For the last few years If This Then That (IFTTT) has been the place to go if you wanted to customize your…
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Twitter teases a bunch of new product features, including new apps and algorithmic filters
Today on Twitter's first ever analyst call, the company previewed a massive range of products it's developing. Here's a rundown on the most important features.…
Read MoreThere is no one Twitter experience — there is only your Twitter experience
Yes, Twitter is becoming filled with more noise and possibly less signal, as Jenna Wortham argues in the New York Times -- but it's also true that much of that experience is a result of how we choose to use the service…
Read MoreTwitter’s IPO #pops, Microsoft’s CEO search narrows and people love fonts
On the podcast this week: Twitter's big piles of money, Microsoft's small pile of potential CEOs, and the surprising popularity of typefaces.…
Read MoreThree reasons why the Semantic Web has failed
The focus on the semantic web was fun, but ultimately missed the big picture, which is people care not about knowledge graphs but about the people and current events happening in their social graphs.…
Read MoreREST Hooks and the real-time web
Users have grown accustomed to a real-time web, but now they want an easier-to-implement real-time integration between web services. REST Hooks seems to be the emerging standard for such integration.…
Read MoreA test of Twitter’s monopoly power
A legal precedent could begin a slippery slope toward Twitter being required to provide access to the fire hose of naked tweets that is becoming so essential to the broader data and web ecosystem.…
Read MoreSky News joins the anti-social media brigade
A new policy from Sky News bars reporters from posting anything other than work-related content on Twitter, and even forbids them from retweeting anything that doesn't come from a Sky account. As with so many other similar policies, this completely misses the point of social media.…
Read MoreWhy Google and Twitter need to kiss and make up
The back-and-forth between Google and Twitter over Google's new social-search results is only the latest manifestation of a much deeper problem with the relationship between the two former partners. The reality is that both sides need each other more than they would probably like to admit.…
Read MoreWhy Pusher wants to help you build the real-time web
London-based startup Pusher began life in unusual fashion -- but now, thanks to its tools to let developers build real-time services quickly and easily -- it is hoping to become the foundation for a new generation of online apps.…
Read MoreWhy Twitter’s “verified account” failure matters
It may have been simple error that saw Twitter mark a fake account as "verified," but the fact that the company won't even say how its verification process works means it still has a lot of work left to do in the trust department.…
Read MoreNews as a process: How journalism works in the age of Twitter
A new study of the way information flowed during the Arab Spring uprisings earlier this year paints a fascinating picture of how what some call "news as a process" works, and the roles bloggers, mainstream media and others play during a breaking news event.…
Read MoreMovable Ink breathes life into e-mail
While the web is interactive and dynamic, e-mail reflects very little of that evolution. But Movable Ink, a New York start-up, is trying to breathe new life into e-mail marketing by making e-mails real-time and context aware, creating messages that don't go stale.…
Read MoreCloud MapReduce Targets Big Data in Real Time
Cloud application-platform provider Appistry has teamed with Accenture to develop Cloud MapReduce product. Cloud MapReduce is focused on real-time analysis of streaming data, and it complements Appistry's distributed file system to form a Hadoop alternative for certain applications.…
Read MoreToday in Social
Do we really need another browser, even one that’s optimized for social media and information feeds? RockMelt launched this weekend, and it’s…
Read MoreYahoo Open-Sources Real-Time MapReduce
Yahoo has open-sourced its S4 project for developing real-time MapReduce applications. As we’ve seen with Google’s new Caffeine infrastructure for its Instant Search features, there is a growing trend of unchaining large-scale data analysis from its batch-processing roots.…
Read MoreHow to Get a Jump-Start on Real-Time Advertising
Even if you don’t believe real-time feeds will become the dominant content consumption paradigm, they're clearly a growing force. Consumer-paid access to real-time feeds is largely for paid mobile apps, and advertising is the immediate payoff. So here's how social media companies can best cash in.…
Read MoreToday in Social
The AOL-Yahoo trial balloon floats again. Bankers are talking, though, possibly, not to Yahoo yet. Some like the potential combo, but our…
Read MoreApple Planning iAds Service to Take on Google
Apple hasn't made any secrets about its plans to get into the mobile advertising game and now it seems they will be revealing a new advertising venture built on top of the framework provided by its recent purchase of Quattro.…
Read MoreToday in Social
The real-time world’s still chewing over the launch of Google Buzz and its implications. Some think it may flop without further tweaks,…
Read MoreToday in Social
Last year was really just the opening act for the real-time web. To understand the impact it’s going to have in 2010,…
Read MoreWill the Real-Time Web Bring High Performance to a System Near You?
The real-time web has never been hotter, with Bing and Google presenting Twitter and Facebook updates in real time, and Google upping the ante with news headlines and MySpace updates, as well. This type of data is just the tip of the real-time iceberg, though, and displaying information in search results is only the first step in leveraging it. The question now is what types of systems companies will need to put in place in order to make the most of these mountains of data.…
Read MoreWhat's Next for the Web?
Monday’s GigaOM Bunker Event looked at where the web is headed. As Jennifer Martinez reported at GigaOM, “A group of technologists explored…
Read MoreCould Activist-Style Micropayments Be a Real-Time Ad Model?
Despite the huge impact that PayPal and online micropayments in general have had in unleashing web-based commerce, much of its potential has yet to be unlocked, particularly in the context of the real-time web. Sites like the Huffington Post's Insight Page and CauseCast see the potential of micropayment systems to generate concern for a cause. But the real potential lies in harnessing concern that already exists — tapping the emotion of the moment.…
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