- OSCAR Canada — open source healthcare (EMR) software, akin to VistA. See linuxmednews.com for more.
- Instaviz — iPhone app for mindmapping/any other blob-and-line diagram. I’m hypnotised by the correction of a fuzzy hand-drawn circle into a clean crisp algorithmic circle.
- Buddypress — open source software that turns a WordPress installation into a social networking platform. Ok, so social networking software is now essentially free. What’s the next big thing that will as hard and new as social networking was in 2003?
- Getting Insight Into One’s Own Email — Thunderbird now shows interesting facts when there’s no message to look at: recently read messages, messages most likely to be interesting, and a histogram of activity.
ENTRIES TAGGED "social networking"
Social Networking is the Means to Achieve Workplace Collaboration
Yesterday I live-blogged a bit from the terrific Government 2.0 event produced by FedScoop.com at the Newseum in Washington, DC. I wrote a post about how collaboration was not the means, but rather an end made possible by the means of social networking tools. You can read my original writing and some initial comments here. Here on O’Reilly Radar, I expand on these ideas.
There are Over a Million People Actively Using Facebook Right Now
A little over a week ago Facebook reached a major milestone: 300 million active users. The fastest-growth region continues to be Asia, but growth in other overseas regions such as the Americas and Africa have also been strong.
RSS never blocks you or goes down: why social networks need to be decentralized
Recurring outages on major networking sites such as Twitter and LinkedIn, along with incidents where Twitter members were
mysteriously dropped for days at a time, have led many people to challenge the centralized control exerted by
companies running social networks. We may have been willing to build our virtual houses on shaky foundations when they were temporary beach huts; but now we need to examine the ground on which many are proposing to build our virtual shopping malls and even our virtual federal offices. Instead of the constant churning among the commercial sites du jour (Friendster, MySpace, Facebook, Twitter), the next generation of social networking increasingly appears to require a decentralized, peer-to-peer infrastructure. This article looks at efforts in that space and suggests principles to guide development.
Dear DoD, the Web Itself is Social
From infrastructure technologies like OpenID and OpenSocial, to widgets like ShareThis and Friend Connect, to The New York Times itself and your phone, features and interactions that you once only found on social networks are becoming ubiquitous. While it may be convenient for the DoD's IT department to think about social networking as a list of URLs that they can block from any network, the reality is that social networking is becoming a core piece of the web itself.
Facebook Adds Million of Users in Asia
Since my previous post on Facebook users by country, the company has grown rapidly in Asia. Over the last 12 weeks, Facebook grew 90% in Asia going from 11.4 to 21.7 million active users. With a Market Penetration of only 0.6% in Asia, Facebook has barely scratched the surface in the region.
Sarah Milstein on Iranian Protests and Twitter
In this 10 minute interview, Sarah Milstein, co-author of The Twitter Book, discusses Twitter’s impact on the Iranian protests, the emerging relationship between Twitter and breaking news stories, and she addressed the fear of inadvertent transparency within immediate social messaging communications media.
Captivity of the Commons
This post is part two of the series, “The Question Concerning Social Technology”. Part one is here. These posts will be opened to live discussion in an upcoming webcast on May 27. In January 2002 DARPA launched the Information Awareness Office. The mission was to, “ imagine, develop, apply, integrate, demonstrate and transition information technologies, components and prototype, closed-loop, information systems that will counter asymmetric threats by achieving total information awareness (emphasis added)” The notion of a government agency achieving total information awareness was too Orwellian to ignore. Under criticism that this “awareness” could quickly migrate to a mass surveillance system the program was defunded.
Four short links: 11 May 2009
Healthcare, Diagrams, Social Networking, and Email
Goodreads vs Twitter: The Benefits of Asymmetric Follow
I am never more painfully reminded of the limits of symmetric “friend” -based social networks than I am when I post a book review on Goodreads. I love books, and I love spreading the word about ones I enjoy (as well as ones I expected to enjoy, but didn’t quite). Most of the time, my reviews go out quietly to a small group of friends, whose book recommendations I also follow. It’s a lovely social network. But every once in a while, I post a link to one of my reviews on Twitter, and am immediately deluged with friend requests. Some of them are from people I know, but whose taste in books I may not share (or even care about), and many are from complete strangers. If I say “yes” to any of them, I have to see every book they review as well. As you can imagine, it doesn’t scale.
How Big Data Impacts Analytics
Research for our just published report on Big Data management technologies, included conversations with teams who are at the forefront of analyzing massive data sets. We were particularly impressed with the work being produced by Linkedin's analytics team. [We have more details on Linkedin's analytics team, in an article in the upcoming issue of Release 2.0.] At the second Social…
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