is […] Read more »
Joshua Porter runs a design and consulting company that focuses on designing social web applications. He left full-time employment this summer to found Bokardo Design and now works out of his home office. Josh blogs at Bokardo. Describe your job/career In August of this year I […] Read more »
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