Category: Web 2.0
Is MySpace dumping Tom?
Tech industry website TechCrunch reckons that the founders of MySpace might soon be scanning the jobs pages, as owner News Corp’s CEO of Digital Media, Jonathan Miller, is looking to replace the CEO, CTO and President of the service.
It’s claimed that a decision has already been made to terminate co-founder Chris DeWolfe, the current CEO of the service. Apparently the senior executive team will soon follow, which includes Tom Anderson (President and default friend for any new signups on the site) and Aber Whitcomb (CTO).
What this means for the site is still unclear, though it’s been struggling to compete with upstarts Facebook and Twitter and only really holds ground in the music sphere. Apparently a new CEO has already been recruited and is in the final stages of contract negotiations. Whether he or she will be able to reverse MySpace’s terminal decline remains to be seen.
(via TechCrunch)
Scalextric enters the world of social media
Scalextric phoned me earlier. If you were a child of a certain part of the late 80s and early 90s, then you’ll immediately be envious. In actual fact, though, all that happened was that my inner eight-year-old immediately took the fore and started babbling excitedly. It was quite embarrassing. All they were trying to tell me is that Scalextric has entered the world of social media.
The company has launched a Facebook application, a YouTube channel and a blog. That wouldn’t normally be terribly exciting news, but the app and the channel seem pretty cool. The Facebook app lets you build a garage of cars that you can send to other people using the app. A few people will also win real-life Scalextric vouchers, so you can fill your real-life garage up with that instead.
The YouTube channel is also pretty awesome. There’s video of Jensen Button playing with the diminutive cars, but also guides on how to replace the contacts under the cars if they get worn, and footage of an attempt at the world record for biggest Scalextric track.
Lastly, the blog. It’s a little clunky, but there’s sections for news about the toys and space for news about motorsports. There’s also a ‘coming soon’ section for technical help on Scalextric builds, which I’m sure will come in handy.
The only thing missing in this list is a Twitter account. What’s that all about, Scalextric? I want to message @scalextric and not have some bloke from Warwickshire reply.
Blog, YouTube and Facebook App
Twitter at work with SpreadTweet
If you work in a big corporate office and you crave Twitter salvation, but it’s been banned by the small-minded IT department, then I’ve got the solution for you. Spreadtweet. It’s an interface for Twitter that looks just like Microsoft Excel.
It comes in several flavours – OSX Office, Office 2003 and Office 2007, and it uses Adobe Air for the backend, but it’s relatively speedy and fully operational as a Twitter client. The developer admits that it’s “probably not” legal, so grab it while you can.
SpreadTweet (via @bryonyb)
Twitter gets the 'all-clear' after a weekend of virus antics
In a metaphorical ‘get your own back’ situation, everyone’s favourite bird-themed microblogging website, Twitter, was assaulted by worms over Easter weekend. Four waves of assaults hit the site, with those infected spamming out a link to a Twitter clone called StalkDaily.
The creator of StalkDaily, 17-year-old American student Michael Mooney, has admitted he was responsible, saying:
“I really didn’t think it was going to get that much attention, but then I started to see all these stories about it and thought, ‘Oh, my God’.”
While the attack could have been considerably worse if it had been more malicious in intent, security experts said they were surprised it had even been possible on the site, as Facebook and MySpace saw similar assaults quite some time ago. Twitter has promised to conduct a ‘full review’ of what happened.
Facebook hits 200 million users
Today at some stage, Facebook will hit 200 million users – nearly 3% of the world’s population. It’s another massive milestone for the service, which only hit 150 million back in January. The news means that it leapfrogs Brazil to become – if it were a country – the fifth most populous country in the world.
The news has prompted boss Mark Zuckerberg to make a blog post, asking what 200 million means to you. A video’s been put together, too, which you can see here, featuring a heatmap that shows where Facebook is most accessed – proving fairly conclusively that it’s still an exclusively western phenomenon.
If you’re interested in more about Facebook, then have a read of my article the other day which discussed why we shouldn’t forget about Facebook in all our excitement over Twitter and Spotify.
Court rules against family driven out of town due to MySpace rant
Cynthia Moreno will be careful about what she puts on the internet in future. Her family has just lost a lawsuit against their local newspaper after they were driven out of their hometown following a minor rant on MySpace by the daughter.
Cynthia, originally from Coalinga, California, had just visited her family and returned to the University of California at Berkeley. She composed a short blog entry on her MySpace page, titled “Ode to Coalinga”, which began “the older I get, the more I realize how much I despise Coalinga”. It detailed her frustrations with her hometown and made a bunch of negative comments.
She probably amused a few of her top eight with it, some of whom were likely from Coalinga themselves. One person who wasn’t amused, though, was the principal of Coalinga High School, who spotted it and sent it to Pamela Pond – the editor of the local newspaper, the Coalinga Record.
Pond considered this a submission, for some reason, and printed it on the letters page of the paper. The community was incensed. Cynthia’s parents, David and Maria, and her younger sister Araceli, claim that they received death threats and gun shots were fired at their home. Her father’s business, which had been going strong for 20 years, was forced to close because it lost so much money. The family had to move out of town.
The Morenos filed a lawsuit against the principal of the school, the newspaper and its publishers, as well as the local school district. They alleged invasion of privacy and infliction of emotional distress. On 2nd April, however, the judge ruled against them, stating that:
“Cynthia’s affirmative act made her article available to any person with a computer and, thus, opened it to the public eye. Under these circumstances, no reasonable person would have had an expectation of privacy regarding the published material.”
The judge did rule, however, that their complaint of emotional distress should go before a jury. The family contend that the principal didn’t have permission to submit the blog post to the paper, so it’ll be interesting to see whether a jury agrees.
In the meantime, what do you think? It seems clear that a silly blog post shouldn’t have to force a family to move out of a town. Who’s in the wrong – the girl? the principal? the newspaper editor? Maybe just the population of the town for overreacting? Let us know your opinion on Twitter – message us at @techdigest.
(via Law.com)
OPINION: Don't forget about Facebook
With the tech world all a-twitter about, er… Twitter, and having little sexy accidents when talking about Spotify, it’s sometimes easy to forget about Facebook. In reality, Facebook is only a couple of years older than both Twitter and Spotify, and there’s still people out there who say things like “I don’t get all this Facebook malarky”.
Let’s start with the numbers. Facebook recently hit 175 million active users – if it were a country it’d be the 6th most populous in the world, between Brazil and Pakistan. More than 3 billion minutes are spent on the site every day – enough time to watch the extended edition of the Lord of the Rings trilogy 4.3 million times. Or read “War and Peace” 35,000 times.
Don’t forget that Facebook popularized the app store concept way before Apple, too. Sure, most Facebook apps are a load of old rubbish and their integration was an unmitigated disaster for the user experience (hence why they’ve mostly disappeared) but most iPhone apps are crap too. Seriously, how long does iFart sit on your phone before you delete it?
Despite being blamed for wanton destruction, Facebook even saves lives! News reached us this morning of a kid who was saved from a suicide attempt by a friend over Facebook chat. The power of having all you friends at your fingertips can stop people from doing silly things, and can rescue them when they do silly things.
So don’t forget about Facebook. Businesses – If you’re developing an Android app, stop and think – why not port this to Facebook, too? If you’re thinking of starting an ad campaign on Twitter or Spotify, remember Facebook’s userbase and think about using Facebook’s powerful ad tools to reach its bazillions of users. It’s not old hat.
The rest of you – go check in on your Facebook friends. Maybe you haven’t seen them since primary school, but that doesn’t mean you have nothing in common – on the contrary, you might have more than ever in common. Go poke that girl you ‘fancied’ when you were 13. She might even poke you back. The rest of the world is a little slower than you, mister early-adopter. Don’t forget about them.
Here’s a handy link. Click it, and spend half an hour remembering the web two years ago. You might even like it more: Facebook.
UPDATED: Google in talks to purchase Twitter
Google is in talks to acquire Twitter according to sources in a Tech Crunch article this morning. Negotiations have been believed to be at both late and early stages, so we can probably take from that that the stages are in fact somewhere towards the middle.
Google’s valuation of the microblogging platform is thought to be well in excess of the $250 million that Facebook offered a few month’s back. The important difference to this deal is in the payment plan.
Zuckerburg Inc. was looking to use overpriced Facebook stock for the majority of the bargain whereas Google is ready to pay in both cold, hard cash and more stable, publicly-valued shares.
The big questions surrounding the deal are about what Google plans on doing with Twitter and what founders of the service Evan Williams and Biz Stone want out of it too. Twitter represents a real-time search of news and events happening now whereas Google results give weight to pages according to when they were indexed and how many people link to them. If Google does go through with the deal, they would effectively own search but whether they would improve Twitter or leave it to rot is another matter.
For a bigger discussion of the ins and outs of this one, download the Tech Digest podcast.
(via Tech Crunch)
Doodle helps you make choices with a large group of people online
Need to make a decision in a hurry online, with a group of people? Doodle’s got your back. It bills itself as a scheduling and choice-making site, and it pretty much does that – and nothing else – which is a breath of fresh air compared to most sites.
The question-asker just puts in the details, and up pops a link which he or she can then send to anyone they want to get input from. You can choose whether your poll is private or whether anyone can see anyone else’s answers – which will reassure the privacy-conscious.
Doodle’s free, and you can try it out right now. Registration is optional, but it’s quick and simple. It’s ad-supported and the company is based in Zurich, Switzerland. Go try it.
Wikia Search project abandoned
Following poor traffic, Wikia Search will be shut down, says Jimmy Wales, trustee of the Wikimedia foundation. It was originally intended to be a search engine where users could influence the ranking of results, but recently it’s struggled for traffic – attracting just 10,000 unique users per month ovedr the last six months.
Wales says: “This one is too far away. It was going to take at least a another year to two before it’s usable by the public, and we can’t afford that right now. I’ll return to this again when the economy is good.”
Part of Wikia Search’s decline can probably be attributed to Google SearchWiki, launched last November, which allows users to comment and influence, though not fully determine, the rankings of individual results on Google searches.
Wales also discussed Microsoft’s shuttering of Encarta, commenting that it’s “disappointing to see a center of knowledge going away”. He said that he’d been attempting to contact Microsoft about integrating some of Encarta’s content into Wikipedia. Due to Encarta’s relatively small size, however, “the community probably wouldn’t find it useful. However, the images might be useful.”.
Wikia Search (via Cnet)
