If you take a look at your Instagram feed today, would you be able to tell that everyone’s favorite mobile photo-sharing app is owned by Facebook? Maybe not. But over the course of the next year, we might see that changing. Read more »
Proposals are in the works to change the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act in the wake of hacker-activist Aaron Swartz’s untimely death, but those changes are important for reasons that go far beyond just Swartz’s suicide. Read more »
Delivering and managing the web experience isn’t just about mobile. Companies are also faced with new challenges in the desktop environment, including browser fragmentation, network evolution, and client-side technologies. They must invest in both the desktop environment as well as to create an optimized experience for mobile. Read more »
IFTT has raised a $7 million Series A funding round led by Andreessen Horowitz. The site allows users to make connections between actions on different sites, adding connectivity on the web as services become more individual. Read more »
Data from the Internet Society’s Global Internet User Survey shows that we’re contradictory when it comes to our feelings and actions taken online. This won’t come as a surprise to most, but we think the Internet is a source of good, yet we don’t trust it. Read more »
The online world and the real world still don’t meet in many places. But with same-day delivery Google may be trying to understand how to make those two worlds mesh, while also improving its ability to track how well its ads work. Read more »
You can’t beat Silicon Valley by trying to be Silicon Valley — so why does Europe spend so much time trying? If the continent’s entrepreneurs want to become true leaders, they need to shake off the past and stop playing a game that’s stacked against them. Read more »
This week marks the 21st anniversary of the world’s first website, and as new social-web platforms like Twitter and Facebook spend more and more of their energy trying to control and monetize their networks, it’s worth remembering some of the choices that the web’s creator made. Read more »
Many online media outlets continue to rewrite news without providing a link to the original source, but doing this is both rude and short-sighted: Linking is one of the fundamental underpinnings of the internet and a crucial part of the culture of the web. Read more »
Facebook’s meteoric rise and multibillion-dollar valuation may have created an incentive for thousands of entrepreneurs and investors, but veteran venture capitalist Bill Davidow says its philosophy of customer exploitation has also helped distort the values that Silicon Valley technology companies used to hold dear. Read more »
Mail.ru CEO Dmitry Grishin isn’t happy being one of Russia’s most successful internet entrepreneurs: now he wants to help a new generation of robotics companies, and is launching a fund with $25 million of his own money to try and kickstart a more ambitious future. Read more »
The latest criticism of Google as an unfair monopoly, which comes from the CEO of a comparison shopping site called Nextag, is riddled with flawed logic — but the search giant has also invited this kind of charge with some of its recent behavior. Read more »
Facebook went down for a few hours last night, causing people to turn to Twitter to complain, quip and mourn. But despite the outsized reactions from the site’s users the web itself barely felt the shock of losing the largest social network on the planet. Read more »
Whether they’re outraged, scrabbling in terror, or simply hoping it goes away, it’s the privacy rule that European startups can’t ignore. But what exactly is the European cookie directive? As the rules come into force in the U.K., we take a look at the details. Read more »
Mounting evidence suggests Europe’s mobile operators are becoming increasingly censorious, thanks to haphazard adult content filters that are applied to millions of users. The result? De facto, unregulated censorship that screens out thousands of legitimate websites, including GigaOM. Read more »
The upstart unlimited music service, like Rdio before it, has a better web music widget than Spotify, and has just inked a media partnership for it. But will it really count for anything? Read more at paidContent »
Changes brought in by much-hyped Berlin startup Amen were partially intended to stop the opinion service being used as a messaging platform — ironic, given that the CTO was a key early developer at Twitter. Read more »
If a mainstream media outlet like the Wall Street Journal fails to link to a blog that broke the news they reported hours later, is that just a lack of courtesy or something more serious? The bottom line is that linking is about building trust. Read more »
The Internet Society is organizing a pow wow of big ISPs, web companies and networking equipment providers on June 6 to ceremonially bury the world’s current Internet protocol, IPv4, and permanently implement its successor, IPv6. Read more »
Caterina Fake plans to launch her new company to the public in 2012. She says while 2011 has been about being heads down and working with the team, 2012 will be much more about going out and interacting with users. Read more »
In GigaOM’s third article in our series on New Year’s resolutions from 12 tech leaders, Coffee & Power co-founder Philip Rosedale explains why he wants entrepreneurs to think really, really really big, and way outside the box in 2012. Read more »
In GigaOM’s second article in our series on New Year’s resolutions from 12 tech leaders, Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg digs into why the Internet needs strong, independent platforms for those of us who don’t want to be at the mercy of someone else’s domain. Read more »
2011 has been all about personalized mobile apps, and Evernote has benefited handsomely: In the past 12 months, the personal note-taking software company grew its user base from 6 million to 20 million. GigaOM talked to CEO Phil Libin about the growth and Evernote’s 2012 outlook. Read more »
How are people like Sun co-founder Scott McNealy, Paypal co-founder Max Levchin, Wordpress founder Matt Mullenweg, Cisco CTO Padmasree Warrior and Foursquare founder Dennis Crowley approaching 2012? We asked 12 of the best-known tech industry leaders to share their New Year’s resolutions with us. Read more »
Forrester CEO George Colony reignited a minor firestorm recently by saying “the web is dead” and the app ecosystem is replacing it. Others, however, argue that the open web has benefits that apps do not have, and that losing these features would have serious consequences. Read more »
Facebook launched its native app for Apple’s iPad on Monday, but the bigger story is wider support for web technologies as Facebook tries to be everywhere on every device. The company shared news with developers explaining how social app discovery using HTML5 can reap greater engagement. Read more »
After years of focusing on desktop software, Adobe has finally gotten the memo that the future is in cloud storage, web-friendly technology, and mobile apps — and launched a “transformation” to address those markets. But Adobe’s bold new direction will almost certainly come with growing pains. Read more »
Mobile is turning travel on its head, and much like it’s changing the way thousands of other companies do business, it’s also changing how Expedia thinks about its product. Instead of searching and booking travel, a mobile device can provide a concierge-like level of service. Read more »
Thinking about September 11 makes me realize how much the media landscape — particularly on the web — was transformed by those events, and how very different the world is now when it comes to how we experience real-time news thanks to social media like Twitter. Read more »
The idea that AOL might want to merge with Yahoo — as a news report on Friday said it does — isn’t surprising, since the company has tried to arrange a similar deal at least twice. The only question is which metaphor for failure should apply. Read more »
Evernote, the popular note-taking app, recently updated its clients on both Mac OS X and iOS, and though there are highs and lows, overall each update brings appreciated improvements. The changes could even upgrade Evernote from bench-warmer to starting player in my daily workflow. Read more »
For several days now, journalism professor Jay Rosen and author Nicholas Carr have been debating whether the internet makes journalism better or worse. In the end, neither side wins — or both do — because the internet amplifies both the good and the bad things about the media. Read more »
Android may have had some major victories this past year over Apple’s iOS, but the war is far from over. In international markets like the U.K., the iPhone and iPad still account for the lion’s share of mobile connected app use and web traffic. Read more »
As millions of consumers gained access to the Internet, new market opportunities emerged. But today, content is so heavy, and networks so overburdened, that more efficient use of the network is a critical behavior. This provides a new market opportunity for content optimization and CDNs. Read more »
The Financial Times has struck out on its own against Apple, urging subscribers to switch away from iTunes in favor of a dedicated HTML5 app. It helps the venerable newspaper break free of Steve Jobs’s iron grip — but will others follow suit? Read more »
You wouldn’t think that we would still be having debates about the value of linking, but a blog post by Doc Searls about the dearth of links in newspaper stories led to a Twitter debate that shows how far some media outlets still have to go. Read more »
The first quarter of 2011 saw plenty of competition between various web companies — and some heated tension, too. Content farms generated the most debate, with Demand Media’s IPO attracting attention and controversy and Google making a major change to its ranking algorithm. Facebook, meanwhile, maintained its heavyweight status online, but this time the social network’s impact was centered on social search, unified communications and comment systems. And Facebook’s ongoing dominance raised the question, Is there room for more than one social network? If niche networks like Quora and Color are any indication, the answer is “yes.” Additional companies mentioned in this report include Twitter, Groupon, Microsoft, LinkedIn and MySpace. To see the full list of companies, and to read the full report, sign up for a free trial. Read more at GigaOM Pro »
The controversial decision by the World Wide Web Consortium to create a new — and potentially confusing — brand identity for HTML5 doesn’t tell us much about the future of technology, but it does expose the weaknesses that motivate the web’s ruling body. Read more »
The three biggest names in global web trends – Google, Facebook and Twitter – have released their top ten lists for 2010. In lists filled with global recession worries and natural disasters (earthquakes, volcanic eruptions, Justin Bieber) it says a lot that Apple is still popping up everywhere. Read more »
Sir Tim Berners-Lee, who created the web 20 years ago next month, says there are threats to the freedom of the web all around us, and we need to fight them in the same way we fight to protect our freedoms in the real world. Read more »
