Technologizer

Twitter’s Ad-Free Nirvana: Going, Going, Gone?

Friday, November 20, 2009

I‘m at TechCrunch’s Real-Time CrunchUp, an interesting conference in San Francisco on the booming subject of Web sites and services that move just as fast as the rest of the world does–Twitter, some aspects of Facebook, and lots more. The first session this morning was a conversation between TechCrunch’s Mike Arrington and Twitter’s COO, Dick [...]

Xbox Live, Facebook and Twitter: Incompatible

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

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Here’s a telling moment from my first experiences with social networking on Xbox Live: While rifling through status updates on Facebook, I spotted a comment that seemed worthy of a response, which would’ve taken forever to type on my controller. Also, there was a Web link which the Xbox 360 couldn’t access. So I got [...]

TypePad Takes on Tumblr With Free Microblogging Feature

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

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Six Apart’s TypePad blogging service has long been aimed at bloggers who were serious enough about what they were doing to fork over money for a blogging platform. But today Six Apart is announcing TypePad Micro, a new level of TypePad service that’s meant for extremely casual blogging–and which is the first version of the [...]

The Myth of Platform-Independent Applications

Tuesday, November 17, 2009

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At Microsoft’s Professional Developer Conference in Los Angeles this morning, Seesmic announced that its Seesmic Desktop, a popular tool among Twitter power users, is coming to Windows. Finally! Um, hasn’t Seemsic run on Windows all along? Well, yes, but that’s because it’ s written in Adobe AIR, an application platform that lets programmers write Flash applications [...]

Google Friend Connect: More Ways to Connect Friends

Wednesday, November 4, 2009

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Google has rolled out a major update to Google Friend Connect, its service that lets small Web sites (and some not-so-small ones, such as the Huffington Post) easily add community features such as comments, reviews and ratings, and the ability to friend other visitors. There are a bunch of new features, all of which you can [...]

Think Before You Tweet

Wednesday, October 28, 2009

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My roommate recently put a bug in my ear about an October article in the New York State Bar Association Journal. The premise was simple: You can be held accountable for what you post on social media Web sites, and some people have gotten themselves into a real fix. Author Michael Getnick recounted stories of clients [...]

Facebook for the Departed

Monday, October 26, 2009

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Over at Facebook’s official blog, Max Kelly has written about what happens to a Facebook profile when its owner passes on. Facebook offers a service called memorializing which leaves the account in place but mostly freezes it in time: When an account is memorialized, we also set privacy so that only confirmed friends can see the [...]

Facebook’s New Front Page Looks DOA

Sunday, October 25, 2009

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For a market-leading company, Facebook’s moves are sometimes so half-baked that it’s practically mindnumbing. The latest example of this is the site’s new home page. For whatever reason, Facebook has tweaked the news feed to become more of a “top stories” format then a chronological timeline of your friends’ activities. (If you’re curious, here is why [...]

Sir Tim is on Twitter

Friday, October 23, 2009

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He’s as important a pioneer as Johannes Gutenberg or Alexander Graham Bell –except that he’s alive, well, and very much deeply involved in determining the future of the medium he created. He’s Sir Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the World Wide Web and the director of the World Wide Web Consortium, and it was [...]

Is Twitter Basically Broken?

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

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Yesterday evening here at the Web 2.0 Summit, Twitter CEO Ev Williams sat onstage and confidently declared “Scalability today isn’t an issue for Twitter.” If so, the Failwhale is a big fat liar: When he appears, he’s accompanied by a message that “Twitter is over capacity” and that there are “Too many tweets!” And while the Failwhale [...]

Yup, Google is Getting Twitter Search, Too

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

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Did I just hear another shoe dropping? Shortly after Microsoft’s Bing launched Twitter search, Google’s Marissa Mayer has blogged that Google also has a deal to integrate Tweets into its results. Something will show up “in the coming months,” which could presumably mean either next week or sometime in 2010. Mayer didn’t have much to say [...]

Yup, Bing Gets Twitter Search

Wednesday, October 21, 2009

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Back in July, Bing added some not-very-exciting Twitter integration to its search results. Today at the Web 2.0 Summit here in San Francisco, Microsoft confirmed the news that All Things Digital’s Kara Swisher broke (and my colleague Ed Oswald wrote about): Bing has a deal with Twitter to provide a much more sophisticated level of [...]

Will the CIA Snoop on Social Networks?

Monday, October 19, 2009

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The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency has bought a stake in a company that monitors social media as part of an ongoing clandestine effort by the agency to aggregate content from public sources, Wired is reporting. The CIA has invested in Visible Technologies, a company that produces technology for search engine marketing for social media. The CIA’s [...]

Twitter’s Non-Failwhale Fail

Thursday, October 8, 2009

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When something’s awry with Twitter, we’re used to seeing the Failwhale show up to relay the bad news. At the moment, though, troubles of a more subtle sort appear to be afflicting the site. Peter Kafka of All Things Digital is reporting on current problems with users’ Twitter timelines, and they certainly seem to be [...]

Twitter to Get Lists

Wednesday, September 30, 2009

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For a service that’s famously slow to add features, Twitter is being awfully public lately about its to-do list. It says it’s working on a fully integrated way to retweet other folks’ items. It’s spoken of geolocation features. And now it says that it will soon add lists–basically groups of Twitter users that any [...]

Secret Service Investigates Facebook App

Monday, September 28, 2009

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Facebook polls typically ask questions as mundane as “what’s your favorite breakfast cereal?” But over the weekend, a poll asking whether U.S. President Barack Obama should “be killed” was anything but mundane, and drew the attention of the Secret Service. The poll gave respondents four options: Yes, Yes if he cuts my health care, Maybe, and [...]