
Although the daily trends on Twitter over the past year have often been silly or even obscene, hindsight has proven to be much more interesting.WhatTheTrend has compiled a great overview of Twitter hashtags and trending topics. Their Twitter Zeitgeist 2009 gives us food for thought as we move int...
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Facebook's getting its own movie, Ashton Kutcher is the social web's unpaid spokesman and now NBC is launching a show dedicated to mobile apps.What's the world coming to? Call me old fashioned, but where I come from, a geek is a geek and a mainstream actor with an iPhone is still just a mainstrea...
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According to a report released today [PDF] by Reporters Sans Frontières, the number of bloggers around the world arrested because of their online work jumped from 59 to 151 between 2008 and 2009, an increase of 155%. Additionally, one blogger died in prison and 61 were physically assaulted...
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Two years ago, ethnographer danah boyd had the blogosphere abuzz with her look at class-based divisions between teens on MySpace and Facebook. The esteemed Microsoft researcher found that Facebook's collegiate origins encouraged a group of slightly more educated mainstream community members. Mean...
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Thanks to the recent proliferation of do-it-yourself iPhone app services, the next big thing in Apple's App Store might just be vanity apps. Take, for example, Appsfire's Ouriel Ohayon, who just announced the launch of his own iPhone app. Ohayon used Odiogo Apps to create this personalized app. O...
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This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the 5 biggest Web trends of 2009. So far we've explored these trends: Structured Data, The Real-Time Web, Personalization, Mobile Web / Augmented Reality. The fifth and final part of our series is about the Internet of Things, when ...
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OpenID, the open standard for federated user identity across multiple websites, is led by the OpenID Foundation. That organization announced the election of its newest Board members today. These are the people who will be moving and shaking OpenID on a policy and standards level. While systems...
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In our first post about trends in the enterprise for the coming year, we looked at five forces that will rise in importance in 2010.In part two, we picked five more trends that we feel will have importance in the enterprise for the year ahead. The more we look at the space, the more we see how mo...
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Britain's Conservative Party plans to offer a £1 million taxpayer-funded prize for a website that can "harness the wisdom" of voters. The price will be given to the team that develops a platform that enables large groups of people to come together online to solve common problems and develop new p...
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Let's say you're a butcher, a baker or a candlestick maker. You want to get up to speed on the social media activity in your market, as fast as you can. Or perhaps you want to sell things to candlestick makers online, or you're a journalist writing a story about blogging butchers, or maybe you'v...
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Just as many of us are getting used to augmented reality applications for cellphones and digital cameras, Babak Amir Parviz and his University of Washington students are taking it one step further. The group is working on a human machine interface where LEDs are embedded into contact lenses in or...
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Ever since two friends and I staged a two-week jaunt around the Midwest to attend a great new conference earlier this year, I've been more and more aware of a growing trend: the social media road trip.While on the road this year, I've come upon long-term social media road warriors such asof the T...
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Emanuele Vulcano is making waves with his latest Infinite Labs release. The grad student recently released SwapKit - a new iPhone OS exchange protocol that allows developers to share data between locally installed iPhone apps. SponsorSwapKit is a unique protocol in that it allows developers to tr...
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Looking to spruce up that bland PowerPoint presentation for your next meeting with possible investors? Or do you need high-quality photographs for your product's homepage or blog? Sprixi, a free use image search engine, is an excellent source for finding just the right image to add those finishi...
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One of the best things about Twitter is its wildly creative ecosystem of applications built by people outside the company. Those apps have been constrained, though, by technical limits imposed on retrieving data from Twitter. Those limits are just about to be raised much higher and developers t...
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In 2006, Flickr co-founder Caterina Fake coined the term "BizDev 2.0" when looking at the phenomenon of supplying commercial API keys to startup partners. Said Fake, traditional business development meant "trying to get hopelessly overbooked people to return your email. And then after the deal wa...
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This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest Web trends of 2009. So far we've explored these trends: Structured Data, The Real-Time Web, Personalization. The fourth part of our series is on Mobile Web. We're including Augmented Reality in this category, as we t...
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We have profiled Twitter-based file sharing services in the past, but in some cases the shared files were read-only and the UI design left much to be desired, or the service merely redirected the user to a third-party file sharing service.Argentina-based Ideateca has conquered these drawbacks wit...
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Earlier this year at the SemTech conference in San Jose, I sat down with Wolfram|Alpha's Russell Foltz-Smith. Wolfram|Alpha bills itself as a "computational knowledge engine," a nerdy and unfortunately not very intuitive description. Because it's hard to grok, most people have categoriz...
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We've been keeping an eye on real-time search company Collecta for a while now, and we've been consistently impressed with their product.The startup has been making headlines throughout 2009 and is wrapping up the year with a bang. This morning, they announced a partnership with MySpace. The resu...
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At the beginning of this year, analyst firm Gartner released a report that highlights eight up-and-coming mobile technologies which they predict will impact the mobile industry over the course of the next two years. According to Nick Jones, vice president and analyst at the firm, the technologies...
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Christmas is a holiday that brings people together, so perhaps it should be no surprise that Facebook has become a part of millions of peoples' Christmas experiences. For the first time in its history, Facebook was the #1 most visited website in the United States on both Christmas Eve and Christ...
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Business social network LinkedIn made a major upgrade to its iPhone app tonight but coming from a service with such incredible potential, there remain some major disappointments.The new app looks like a less elegant version of the Facebook iPhone app, but it's less customizable. There are a vari...
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It's one thing to have resolutions for the new year. I, for example, plan to lose weight, learn Python and design the perfect handbag. But since nothing satisfies like the quick achievement of a short-term goal, here are eight things every good nerd needs to to before the ball drops later this we...
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While 2009 has been the year of the API, it's the codeless creative experiences that drive mainstream adoption. Every December ReadWriteWeb's writers collect up their thoughts from 2009 and make predictions for the year ahead. My first prediction was that augmented reality applications would gain...
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While 2009 was a year to keep our noses to the grindstone, many of us let our personal blogs languish in decay. Whether it's offline or online, it's never healthy to neglect yourself or those who care about you. One way to turn over a new leaf and keep your community engaged in 2010 is to install...
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This week ReadWriteWeb is running a series of posts analyzing the five biggest Web trends of 2009. Our first post was about Structured Data, our second about The Real-Time Web. The third part of our series is on Personalization. Personalization has long been a buzzword on the Internet. With the g...
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There isn't a mass exodus from Facebook over the privacy settings, but it is responding with messages like this sent to users to assuage their fears: "Worried about search engines? Your information is safe. There have been misleading rumors about Facebook indexing all your information on Google. ...
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IBM CEO Sam Palmisano had some questions of his own in response to a question by a Barrons writer about Google in the enterprise.The quote appears in a Barron's story about IBM's comeback. The actual story requires a subscription to view. Here is what Palmisano had to say:"Is Google going to beco...
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Who was the first person to follow you on Twitter? According to the app FirstFollower.com, mine was someone I never followed back until today! Chances are you're already following your first follower, but you probably don't remember who they are and it's interesting to find out.Built by Russian...
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It's not easy to migrate to Windows 7 from Windows XP. Core incompatibilities just make it inherently difficult.In the next year, it is likely that the enterprise will face the challenges of this migration, especially as new workstations are purchased. The challenge is compounded by the fact that...
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